By CHRIS PACKHAM
Gotta keep the devil way down in the
hole: If you're like me, you spend a lot of time sitting in
your darkened kitchen drinking Taster's Choice and listening to the
police scanner, and you smell so strongly of Aqua Velva that you can
see wavy blue-colored odor-lines wafting from your torso. And, thanks
to the police scanner, you know that life in parts of Kansas City is
terrifying and dangerous. Unfortunately for people who like numbers,
such as Nate Silver and Jimmy the Greek, that danger is also
mathematically unquantifiable, according to Yael T. Abouhalkah and the
Kansas City Police Department. In 2007, Kansas City was 18th on the
list of the nation's most dangerous cities. NOT BAD! This year, the
Police Department was so bad about record keeping that they couldn't
give accurate numbers to the FBI. Therefore, Kansas City didn't make
this year's list. Furthermore, while there are no numbers to back up my
contention that we live in the MOST DANGEROUS CITY IN THE WORLD, there
are no numbers for the police department to use to dispute that contention.
After the jump, where science has gone wrong. HINT: It's not the
standard model of particle physics! Click here or on my creamy vanilla filling:
Science
Whatever: If scientists want to bitch about public ignorance
-- and they do! -- they're going to have to divest some or all of their
annoying scientific whimsy and start acting more like the grim-faced
Germans who invented rocketry and bombed the shit out of Western
Europe, forcing the United States to send your grandfather over with a
rifle and some kinetic fireball incendiaries strapped to his back to
bomb their Nazi asses straight to the Germanic equivalent of hell. That
was when people took science seriously. In 1997,
some insufferable NASA scientists dressed in matching rugby shirts
landed a robotic probe on Mars and immediately began applying the most
unacceptably whimsical names to rocks that they could think of:
Barnacle Bill, Scooby Doo, Yogi, the list goes on until your body
develops a toxic insulin resistance and you lapse into a diabetic coma.
It was so horrible. That was about when my support for the space
program died and I repented to God for my prideful ways and turned my
life over to Christ, but what else is there to do in prison after
you've maxed out your body's potential for muscular hypertrophy at the
weight station? Watch the NASA channel? That's what got us into this
trouble in the first place.
The pygmy tarsier is a primate so
tiny that it sleeps in a matchbox and washes its tiny face in a sink
made out of a walnut shell. Like a lost city or an Ark of the
Covenant, the last time one was spotted by anybody who wasn't drunk or hopped up on jungle
jenkem, which is like urban jenkem only made out of leopard poop, was
in the 1930s. Now the mythical tiny men have been recovered via the
scientific method of deploying hundreds of nets around Indonesia, and
the science writers who aren't busy saying they look like li'l Furbies
are instead saying they look like gremlins. Thanks to scientific
whimsy, the half-wits who are convinced that the Large Hadron Collider
will bring about the end of the world after it's repaired next summer
are now probably going to be writing letters to the editor unencumbered
by subject-verb agreement or punctuation, vehemently begging scientists
not to feed pygmy tarsiers after midnight. Previously, on Science: Special Victims Unit: Hobbits. It's your
own fault for drawing pop-culture analogies, science; why do you think
so many people are worried about the psychotic leprechaun haunting the
International Space Station?
Showing 1-1 of 1
shaw! We already knew of the existence of Furby�s, Packham old man.
How else to explain the unannounced addition of fashionista blogs
to your blogroll?
The only viable explanation is that you were feeding the mogwai after midnight
and, as a cruel joke on those innocent Kansas Citians looking for a way to go fug themselves, letting the gremlins add new, theme-related blog entries.
Cruel, yes. Up to your normal standards? Hardly�
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