You can’t go fishin’
In the Ordovician
Unless you like jawless fish
But you may as well might
Because a large trilobite
Will fill up your dinner dish
But for a serving of ‘taters
You’ll have to wait til much later
Til the ‘volving of flowering plants
And if you wait a little longer
For the species which b’long ya
Then you may be able to drop ya pants
And have some nookie after dinner
(A Country and Eastern Song)
sung to any tune that fits
She came from Astrakhan
And when she left that’s where she went
My beautiful Mongol bride
She went to Archangelesk
She was cold – she was very cold
But I warmed to her
She went to Almaty
She got lost – She got very lost
And I’ve never heard from her
I returned to Adelaide
When she left that’s where I went
I lost my bestest friend
My sweet sexy Mongol bride
Morals to this fable :
Midget-minded climate skeptics are definitely pains in the proverbial and they just keep on regurgitating things they read on blogs unthinkingly, so the memes, or mind-viruses if you like, tend to take on a life of their own. The Romans saw all this was going to happen and invented the term ad nauseum at about the same time they were inventing the Catholic Church.
One of the most prevalent mind infections at the moment, is that climate scientists hide all of their data, which is just a ridiculous assertion in this time of the internet. It’s obviously annoyed other people too and here’s a page that has been compiled acting as an index to what’s available. So if you have an acquaintance (they won’t be your friend) and they start pretending there is a great big conspiracy and the data is not freely available point their minimal attention spans at RealClimate:Data Sources
Tell your leaders gone to Carbonhagen not to cap and trade. Tax carbon at the mine and port. We need to stabilise the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere at under 400ppmv and we’ve got to start taking people’s cars away if necessary. Start with all the Toyota Hiluxes and anything bigger. We need to turn over our cities to the bicycle.
And remember that carbon dioxide isn’t the only pollutant we need to get rid of. It’s all the wood smoke too.
I spent six years in my garden
listening to the raucous silence of
owls and crickets,
magpies and fairy wrens,
pobblebonks and currawongs.
Here lies Ben the dog.
Here is where the sheep died.
Here is the window where the blackbirds broke their necks.
Here is the corner of the shed I found wedged the stiffened cat.
Here are the irises where we spread my uncle’s ashes.
Here is the compost bin with the parrots and the rats
and the ring-tailed possums I poisoned trying for the rats.
Here is where we shot the sick kangaroo.
Here is where the fox died.
Here are only the feathers of my chooks.
Death is everywhere here.
It is beautiful.
It is biological.
It is alive.
It’s the end of my six years here.
I just spent two and a half days in the garden.
There’s two and a half bunnies in the bin.
* Every story true.
Yep, I will no longer pretend that Christianity isn’t ridiculous. I refuse to play that game. I’m all for tolerance, and I can put up with all kind of weird stuff from no end of crackpots, but I cannot and will not pretend that Christianity makes any sense or has any merit.
I really liked a book by Andrew Parker called in the Blink of an Eye giving his hypothesis about vision setting off the Cambrian arms race and I loved his follow up about colours in the natural world. And I knew they were the first two in a supposed trilogy so I looked up to see if the third book had been written and he’s gone off trying to harmonise Genesis with natural history, like somehow crackpot theories can be accommodated into the real story of what actually happened. It really annoys me when people say that religion and Science can be reconciled. They can’t. Andrew Parker you’ve let me down. Religion cannot be reconciled with science, because religion is wrong. Get over it people. Genesis is meritless, and don’t try to reinterpret it with modern biology and physics and say that this is what those bronze-age peoples really meant. Bronze-age people didn’t know anything about the working of the cell, so therefore they knew nothing of the origin of those cells.
To quote a song “There are precious few, who can prove, that at the root, this all nothing but cold calculations.” It’s all biochemistry baby.
See this, it’s the 10 Commandments in Atoka, Oklahoma. Yep that’s right there’s only 10. That’s like 16 fewer than the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And they call that a moral code. Only 10. Geez, Louise, is that much to go on?
Let’s go through them.This official list as provided by the small town evangelists in America, which is presumably derived from one of the versions in the Pentateuch.
1. Thou shalt have no other gods. Well that sucks because Ganesha and Apsu are way cooler than the sandal wearing (and obviously jealous) bearded one they gave me in the Hope Valley Uniting. Verdict -> Completely irrelevant and not much to base a moral code on.
2. Thou shall not worship any carved image. He is a jealous one. Verdict -> Completely irrelevant.
3. Thou shalt not take my name in vain. Oh but my vainglorious deity. Verdict -> Completely irrelevant.
4. Remember and keep the Sabbath Day holy. Whilst a day off from work is a great idea. Only one a week sucks, and why is there 7 days in a week and don’t give me none of that Genesis rubbish. Verdict -> Chill a bit. Ok.
5. Honor thy father and thy mother. Yes it’s easy to think of exceptions, but on the whole it’s a very Confucian thing. Verdict -> Perfectly reasonable.
6. Thou shall not murder. It’s easy to forget that it only meant Israelites. Moses himself killed an Egyptian the first time we meet him in the book, and the Israelites were pretty good at wiping out whole races themselves. Verdict-> It’s probably best not to kill an Isrealite, and other people too.
7. Thou shall not commit adultery. Verdict-> that’s a private matter between yourself and your spouse and the leg-overee, but it shouldn’t be a criminal offence. Go Tiger.
8. Thou shall not steal. Misappropriation takes the form of more than just physical theft. There is privatising of state assets for instance. Or overcharging for essential good and services. All the houses I have ever lived in have been on land stolen from indigenous peoples. Verdict -> as a general rule this is usually a good idea, but in the modern world it is often observed in the breach.
