Ben McKenzie’s short play A Record or an OBE – in which Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor of famous British comedy troupe the Goodies try to carry on after Bill Oddie’s (fictional) departure in 1975 – returns for seasons at the Adelaide Fringe and Melbourne International Comedy Festival! A Record or an OBE stars Ben as Graeme and Rob Lloyd as Tim, and is directed by Scott Gooding. Tickets are one sale now; check out the Shaolin Punk web site for more information.
Tag: Adelaide Fringe
Here’s an experiment you can try at home.
Just to show me they appreciate their starring role in my show, a bunch of microorganisms have decided to swarm and multiply in my throat, first making their presence felt at 5am on the morning I left for Adelaide. I’m booked in to see a doctor today; we’ll see how the little rascals do trying to evolve their way around some antibiotics…
The problem is, of course, that some bacteria have evolved resistance to antibiotics. Remember, these microscopic villains reproduce incredibly quickly; even though some species do not reproduce sexually (and therefore lack the sophisticated variation of those who do), they still have more than enough variation through simple mutation over the millions of individual organisms and hundreds or thousands of generations that are currently living inside me to have a fair crack at it.
But never fear; the Man in the Lab Coat’s mighty constitution (at least 14, for the D&D nerds out there) is up to the task of battling these foul invaders, even if medical science isn’t. The corpuscles are massing, indeed the offensive has already begun, and come Friday my sweet voice shall be unadulterated by germs.
See you all at the show!
Lift Off.
Tickets have started to sell for [intlink id=”46″ type=”page” anchor=”Evolutionary”]Evolutionary[/intlink] in the Adelaide Fringe, especially on the cheap nights (opening night and Tuesdays), so be sure and book in early via FringeTIX if you want to get in! Note also that the venue is the Basement Bar, not the Lounge Bar as originally advertised, though I’m still at the Lizard Lounge.
In other news, did I ever tell you about the research that suggests bats have an evolutionary trade-off between brain mass and testicle mass? A survey of bat species showed that the larger their brains, the smaller their testes, and vice versa.
I think there’s a message in that for all of us.
Evolution Sunday: Wow.
In case you haven’t heard, Evolution Sunday is the latest part of the Clergy Letter Project, a collection of clergymen who are standing up to be counted and insisting that Darwinian evolution via natural selection is perfectly compatible with Christian faith. On Evolution Sunday, preachers from around America spoke to their congregations about Darwin and his theory in a positive light.
One day, we’ll look back on this and wonder why it was all necessary. Seeing something like this makes me wonder why I spend so much time and energy promoting the idea of evolution, but the answer I always come back to is that it’s wonderful. It’s an elegant, beautiful, powerful idea that makes such amazing sense. I find wonder in it without any sort of religious connection, but I’ve no bone to pick with those who find wonder in both. The bone has always been with extremism – both the Creationist kind, and the kind that uses natural selection to justify rascist, classist or otherwise -ist nonsense. Slowly the power of that extremism is ending in America, though there’s still plenty where it came from.
Adelaide is two weeks away. Get yourselves ready.
Evolutionary confirmed for Adelaide Fringe!
Evolutionary: The Man in the Lab Coat Evolved is coming to the 2006 Adelaide Fringe Festival in March! See the shows page for more details.