Democrats for Mitt Romney

From Daily Kos.

I don't endorse screwing around with elections, even if the Republicans did it first. But this sure is funny:

The Most Trivial Reader Contest Ever!

With a title like that you might be expecting some sort of witty trivia contest, but I'm not quite that clever. Instead I'd like to offer you a chance to do something that has been amusing me most of the day, distracting me from studying for finals and writing my last papers of the semester. It started with two words:

Projectile Dysfunction

Somehow those two words, put together, have been an endless source of inane amusement for me. Perhaps they will be for you, too.

The contest is this:

Either

a.) Come up with a picture that would best make use of the caption "Projectile Dysfunction," and either email me the picture or leave a comment here describing it, or

b.) Write a brief story or joke featuring "projectile dysfunction" and either email it to me or leave it in the comments section.

The winner gets...

well... hopefully not projectile dysfunction.

The winner gets...

the mythic Dave Chapman award for creative use of the Internet!

UD on the Road

My grand theory of Unintelligent Design was intended to explain all of those inexplicably stupid attributes which could never have survived the ongoing process of natural selection, proving both:

a.) that the universe was crafted by a supreme Designer, and

b.) that this Designer, like us, is unintelligent.

When I first wrote about it here I challenged readers to actively seek out evidence that we have been created by a, well, less than perfect mastermind. I challenged readers to see their world through lens of UD, and to look for those fatal flaws in our design which point to our supremely flawed Designer.

I, too, have taken up this challenge, and I am finding unintelligence all around me. Especially on the road.

One key component of our unintelligent design is our inability to identify that which is in our best interests, and how to realize that interest. Our instincts, our impulses, our fundamental drives all slip right on past cognition. Nowhere is this more evident than when we are driving.

How often do we see drivers pitch vehicular hissy fits, swerving from lane to lane trying to go just a little bit faster, only to find that each manic lane change has cost them more of their precious time? Such crazy driving is a drastic miscalculation both of one's interests (preferring haste to safety) and the behaviors most likely to produce the desired end (hasty, reckless driving ultimately slows one down). But while this may be the most obvious example of our unintelligent design, it is not a particularly humorous one.

However, in the past few weeks, I have observed two more humorous examples of UD on the road:

A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned, but What Does it Profit a Man to Gain a Penny But Lose His Life?

On the way to the hospital for my wrist surgery I saw this strange sight, which may prove once and for all that some of us love money far too much. A man was jaywalking across a busy road, which is dangerous enough without being distracted by what David Wilcox call "shiny junk." Having safely negotiated his way past the hoards of oncoming vehicles, the man stopped just before the curb, turned around, and bent over to pick something up. Oh lucky day, he might have thought to himself, as the cars whizzed by his face. Some poor sucker dropped a penny!

I know that our crazed capitalist culture has followed in the long human tradition of assigning some contrived value to certain symbols, allowing you to exchange those symbols for something you might actually have some use for. In fact, we have elevated this silly human practice to whole new heights, placing these symbols at the center of our public religion. But even in such a money-obsessed culture, it is hard to blame this man's actions on anything other than faulty wiring, clearly the work of our Unintelligent Designer.

Vanity (Mirror), Vanity (Mirror), All is Vanity

Driving to pick Adam up from his preschool today, I saw a late-model Toyota Corolla swerving aimlessly between lanes. First I thought, Isn't it a bit early in the day to be that sloshed?, but I soon realized that the culprit wasn't alcohol at all. The car's rear view mirror was aimed not at the traffic behind the car, but directly at the driver's face.

The "operator" of the vehicle - I can't bear to call her a driver again, as the car was driving her at least as much as she was driving it - was, with the vehicle in motion at well over 60 miles per hour in HEAVY TRAFFIC (can you hear me screaming?!?) doing her hair and make-up!!!!! Talk about being all dressed up with nowhere to go!

How can we explain the genetic survival of traits that so clearly misidentify one's interests and the behaviors needed to secure such interests except to say that they were willed by a sovereign, yet stupid, Designer? Or, to put it another way, if we are made in the image of God, what exactly does that say about God?

A New Explanatory Theory: Take This, Evolustionists and IDers!

[Note: this post should not be read by the humor impaired, even though I am often among their number]

Since I broke my wrist, being physically unable to work, I have had a great deal of time on my hands. Way too much time. Time to ponder. Way, way, way too much time to ponder.

My pondering began when I realized that a reflex, an unconscious decision made in less than a quarter of a second's time, has reduced me to this broken shell of my former self, hand and arm wrapped and bandaged, a screw surgically (and permanently!) inserted into my wrist. I'd taken martial arts classes. I'd been trained in how to fall, my natural reflex subverted to avoid just the sort of injury I sustained. I spent months flopping on the floor of the studio, fearing the floor at least as much as the tongue lashing I'd get for hitting it wrong.

Under the supervision of my martial arts master I learned the art of falling. Knowing in advance that gravity would soon win our perpetual wrestling match, I could curl my body just right to hit the ground rolling, "slap out," and pop right up to resume the attack.

But, given my first chance to fall in a "natural environment," my first uncontrolled fall, the first time that gravity won even though I didn't let it, I reverted back to form. To reflex. An unconscious decision, unwilling to remain repressed, made in less than a quarter of a second, left me temporarily disabled.

And, like I said, this has left me with time to think. Time to ponder. Far too much time. Time to revisit everything I ever thought that I believed. And, in this time, I realized that my injury - or, more accurately, the asinine reflex which gave rise to it - stands as the ultimate challenge to two competing explanatory theories. My injury - or, again, the reflex which gave rise to it - knocks off the two theoretical giants at the center of both our culture war, and the broader war between science and religion.

The question of evolution by means of natural selection or intelligent design has, I propose, finally been answered in the most decisive fashion: Neither!

You see, if our biology could be explained by Darwinian evolution, then it stands to reason that at some point such a useless trait would have been weeded out of the gene pool. How can billions of years not eliminate the most counter-intuitive and destructive impulses?!? If it truly were "survival of the fittest," whichever of my ancestors possessed this ridiculous instinct would surely have been wiped out, leaving no trace of this trait.

No, the only way such a trait could have survived is if it were willed to be, and to be everlasting, by a sovereign creator, a supreme designer. But, from this trait, what can we learn of this designer, whose work is so manifestly evident in our fatal flaws? This is certainly not the perfect and benevolent artist/engineer proclaimed by ID. No, that the work of God is found in the most inexplicable aspects of our genetic make-up - not that which is, as IDers claim, too complex to be explained by random mutations over time; but that which is too stupid, too counter-productive, to have possibly survived the process of natural selection - points not to an intelligent designer, but to an unintellegent one!

That's right, the reflex to stick your hands down to break your fall as gravity hurls you to the ground proves once and for all that not only is there a God, but that that God is an idiot!

So I challenge you, dear reader, to look at nature with these new eyes given to you by the grand theory of Unintellegent Design (UD, for short), and find more evidence that we have been Unintellegently Designed.

This is the new Sandalstraps' Sanctuary reader contest: To find and report here evidence of our Unintellegent Design. We need both stories of stupid behaviors and reflexes which should not have been allowed to survive the billions of years of so-called "natural selection" which have supposedly led to us, and also theoretical work to bolster UD against those who would like, for ideological reasons, to shoot it down before it can knock down the twin idols of evolution and ID.