Spring is in the air. The plants are sprouting. That last pile of snow on the shady part of your neighbor’s lawn has successfully melted. And your bathroom is alive with terrifying, multilegged creatures that look like this:

Yes, it’s active season for everybody’s favorite arthropod, scutigera coleoptrata, aka the house centipede. One of these bad boys scuttled across my bathroom floor just last night. My cats, which were born in the South and are still somewhat disappointed by Minnesota’s distinct lack of huntable palmetto bugs, think this is great. I’m less enthused. But I figure that when life hands you horrifying household pests, the least it can do is make them interesting.

With that in mind, I present:
Four Facts You Didn’t Realize You Wanted To Know About That Thing Living Behind Your Toilet

1.Scutigera Coleoptrata are Not Your Fault

Stop beating yourself up. Unlike, say, cockroaches, house centipedes aren’t hanging around because you didn’t clean the kitchen. At least, not directly. Scutigera coleoptrata feed on spiders and insects–they’re actually pretty beneficial if you’re willing to do the devil’s arithmetic here and decide that you’d rather have one fast-moving centipede than a colony of roaches. That said, leaving crumbs and half-eaten sandwiches about does create a nice environment for s. coleoptrata’s food to grow in. So it might not hurt to clean.

2. Scutigera Coleoptrata are Efficient

They’re actually capable of eating several other bugs at once, noshing on one meal while holding onto another with one of their 30 legs. They usually hunt at night, waiting for prey to get close enough that they can jump onto it, lasso it in, or whip it into submission.

3. Scutigera Coleoptrata are Not a Toy

House centipedes do their hunting via a set of venomous front legs. The good news: They won’t come looking to start a fight with you and, most of the time, even if you do egg them into attacking, they won’t be able to break your skin barrier. The bad news: That’s only most of the time. S. coleoptrata has apparently successfully stung humans before. Not life-threatening, it’s supposed to feel a lot like a bee sting.

4. Scutigera Coleoptrata Will Not Forget This

Unlike a lot of household pests that can be expected to die shortly after breeding, s. coleoptrata can live as long as seven years. There’s a distinct possibility they’ve been in your house longer than you have. During that time, they can grow to be as big as 1.75 in. long. Unsurprisingly, getting rid of them isn’t easy. Sticky traps are often recommended, but the house centipede can escape those by simply breaking off the stuck legs and growing them back later.

Photo courtesy Kenta Hayashi

“

(Via Boing Boing.)

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, some useless moron, and an unexperienced, murderous pilot (who I’m sure would be burning in hell for all eternity, if there was such a place).

For those of you who think ‘Peggy Sue’, ‘Oh Boy’, or ‘That’ll Be the Day’ when you think of Buddy Holly, search out the Purple Chick Collection and listen to some of his early work. It’s effing amazing.

But the biggest loss by far was Ritchie Valens. That guy is the reason I play guitar. We share the same birthday, and we’re both lefties who play guitar right-handed, so in the depths of my darkest delusions, I thought we were the same person.

And for those of you who think of Ritchie Valens as the Donna/La Bamba person, let me point you to Fast Freight, just for starters. It’s incredible that he was 16-17 years old when he recorded that. His voice can be a bit jarring, I’ll give you that, and his lyrics are bland/predictable/silly, but the kid was a guitar MONSTER. Had he time to more fully develop, he would have towered over the likes of Hendrix/Clapton/Page.

It’s unbelievable that he was brought down by a mere plane crash. You would think that his sheer force of being would have kept them in the air. In fact, it’s so implausible that anything other than himself could kill him, I think they should re-open the investigation. I’m confident that they would decide that it was in fact a murder-suicide.

As for the Big Bopper, I think he was the 1950′s equivalent of Hansen or Carrot-Top. Something that gets a grin or a chuckle the first time, but has no real substance or value. I suppose it’s sad that he died, but he had no business being around real musicians in the first place. And just to give you some insight on how messed up his lineage is, his own son had him dug up a couple years ago to disprove some silly conspiracy theory about him actually surviving the crash and being shot or something. To even consider that the Big Bopper could have walked away from a crash that claimed both Valens and Holly is just unfathomable.

