Missouri Wildlife with Kaje: My Top Five Snakes to Catch

This was going to be a top ten, but then I realized that there aren’t many more than ten species that I encounter, some of which are too boring to mention. Instead, here’s my top five followed by the top snakes I’d like to catch.

#5: Black Snake
While it’s the second most common snake I find, they’re still a treat. Its large size provides some challenge, and each one has its own unique appearance. Yesterday I found one with only one eye and a partially healed gaping stomach wound. Nice.

Image c/o Missouri Conservation Dept.

#4: Rough Green Snake
The rough green snake is no challenge at all. You can just scoop it up without a care in the world, because it never bites. Ever. It’s also gorgeous. Even my mom likes this snake, and she hates snakes.

#3: Prairie Ring-Necked Snake
Another no-challenge lightweight that squeaks by on appearance alone. It’s merely cute while right side up…

…but when alarmed, its tail curls up, revealing the brilliant orange hue of the underbelly.

#2: Bullsnake
Missouri’s largest snake, it’s also becoming increasingly rare, at least in my neck of the woods. It has an intimidating threat response, unleashing a deafening hiss with mouth agape.

#1: Yellow-bellied Racer
The blue racer is a bastard to catch, and a gem to behold. It’s fast. It’s mean. It can get a pretty good size. And it’s always lovely. Especially the eyes. Five stars.

Now! Some snakes I’d like to catch:

Speckled Kingsnake. Hur hur pretty.

Eastern Coachwhip. A racer on steroids. I heard of one herpetologist who tried his whole life to catch one of these.

Copperhead. Just to say I did.

Timber Rattler. See “copperhead”.

Hog-nose Snake. These things are supposedly hilarious. They’ve got pig noses, they puff themselves up, and they play dead. You make me laugh, Inflatable Zombie PigSnake. Let me catch you!

Missouri Wildlife with Kaje: Snakin’ Tools

Yellow-bellied water snake. This pic was not fuzzy when I uploaded it.

Everyone has a hobby. One of mine is catching and releasing snakes. This practice of searching for reptiles and amphibians is known as “herping,” but to be more specific and avoid assumptions that I’m into a weird STD fetish, I use the term “snaking.”

Why on earth would one go herping/snaking? Aside from being fun, there are other, practical reasons to do so:

1. If someone has a problem snake on their property, they can call you instead of getting the garden hoe. You’re helping the environment and stuff!

2. People think you’re totally hardcore. Most of the people in the world (especially, for some reason, grown manly men) are absolutely freaked out by snakes. People who handle wild snakes expertly and nonchalantly get props from everyone. Babes follow. Get a foreign accent and you can get your own TV show.

Being a reader of my blog, I assume that you hang on to my every word and ape everything I do to make up for your own sad lack of personality. You poor dope. Well, don’t let me rain on your parade. Here’s what you need to catch snakes:

Knowledge. Read everything you can on snakes, herps, local wildlife and nature in general. You are ready when you can tell what kind of snake it is just from a glance.

Knowledge. Do it again.

Knowledge. Actually, just never stop.

Ethical boundaries. A subset of knowledge, you have to follow ethical guidelines. If you can, always release the animal where you found it. Don’t remove the animal from the wild unless it needs medical assistance (moot point, unless you have a herp vet or conservation office nearby). Do your best to not harm or exhaust the animal.  Et cetera, et cetera– there are tons of resources on the internet to aid you in this.

A good camera. You will want to take pictures of everything you find. Be sure it has a good macro setting, so you can get good pictures up close. I’m thinking about stealing Jim Stone’s camera for the future. Don’t tell him about that.

My tool of choice.

A snake hook. A snake hook is all you need to transport a large snake. You can make one yourself out of an old golf club and a metal hook, or buy them ready made.

Snake tongs. You can also use these to handle snakes. I don’t use them because (A) I don’t have the hand strength to use them even if I wanted too and (B) the risk of injuring the animal is greater. If you want to use tongs, get a Gentle Giant from Midwest Tongs- don’t use the crappy non-cushioned metal grabbers!

