statistics on rage towards umpires

Times umpire was called "blind," "nearsighted," "poor of vision," or "sightless": 45,264

Times umpire was asked to purchase spectacles: 38,407

Times umpire's sexual adequacy was called into question: 8,216

Times dirt was kicked by player at umpire: 6,772

By manager: 17,183

Number of umpires struck by baseballs, bats, or helmets: 5,223

Average sick leave taken by umpires after such incidents: 8 days

Number of players ejected for threatening or harassing umpires: 45,862

Number of managers ejected: 349

Number of sunflower seeds surgically removed from one beleaguered ump, circa 1927: 78

All statistics found in The American Experience: Baseball as a Way of Life, 2003, and represent the years 1960-2002.

[twenty-ninth in a series]

listen at your own risk

"The bottom line is that you don't know shit."

So saith FM108, an Canadian hip-hop band who have produced a pro-ID screed called "Agency" that rides a well-worn rut (Darwinism is just a theory, there are no transitional fossils, the Cambrian explosion is a creation act, blah blah blah). Imagine Linkin Park on an off day, mixed with a beat cribbed from a Yamaha keyboard, vocals by your jaded high school biology teacher.

And yet this is the sign that "ID is making cultural inroads." Yep, an unknown, self-produced, talentless hip-hop group.

Go ahead. Listen to "Agency." Then know why you never, ever, ever ask a philosopher about his taste in music.

[Thanks to PZ Myers for the link. Welcome, Pharyngulans. You might also be interested in a moment of truth, information please, and pro-neo-darwinism.]

"Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not."

Dembski, on the other hand....

Splenda Hippocampus

She was the first girl I ever dated. Bucktoothed, goggle-eyed, a misshapen mass of limbs and protuberances, I was a wreck. Splenda, though, spilled gorgeous all over the place. I was lured in by her glowing green eyes, and trapped like a mackerel in the seine of purple hair that fell down her back.

She chomped through her burger and grabbed a fistful of fries. "This is a blind date," Splenda said, "but I ain't blind. Didn't your parents ever hear of orthodontics?" I slurped soda through a straw wedged between my incisors. It was stuck, so I just shook my head. "And those Coke bottles on your schnoz. Are they bulletproof?" She hiccuped and snorted, a waterfall of musical laughter.

Splenda's razor wit would have sliced me to ribbons were I not wrapped in the chain mail of love at first sight. "Your brows meet in the middle like U.N. delegates," she cracked. "Is that Rainier or Everest on your forehead? I think I see mountain climbers." I smiled. She was sharp, deadly, adorable.

"Listen, don't you get it? You're an ugly freak, and I hate my sister for setting me up with you." Splenda had broken a few hearts, a few more jaws, and a lot more egos. "Don't you have any self respect? Here I am, dragging you all over the carpet, and all you do is stare and smile like a proboscis monkey." She threw a five dollar bill on the table and snatched up her purse. Tiny tears were welling up in her eyes, and I thought my heart would fall out of my chest.

"You stupid, stupid..." She couldn't finish the sentence, and stormed out.

I never saw Splenda Hippocampus after that. But the memory of her beautiful smile, of her beautiful eyes, of her beautiful, beautiful hair, haunts me to this day.



[twenty-eighth in a series]

sourpuss

What does a cat's lack of a sweet tooth tell us about common descent? PZ Myers explains.

historical views of children

From prehistoric times to the present, children have been seen and not heard.



"The 'conversation bubble,' a staple of comic art, originated in ancient times. At the Lascaux cave site, such bubbles are found in some of the later wall paintings.... Remarkably, though crude drawings of children are included in many of the paintings, not a single one is drawn with a conversation bubble... perhaps the earliest confirmation of the adage, 'Children are to be seen and not heard.'"

Quincy Peters, Comic Books: A History


"The most important rite of passage is the transition from youth to adulthood, a ritual known as freeing the voice. The child is gagged and lashed to a pole in the center of the village, and a circle of elders surround him, chanting and covering their ears. The child must struggle to break free, and when he is successful, the elders unstop their ears and sit at his feet, listening carefully as the child delivers an impromptu speech."

Margaret Mead, Life Among the Therenog


"Just as Paul commanded Corinthian women to remain silent in church, so must a father command his children to remain silent in the home."

Philo of Hippolyta, Declarations


"He was a saucy brat, disrupting my finely-crafted repartee with his oafish ponderances. Imagine it--about to deliver a line guaranteed to provoke mirth and merriment, and perhaps secure a place on the staff of the Encyclopedia, when interrupted by the complaint that if God had wanted us to wear spectacles he would have given us shapelier noses. How one wishes for the inaudible children of yore!"

