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pharyngula | November 8, 2010Martin Pribble has been interviewing various godless people, including Greydon Square, Lovingdoubt (she's a youtuber), and Eugenie Scott . Now he's gotten around to me.
If nothing else, read Greydon Square's — there's a different perspective for you, that still arrives at similar conclusions for similar reasons to mine.
drorzel | November 4, 2010Welcome to this very-carefully-posed edition of Thursday Toddler Blogging:
That's Kate and SteelyKid reading The Cat in the Hat,shot from a slightly odd angle so as to hide the wicked shiner that SteelyKid is sporting, thanks to a tumble down the stairs on Tuesday morning (while I was getting ready to take her to the doctor, no less-- Tuesday was Not A Good Day). She's doing just fine, but it's really a terrible look.
This also continues the playing-with-the-camera trend of the last week or two, as this was shot without the flash. The angle is also chosen to put the lamp on the end table out…
pharyngula | October 31, 2010Two salient facts:
We no longer have any cats. The kids all moved out, and to our shock and surprise, they took their pets with them. I guess we raised them responsibly after all.
Temperatures here in the soon-to-be great white north have dropped into the freezing range lately, and are likely to stay there. And lower.
Any of you who have lived in this part of the country knows what happens next: the wildlife all tries to move indoors, and without large roving carnivores about, the rodents have been having a carnival. They've been banging the pots all night and frolicking on the…
pharyngula | October 29, 2010Our university library is having a book sale today, one of those unfortunate but necessary events where they purge old or duplicate items from the collections to make room for new books, and I had to make a quick browse. What did I discover but an old children's book that startled me with fearful and powerful remembrances — this is a book that I checked out from the Kent Public Library when I was ten years old.
That's the Golden Guide to Mammals by Herbert S. Zim and Donald F. Hoffmeister, copyright 1955. It features "218 ANIMALS IN FULL COLOR", with maps of their distribution and short…
jdupuis | October 29, 2010A second Halloween-related post, with the happy day coming up this weekend. My "give a scary book" post came on Monday.
Anyways, a recent post on Horrornews.net really resonated with me: Growing up as a horror fan. Mostly because I too grew up a huge horror fan, mostly watching cheesy old Hammer films on tv, the Dracula and Frankenstein ones having particularly strong memories for me. To this day, I'm a huge fan of some of their main actors such as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Island of Terror is non-Hammer film that I have vivid memories of watching when I was a kid -- as is…
pharyngula | October 28, 2010Brain melting. Remember that call for applicants for a tenure track job? We're screening all those applicants now, and meeting tomorrow to consider who to invite to the first round of preliminary phone interviews. If you haven't got your application in, you're late! You're going to hope everyone else sucks badly if you're still trying to get something filed here.
All it means to me right now though is more squinty staring at lots and lots of essays and CVs and recommendations. I may be entering a data coma soon.
pharyngula | October 25, 2010This one is from the Guardian, and features a collection of people from the London TAM, including the amazing James Randi.
I've got to get me one of those adjectives in front of my name. The obnoxious PZ Myers? The annoying PZ Myers? The bootylicious PZ Myers? There must be something.
pharyngula | October 25, 2010While I was at TAM London, it seemed that every time I had a 5 minute break someone would stick a microphone in my face and record an interview. Now the Righteous Indignation podcast is up, with an interview with me…but you should listen to it for the lovely Merseyside accents. It was almost like having a conversation with the Beatles.
pharyngula | October 23, 2010Tomorrow (Sunday), from 2-4pm Central time, I'll be on the League of Reason show. I'm not sure exactly how this is going to work; I'm calling in via skype, the link above takes you to a chat page so you can razz me as I'm talking (I expect all the other panel members will be addressed respectfully, while you guys will be calling me "poopyhead". Seriously, I can't take you anywhere.)
It should be fun anyway.
drorzel | October 21, 2010This week, we see Appa and SteelyKid with all the essential elements of bedtime:
From right to left, we have: Goodnight Moon, the Winnie-the-Pooh collection I've started reading to her after her bottle, and the brown-and-white doggie she has adopted as her essential comfort animal. This was apparently a Valentine's Day promotion from some chain store a few years back, as Kate learned while finding a backup doggie on EBay-- we can't do bedtime without it, and don't want to think about what would happen if it got lost.