A canvas bag. When the need arises to relocate the snake (or show it off before you let loose), you’ll need a bag.

Hand sanitizer and hand wipes. Snakes are germy. When you pick them up, they smear musk all over you. If they bite you, you need to clean the bite even if it isn’t a venomous snake, since snakebites are usually full of salmonella and other tasty germs. Always wash your hands before and after handling a snake.

Fist aid for venomous snake bites. I don’t bother with these, since there aren’t any venomous snakes where I live. Your mileage may vary.

Gloves. If you’re a wiener. I personally don’t worry about bites, since I have a high pain tolerance and the immune system of an ox. I like to think of them as battle scars.

Mad skillz. A snake’s vision is poor and responds to movement and color. Try to limit sudden movements (let the snake know you are there, don’t spook them!). Use motion to distract the snake so you can grab it. Snakes only hear vibrations through the ground, so don’t worry about making sound. Reflexes are a must!

I think I covered about everything. Next up: my top ten favorite snakes to catch!

Missouri Wildlife with Kaje: Can I Buy a Ticket to the Garter Snake Ball?

If you go out walking today, walk beside the ditches. If you’ve paid all your taxes and been good to the elderly, you may be blessed with the sight of a bunch of little male garter snakes entwining a much larger and very sore female. You’ve found a garter snake mating ball!

Like most people, you’ve always wondered about the reproductive happenings of snakes and other seemingly bitless animals, but were afraid to bring it up in polite company. Luckily, I am not polite company.

First off, snakes are not bitless; like most tetrapods their bits are usually internal. They have a cloaca, which is a hub shoot for the poop/pee/lovin’/baby/musk shoot(s), at the base of their tail. If you’ve ever picked up a snake, you probably have been smeared with some nasty smelling gunk and know where this is. In garter snakes and most other male squamates, the cloaca also holds the hemipenes: which is basically a forked wang.

Garter snakes, being one of the most cold-tolerant, are the first snakes to come out when it starts warming up. They usually share winter dens, ranging from just a few individuals to several thousands. The males are first, and they usually hang around and wait for the females to emerge. The females emit pheromones which attract the nearest males, and it’s on. Really on. The males all swarm around the female, each one trying desperately to align themselves just right before any other male can.  Around my house the biggest number I’ve seen is five males to a female. Elsewhere, these mating balls get even bigger than that. It’s like an ocean of snakes.

Image co/o CTV Winnepeg

The lucky male that gets everything in place inserts one hemipenis, and does the deed.  Sometimes he leaves a copulatory plug, which is a supergross secretion that hardens and prevents further mating from taking place. The female possesses the ability to store the sperm for when she needs it, and can keep it there for five years. They usually give birth to live young from July to October.

Now you know how garter snakes do it. I hope you are fulfilled, yet unaroused.

Day Three-ish of the Big Silly Jesus Circus: Freethinkocalypse

When I first proposed a Dr. Sharp field trip to the Joplin Freethinkers, we assumed we had a lot of options regarding which presentation we wanted to see. Our intent was to view the proceedings, ask questions, and mingle with the audience members; also to eat at Bamboo House.

When I got the schedule, however, I noticed that discussion was segregated into its own seminar, on the last day, at an inconvenient time. That’s what we get for assuming it was anything other than a brainwashing session. So Wednesday at 2:00 it was. Only five of the Joplin Freethinkers could make it. Jim Stone was also going to make one last hurrah.

This was the smallest crowd of all the presentations I attended. Before the show we looked at all the merch and replicas, and chatted with the audience and promoters. When we revealed that we were the Joplin Freethinkers, there wasn’t any hysterics or “I’ll pray for you”s. They were eager to hear what we were all about and chatted us up gladly.

