Our cats are both on the youngish side of rambunctious, nearly a year and not quite two years old, respectively. Every once in a while, they go into what Amy and I affectionately refer to as “psycho-kitty” mode. Their pupils get very wide, their tails start to twitch madly, and they start tearing ass around the apartment, killing anything that moves and, for good measure, assaulting anything that looks like it might move sometime in the future.
  This morning, when I dragged my lazy butt out of bed, I discovered that they had taken the latest round of p-k to new heights. They de-arranged the couch cushions and knocked most of the stuff off of the coffee table, entertainment center, and Amy’s desk. That is all per the usual madness. This time, though, they somehow managed to pull the tablecloth completely off, despite it being weighed down by a good sized book of coupons and a ceramic snack dish. The dish only happened to not smash because Amy and I have been leaving our snow-covered shoes near the table, and it seems to have bounced off of them before hitting the floor. If we’d been less concerned about tracking dirty wetness about the house, we’d be short one slightly adorable snowman-shaped snack dish. Talk about your close calls.

  Remember that joke that kids used to play on each other? “Say ‘I’, then spell ‘cup!’” Boy, that was the height of hilarity when you were six, wasn’t it? Well, all of a sudden, Charlatan likes to (spell cup). Unless I shut the bathroom door firmly enough to latch it, she comes barging in as soon as she hears the clank of the toilet lid against the tank. She’ll climb up and perch on the side of the tub, and watch the goings on in the bowl. I can’t even reach over to put her on the floor, for fear of anointing every surface in the bathroom. I’m sure it says something about me that I’m slightly embarrassed about urinating in front of my cat. What it says, I’m not sure.

  As I was typing this revealing look into the feline life forms residing here, Barrymoore decided to investigate. Sensing, somehow that I was passing on secrets that might jeopardize national kitty security. In an effort to thwart me, he climbed into my lap, inserting himself betwixt myself and the keyboard. He then proceeded to lick and nibble on the back of my hands. It was very sweet and affectionate, but it made it impossible to hit the correct keys in sequence. Fortunately, he’s much smaller than me, so I was able to remove him, after pausing to love him up for a few minutes.
  God help us if they ever evolve thumbs.

The state of Massachusetts has an Official Donut.

… I want to have an official donut.

  It turns out that Isaac Hayes probably didn’t quit South Park. Instead, his church quit for him.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

No, not like those creepy brain-worm things from Wrath Of Khan. I’m guess it’s more accurate to say pop up in my head, like some damned existential toaster. For instance, this little gem, which welled up so fast and hard that I recited most of it out load before I realized I was talking to my dogs, and they were ignoring me. Anyway, here it is for posterity, with minimal editing.

  You know what I like? Things that have their own time. How cool is that? Like “go time.” It’s go time! Action is immediately happening! It’s time, and you’re gonna go. Granted, you don’t know where you’re going, or what you’ll be doing when you get there, but you’re a man of action! Silly details like that don’t bother you.
  Or Miller time. It’s Miller time! That sounds like a great time. I think there’s something sort of cool about a beer so crappy, it can alter the very fabric of the Universe. The only thing better than Miller time would be “good beer time,” but if that time ever appeared on my clock, I think my liver would leap right out of my body and crawl away under its own power. Like a rat from a sinking ship, my liver.
  And then, there’s the big daddy of them all, the time that makes all other times pale by comparison. That’s right, I’m talking about Hammer time. Man, do you remember when it used to be Hammer time about four dozen times a day? Now it’s only Hammer time when you’re drunk and looking through your old cassettes, or in the last half-hour of a wedding DJ’s set, or on one of those new radio stations with no announcers that only plays the most mortifying hit singles of your childhood.
  Here’s a question? What would happen if it was Miller time and Hammer time at the same time? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect it’s something horrifying. Maybe the producers of Fear Factor will try it one of these days, as long as they can find an approriate testicle for the contestants to eat while it happens.

Three things I did not know:

1. Dr. Henry Heimlich, purported inventor of the famed and (I shit you not) registered trademark “maneuver” for rescuing choking victims is still alive.

I don’t know why, but I always assumed that such a simple procedure must have been invented in the 19th century. Based on the last name, I pictured a humble Bavarian physician, decked out in lederhosen and suspenders. While knocking back a pint at a rural ale house, he rushed to the aid of one of the town volk who was choking on a bit of bratwurst. Thanks to his quick thinking, his technique became the namesake maneuver, and his improvised flailings (and maybe the bit of horked-up sausage) were preserved for posterity.

As it turns out, the maneuver was first described in the mid-70s. Although it is still taught as a remedy for choking, it isn’t the recommended first treatment. Dr. Heimlich was born in Delaware in 1920, and doesn’t seem to be particularly humble. Or Bavarian.

