Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge

Some of you may have noticed that the Refuge looks a little different than it did yesterday morning. This is no accident.
When I returned to blogging in January after a four-month sabbatical, I swore I would avoid returning to my previous form and spending many hours a week mocking the same people or entities hundreds of others with more exposure and panache were already pointing at and deriding. I wanted to focus almost exclusively on the science-related areas about which I am most qualified to write — exercise physiology (particularly in endurance exercise) and doping in sports.
But soon I succumbed to easy temptation, and my own unbridled antipathy toward various forms of intellectual dishonesty once again had me generating superfluous nonsense by way of convincing people of conclusions every sane person has already reached and that those between the cross-hairs have no interest in entertaining.

I became a part of ScienceBlogs by riding on Doc Bushwell’s coattails. She’s a personal friend who shares a lot of my views and whose wit, compassion, and wisdom have enlightened and entertained me in all sorts of ways. In 2006, she was generous enough to let me and Jim contribute what we might to her Chimpanzee Refuge, then a humble Blogspot locus with maybe 50 visits a day, many of them by mutual runner friends. When someone finally noticed that Doc’s ability to combine an usually erudite bench-monkey’s grasp of applied biochemistry and pharmacology with a delectable dose of strategically deployed sarcasm and scatologia, she was asked to join this group of blogs, and Jim and I with her.
It’s been a treat having my posts gain more attention than they ever would have otherwise, and I’ve appreciated the often caustic and invariably dead-on comments — and corrections, where needed — some of the Irregulars have provided. And if you all knew how hardworking and personable the Seed overlords are, you’d wants to have their children and eat them too. But I am not a scientist. I’m a guy with a reasonably strong layman’s grasp of the basics of and some of the intricacies, but that’s it, and he areas of science in which I do have a considerable grounding are of little interest to most. Simply put, I’m out of place here, and this is true no matter how strongly some might argue they were entertained by some of my ranting and cursing.
I entered this arena as someone whose own blog focused mainly on competitive distance running and to a lesser extent on culture wars, whatever corner of biosphere I happened to be writing from, and whatever else I may have noticed that day. I made no effort to popularize this blog, preferring to believe that those it would best serve would find it one way or another. I’ve started doing this again, and it feels a lot more comfortable and a hell of a lot less theatrical. And probably as a result of this mini-renaissance, I’ve begun to notice the various drawbacks of being part of a “community” this ponderous.
When I weigh spending more time reading and studying, exploring the outdoors, and hanging out with my girlfriend against reminding the world )always with the volume cranked all the way up) that imaginary faeries and unsupported beliefs about various medical and health issues are just that, it’s an easy call. I don’t want to immerse myself in the septic ignorance trumpeted on more blogs than anyone can count; I want to avoid them and the functional illiterates who write them, a task easily managed in meatspace. And if I am to stand a chance of finishing the long-range projects on which I’ve made some progress, I gotta bow out.
That is all I have. Those of you whom I know outside of this place know where and how to find me. to the rest…San Dimas High School football rules!