Wheat-dogg’s world
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From the BBC: Universal Studios plans a Potter theme park in Orlando.

It’s bound to happen, y’know. Christians have picketed and boycotted DisneyWorld for letting gays and lesbians visit the park. They’ll probably protest the satanic influences of Harry Potter, too. Mark my words.

The comsummate anti-creationist, PZ Myers, has compiled 75 blogosphere reactions to the opening this weekend of the Creation Museum near Convington. More are on the way. Check it out.

Martha Heil of the American Institute of Physics also has an early reaction to her CM visit.

Popular cartoons and movies may say humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, but the idea is just plain wrong. The dinos were dead long before our hominid ancestors evolved. The fossil record leaves little room for argument.

The Bible says nothing about dinosaurs. To reconcile Scripture with the fossil evidence, creationists have to perform some fantastic mental and logical gymnastics to explain how Genesis somehow omits mention of such obviously big creatures.

On Memorial Day, believers in these convoluted arguments will celebrate the opening of the Creation Museum in Boone County, near Covington, Ky. The Museum, a project of Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis, was built with $27 million in donations, so there are either a lot of very gullible donors or just a few very rich, gullible donors.

Excuse me, I mean faithful donors.

To counteract this monument to misguided generosity, a group calling itself Rally for Reason will hold a peaceful protest outside the museum’s gate beginning at 9 am that Monday. Although an atheist organization has spearheaded the rally, churchgoers will be there, too. If any of you out there will be in the area that day, I hope you will join in the protest.

It’s a free country and creationists can believe whatever they like, even if it’s just plain wrong. The danger in this museum is that it gives the uninitiated the impression that creationism is somehow “science.” Creationism is religious thought, and the museum is really just a church in disguise. [If you doubt the Sunday-school nature of the Museum, check out this walk-through
from the AiG site. I’m seeing more religion there than science.]

How deep can hate and hypocrisy get?

One of the country’s most conservative religious leaders, Jerry Falwell, died recently at age 73, apparently of natural causes right in his office at Liberty University. Founder of the religious-political group, Moral Majority, Falwell was known for his condemnation of homosexuality, abortion and pornography as three of the greatest sins threatening the “American family” and the USA.

Now, Friend Falwell and I would probably never agree on a lot of things. His particular kind of theocratic influence on politics to me is an even greater threat to the fabric of our democracy than the three biggest “sins” I mention here. Nevertheless, I would not speak ill of the man. It’s not seemly, and from what I have heard, he was apparently a warm, caring individual, despite his public persona.

It’s no surprise that some other liberals say they are just pleased as they could be that Falwell has gone to meet his Maker. What stupifies me is that someone on the other end of the spectrum — a self-professed Christian — would celebrate Falwell’s death.

Falwell, it seems, is in Hell now because he wasn’t Christian enough! Or at least that is what Fred Phelps, rightwing religious whackjob, claims.

Phelps is hauptführer of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, KS. These are the people that claim God hates America, Sweden, and mostly everyone but Phelps and WBC, because they tolerate the very mortal existence of gays and lesbians. These are the heartless SOBs that protest at the funerals of gays, lesbians and US servicemen and women.

These three clean-cut college graduates helped feed the folk-music renaissance of the 1950s and early ’60s, which itself spawned another generation of (more topical) folk-song writers. This album was one of my father’s favorites, so I heard it a lot as a kid.

In 1957, fresh out of college, Nick Reynolds, Dave Guard and Bob Shane took old folk songs, dusted them off, added some humor to the delivery, and quickly acquired a fan base among college students in the Bay Area of California. They were discovered in a club, signed to Capitol Records and within a year, had a gold hit, “Tom Dooley,” in 1958.

The Trio rode the wave of folk-song mania through the mid-’60s, when the British invasion led by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones pushed most folk artists off the charts.

This album, their fifth chronologically, was released in 1959 and features a mixture of oldtime folk songs and sea chanties and newly minted songs by composers writing in the folk song idiom. Instrumentation included guitar, ukelele, banjo, bongos, and overdubbing! Producers back then, as now, had a performer sing a duet with him or herself, to create a fuller sound. The trick gives the Trio a larger presence, though they probably had decent voices without the electronic massaging.

[Nowadays overdubbing is used to conceal the fact that many popular singers have pretty crappy voices — maybe tuneful but lacking volume — which explains why some artists sound fine in recordings but awful in live concerts (except of course for those who lipsync their own music). Anybody here thinking of Ashlee Simpson right about now?]

As a former newspaperman, I have been following the news of Newscorp’s bid to buy the venerable Wall Street Journal with interest and trepidation. By all accounts, Newscorp wants to use the WSJ as a gateway to the Far East, where Newscorp is weakest.
Newscorp, headed by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is not exactly renowned as the purveyor of high quality journalism. Murdoch’s papers, which include the tabloids The New York Post and The Sun of London, among many others, pander to the lowest common denominator of readers. [The Sun’s page 3 features topless models, for example. It’s popular enough to have its own web address.] While he does own the more reputable The Times of London, as well as other less flashy papers, Murdoch is about selling papers to make money, not necessarily furthering the public good.

Meanwhile, the Journal, which has remained a steadfast (and staid) pillar of journalistic integrity and quality, has built its own (albeit smaller) media empire by being quick to recognize the power of electronic storage and retrieval. While other major newspapers were still delivering newspapers by truck to points outside their hometowns, WSJ’s parent company, Dow Jones, was sending the paper electronically to printing plants scattered across the country (and overseas) for quick delivery to its subscribers.

It wasn’t the Internet, but it was better than waiting on a truck delivery.