2. Dr. Heimlich has been dogged by allegations of fraud.

One of Dr. Heimlich’s most persistent critics is his son, Peter Heimlich. Among the allegations he levels against his father is the charge that the famous technique was appropriated from Dr. Heimlich’s long time colleague, Dr. Edward Patrick.

3. Dr. Heimlich may be completely, dangerously, batshit insane.

Dr. Heimlich advocates the use of his system of abdominal thrusts to treat drowning victims, despite much evidence that such use is dangerous and potentially fatal. Most obviously crazy, though, is his insistence that he can cure HIV/AIDS with an injection. Of malaria.

Dr. Heimlich, who has no training as an immunologist, seriously believes that he can cure AIDS, as well as cancer and Lyme disease, by injecting patients with malaria. In support of this hypothesis, he’s conducted ethically suspect trials with HIV patients in China and Africa. One of the conditions of those trials was that participants couldn’t receive any other treatment, either for their HIV or the symptoms of their malaria infections.

This is what I get for relying on Eddie Izzard for information about a public figure.

I’m not about to say that my hour of casual reading amounts to a definitive case, but there is a good bit of evidence of a disconnect between Dr. Heimlich’s self-promoted legacy and the details of his actual career in public health. If you think I’m wrong, feel free to argue.

As I sit trying to coax my wife’s computer into compliance, I’ve got the TV on. It gives me something to watch while scans are running, updates are installing and unnecessary bits of Windows are deleted.

Right now, I’m watching a TBS feature called “TV And A Movie.” They show a movie, and intersperse it with promotional bits for beauty products.

This time, they’re showing a children’s film called Zathura. It’s a good movie, but it makes absolutely no sense in the context of a makeup regimen. The only characters are two pre-adolescent boys, a scruffy male astronaut and a bunch of nasty, dinosaur-looking aliens. There is a teenage sister, but she spends most of the movie cryogenically frozen on the floor of a bathroom.

Where exactly is the beauty role model in that bunch? And why exactly are we trying to sell overpriced shampoo to this audience? Somebody at TBS really needs to lay off the blow.

The sleeves of a grey sweat shirt, neatly cut off and left lying on the sidewalk. Their cuffs were just barely not touching, like star crossed lovers, unable to quite reach each other before their tragic and obscenely romantic deaths.

I am suddenly obsessed with wondering why someone would leave their sleeves lying on the sidewalk. Did you Hulk out, with enough warning that you were able to cut off your sleeves before your newly massive biceps burst out of them? Did you have to participate in an impromptu Flashdance routine? Was the weather so much warmer than you expected that the only way you could avoid massive, lurking pit stains was to open your underarms to the breeze?

This is what happens when I can’t sleep at night. My daytime brain turns mundane littering into something absurdly dramatic.

Last week’s avalanche of election news swept a lot of things off the trail and buried them in a remote part of the news wilderness. One of the stories that died of hypothermia at the bottom of a gully was actually election related. Voters in Pennsylvania’s 29th district re-elected state Senator James J. Rhoades to another term. Sadly, Senator Rhoades will be unable to serve, since he died 17 days before the election from injuries he received in a car accident.

The Pocono Record explains how the incumbent Republican beat his Democratic challenger, despite being dead at the time:

Rhoades died too close to election day to replace the incumbent senator’s name on the ballot and his staff continued to campaign for his election after his death. (emphasis added)

This suggests that there were two reasons that Senator Rhoades was victorious. One of those reasons is understandable, if not entirely satisfying. Yes, finding a new candidate in under three weeks would have been difficult. But would it have been prohibitively difficult to note on the ballot that electing a dead man would trigger a special election, rather than just leaving him their as a space-filler?

The second clause in that sentence is just disturbing, mostly because it’s so unsurprising. It sounds crazy and morbid; Rhoades’ staff was so devoted to their beloved leader that they wanted to have his corpse embalmed and propped up in a chair in Harrisburg, while a psychic contacted his spirit and asked him how he’d like to vote on fluff resolutions.

The truth, one suspects, is that they didn’t want the seat to go to a *gasp!* Democrat. They weren’t campaigning for a zombie senator, they were working to keep the other guy from winning, so they’d have a couple of months to find a suitable replacement candidate before the special election in January. Instead of saying that, they kept up their “memorial campaign,” and got a corpse elected rather than see challenger Peter Symons take over the seat.

