personal
pharyngula | September 26, 2009More travel this week: I'll be in Lewiston, Maine to speak at Bates College, at 5 p.m. Tuesday, 29 September, in Room G65, Pettengill Hall. And from there I'll be flying to Los Angeles for the AAI convention.
Lots of flight time is lots of writing time, right?
clock | September 24, 2009Under the fold are some pictures from the inaugural Long Table event at 3Cups in Chapel Hill with Moroccan food prepared by Sandwhich, organized by Anton and Erin Zuiker.
There were about 35 people there. I knew a few of them from before, but it was mostly new people I got to meet. Some people were new even to Anton and Erin as this was a publicly advertised event, open to the first 35 people who sign up. Every now and then, a person would get up and tell a short story related to food and travel, mostly about unforgettable meals in unforgettable places.
I am aware of only one blog post about…
drorzel | September 24, 2009SteelyKid says, "Daaaad! This is no time for Baby Blogging!"
"Appa and I are reading Dinosaur vs. Bedtime. Come back and take a picture later!"
SteelyKid has started to get interested in books, though as you can tell from the orientation of this one, she doesn't exactly have the reading thing down. She loves turning pages, though, and looking at the pictures.
Sadly, she also loves to crinkle the pages up, and try to rip them out. This copy of Dinosaur vs. Bedtime is down a page or two already. She'll learn, though.
pharyngula | September 24, 2009Jebus, they can't shut me up. Just got back from the afternoon discussion, which went on for two hours. It was great fun. Of course…
My opening remarks were about being assertive atheists who challenge conventions and do things like desecrating crackers…
…and a priest, complete with clerical collar, was right there in a good seat smack in the middle of the auditorium.
He looked a bit peevish, but didn't say very much. A few of the other Catholics around him expressed how offended they were, which was fine. They could have taken more time to state their case, if they wanted.
Good times. You…
pharyngula | September 24, 2009I'm keeping busy here — we had a packed house at my talk (which was all wonky sciencey biology stuff) last night, I did a press conference this morning which might get a few soundbites floating around North Dakota, spent a little time on the Christopher Gabriel show on WDAY radio, and now get a brief break before I head over to NDSU for a 2:00 discussion session on atheist activism, which should be fun. I plan on briefly discussing the Creation Museum trip and desecrating communion wafers, and then let other people howl back and forth for a while.
At 6:00, it's time for the Fargo Theatre and…
jstemwedel | September 24, 2009I ended up spending a significant portion of the last several days down with something flu-like. (It included a fever and the attendant aches, chills, and sweats, as well as the upper respiratory drowning-in-my-own-mucus symptoms.)
I did not drag my ailing butt out of bed to go to the doctor and have my flu-like thing characterized. (In part, this is because I knew it would pass in a few days. In part, it was because I managed to tweak a muscle in my right side by sneezing hard and thus was unable to straighten up or be as mobile as I normally am. Someday, I swear, I am going to figure…
jdupuis | September 23, 2009If you feel the need to socially network with ScienceBlogs and any of us various SciBlings, you can do so on Facebook and Twitter. I suspect that most of us who are on those services are fans/followers of ScienceBlogs.
The main places I hang out are Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook. Drop by and say hi!
(I don't know if it exists, but it would be interesting to see a list of all of our various handles on those and other services.)
jstemwedel | September 22, 2009Imagine you are looking ahead to a furlough day and taking seriously the piece of the agreement that specifies that you won't actually do any work on that furlough day. To prevent yourself from backsliding by doing work to pass the time, do you:
A. Schedule a spa-day at a local salon (thus also helping offset, if only just a little, the hit local businesses take during furlough days).
B. Let chores at home pile up, ensuring that your time will be gobbled up by doing them (or by hiding from those depending on you to do them).
C. Come down with some gnarly cold that knocks you on your butt…
drorzel | September 22, 2009One of the errands I ran Sunday with SteelyKid was a run to the local Eddie Bauer outlet to pick up a couple more pairs of khakis for work (well, they're black, actually, but in style the same as the khaki ones). As is often the case, I ended up buying two different sizes-- not just because this was at a discount outlet store, but because of the inconvenient quantization of pants.
I have a collection of khakis in two different waist sizes. this is partly because I lost a whole bunch of weight back in the Bad Time when I had horrible stomach problems (much of which I've gained back), but also…
pharyngula | September 21, 2009I'm traveling to Fargo on Wednesday for a series of events. I think I know what I'm doing, so let me spell out as much as I know.
On Wednesday at 6:00, I'll be speaking at Minnesota State University Moorhead, in room 118 in the Science Lab building, on the subject of "Darwin and Design".
Wednesday evening afterwards? I don't know. Somebody will probably take me by the elbow and lead me to beer.
