The terror that Adam's sin unleashed

. . . was the Tyrannosaurus Rex. But Noah let it on the Ark anyway, according to the new Creation Museum. The ambitious 25-million dollar monument to absurdity will re-prove definitively to indoctrinated morons that T-Rex and all his dino pals lived and worked right alongside all of earth's contemporary mammal life, including a plucky species of soft, chewy ape. Details are still to be hammered out, but this information suggests this new complex of learning will follow closely the toddler-friendly Hanna/Barbera theory of speciation.

While many historical museums choose to include artifacts that actually came from history, curators at the Creation Museum are blazing a brave new trail, making sure that everything on display is brand-spanking new.

This "wonderful alternative to the evolutionary natural history museums that are turning countless minds against the gospel of Christ and the authority of the Scripture" will be a beacon to all believers, shining brightly from the cultural hub of Petersburg, in Northern-gatdam-Kentucky.

Strangely, after searching the internet for hours and finding tons of blog traffic on this, I have yet to find any of the site's frequently asked questions actually being asked, by anyone. The questions that are asked, unfortunately have not been answered, questions such as "who the hell are you people," and "Oh God they've given them money." The latter, in fairness, isn't a question.

The organization's website, Answers in Genesis, also features instructions for planting bombs in schools. Ostensibly an indictment of evolution, the cartoonist failed to mention, of course, that bullet-point number 2 has less to do with Charles-gatdam-Darwin than with James-gatdam-Madison.

Then, if you don't feel convinced, browse the archival evidence that evolution is the driving force behind abortion [and feminism], euthanasia [and humanism], racism, misogyny and both Communism and Nazism [fascism] which are, of course, polar opposite movements. Evolution's misogyny is a particular slap in the face to creationists because, before Darwin, keeping women pregnant and in the kitchen had been the exclusive territory of religious conservatives. Frankly they want it back.

Men lost a rib, so women lose their personhood. That's called a balance of power folks.

While they're right about evolution's contribution to U.S. eugenics projects, that kind of Aristotelian end-focused selection bears no resemblance to current Evolutionary theory. The problem, it turns out, is that some zealots thought Darwin's Natural Selection was a path to God, so they forcibly sterilized people with glaucoma.

Eugenics ended not by removing Evolution from science, but by removing God from Evolution.

Yeah I got this from Maureen Dowd, who most likely got it from the 10,000 bloggers that were on it a month ago. That makes me uninformed. I'd like to point out that again she draws the wrong conclusions.

Read the full thing here.

Memoir

It occurs to me that I haven't spoken in sometime about a subject dear to me, my inconstant progress though life.

This installment finds me tending shop in a small township in Washington's eastern prefecture, bordered on the North and Northeast by the grand Spokane Valley. To my proximate west lie the channeled scablands, an undeservedly bad-ass name, and all the tedium they bring. Here, in this mining camp of malaise, this border fort at the confluence of nothing in particular, fierce libertarianism and grain subsidies live together without the slightest irony. Farmers till and sow the very soil, or not--depending on the mood of the USDA--and earn the same either way, while the youth of other small towns converge on a regional university to ensure that they will not, ultimately, meet the same fate. Somewhere, in the midst of this, dwell I, attempting feats of suggestion to discourage these disparate types from parking their cars here and engaging me in acts of business.

I will not be accepting your currency today, I project--kindly but firmly--through the sounding board of my frontal lobe, there will be no goods offered hence, nor any services rendered. Most people get the hint.

Father says January and February are his slowest months. With me in the shop, he's right.

It's not as though I wouldn't want to parley with some frontier type--I'm terribly lonely here--but I haven't yet met anyone who lives up to my mind's lofty expectations. Ideally she would be an elderly trapper, a widow. Fattened by her prodigious trade and able to settle down, She'd spin yarns of her continual march back to the wild, pulled by a love of nature's creatures. A love expressed in the simple desire to kill them and take their skins. We'd talk of Baudelaire and the territoriality of feral cats. Upon meeting, monthly--she in town for dry goods and hardtack, I quietly tending shop--we'd hug the big hugs of bawdy folk, unashamed of our affection for one another. She'd hail from the forests of Baden-Baden, but speak the queer Gaelic inflection of a Newfoundlander. To bad no one like that exists.

As it is, my only companions are foul-mouthed drunkards who hide their considerable wealth in vast expanses of fallow land. Their complaints are numerous but uniform and hinge on an apparently startling number of people hereabouts who's fat, and so gatdammed ugly you can't hardly stand it to look at 'em. One of these elderly gentlemen, a real-estate mastermind I'm told, sports a red ball cap with an upturned bill and the finest set of manufactured teeth you're likely to ever see. He affects a slack-jawed ignorance that hybridizes Columbo and Moose from Archie and Veronica, yet he has steely, intelligent eyes. His stupified look and penetrating gaze make me feel like a joke is being played on me. Watching his interaction with others, it seems as though he's playing it on them as well.

So I try to keep my mind sharp against such trickery by undertaking feats of science and induction. Today alone I discovered the exact number of sheets the office shredder can handle without jamming. Utilizing the myriad newsprint flyers at my disposal and through careful planning and execution according to accepted standards and practices, I've concluded the number is 24, no more, no less. If fed incorrectly, leading edge off-parallel with the device's teeth, that number often drops to 18.

