Grandpa Simpson lives!

Congratulations, Arthur L. and Ina Jean Strobel! They’ve been married for 65 years, a commendable accomplishment. I’m going to recommend, given Arthur’s interests, that for his 66th anniversary, they reward themselves with a real genetics class.

Here’s their anniversary announcement, published at, I presume, their own expense. He rambles on about his service in WWII, and then, strangely, talks about the actions of a German major who was charged with defending a bridge, and who might be a distant relative. Which leads him to talk about the inheritance of the Y chromosome, something about Romans and Celts, salt mines, and National Science Foundation Institutes. Also,

Arthur and Ina Jean consider attendance with and participation in a scripturally based church to to be of high importance for a long, happy, useful and satisfying life. They consider fiscal responsibility to be very important for family stability. They never pay extra for an extended warranty on a television, refrigerator, washing machine, automobile or anything else. They prefer to pay the complete price at the time of purchase for these items as extra pay for financial charges would be unwise. Arthur and Ina Jean consider spiritual and fiscal development and maturity to be worthy goals.

Then we’re back on the chromosome business, where we learn that having a Y chromosome makes you strong, good at chess, and able to solve Rubik’s Cubes quickly, while having two X chromosomes allows you to touch the back of your head with your foot. Also, one trick is to tell stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m’shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt. Which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ’em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, you’d say. Now where was I… oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn’t get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones… . Oh, wait, no — I got that last bit somewhere else.

I would not recommend going to the anniversary party. Arthur’s sure to corner you and lecture at you for hours.

(via Kajed Heat)

Happy Halloween!

People are always sending me pictures of their terrifying tentacled creatures, so I thought it only proper today to exhibit one that will send chills down your spine. Behold! A nightmare from Tupelo, Mississippi!

Note the cool regard of all she sees, the superior attitude, the tentacles, the stylish purple outfit with googly eyes on her head — she’s clearly an atheist. You will bow down before her.

Religion is only one source of irrationality

So now aliens are bigger than Jesus.

According to a recent survey carried out by the makers of the new alien-shoot ’em up video game ‘XCOM: Enemy Unknown’, an estimated 33.1 million inhabitants in the UK believe that life exists on other planets, while only 27.5 million – less than half the country – believe there is a God.

52 percent of the population believe evidence of UFOs has or would be covered up, because the fact of their existence would threaten the stability of the government.

10 percent of the country claim to have seen a UFO, with almost a quarter more men claiming to have done so than women.

Although the source of the survey might have skewed the results a bit, I can believe it. I’ve met a few UFOnuts, and they’re pretty dotty…and worse.

By the way, I may have a brief appearance on the UK Conspiracy Road Trip series soon — Jerry Coyne was on the episode with creationists last week. I’m not the draw in the show, though. It’s the deranged theories. One guy tried to tell me that Jews were reptiles from another planet.

OK, OK…so that cracker really was Jesus

According to Michael Nugent, today is the “Day of Agreement” and we’re supposed to be really really nice and go along with all the nonsense people tell us we’re suppose to respect. Just for today — we can go back to being normal tomorrow.

So I’ll go along with that and agree with the Catholics that the cracker I abused really was of one substance with The Lord Jesus Christ, Ruler of the Cosmos, Grand Judge of All Humanity, Vengeful Enemy of Fig Trees.

I’ll also admit that I really enjoyed stabbing Him, and would gleefully do it again if I had a magic cracker handy.

Nerd life forever

Oh, no, there are more reasons I can never run for public office in the United States.

Colleen Lachowicz is a Democrat running for the state senate in Maine. The Republicans are running attack ads against her, arguing that she isn’t fit for office because she plays an orc rogue in World of Warcraft. It’s not clear whether she’d be OK if she’d been playing an elf paladin.

Alas, I think I’m worse. I play an undead warlock. Also, I’m an atheist. Doooomed.

Oh, no! I just noticed in that picture…I’m also wearing a dress! Crap, I’m just going to have to resign myself to spending the rest of my life sucking at the public teat, never contributing anything, aren’t I? I’d move into my mother’s basement, but she doesn’t have one.

Hasn’t changed a bit in half a millennium

Archaeologists are digging up a Tuscan convent and have found some skeletons that might include the remains of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, also known as Mona Lisa. She’s still lovely after all this time.

One investigator has been going through the bones, trying to identify the dead woman, so they can apply forensic reconstruction to her skull.

Wait…why?

I mean, we already know what she looked like. I can understand general historical research on Renaissance remains, but pawing through the graveyard to find one famous person simply to reconstruct a face we’re already familiar with seems peculiarly ghoulish — nothing but a sensationalistic game. What question does this answer, what do we learn from this pointless exercise?

Fortunately, I’m not the only one who wonders about that.

But not all experts are convinced by the claims of Dr Vinceti and his team. Dr Kristina Killgrove, an anthropologist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the US, said on her blog: "Although the excavation is being carried out in a professional manner, Vinceti’s quest to dig up the ‘real’ Mona Lisa is not grounded in scientific research methodology." She added: "The news media’s breathless coverage of it threatens to signal to the public that archaeologists are frivolous with their time, energy, and research money."

Maybe, once they identify the skull, they can send it off to the Louvre and mount it on the wall next to the painting. <sarcasm>That’ll be informative.</sarcasm>

A curious bit of frivolity

There’s this game called Minecraft (oh, have you heard of it?) which is a kind of world-builder game — you gather resources like wood and ore and meat, and you craft stuff out of it. I’ve learned something odd about it.

You gather wool from sheep. You can make colored wool with dyes.

Nice revelation: you can dye whole sheep and harvest colored wool from them. That was unexpected: it grows back in the color you dyed it. That’s not physiological!

And then…if you dye a sheep and then breed it to produce more sheep, the color breeds true. Dye two sheep lime green, and you can generate a whole flock of lime green sheep.

I don’t know whether to be appalled or delighted. It opens the door to exploring rules of Lamarckian inheritance, except there doesn’t seem to be any room for any kind of selection or predation or variation in anything that affects survival or reproduction. Someone tell the game makers to get a biologist as a consultant, there are possibilities here!

(I hear I can breed wolves, too, but I haven’t tried it. Do they vary in any interesting ways? Can I select for sheep-eating wolves?)

Come to think of it, I did have a gannet appear in my toast yesterday

A wildlife photographer gets a lucky break and captures an aerial photo of a flock of flamingos that’ has spontaneously assembled into a rough wading-bird shape. Cool enough, a nice example of pareidolia in wildlife form, and then the photographer has to go and ruin it:

“The reaction to this photo has been remarkable. Some people have actually said that the image is divine intervention and proof that there is a God.”

That’s a pretty remarkable reaction right there, first crediting the Ultimate Patriarch for a happy accident and then distancing yourself from it, FoxNews style, with the “some people say.”

I don’t stampede my herd of pronghorn through your cathedral, guy. Please keep your God out of my Wonders of Nature.