Here Be Monsters.

This was a phrase used by map makers long ago to depict uncharted waters where ships were known to have entered but mysteriously disappeared. They never returned to their home port so were listed as "Lost at Sea".

Yesterday, the photo of the spectacular show called, "Walking with Dinosaurs" was attached to this phrase. The world of those ancient monsters that so beguile and beckon children and adults alike to re-imagine the world and the universe that produced such creatures. Our ancestors, we are told. We are amazed. We are terrified. We are proud. We clap when we see them recreated as if they might hear our applause and take a courtesy bow. Kids in the darkened, cavernous sports arena waved sparkling pin wheels to celebrate the monsters in their midst.

Today, talk of monsters again. But, there will be no clapping. No re-imagining. No comet kills this monster with a spectacular Big Bang and spectral light show. Death comes slowly, inch by inch, day after day, week after week, month by month, and year after year and with a clenched jaw. All one can do is bear witness and hope your own life and death takes another route.

This photo is of the same woman I have shown before in better days, The Compact, and in our final days as mother and daughter, Stayin' Alive.

If Stayin' Alive represented our final days together, this image reflects the 14 years that proceeded it.

The monster?

They called it many names. Depression. Dementia. No Doctor or consulting medical professional ever really called it by one thing. They treated the behaviors only: depression, hopelessness, abusiveness, combativeness, hallucinations, as best they could. But, it lived within and it resisted these treatments, even mocked them.

Amidst the tangled neurons of our brains, there be monsters that chew up reason and common sense and spit it out in contempt. What it also demolishes in its rampage are any traces of love they may have once had for this world or the people in it.

This was not Alzheimer's. Nor was this a gradual fade into passivity, frailty and fog that breaks hearts in other ways.

It was a failure of whatever it is that makes us human and animals, the hardwiring of love. The experts were not so expert when it came to this.

These synapses fail at the time this bond is needed the most. The terror is not in the sounds of illness, but in the silence. The silence that is filled with rage-- ruminating, fuming, posturing, readying itself rage for another battle without victory.

This monster, in the end, consumes all human bonds. When death comes, it is not proud. It is not healing. Nor, is it even a relief or peaceful. It refuses drops of water, touches of the hand. It is alone, despite a bed surrounded. It clenches a jaw tight, grinding on as if steeling itself for the journey ahead.

Here be Monsters, indeed.

How fanciful, yet foreboding, this phrase sounds. Ships "Lost at Sea"? Suggestions of the romantic in this term as well.

They be poets who say that, people, not the passengers on the doomed ship.

If it is happening to you or someone around you, take a deep breath, pick up your camera or whatever your creative "pinwheel" is and tell the truth-paint it, photograph it, write it, sculpt it, perform it.

Wave it all around, side to side, like a benediction in the darkened world that envelops you and them.

From a distance, it may look like a blessing. Up close? It's a curse and a blessing.

It's your life jacket.

©Pat Coakley 2008

PHOTOGRAPHS CANNOT BE USED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION

I know if you were like me on friday nights you were parked right in front of the t.v watching this joint........

The Famous Winged Archeopteryx Fossil

In that primordial land so long ago, many strange creatures had wings and took to the skies.  These even included some medium-sized reptiles, which fed on smaller dinos (a dragon if I ever heard of one).  The smaller ones glided between trees searching for insects to hunt.  Smaller reptiles used extensions from their ribs to form large gliding surfaces on the side of the body.

Kuehneosaurs, grew to 70 centimeters long, were first found in the 1950s in an ancient cave system near Bristol, England.  Their lateral wings were always assumed to be a form of flying adaptation, but their aerodynamic capability had never been studied before.  It turns out that, although stable, the wings were not amazingly effective. 

Kuehneosuchuses with long "wings," it turns out, was a glider (it has elongated wings), while Kuehneosauruses, with much shorter "wings," was a parachutist.  However, because the two forms are so alike in other respects, it is possible that they are males and females of the same animal.

Dinosaurs roam in Sea Bright--and they deck themselves out in Christmas lights.

(This is the best front-yard ornament EVER.)

I can only assume that it is either the result of a badly healed break (though if so, it must have been close to the tip of the original spine and it is odd that it has healed so badly and created such a large mass as a result), but I think it more likely that this is a result of an infection that spread inside the tail causing the build-up of ossified tissue. Clearly it was not too bad as it never spread down the neural spine nor reached the other vertebrae. An interesting little snippet though I hope.

They have come from Indiana, one woman says, two toddlers toddling at her feet, because they have been home-schooling their children and they have given them this adventure as a kind of field trip. The whole group then bustles into the lobby of the building, where they are greeted by the long neck of a huge, herbivorous dinosaur. The kids run past that and around a corner, where stands another, smaller dinosaur.

