Lee's Blog

I was going to go on with the Story of Sooty, but I can’t let this go. This Comfort clown is absolutely clueless! He’s been corrected on this in detail, but he just goes on spewing his idiocy:

At what point of time in evolutionary history did the female evolve alongside the male? And why did she evolve? Then explain, if you would professor, why horses, giraffes, cattle, zebras, leopards, primates, antelopes, pigs, dogs, sheep, fish, goats, mice, squirrels, whales, chickens, dinosaurs, beavers, cats, human beings and rats also evolved with a female, at some point of time in evolutionary history.

“I simply expose atheistic evolution for the unscientific fairy tale that it is, and I do it with common logic. I ask questions about where the female came from for each species. Every male dog, cat, horse, elephant, giraffe, fish and bird had to have coincidentally evolved with a female alongside it (over billions of years) with fully evolved compatible reproductive parts and a desire to mate, otherwise the species couldn’t keep going. Evolution has no explanation for the female for every species in creation,” he said.

Note the assumption, which he makes every time he babbles about evolution, that the species consists of males, and it is a great coincidence that females happen to come along in time to keep the species going.

Note also that he has no clue about common descent: “horses, giraffes, cattle, zebras, leopards, primates, antelopes, pigs, dogs, sheep, fish, goats, mice, squirrels, whales, chickens, dinosaurs, beavers, cats, human beings and rats …” Comfort, you imbecile, those are all vertebrates.

The species he names are descended from a common ancestor species which was a vertebrate species. The common vertebrate ancestor species had already evolved sex and the division into males and females. Breeding populations adapted to different environments over a period of hundreds of millions (not billions) of years, and became more and more different, with the result that they are now what we call horses, giraffes, cattle, etc. But all of the breeding populations, by definition, consisted of many females, at least, and almost always many males too. (Although there are some species that, so far as anyone can tell, have been reproducing parthenogenetically for millions of years, so that they are all female, there are no species, and can be no species, that are exclusively male.)

So the issue isn’t that “evolutionists” claim that the (all male) dog species or elephant species or bird species appeared and then, providentially, corresponding females happened to appear. (Female dogs are not really, you know, dogs, just sort of dog-shaped incubators, just like female humans aren’t really, you know, human beings that you might need to regard as equals or as entitled to any respect or human rights, as the clueless creationist makes exceedingly clear every time he shoots his ignorant mouth off.)

In fact, scientists recognize that females existed all along because they’re part of the species, just as much as or even more than, the males, Comfort, you moron!

Now the question of how the division into two sexes initially arose and has been maintained for hundreds of millions of years in nearly all species that ever had it is a very interesting scientific question that real scientists are working on. Claiming that “God did it” may make the clueless creationist happy, but it’s a science-killer. Why research when you can sit back and answer every question with three words recited by rote?

What’s more, lying about the work of real scientists merely makes the clueless creationist look deeply stupid and dishonest. As we say back home, Comfort would have to look up at a snake’s belly. I will now honor the clueless creationist in my accustomed manner: Comfort (*spit*).

Sooty was my very first ferret, whom I got when I was a senior in college. The school had announced that we were no longer allowed to have “uncaged” pets. So I looked around for the smartest, most loving animal that I could pass off as a “caged” pet, and that was a ferret. So I went to the pet store at Penn Square Mall and found an adorable, affectionate little critter that I named Sooty.

Wherein Sooty goes for a ride

The pet store put Sooty in a little box, but I didn’t think that was quite right, so I let her run around the car. This turned out to be a bad idea, as she promptly disappeared. I practically tore the car apart looking for her. She had crawled up inside the springs of one of the seats.

Wherein I discover that ferrets are boneless

I took Sooty home and let her loose in my room with a supply of food and water, and a litter box. After a while of watching her and playing with her, I had to go down and talk to my parents. Pretty soon, my sister came down and said, “Lee, there’s an animal in the bathroom. Is it yours?”

Sooty had slithered through a crack under the door which I could not believe she had even got her head through, much less the rest of her body. I could only conclude that ferrets really don’t have bones, and in fact are a form of liquid.

Wherein Sooty plays dead

Pretty soon, it was time to go to college. I drove cross-country, and I had a passenger to keep me company. He held Sooty in his lap (since we had learned not to let her roam the car), and stroked and petted her as I drove. After some hours, we realized that she had gone utterly limp. I held her up, and her head flopped from side to side.

I thought she had succumbed to some awful ferret weakness, so I laid her on the grass while we discussed the situation. After a while, I noticed that her nose was twitching a bit, and pretty soon she got up and was ready to play. That was my first introduction to the fact that ferrets “sleep like the dead”. It is truly alarming to see.

So we got back in the car and went on to Connecticut.

Wherein Sooty claims her toys

I was assigned a little dorm room at college, so I immediately moved Sooty and my things into that room, and turned her loose to play (first inspecting for any tiny openings that she could slither through. I had five suitcases of graduated sizes which were hand-me-downs from my parents. I lined them up along the wall but didn’t unpack because I had to go fill out paperwork, sign up for classes, etc. So I left Sooty exploring the room while I took care of things.

After a while I came back and found Sooty asleep in the bed and four suitcases lined up along the wall.

Wait a second.

Four suitcases? Weren’t there five?

So I started hunting for the missing suitcase, casting dark looks alternately at Sooty and the door. It seemed very unlikely that someone could have come in and taken the smallest suitcase, but it seemed unlikely that Sooty could have taken it either.