As we were finding our seats, I happened to look up and wouldn’t you know it? We had a surprise guest- my Calvinist friend from Bible study! You probably know her as Calvin and Luther Will Kick Your Atheist Behind in the comments. We all got acquainted and took our seats as Dr. Sharp took the stage somewhat awkwardly. This time, instead of notes I just recorded it with my camera’s video function. Of course, as soon as I got home I found out that I can’t upload video with my crap connection anyway, so you’ll have to make do with my transcripts.

The first question was from a man who had questions about radiocarbon dating. Le yawn. Sharp is very dull even when Gish Galloping.

The second question was from the JFT’s Rev Al. Unlike most of the audience, Al actually knows some things about radiocarbon dating.

Dr. Sharp: Anyone else? (Al walks to the mic.)

Rev. Al: I have to agree with you that they nobody uses carbon-14 to date anymore,they all use carbon-12 now, ’cause carbon-14 was found to be inaccurate, and carbon 12–carbon 12 is only accurate to about 50,000 years. Now, uh, as for the age of the Earth, they uh, have stopped using just uh, radiometric isotopes, and started using a radiometric isotope s–

Dr. Sharp (interrupting): (unintelligible) Do you have a question sir? Do you have a question? Get to your question!

Rev. Al: So uh, how do you reconcile that, uh, the earth is 4.45 billion years old because of the radioactive isotopes that is isolated from the surrounding rock via (?) zircon crystals?

Sharp decided to answer with a plug for books from the merch table (Starlight and Time by Dr. Russel Humphreys and Thousands Not Billions by Donald DeYoung), and had someone fetch Al a free copy of the latter. Sweet!

The next question was from a woman who wanted him to elaborate on Mt. St. Helens (since last time he kind of forgot until the end that it was the focus of the lecture). Woo. I could here Jim behind me scratching out more notes, and the occasional snort of disdain. During this, I finally decided what my question was going to be. Let me tell you now, it was a doozy!

Unfortunately, Dr. Sharp abruptly asked “next question” and before I could even sputter a note the next question was asked. It was about how Darwin affected Hitler. Godwin time. My buddy Randy loudly facepalmed.

Regardless whether or not Darwin was the driving force behind Hitler and the Holocaust (there’s considerable debate, as the Nazis cherry picked from lots of different fields, including science, Christianity and even occultism to fit and refine one messed up ideology), that doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not evolution was false. Germ warfare is used to kill people, does that mean we should discard the germ theory of disease? In any case, there was a lot of falsehoods here. For example, did you know that Darwinism is the root of racism? Huh! You mean there was no racial strife at all until 1859, and suddenly everybody started giving non-whites a hard time? When he was pontificating about Social Darwinism, he said it was a move from “Biblical capitalism.” Maybe that’s what he meant with the racism thing. “Darwinian racism” was a move from “Biblical racism.” I don’t know about Sharp,  but Answers in Genesis still advances the Hamite story of racial origins. Hurray for going back to Biblical precepts!

And suddenly, he was out of time. I sputtered and pouted, wanting to ask my awesome question. He then addressed us.  “You folks are the Joplin Freethinkers, right? If you guys want to set up something and pursue this further, meet me up at the front and we can work something out.”(my camera went out before this, so it’s paraphrased)

So we went out and schmoozed. Al and Sharp swapped cards, and talked about doing our own debate, in Joplin. We told him we’d talk with the board about it. I should have mentioned that his colleague Dr. Jackson had made his own offer on my blog comments. Ah well.

Outside, Jim and the JFT got into a debate with CaL that went on waaaaay too long. During pauses, I got everyone’s opinions. Jim and JFT thought that it was boring and infuriatingly dumb. CaL, who is a creationist and otherwise agreed with Sharp, thought it was really rude of him to cut Al off. “If he acts hateful toward you, he is sinning.”

This was my last seminar (one of the JFT made it to the last seminar: you can read his account here.) To celebrate we went to El Charro’s, thinking about debate possibilities.

I’m thinking the question should be “Did Parasaurlophus shoot acid out of it’s nose? Support your answer with original research.”