Which is wearing a saddle.

It is an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a dinosaur used for dressage competitions and stakes races. Any working dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would wear a sturdy western saddle.

This is very much a show dinosaur.

We are talking about the Creation Museum, of course. Oh, look, it's Adam before that bitch made him sin!

Elsewhere in the museum, another Adam figure is full-size, if unpainted, and waiting to be installed. This Adam is reclining peacefully; eventually, if the plans stay true, he will be placed in a pool under a waterfall. As the figure depicts a prelapsarian Adam, he is completely naked. He also has no penis.

This would seem to be a departure from Scripture inconsistent with the biblical literalism of the rest of the museum. If you're willing to stretch Job's description of a "behemoth" to include baby brachiosaurs on Noah's Ark, as Ham does in his lectures, then surely, since we are depicting him before the fall, Adam should be out there waving unashamedly in the paradisaical breezes. For that matter, what is Eve doing there, across the room, with her hair falling just so to cover her breasts and midsection, as though she's doing a nude scene from some 1950s Swedish art-house film?

I adore good writers.

Read it alllllllll.

Then go play at Pharyngula and learn things.

In that case both of us were right. But that is not always how it is. Sometimes only one can be right, and the other one must be wrong. So it was in the following exchange... 

My Swiss host brother at the time was really fascinated with dinosaurs. He had dinosaur t-shirts and toys and bed sheets and books... I looked through one of his books one day and couldn't believe what I was reading!

This family believed that dinosaurs and man existed TOGETHER!!!!! 

WHAT??!

Everybody knows that dinosaurs became extinct long before man walked the earth! That's what I learned in school and I accepted it as fact without question. It never even occurred to me that it conflicted with creation. I never gave that a thought. (I didn't question things too much then.)

Of course I was reading a foreign language, so I could easily have been mistaken. So I pursued the topic with my host mother (again in german) to find out more. Our conversation made me even more curious. She gave me quite a bit to consider...

It is very curious that numerous legends from all over the world(!) speak of the same fire-breathing creature. How did they all come up with so similar a beast?  

In the book Dinosaurs and Creation, Phycisist Donald B. DeYoung reminds us that heat/blaze firing phenomena is not necessarily absent from the animal kingdom. We observe similar stunts in creatures today. The electric eel is capable of producing enough electric voltage to start a spark (in the right circumstances). A chemical reaction within the Bombardier beetle creates a boiling-hot liquid/gas, which is expelled out the abdomen for defense. And every animal, just by the natural process of digestion, produces a flammable methane gas. (And my husband's band could prove it as they used to get a kick out of igniting their own farts... Boys!) 

Archaeology has uncovered numerous dinosaur skulls containing hollow chambers and crests. We can only make guesses about what purpose these cavities served for the beast, but it is possible that chemicals collected in these hollows allowing the beast to breath smoke or perhaps even spark a blaze. Who can know?

Some petroglyphs may be interpreted as dinosaur-/dragon-like beasts. Even breathing flames? Who knows. Again, we can only guess about the drawings, no one (not even scientists) can seriously know for sure what is actually depicted in these peculiar petroglyphs. But it does beg the question---WHAT kind of animal inspired these drawings? Did man actually encounter such creatures??

Obviously none of these above discoveries prove anything...but it does spark interest. (couldn't resist the pun). Is there any reason why there couldn't ever have existed a creature who breathed smoke or fire-like blazes from his nostrils? I didn't live way back in the dinosaur age. (According to some scientists, no human ever did. Are those scientists insisting they have all the facts about what existed MILLIONS of years ago, even before man ever walked the earth??) 

I do not claim to have the facts about creatures that are long extinct. I don't believe anybody can claim that. But I seriously cannot rule out the possibility of "fire-breathing" dragon-like beasts. And I am convinced that humans and dinosaurs were contemporaries. The Bible describes dinosaur-/dragon-like creatures. I know a lot of people interpret these beasts as the crocodile or the mammoth or whatever. But those interpretations are flawed, they don't really match the descriptions. I believe the Bible is a reliable and complete source. I believe these beasts really existed as they are described--even flame-breathing creatures such as the leviathan.  AND I believe man has encountered these beasts.

And now you all think I am out of my mind. That's okay. Maybe I am.

Remember, when you watch these videos that some of these creatures--according to the expert Atheist evolutionists--are supposed to have died off "millions and millions of years ago."

Enjoy.

