Intelligently designed penguins
I read (probably in the 'Oddly Enough' section of Yahoo!News, which shamingly I often find more gripping than proper news) that a wholesome film about emperor penguins called March of the Penguins has given a shot in the arm to the anti-Darwinists, prompting them to argue that any society so clearly well-organised and morally sound must be proof of intelligent design. Nice New York Times editorial here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/opinion/18sun2.html. Apparently Christian groups in the USual places have been block booking cinemas to show the film, and taking paper, pen and pocket torch in with them to take down any messages from God which might be transmitted during the screening. On the one hand it's delightful that cinemas are being booked out for a wholesome film about emperor penguins rather than for the grotesque religio-porn of Passion of the Christ; on the other it makes one rush for the nearest copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos (did anybody else find that possibly the most misleadingly blurbed book ever?)
Anybody interested in going to see a wholesome film about emperor penguins later this autumn?
posted by Carol O'Sullivan @ 9/24/2005 01:23:00 pm
6 Comments:
Hey, how did that happen? Usually I get an email whenever someone posts! RR slipped in under the radar, I'll be bound....
Welcome to the B&B, RR! Tea or coffee?
Anyway, I don't understand the Intelligent Designers' penchant for penguins. Are they not the same birds that fall over backwards en masse whenever an aeroplane goes overhead?
And I'll consider escorting you to the cinema, as long as the emperor penguins don't attempt to learn Old Norse in one evening or live in a tree trunk.
Aha, urban myth (or should it be rural myth) alert - penguins-falling-over-backwards-at-sight-of-plane theory now apparently entirely discredited; read somewhere that it was either prankness aforethought or just punch-drunkenness on the part of the alleged observers who were Falkland Island troops.
Tree-trunk???!?
Well the Old Norse is about me obliging the Landlady to sit through large portions of The Thirteenth Warrior so she could tell me what language the Vikings were speaking around the campfire - which she did with her usual immense kindness. But the tree trunk has me stumped.
Two words: hobbity burrow
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