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pronald | December 28, 2010Happy Holidays from my friends Finn and Gunilla with winter photos of their farm.
pharyngula | December 12, 2010A few years ago, it was the I-35 bridge that collapsed (during rush hour!); this year, we get the spectacle of the domed athletic stadium in Minneapolis, the Metrodome, collapsing under the weight of our recent snowstorm.
Maybe we need to start building stuff stronger.
pharyngula | November 26, 2010Minnesota State Representative Tom Hackbarth is a Republican. How can you tell? By his deranged behavior.
A security guard at a St. Paul Planned Parenthood clinic called the cops last week after he spotted a Republican state lawmaker with a loaded gun in the parking lot. But the pol says he was only "checking on" his online girlfriend, who he thought may be on a date with another man -- a claim police have not been able to corroborate because the man did not have a phone number or address for the woman.
Because that's how married (but putatively in the midst of a divorce) Republicans look…
pharyngula | November 8, 2010The student freethought group at UMM is having another meeting this evening at 7 in the Moccasin Flower room. The subject tonight is to pin down exactly what "freethought" means!
pharyngula | October 24, 2010We're off to a late start, but the first meeting of the UMM Freethinkers will be held tomorrow, 25 October, at 7:00pm in the Moccasin Flower Room of the student union. I should add that if you aren't a student, but are an interested member of the Morris community who would like to get together with fellow infidels on a regular basis, you're invited, too.
I'm not sure what exactly the meeting will be about, since it's entirely student run, but I'll be saying a few words at the event. Come on by and help us plan our imminent takeover of the universe!
pronald | July 10, 2010Check out this video to see what life is like in Davis, California. If you missed it, dont fret, the Tour de Cluck will be an annual event.
Here is a preview for next year's event: our hens, Oreo and Snickerdoodle.
pharyngula | June 30, 2010At first, it was a distressing slithery whisper, like a krait loosed in the room; then a sensation, an itch, as if an assassin were trickling arsenic into my ear; and then apparently the assassin decided to get sadistic and switch to sulfuric acid. I woke up and blinked at the alarm clock; the glowing red LEDs balefully informed me that it was 4:30am. I creakily rose out of bed, went to the window, and pressed my ear against it. It wasn't a horrible dream. It was true. It was…hymns. Cheesy hymns, played mechanically on an electronic carillon.
Normally, I can cope. These well-insulated…
pharyngula | April 3, 2010Let's hope Tarryl Clark can pull it off: she's the Democratic candidate running against Michele Bachmann. She has a fairly sensible, centrist agenda so maybe it will work…but then, they could pull a mangy muskrat out of the Mississippi and run it against Bachmann, and it would be an improvement.
She doesn't have a catchy campaign slogan yet, though. May I suggest "Tarryl Clark: Not Crazy" as a possibility?
pronald | March 18, 2010I try not to travel in the spring. Instead of the stale air of the airplane, I try to get out to the mountains, the beach, the garden or to the nearby foothills.
Last weekend my daughter and I (who is 8 years old today), went for a walk. I thought she was strong enough to do the 5 mile hike in the Stebbins Cold Canyon Preserve so off we happily went. As we started up the VERY steep hill, her trust began to dissipate. Then the inevitable "I want to go home".
I definitely did not want to go home. More than that, I did not want her to want to go home.
"Look, a soap plant, the people that were…
pharyngula | February 11, 2010I'm home again from Iowa, but there was a moment where I just about turned around. Coming up into Minnesota, there is a nice big billboard with the following message on it.
