It's a fact; I've tested it.  People are afraid of PENCILS...(!)  Who knew. (Or, they're afraid of Magic Tricks.  But still.  Usually just the pencil is enough.  So.)

Anyway this was a discovery, and I had to share.  So I scouted up ahead, through the Silent Hill hottie (but lesbian) nurses, and into the Gothic cathedral with the hottie vamp chick (straight but attached), where I can see "ahead" out into the secondary graveyard a good three minutes' worth... no pigeons.  Good.  I had time.  So I backtracked and went through Arkham into the Egyptian Tomb area.

There are two tall skinny guys there at the entrance decked out in Basic SWFX zombie suits modified as mummy soldiers... first-year n00bz I think... so, they had to know.  And sure enough they were sitting, not standing statuesquely on guard duty as they're supposed to be.  They were counting on a motion detector that bangs a crate lid to warn them, but I was
moving too fast.

They see me and stand up, looking guilty.  Or at least, as guilty as a guy in  full mask CAN look.  Still, there's a certain body language.  So I've gotta play them.

(OK it's like this, and I don't make much of it, but I have a certain reputation round the place, and a certain respect.  That's fair; I've turned in some pretty good work in the last few years, and this year's Joker kit-- and act-- is already semi-legendary.  Like the n00bz are scared to talk to me in case I'm a stuck-up jerk.  But that's not how I roll.  It's an annual ad hoc brotherhood, a 'tribe' of sorts I guess.  Anyone brave enough to approach gets friendly conversation.  And I'm probably now on over a dozen FaceBook/MySpace pages in a pic standing next to the page owner.)

THAT said, I have two guilty-looking little puppies hoping I don't see the wet spot, so I snap out of the Joker and into Ash, 'boomstick' delivery:

"Awright, two things, guys." (almost went the 'primitive screwheads' route)
"First, <holding one up> people are afraid of pencils.  Ya got that?  Okay then. I don't know why, but it's true.  Remember it."
<turning, re-turning>
"Oh and second.  Zombies don't have male accessories.  Think about it.  Look at yourselves.  Soft tissue is the first to go."

I walked off, reflecting that playing to a crowd wearing full rubber masks is a really tough gig.  I mean they could be blowing Dr. Pepper out their noses and who could tell.

So a few groups later it's quiet again... I scout forward, nothing, so I go back to the Tomb.

They're sitting again.  Maybe I wasn't scary enough.

So I walk up, pull out a pencil, and say, "Okay.  Remember what I said? That's right.  People with accessories the size of pencils-- are scared of zombies."

Walk off, yup, rubber masks, tough crowd...

I went back one more time that night.  I just held up the pencil-- and nodded to both of them.  They sort of nodded back.  I think.  Hard to be sure.

Damn masks.

The Editor of one of the largest scientific journals around launched a completely typical attack on Global Warming "deniers", of the sort you can see in any mainstream media any day of the week, right along with the now de rigeur Sarah Palin hate.

Just one problem-- his audience is scientists.  REAL ones.

One of the key elements to sound science is "scepticism"...the Scientific Method in a nutshell:  You see something cool, like how when water freezes into ice it floats on water.  Everything else in the world gets denser when it goes from liquid to solid, but not water(!)

So you think, Why--??-- and you play with it a bit, and tell yourself a story (called a hypothesis, "under/less than a thesis", that's important) about why it might be the way it is.

Then, you try your hardest to bust your own story, and you invite others to try to as well.  If it gets busted, fine; you turf that hypothesis and make up another one based on what you've learned.  Try to bust the new one.  If a story finally can't be busted you call it a Theory-- and keep on testing it too.

"Science"-- real science-- is 99% a system of disbelief.  The 1% that makes it through all that rigour is trustable.  Not so much "believable" or an item of faith at all, just trustable, like a sturdy tool; something you can work with to find out more.  And if a theory gets busted, like Einstein (partially) did to Newton, then no one gets mad, they get happy(!) and set to testing the brand new stuff.  To them it's like a box of new toys.

So, you tell a bunch of scientists that "the debate is over" on AGW implying "we know everything now"-- and they're going to beat you up.  Scientists don't think that way, don't live that way, and they have no tolerance at all for it.  They aren't going for ratings or votes.  They aren't trying to sell anybody stuff or get elected.  They're trying to FIND OUT.

(Note:  All that ^^^ assumes "a perfect world"... there are egos, there are competitions for funds... but it's a lot more sincere than politics.)

So this Editor got beaucoup negative reactions for his completely fashionable and unscientific attitude, and if you read the comments, even the ones who agree with him that CO2 is a threat to be coped with just didn't appreciate his huckster attitude in a scientific journal.

Yes, a lot of them don't think AGW is a big deal.  That's good.  But it's a lot better that scientists are finally in an uproar about the presentation of this AGW barely-even-hypothesis that's nowhere NEAR tested enough to warrant largescale economic wreckage.  Especially in view of all the testing it's been failing lately... but never mind that for now.

