Last year, the governor of Georgia asked his citizens to perform a rain dance to alleviate the drought in that state. Now the mayor of Birmingham, AL, Larry Langford, has decided that the crime rate in his city is way too high, and that it’s time to try to look as though he’s doing something about […]
I’m currently laid up with the flu, feeling sorry for myself, watching trash on TV and periodically shoving cat butts out of my face. The reason for this, of course, is that new strains of influenza virus appear all the time. Like it or not, that’s evolution. On the plus side, I’m glad that my ancestors had […]
If you’re a touch-typist, you’ve probably typed a word without realizing that you had placed your hand in the wrong position. As it turns out, sometimes this can yield a different existing word:
A certain movie was released in theaters today, and several critics have already weighed in on it. Rotten Tomatoes‘ tomatometer is a good tool for seeing at a glance how fresh (lots of good reviews) or rotten (lots of bad reviews) a movie is. But rather than jumping straight to the chase, allow me to […]
In case you missed the flap over the animation of cellular processes in the upcoming movie Expelled, here’s the nutshell version: People at prerelease screenings said they saw footage from XVIVO/Harvard’s The Inner Life of the Cell. Bits of very similar animation appear in promotional clips for the movie such as this one. There’s a post […]
In the packrattish hoard of accumulata that is my music collection, I recently discovered a song by Russian singer Alla Pugacheva, about a man who loves a woman so much that he sells his house and buys a million red roses, so that she opens her blinds and sees a sea of flowers outside her […]
If I may boast for a bit, it looks as though the folks at the ACA liked my April Fools piece, enough to mention it on the latest episode of The Non-Prophets (about 6:00 through 6:30 minutes into the episode). (You can listen to the intro to hear where the phrase “Dillahunty International Studios” comes […]
Over at Dembski’s wankfest, Denyse O’Leary is having an outragegasm over her favorite PZ Myers quote. So nothing new to report in that respect. But a few sentences caught my attention: Myers, who teaches at a Minnesota liberal arts university that is proud of its status […] But most Americans do not know even about it, let alone […]
(Update, Apr. 10: Rep. Davis has apologized to Rob Sherman. Good on her. Oh, and the hearing described here wasn’t about the moment of silence thing.) Eric Zorn reports an exchange in the Illinois General Assembly between State Rep. Monique Davis and Rob Sherman, an atheist who opposes Illinois’s law mandating a moment of silence: Davis: I’m […]
The What Have We Learned crew present a song about the very special love between a man and his aluminum picnic table: The guy on the right is Mike Argento, the H.L. Mencken of the Dover Panda Trial.
