links for 2005-09-21
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A Pennsylvania school district has been told to shut down its Gay/Straight Alliance or face God’s retribution.
Pride March of the Penguins
Much is being made of the apparent adoption by American Christian conservatives of a nature documentary they reckon provides “proof” of the syllogistic “intelligent design” theory.
By all accounts the movie, March of the Penguins, is set to become a box-office smash on the back of the Christian chatter it’s generated.
Towleroad got onto this a week or so ago, quickly pointing out some of the more obvious flaws in the theologists’ thinking:
Why don’t we also include Roy and Silo in that discussion? They’re the gay penguins at the Central Park Zoo who so yearned to bring up a youngster that they took care of a stone for several weeks hoping for it to hatch. Now I’m not sure that’s an argument for “intelligent” design, but it certainly proves that in the penguin world they’re not all marching towards heterosexuality.
In today’s Australian, columnist Emma Tom picks up the argument and expands on it:
[Using] animal habits as allegories for human values is risky. Sure it can work when applied selectively, but the big picture is not so neat. Take emperor penguins, for instance. Couples are monogamous during the breeding season, but only one in 20 penguin pairs are still together after two years.
The rest engage in a partner swapping spree that makes the key party scene in The Ice Storm look like a Hillsong singalong.
Tom picks up the Roy and Silo ball too, and runs with it:
It’d be fascinating to hear how churchfolk reconcile this type of natural homo romping with their intelligent design theory. After all, if the big G intelligently designed female monkeys to play games of erotic peek-a-boo, who’s to say he wasn’t planning something similar for humans when he dreamed up the ingredients for Mardi Gras?
In the Philadelphia Enquirer, Faye Flam (her real name, I guess) followed her journalistic training and went to the experts for comment. It turns out that not only is the God Squad reading rather too much into the film, the filmmakers, a French team spending the National Geographic dime, have exaggerated, misrepresented and editorialised their “documentary” into difficult territory:
Kooyman said these cold-adapted penguins probably aren’t suffering, despite what viewers are told. From beginning to end the scriptwriters project human feelings onto the penguins. It’s not exactly scientific, but then the film probably couldn’t have achieved its blockbuster status without going light on the science and heavy on the melodrama.
Flam also reveals some disturbing news about Roy and Silo. It seems that Silo, after a six-year walk on the wild side, has gone back into the closet and now “has a girlfriend”. Poor Roy.
links for 2005-09-20
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“By choosing an avowed lesbian for this national event, these Hollywood elites have clearly invited God’s wrath,” Robertson said on “The 700 Club” on Sunday.
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The head of Zagreb Zoo, Mladen Anic, said: “We have set two cages aside for Homo Sapiens so people can experience how an animal perceives their cage.”
Flat out like a lizard drinking
It’s been a hectic weekend. Following on from the excitement of Friday night’s football outing, I jumped on a plane on Saturday to get to my lil’ sister’s (and her partner’s) 40th birthday in Wollongong. Marg is the closest in age to me of my six siblings and the only girl in the family (please no jokes) so she’s special to me and to all of us. She also knows how to host a wing-ding of a party so I had no hesitation in making the journey to the ‘Gong for the do.
I even managed to convince our brother Bill, who lives in Brisbane, to make a last-minute flight booking and get his arse to the party. Sometimes a little gentle prodding goes a long way.
The party was semi-optionally fancy dress – you were supposed to wear something you’d have worn to your high school formal. I don’t even recall my high school formal, so it must have been a glittering affair, but I dare say it was anything but formal. I was a dag then and I’m a dag now, so it wasn’t a fancy dress theme I could do much with. My 79-year-old mother, on the other hand, came in the same nurse’s uniform she wore at her graduation in the late 1940s. God bless her:
Sunday, nursing a very sore head, I headed home to Melbourne and the news that my friend Sean had succeeded in obtaining Grand Final tickets for the two of us. Woohoo!
Monday, we went to the Royal Melbourne Show to see the cows, horses, chickens, cockies, men-in-jodhpurs, screaming kids and sheep:
More photos from that expedition on Flickr.
Cheer, cheer, the red and the white
Took my husband and my mother-in-law to the footy last night.
A big game with much at stake and a huge result. Sydney are through to the grand final.
I bent over backwards to ensure we had tickets to this game, despite the predictions that we’d be going home disappointed I had a feeling in my waters that we could be in for a thriller. An amazing atmosphere with more than 73,000 people at the MCG, of whom about 80% were barracking for the other team. Outnumbered but not outclassed.
Because of the scramble for tickets I was sitting away from Brent and Mom, who were in the public seats while I was in the members’ area, but I understand that she got right into the spirit of the event, perhaps even telling Umpire McLaren to “pull a jumper on, ya mug.” Or maybe I’m projecting.
So next week we’re in with a chance at the premiership and by crikey I’ll be there. Sydney have not won the flag since 1933, so we’re definitely overdue.
As my brother Bill sometimes says, who’d have thought so many people could be so interested in watching a bunch of blokes kick a bag full of air around a paddock?
(If the photo above looks a bit odd, it’s because I took it with my Treo under a sodium vapour discharge lamp at the railway station on the way to the game, so it came out in puke yellow and baby-poo brown, and I recoloured it).
links for 2005-09-14
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Former Liberal leader, playboy, boyfriend of Shirley Maclaine/Madeline Allbright, Andrew Peacock, guilty of drink-driving. Collided with power pole & refused breathalyser 11 times. Got off lightly.
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Show time in Melbourne and AntarcticaMy first time at the Melbourne Show (tentatively planning to go on Monday). Unfortunately, the local event doesn’t include Antarctica’s “telephone darts” which sounds enthralling.
links for 2005-09-08
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Journalist, editor, republican and author of “The Lucky Country” dies at 83.(tags: death)
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Interesting, if for no other reason than the story includes a “forensic sedimentologist” who quotes from Dirty Harry.
links for 2005-09-07
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Indian woman arrested for murder after allegedly throwing her baby boy down a well because he ‘might’ have had AIDS.