My buddy Burt Humburg is featured in a story in the York Daily Record, which has been doing a great job of covering the Dover situation as it has developed over the last year and a half. I met Burt at a conference at Berkeley in 2003 and he was a riot. On leave from his medical residency at the time, he was taking full advantage of his few precious days of freedom by imbibing large amounts of wine underneath a giant T-rex skeleton (one of the cooler places I've ever seen for a cocktail party). Burt has a knack for being right in the middle of every anti-evolution controversy in the country. He was in college in Kansas when the 1999 battle over evolution was going on and was one of the first members of Kansas Citizens for Science. He was in Minnesota for med school when they had a battle over the state science standards there involving evolution. And now he's in Pennsylvania doing his internal medicine residency at Penn State with the Dover situation going on. Hmmmm. It just occured to me that maybe Burt is like the Typhoid Mary of creationism - wherever he goes, that state gets infested with it shortly thereafter. Boy, I hope Burt never comes to Michigan....
Heh. You aren't the first person to notice the connection. I was making the exact same joke to Nick Matzke at the trial. "You know, Nick. First time's happenstance. Second time's coincidence. Third time's enemy action. I'm at four now..."
BCH
People have probably been convicted on less circumstantial evidence than this. Ed, you had better post his picture at the Michigan border.
Burt Humburg wrote:
Okay, admit it. You're a spy from the Dark Side. They sent you to Berkeley to make a full report on the assets of the enemy. I hope you included a detailed description of Nick's pickup truck.
Nick's truck? People drove to this gig? I don't know about you, but if it wasn't in walking distance to or from the local BART, it wasn't on my itinerary.
At the next summit, I propose PZ bring some of this brew that he opines endlessly about. You can bring ribs.
BCH
Burt wrote:
Well Nick lived out there and wasn't staying at the hotel. When we all went to dinner one night, we ended up with Nick, Skip Evans and me in his tiny little pickup truck on the way back, none of us exactly skinny people. Talk about 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound sack!
Hey, I'm up for that. We'll commandeer Genie's house for a weekend and I'll bring the smoker. She won't mind.