Category: Uncategorized

Disinheriting the wind

From The American Scientist, here’s a concise and powerful statement of the reasons “Intelligent Design” is not science and why its presence in public schools should be opposed.

Allowing students to “opt out” of learning the basic facts and theories of biology is about as wise as allowing them to “opt out” of algebra or English: It constitutes malfeasance. […] The ID movement is more than an attack on biology because evolutionary theory unifies the life and earth sciences with physics and chemistry. If ID is accepted as a credible science, then the most basic definition of a scientific theory and the fundamental principles of the scientific method are not being taught. […] ID is an insidious attempt by a religious caucus to impose its views on the whole country. The avowed aim of ID advocates—to undermine science and replace it with their personal religious convictions—amounts to a form of prejudice that is both poisonous and horribly frightening.

internet murder news from all over

So, yeah, they found the body of the 17-year-old girl who got murdered in VA. And they have a person of interest whom she met on the Internets. And they both have LJs and myspaces, and he has a deviantart gallery with lots of creepy-ass pictures of young-looking girls, and her LJ name is “jailbait” backwards, and it’s really fucking depressing.

Whether or not homeboy is a murderer, he’s certainly a disagreeable person. Also a shitty photographer.

In any case she’s dead, he’s in jail, and they’re both clichés. Except of course that she’s entitled to be a cliché at 17 and he has no excuse at 38.

His deviantart gallery (mostly just thumbnails), her myspace, her livejournal at tiabliaj, and his livejournal at skulz67 are still up for now, for morbid curiosity purposes.

From news stories:

“Detectives seized more than 70 other items from Fawley’s home, including a box of bones, a machete and part of a box spring bearing a reddish-brown stain, according to a search warrant.”

“On the morning after Taylor’s disappearance, Fawley, a self-described “prolific Goth web master” who “collects” auto license plates, told police he had just been beaten, robbed and kidnapped by unknown assailants. He said they put a bag over his head, stuffed him into an unknown car, and drove him to an unknown location, where he was left on an unknown dirt road. He was “saved” when an unknown good Samaritan, in his case a Hispanic male, found him along the road and drove him back to Richmond.”

Thanks to hepkitten I am only four degrees from the victim, but oddly I show no connection with the LJ Sixdegrees tool to the accused murderer.

More detailed, probably too detailed blogulations about this are here and here, the latter going on way too much with psychological diagnoses. Also here.

Boy those guys all write too much.

come hold my shaking hand and I’ll show you around

Between two conversations at D’s tonight I went out to Santiago Canyon Road for some high-performance driving. I do love a canyon road at night, coming into the curves at 80, smelling the intense chaparral, trees whooshing over the open sunroof. Not many people out there in the evening. For about a half hour I’m in the country, and then dumped back into suburbia.

I really wanted someone in the passenger’s seat. I miss having friends who’d be cool with just heading out to nowhere and talking in the car. I remember maybe 15 years ago going out to the desert and back with Darryl. We had a real peak experience together after a night talking, when we came back down the Tejon Pass at sunrise and the mountains coming out of the clouds were right fucking smack in our faces like a Japanese painting. It shut us up completely for a good hour.

Lately I wrap everything in words more than ever, layers and layers of paragraphs piled on puff-pastry style. What I really want to do is curl up with someone. Prose will have to do for now.

Laws of Nature: Stimps’ Law of Ice Cream

This law states simply that all ice cream names could also describe bad dumps. The latest ad poster from Carvel next to D’s proves this law once again. Carvel can’t seem to get a product name that doesn’t make me clutch my stomach. Fudgy the Whale? Fruit Fizzlers? Sundae Dashers? Hlrhgalgbag

The Brown Bonnet

To make you feel better about life, here’s a picture of my cat being cute.

Pouss Reclines

Amazon recommendation funnies

Browsing Amazon for books about fascism (yes I am a cheery fellow), I found one in the usually excellent “Very Short Introductions” series. Of course Amazon always likes to pair things up and get you to buy two. In this case they ended up making a controversial statement about political economy.

No! They aren’t better together! No! NO!

fashizm

I hate you, milkman eyeteeth

brontes

Yes, this was an actual Disney animated television show pilot in 2003. The artist who did this is mostly known for gay beefcake art (NSFW), apparently. He’s also a successful caricaturist (ranai do you know this guy?). I wish he didn’t look so much like Jeff Gannon but I guess that clone look goes with the territory. Walt Disney presents: Tom of Finland… on ICE!

The Brontës, though? Disney? WHAT THE…

Pier Paolo Fettucine

I made dinner tonight consisting of: seared New England jumbo scallops; tricolor rotini pasta with fresh garlic and olive oil; and fresh green beans with butter and fines herbes. I do like to cook a good meal.

Went to D’s and Ruba in turn. I’m trying to get used to Movie Guy Dan’s way of telling a story which is in fits and starts with lots of digressions that go nowhere, and fragmented narrative that’s always getting derailed. Plus twitches. He’s just enough older than me that his “back in the day” stories are all about the big kids who were cool that I couldn’t hang out with, so I’m always hungry for the tale. But damn, it’s a frustrating conversational style.

Ruba was the usual trance-inducing mess. Fifteen-year-old rebel teenagers, twentyish blown-sideways-through-life people playing pool and smoking with “what the fuck happened” looks on their faces, and a rotating cast of alarming old men. The guy I call “Super-Catholic” was there. He’s a sixtyish guy with close-trimmed grey hair who wears Mr. Rogers cardigans and sensible shoes. The one time I overheard his conversation at D’s he was trying to get some college guys excited about the Catholic Church in a very Reach Out To The Generations With Youth Group Training way. He alarms me.

The pool playing and the weird lighting and the excess caffeine and the general Ruba atmosphere put me into a trance state in which I watched a rogues gallery play pool to an increasingly peculiar soundtrack: Billy Squier’s “In the Dark”, Van Hagar, Lionel Richie’s “Stuck On You” (worst song ever), and a long painful set of Easy Rockin’ Hits concluding with “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. All for the benefit of the manager, a perky Middle Eastern lady in her late fifties. The kids weren’t impressed. I was pretty shocked when that awful Hungry Eyes song from “Dirty Dancing” came on. It’s like she was trying to clear the joint with music that I found painfully unhip twenty years ago.

I like watching people play pool. The rhythm of it, and trying to predict the shots, and watching them try to predict the shots, all of it. I like Ruba generally, because I’m such a complete outsider there that I don’t feel left out. I can just watch the circus go by in awe. Rich suburban boys with tough-guy neck tattoos, part-time porn stars, defrocked college athletes, half-reformed skinheads, dorkwad normals huffing on hookahs, teenaged girls trying to look older and more sophisticated, and every kind of almost-loser Orange County has to offer. There’s nothing like it.