Despite the giggling and laughing that accompanied the picture-taking, she…
pharyngula | October 18, 2010I'm in London, and I got ambushed by this guy making videos. He bought me beer, what can I say? Anyway, he said he wanted to ask me serious questions about biology, and when he got me on camera he instead asked me all this weird stuff about constellations and telescopes and has me looking like a stammering moron. He'll probably put it online soon, and then I'll be in trouble.
He goes by the name Andromeda's Wake. At least it was really good beer.
My humiliation and profound ignorance made public:
pharyngula | October 17, 2010Do you expect a full report? TAM London is over, I have no sense of time left, I just got back from a late and very entertaining dinner with the ferocious Rebecca Watson and the fabulous Richard Wiseman, and I think I need to pass out.
It looks like you can get a video feed of the various talks at the live feed — they're playing back the recorded events right now. You can read the #TAMLondon hashtag to get an idea of the audience reaction, and Martin Robbins has liveblogged the whole weekend. Or if you'd rather, you can read few short sound bites.
My talk went fine, I think, although it's…
drorzel | October 17, 2010I'm always taking pictures of SteelyKid going about her business, so a little turnabout is fair play:
The "camera" she's using is actually a small calculator that my mom gave her. She also uses this like a phone, to carry on lengthy conversations with her great-grandmother and sometimes friends from day care. She'll also sometimes just punch the buttons to watch the numbers change on the display.
Basically, it's a toddler iPhone. A whole lot cheaper than a real one, though...
drorzel | October 14, 2010I didn't think I'd make it back in time for this week's Toddler Blogging, but things wrapped up earlier than expected in Buffalo, so I made it home in time for dinner. And a celebratory reading of Moo, Baa, La La La:
That's really about all I have the energy for. In case you didn't know already, New York is a rather big state to drive across. It's good to be home, now I'm going to fall over.
drorzel | October 12, 2010SteelyKid is a big fan of the classic children's book Goodnight Moon, which, if you haven't spent the last sixty-odd years in a cave, you probably know features a bunny saying goodnight to a variety of objects in a great, green room. The attentive toddler will find a lot to look at in the pictures-- there's a mouse in every one that SteelyKid delights in pointing out-- but an inquiring adult might well ask "Just how long does it take this bunny to say goodnight to all this stuff, anyway?"
Well, we can answer this question with SCIENCE! You see, there are six pictures in the book showing the…
drorzel | October 9, 2010This is a couple weeks old, but I only just got around to uploading it. It should give you some idea of what it's like reading books with SteelyKid, though:
That's Kate and SteelyKid going through some of Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. SteelyKid is big into pointing things out in the art of whatever book we happen to be reading. This has a slight tendency to undermine the effectiveness of Goodnight Moon as a bedtime ritual, as there's a lot of "Mouse right there!" and "Cow jumping over moon!", but it's really, really cute, so I roll with it.
drorzel | October 7, 2010SteelyKid has a new friend, who she shows off in this week's Toddler Blogging:
She's a huge fan of Goldbug in Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, so when we found out that there's a plush Goldbug toy available on the Internet, it was a real no-brainer. She recognized it immediately, despite Goldbug-the-toy being approximately 100 times Goldbug-the-character.
Unrelated disgustingly cute toddler babble story:
Today was the first break we've had in a week of dreary rain, so we celebrated by stopping by the playground after day care. For a little while there was a really bright…
pharyngula | October 4, 2010One more "he's such a teddy bear" and I am going to set my beard on fire and howl. I met the similarly ferocious AJ Milne in Montreal, and he has written the first honest account of my appearance.
I assure you, the man was terrifying. Came into the place on this huge Harley belching clouds of black smoke smelling distinctly of brimstone, its engine thundering in that deep, subsonic register only the truly badass bikes of that brand get right. All while swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniels, which he threw into the audience before mounting the stage.
Little known fact: the reason I had that…
pharyngula | September 28, 2010The local newspaper would print out the names of all of the kids who made it onto the school honor roll, and my grandma would pinch my cheek and tell me what a good boy I was for studying hard. I do wonder how she would respond to making it onto the Playboy Honor Roll.
I think she'd say "Nehmen!" and wag her finger at me and tell me I'll be getting no krumkake that day.
pharyngula | September 26, 2010Our #2 Son has just graduated from officer's training school, and here he is in his fancy duds getting his bars pinned on by his mommy.
Next, he's heading off to Fort Knox for a while. He has been instructed to bring back souvenirs.