Amazing water creatures:

Amazing flying creatures:

8/10

The first band to grasp hold of this reality is "Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground", a project formed by members of "Gatsby's American Dream". The album is truly amazing, but I'll leave it at that to avoid going off topic. The group decided to release there album as an LP with a free digital download. Now packaging LP's with digital downloads is becoming more and more popular and a wonderful idea. You get the endless versatility of an MP3 along with the exceptional quality of an LP with a beautiful showing of the album art. In an interview with the band they explained their reasoning:

"In our humble opinion, the compact disc format is dated and disposable. Digital audio sounds like balls and we prefer hearing our music in a more dynamic setting. We believe listeners will definitely enjoy the listening experience on vinyl more."

The CD is truly a compromise between vinyl and the MP3. The LP has the highest sound quality out there but it's fragile and about as portable as a microwave. The MP3 is the most compromised audio you can get. It's compressed until it's soul is gone and as you may have heard it sounds like balls, but when you can fit your entire library onto one player you can't complain about the convenience it offers. The CD gives you good sound quality but not as good as vinyl, and it's pretty portable but can still be scratched and you have to carry them in a book. If I toted around my iPod in CD format it would look like I was dragging an encyclopedia set around.

But being a compromise between the two doesn't seem that bad, right? It seems like it could be the best of both worlds. It could bridge the gap and fulfil all of our needs. It even makes neat little rainbows of light when you look at the under side of it. How could something so magical be thrown to the wayside. Unforutnately that's not what listeners want today. When you think about it, it's almost like killing a unicorn. Well in today's most listeners are willing to kill unicorns and sacrifice sound quality for convenience no matter what the alternative. The other listeners are the ones that see the inferior sound quality MP3's pose and want to counter the MP3 culture by buying vinyl, the highest sound quality out there. The records show vinyl has become more and more popular in the past few years. There are many independent labels releasing there albums on vinyl with a free MP3 download and major labels are starting to do the same for some of their artists. This truly gives you the best of both worlds without any compromise.

When you look at any media device that has a CD player in it you see that the CD drive with a nice coat of dust over it. We don't mean to neglect them after all they have done for us, but do we really want to go through all that work of putting the CD and finding a track only to take it out again.  I mean seriously, I haven't even had batterys in the remote of my CD player for over a year. It just isn't needed anymore. Most new car CD players and home theaters are coming equipped with ports to plug in MP3 players and it seems like every company under the sun is making an iPod dock whether they make audio gear or not. I hear Purina is coming out with one next month. But serisouly, in our fast paced word convenience is king and quality means nothing. Sadly this is the case for more than audio. Why spend time going to the store to buy a high priced CD. Besides the game of "find the corner you can peel the plastic seal off from" there really isn't any point in making the trip. Being able to buy songs one at a time on your computer with a single click sounds a bit easier. Another problem is the poor shape the music industry is in. Sales are down from piracy and a slow economy so the extra manufacturing costs that go along with making CD's are just too much. The last thing a dying format needs is a weak industry to support it.

The strange part is with video we are fighting to make higher and higher quality presentations with HD-DVD (R.I.P.) and Blue Ray and the public can't get enough. Now when we did the same thing with audio by putting out HD-CD and SACD we passed it off as a waste of money. If we focused on the quality of sound as much as we did video the CD would still be a powerfull force and the MP3 would have a run for it's money.

If you need any more evidence just ask youself the last time you said, "Hey man, nice Discman." Still thinking? I rest my case.

To read the whole interview with Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground click here

• Now Playing: Desaparecidos - Manana (the MP3 I got with the vinyl)
  

Fact:

Dinosaurs once roamed the planet. This is hard to refute without sounding like this guy. And no, neither God nor Satan planted dino-bones in the soil to test your faith.

Fact:

Dinosaurs are not in the Bible. Again, this is pretty straightforward. Regardless of the charming image above, they’re just not there, not implicitly, not explicitly. No Dino’s. None.

Conclusion:

Because there are no Dinosaurs in the Bible, the Bible – and everything in it – is fraudulent.

I even lost myself with that bit of logic.

Organized religions are all (most?) created in the same manner. They start with an established premise and build upon it. When Christianity was being introduced, it made sense to align with the existing theology – Judiasm – as it was more likely to foster adaptation.

Unfortunately, the stories in the Torah were never meant to hold up to critical analysis.

But let’s be fair, it is impossible to understand what it was like to live back then. Today, there isn’t anything that happens that cannot be explained within moments of it occurring. Tornado? Earthquake? Tsunami? All of these natural disasters are easily explained by various conditions within the atmosphere.

Back in the day, however, if the wind blew too hard – you can be sure someone was getting sacrificed. Explanations were needed for everything – including why (and how) we came to exist. There was so much that was unknown – and even if it had been known, it would have been misinterpreted. You had better be thankful that no fossils were discovered back then. You’d be praying to Raptor-Jesus.

