Caitlín R. Kiernan

It's a bloody, frelling shame that creationists are such a nuisance that we're forced to regard them as anything but comic relief. Because sometimes they really are pretty goddamned funny. For example, Project Pterosaur. I'd love to have their logo on a T-shirt or a tote bag or a pair of panties or something. It's just too, too entirely, preciously surreal not to be funny. It sort of looks like something Wilma Flintstone might have designed for the KKK.





Yeah, so, anyway, I just adore the way that creationists seem to think that the discovery of living descendents of clades believed to be extinct would in some way count as evidence against the fact of evolution. Especially pterosaurs. Nothing living today could have evolved from the pterosaurs, as pterosaurs would appear to have bitten the big one in the K/T extinction, leaving no descendants. 2 and 2 = 14, just as long as it gets the job done. I mean, even if these "theobiology" yahoos managed to find their Holy Grail, a living pterosaur in darkest Africa, and they were able to establish their pterosaur "rookery," blah, blah, blah, so the hell what? I mean, yeah, it'd be cool, that pterosaurs pulled a coelacanth and survived the Cretaceous and have somehow been hiding out for the last 65 million years, but it would in no way challenge our current understanding of evolution and the history of life on Earth. It would merely add to what we know about the evolution and biology of the Pterosauria. This is one reason that creationism is presently wreaking such havoc with American science education. Their antics are often so absurd that scientists dismiss them as harmless cranks, only to learn later on that an awful lot of people aren't interested in or simply cannot tell the difference between science and crankery.

It's really a shame there's no practical way to tax stupidity, or at least convert it into a clean alternative to oil.

Anyway...no writing yesterday. The despair that was tugging at me early in the day finally mushroomed into full-blown despondency, and I have discovered it's almost utterly pointless attempting to write tentacle smut when I'm despondent. I speak from experience. I've tried. And it inevitably turns into these bizarre postCthulian phenomenological dialogues on reality and the nature of being. Better to drink, I say, than imbibe in existentialist rants with the Great Old Ones. So that's what I did. I opened a new bottle of La Fée and consorted with The Green Fairy until I could no longer see quite straight. I think I had it in my head to get plastered, then have Spooky drive me to the mall to heckle Xmas shoppers. Fortunately, she stayed sober, and I wandered no farther than the front porch, where I could only heckle squirrels (thought they deserve it far less that Xmas shoppers). Early in the evening, a friend called to see if we wanted to do dinner Saturday night, and I was still too stinko to give her directions to the restaurant in question. I was a bad, bad nixar. Which pretty much insures that I'll write today, lest the guilt rend me asunder and grind my bones to dust.

I have to decide on the subject matter for the second vignette for Sirenia Digest #1. I wish I were better at funny, because I'd love to write something about a whorehouse in Innsmouth, circa 1924. But, alas, me and funny have only a dim and passing acquaintance, at best. I'm good for a one liner here or there, but that's about it. I blame Catholicism.

Meanwhile, thanks to sclerotic_rings for directing me towards Project Pterosaur, which made me laugh almost as much as learning that Former FEMA Director Michael Brown has started a disaster preparedness consulting firm. Also, we've begun a new round of eBay auctions, and I'd be grateful if you'd take a look. There are copies of The Five of Cups, Silk, The Dry Salvages (both the trade and limited), In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers, and The Worm in my Mind's Eye. All proceeds go to keep me and Spooky and Sophie from taking up residence in a cardboard box at the corner of Peachtree and Ponce.

Postscript — I'll send a shiny new nickle to the first person who proves that Project Pterosaur is, in fact, an anti-creationist hoax site, instead of being the real thing. That would make it even funnier.