While I don’t hold with Creationists (or even proponents “Intelligent Design” as the term is currently employed) my world-view is generally in line with that of mainstream Roman Catholicism, a paradigm which is still lacking enough in empirical rigor to draw a fair amount of fire from skeptics. As time goes by I’ve found more and more that prolonged confrontation over these beliefs, even when tenable, frequently causes me enough anxiety to have minor biological repercussions.

An odd byproduct of this is that I occasionally feel sort of a sympathetic anxiousness when other folks views are attacked, sometimes even if I disagree with them or hold an opposing viewpoint. As a result I don’t argue as much in general as I did in earlier years, and (as you’d probably imagine) find some of the popular topics on blogs I frequent cause my stomach to churn a little extra. Curse of Greyface at work in me no doubt.

But in spite of these occasional misgivings about rocking boats when I recently came across the New York Dolls “Dance Like a Monkey” video it somehow amused me greatly:

Click here to watch “Dance Like a Monkey”.

I really gotta hand it to them: between the actual song lyrics and the video animation this thing has got more creationist, evolutionist, religious, skeptic, political, and scientific in-jokes than I’ve ever seen crammed into a 3 minute and 25 second package previously.

The FSM gets some action (always a crowd pleaser with skeptics). But I think my favorite parts were the obvious Dubya/monkey visual humor, and a passing reference to the Scopes Monkey Trial.

I’m actually surprised it hasn’t shown up on Boing Boing yet as it is totally their bag, and will be even more surprised if someone else doesn’t point it out to them before this gets posted.

Just wanted to say that Mike and I have been watching Uncle Nagy’s House. It’s pretty entertaining. It’s cool to see that there are other people out there doing video just for the heck of it. I think we’ll probably go to the Episode 6 screening.

Warning: if you are offended by rape jokes, don’t bother watching the show.

So after Tim threw up Night Caller, we got on the phone and started talking about the “archives”. Soon after, the dig began.

The thing is Night Caller isn’t all that old. Like what, maybe a year and half? I dunno. Somewhere, the debauchery of Night Caller is still fresh in my mind. The “10 years” of absolute nonsense before that is all but a forgotten prehistory. Going back another 5 beyond that, to the unlistenable 4-track years, it is like trying to decipher cave writing. If we are the late night of the web now, 15 years ago our only fan was truly our mother. Wonder why. Luckily though, all wasn’t for nought. We actually managed to make some gems during that time.

Over the next couple weeks, months, maybe years, I’m going to be posting up some of those choice gems. Tim probably will too. This will hopefully placate our readership, encourage them to come back, attract a couple new folks and maybe even writers for the forum – that is until we get around to posting the things that we are actually doing now. You can expect one of these later this week or early next. So be sure to be constantly (and I mean constantly) refreshing your browser.

For now though, I give you the first installment from the vaults:The Lesternomicon. The Lesternomicon was originally an offshoot of Chook. While not directly related to what Chook would become, or even show up on the Chook site, in a lot of ways it gets at what the spirit of Chook was. Chook, even in its early days when Dragon and I were cooking up Chung Hort stories, was originally intended to be a mythos and a universe of characters. While arguably this was never fully realized and at best half-baked, it was always working in the background. For most of us involved with the sprawling and disjointed project, the word mythos pointed dead ahead to Lovecraft. That was the genesis of The Lesternomicon. It would become part Shub, part Chook, part Lester, part Larry, massively unintelligible and also unfinished. Originally, it was to be a book unto itself, a sort of religious text, much like Lovecraft’s Necronomicon. While I don’t foresee it being finished any time soon, perhaps it one day will be. Till then, enjoy what there is of it.

Props to Chris who probably wrote more of it than I did. I’m not sure who did the PDF though. It might have been Tim (nice spider).

Click here to Download The Lesternomicon in PDF format.

The premier of the second season of the new Doctor Who ran on Sci Fi Channel last night and it was really good. Though I know a lot of people liked Christopher Eccleston’s more hard-boiled take on the good Doctor, I thought David Tennant’s Doctor was more in the spirt of the show’s more eccentric qualities. While the series willingness to inject a little more action into the stories does change it from the feel of the old considerably, it also finally brings the series into the 21st century. Here is looking to more episodes!

DJWebb alerted me to the rather baffling fact that over 1,800 people have viewed Spontaneous Combustion on Google Video. Sure maybe all 1,800 people stopped after minute one, but really who is counting? When you type in the words “spontaneous combustion” into the Google Video search engine, the movie is ranked number 1, above South Park‘s take on the phenomenon. It even gets a respectable 3 out of 5 stars. That converts to something like 6 stars on IMDB, or maybe one of those ubiquitous 7.1’s on Pitchforkmedia.

On why a big rip is gradually forming on my side of the bed:

Dragon: I know, maybe the mattresses they installed in this building were manufactured with the assumption that every year a different person will sleep on them and the wear and tear will even out over the whole surface. But since I’ve slept on it in the same direction four years in a row without an egg-crate* it’s getting too much stress in these particular spots.

She Dragon: Or maybe it’s because every year it collects the hopes and dreams of the varied dreamers who sleep upon it. But your dreams are so vapid and shallow that you’re robbing it of it’s essential mana and it’s become weak.

*– Egg-crate: A piece of corrugated foam rubber used to suppliment the cushioning of firmer sleeping surfaces.