Saturday, September 18, 2010

Bathroom Monologue: Monologue for a chipper Ian McKellan sitting on a picnic table

“Every scientist I’ve ever met believed in intelligent design. No decently observant man can deny it. It’s more a feature of the world than natural selection these days. Look around you for examples.

“See how the trees frame this park? How the flowers compliment the pines in color and fullness? The lawn kept an inch and a half high?

“How about my phone? Tiny. Network accessible miles from town. Complexity explicable only by a designer, and a designer who gets up on stage to sell you new things every year.

“Did you catch the Westminster Dog Show last night? All of those dogs, winners and losers, was the result of strenuous breeding for traits their masters wanted.

“From landscaping to calculators to poodles, intelligent design is everywhere. I gather we avoid the term out of modesty – we’re kind of incompetent designers, what with all the extinctions and oil spills. Maybe ‘well-meaning design,’ or, ‘decent-effort design.’ ‘I’m-sure-somebody-wanted-something-out-of-this design.’ Intelligence is in most of this. Misplaced, misused and misunderstood, as it likely is, but it’s affecting things.”

3 comments:

  1. This is such a great post! You made me think of the issue in a totally different way. You often do that with your posts because you point something out that's new or different.

    Jai

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  2. Phrases come pre-loaded with their own meaning. You just helped unload one Mr Wiswell; you've done well.

    You had a little oops with "knew things". I do enjoy finding your oopses, because you leave so few of them; they're like little treasures, coins dropped on the street.

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  3. Thanks for catching my typo, Bernard. I can never catch all of my own.

    Some of my punnery is accidental, but other phrases just ask for it. We are intelligent designers.

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