Alas, this is my very last day in Iceland. I’m packing up and cleaning up, and heading off to the airport this afternoon, then flying for 6 hours. I estimate that I’ll get home about 10pm Central time, when I will flop into bed and may not move for a long, long time.

You know what that means: the blog will be neglected even more than it has lately. Behave yourselves! I don’t want to get home to find beer spilled all over the carpet and bras dangling from the ceiling fan. If you’ve left bloody creationist entrails all over the place…well, that’s OK. I’ll clean those up when I get home.

Also when I get home, I’ll be putting up the much-delayed Carnival of Evolution. It’s been delayed because Iceland happened, and I’ve been terribly distracted by marvels of nature. Sadly, my laptop also seems to be dying a death of paroxymal seizures — I’m hoping to be able to diagnose it and fix it when I get home, and barring that, I’ll be able to use one of the other laptops at home, but right now I’m limited to the iPad, which isn’t so great for longer writing projects.

So, epic foreign saga time is almost over, look for Pharyngula to be back to its old self Monday morning.

My Scienceblogs site is a-changin’. National Geographic has been working behind the scenes to convert and move all the old data to a newer and prettier website, and the final surge of fixes is going into place tonight and tomorrow — so don’t bother commenting over there for a while until it’s all stabilized.

I suspect it will all go smoothly (and the new site is looking good) except for a little bit of drama. NatGeo has informed Abbie Smith that they want the ERV slimepit posts taken down, according to Abbie’s own account on facebook. There are various accusations as well that it’s us here at FtB who are responsible for the complaints that are bringing it down — which is not true. All along, NatGeo has been telling me that there will be new Standards & Practices rules at the National Geographic-branded Scienceblogs site — it’s why I took proactive steps to move all of the new godless anti-religion content to the new site at Freethoughtblogs. I’ve said since last August that there were posts that bugged our new NatGeo overlords, and that there were changes coming.

Abbie Smith is in denial. Now, in addition to implying that Sb crew at FtB are responsible for shutting down the slimepit, she claims I’ve been lying about the imminent changes.

NatGeo have been just fine. Not being sarcastic. PZ was blatantly *lying* about censorship from NatGeo last year.

So I said NatGeo would be lightly censoring content last year. This year, NatGeo is telling Abbie Smith to censor some offensive posts. Therefore, in Abbie Smith’s world, I was lying when I said NatGeo would be asking us to censor some content.

I don’t get it.