Oy, it’s an evening for a debate with a creationist. Hey, Matt Dillahunty, would you like to jump on a plane and zip up here to Fargo, North Dakota to take over for me? You’re so much better than I am at this stuff.

Probably not. I just have to brace myself up, I guess. Anyway, it’s going to be packed with Christians — I think the 7th Day Adventists are sponsoring this thing — so any friendly godless faces in the audience will be appreciated. It’s at 7pm, in the Ramada Inn (1635 42nd St S), and the topic is “Is there evidence for a creator or not?”. I’m “not.”

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If you submit a comment and it is held for moderation, it is not your fault, probably: we’re having problems with Akismet, our spam filter software, and it’s holding up a lot of people’s posts. We’ve got TOP PEOPLE working on it, so just be patient. I’ll be browsing the bloated queue of posts held for moderation later, sometime after work. I might approve your delightful comment then. Or I might cast your worthless screed into the eternal flames of perdition, which I happen to have burning right here by my right elbow.

One of the more trivial ways the trolls carry out a campaign of harassment is to sign me up for random newsletters, getting me on mailing lists for organizations I have no interest in following. For a while, I was getting gay magazines and all kinds of strange porn offers; I laughed those away. Then I was getting signed up for church email newsletters. I get regular updates from the City of Riverside, California — the last I looked at one, which was sometime ago, I was getting information about their sewage treatment plant. You get the idea. Of course, all I do is flag them as spam, my email software then automatically dumps all future email from that source into a junk mail folder, and once a week or so I have to remember to trash the tens of megabytes of crap in that folder.

Now someone has ever so cleverly signed me up as a supporter of the National Association for Gun Rights, which has offered me a chance to enter a drawing, and being a generous sort of person, I thought I’d share it with all of you. Please do sign up for it.

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The newest member of the FtB team is up and running: Jamila Bey is here!

I thought it would be nice to have the superbowl playing in the background while I was working this evening — I have good memories of my father and uncles enjoying the game when I was young, even if I never got into it myself. But I turned it on 15 minutes ago, and it was actually rather intolerable: the self-importance, the hyperbole, Bob Costas (that was Costas, right?) fellating the players and telling them how important their ball-catching and people-hitting abilities are, and going on and on about trivial statistics from past games. It’s all kind of icky.

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I normally don’t watch football, but I thought maybe I should get a little bit into the spirit of it all since I am from Seattle, and one of the teams has a corporate owner who has been gouging my relatives for a stadium and services for years. Besides, I’ve got my exams graded and my lecture prepared for Monday already, so any excuse to party, right? I’ve never been to a Superbowl party, either, so I’m not sure how one does it. But I’m sure there will be explanations and suggestions in the comments.

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I was sorting out my calendar. It always helps to occasionally figure out where I’m going and where I am, and it’s also helpful for my wife, in case she’s wondering where I got to. These are my travel plans for the next several months, in case anyone wants to hunt me down.

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