Hooray!

Villagers, rejoice! I'm not drooling blood anymore.

I think I'm going to have my newly-extracted wisdom teeth set into cufflinks. That way, the next time I'm arguing with an creationist or ID'er, I can just point at my cuffs and say,

"See these? You're an idiot."

A little less wisdom: Okay, God?

I just had my wisdom teeth out. It hurts like a motherfucker. The general anaesthetic and the Nitrous Oxide are wearing off, leaving only a general contempt for everything.

So, just as I sometimes whack my broken toaster on the off-chance that it will learn its lesson, I'm going to write an open letter to God on the off-chance that he exists.

As the capital G suggests, I'm addressing the god of Judeo-Christian tradition. I will, however, happily accept replies from other gods, demigods, or their non-corporeal messengers.



To: God_Allah_YHWH@gmail.com
CC: shiva_destroyer_of_worlds@yahoo.in; buddha_belly@hotmail.cn; prince_of_darkness@microsoft.com; mjollnir_man@gmx.com
BCC: Eric "Slowhand" Clapton

Why, God, why?

Why would you have given me a special subset of teeth that cause nothing but pain? Is there just a little of Job in all of us? It it a vestigial reminder of some Original Sin?

I've got to say, I'm a little vexed. I know you have a Plan for all of us, but for the life of me I can't figure out how my wisdom teeth fit into it.

Pain, I thought, was a necessary result of free will. But this had nothing to do with free will! There's no choice that I or anybody else I could have made differently that would have avoided this, save for to have had these teeth removed years ago.

I can't drink alcohol, I can't have a cigarette, I can't chew solid food; I'm in pain, I'm still a little high on laughing gas, and frankly, I'm more than a little pissed.

Feel free to let me in on the joke if I'm missing anything.

Sincerely, Phaedron.

Not even three-fifths!

"Mr Rising, you're actually ineligible to cast a vote for Barack Obama."
...
"No, it's not a curtailment of your rights, Mr. Rising."
...
"Yes, but that doesn't extend to Canadians."
...
"Mr Rising, you don't get three-fifths of a vote."
...
"Mr. Rising, it's not because you're black."
...
"Because you're not black"
...
"I seriously doubt that you're black 'from the waist down,' Mr Rising."
...
"Please put your pants back on, Mr Rising. We're all very impressed."


My point is, the Man's keeping me down. You'd better cast votes for the two of us. And did you know that it's illegal to take off your pants at a voter registration kiosk?

Untitled (Until further notice)

It's been a while since I've taken a hit of the sweet catharsis that can only come from airing my most intimate thoughts into the ether of the blogosphere. I think I'll shelve the decorum for the best summation I can make of the few weeks since my last entry:

Jesus fucking christ.

I drove to Alabama with Nez, Bryan, and J-Dogg, skipping two nights of sleep on a 45-hour, 85 mile-per-hour nonstop meander through the United States.

I went to Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Kentucky.

My ballin' blue minivan (don't fucking say it) broke down in Mountain Brook, AL, two miles from our destination.

I fixed it and got back to Ottawa a week ago.

Then I drove to Toronto a few days later. Because I felt like it.

I met up with Tall Penguin for an in-person mea culpa (here) over the bookstore bible incident (here, here, and here).

I drove back to Ottawa, making it into the city just in time to start my new job at 7am. A ten-hour shift on zero sleep is a feat made possible only through the wonders of Adderall. The perscription is mine; deal with it.

But despite the sporadic foray into my favourite rubber-stamped prescription psychostimulant, the fact remains that I haven't actually gone to sleep since Wednesday evening. Before that, Monday night was the last time my head hit a pillow.

Understandably, I'm beyond the stage of delerium. I'll be making posts on my adventures in more detail when I'm somewhere close to lucid. Until then, here's a rough sketch of the weeks to come:

Heading down to Amherst, NY for the Center for Inquiry's CFI On Campus 2008 Student Leadership Conference, an apparent coming-together of young collegiate agnostics, atheists, and freethinkers from Canada and the USA.

After that, I'll likely be heading down to Washington, DC. Sophie's there on an internship with the U.S. Congress, and I've rallied a loose fellowship of fraternity brothers for a pilgrimage to the chapter at George Washington University.