Intermission: Scientific Methodology As It Pertains to Fried Chicken

I’m trying to figure out a way to upload video with my crap internet connection, and I’m running on fumes anyway, so here’s a brief intermission from the BSJC. I want to talk about the taste test in the Chicken Annie’s/Chicken Mary’s episode of Food Wars.

(Disclaimer: I am indifferent to the Annie’s/Mary’s debate. While I do love Annie’s, I’ve never tried Mary’s so I can’t really compare the two. My contention doesn’t lie with the fact that Chicken Mary’s won.)

I know this is a TV show taste test and not the James Randi Million Dollar Challenge, so a strict and elaborate double-blind setup isn’t necessary. However, there was one really huge flaw in the test that throws the results in question. I’m of course talking about the “impartial” judges.

If you missed the show, here was the setup. There were five taste testers. Two of them were “super fans” of the respective restaurants. I imagined they were included in case of the hilarious possibility that a “huge fan” picked the wrong chicken. The other three were “impartial”, but in reality only one could be called that.

See if you can spot the impartial one. One was a food critic from some big city who had never been to Pittsburg. The second was the sheriff of Pittsburg. The third was some old dude who was a “local celebrity.”

If you guessed tester number one, give yourself a hearty pat on the buttocks. What do the other two have in common? They both live in Pittsburg. I didn’t catch if those two have never eaten at those restaurants, but I really, really doubt it. That’s not impartial. What they should have done for all the testers was narrow it down to people who have never been to Pittsburg and never eaten either restaurant’s chicken. They didn’t even have to be food critics; I’m sure Bobcat Goldthwait could have freed up some time in his busy schedule. That would have effectively lowered the chance of bias.

However, the Food Wars crew neglected to notice or care about this glaring error. With that in mind, this test means nothing to me. I will probably continue to enjoy the Annie’s that my parents bring home. Even on those occasions when we find a wing that has a stray feather still attached.

Yeah... I wasn't joking.

Day Twoish of the Big Silly Jesus Circus: An Atheist, an Engineer and a Muslim Walk Into A Bar

1,000 Years in a Day

When I first called to ask about the schedule for Dr. Sharp’s presentations, the woman on the phone urged me to attend Tuesday’s afternoon seminar, 1,000 Years in a Day. “It’s the one he really wants people to come see. It’s about Mt. St. Helens.” Well, shucks, I’d be happy to oblige. Unfortunately, geology is not my cup of tea. How will I be able to pay attention, I wondered? I won’t be able to tell, other than the fact that Dr. Sharp’s mouth is moving, if what I hear is accurate or not.

Luckily, it turns out I knew someone whose cup of tea was geology —fellow Globe blogger Jim Stone! We whisked ourselves to the auditorium, nabbed some front row seats (there wasn’t nearly as many people this time—mostly retirees, well-dressed children and their guardians) and whipped out our notebooks and cameras. See, old media? We bloggers got this journalism stuff down PAT!

Since Jim is the expert, I will let him handle parsing out facts and the falsehoods of Sharp’s geology. Even so, I really had trouble paying attention to this seminar. It had less lashing out at reality, and more rehashing what the bible said, than yesterday’s. We had some babbling about the nature of time according to the Bible (my notebook page on this section just says “TIMECUBE”), some of Dr. Sharp’s vacation slides, mangling the history of geology (Charles Lyell wasn’t a geologist because the title didn’t exist yet, you idiot), more insinuation that change and adjusting beliefs in the light of new evidence is BAD, the Ark again, implying that only a flood could rapidly bury all those fossils, a WHOOOOOLE lot of projection (“Evolution is a religion! Scientists pontificate!”). At several points I zoned out and started scribbling monsters instead of notes. I snapped back when he discussed the Smithsonian Institute’s Morgie, as he finally allowed his sputtering lunacy to surface. “In the nation’s capital they are INSTRUCTING your children—INSTRUCTING them!—to ‘touch their primitive momma!’ A few blocks from the WHITE HOUSE!” RAAAAAUGH SHARP SMASH!

