Gender reveal parties are still a thing?

It’s another lethal gender reveal party.

Growing up, Christopher and Michael Pekny were brothers and best friends. It only made sense that when 28-year-old Christopher was preparing to celebrate the upcoming birth of his first child, his little brother was right there beside him.

“My brother Michael and my brother Chris were so incredibly close,” Peter Pekny, their oldest brother, told The Washington Post early Tuesday. “‘Chris and Mike’ — it was one name. They were always, always together.”

And so the two men were together Sunday morning, tinkering in a garage in Liberty, N.Y., to rig a small device to emit a pink-or-blue burst during the grand finale of a gender-reveal party planned for later that evening.

But the homemade device unexpectedly malfunctioned, killing the expectant father and seriously injuring his 27-year-old brother, New York State Police said in a statement Monday. Police are still investigating the cause of the explosion, but no criminal charges have stemmed from the accident.

Jesus. The original gender reveal gimmick was just cutting into a cake to see what color it was under the icing…and now people are building bombs? I suspect that baby and her mother would have preferred to have a father around, rather than some irrelevant pink or blue confetti.

By the way, the woman who started the craze, and the daughter revealed by the pink cake, have evolving views.

Karvunidis says her views on sex and gender have changed, especially when she’s talking to her daughter.

“She’s telling me ‘Mom, there are many genders. Mom, there’s many different sexualities and all different types,’ and I take her lead on that,” Karvunidis says.

“Celebrate the baby,” she says. “There’s no way to have a cake to cut into it, to see if they’re going to like chess. Let’s just have a cake.”

Let’s get everyone on board with that simple idea, OK?

He’s not wrong

MC Hammer (!) had to rebuke one of those anti-philosophy, science-is-all-about-truth types, and he put the hammer down.

“When you measure, include the measurer” is such a good line. He has splattered this @drewgrey character so effectively that he doesn’t even realize how thoroughly crushed his views are.

Right now I’m rethinking parachute pants. You know, they probably are pretty comfortable, and nice and loose for dancing. Could he have been right about them, too?

Darwin, Victorian

Adam Rutherford presents a balanced assessment of Darwin.

Darwin was a liberal, and an abolitionist, perhaps influenced by his taxidermy tutor in Edinburgh, a Guyanese man called John Edmonstone who had once been enslaved. But we must be honest in our assessment of him and his work. He was a man of his time, and The Descent of Man contains many passages that seriously jar today, being scientifically specious and politically outmoded. Darwin never mentions Edmonstone by name, only as a “full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate”. He speaks of how the “civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races”.

In the more elegant quotations, you may note the typically Victorian use of “man” to mean all humans. It is less forgivable given Darwin’s belief that women were intellectually inferior: “If men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.” At least part of his incomparable legacy is that we now know this to be incorrect.

That’s fair. Basically, everyone who lived over 50 years ago was stuffed to the gills with wrong ideas — wrong as we know them to be now, and 50 years from now the next generation will be appalled at what the majority believes now (“You went to church, and thought capitalism was good?”) — but at least he was in the vanguard of those trying to bring about a better world for all.

Still, when Bill & Ted fetch him back to the modern day in their telephone booth, I expect to be disappointed. I can imagine Darwin tut-tutting on Twitter about all those women in comic book movies, and suggesting, in the name of the betterment of mankind, that maybe those ladies should be home tending the children, and maybe they aren’t better than a dog anyways, what with all these modern ideas. Let’s keep him in the 19th century!

Hmm. Maybe we could use that telephone booth to send a lot of 21st century babblers back the 19th, where they’d be happier.

Good news from the progeny

#2 Son, Connlann, is going to be promoted — he is now a Captain (Promotable), soon to be a Major. Even better, he’s been assigned to a new base. He’s getting out of Texas, yay! And he’s going to be stationed at Fort Lewis, in Washington State.

Now Mary and I have another excuse to visit the Pacific Northwest, once we get vaccinated…which is not imminent. Last date I heard was SEPTEMBER. Yeesh. I guess we’re down near the bottom of some list.

3 out of 5 white evangelical Christians are poisonously stupid

Jan 6, 2021; Washington, DC, USA; Protesters at the United States Capitol as the U.S. Congress meets to formally ratify Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 Presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021.. Mandatory Credit: Jack Gruber-USA TODAY

But there are some good ones, principled ethical Christians who are appalled at the direction their congregants have taken, like Jared Stacy.