I did a double-take and thought about going back around to get a photo of it, but decided it wasn't worth it, as there really wasn't any place to pull over safely. That was a rather vile message, but then, this is Christianity we're talking about, and this was on I-35, which seems to be a focus for religious insanity.
pharyngula | January 26, 2010Yeesh. This is not how we want our university to be known. One of our former students, Joe Basel, is accused of being an accomplice in a break-in to wiretap a senator's office. I knew him slightly, but he never took a course from me. He claims he was "pushed" into conservative activism by our liberal campus, which is complete nonsense: the campus isn't that liberal at all, as most of our students are from rural communities, and in my few encounters with Basel I found him to be a conservative lout from the very beginning. I know he wrote about me a few times in the awful conservative rag he…
pronald | January 18, 2010Last year, I attended a Food Symposium at the Mountainfilm festival in Telluride.
Many of the speakers offered a simple solution to feeding the world in the face of a population that is expected to grow to 9.2 billion by the year 2050: Eat local.
But how much impact will the "locavore" movement really have on sustainable food production?
Not much, says James McWIlliams in his latest book "Just Food". "Eating local is not, in and of itself, a viable answer to sustainable food production on a global level."
"We should not delude ourselves into thinking that the relatively easy decision to…
pharyngula | December 24, 2009THIS. IS. MINNESOTA. We like our Christmases white around here, and it's not enough just to have a few decorative snowflakes tumble down — we need a blizzard, and that's what we're going to get. I was out there in the frigid whiteness earlier today, clearing the driveway and sidewalks, and now I'm all worn out, ready for a good night's rest. I expect I'll get up tomorrow to find even more snow piled up everywhere.
Another traditional way to spend the day before the blizzard is to scurry about stocking the larder, and I did a bit of that too…which led to the nicest, sweetest, most heart-…
pharyngula | December 7, 2009This is short notice, but hey, it's not like the residents of North Dakota could have anything else planned*: August Berkshire, that other atheist in Minnesota, will be speaking in Fargo on Tuesday evening.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009, 7:00 pm - August Berkshire, past vice president of Atheist Alliance International, will do his one-hour presentation "Exploring Atheism" for a meeting hosted by Atheists, Agnostics & Secular Humanists (AASH) in the Rose Room of Memorial Union, North Dakota State University (NDSU), Fargo, ND. Free and open to the public.
*After that opening potshot, the…
pharyngula | November 17, 2009Well.
It was a strange event. Kittywhumpus and Greg Laden have good detailed breakdowns of the debate, so you can always read those for the audience perspective. As for me, I've learned that you can never prepare for a debate.
I tried. I had a focus — the topic, chosen by Bergman, was "Should Intelligent Design be taught in the schools" — and what I prepared for my side was a set of arguments on that point. I used my own experience teaching biology to lay down a few principles: to teach a subject as science, you need an explanatory mechanism or theory that provides a conceptual framework for…
pharyngula | November 16, 2009For those who were wondering, it's still happening. 7:30pm tonight, at the North Star Ballroom in the St Paul Student Center, 2017 Buford Ave. S. The topic is "Should Intelligent Design be Taught in the Schools?". I'll be there. It's going to be recorded. I'll probably be available for conversation afterwards, briefly…I still have to drive all the way back to Morris tonight.
The infamous Skatje will also be in attendance.
pharyngula | November 13, 2009Plans are afoot to build a creation "science" education center in Henning, Minnesota — about two hours north of Morris. They plan to push the simple-minded literalist creationist claim that the earth is 6,000 years old and peddle the same BS that the Creation "Museum" does — it's stark raving mad. These quotes tell the whole story:
The aim, Schultz said, is to provide families and young people with information they can use to respectfully question differing points of view they may encounter, like at school.
"What we're finding is, many kids are subject to ridicule, lower grades, being…
pharyngula | October 27, 2009I'm going to be in this silly debate on "Should Intelligent Design Be Taught In The Schools?" with creationist kook Jerry Bergman on 16 November, sponsored by CASH and the local Kook Central. The latest hangup, though, is that the creationists want to have a pre- and post-debate survey, and they plan to give the audience these questions:
I think intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in all schools, public and private.
Strongly DisagreeDisagreeUndecidedAgreeStrongly Agree
I think intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution by teachers who support it, without…