Say what you will though, Dr. Sharp has at least one redeeming feature: he seems to have taste regarding Branson’s entertainment value. Which is more or less zilch, aside from the view.

An eternity later, with a little over ten minutes to spare, he finally got to the freaking volcano. Jim was in the zone, his notetaking a blur.  We reached the plugs, and it was finally over. I turned to Jim and asked, “Am I right? Was that all just nonstop lies?” Jim nodded, “Ooooh yeah”. We took some goofy pictures of ourselves with the fossils, and left for Denny’s to recount the logical atrocity we just witnessed.

Missing Links and Other Evolutionary Assumptions

Jim and I can both be described as not especially religious. My friends A and K, however, are. They were open to a lot of the points creationists have, but others turned them off from the subject completely. I admit to worrying about how they would be received, as it’d be pretty obvious to the rest of the audience that they worship the wrong God, being Muslims and all. Luckily, I ended up not having to worry; more on that later.

Amusingly, before the show, the kid next to me was rattling off all he knew about dinosaurs to the woman he was with. You know all the things about T-rex from yesterday? He got them all right from memory. If only he came yesterday, he would have been in for a treat.

This time the ball was back in my court, as we were returning to evolution itself. Today’s thesis was that missing links totally, 100 percent did not exist.  Most of the core themes that his arguments hinged on tonight, were erroneous from the start. Evolution is not a “ladder of progress”, it’s adapting to whatever natural pressures are applied to the population.The eye is not irreducibly complex. “Living fossils” are not the same thing as their ancient counterparts and are affected by evolutionary forces as well.

Finally, of course, there are indeed transitional fossils. See my Archaeopteryx post for an example of how Dr. Sharp deals with the obvious ones. Aside from handwaving away certain facts about Archaeopteryx and its ancestors (the latter of which he depicted as scaly, not true doc!), he also redefines “transitional fossil” into something it’s not so he can debunk it. This is my quick Photoshop reconstruction of the animal that Dr. Sharp revealed was a “missing link”:

I got a degree in graphic design for this.

I think I could stop right now if I wanted to. Dude is clearly wrongity wrong wrong wrong, and maybe insane. Your take home message is this: this guy thinks that whalecow is what evolution predicts. Also, T-Rex ate coconuts unspecified plant matter NOT COCONUTS BECAUSE THAT’S SILLY.

There was also a lot of quote mining in this presentation. Quote mining is a practice, infamous with creationists, of just stringing together out-of-context quotes to make scientists sound like idiots, conspirators, or secret anti-evolutionists. An example was a quote by Stephen Jay Gould, made to sound like animals suddenly appeared fully created in the fossil record. What was omitted was what Gould was describing, his hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium. He uses “suddenly” in the context of deep time, which may be thousands of years. He also did this for Darwin, Stanley Miller, and a whole bunch of other scientists.

We were running out of time, so finally he addressed hominids, much in the same way he dealt with everything else. “Oh, this was a hoax, this was a mistake, this bone was found in different sediment (lie), I know a guy who looked like a Neanderthal, this was just a human, this was just a monkey.” Plug, and out. Good, this is starting to get tedious.

Me and my friends went out to look at the merch and talk to Dr. Sharp. As said before, A and K didn’t encounter anything worse than stink eyes and a guy who was a little touchy-feely, which was a relief. Ayesha had a lot of qualms with the presentation, but also agreed with finer religious points, and Dr. Sharp himself was courteous and attentive when she asked him questions about God and time. Everything went smooth. We went to Sonic and talked about conspiracies and John Carpenter movies over fish sandwiches.

Tomorrow is the last day! What surprises await our hero? Featuring a special surprise guest, or two, or several…tune in tomorrow, same Kablam time, same Kablam blog!

Day One-ish of the Big Silly Jesus Circus: Lies About Dinosaurs

Where's the saddle?

