Any New Jersey readers out there? Anyone from Seaside Heights?
Why didn’t you tell me?
I had to find out about this exciting event in the grocery store checkout line. I was most interested to learn that it ravaged the shore line during a recent storm, but seems to have put most of its effort into destroying a church.
Hmmm. I didn’t do it, officer.
The burning question is, do I get one if I go mad?
This is the week of the Stevens County Fair, right here in bucolic Morris, Minnesota. It starts on Wednesday, 9 August and runs through Sunday the 13th, so you all still have time to start heading out this way. It’s your classic rural fair: there will be accordions, deep-fried anything on a stick, pig-judging, carnies, a demolition derby, country-western music, lawn mower races, 4H kids, and tractors, snowmobiles, and ice houses for sale. You have not lived until you have experience a midwestern county fair.
(Oh, and don’t eat the food if you want to continue living. It’s like jabbing your aorta with a turkey baster clogged full of pure cholesterol.)
I think we’re planning on having our weekly Drinking Liberally session at the beer garden at the fair, so there’s another reason for coming on Thursday evening.
I’m going to be there just about every day. I volunteered to man booths at various hours for UMM, our local humane society, and the Stevens County DFL. Come on down—the fair is free, parking is free, it is the thing to do in August.
We seem to be talking about breasts a lot this week, don’t we? Abel Pharmboy raises a provocative ethical question: is it crass or is it reasonable for breast cancer researchers to ask Hooters to promote breast cancer awareness? I’m of the opinion that we ought to get every penny we can from them, but stop short of giving any hint that we actually endorse their business…although I’d wonder if even asking them for their assistance is granting them respectability, or if acknowledging the assistance of Hooters would turn a serious event into a joke.
It’s probably best to post your answers to Terra Sigillata. I’d really be interested to see Twisty‘s opinion!
(Just a wild thought…I wonder how much money doctors could get for naming rights. Offer to change the name of the disease to Hooter’s™ cancer. I know, that’s even more tasteless than getting them to sponsor a meeting.)
I won’t post this lovely print directly, since it might not be safe for work—not because it shows breasts, but because if any of your passing colleagues know anything about molluscan anatomy, they’ll realize that that cephalopod is gnawing on her head and be horrified.
(hat tip to Leslie Madsen-Brooks)
Our behind-the-scenes whip boss at Seed, Katherine Sharpe, mentioned this comic, and after I was done laughing, I had to post it.
It could be our new motto.
Over at the Panda’s Thumb, there is a sharp rebuttal of the creationists’ complaint about junk DNA. Read it, it’s useful. It leads to a bothersome and more general point, though.
Collins has another published interview in Salon. It’s sad, actually—in every new interview, he says pretty much the same thing, but he digs himself in a little deeper. I ordered his book the other day, and now I’m beginning to regret it; it’s beginning to sound like trite Christian apologetics with no depth, no self-reflection, no insight…just compound anecdotes intended to rationalize a conclusion he has arrived at with no evidence. It’s distressingly anti-scientific.
For instance, we get an expansion of his hiking anecdote:
Let’s start the week with another open thread, and a few carnivals.
There is now an online petition to save the Australian Lungfish. Take a moment and put your name on it!
Also, it’s not just the lungfish—as Monika Dieker reminded me, there’s also the Mary River Turtle at risk.