That's all for now. I need a shower badly; I smell like sex and Marlboros, dish soap, cheesecake, and the unmistakable aroma of chopped liver. Don't ask.

Sweet Home Alabama: Answers in Genesis

I'm running on a cumulative 3 hours' sleep over the last two days, so bear with me. This is important. It's come to my attention that the Creation Museum, fundamentalist Christianity's answer to Poe's Law, is on the outskirts of Cincinnati, just across the Kentucky state line.

From their web site:

Walk through the Garden of Eden. The Tree of Life, central to the garden, stretches out its branches, laden with ripened fruits. Come face-to-face with a sauropod, a dinosaur of incredible dimensions. His monstrous frame moves through the low-lying thicket as he grazes on plants. Introduce yourself to our chameleons. Examine bones, a clutch of eggs from a dinosaur, an exceptional fossil collection, and a mineral collection. Walk through the Cave of Sorrows and see the horrific effects of the Fall of man. Sounds of a sin-ravaged world echo through the room. Finally, see the sacrificial Lamb on the cross, and the hope of redemption.

The themes of the exhibits resound in the theater presentations: Men in White, Six Days of Creation, The Last Adam, and Dinosaurs and Dragons. Our Special Effects Theater, complete with rumbling seats and rising mists, takes visitors on a fantastic quest to find the real purpose and meaning of life.

And I'm going. No word yet on whether that will constitute Kentucky's token streak, but I'm leaning towards taking a pass on this one. The state-to-state tour of gratuitous nudity is meant to be just for shits and giggles, and as suiting as it would be to streak through the "Garden of Eden" historical exhibit - replete with Adam, Eve, and their dinosaur neighbours - we're not really looking to spread a message. Also, it would be a phenomenally quick way to get arrested.

A tentative date has been set. My odyssey begins out of Ottawa on Friday, June 20. My housemates Bryan and Ross have all but dropped out of the coming trip, but it's looking like my pimpin' minivan will be full anyway: Zach and DK (of bible-shuffle infamy) will meet me en route through Toronto, and Sam (hereafter, Nez Deux) will join the fellowship as it passes through Dayton, Ohio.

The Marketplace of Ideas

I realize that with a second post on the topic of the bookstore mischief saga, I risk typecasting myself as "the bookstore guy." Still, there were a lot of responses to the whole thing on Tall Penguin's blog, and an unbelievable number on PZ's.

There's one subset of those that I'd like to address.

When DK and I moved those bibles, it was done less as a political statement or some opening salvo in a campaign of petty bookstore terrorism, but more for sheer shits and giggles. We'd just come out of Harold and Kumar 2, and were in an insolent sort of mood.

There are some, however, who feel that there's another subtopic which is more systematically misplaced in bookstores. Many comments on Pharyngula suggested that Science shelves should be bereft of such gems as Michael Behe's intelligent-design manifestos, or any any book on new-age pseudoscience.

It's with this that I must take issue. When, in my email to Dr Myers, I referred to the democratic marketplace of ideas, I was not paying lip service. It is a fundamental tenet of western democratic society that as long as nobody is literally hurt, every opinion has a right to be heard. I'm not saying that every opinion is worth the paper it's written on, just that anyone has every right to make their case. This is especially the case in the rigours of the scientific process, where any theory - new or old - is continually vetted by a process of peer review and critique.


In the case of Behe's ID idiocy and New-Age acupressure guides, they belong squarely in the science section. The questions that they address (Who are we? How did we get here? How can the flow of Chi affect my basement grow-op?) are fundamentally scientific ones. Just because a particular author's answer to a real scientific question is completely insipid does not mean that it does not belong on the Science shelf.

Call me Naïve, but I truly want to believe that in the great marketplace of ideas, theories will ultimately rise and fall on their own merits.

If you want to rid your local science section of wastes of wood-pulp like Behe's books on Intelligent Design, here's how to do it.

Let his opinion be heard.

There is only one appropriate response to a ridiculous proposition, and that response is thorough ridicule. Give Behe and his ilk a seat at the table. Engage him. Expose his ideas for the unscrupulous shams that they are. I'm not advocating that anyone treat fools with kid gloves - far from it. All I'm saying is, give these people just enough intellectual rope to hang themselves with, then help them build their gallows.