I just got back from Dr. Sharp’s Truth About Dinosaurs seminar at the Theibaud, and I’m here to report my experience.

For those not in the know: Dr. Sharp is probably the most shameless and malicious liar I’ve had the misfortune to see in person. I credit him for my eventually conversion into a pinko atheist activist, way back in middle school. He is a little league young earth creationist, and while he’s in cahoots with Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis fame, his piddly museum and presentations get nowhere near the fame and infamy Ken enjoys. Which is a shame, in a way, because he’s got his own style and quirks that could really propel him to the top of creationism’s elite. Yet for some reason, he languishes in obscurity.

Anyhoo, he’s back in town for four days. The presentations started yesterday, but I was too busy to go. There was no way, however, that I was going to miss the Truth About Dinosaurs seminar. So I loaded up my camera, my iPhone, and my sketchbook and hauled.

This was “Family Night,” the most hyped presentation of the whole event, but I was still floored by the size of the crowd. It was standing room only. I have never seen the Thiebaud so crowded, ever. I ate my free hotdog, and went inside.

The stage was filled with replica fossils. They were mostly dinosaurs and Mesozoic reptiles, with a few trilobites, a Bison latifrons, and inaccurate old hominid skulls such as Piltdown Man (chosen to show how science GETS THINGS WRONG!!!!111!!!) Unfortunately, my camera battery went from two bars to one, and it stopped working. Damn! Luckily I still had my iPhone…which takes crap pictures and was also low on juice. (I know what you’re thinking, but Sharp had technical difficulties too—God hates both of us!)

I snagged a seat not far from the front. Musicians from the church were set up amongst the fossils. The show started off with a prayer, and then…Christian rock.

Christian rock…why did it have to be Christian rock? I imagine it serves as a filter, driving away those souls who have already been irredeemably tainted by the Satanic force of good taste in music. Time became meaningless in this unprovoked assault on the ears. At least back in 2000, Dr. Sharp just stuck with good ole “Amazing Grace.”

Finally, nearly an hour after the doors were opened, Dr. Sharp got on stage, and 40 some minutes worth of bullhockey started spewing from his lips. I started taking notes.

His central theses are as follows:

1. If science is to be believed, and death was in the world before humans (Adam) existed, then humans were not responsible for the Fall, and thus Christ’s sacrifice is meaningless and the whole thing is kind of stupid.
2. “Liberal social engineers” and “the uncircumcised philistines of Hollywood” (his words exactly) deliberately use dinosaurs as candy to lead children away from Christ into the windowless van of secular humanism.
3. Do not trust scientists. He explicitly said this. “Never, ever take a scientist’s word, no matter how many degrees or studies he has, over the word of God.” People wonder why scientists don’t give creationists equal time or waste time arguing with them. Gee, maybe it’s because you’re arguing in bad faith?

Apparently, what got Sharp into dinosaurs was the same thing that got me into dinosaurs: Jurassic Park. Big Hollywood, by the way, counts as “science” in Sharp’s world. The way he spits out the name “Spielberg” makes me suspect that he’s one of those guys who thought “the Passion” was an important movie, if you know what I mean. Unfounded assumption on my part, moving on. He ragged on how the dinosaurs were portrayed in the film, with such laughable concepts as a fast T-Rex and super smart Velociraptors.

Keep in mind, this guy thinks T-Rex ate coconuts.

Pay no attention to my left

He moved on to the T-Rex skull on the stage, and went into the scavenger/hunter debate. The implication, of course, is that those dumb scientists can’t get their story straight! He said its brain was the size of a walnut; it’s actually bigger than a human’s, but whatever. Also, since T-Rex was constantly loosing teeth, it couldn’t tear out chunks of flesh; unlike the teeth of a shark, which are WAIT A MINUTE…

For the record...

