Imagine for a moment that you go into your neighbor's home one day and discover a large homemade bomb sitting in the middle of his living room. "Don't touch that." your neighbor tells you, "If you do, the bomb will explode and our entire block will be destroyed." How would…
Bush declares that the government is not reading (listening) to the content of the phone messages being tapped by our security apparatus. He's probably trying to figure out why people are so upset. After all, he's trying to protect us from terrorists. Oddly, I believe him when he says this. …
The Vatican is going a little too crazy about The Da Vinci Code, it seems. The Vatican’s claim is that the movie is “full of calumnies, offences and historical and theological errors regarding Jesus, the Gospels and the Church.” It would seem that in a work of FICTION, errors of…
I just received a notice from Consumer's Union (publisher of Consumer Reports) that infuriates me. I have to say, though, this USDA proposal is par for the course for this administration. This particular proposal would allow corporations to say that milk is "organic" when it is not. As one of the many people…
Today I was day-dreaming about taking another field trip to a fundamentalist evangelical church. In my dream, though, I wasn’t going to church to simply observe all the folks getting terrified over getting barbecued in hell. Nor was I there to promote my new and improved version of the Ten Commandments.
No, in this dream I was a Martian anthropologist starting my field studies on Earth. Out of raw luck, I landed my saucer on the parking lot of a fundamentalist church and walked in to begin studying the animals that I found inside. Here are the field notes from my dream:
I walked in church and noticed lots of animals. In impeccable English (I studied English a bit in Martian high school) I asked, “Where do the animals sit?”
One of the “men” in charge told me that “animals are not allowed in the church, only people.” As he said “people,” he pointed to some of the animals.
I inquired, “But aren’t those people animals?”
This brought on a half-dazed squirmy look. He looked at me like I was from Mars, which I was, of course. He protested that he didn’t think of people as “animals.”
Because I was confused, I pulled out my textbook on Animal Behavior, 7th Edition, by John Alcock (2001). I glanced at the table of contents, which contained a long list of attributes pertaining to “animals.” I then quickly read further.
Chapter 8 covered “feeding behaviors,” indicating that animals ate food. I happened to …