On a recent bus trip from upstate NY, back to the forlorn isle of Manhattan, a woman somewhere behind me indulged in a long cell phone chat.  For a full, voluble half-hour, she kept her yakmate abreast on where the bus was: every freeway exit, toll booth, and road sign we met on our perilous journey was described in […]

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[Darwin continues to munch on a birthday cake with 200 candles; and we continue to cheer him on with my talk on his cultural impact.  We’re now in the full cry of the Cold War, watching the Scopes Trial be rewritten as “Inherit the Wind.”  Oh dear.] 
In fact, ”Inherit the Wind” departed so much from the […]

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[Yes, Virginia, there is a Charles Darwin; and we continue to fete his bicentennial by serializing my talk on the impact of his theories on American culture.  Have a seat.]
A few days after the Scopes trial had pooped out, Bryan died.  Mencken exulted, “We killed the son-of-a-bitch,” and ran a rather nasty obituary, calling him […]

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[The serialization of my talk on Darwin’s odd cultural impact marches forward.  We take a break from the Scopes Trial to ponder the history of caveman cartoons — and the curiously tenacious popularity of the brontosaurus.]
Well, the legal news is always engrossing, but let’s turn for a moment to the funny pages.  It’s as good a […]

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[Open wide, for another tasty dipperful of my talk on the apparently ceaseless squabble between Darwinians and anti-Darwinians.  I gave this talk at a couple of Fortean conventions a few years back; I’m posting it here to celebrate Darwin’s bicentennial.  See the earlier dippersful for more details; meanwhile, the Scopes trial is in progress.]
The Scopes trial was […]

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[We continue to mark Darwin’s bicentennial by doling out my talk on his cultural wallop.  So far we’ve run through some misconceptions, the melancholy tale of the brontosaurus (to whom we will return), and the background of the Scopes trial.  We’re ready to meet some of the principals.]
Bryan is such a complex character that it’s a pity to […]

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We have heard reports that the Ullage Group is fixated on the past and that ullage means old things and concepts. To some extent this is true. There are many ullage topics of interest frozen in the glacier of the past. So let’s have a hot post about something new.
The TV-B-Gone is […]

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[We continue to mark Darwin’s bicentennial by serializing my talk on the cultural impact of his work.  So far, we’ve touched on some of the popular misconceptions of his ideas, and on the flurry of legislation leading up to the Scopes Trial in the U.S.]
Meanwhile, paleontologists, like dirty little kids, had been scrabbling in the […]

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[We resume the serialization of my talk on the cultural hurly-burly that greeted Darwin’s theories.  As we open this section, our animal friends are really going at it.]
Lions and tigers make ligers and tigons; camels and llamas make camas; antelopes give taxonomists nightmares.  Mules have been known to foal baby mules; yaks, bison, and cattle […]

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[It’s the Darwin bicentennial; it’s time to party like primates.  I’ll tip my bit into the punchbowl by serializing, sip by sip, a talk I gave at the 2006 “Fortean Times” UnCon and the 2007 INFO (International Fortean Organization) FortFest.  It’s mostly about the confused interbreeding of evolution and American culture.  I’ll update it a bit as I post it; […]

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