I've also begun to read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, written this thing here, studied up on the dialects of Newfoundland and Labrador to add depth to a passing comment made about a fictional woman, then looked further into Hiberno-English and it's variants, which are funny and quaint.

What have you done with your day?

Now, as the 4 o'clock hour approaches, I conclude that my mind tricks have been mostly successful, for a Wednesday, keeping all intrusions at bay save that of that gatdammed Newfoundlander Graham Bell's soul projector. The phone is outside my mind's range, as I lack both the psi-rating and technology to project such distances. I'm currently fashioning a crude transmitter from discarded aluminum windows, from which I hope to blanket the area in brainwaves like a wireless hotspot of psionic coercion.

In the meantime, it's edifying to watch people drive through our parking lot on the way to other businesses. Makes me feel generous and sad--maybe a little noble--alone here, waiting to serve.

Read the full thing here.

Six dollar and fifty cent baby

I knew it was going to be a good movie-going experience when, at a theatre where I was carded going into The Life Aquatic, the zit-speckled sentry with the power to discount my ticket didn't even ask to see my ID when I told him I was a student. I don't actually have an ID anymore, and I was betting on just such a response. Poor kid's not going to last very long at Regal Cinemas.

Then again, sometimes Dame Fortune, she smiles on you.
I realized early on that my critical palate was soiled, that I wasn't able to tackle Million Dollar Baby with the singular focus the movie deserved. This is the trouble with seeing movies after the Oscar nominations have been announced. Rather than the simple rubric of what is good and what is bad about a given movie, I am preoccupied with specificities: did Clint Eastwood/Morgan Freeman/Hillary Swank deserve their respective nominations? Will they win?

These are essentially the same questions I ask anyway but, having some external benchmark, I also start to question my own opinions. What do these people--industry types, degrees of separation closer than I--see that I don't see? When the movie has been nominated for 7 academy awards, and almost all the big ones, the pressure is especially great.

I really hate that.

Adding to the discomfort, Million Dollar Baby is essentially two movies. The first is a formulaic tale of overcoming adversity. With a plucky protagonist, a surly mentor, a wizened old sidekick, and a handful of colorful side characters, the first hour-and-a-half you've seen a million times before. You've seen it in Rocky, you saw it in Mighty Ducks, Major League and even, you know, Top Gun. The first two acts are fun and heartwarming and wouldn't get nominated for anything. Morgan Freeman might squeak in as the one-eyed ex-boxer, but I don't think he'd win.

I was beside myself trying to figure out what Eastwood had done that was so fantastic, but I just couldn't get it. Maggie's journey is imbued with a powerful sense of destiny. The pacing is brisk, obstacles are overcome quickly. There's very little time for the characters to doubt themselves or their abilities. Maggie's ascent is as quick and sharp as her left hook. As an audience, we like her because she's so damned determined and so damned good. She's the LeBron James of women's welter weight boxing. She's not actually big enough to fight welter weight, but nobody her size will fight her, so she has to fight up several classes. Her character, like her record in the ring, in unimpeachable. She passes up chances for betterment to stay with her mentor. She is unmoved by the trappings of success. She uses her considerable winnings to help others while living in little more than a tenement. This imperviousness to the world and her forceful presence in the ring give the story a very beguiling and mythic feel.

Then the movie changes, becoming something totally different. The action climaxes with a force so unexpected that it knocked the wind out of me and sent the film spinning in completely new directions. There, on screen, something happened that made my jaw drop and my hand instinctively rise to cover it. I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my free arm around them like some damned child looking for solace. Somehow, this simple movie had managed something that no other movie has. It made me, in utter disbelief, gasp like my mom. Suddenly it is obvious that Eastwood and screen writer Paul Haggis have been playing us for suckers, this will not be a film of easy success or simple redemption.

Morgan Freeman's character, Scraps, narrates, and quickly we realize that only now, after shrieking like your high-strung mother the climax of action, can the real movie begin. That's the reason for the odd brevity: there's a more important story left to tell. Still, what becomes a rich and fulfilling emotional payoff would be blunted without a detailed inquest of both Maggie and Frankie's lives. Only in seeing her skyward ascent can we appreciate the finality of her circumstance, and only by seeing the man Frankie Dunn [Eastwood] is, can we understand why he must do what he, ultimately, does. So Scraps is in a tough place, with two very different but interdependent stories to tell, and he manages it admirably.

Eastwood's direction mimics Scraps' unadorned speech. The only conceit he allows himself are subtle homages to The Third Man. Simple sleights of lighting ensconce the characters in shadow, a trick he's used since The Bridges of Madison County. In shirking the gimmickry and gauzy sentimentality of many sports movies, Eastwood forces the weight of narrative onto the shoulders of the characters, who all give gorgeous, quiet performances.

By the end, Million Dollar Baby has become none of the things it pretended to be initially. Despite the divergence, the two ends eventually meet, and the movie never feels fractured or fake. Eastwood has told a story that is both a simple, rousing sports flick and something much more painful, real and, well, Oscar-worthy.

Read the full thing here.