Dialing for Darwin

Hip-hop MC Priceless Diamonds describes herself as a “boss bitch” who grew up boosting clothes and turning the occasional trick. She’s no angel, but she’s got advice. So listen up, y’all.

What’s the best way to win a girlfight?

Fight her like a girl. Hitting, biting, scratching, kicking, all that. Whatever you have to do to win. I only fight if I’m pushed between a rock and a hard space, you know? Like, one time I was coming out of the Hurricane and these females tried to jump me, so I had to defend myself. I pulled out her fake ponytail and everything. There were two. They wanted to jump me over a guy, as usual. Over jealousy and envy. I had the guy, and she saw that she couldn’t take him from me so she wanted to fight. It was so embarrassing because everybody’s watching. The whole club was outside watching the fight. But at the time, you so mad, you don’t care what anybody thinks or says.

My mama always told me, if you get jumped, grab one of ’em and beat the hell out of ’em. The other ones will fall back. This was in high school. I’d been in a fight already. I probably lost a couple, but I won a few, too. But I did fight. If you don’t fight, then they think they can punk you. And they’ll keep punkin’ you — they ain’t ever gonna leave you alone. Better to fight and lose than never fight at all.

The “Girlfight” song was really stupid. But it said what be happening. When she said she and her girls was down to ride, and they riding around in their car looking for the girls, and if they see ’em, they’re gonna jump out and tear them bitches’ heads off. Younger people out there do that. People our age, I don’t see us doing that anymore.

Got a question only Priceless can answer? E-mail her at bossbitch@pitch.com.

Dialing for Darwin

Oddly, an editorial in the Vatican’s official newspaper arguing that intelligent design shouldn’t be taught alongside evolution didn’t get a lot of play around these parts of the prairie.

In his editorial in L’Osservatore Romano, Fiorenzo Facchini, a University of Bologna professor of biology, endorses Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. He also supports a federal judge’s ruling that outlawed the teaching of intelligent design in public-school science classrooms in Dover, Pennsylvania. “If the model proposed by Darwin is held to be inadequate, one should look for another model,” Facchini argues in the January 16-17 edition of Vatican City’s newspaper. “But it is not correct methodology to stray from the field of science pretending to do science.”

Ouch.

Vatican leadership signs off on anything that goes into the paper, so many news organizations rushed to report that the pope himself had clarified his evolution position. A New York Times headline read “In ‘Design’ vs. Darwinism, Darwin wins point in Rome.”

The Seattle think tank behind the intelligent-design movement, the Discovery Institute, issued a statement saying the Times was “trying to put words in the Vatican’s mouth” and dismissing Facchini as “a little-known writer.”

We were curious what local ID-olators thought of the Vatican’s supposed stamp of disapproval for their pseudoscience.

“I don’t have any respect at all for your paper,” John Calvert, managing director for the Intelligent Design Network, told the Pitch. “I just can’t believe the way that you treated Connie Morris [Justin Kendall’s “Unnatural Selection,” August 18, 2005]. It is just atrocious. So I am just not comfortable. You guys have an agenda, and it’s wholly, in my mind, inappropriate. So I would rather not talk to you. Thank you.”

Then Calvert hung up. For the record, our agenda after that call was to portray Calvert as having bad phone manners.

We were feeling a little chatty, so we called University of Missouri-Kansas City med-school professor William Harris. We asked him what he thought of the Vatican’s editorial. “You know, I don’t think I really have any thoughts on that,” Harris said. “I’d like to kind of stay out of the press on this issue.”

Fair enough, but then he added, “You guys didn’t do us a big favor the last time you reported. We don’t think that you’re particularly unbiased.”

And then Harris hung up. Another expert lacking phone manners.

We were starting to feel like a telemarketer. We decided to skip straight to the source and end the controversy. So we called the Vatican and asked to speak to Pope Benedict XVI. After putting us on hold, the operator mistakenly transferred us to L’Osservatore Romano. So we called back and asked if the pope was free to chat. “No, you can’t speak,” the operator said. “You can write a letter.” We wanted to know if he’d really read our letter, or if it was like sending one to Santa. “He will reply. It will take time. It will take time, but he will reply.”

We’ll let you know when we hear back.

Net Prophet
Shadowing Jessi