I’m flying away again, straight back to Minneapolis, arriving this evening. I’m not going straight home to Morris, though, because by great good coincidence Roy Zimmerman is playing in the Cannon Falls High School Auditorium (8209 E Minnesota St., Cannon Falls, MN), so I figure I’ll take a little detour and pop in there for a while. If you’re in the area, stop on by!

I’d hate to think that someone at Syracuse University might be driving to RIT tomorrow to hear my lecture, since I’ve been invited by The Atheists, Agnostics and Freethinkers Alliance to speak at Syracuse next week, on 8 April.

Oh, and look: Hemant is there tonight, warming up the audience for me. How nice of him!

I’m off to some place in New York on 1 April — I’ll be speaking at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Webb Auditorium, Bulding 7 at 8:30PM. This is going to be a quick blitz, fly in Thursday, fly back Friday, because I’ve got work piling up on me…but I’m sure I can find a little time in the evening after the talk for informal chat.

Another podcast, this one from Citizen’s Radio with Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny — they interviewed me in Melbourne. Tune in, it’s like CNN with more swearing!

Yeah, I’m on Skeptic Zone #75. I think this is the one recorded in the pub in Canberra, with Dr Rachael Dunlop.

I’ll be on the air with Scooter on KPFT shortly, at about 10:30 central time. There is live streaming, if you’re interested. I think we’ll be talking about Australia and the Global Atheist Convention, but who knows? That guy is crazy.

This evening’s R&R for the Trophy Wife™ and myself is a lovely cup of tea made with some of the sampler of Australian teas I was generously given by Annie M. this past weekend. We like it. Thanks very much!

Everyone knows already why I was off in Melbourne this past week — it was the Global Atheist Conference — but why did I hare off to Canberra for the weekend? It was another conspiracy.

Many years ago, the locus of all things evolutionist on the interwebs was found on Usenet, in a group called talk.origins, where a motley mob of ruthless science proponents regularly mocked and crushed creationists and honed their skills at rhetorical combat. I came out of that particular culture (and, by the way, the commenting rules here, with a policy of limited interference with the substance of people’s comments, grew straight out of talk.origins). Talk.Origins still exists as a discussion group, and evolved into a very useful web site, as well, and many of the regulars who haunted Usenet have since branched out into blogs, suchs as The Panda’s Thumb.

Oddly enough, quite a few of the illustrious and honored masters of talk.origins are Australian. So, as long as I was there in Australia, we had to meet up and share our plans for world domination. It was kind of like a meeting of the Illuminati, only we’re mostly poor academics and civil servants, and our only magic power is our obsession with flooding the internet. Here’s one photo of the group:

They are, from left to right in the back: Cartman (respect our authoritah),
John Wilkins (master of sowing confusion with philosophy),
Chris Ho-Stuart (the milquetoast atheist),
Jim Foley (most definitely a hominid),
PZ Myers (biggest mouth), and
Chris Nedin (biggest Dick (seriously, he showed us the award) (and photos of the real thing) (it’s over a meter long!)). In front is Ian Musgrave (best beard). You should be reading their blogs! Especially if our plans for world domination come to fruition, since you will want a leg up in flattering your masters.

Also, while I was in Canberra, I spoke at a Skeptics in the Pub meeting, which was held in a very classy pub, King O’Malley’s. It was rather interesting in that more people showed up than was convenient (several hundred), and they were sort of draped into all kinds of nooks and crannies. It was also one of those talks where I gave a short introduction (literally, I read the intro to the book I’m working on), and then didn’t get to the rest because we just ended up doing a long Q&A for the rest of our time.

I am not in that picture. I’m somewhere way off screen, hiding from the mob, I think.

I’m holed up in a hotel room, writing, writing, and writing some more, only emerging sporadically to see a little Australian sun and get a little exercise, and also to exercise my brain a bit. A few things are going on here in Melbourne.

I wish I could attend this panel discussion on the “Science and God: Incompatible?”, just because it’s stacked with Christian apologists who will no doubt be annoyingly superficial, and because it was the topic of my lecture at the GAC (my answer: yes. Incompatible, irreconcilable, and dear sweet baby Jebus, keep your superstitions away from the grownups). It’s at the St James Conference Centre, 12 Batman St, West Melbourne, tonight at 8.

I’m skipping it, though, because I’d rather attend a lecture by Craig Venter tonight, at 6 in the Melbourne Convention Center. Evidence-based reasoning always wins over old farts exercising in wishful thinking in a church.

And tomorrow afternoon, Thursday, I’m going to try and drop in on the University of Melbourne Secular Society’s dissection of creationism and specifically of Ray Comfort’s bad introduction to the Origin. That’s at 1:00 in Theatre 4, the Alan Gilbert Building.

I’m spending my weekend in Canberra, and I will be giving a talk to Skeptics in the Pub at 12:00 on Saturday, in King O’Malley’s Irish Pub, 131 City Walk. I haven’t quite decided what I’ll be talking about yet, though — I’ll probably sort that out on the plane on Friday.

I am an unconsoleable wretch. I am 15,500km from home, parted from my beloved on this day when we should be together. This is our 30th wedding anniversary, we’ve known each other now for 45 years (we had a long engagement), and I’m in Melbourne, Australia, while she’s in Morris, Minnesota.

I sigh. I have a bottle of wine here I’ll be drinking alone. Because of the time difference, she’ll be sleeping while I’m awake and vice versa. We’ll celebrate when I get back on Sunday.

Until then, all I can say is that thirty years is not enough.

Oh, and any rascals who might be sniffing about the finest lady around while I’m away might want to recall the story of Penelope and Odysseus: you won’t be getting anywhere, and I will be back.