9. Thall shall not bear false witness. This includes evangelising of Christianity surely. Lying to children about the existence of God is another one. Verdict-> tell the truth, and value the truth.
10. Thall shall not covet. Neighbour’s wives and asses, right? Implying women are only chattels. Envy and jealousy aren’t good, true. Verdict -> a general rule I guess.
So in the 10 commandments, I say 6, possibly 7, are of any value, and one Christians definitely don’t keep. It’s not much to base a moral life on, is it?
What’s this? God’s fingerprint?
Nope, of course not. It is Dickinsonia rex. An example of Vendian fauna from the Ediacaran.
The answers aren’t in Genesis. They’re in the fossil record. To pretend it’s the other way round would just be ridiculous.
You can keep your second-rate Buddha-type character thanks, and don’t bother me with unsubstantiated claims any more.
In an effort to make Kapiti a clean and green place to live there is a new website at:
The Clean Air Society of Kapiti Coast is now at http://cleanairkapiti.wordpress.com/
It should be of particular interest to anyone who lives in Kapiti and likes to breathe.
Every so often someone is an absolute idiot and deserves to be told the whole story, which usually means I get to tell them they’re an idiot.
I always thought since the demise of the King Island and Kangaroo Island dwarf emus there was only one species of emu, but I think there are some regional differences. Unless they are chameleonic and change their feather colours to match the colour of the road they are walking over. I give as examples a photo I took in the Adelaide Hills,
Grey coloured emus
and one I took in Queensland
Brown emus at Mt Surprise
Just as there are possibly two types of emus, there are four types of rhea: The Greater Rhea, Darwin’s Rhea, Diarrhea and Gonorrhea. Sorry, but I didn’t get any photos of rheas from my trip across Tierra Del Fuego.
After that appalling joke I have to make it up to you with some more of my bird photos: Starting with a musk lorikeet
Let me show you my boobies:
and the closely related gannets:
I like a good shag:
and one for the ardecaephobes amongst you:
remember your halcyon days?
There is something wonderful about birds. One of my bug-bears about religions are their anthropocentricity. They keep on pretending that we are the chosen species, and that God created us in his image (although it seems to me to be the other way round). Clearly though, when compared to birds, we are not the pinnacle species on Earth. We can’t even fly. We’re rubbish at it. As the late Douglas Adams said, flying is the art of throwing oneselves at the ground and missing. We don’t miss. I wish I was evolved from theropods rather than some protoprimate. I wish my hips were saurischian. I wish my breast bones had the muscles to beat my wings, and I wish I had feathers. I wish I had hatched, could see in ultraviolet, could fly across oceans and regurgitate fish. Well I could probably master the regurgitating fish if I tried really hard.
So in our near meaningless human lives one of life’s great pleasures is taking good photos of birds. That’s why the Japanese engineers behind the scenes boffining Canon digital cameras should be canonised. Thanks fellas. Arigato.
I love this stuff. Geologists over the last 30 years, under the auspices of UNESCO, have been formally defining the geological time scale (something I reckon if you’ve not memorised, should prevent you from voting in parliamentary elections), Download a copy at http://www.stratigraphy.org/upload/ISChart2009.pdf, then print it out on A0 and frame it for your wall, burn candles around it and chant “I won’t let my progeny forget their phylogeny”.
Oh my, the Pleistocene party now starts early. The Gelasian stage has been stolen from the Pliocene and put to the start of the Pleistocene and they’ve defined the Quaternary finally.
Still no word on the Anthropocene stage though. What’s the Anthropocene I hear you ask? Well the Holocene is to be split from 1800AD, which is where humans started messing up the planet.
Do I get my jollies over this? You bet:
and if you are wondering what that is, well this explains it. It is a “golden spike” or a GSSP, a global standard, section and point, in this case the base of the Ediacaran.
And what is the Ediacaran? Well if you live in Adelaide go to the Museum and go to the top floor and find the Edicaran room. And you’ll see some cool fossils, like this Dickinsonia. Nobody is quite sure how it relates to the modern phyla of the animal kingdom.
I’ll post more about golden spikes some time later in the Anthropocene, but for now as seen in a museum in Punta Arenas, even the moon has a geological timescale:
which I think is rather, rather cool.
A collection of signs from my photo library:
I spent 12 years of my life as an Ada programmer. If only I’d heeded the warnings. Here’s the tick image.
This sign would be so cool if it was somewhere on a footpath in the Altai mountains or somewhere else in Central Asia. It was really in the Tasmanian Arboretum near Devonport. They also had a pair that said North America/Gondwanaland, which’d be cool if I saw it when there was still a Gondwana. (I would love to visit the Mesozoic)
A don’t get turned into cat shit warning sign, marking the turn around point in a hike I did in the Rio Los Cipreses park in Chile:
At Cape Race in Newfoundland I saw a sign, and went over closer to read it, and then a fog horn went off, deafening me, and scaring the holy bejesus out of me, and then I read the sign. “Yep, so I gathered”
And whilst in Newfoundland, the always popular sign on the road down to the curiously named town:
I just like the whole of idea of tree kangaroos and although I’ve spent my time looking skywards in forests where they supposedly live this is the closest I’ve ever got to seeing a tree kangaroo anywhere. I don’t even think any zoo or wildlife park has a tree kangaroo. Correct me if I’m wrong.
The future and the past all in one sign, like the Jetsons and the Flintstones back to back on Saturday morning in Pasagshak, Kodiak Island.
There endeth the post.
