Heard this Kevin Kling commentary on NPR this afternoon. Kevin is my favorite NPR commentator – he can tell a wicked funny tale and I enjoy his accent. Though I don’t believe in God, Jesus or Santa (the three supernaturals he invokes) I do believe in, every so often, taking a good look around and appreciating things. Stop a minute and be thankful – we’re completely insignificant in the overall scheme of things and yet are lucky – we’re all (I hope) self-aware – might as well enjoy the ride…

I realize I’m going to feel pretty damn stupid if it turns out to be something bad, but some of the comments in the NYT’s ‘the Lede’ blog regarding the bad smell in NYC and parts of New Jersey are lots o’ fun:

Wasn’t it Walt Whitman who wrote, “O Captain, Mercaptan”?
– Posted by bg

It could just be the scent of the Giants and Jets returning home.
– Posted by Tom

Perhaps it’s General Tarkin’s foul stench.
– Posted by JR

Read this headline again and tell me that it wasn’t already run in the Onion.Mayor Says Odor Doesn’t Appear Dangerous: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that the source of the smell was unknown, but officials were “very confident” it was not dangerous.
– Posted by Dan Lowndes

My thermometer reads 64F at 1:30 in the afternoon. I took the panther chameleon outside to catch some rays – no UV bulb can compare with the real thing. He’s loving it:

The horses across the street are having a high old time – bucking, kicking, taking mud baths and acting like it’s April (boy are they going to be disappointed in a week or so). I’m glad I won’t be cleaning ’em up…

P.S. – for those who don’t know, I live in New Hampshire. It’s a state that’s not usually noted for it’s balmy winters.

Another big hurray for one of the only 2 radio programs I go out of my way to listen to – Kathy’s Red Eye R&B. The other is also on WUNH – Bruce’s Blues Show on Sunday evening. WUNH is making the shows available in hour-long chunks for listening off-line – just click the sound waves (aka free waves) under each show title. Woo-hoo – listening goodness!

Christopher Hitchens’ essay, “Why Women Aren’t Funny”, excited a certain amount of discussion around the internets recently. I’m not going to add my 2 cents on his hypothesis*, but one blogger’s reply did an excellent job of making some points that I think would be useful to keep in mind any time a pundit uses evolutionary biology to justify an argument. My 2 favorites:

1. Learning, culture, human malleability. It’s the whole nature/nurture thing cast in terms of how we adapt to different circumstances.

Many animals can be trained.

We can be taught. We are teachable.

To be trained is to be habituated, conditioned—reprogrammed. To be taught to how to do something is also to be taught how not to. Anything we’ve been taught, we can unteach ourselves.

So it seems to me that whenever you want to try to explain why a person, or a whole lot of persons, are the way they are, the first thing to look at is not what might have happened to their homo erectus ancestors millions of years ago, but what they themselves have been taught right here and now.

If you have to go back in time, you needn’t go back more than a few generations, where you can read what their great-grandparents were taught.

Now, the difference between believing that people are what they are because of what they’ve been taught and they are what they are because what they are was biologically determined for them millennia ago is that the first belief allows for people being able to change and the second belief is pretty much an argument that they can’t, they’re stuck being what they are, no matter what.

2. Panglossianism. Since the argument is that people have evolved to behave in such and such a way, we need to skate over the possibility that the behavior is neutral or (gasp) maladaptive. Instead, it’s a relatively straight path to the best of all possible worlds.

The general weakness in all these arguments has been that the amateur assumes that everything about us has an evolutionary cause. Take us for all in all, we are the pure products of natural selection.

But as Stephen Jay Gould was often at pains to point out—usually to religious types who wanted to prove that evolution is not a fact and thought they had a Gotcha! when they could point to something about an animal they felt made no sense as an adaptation and therefore could not have been naturally selected for or something that appears too complicated to have been the result of biological accidents to have invented and refined—not everything about an organism is there because it is useful.

Some qualities or features appeared because of accidents—mutations, etc.—and stuck because there was no reason for them to be naturally selected against.

And some features and qualities are there because they are contingent upon other features and qualities that were useful.

…

It’s finally an argument that whatever is, is right, an aphoristic thought that as Dickens pointed out, “would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.”

The second point reminds me of why I stopped studying economics – it starts to smell like theology after a while – justifying the ways of god to man…

*why? 1. It’s a trap – “Look! Those that disagree with me – dull, earnest, no sense of humor!”. 2. Been done (better).

A new book for my wish list: The Adventures of Abdi. I’m going to see if i can interest the Lower School librarian in getting a copy for the school library – visually stunning:

*

Via BibliOdyssey with a stop at a new-to-me blog that’s going up under Sensory Stimuli – Monster Brains.

First – slow news day here in New Hampshire. While waiting for the weatherman to come on the morning news I was stunned to see a story on Nigerian spam scams. Gott im Himmel! How can there be, at this point, someone on the planet who is at the intersection of ‘has access to a computer’ and ‘is clueless about Mrs. Miriam Abacha’. In a nod to just how current the story isn’t, part of the feature discussed a NH man who went to jail for 4 years in 2001 as a result of one of these scams. The poor bastard has already done his time and yet this is news? I offer MC Frontalot’s Message 419 as music to shake your head by.

II. Roman burial unearthed in London. Very interesting stuff – I’ll probably now fly off on a tangent reading about Roman and pre-Roman Britain (Yo! Hadrian!). Ackroyd’s London: the Biography was wonderful, but didn’t go far enough into the really old stuff. The music that goes with this item is appropriate both for it’s last verse (la-la-Londinium) and for it’s focus on the people who built the burg (including the Victorian sewer worker who swiped the Roman’s head). Also, navvy is a great word. XTC’s Towers of London:

At last, a blog entry regarding an NPR story that does not wrap up with me foaming at the mouth. Morning Edition ran a story today on a Mennonite community in Chihuahua, Mexico famous for their cheese. It’s an interesting tale with a (tenuous) personal connection – a lot of Mennonite blood flows through my veins. The Chihuahuan community came from northern Germany via Russia and Manitoba; my connection is through my mom – German/Swiss via Ontario. Hey, Heidi the Hick – mom’s maiden name = Lehman, granma’s maiden name = Wideman, both born in Markham, Ont. – I’m betting some of those names ring bells for you… I’m also told that, coincidentally, on my dad’s side there’s a bunch of Indiana Mennonite heritage, but I know less about that.

A pre-schooler’s turkey story:

I know they walk. Well, well they walk on the street. Well, they walk to get to the other side. They are going to their homes. They live in the grass. They eat turkey or maybe yummy cheese or maybe something clean or maybe something yucky. To catch a turkey my Dad would use a net. He has really power hands. He throws the net and then he grabs the feet. He gets tired when he runs out of power. But some heroes don’t get tired. Moms gotta cut the feathers off the turkey. You do it with scissors. Mom doesn’t catch a turkey. She’s not very good at catching things. She cooks it in the oven for five minutes. All of us eat it.