Eventually it occurred to me to look inside the little closet that was part of the room, and there was the missing suitcase. Inside were Sooty’s toys. Apparently she had smelled them inside the suitcase and decided to put them away in the darkest corner she could find, suitcase and all.

To be continued …

I have now joined Facebook, after two people suggested it. I still haven’t quite figured out what I’m supposed to do there, but perhaps my friends will assist me.

I did discover the Facebook has groups which you can join, one of which is called, logically, “Ferrets are better than Everything”. How could I not join? And they have pictures! A couple of hundred cute little ferrets pictures!

During my late and unlamented career in the law, at one point we had a clerk. He was a nice, well brought up Catholic boy and, perhaps, unversed in the ways of the wicked world. So we were quite different.

One day we were chatting about books and our various interests, and I asked casually, “Have you ever read any Lovecraft?” He gave me an appalled look and then turned to my boss, his expression clearly begging for rescue. My boss and I realized immediately that he thought I was asking if he’d read the Kama Sutra or something like that, so we hastily clarified: “H. P. Lovecraft — it’s the author’s name“.

Since then, if I happen to discuss these books with someone, I am always at pains to say something like “Have you read the works of H. P. Lovecraft?” to avoid any unfortunate interpretations.

I’d like to teach a class this spring at Miskatonic U.
I hear you can get tenure there in just a year or two.
The library is truly vast with stacks of eldritch books;
I’m told the Necronomicon is worth a couple looks.

Necronomicon -
what I’m hoping to find.
But what’s it done to my mind?
The Necronomicon.

I’d like to have a class survive to graduation day –
The sophomores keep turning up, drowned in Innsmouth Bay.
I’d like to call my mind my own, in perfect sanity –
I don’t know why I wrote that line, there’s nothing wrong with me.

Miskatonic U
I’ll be fleeing today
Hope I’m getting away
From Miskatonic U

I’d like to delve an eldritch tomb alive with ancient sin
I’d like to build a ring of stones and call Yog-Sothoth in.
I’d like to teach the world to scream in perfect agony.
I’d like to call Cthulhu up from deep beneath the sea.

It’s the surreal thing (Cthulhu)
What I’m fearing to find
When I’m out of my mind
It’s the surreal thing.

Ah, now this is funny. Even though they misspelled Nyarlathotep as “Nyalrothotep”. They shall be eaten last.

By the way, Cullen, do you happen to recall the words to “I’d like to teach a class next year at Miskatonic U”?

So, PZ crashed another poll. Well, there’s a certain humor in crashing obvious push-polls that the creators obviously intended to use in a pretense of proving something. Maybe that’s what this poll was, though the creator denies it and asserts that it was intended to allow his “community” to have a voice. Clearly PZ’s community was not part of his community.

Without weighing in on the merits of this particular incident, or the reactions by the creator, his supporters, and PZ’s minions, I have to say that I am troubled by this whole pattern of conduct. We saw during the late campaign that The One’s minions felt it perfectly acceptable to smother any attempt at dissent by their sheer numbers — tie up incoming phone lines so no one else can get through to a radio discussion, for instance. And on-line — well, forget it. You don’t even need zombie computers if you have zombie minions to flood comment sections or polls. It’s all in fun when PZ does it, but the implications are not good.

So I was trying to think how you could prevent this sort of thing. Obviously it’s not a problem on this site — only two people read it anyway, though I get loads of zombie comments about assorted drugs — but for sites like The Daily Grail, what could you do to, on the one hand, allow people to comment freely without handing out personal information, and yet on the other hand, prevent poll-crashing or comment-flooding.

And I have an idea!

Suppose you had a little PHP program that did nothing but generate GUIDs on request (I would write one but I’m already playing hooky from fixing a bug). Anyone who logs onto the site can request one, and the program would generate it and add it to a list of valid GUIDs. Any time you want to have a poll that can’t be crashed by Pharynguloids or the like, you just turn off the GUID generator and require anyone who wants to vote in the poll to first present their GUID. One vote per GUID. Then the only people who can vote are those who had visited at least once before, and made the minimal effort of getting and recording their GUID.

Of course, the GUID could be stored as a cookie so the user doesn’t even have to record it, but some people run with cookies turned off or they clean their cookies, so making it visible to them for recording would be convenient.

In fact, you might want to generate the GUID then offer the user the opportunity to bookmark the site, with the GUID neatly inserted as a parameter attached to the URL. That way they wouldn’t have to record it anywhere but they wouldn’t lose it if they cleaned cookies.

Since the GUID has nothing to do with the user, they don’t have to give any personal information, which would certainly be an incentive for me to use it, but at the same time if anyone used it in a poll, you would know that they’d been to the site (or someone who’d been to the site gave it to them, but if you restrict them to one vote per GUID, they can’t skew the poll by giving out the number).

The only issue would be that someone might write a program to collect a horde of GUIDs for later use, but if that became a problem, you could verify that a human being was requesting, in the same way that you can verify that a human being was commenting. You could also time them out — if someone hasn’t been there in several months, you might not consider them part of your community and might not want them voting in your poll.

This is just an unsolicited plug for my favorite guitarist, Edgar Cruz. I am trying to fix a bug in my code and am listening to one of his CDs as I do it. I have most of his CDs and will try to pick up the rest when I’m back in Oklahoma.

I have seen him several times in person, and it is awe-inspiring to watch him play. He also seems to be a genuinely nice man.