Eden, Noah, Exodus – are all great stories. Not ‘true’ stories, but great, compelling – and you better believe they served a purpose. They kept people in line.

The Bible is not the inerrant word of anyone - certainly not God. It’s a morality tool, a book of rules, of social mores. It has interesting people and meaningful parables. Reading it can lead to a better understanding yourself and a better way of life.

But there are no dinosaurs.

Peace Be With You.

-JC

Fossils

The majority of fossils are found in marine
sedimentary rocks. Only rarely fossils occur in igneous and metamorphic
rocks.

Requirements of Fossilization:- There are certainly a few requirements of fossilization.

1. The organism should possess hard parts:
Possession of hard part is very importan requirement.
These hard parts might be shell, bones, teeths or the woody tissue of
plants.

2. The organic remains must escape immediate destruction after death:
If the body parts of an organism are crushed, decayed ,
badly weathered, or otherwise greatly changed, this may result in the
alteration or complete destruction of the fossil record of that
particular organism.

3. Rapid burial must take place in a material capable of retarting decomposition.

The type of
material burying the remains usually depends upon where the organism
lived. The remains of marine animals are common as fossils because they
to the ocean bottom after death, and here they are covered by soft muds
which are converted into the shales and limestones of later geologic
ages.
Ash falling from near by volcanoes has been known to
cover entire forests. Some of these fossil forests have been found with
the trees still standing and in excellent state of preservation.

Uses of fossils:-

(1) The fossils are commonly used for correlating the strata and determining their relative age.
(2) Fossils indicate wether the rock is a fresh water deposit or a marine deposit.
(3) Fossils give information about the climate of the times in which they lived.
(4) The fossils have helped in understanding the evolution of plants and animals.

But the U.S. government just went up a notch in my book for using dinosaur icons.

- suse

Strap on your fur bikini, because One Million Years BC

is the Greatest Movie EVER!

This movie contains:

GIANT IGUANA.

Child-Eating Allosaurus.

THE SAVAGE SEA TURTLE!

Oh, yeah. Raquel Welch is in there, too.

While unemployed you also get try to coax the dog you are watching into the pool in the backyard. This means I got to use all sorts of toys, trickery and dogese. I failed miserably. Luckily, looks like I won't have a job for at least the next two weeks, so we've got time. No worries.

But most importantly, being jobless lets you find amazing things like the almost-was opera Soccersongs. This was an opera that was to debut for the 2006 World Cup. It was commissioned by the German government as a collaboration between director Robert Wilson, music producer Hal Wilner, and singer-songwriter Herbert Groenemeyer. It was going to have inflatable items and robots, but more importantly, the opening scene was going to have dinosaurs and soccer. Seriously, amazing. Someone managed to combine pretty much my favorite things: dinosaurs, soccer and musicals. Oh Germany, how I love you so. I think this idea needs to be resurrected. Maybe we can get Alanis on board. Ferrrosh, can you ask her?

- suse

full disclosure: I am 1/4th German, i.e. partially biased

My son has a new fascination with dinosaurs.  He even asked me recently where they were.   I told him they were "all gone", but he wanted to know why.  Gulp.  I am not ready to discuss extinction with a three-year-old!

He resumed our conversation this morning.  Out of the blue he announced, "I want dinosaurs to come in my backyard."

"Really!?" I asked. "How many dinosaurs? Do you think they will all fit in our yard?"

"Maybe just 1.  That's not too big.  But they don't want to see me in this (pointing to pajamas),  I need to put on cyothes." 

He talked about dinosaurs most of the morning.

"I don't like green dinosaurs. Just orange and blue ones.  A triceratops.  And a pterodactly that fyies in the sky." 

"They will come at 10 o'clock on the DVD pyayer.  But it's 9 o'clock yet".  (even though it was actually 7:30)

"They will come from the field with the animals and the ones that swim the water." 

"Maybe 3 dinosaurs will come, or 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10...  Oh, that might be too many.  I will count them when they get here!"

"Colored dinosaurs are pretty, like that thing." (pointing to a painting on the wall)

"Why aren't the dinosaurs here yet?"

"Well, at 9 o'cyock the dinosaurs have to go to bed.  But at 10 o'cyock they will come to my house."

"What if the dinosaurs don't come?"

"They will!" 

"How do you know?"

"Because I said so!"

I'll see if I can find a clip of the scene and post it, so you can hear his voice,  The first and Second season are avaible in one single set at http://www.amazon.com    and you can also rent it at http://www.netflix.com

Now many parents were rightly alarmed about the violence going into the brains of their pre-pubescent and mostly pubescent children; especially when ER's across the country saw a 600% increase in spine ripping and children were screaming, "FINISH HIM!" during friendly games of Smear the Queer instead of just Smear the Queer like normal children.

