Craigslist Double-takes: Part 1

I was surfing the Seattle craigslist today, and came across a couple entries that made me do a bit of a double-take...surely not the strangest craigslist entries, but they made me chuckle a bit.

Firstly, under the "event" category was Christian Pastor Needed For Wedding Ceremony:

We are being married on August 29th, and would like a Christian Pastor to perform our ceremony. It is a laid back, backyard wedding, and we are seeking a professional, warm person to marry us.

First of all, I don't understand how you could not have someone that you would want to perform the ceremony - if the Christian community is that disconnected, we have a problem. Oh wait. I have a whole nother blog on that topic. But even if you didn't have a church per se, what brings you to post on craigslist for a pastor for your wedding? Looking for someone to mow your lawn? Sure. Write a website? Great. Maybe even walk your dog? That works too. But legally bind you in holy matrimony to the love of your life? Really? It boggles the mind.

The other was less outrageous, and more of a double-take. It was in the writing section, and the title was Science Blogging. Okay, I figured, I don't exactly feel like writing about plants and animals and cells and chemicals and stuff, but I could...heck, I could even write a good bit about DNA and enzymes and more complicated stuff like that. But then I read the body of the ad:

Looking for self motivated computer savvy person to write a number (2-3) of blog posts for the site:

www.P212121.com

The site's primary focus is on macromolecular crystallography.

If you are interested, please send us an email including your experience in crystallography and a writing sample.

Now I checked out the blog and all, and it's interesting enough. But it's that last phrase that got me..."please send us an email including your experience in crystallography...and a writing sample." Now I only have a vague idea of what crystallography is. It's what Watson and Crick basically stole from Rosie Franklin and went and discovered DNA with, leaving her to die of ovarian cancer, probably exacerbated if not caused by those selfsame X-ray crystallography efforts.* To just casually throw that out there alongside a writing sample, as if it were "please include your experience in operating an automobile" or "detail your accomplishments in the field of eating dinner" is jarring, to say the least. Not to mention simply titling the post "Science Blogging" when the subject of your site feels comfortable sitting around the table with phrases like "electron spectroscopy", "nanolithography", "photonuclear experiments", and "synchrotron radiation source" is just plain mean.

*There are two things you should know about this sentence: firstly, it's a terribly cynical and pessimistic view of events (but not wholly inaccurate), and secondly, it may or may not be gramatically sound. But it's 3:30am, and I'm blogging about a nasty bit of politics surrounding the discovery of DNA because of a craigslist post. At this point, I relax my standards ever so slightly.