Is that a cephalopod in your knapsack?

He’s a nerdy science guy who makes a lot of science-fiction jokes and has people waiting for his next “Friday Cephalopod” blog post.

P.Z. Myers fans ooh and aah at his intellect and exploits, whether he’s talking about the mating habits of octopuses or riding a giant plastic dinosaur while leading a field trip of skeptics to Ohio’s Creation Museum. He has even earned a guest spot on the Web series Mr. Deity, playing God’s science adviser.

In real life, Myers is a biology professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, where he specializes in evolutionary developmental biology (what the science nerds call “evo-devo” so it sounds cool). In the blogosphere, he’s the author of Pharyngula http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula, an extremely popular site at ScienceBlogs, and he’s become very well-known as an outspoken atheist.

Well, he’s an atheist except for when he’s advocating the worship of Cthulhu, a god invented by horror author H.P. Lovecraft that bears a striking resemblance to a cephalopod … er, giant octopus.

To say that Myers is “irreverent” is an understatement.

He’ll be making three local stops on a lecture tour of California, which makes it easy for locals to find out what all the fuss is about. OK, so Myers isn’t quite as famous as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. He is a really, really smart guy with a perverse sense of humor (don’t believe me, go read his blog), and he’ll be lecturing on the topic “Evolution in Light of Creationism and Intelligent Design.”

Nothing exciting about that, right?