Wintry mix has gravel all up in it. I never think of it falling from the sky, just the mess it makes when it lands.

I'm just glad you people understand me.

I don't want to go to my meeting. My accomplishments for the year? Not killing every single last one of them for the way I got treated post-layoff shuffle. Not killing backup coworker for at the last minute taking time off, forcing me to train yet another person a week before I was to be gone. Not killing the people in the xxxxx's office for their screwy instructions, or rather lack of, that had people yelling at me from all over the planet for something that was not my fault.

I sense a theme.

So you're saying that going into the meeting with a machete and saying, "See, not a drop of blood on it!" wouldn't be the right approach?

I'm guessing no.

It's rather distressing.

Maybe I'll have a coughing fit!

Snow has started in DC. Doesn't look like it's sticking yet, but I'm on the 8th floor.

Intelligent Design on the wane? [link]

Behind the headlines, however, intelligent design as a field of inquiry is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for. It has gained little support among the academics who should have been its natural allies. And if the intelligent design proponents lose the case in Dover, there could be serious consequences for the movement's credibility.

On college campuses, the movement's theorists are academic pariahs, publicly denounced by their own colleagues. Design proponents have published few papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

"They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

"From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.

While intelligent design has hit obstacles among scientists, it has also failed to find a warm embrace at many evangelical Christian colleges. Even at conservative schools, scholars and theologians who were initially excited about intelligent design say they have come to find its arguments unconvincing. They, too, have been greatly swayed by the scientists at their own institutions and elsewhere who have examined intelligent design and found it insufficiently substantiated in comparison to evolution.

Neck still hurts like whoa. Work horrible. Being nitpicked and guilted on all fronts, including fannish. Want to crawl under bed with heating pad and manga.

I've decided that since "creationism" has changed it's name to "intelligent design", I'ma give "evolution" a new name.

From henceforth, "Evolution" is to be called "gradual development".

t stamps foot