Earthman's Notebook

Robins look … well, silly. They stand on the grassy verge with heads upraised, stock still for indefinite periods like little feathered statues, than drop down and make lightning-fast dashes to some other part of the lawn. Where they again stand still for an unpredictable while.

And despite all the press they get in songs and stories, they’re not even all that pretty. An unattractive dull gray body, ugly yellowish bill. Okay, they do have that red breast thing going for them, but it’s not even really red, is it? More of a reddish brown. And when you live in a place where brilliant scarlet cardinals regularly visit your back deck – not to mention equally colorful blue jays, red-winged blackbirds, goldfinches, and several kinds of red-accented woodpeckers – robins are pretty tame fare.

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Suppose there was a way to make other people think like you?

Imagine a drug you could hand out that, with regular doses over a period of time, would cause other people to agree with you in every way. A drug that would cause them to be UNABLE, mostly, to disagree with you.

1) Would you give it to your kids?

2) Would you give it to your friends?

3) Would you give it to friends without telling them what it was but saying it would be good for them?

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I somehow got onto a right-wing Christian mailing list. Without fail, EVERY email they send me is both amusing and disturbing. That they’re so wrong, but so earnest, is funny. That they’re enticing others to be so wrong and earnest, that’s disturbing.

The latest was an Action Alert! from the stick-up-the-backside “American Family Association”:

“Pepsi Produces Another TV Ad Promoting the Gay Lifestyle”

Yes, the “gay lifestyle.” The lifestyle that people choose, and then recruit others into, so they can all be evil and debauched together, and get people to hate them. All done deliberately, you understand, and in opposition to good traditional American Christian values.

And yes, Pepsi is saying “Be Gay!! Everybody drink Pepsi and engage in homosexual activity!! Don’t be like all those heterosexuals who drink Coke!” What better publicity campaign could you get?

I had to respond to the part that said “Sign the Boycott Pepsi Pledge.”

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What follows is from a site called the “Hal Turner Show“. I kid you not.

After we kill them: what to do?

After the pending Second American Revolution results in killing the people who have wrecked this country — yes, you KNOW who I’m talking about — what are we going to do as a nation to move forward?

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[ Argh. My newer version of WordPress has controls for placing an image, but they DON'T SEEM TO WORK. Until I figure them out, we'll have to live with the non-existence of text wrap. I say again: Argh. ]

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Comment-volleying on a blog with one of those people I refer to as a “nice Christian” – the people who project kindness and understanding as their motivation, all the while ripping your metaphorical guts out (“There’s no such thing as atheism! It just doesn’t make SENSE!”) – I stepped away from the subject of the debate for a moment, for the benefit of the other rationalist commenters, and addressed the interaction itself.

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Our Dear Mr. Darwin would be a very spry (I’m sure) 200 years old this Feb. 12.

The man did so much for us. Aside from the claims of the idiots on the godder side of history, people of reason don’t worship him. But we do give a boatload of credit to a guy who worked so tirelessly, throughout his life, to understand and explain this most beautiful and fruitful idea: that all living things are interrelated. Man, how cool is that?

Here’s a painting of him done by premier natural history illustrator Carl Buell.

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Lest we forget: This is also the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln. And bravo for that, too!

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PS: The above image is COPYRIGHTED. If you snake it from my site, after my friend Mr. Buell was so kind as to allow me to post it, I’ll hunt you down and feed you to the invertebrates. AFTER I superglue hungry ferrets to your knees.

If you want a copy of the painting — which is fully life-sized — for your own Darwin Day celebratory use, contact Carl Buell directly at Carl [at] olduvaigeorge [dot] com.

At least one college I know of is printing out the full portrait and mounting it on a cutout backing so that students can pose with it for pictures.

Molly Ivins died two years ago today.

If you don’t know  who she was, go HERE to read some of her delightful quotes.

“I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn’t actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.”

She was a Texan — a Texas liberal! — with a loud mouth, a wickedly cynical pen, and a sense of humor and justice and love that made her … special.

She knew, and gently despised, the idiot George W. Bush (whom she called “Shrub”), and all the people he surrounded himself with.

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I got one of those Nigerian email scams. I’d guess it was about number 50, or maybe it was 75.

I’ve been thinking for several days about two very different views of atheism. One is from the godder side, where atheists are consciously evil, and want to hurt people and destroy things. The other …

Well, read the email first.

DEAR BELOVED IN CHRIST,

Yeah, the whole thing is in capital letters. I’ll spare you by translating it into something less shouty. I’m leaving in the typographical errors and misspellings, but I’m fixing the weird line breaks and large number of extra spaces sprinkled throughout.

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I’m chuckling, but in a grim way.

I get these emails from something called Worldview Weekend, a Christianist organization that sees a plot to murder God – and white people – in every shadow. I signed up in  a weak moment a year or so back, just to keep tabs on what they’re selling.

Some of the lines from this week’s plate of steaming neo-con Jesus (I confess I added all the exclamation marks, just because it seems funnier that way):

Liberals to Spend $1 Trillion And Can Not Say it Will Produce One Job!!!

Uh, hello? How many net jobs were created by the several trillion that Bush spent?

Distracting and Destroying the Middle Class, by Brannon Howse

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History. Yes.