The BillPages

Rob says he can do it, so I can do it too.

Only mine has hyperlinks.  Hah!

Well, I was off all last week, and to enjoy my vacation to the fullest, decided to get sick. Bleh.

Fortunately, there is a wealth of entertainment that can be enjoyed in the privacy of ones own home, never straying far from a box of kleenex and hot mug of Neo Citron.

For starters, James Randi is back doing the commentary for his own website. He'd been away since his heart surgery, and is still recovering, but his return is a welcome sign of good things to come. All the best, James.

And there's always the Penn Jillette radio show. You can listen to excerpts or pick up the streaming audio from Penn's Free FM site, here. Or if you use iTunes (and this is the only thing I use iTunes for) the entire program is available the next morning as a free podcast.

And Derren Brown has a bunch of cool things on this website. Derren's new series of shows is currently being broadcast in the UK, and he continues to amaze and astound at every turn. When, oh, when, will someone on this side of the pond pick these things up for broadcast?

Now for the $0.99 booby-prize: what do these three things have in common? That's right, magic. Randi is an accomplished magician who turned the skillset that magicians develop in on itself and now spends a great deal of time educating people in the ways of fakes, fakirs and flim-flam artists in a desperate attempt to promote reason.

Penn Jillette is - in his own description - the larger, louder half of Penn & Teller, world-famous magicians and showmen who, themselves, set the magic community's teeth on edge by giving away trade secrets on a regular basis. His radio show, co-hosted with Michael Goudeaux, who works with magician Lance Burton and is an accomplished juggler, regularly points out everyday idiocy and fuzzy thinking in the world today, and is also frequently hilarious.

And Derren Brown is a magician and - heck what would you call it? mentalist? - who has pulled off some of the most astounding things I've seen from a TV magician in years. With the help of my much-wiser-than-I friend Gord, I managed to figure out how he did one of his tricks. One. After twenty-odd hours of programmes, I now know how he did ONE thing. The guy is really good. And all the time, Derren makes it clear that he posseses no supernatural, paranormal or mystical powers of any kind.

Wonder is where you find it, folks. The world can be marvelous without surrendering reason.

"The Fossil is remarkably well preserved."

No they're not talking about Sharon Stone.

Scientists have discovered fossilized skeletal remains that seem to fill in a significant portion of the evolutionary gap between sea and land animals. It's long been understood that living creatures evolved in the water, and then at some point struck out onto land. Now we have some solid evidence of that evolutionary process.

The Tiktaalik is big news, folks, especially coming in these dark times. Hot on the heels of some Intelligent Design smack-downs, this find represents the ongoing, exploratory nature of Evolutionary Science. Hopefully, on-the-ball science teachers can use this current events story to illustrate the nature of Scientific Theory, the quest for empirical evidence, and the open-ended nature of biological study.

How carefully considered are the findings of real, honest-to-goodness scientists? Well, according to this BBC article, they started out on this path of discovery in 1999, made their first big find in 2004, and are only now going wide with the announcement. That's a seven year process, and they're still not done exploring the ramifications.

That's how science works, folks. When it sees something it feels is irreducibly complex, it tries to figure out how it got that way, and doesn't just say, "well, it must be God. Or Aliens. Or Alien Gods."

rAmen, brothers.

I've always liked Bill Paxton. Who can forget him as Chip in Weird Science? Or as the hapless spy wannabe in True Lies (I have to lie to women to get laid. And I don't score much. I got a really small dick, it's pathetic!)?

Now he's playing a man with three - count 'em, three - wives in HBO's new series Big Love.

Paxton plays a true-believer Mormon, who goes the old-school route and engages in polygamy. The modern Mormon Church, or Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints, officially renounced polygamy a long time ago now. But in this delightful work of fiction, Paxton is a man raised in a polygamous environment who sees nothing wrong with filling out the family photo a bit.

The community he comes from, referred to as 'the compound', is back-woods creepy, with women toiling in farm fields owned by their husbands, people dressed in almost amish-like "prairie garb", and old men marrying young, young girls. Isn't wacky how creative those Hollywood writers can be?

Or did they just read the papers?

Check out this tale, from the Associated Press. Or this one, from the Austin Chronicle. Both deal with a real-life compund, by some accounts little different from the one headed by Harry Dean Stanton's character of Roman on Big Love. Charges of polygamy, underage marriages and harbouring fugitives are just some potential storylines - uh, I mean, problems facing the community.

And Newsweek has this article, which puts, at times, a positive spin on multiple-marrying men. This is not the only publication to liken polygamy to gay marriage, as a personal rights issue. From the article:

"if Heather can have two mommies, she should also be able to have two mommies and a daddy."

Not every article is quite so lenient. The Washington Post, predictably, takes a more conservative stand. In a low-key opinion piece, columnist Charles Krauthammer takes the backhanded approach of warning against gay marriage, as a method of warding off polygamy:

"To simplify the logic, take out the complicating factor of gender mixing. Posit a union of, say, three gay women all deeply devoted to each other. On what grounds would gay activists dismiss their union as mere activity rather than authentic love and self-expression? On what grounds do they insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary number of two?"

Neither is this specifically an American issue. As the Newsweek article points out, a recent study funded in part by the Department Of Justice suggests that decriminilizing polygamy might be the right thing to do.

"In light of the fact that we have a fairly permissive society, why are we singling out that particular form of behaviour for criminalization?''

And that's what it boils down to, right? Who is the government, to tell us what we can and can't do in our personal relationships? If I want to live with three hot chicks, like Paxton's Bill Hendrickson, then isn't it my right to do so? (Assuming, of course, that I could find three women willing to do so. With me. Hmm... can the government help me with THAT?)

In fact, the only really compelling argument against polygamy I've seen recently is from another TV show. ABC's Boston Legal ran an episode recently in which the fictional law firm of Crane, Schmidt, etc defended two women and a man living as a polygamous family. The D.A. made a compelling little speech, which included this excellent point:

"Well the law against polygamy is practical as well. Say you’re a man with good health insurance, and a generous nature? Why not go down to a hospice and marry fifty terminally ill women so they can have your health benefits? If a billionaire could marry a thousand women and claim them all as dependants on his tax return, don’t you think he would? No. The law against polygamy doesn’t just make sense from a moral point of view, it’s practical as well."

So, until we address the fundamental unfairness of ALL the laws and institutions which are wrapped up in the myth of marriage being a good thing in and of itself, maybe it's okay to keep polygamy illegal.

I still like Bill Paxton, though.