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"The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
--Albert Eistein
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**...****...**
Actually, as a Deist, I am capable of believing in a form of "Evolutionary Creationism," and I think that that cartoon may be closer to the truth than we realize.
Picture this scene, roughly 64 million years ago....
God: "YO! Aziraphael! Come here!"
Az: "Yeah, boss?"
God: "What's the status of Planet 3, Star 24,308,331,302, Galaxy 456,981,003,776?"
Az: "Hmm... let's see... largely tropical, supercontinent breaking up into fragments, large numbers of a lot of species of reptilian life, a few primitive mammals, that's about it."
God: (sighs) "Anything getting smart?"
Az: "Doesn't look like it. We're guesstimating that there's a .00042% chance that one of the raptor species MIGHT reach sentience... eventually."
God: "No, No, that's not good enough odds. Hmm. Okay, here's what we do. You know those leftovers out in the cometary halo?"
Az: "Yeah?"
God: "Gimmie a chunk, say, 20 kilometers wide. Bring it in... let me see that map... oh, right on that little peninsula. That should be enough. We'll start over again with those little shrew things. Bump up their adaptability a bit, let's go for bipeds. I haven't done bipedial mammals in AGES."
Az: "You're the Boss, Boss."
Out in the Oort cloud, a big ice ball gets a little unseen nudge...
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"Ed Gruberman, you fail to grasp Ty Kwan Leap. Approach me, that you might see." -- The Master
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"What he did to that walrus gentle-man was inexcusable."
-T. Herman Zweibel on "Mr. Woodrow Wood-pecker", The Onion, 7-Nov-2000
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Buffy: "See, this is a school. And we have students and they check out books and then they learn things."
Giles: "I was beginning to suspect that was a myth."
- Buffy: The Vampire Slayer