So when these slowly aging baby boomers realized something may have been damaging the fragile cerebral cortexes of their younglings, they flipped out.  Soccer moms wrote letters to the game's maker Konami, games were banned from Christian neighborhoods, the LA riots started, Palestine inexplicably decided to go to war with Israel after a thousand years of peace, etc.  Violence in videogames was the new violence on television.

Many people cited rising gang violence in inner cities, higher dropout rates and the exponential decline of the American education to these horrible videogames their children were playing.  I offer two hindsight observations to parents concerned about what their children play, listen, watch, etc.   Firstly, you should have been parenting.  Secondly, now bear with me folks, you should have never ever, by any means, let them watch commercials for cereal from the mid-nineties.  This is some of the most subliminal, chaotic, morally reprehensible behavior coding I've ever seen.  Here are a few examples:

Corn Pops:  A kid is about to go to school and he's ready to get on the bus when he sees that his mother has purchased him Corn Pops.  He then fakes sick to stay home and eat Corn Pops, presumably before going to smoke a shit load of crack.  It then flashes to this adolescent's mother heading to school while he eats Corn Pops with a sly smile on his face and his inner monologue then echoes, "I gotta have my pops."  Are you kidding me?  Cereal is encouraging children to stay home from school to eat cereal, and do crack.  I'm not so sure about the crack part, but skip school for cereal?!  Priorities folks, priorities.

Apple Jacks:  The scene flashes to three ethnically diverse children playing in a tree fort and devouring bowls of Apple Jacks.  The father comes out, asks them what they're eating.  The children respond with "Apple Jacks!".  The father tries them and says, "But they don't taste like apple."  The kids then respond with an enthusiastic, "We eat what we like!"  This is the equivalent of saying, "Dad, you're a fucking retard."   What we don't see is the dad beating all the children with his belt some seconds later. 

There are indeed a few things we can surmise from this commercial.  Firstly, that it does not take place in New Hampshire or Maine.  This cereal is encouraging a rational disconnect between nomenclature and preference.  It is not entirely necessary for something's name to automatically describe its characteristics, such as Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but it would be nice for some explanation from the children.  One child may have exclaimed, "Why yes father, there is a noticeable omission of apple flavoring, however despite this, we do, in fact eat what we enjoy eating, as it were, ergo, concurrently, henceforth, esquire."  Apple Jacks encourages irreverence, paternal alienation and a flawed rationality for personal proclivity.  Shame on you Apple Jacks.

The next group of cereals are by far more damaging.

Trix:  I saw this rabbit struggle to eat cereal for ten years.  We can assume he's had it before and fuckin loves it because why else would he be constantly trying to get it in spite of the roving gang of malevolent children who have taken the high order that Trix are only for kids.  Hey rabbit. Fuck you. 

So not only does Trix encourage kids to deprive others of the luxuries of life, but it encourages them to do so through stealing.  I wonder if any of the young executives of Haliburton, Blackwater or Enron were big fans of Trix cereal.  You know that Dennis Kozlowski has a pool filled with it surrounded by cages of white rabbits just so can he laugh in their faces.  If ever there was a mid-nineties cereal advertisement that is an allegory for Western capitalism, this must be it.  Or is it...

Lucky Charms - In addition to being a terrible stereotype against our Irish friends, it encourages the same kind of selfish antics that Trix does.  The commercials, which have Lucky the Leprechaun running like a landshark is chasing him, always end with the kids taking the Lucky Charms cereal from Lucky.  There is one question that warrants answering:  Why is Lucky holding back his cereal?  Maybe he knows it's too sugary and he wants to save their parents the dental bills to fill a cavity.  Maybe Lucky is a spokesperson for the Dental Association of America when he's not conjuring marshmallows out of thin air.  Maybe those kids should wait to have Lucky Charms for dessert because it's got about as much sugar as a bowl of ice cream.  There couldn't possibly be more, but wait...

Fruity/Coco Pebbles - The fault of the "Pebbles" franchase, besides teaching children across America how to spell incorrectly, is that it also encourages stealing.  True fact, the final word in every spelling bee is always "cocoa" and every single child born between the years of 1986 to 1990 got it wrong on the first try.  Do you see what you're doing to the educational system Barney?! 

Fred Flinstone, a supposed blue collar construction worker who is married to Wilma Flinstone (a total fox), is trying to enjoy his Fruity/Coco Pebbles, but Barney is always stealing them from him.  The commercials end with Fred chasing Barney.  Aren't Fred and Barney neighbors?  I feel like a really important person once taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves and to not covet our neighbor's things, unless it is his totally smokin' hot wife Wilma.  It probably wasn't Hitler.  Fruity and Coco Pebbles teach us to covet our neighbor's belongings as well as to steal.

