Weekend Report...

Well, it was a Yamaarashi-chan weekend and the University Street Fair was going on and you know what? Omaha and I wimped out and decided to stay home. We didn't go to the fair, we didn't go to our monthly social Saturday afternoon, we didn't go anywhere. Part of that may simply be because we're broke. We looked at the weather report for the weekend and decided that we were gonna coocoon. We had stuff to do at home, paperwork, accounting, and the like. It was fairly sedate. We kept the kids fed but there were a few times I offered to engage them in games they said they'd rather play with each other.

FallenPegasus wandered over Saturday evening to share our quiet weekend, watching a movie downstairs in the den. I'm not much of a movie watcher so I fixed my Windows box instead. I was very good this time: I wiped the hard drive completely clean (it's sad that there's no way to do that from within Windows) and re-installed Windows 98 from scratch. This time, I let everything run its course, re-booted after every install, and it worked fine. I now have a GameOS'98 install, on top of which I dropped a copy of Tron 2.0, which is pretty good as games go. A first-person shooter full of references to the original movie and an obvious application of FPS technology: we've spent so much time making them realistic when Tron, with its colorful computer world, was a perfect match for the tech. I've only had it crash once, probably a game bug.

I did the usual things, naturally. Lots of chores to get caught up, gave the kids their bath Friday and Sunday (well, Sunday was Kouryou-chan only as I'd taken Yamaarashi-chan back to her mother's), let them try out their new toothpaste, Tom's of Maine, Orange-Mango flavored and they like it. Omaha made these amazing enchiladas from the Cooking for Kids book, although to an adult they desperately needed some hot sauce. Fortunately, I had some Racha. Kouryou-chan wet her bed Friday night so I had to use the upholstery cleaner on it. We bought a new composting bin since one of the neighborhood kids playing in our back yard shattered the lid on our older one, and the city was having its annual gardening sale, ten bucks for a bin.

Since the only "nice weather" day was slated to be Friday, after I got home with the girls I tried to get them to practice on their bicycles. Kouryou-chan isn't afraid of the thing so she started riding almost immediately. Yamaarashi-chan, in contrast, didn't understand why anyone would want to ride a bicycle. "Isn't that what cars do?"

Well, we'll work on that.

New Story: Journal Entry 121 / 01032, "Overextended"

Yeah, a day late, but I've put up the new story, Overextended. It's a nice little piece about P'nyssa and Nance's relationship, how that works, how Shardik feels about it. Enjoy!

Preach it, Brother!

PZ Meyers is one of those good guys fighting the good fight. In a recent post, he pans a book review in Science of the pro-"intelligent design" book, Darwinism, Design, and Public Education, edited by Campbell and Meyer. His objection is to this sentence: "The volume's legal, pedagogical, and social arguments--- in contrast to much of its scientific discussion-- are nuanced and informed."

Meyers responds:

I'm afraid that isn't good enough. This is a book purportedly about the teaching of science, and the science it advocates is crap. That crucial fact ought to be front and center in bold print at the heart of the review, not buried in a weak "tut, tut" somewhere in the midst of broad accolades for the author's mastery of the use of commas and paragraphs. That kind of tepid academic dithering is what's killing us in the marketplace of public opinion.

Get it out. Campbell and Meyer are wrong. They are using rhetoric and well-spoken lies to peddle dishonest crap to school children. When these frauds try to teach my kids that the sky is green, up is down, and by the way, the earth is only 6000 years old, I don't want one of the leading science journals to soft-peddle the stupidity of their cause to extol the elegance of their poesy. I want goddamned critical knives. I want furious rhetoric that puts these fraudulent clowns down. I want, just once, for a scientist to grit his teeth, make his muscles bulge, rip off his lab coat, and roar, "DARWIN SMASH!!!"

Amen.