Voltaire, Letters to French Dignitaries


"Sustained periods of silence in children under the age of eighteen... [was] found to have a positive, rather than a negative, effect on test results in both linguistic and mathematical categories."

B.F. Skinner, Learning by Behavior Modification


"Hey, I mighta said some things I regret, but I never talked back to my folks. I was a good kid."

Al Capone, Testimony Before the Senate Tariffs Subcommittee, June 15, 1927


(Quotes added at the behest of a critical reader.)



[twenty-seventh in a series]

every critic a keyboard

Woe betide he who would dare speak ill of Harry Potter and the Half-baked Prose.


[via Obscure Store]

expunged

Overheard at a weekend party in an unnamed Western Washington county:

"So we had this guy on our voter rolls, and there was some kind of mistake about his birthday, and it turns out he's like 104, so I ask my supe what to do, and she says to delete him, because he's obviously dead, and I say 'Are you sure,' and she says 'Of course, there's just no way.'"

Overheard at the post office on November 8, 2005:

"Hello there Susan, Peter, Esther. I'm here to vote for the bajillionth time."
"Hey there, Mr. Barnes. Good to see you. Now, let's check your registration... hmm... small problem here."
"Really?"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Barnes, but you can't vote."
"Why not? I've voted in every cotton-pickin' election since Abe Lincoln was in diapers--"
"According to this list, Mr. Barnes, you're dead."
"Oh. Well, wish someone woulda told me."

tinkering

After reading PZ's post on blog design (or the lack thereof), I got to thinking: it's been a while since I retooled this ugly ol' thing. So, I present to you the brand new decorabilia, with 50% more Vitamin J.

triskaidekaphobia?

Skeptic's Circle #13 is up at Respectful Insolence, and includes a very important announcement.

what's wrong with flowery prose?

So, dearest reader, you have been perusing Orwell's Politics and the English Language or Strunk and White's Elements of Style and have fabricated the inescapable conclusion that florid phraseology is less than desirable.

A pitiful result, for it is impossible for you to be more mistaken. Your prose should bloom like Antigone's asphodel and glitter like the fulgent firmament. I will show you how to transmogrify banal, direct words into the ethery essence of dreams.

1. Fall in love with alliterative adjectives and adverbs.

Your words should be as much a joy to the ear as to the eye. Alliteration is the most melodious mode of writing, pleasing the pickiest peruser. Keep a thesaurus within reach at all times, whether breezily bicycling to Burma or merrily mowing the lawn's luscious locks.

2. Employ maximal syllabification.

Hemingway's clipped prose is a sin against God. No, no, no. Again: Hemingway's truncated scribbling is an abomination contravening the express wishes of the deity. Let your words flow like a river. No, not yet. Better: Allow your utterances to disembogue like a deluge.

3. Once isn't enough.

Though Orwell takes his cue from the book Ecclesiastes, you should find your inspiration in the pseudonymous Psalms of David. Parallelism is the modus operandi of the Hebrew poet, and you should appropriate it as your own, clutch it to your breast, inscribe it in your mind, write it on the tablets of your heart.

4. Mix and match metaphors.

Good: The loss threatened to destroy his dreams.
Better: The loss loomed like a boulder, threatening to destroy his dreams.
Best: The loss loomed like a bulky boulder, threatening to tear his dreams into pitiful pieces and send him spiralling into a vortex of vacillation.

5. Active verbs are sweaty verbs.

Remember, you want your sentences to effuse effortlessly, not to halt and jerk around the page leaking perspiration everywhere. Moderate active constructions and smooth out rough verbiage. Soften the blow and lessen the impact of strong, overpowering words like "crash" or "snort." Prefer the lubrication of Latin to the asperity of Anglo-Saxon.

6. The all-encompassing rule: Read and imitate Henry James.




[twenty-sixth in a series]

mold blogging

Don't know if you heard about this, but because of it, I donned a hard hat and ventured into the freshly-remodeled wing of the school this morning to clean some personal items out of my classroom, where I'm typing this now. They'll start whacking the mold out of the lower fourth of the walls on Monday, so I figured I'd better abscond with some stone statuettes, framed diplomas, and a few assorted DVDs. Whatever might get tossed around by people in a hurry.

The new classrooms look great, unfinished as they are. Every year so far (and this September makes four) I've started the school year with new habits to build--a new classroom, a new schedule, new content, whatever. So I'll stay mold-free, too.

more explosions rock London transit

Fortunately, fewer casualties this time. But the threat is constant, real, and deadly.

thank you, thank you

Thanks to Travis Benning for a kindly plug.

If you've linked to me in the past, and I haven't given you props, it's because Technorati sucks.

what's a little heresy among friends?