To end this tirade.  It is painfully obvious that violent videogames are not the problem.  Yes GTA, you're off the hook.  I know when I have kids I'm going to watch more for what they see in advertisements than what games they play.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go rip my neighbor's spine out.

I, today, am going to put the hurt on "science." "Science" may have thought it had the world by the tail, with its constantly changing what is or is not a planet and then distracting us with Lisa Loeb, but "science" did not count on the fact that it would continue to run into me, and I have an incredible amount of time on my hands, plus I'm cheap. Those two things, added together, make me more than a match for "science." Those two things, added together, also give me the time and inclination to buy and plant three different trees in my yard in one day, something I could do since the trees cost only $3.50 each, a bargain price even if you consider that I found those trees lying in a pile at the back of the Wal-Mart garden center (the pile of trees in back of Wal-Mart is where most of your high-end landscapers like to shop) and promptly bought them to upgrade our back yard.

Garden centers are terribly depressing on July 13, and I don't know why. Summer, according to me, and I am far more right than "science," goes from June 1 to August 31, so by my calendar, July 13 is only 43 days into the 92 days of summer... summer is less than half over, but go to a store's garden center and they've stopped watering the plants and the trees are all tumbled over and half the space is being used to promote dorm-room-sized futons. Plus, just outside the garden center at this store is the "pet department," where for some reason they had a giant display of little glasses of water each of which, on inspection, contained a very immobile African frog which, the label warned, would get bigger, would like salty water, and would escape from loosely-sealed aquariums. Based on that last warning, I heartily approve of the Wal-Mart African Frog as a pet.

Any decent childhood pet has to have three basic components: One, it has to be alive and not gross. That rules out snakes, which are neither. Two, it has to be able to escape pretty easily, which means that the pet will help bring the family together when the kids come running in and yell "Mom! Dad! Nippy escaped!," which was something we heard every night for about a year when I was a kid and my brother Matt, who back then hadn't yet started lying about thunderstorms, volunteered us to take care of the gerbils from his classroom. There were a male and female gerbil, and the male was named "Nippy," in the grand tradition of naming pets after what they do to you if you pick them up. Matt, not paying attention to Nippy's name would try to pick Nippy up at a bedtime, would get nipped, and would drop Nippy and then we'd all have to try to catch him and put him away.

The third rule of childhood pets is that they are supposed to die pretty soon after you purchase them. That lets you, as a parent, teach a child about the "Circle of Life," which can best be explained as: "Mom is pretty sick of having to be the only one to clean this cage."

The "Circle of Life" is also a good example of "scientific," i.e., wrong and based on pop culture, thinking. The "Circle of Life" as a concept manages to demonstrate, in a nutshell, both where Disney lost it and science went wrong. The "Circle of Life" is a concept that scientists embrace as a nice, clean expression of how the world works; they ("scientists") boil the complex biology and interrelatedness of the world down, taking millions of years of evolution and biological systems so complicated that they make computers look like... well, like something that's not very complicated by comparision, and they reduce that to: birds eat bugs, lions eat birds, Elton John keeps remaking that song about candles. Then they go home for the day and snicker, but never stop to consider how damaging it is to the world, and people, to have so-called 'scientific concepts' based on works of pop culture.

Luckily, the world had me, and I had time on my hands plus a dollar, and was therefore able to be in position to strike a blow on behalf of all of us.

Here's what happened. I was at the library, and was thumbing through the books they have for sale. I was alone today; ordinarily I bring the boys to the library, but I have to be careful because of their escape attempts; the last time we had them both in there, Mr F distracted us while Mr Bunches went running off down the aisles, and we had to become parental version of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive: "Spread out! Cover every book and beanbag chair and rotating rack of comics for a 3-aisle radius!" I didn't have them there this day, though, which gave me the time to browse in peace through the racks of books for sale for a dollar to see what books I can get the boys or myself.

I don't buy books for the rest of the family. I can't buy books for Oldest, because Oldest doesn't have time to read. She doesn't have time to do anything, because of the 40-hour-work week. Oldest considers working 40 hours a week to be a violation of several Constitutional amendments, or she would consider it to be that if she had ever paid attention when I and her school told her about the Constitution and its amendments. As it is, Oldest is pretty sure the 40-hour work week violates something, so she makes sure never to commit one.

The Boy only reads Sports Illustrated, articles about the upcoming Batman movie, and that little ticker on the bottom of ESPN with all the scores.