The biggest facepalm of the entire event, however, was when he said that T-rex couldn’t see well because its eyes were on the side of its head. No. T-rex is renowned for having forward pointing eyes. Every single children’s book in the world will tell you that T-Rex’s eyes faced forward, providing stereoscopic vision. Most importantly, he says this WHILE STANDING NEXT TO A T-REX SKULL, WHERE YOU CAN CLEARLY SEE THE EYES FACE FORWARD. I let slip an audible note of frustration. Inside my brain, I was screaming. But hey, when you have the Bible, who needs A T-REX SKULL IN FRONT OF YOUR VERY EYES AAAAAAAAAUGH

He goes into misinformation about fossilization, and misinformation about gigantism, and then claims that Noah fit everything on the Ark, including the 99.9% of extinct “kinds”, by taking babies instead of adults. You’d think the Bible would have mentioned that. It’s a nice flourish for sure. I have my suspicions that you couldn’t fit those animals even if they were all in Shrinky-Dink form. But what do I know?

Another good facepalm moment was when he assured us that yes, Virginia, dinosaurs really existed. He told of an encounter with a man who believed Satan planted fossils to trick us, along with the moon landing being hoaxed and the earth being flat. “If he’s that far gone to believe stuff like that, what can you do?”

Just a reminder, this guy thinks T-Rex ate coconuts.

Now, the important thing about creationism is faith, but a little evidence doesn’t hurt. Sharp has evidence, and some of it isn’t even from the Bible for all you doubting Thomases out there. How about Mary Schweitzer’s soft tissue? The actual scientists working on it may object, but whatever, scientists are dumb. How about a single piece of Cambodian temple art that depicts something that looks like a Stegosaurus but looks more like a chameleon? How about lake monsters like Nessie and Mokele-mbembe? And who can forget the coelacanth? It’s a living fossil, man.

He discussed dinosaurs appearing in the Bible. Behemoth was mentioned, which you can read about here. Unfortunately, he didn’t mention his “theory” that duckbill dinosaurs spat acid out of their head crests. I hope he didn’t pitch it, because that was my favorite from my middle school days. He also claimed dragons in the Bible were dinosaurs. What followed was an even weirder Hollywood bashing moment, where he blamed “Walt Disney and his ilk” for portraying the dragon as a silly mythical creature. Riiiiight. I have no idea where the hell that came from.

It was time to wrap things up, so he asked for three questions from the audience. Two kids asked their questions, and a suspiciously enthusiastic gentleman asked “Where can I get a good resource to train my kids properly?” You’d think the Bible would suffice, but Sharp’s got a book that’s even better, and wouldn’t you know it? It’s freshly printed and ready to be ordered! The night was weird enough, I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy in the audience was a paid shill. You had to have listened to both of them, it sounded way too fake.

I shuffled out. I’ve got two more days of this guy to last through.

This guy who thinks T-Rex ate coconuts.

Archaeopteryx Aggravates Creationists; Diorama Creators

Oh,  Archaeopteryx, you are a card.

Are you a bird? Are you a reptile? Are you just some sort of weird guy? Your undeniable transistionalness between dinosaurs and birds is an endless source of scientific enigmas and psuedoscientific enemas. Scientists love you, creationists love to hate you while pretending to love you.

While prepping for the triumphant return of Dr. Sharp and his Big Silly Jesus Circus (to be recounted in a later blog post), I noted how he deals with your inconvenient behind. When the guy has an entire presentation called “Missing Links and Other Evolutionary Assumptions,” you know he has to eventually. For all those other feathered dinosaurs, he just pretends they’re hoaxes (which is blatantly untrue and will come back to haunt him the more the world learns about them), but you’re not so easily explained away. Luckily, creationist tribes the world over are adept in several styles of Dumb Fu. Dr. Sharp employs Monkey Style on you, using semantics and rhetorical gymnastics to explain you away. He simply states that you are all 100% bird, including the teeth, tail, modified saurischian pubis, foreclaws, and everything else; and you are not a transitional fossil because scientists have placed it in the bird family so nyeh. He caps this off by saying ostrichs and baby hoatzins have claws, therefore we can ignore your claws. And teeth. And bony tail. And pubis. And all the other features that belong to dinosaurs.