Writes Stephen M. Barr:

...Related confusions lead Polkinghorne to abandon the dogma of divine simplicity. “Trinitarian thinking,” he writes, “surely indicates a degree of complexity existing eternally within the divine nature.” As traditionally understood, the Trinity does not involve a split within the divine nature. Rather, each Person is understood to possess the whole divine nature. In Jesus, St. Paul writes, “the fullness of the Godhead dwelt bodily”—the fullness, not a piece or a pole.

Polkinghorne’s Trinitarian theology is not the traditional one, but in the end that may matter little. It is not for his Trinitarian speculations that he is justly honored, but for his powerful and very public witness. His life and writings have given eloquent testimony that one may be both a man of science and a man of God.

At least in the good old days a heresy charge meant something.

words at war

Tom Tancredo goes Freeper:

"Well, what if you said something like — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites," Tancredo answered.

"You're talking about bombing Mecca," Campbell said.

"Yeah," Tancredo responded.

Hugh Hewitt volleys back:

Such speculations send the message that we are at war with all of Islam. We are not. We are at war with a slice of Islam that is radical and violent. Statements like Tancredo's invite all of Islam to think they are our enemy.

Every media voice that was raised against Dick Durbin's asinine comparison of Gitmo practices to those of Nazis and Pol Pot should speak with equal pointedness against Tancredo's speculation. There is no defending this type of speculation, and no excuse for airing it.

Yet the sentiment is pervasive, and ironically so; Christians who would decry being confused with "a bunch of snake-handling mountain evangelists" are quick to blame Islam as a "religion of violence," glossing over their religion's own militaristic rhetoric.

Hewitt is right. Freeper logic has no place in American politics on either side of the aisle.

worst. theological. analogy. ever.

There's a hoary old joke about someone who stays up all night wondering if there really is a dog, and it's just a joke, right?

Perhaps not.

Every morning, Kay O'Farrell of Olympia says a prayer of blessing and protection for herself and her 7-year-old cairn terrier, Kola.

Kola is important to O'Farrell because she is a reflection of God's love, she said.

"I feel dogs, as pets, give us that unquestionable love and total acceptance that God does," O'Farrell said.

So God's love is slavish and slobbery. Great. What does it mean when your deity-in-miniature poops on the carpet, chews up your slippers, or digs under your fence and into your neighbor's roses?

warning: adult content

It's freely available in supermarkets, in gas stations, on the Internet. At any given Safeway, any given child can find it literally within reach, for it is placed on low magazine racks for easy, sleazy access. It is a scourge of families everywhere. It tears marriages apart. It is aggressive, addictive, and deadly.

It is Wife Porn.

The images are airbrushed, staged, far removed from reality. They create false expectations that lead to frustration and emptiness in an otherwise healthy relationship. They are unnatural and degrading, pandering to the basest of lusts.

Your wife will tell you there isn't a problem, that she's just exploring possibilities, that if yours was bigger she'd be happier, that it's okay just to look, that she can quit anytime she wants.

But what's that on your credit card statement? What URL is that in your Bookmarks? What are those magazines stashed under the bed?

Wife Porn. Beware its seductive tentacles. Watch for its insidious symptoms. Understand its deadly reach.

In the end, we are all victims.

all hail Jon Rowe

He's such a patient debunker of all things "America is a Christian Nation," it's a wonder he has time for anything else.

sound and fury, signifying nothing

My wife and I love to rent stinkers from Albertsons whenever we're between Netflix; on weekdays, any movie is only 99 cents. Our latest masochistic viewing: White Noise, a godawful mess of a movie starring a very old Michael Keaton. The premise: folks on the "Other Side" can communicate with us through static on radio or television. The film is pathetic enough, but more pathetic are the bonus features, the interviews and sessions with "Electronic Voice Phenomena" experts, where they stumble around "haunted" locations, asking the spirits questions and generally getting no response. Except for every now and then, when their digital recorder picks up words. Or, I should say, "words."

Now, the "words" from these voices are jumbled, incoherent, blurred, and otherwise unintelligible. But that doesn't stop the desperate researcher. According to the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena,

In EVP, research has shown that the voice is formed of a fortuitous collection of available sounds and that there is seldom a Formant 0. In effect, the words are being pronounced by someone from an unfamiliar culture. This is true even if it is a loved one because that person is obliged to use whatever sounds are available. That is why we talk about people needing to train themselves to hear the words in EVP, and why a perfectly clear Class A to you might sound like loud noise to someone else. However, once you tell the listener what to look for, that noise will often become obviously the words you said they were. Then later, you or that other listener listen to the EVP again and do not hear the same utterance. It has not changed, but your reference has [emphasis added].

You hear only what you want to hear. I have never seen a clearer statement of confirmation bias and ad hoc reasoning. If we can hear the Other Side, they're probably laughing at us.