They Will Rise Again From the Tundra

Whenever one has the audacity to bring up the topic of evolution in front of a Creationist, the Creationist will invariably (if he is somewhat educated) ask to see proof of these transitional species evolutionists are always talking about. The very request is silly. All species are transitional. What the Creationist wants is a fossil of an ape-man or a fish-squirrel, some clear cartoonish symbol of movement from one species to the next. Of course, evolution doesn’t work in this way. Not remotely.

But every now and then scientists unearth a fossil that contains either vestiges of an organism’s past or early mutations that eventually led to its future.  PhysOrg.com published one such example today: a snake with legs.  Findings like this aren’t entirely novel.  Some whales, after all, have femurs and tibias.  (The NCSE article is an old one, but consider it a primer.  I’m sure the … Read more

Peat hags between Geifas and Fagwyr Wen © Copyright Rudi Winter and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) License.

The following excerpts were originally supposed to be blog posts, but as usual, they either spiraled wildly out of control or simply fizzled like most of the dry rot that comes through my fingertips these days.  In truth, they function more like the journal entries I once scribbled down in those little Moleskines of mine, a practice I more or less abandoned three years ago.  I used to post little tidbits of them online, so consider this more of a brain dump than anything.  This is just a chance to drag these sick, little abominations out of the bog and put them to their final rest out in the Electronic Wastes.

I caution you against reading them too literally and, then again, too metaphorically, … Read more

Courtesy of goodrob13's photostream. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/goodrob13/3928208574/)

So the Obama administration is presently hemorrhaging classified information courtesy of WikiLeaks, the Bush administration is doing so posthumously, the earth’s crust is hemorrhaging oil, and Tom Vilsack is simply battling an embarrassing case of hemorrhoids after/during the stress of the Shirley Sherrod debacle.  Those are the big stories at the moment, but in true form for a real live Twenty-First Century Narcissist, I’m not really thinking about all that right now.

Something terrible happened on Sunday at Dave & Buster’s… I lost.

In and of itself, losing is not a rarity in my life though I am, in general, more accustomed to winning.  But on Sunday evening, I lost in a big way.  I lost at everything.  Even now, my ego hasn’t restored itself, nor will the chasm be sated or filled by gobbling up Scrabble wins and cheap, trivial victories. … Read more

Image Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eurleif/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

There are too many stimuli and no way to unhook from the Delivery System.  Every thirty seconds or so, TweetDeck chirps and notifies me that some Twitter entity or another has posted something to the web.  Facebook is running and constantly updating itself with video, status updates, and one friend who is rebuking me for becoming part of the background noise.  He doesn’t know that I’ve downloaded the Twitter plug-in that updates my Facebook status whenever I write a tweet, nor does he know that Brief, my Firefox RSS reader, keeps flashing feed updates at me for no good reason.  If I am constantly disseminating information, it is, perhaps, only as a form of purgation lest I suffer neuronal overload and slip into a vegetative state.

I can’t help it.  Neither can most of us who’ve fallen victim.  That we will suffer enlarged … Read more

Easter isn’t exactly a day I relish in any capacity, and on this Easter Sunday, I am, perhaps, more irritable than usual.  This patch on my arm is feeding nicotine into my bloodstream to the tune of 21 milligrams over a 24-hour period for the sixth day in a row with no telling how long it will be before I pass a single minute bereft of longing for a cigarette.

I am, on this day, reminded of the fervid retellings of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension into Heaven that rattled down the hallways of my Catholic high school and how odd it was to be an atheist tucked in among the pious masses.  The rub is, of course, that piety is almost uniformly non-existent among teenagers.  Even the classmates of mine renowned for their adherence to the Church defied the constraints of Catholicism’s unrealistic dogma, most likely by engaging in rigorous … Read more