[Oh, here's your "two sentences"; skip all that and read:] The important thing here by far is that scientists are reclaiming Science and refusing to be spoken for by political hack pitchmen.  They're insisting upon
recovering their Method and advertising their contempt for insults passed
off as Science.

As it should be.  Finally.  Makes me happy.  Hope it's a trend.

—Ron Copis

"British Columbia"... ok what the heck!

Now, it seems to be a N.Am thing, naming probs... I mean the US has 50 of them as opposed to Canada's 10 (13 in summer) and they just flat ran out of ideas, which explains two Carolinas, two Dakotas, two Virginias... and this started early on; a couple of the original colonies were named "New Somewhere-Back-Home" as if they were stuck for originality right from jump.

Could be worse; could be Mexico, who got so stuck for State names they had to call one after the most useless and meanest little canine there is.  I mean take something that used to look like a proud and noble wolf, shrink it down so's your average wharf rat could kick its ass, and what do you expect??  Not the dog's fault... but if they were trying to appease the malignant little runts it sure as hell didn't work.  Not on one of them, ever.

But the subject was Canada... so point out to me where "French Columbia" is, that they had to differentiate it.  There isn't one.  Nor a Russian Columbia (they could have named Nunavut that I guess, and it'd make more sense) or Croatian Columbia or Malayan Columbia or even Elbonian Columbia, which makes the most sense of all.

"British Columbia"... what were they afraid of, that all the frogs in QC were going to pour in droves across the whole place just to get to the ocean?  Unlikely.  There's a much closer one.  Even they know that.  But seriously, was it named "British Columbia" primarily as a French repellent?  If so I can think of better... like, soap.

"British Columbia"... newsflash, Pommies, it's about as far away from the UK as you can get and still be in Canada.  I mean cripes.  Way on the other side...

...on the subject, why even "Columbia"...?  As I recall that daft Italian landed like 5, 6, 7000 miles away as the crow flies and even longer if it floats, which as I also recall is what he did.  Of course, what else he did was to land on a little speck of an island, yell, Oh wow, ASIA! and sail right on back home to spread the word as fast as his unreefed canvas could carry him.

Here's a good one:  Another name for canvas is "duck"-- so, bet someone that Columbus used "duck power" to cross the ocean.  G'wan, do it.

But back to "British Columbia"... no, not.  Get them to change the name to just plain unadorned "Columbia" and we'll all be happier, including the cartographers.  Of course, it would just be nicknamed "C." then... and "I went out to C." might be mistaken for "I went out to sea".  But there are worse probs to have and I think I covered most of them.

OK, and something else... I found Albertosaurus, Edmontosaurus, even Edmontonia...but just d4mn if I can find anything called Saskatchewanosaurus.  Or even Saskatoonosaurus, and look, you can't get much cooler of a name than that outside of Dr. Seuss.

Maybe no one has EVER liked the place...?

—Ron Copis

You and I and a lot of DENIERS have been mistrusting the models used for longterm prediction for quite some time, and the easy retort is always, "Yeh, so where's your Ph.D in Climatology?  Huh?  HUH??"

As if you need one.  Common sense and intuition serve us uneducated sods well enough sometimes.  Better than an ivory-tower Gov't-grant teatsucker more than some of the time.

Well, now we have an example, a good solid historically established example where the models go wrong.  And in order to attack that fact they'd have to unravel some of the "proxies" they use to prove that things have never been this "bad" and/or have never gotten this "bad" this quickly.  That unravelling won't stop once started so they don't dare.

By itself it's not much.  Neither is the Alan Carlin thing—suppressed-climate-change-report—but together, and with all the other things brewing and threatening to come together in a Perfect Storm of scientific refutation (including the failure of sea ice to disappear, the thriving polar bears, the dampened hurricane activity, the growing outrage among real scientists, the record low temps in both hemispheres, and a slight but steady ten-year stasis or decline in global avg temp in spite of CO2 ppms barrelling along) I think we'll have a complete reversal of opinion inside of three years.  Which I predicted in five years, without a computer model, two years ago.

Actually I sort of used P. T. Barnum.  He's never failed.

So it's now just a matter of time.  The World right now is a great big pan of Jiffy Pop and as the refutations of the current elite views heat up you can hear it... pop... pop... pop... as one by one, at a steadily increasing rate, peoples' heads are popping out of... ...out of, umm, "the sand".  Let's be polite and call it what it isn't.  Really who cares... it's the fact of the popping out that's important.

This is a long read but worth it-- http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brad-wilmouth/2009/07/16/actor-paul-
rodriguez-turns-gop-after-farmers-hurt-save-endangered-fis --it's impassioned, factual, and funny in spots.

There is no zealot like a converted zealot, and the folks who look as if they're "winning" right now are going to be in a WORLD of hurt as they realise how true that is.

Pop... pop-pop-pop... pop... pop...

—Ron Copis