I'm not sure, do I want to know what vend-a-face is?

It's a Muppet Show thing.

I was thinking, "Hey, I saw that on the Muppet Show."

Not that I'd put it past Emaryn and Leif to invent such a thing.

This is what Conservadpedia has to say about the cactus:

The secularist view of the Cactaceae is that they are roughly two million years old, and that they have evolved exclusively in the new world. This view fails to explain, however, how it is that the Opuntia genus is native to the island of Opus, near Greece. Cacti are known for their high content of alkaloids, and have often been used in the sacramental rights of the Native Americans. Because of this, the early Catholic missionaries in the west thought the plants to be the work of Satan, and this is perhaps a preferable view to that of materialistic evolution since it is difficult to imagine how something like mescaline could have evolved by natural selection. Besides that, the psychoactive content of many cacti have inspired the writings of such ungodly men as Aldous Huxley and Albert Hoffman.

Several species of cactus are now endangered in the west due to "poaching" by collectors and invasive species. But, since Genesis suggests that man has been given dominion over all of the earth, the environmentalist concerns on this note are entirely inappropriate. It may also be that environmentalists, in addition to flauting the Word of God, are merely concerned about the effects that declining cactus populations will have on their supply of mescaline.

Conservadpedia can be pretty funny at times....

[link]

Oh, and only Christians have "faith." And,

"Big Oil has also proven valuable in funding independant [sic] scientists who are able to dispute the propaganda behind Global warming without worrying about losing their government or academic funding due to liberal reprisals."

Gee, that's swell....

eta: And check out this comment:

Although there are lots of funny original entries there, you should know that everybody and their mother has been vandalizing the Conservapedia for a little while now.

The joke entries tend to use better English than the true ones.

I have a dilemma. There's an event tonight that I think would be personally interesting and possibly professionally useful, but I am SO SLEEPY right now, I'm not sure I'd make it through the talk. Do I go, or do I bag?

You'll get your second wind, Jesse. Have some caffeine and a snack.

I just had some hot cocoa, in the hopes that the caffeine and sugar would outweigh the cozy/sleep effect. I think it was a wash. I'm actually a little afraid of getting the second wind -- if I'm all riled up at the end of this thing at 8, will I be asleep by 10 like I want to be? Doubtful. That's the main thing making me want to bail.

Any chance at all of sneaking a nap in before the event? Even 20-30 minutes might do it (if you can, drink a cup of coffee right before lying down -- the caffeine will hit your system just as you're getting up, so you get both the rest and the boost).

eta: I can't speak to the getting-wound-up-afterwards thing, unfortunately -- I don't think that's happened to me since 2005.

St. Augustine had comment that I think might be relevant to the Conservapedia thing I found the quote appropriately enough via Wikipedia

[link]

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

* De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, translation by J. H. Taylor in Ancient Christian Writers, Newman Press, 1982, volume 41

I'm going to give Augustine a break about "even a non-Christian" and the use of word "infidel" given that he died in the 5th century C.E.

Nah, if I have any more caffeine today, I'll never go to sleep tonight. A quandary!!

A request for advice from the cooks among us: The last time I cooked a roast, mixing several flavors as seasoning on the outside worked really well. This time I thought I'd do the following:

• add coriander to the more savory spices I'm rubbing it with prior to cooking
• top it with kalamata olives, slices of plum, and feta cheese for the last hour
• add kalamata olives to the onions and celery that I surround it with to absorb cooking juices

Does this sound like it would be a good idea, or result in a weirdly sweet prune roast reminiscent of Rachel Green's beef trifle?