{"id":1161,"date":"2007-10-28T16:44:27","date_gmt":"2007-10-28T20:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1161"},"modified":"2007-10-28T16:44:27","modified_gmt":"2007-10-28T20:44:27","slug":"fresh-hells-of-idiocy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1161","title":{"rendered":"Fresh hells of idiocy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I see towards the end of a comment thread, where only the trolls cavort and gibber in the ruins, two things: that someone is arguing against me on the basis of a wikipedia entry whose only substantive source is an article I wrote myself six years ago; and a sort of apology<\/a> I somehow missed when it first appeared.<\/p>\n\n

Or, as PZ puts it<\/a> in another context: Yes. Science has an integrity and dedication to the honest evaluation of the evidence that religion lacks.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Instead of brooding on the mysteries of reason, I went out to spend the afternoon in the grey light of Grafham; sometimes the wind carried a chilly drizzle, too. But it wasn’t really cold unless I was standing in the water, and even then I had the warming pleasure of watching sailors further out capsizing their little racing dinghies. Even in a wet-suit, that’s got to be colder than wading. After two hours of this, I waded ashore for the last time and drove to the harbour, where I caught a fish that had to be folded to fit into my little grayling net. This was a very nice way to celebrate the rod I absent-mindedly bought when I arrived and saw it in the sale bin. It is a Powell LGA<\/span> 906, that would have been about £450 five years ago, and which I got, spanking new, reduced to £100. In the intervening years, it has not stopped being a first class rod, while other “prestige” fly rods have grown steadly more expensive: £550 is the price of a stockbroker’s trout rod today and it is utterly ludicrous. For that money you should at least expect that the handle be covered in hand-sewn Siberian hamster scrotums.<\/p>\n\n

I’m prepared to bet that in a blind test where the maker’s identification was covered so that the only real criterion was how performance no one could reliably rank modern graphite rods by price. There was a period when synthetic materials were new in which rod manufacuters made fantastic progress. Now they know how to do it and new models are purely a marketing gimmick. Still, I have profited by this to get something really lovely. So I don’t feel entirely suicidal.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I see towards the end of a comment thread, where only the trolls cavort and gibber in the ruins, two things: that someone is arguing against me on the basis of a wikipedia entry whose only substantive source is an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}