At the End of the World

[vovat]

Sometimes, when there's nothing good on the car radio, I listen to Family Radio, one of those crazy Religious Right stations at the end of the dial. I have to say, if you haven't listened to this kind of radio, you've missed such things as:

• The host on a call-in show (where they find answers "from the Bible, not our own minds") backpedaling when called on the fact that he had said the world would end in the early nineties, and was now saying it would end in 2011. I think he eventually hung up on the caller.
  
• A "creationism moment," where some guy talked about how bees provide evidence for intelligent design. The amusing thing was that he sounded kind of like Sterling Holloway, which, combined with the fact that he was talking about bees, made me think of Winnie-the-Pooh.
  
• Another creationist type saying something like, "If birds and mammals have similar structures, that's because they were made by the same God." This guy kept saying that humans couldn't have evolved from "lower animals." Now, the general ridiculousness of his argument aside, why "lower"? I mean, I'm not a hardcore animal rights type, but isn't it pretty insulting to refer to other creatures that way? (I'll refrain from making a joke about many species of bird are actually "higher" than humans most of the time. [1])
  
• As an example of what not to say if your son says he wants to drop out of school, the words, "Do you want to grow up to be a dumbbell?"
  

On an unrelated note, I left for work early today because I was expecting heavy traffic due to wet roads, but it looks like most of the roads have cleared up. I had time to stop at Coconuts, where I bought used copies of Sloan's Pretty Together and the Fastbacks' Answer the Phone, Dummy. (For those of you who don't know, Kurt Bloch, the lead guitarist of the Young Fresh Fellows, was in the Fastbacks.)

Hotmail just had some weird problem where it kept showing me my mail backwards (i.e., with the newer messages at the top). I think it's always been possible to set it that way, but I never did (I have no idea why anyone would, really, but it's the default on some mail programs), so I don't know what was happening. I sometimes think I should switch to a different e-mail program, but is there any free server that DOESN'T have problems that are just as bad or worse? I tend to doubt it.

[1] Okay, so I DID make the joke. But I made it in a non-traditional and mildly self-deprecating manner, which makes it clever instead of lame, right? {g}