Middle reads, but reading makes her crabby. She's reading 1984, and that's a tough book. She asks me to help figure it out, but I read it 25 years ago and didn't like it, so my answers tend to be "why don't you look it up on a guide on the Internet," which is more and more my answer to people today. Back when I was a kid, parents had to make up answers and hope schools sorted it out later. Now, we send kids to the Internet to get the wrong information and hope schools sort that out. We've become much more efficient, parentally speaking.

Suggesting that Middle look things up makes her crabby, for some reason, and results in her storming off to watch Gray's Anatomy. That's lose-lose from everyone's perspective, so I avoid the topic of books with her.

Sweetie reads voraciously, and I'm using that word in its correct sense: Sweetie reads like locusts eat. Sweetie will get a book and read it in about an hour. She did that once, on a weekend getaway we took to Green Bay -- a misguided weekend getaway, since Green Bay exists solely to be a home for the Packers and this wasn't football season, to the entire city seemed closed. Sweetie bought a book by her favorite author, and then read it all in one day. It took me longer, I think, to eat the roast beef sandwiches we'd bought for dinner than for her to read that book. (And, yes, by our standards, roast beef sandwiches and a book count as a romantic getaway.)

So it's just me, and Mr F and Mr Bunches, that I'll buy books for. It's important to keep getting the Babies! books because they are very hard on books. They like to turn the pages when we read to them. And they like to turn the pages when we're not reading to them. But they turn the pages violently, as if the pages had taken some action that was a personal affront to them. When reading to them, that makes it difficult because they appear angry at the book, turning the page quickly and hitting it sometimes, too. They do that even before I'm done reading the page, so sometimes books go very quickly:

Max was king of all the wild things. He roared. He sailed. His dinner. The end.

Or they go back sometimes, angrily flipping to a previous page, so we read:

Baby Elmo drinks from a cup. Baby Elmo waves good-bye. Baby Elmo drinks from a cup. It's like Baby Elmo wasn't quite done, or has OCD.

They also tear the pages out of books and then fight over who gets to run around the couch waving them, the result being that we have a couple of books that no longer exist except as a hollow shell, a cover with no pages. I'm of mixed emotions about all of this. As someone who loves reading, I want them to like books and enjoy reading, too, so I try to encourage their interest in books. But, as someone who loves reading, I want my books to have pages in them. I'm walking a fine line, here.

As I was trying to select books to restock their shelves with, I stumbled on a book called, simply Dinosaurs:

I took it out and checked to see if had the most important feature: did it cost only a dollar? It did, so I flipped it open to see what kind of dinosaur book it was. After all, I like dinosaurs, and the babies do, too. All kids naturally like dinosaurs, because they are big animals that look cool and could eat Daddy if he keeps making them go to bed.

Dinosaurs, the book I had just found at the library, I concluded was lacking as a kid's book. It had a lot of drawings and photos of dinosaurs and their skeletons, and a lot of printing, but I rejected it as too advanced for the boys and not having certain necessary, highly-educational features like colorful anthropomorphic animals of the sort found in such other technical treatises like How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?, the main dinosaur tome in our house. Books for kids need color and pictures and the like; the boys really prefer to run around the house after each other waving very colorful bits of the former books.

I moved on to the next rack of books. Then it struck me... Dinosaurs was an older dinosaur book. I moved slowly back to the rack, hands trembling, and pulled it off the shelf again.

Longtime readers will remember my groundbreaking, earth-shattering scientific treatise entitled Velociraptors, My Butt. The theory... well, it wasn't a theory, as it turns out, but the at the time it was only a theory, and the theory at the time behind Velociraptors, My Butt was this:

Scientists are big stupid liars who simply make stuff up because it sounds good, including "velociraptors," which, I posited, were entirely-fake animals that had been made up by author Michael Crichton for his Jurassic Park, and which were then so popular that scientists simply decided to say "okay, velociraptors existed," and they slapped together some skeletons and claimed they always existed.

I based that theory on one incontrovertible fact: when I was a kid, I loved dinosaurs, and I'd never heard of "velociraptors." To me, it was inconceivable that they could have existed without me, a 12-year-old reading about dinosaurs, not hearing of them. Ergo, they did not exist when i was a kid. But new dinosaur books, dinosaur books printed after Jurassic Park, always had velociraptors in them. What I needed, I decided, was an old dinosaur book, one made before Jurassic Park.

So I held my breath as I turned to the publication and copyright page of Dinosaurs, and saw that it was published in 1983. Jurassic Park, the book, came out in 1990. This was my chance...

I turned to the index and scanned it... and saw: no velociraptors!

Ha!

Ha!

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!Ha! Ha!Ha! Ha!Ha! Ha!Ha! Ha!Ha! Ha!Ha! Ha!

