WTF?

I realize that some news cycles are occasionally very, very loopy, but this one has
to take the cake.

Here, have some recently announced strangeness to go along with another bizarre event of recent vintage.

Farrah Fawcett, 1947-2009

Regardless of what you thought of her or her career*, she was brutally frank in documenting her illness and deserves our respect for that, if nothing else.

(*Your humble correspondent opines that she did stuff worth watching - just not when she was on Charlie's Angels.)

Writer's Block: All-Nighter

It figures this would be at a SF convention...

The last time I did this was at Capricon 8 in 1988; at that time, the first version of Doctor Who was going into a death spiral on the BBC and I wanted to catch some episodes from the last (in both senses of the word) season.

Unfortunately, those episodes aired from 2 am to roughly 7 am in the film room.

I succeeded - despite several 1-minute nod-offs - but was constantly hallucinating about friends from a room party passing me beers who weren't there. What fun.

Ever since then, no matter how wired I might be, I need at least a couple of hours of sleep in order to insure that my brain won't melt, seep out of my ear canals, reconstitute itself on the ground, sprout legs and run away.

Or something like that.

New strategy for the Stupid: putting words into dead people's mouths

Unfortunately, the victim seems to be Charles Darwin:

Those of us who've been active in defending science education from the attacks of creationists, as I have for most of my adult life, often find great amusement in the fact that the anti-evolution movement evolves quite rapidly in response to changes in the legal environment. The latest strategy, apparently conceived by the brilliant minds of Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, is relatively clever in concept and mind-numbingly idiotic in execution.

What did these two geniuses come up with? How about publishing an abridged edition of On the Origin of Species -- it is in the public domain now, after all -- and slap on an introduction full of blatantly creationist nonsense.

If you're not famiiar with Ray Comfort, here. And, for that matter, here. And yes, his running partner is the same annoying doofus from Growing Pains you're thinking of. But he's an annoying doofus with a theological axe to grind, of course, and that means he has to annoy seemingly everyone on the planet instead of just going away.