Oh yeah, and fuck you Don McLean. The plane was not called ‘American Pie’, and that song is teh suXXors. There are, admittedly, many things that make me crazy with rage, and that song ranks among the top. Give me anything by Aaron Neville, the Bee Gees, Randy Newman or Tay Zonday, mix their worst songs together as ONE TRACK and you still won’t come near the horrible pit of noise and pretentiousness that is American Pie.

In June of 2004, I began a book entitled “The Mormon Creed: Examining the Articles of Faith of the LDS Church”. Although I finished it sometime in early 2006, I haven’t done anything with it. I’ve decided to take the publish it online in serial form. Please visit it at mormoncreed.com.

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UPDATE 2/11/09: It’s gone now.

It was in the news this week that the Catholic Church has proclaimed that evolution is compatible with Biblical teaching. Let me explain why I believe they are wrong.

I always thought roughly along the same lines; why would God have to create everything miraculously? Wouldn’t the creator of everything also be the creator of science and mathematics? Couldn’t he use those rules to create everything that we see today? He wouldn’t have been in a rush to create everything if he’s God, right?

As I studied Catholic teaching, they seemed to be saying the same thing. Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger (Now Pope Benedict XVI) supported the idea that God created through evolution, and both have talked on several occasions about science and religion being intimately intertwined, rather than being diametrically opposed.

For quite a while I supported this idea, and I accepted the idea that the creation stories in Genesis were simply parables- fundamentally correct but not literally true. Then it hit me.

The purpose of Jesus’ sacrifice of himself on the cross was to redeem humanity from inherited sin- inherited from who? Adam and Eve. In Genesis, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and partook of the fruit from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they were changed from immortal, perfect beings to mortal flesh and bone. Their sin created what the Catholic Church calls “original sin,” sin inherent in the entire human race.

When Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross, he took upon himself the sins of humanity, and promised that all who are baptized in his name are forgiven this ‘original sin’.

But wait a minute.

If there was no literal Adam and Eve who partook of a fruit of a tree against God’s commandment, there is no original sin. Is this story simply an easier-to-understand version of a much larger and complex general falling away of humanity? Does that really make sense?

If all life evolved via Natural Selection, where exactly was the proverbial “final straw” for God? When did he strip humanity of perfection and condemn them to mortality? The more I studied religion and science, the more I realized how absolutely opposite of one another they truly are. Without Adam and Eve, there is no Jesus; without Jesus, there is no Christianity. This is why Christians and so-called ‘Young Earth Creationists are so passionately against the theory of evolution. Their livelihood and their entire worldview falls to pieces in the face of evolution. The Catholic Church is pretending there is another alternative, that science and God go hand-in-hand, but this is simply not the case as far as I can tell.

I believe that religion is here because people cannot accept the fact that this life is all there is. People are willing to discard science and learning simply because it is incompatible with the preposterous myths they’ve been indoctrinated with.

I saw a “demotivational” poster online which fairly clearly sums up Christianity and its bizarre mythology. It features a picture of Jesus with his arms outstretched and says something like:

I’m going to create a man and a woman, then give them rules I know they will not follow. When they don’t follow the rules, I will burden them with Original Sin. Then I’m going to impregnate a woman with myself as her child, so that I can be born. Once alive, I will kill myself as a sacrifice to myself, to save you from the sin that I originally condemned you to.

We had sent our demo cassette to every indy label we could think of, and got a call from Lynette’s girlfriend, Debbie, saying that they liked the tape and wanted to hear more. Maybe a week or two later (I can’t remember exactly), Matt, Gavin, and I were on a plane headed to San Francisco. I was nineteen and it was my first time flying. I was petrified but excited.

Upon arrival, Lynette, and Debbie were our main tour guides. They welcomed us into their home, showed us around the city, and didn’t even get upset when I (accidentally!) broke two of Lynette’s guitars and Matt (also accidentally) puked all over their bathroom. They treated us like old friends even though we were perfect strangers.

I just learned that Lynette died last December 7th at her band’s rehearsal space. She was 37.

Goodbye, Lynette. You left a great impression on me, and gave all of us something to aspire to. Thank you for treating us so kindly. The world is a darker place without you.