Another interesting outcome is that the third-place candidate for the seat, independent Dennis Baylor, hasn’t officially conceded, despite receiving about 2,000 votes to Rhoades’ 71,000 and Symons’ 41,000. He points out the practical problems of conceding to a dead man, as well as the unclear procedure for trying to get on the ballot as an independent candidate in the special election. If it works the same way as it did for the general election, Baylor will have to gather a certain number of signatures on a petition to secure a place on the ballot. Instead of having six months to gather the required names, he’ll have less than three.

So, congratulations to Pennsylvania’s 29th District. That is one state senate seat that is guaranteed not to generate any patronage jobs and wasteful spending, at least until January.

There is a lot about creationism that baffles me. I’ve never understood how anyone could simply dismiss the mountain (range) of evidence that supports evolution. I’ve never understood how one could swallow the internal contradictions and provable falsehoods of the bible as a blueprint for creation, or the laughably absurd logic of the arguments in favor of a universe created as a lark by a lonely deity who needed a few million new BFFs. I’ve really never understood how someone could assume the existence of an intelligent creator, and then not spend every single waking second giving that creator a hard time for all the horrible shit that happens on a daily basis.

The one thing, though, that I always thought I understood was the emotional underpinning of creationist belief. Intuitively, I can see why it’s comforting to believe that humanity, as a species, has a divinely ordained place as the cheesy Christmas star on top of the tree of life. That the whole big, beautiful world was custom designed for our comfort, so that god’s millions of new buddies would have some place to park their boats.

I always thought that I got the appeal of that notion, but lately I’m starting to find it a lot less… well, appealing. The universe is, at every scale, an amazing, wondrous, fascinating, awe-inspiring place. It took many billions of years to take the form we observe today, and it all happened without any agency. All of that amazing stuff happened as a result of chance and blind luck. It wasn’t inevitable. It didn’t have to happen. That, to me, is far more special than the idea that it was all pre-determined, created as is by the the snap of divine fingers.

As we learn more about everything from cosmology to biology, I find the “god done it” hypothesis less and less satisfying. Okay, so we weren’t magicked into existence to rule over our own private playplanet. So what? We’ve gotten to the point where we can observe the largest structures in the universe, and hack the code that controls all terrestrial life, and we did it with the tools we had, not at the behest of a deity. We can be proud of our accomplishments, and humbled by our mistakes, without having to shift the praise (or blame) to an invisible causal agent.

Take the recent story about induced out-of-body experiences. Scientists were able, without any drugs or physical manipulation of the brain, to convince subjects that they had swapped bodies with a mannequin. And they were surprised how easy it was.

Why is this so cool? Because it shows that the sense of “self,” the perception that your body is an individual entity, is an illusion created by the brain. Somewhere along the way, the brain developed a system to convince itself that it was inside of the body it was inhabiting. It’s a way for an organ that can’t directly sense its location to “know” that it’s perched atop the spinal column. And it’s really easy to fool.

This means one of two things. Either this essential regulatory system developed in response to environmental pressures, or it was plugged in by a creator who was simultaneously a) powerful and insightful enough to build such an intricate system, and b) too lazy or incompetent to design a system robust enough that it couldn’t be fooled by a couple of video cameras. I just can’t fathom what is more satisfying about the second scenario.

And it’s the same all over the body. It’s sophisticated enough to wring molecular nutrients out of food, but it’s clumsy enough that it takes in air and solids through a single structure. Anyone who’s ever choked on a chunk of hot dog or laughed until milk shot out of his nose is evidence against a competent designer.

I suppose I’m biased by my (total layman’s) interest in science, but I’m can no longer understand how it’s more satisfying to believe that humanity was specially created. We’re discovering so much amazing stuff about ourselves and the vast universe around us. I’d rather know that it happened on its own, and we’re lucky enough to be able to observe and understand even a small part of it.

Next time, we’ll talk about why this dilemma matters at all. In the meantime, does anyone have a better reason, something that I’m missing, that explains why creationist belief is more comforting? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

• Shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist wanted to ”humiliate the tyrant.” (American journalists know that, where President Bush is concerned, an open mic and an audience are usually sufficient.)
• Despite more aggressive fact-checking, millions of American voters are grossly misinformed. (They must be, since they voted for the Muslim Socialist Antichrist.)
• From the Know Your Enemy desk: SEED’s Nathan Schneider interviews Adnan Oktar, champion of Islamic creationism. (Reports of the worldwide demolition of Darwinism are, sadly, only slightly exaggerated.)
• Being Amish means that you a have a god-given right to live in a house that doesn’t conform to building codes. (Here’s a simple solution. Build however you want; if your house collapses, emergency responders will stay home, and god can pull you out of the rubble.)
• Study shows that male intelligence correlates with indicators of semen quality. (So “male intelligence” may be an oxymoron, but “smart and spunky” is redundant.)