Jared Stacy is still processing his decision to leave Spotswood Baptist Church in Fredericksburg, Va., last year. Until November, he was ministering to young parishioners in their 20s and 30s.

But in the four years since he had joined the church as a pastor, Stacy had found himself increasingly up against an invisible, powerful force taking hold of members of his congregation: conspiracy theories, disinformation and lies.

Unfortunately, they’re outnumbered by the bad ones.

The lie is so powerful that a recent survey by the conservative American Enterprise Institute shows that 3 in 5 white evangelicals say Biden was not legitimately elected.

Among them is Pastor Ken Peters, who founded the Patriot Church in Knoxville, Tenn., last year.

“I believe that right now we have an illegitimate president in the White House and he was not elected by the people,” Peters told NPR. “I believe the truly ‘We the People’-elected, should-be president is residing in Florida right now.”

On its website, the Patriot Church is described as a movement: “a church interceding on behalf of her nation.” That movement has a name: Christian nationalism. Some conservative evangelical circles have incubated and spread these kinds of conspiracy theories — some of which have led to violence – for years.

These people have totally ruined some perfectly reasonable words, like “family” and “patriot”, that have now become red flags to let you know that what follows is only hatred and paranoia and selfishness.

(By the way, I don’t trust the American Enterprise Institute, so it is entirely possible that white evangelicals aren’t as generally wretched as their poll suggests.)

I scrutinize our local philosophy offerings with some trepidation

Every year, our philosophy department puts on a colloquium series on some topic in philosophy — this year, it’s the philosophy of conspiracy theories. Very timely! And I don’t see that our local conspiracy theorist faculty member is mentioned, and maybe not even involved, so there’s hope it might be good.

The first public lecture is tonight, titled “Conspiracy Theories and Public Trust”, over Zoom. I really don’t need to pile more on my plate, but maybe I can listen in while I’m grading papers.

Minnesota disappoints me

The state had a contest to name our fleet of snowplows, and the results demonstrated no creativity at all.

I’m sorry. We should be ashamed and embarrassed. Have you seen the list of Scottish snowplow names?

Amber Snowy
Arctic Angel
BFG Big Friendly Gritter
Blizzard Bear
Chilly Connolly
Darth Spreader
David Plowie
For Your Ice Only
Fred
Gangsta Granny Gritter
Grit A Bit
Grit Expectations
Gritallica
Gritney Spears
Gritter Bug
Grittest Hits
Grittie McVittie
Grittle Mix
Gritty Gonzales
Gritty Gritty Bang Bang
Han Snow-lo
I Want To Break Freeze
Ice Breaker
Ice Destroyer
Ice Queen
Jeremy Brine
Lew-Ice Capaldi
Licence To Chill
Luke Snowalker
Meltin’ John
Mr Plow
Mrs Gritter
My Name’5 Doddie
Nitty McGritty
Penelope Gritstop
Plougher O’Scotland
Polar Bear Explorer
Polar Patroller
Ready Spready Go
Rumble
Salty
Sandy The Solway Salter
Scotland’s Bravest Gritter
Sir Andy Flurry
Sir Grits A Lot
Sir Salter Scott
Slippy McGritty
Snow Bother
Snow Destroyer
Snow Dozer
Snow Trooper
Snowball
Snowbegone Kenobi
Snowkemon Go
Sophie Salt
Spready Mercury
Sprinklebell
Sprinkles
The Golden Great Gritter
The Grittiest Snowman
The Incredible Ice Bear
The Snow Buster
The Snow Solution
The Winter Explorer
True Gritter
Yes Sir Ice Can Boogie

Go back to the drawing board, MNDOT.

Spam filter powers activate!

Got this in my email this morning. Now I’m triggered.

No. I don’t believe a bowl of gummy bears will change my life. I’m going to guess these contain cannabis, but I don’t care enough about my hypothesis to click and check.

The Fox News logo immediately alerted me that this is garbage marketed at old gomers, and I’m not there yet.

Then there’s “AND SO DO THE THE SHARK’S”. Double “the”, inappropriate possessive, and citing Shark Tank, that show about a group of arrogant capitalists? No thank you.