By the way, the thing about the ostrich is a lie. Creationists lie. That’s all they do.

Another creationist who lies is Ken Ham. Ham runs Answers in Genesis and the infamous Creation Museum in Kentucky. He also maintains a pretty heinous chinbeard. Seriously, look at this. Ew.

We don’t need transitional fossils; all we need to disprove special creation by a loving god is that crap on his jaw. I digress.

More like Fakeyopteryx, amirite?

His approach differs slightly from Dr. Sharp’s, in that he just completely mutilates you. The sculpture in his museum retains two of your claims to fame and discards the rest. Gone are your teeth and dinosaurian skeletal structure, in goes the beak and bird features. If someone showed this to an actual scientist and had them guess what it was supposed to be, they would never, ever guess it was Archaeopteryx. It’s not even close. It’s like putting booties on a dog and calling it a Shetland. This bird-itized reconstruction is just the thing Ken needs to further his modus operandi. Which is lying. And chinbearding.

Yep, you’re pretty aggravating to creationists. You’re also pretty aggravating to me.

That’s because I’ve been all over the freaking internet, and I cannot find one museum quality model of you. I can’t even find a toy of you. You’re the most famous fossil of all time, and you just happen to be toy sized, there should at least be a plushy of you somewhere.

How the flipping monkeypuzzles am I going to put together a dope presentation on evolution if I can’t have a Beanie Baby Archaeopteryx in there?!? That would be adorably awesome and awesomly adorable. Yet you hold back.

To heck with you, Archaeopteryx. It looks like I’m going to have to settle with a Microraptor toy. Have fun tearing it up at Ken Ham’s pad. With your stupid fake beak.

Oh Hey, I Have a Blog

(Aren’t you glad I refrained from typing “o hai?”)

So yeah, I have a blog. I better write blog posts, as that is what bloggers do when they aren’t eating cheetos. I just checked to see what the outside world was doing, and I heard about the shooter at the Pentagon;  so I think I’ll ramble about mass shooters and other lone nuts.

• It’s difficult to ascertain what causes lone nuts, because that’s what they are, lone nuts. The only thing you can do is study several lone nuts and see if there’s a pattern, such as mental illness, insecurity, exposure to certain enviroments, hatred of certain people, groups or organizations, etc. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently released a report saying that extremist groups have grown by 244% in the last year. That helps answer it, especially with the Houston kamikaze pilot and the Holocaust Museum shooter,  but again you must realize that these folks are lone nuts and thus unpredictable. Amy Bishop wasn’t a KKK member or a member of an equivalent left-wing group, she was just an unstable woman with a history of violence, who was less into making a political statement and more into annihilating her tenure review board. The Pentagon shooter, while railing against the government, was also a 9/11 conspiracy nut, which is more a goofy leftist conspiracy than a rightist one. We’ll have to wait and see for 24 hour news to enlighten us.

• Then you have the Fort Hood shooter and the underwear bomber, who were religious extremists. Incidentally, how does one classify Islamic extremists as left or right? In Islamic society that would be conservative extremism, but in America the right wing is typified by Christians, so non-Christian violence would be declared leftist violence. Whose definition do you use? If the Houston kamikaze guy crashed into the Burj Khalifa, would he be disparaged in Arabic media as a left-wing extremist?

• Why is it that referring to infamous killers by their full names rings so well? John Wayne Gacy! John Patrick Bedell! Lee Harvey Oswald! James Earl Ray! Ominous!

• Do you ever wonder if people in the 50′s were right and all this violence was actually caused by Elvis Presley’s pelvic movements? Maybe the lewd gyrations emitted waves of moral decay which reverberate to this day, causing such aberrations as nonwhite presidents and Lady Gaga videos, and eventually culminating in the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano and the shifting of the New Madrid faultline? WHY DIDN’T WE LISTEN?!?