Take THAT, science!

I of course bought the book, trying hard to contain my jubilation, and made my way out to the car. All the way home, I kept looking over at the book and patting it and smiling. If it panned out, I figured, this would become instantly the third-best day in my life. Number one is my wedding day; number two (tied) is each day one of the kids were born. But this would be number three, for sure, replacing even the day I ate at Sonic.

I found that book at the library was two weeks ago, and the only reason I didn't write this up earlier is because I, unlike "science," do some actual research, which in this case was to read the book, which, I am extra-extra pleased to note, contains not a single word about velociraptors.

I win.

I am no dummy, though. I know my report here will be controversial. I can't go around taking on "Big Science" without expecting vicious personal attacks on my credibility, things like Hey, reading one book doesn't constitute 'research' or "You're not fooling anyone wearing those baggy shorts, we know you've put on weight." I have been down this road before, after all. So Iwent back to the basics, and I re-reviewed the other scientific treatise I had on dinosaurs.

No, not How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? I am not considering that a "scientific treatise," since that book, while more reliable than Wikipedia, suffers from some deficiencies, most notably this: it never answers the titular question.

If you read How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? you'll see I'm right: you'll end up wondering, well, how do they? The book is simply a series of questions, as it turns out-- it asks, over and over, whether they do this or that or the other thing to say goodnight, but it does not give you an answer, or even a theory, one way or the other about how dinosaurs actually say goodnight.

No, I was going to need something with far more intellectual rigor. I had Dinosaurs, but I needed something equally impressive in the world of academia, and luckily, I had it: one of the best-researched, best-written, most impressive dinosaur texts on the market:

"A Number of Dinosaurs." This book explains the hard-to-understand world of dinosaurs and the complex fossil record through the highly-scientific method of counting pop-up dinosaurs from 1 to 10. On each page are representatives of the dinosaur world -- one on the first, two on the second, and so on up to 10, at which point the book ends, having cataloged and popped-up every dinosaur known to have ever existed.

I went back and read and re-read "A Number of Dinosaurs" over and over, searching for something, anything that would disprove my controversial Velociraptors, My Butt theory, and I can assure you, A Number of Dinosaurs, like Dinosaurs, makes no reference to the famed "velociraptors."

So let's review what we know:

A. Scientists claim that velociraptors were discovered in 1924, or 1971, or sometime. They can't make up their minds about when they were discovered, but scientists maintain that "velociraptors" were, in fact, discovered (and not by Michael Crichton.)

B. Nobody ever, before 1990, heard of a "velociraptor," as has now been conclusively proven by my memory and the hard work of author John Man and his book Dinosaurs.

C. "Velociraptors" are fake,

D. "Science" is bunk, and

E. I rule.

Team Dad:

Team Dad
by

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Located in the Midland Provincial Park at Drumheller, Alberta Canada is Canada's only exclusive paleontology research center. For anyone interested in dinosaurs, this is THE place to go! Fossils, full exhibits, and all sorts of programs and interactive activities keep visitors of all ages enthralled in this amazing museum.

The roads you travel to the museum are the start of your adventure. Amazing scenes, hoodoos, and kinds of interesting sights fill the prairie landscape. In fact, it is impossible to see everything in only one trip!

Once at the Royal Tyrell Museum, massive dinosaurs and a friendly staff are the first thing you will notice as you journey back into prehistoric times. Fun and informative interactive displays help to understand how the earth worked in its earliest days. The Cretaceous exhibits show you all sorts of dinosaurs and explain how these intriguing beasts lived more than 70 million years ago. (They look extremely real so the youngest visitors may get a bit scared.) Also, another exhibit shows you what the vegetation may have looked like during the days of the dinosaurs.

Other exhibits in the Tyrell Museum include a magnified look at life in the ancient oceans and aquatic life, the evolution of mammals, and the story of how humans come to inhabit North America. While you are here, you can also see paleontologists at work! If you would like a taste of what you will see at the museum, you can have a virtual tour of museum at http://www.seevirtual360.com/themes/2/theme02.aspx?listingID=8716#

When you leave the Royal Tyrell Museum, be sure to tour Midland Provincial Park. The park is rich in prairie life and mining history. There is 'The Midland Coal Mining Company Office' and several hiking trails that showcase the best the region has to offer. Some of these trails even lead to real mines and displays to help you learn and experience the area. The many trails allow you to customize your tour of the area. There are so many here you could spend days seeing all there is to see here.

For other things to do in the area like the Rosedale Suspension Bridge and historic buildings in the area, see the Virtual Drumheller Website or the Drumheller Valley Interpretive Center in Drumheller, Alberta.

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