Thursday morning I'm doing a press conference with the Red River Freethinkers, and then at 11ish, I'm going to be on WDAY radio for a short while. Tune in!
Thursday afternoon at 2:15 2:00, I'll be…
clock | September 21, 2009Music that makes me laugh, or makes me want to dance, is entertaining music.
Music that makes me think or admire the artist's skills, is good music.
Music that makes me cry is Great Music. Rare.
drorzel | September 20, 2009I'm working on a badly-neglected project this morning, so here are a couple of pictures of SteelyKid from yesterday's trip to the park. (You can see more in my Flickr sets, linked at left.) This one gets you the basic idea of what it's like taking a very active toddler to the playground:
Finish one thing, and run determinedly toward the next thing...
(This also shows off her awesome "S is for Space Ship" shirt, which is a little big on her, but then, it's a 24-month size, a full nine months ahead of her nominal size. It's also from the boys' department, because girl-toddler clothes all suck…
rskloot | September 19, 2009It's that time again: Today , September 19th, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Japanese Respect for the Aged day ... and my birthday. It also happens to be the day Giles Corey was
"pressed" to death by villagers who stacked increasingly large rocks on
him because he'd been declared a witch in the famous Salem Witch Trials
(1692). It was the day women were finally allowed to vote (1893) and
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid committed their first robbery
(1900). It's the anniversary of the first underground nuclear bomb test
and the Dodgers last game at Ebbets Field (1957), where they…
revere | September 17, 2009It's been a hard year or two. First Miriam Makeba. Then Odetta. Now we've lost another one, Mary Travers, the Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary. Mary died Wednesday of leukemia in Connecticut. Even before Mary, Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow formed one of the iconic sixties folk groups in 1961, Mary sang back up for Pete Seeger. And for half a century, Peter, Paul and Mary we're there when we needed them. Every major demonstration or event. Always. They were there.
Political songs were a mainstay but so were love songs and children's songs. So here's Mary, in later years, singing one of the group'…
drorzel | September 17, 2009SteelyKid says "Yayyy! Baby Blogging on the stairs!"
(Not shown: Kate making a similar mouth-wide-open face for a very different reason...)
pharyngula | September 17, 2009I give you all fair warning: my daughter Skatje has passed her driver's test, and has a license to drive. Alone. Without her father sitting by her side, hands clenched tightly to the armrest, feet pounding the floorboards to hit imaginary brakes, and using the force of his indomitable will to prevent collisions, explosions, squirrel-squishings, etc.
You might just want to stay home for the rest of your life.
jstemwedel | September 16, 2009Dr. Free-Ride's better half went to the Free-Ride offspring's school for Back to School Night earlier this week. (I stayed at home with the sprogs to oversee dinner and baths.)
Dr. Free-Ride's better half reported back that the younger Free-Ride offspring's third grade teacher "doesn't believe in too much homework". ("She doesn't believe it's possible to assign too much homework?" I asked cautiously. "No, she doesn't believe an excess of homework is a good thing," my better half replied.)
And, she supported her stance with a page she distributed to parents summarizing recent educational…
clock | September 15, 200917 years ago, there were no broods of periodic cicadas emerging (and also none this year). But that year something much more momentous happened, on this day exactly - Catharine changed her name....into something translatable as 'The Bride Of Coturnix' ;-)
Happy anniversary, medawlin'
And what she got as a present?
A whole bunch of Howling Pig soaps - very, very nicely fragrant:
Howling Pig? This is where the name comes from:
The Legend Of The Howling Pig
Legend has it that once, long, long, ago, the pigs ran free in great, happy herds, roaming the wide open spaces of the lone prairie, much…
jstemwedel | September 15, 2009First off, I moderate all my comments. Mostly it's to eliminate comment spam, but it also means the rare death threat is not going to post without me approving it.
Second of all, why would you think you have the evidential basis to discern the religious convictions (or lack thereof) of either this blogger or her offspring? Even if you did, why would that be germane to a discussion of a classroom snake? And why, in any case, would it make you feel justified in asserting "you have forfeit your life"?
Obviously, you feel like you have an important message to convey to someone. I would like…
drorzel | September 12, 2009I almost forgot about yesterday's anniversary-- I didn't think of it at all until the fulsome tribute before Thursday night's football game. I actually waffled for a bit about whether to put up the annual moment-of-silence post. It's been eight years, everybody's concerns have shifted to other things, and September 11, 2001 doesn't loom quite as large as it did a few years ago.
I decided to go with it, though, for the same reasons as always. How long will I keep doing this yearly? Probably until this stops making me cry. Gonna be a few years yet...
Screw this depressing stuff. Here's a happy…