Chad Austin over at Chad’s Running Commentary sends word that PBS stations in North Carolina will be broadcasting the debut of a new documentary. Yah I know some people think that “PBS” means “Pretty Boring Stuff” but fact is they DO air some amazing things besides dragging Betty White and Kermit the Frog out every spring to shill for money. And if you happen to live in-state you really, oughtta, gottta watch this thing tomorrow night ‘cuz we’ve received word that it might get a lot more crazy than PBS is mostly known for. In his post Chad writes that…

North Carolina may have the most diverse mixture of dialects of anywhere in the United States, according to NC State linguistics professor Walt Wolfram. I helped Dr. Wolfram get the word out on his new documentary, “Voices of North Carolina,” which airs on North

Little after 10 PM on an early January evening here in North Carolina. Average for this time of year for this part of the night is about 20-30 degrees Fahrenheit, and if we’re getting buffeted by a winter storm that usually goes to between 5 and 20 and sometimes a lot lower.

According to the Weather Channel’s website, right now it is 64 degrees. The projected low for the next ten days is predicted to be 39.

Now, we’ve had it be this warm before only to make up for it in spades. Twenty winters ago we had a Christmas and New Years in the seventies and mid-eighties… only to suffer through a massive snow and ice storm a few weeks later that dropped the mercury to minus-2. And that was the high for a couple of days! And this part of the state went four years or ...

Someone sent me a link to an interesting article by Maureen Farrell titled “‘God Is With Us’: Hitler’s Rhetoric and the Lure of ‘Moral Values'”. I know nothing about Maureen Farrell at all, but this is a pretty scary read in that she notes the uncanny parallels between the semantics of the Third Reich and what George W. Bush says (which his followers parrot). The gist of Farrell’s piece is that anyone can say the right words and make the correct gestures and come across as a devout and God-honoring Christian. That… and also that people are foolish to blindly follow such a person without also examining his underlying character (you know: the things and beliefs that really define what a man is). The German people got hoodwinked by Hitler because of his rhetoric, and now many Americans are following suit behind another man and judging him by slick ...

This is now officially the first film of 2005 that I want to see. Last year it was Miracle and it didn’t disappoint. This year it’s going to be Hotel Rwanda with Don Cheadle and Nick Nolte, and I only decided that I wanted to see it this bad a short while ago when I read ComingSoon.net’s interview with Cheadle and watched the trailer. I vaguely remember this, come to think of it: the hotel manager in Rwanda who turned his palatial resort into a safe haven for hundreds of refugees during that country’s civil war a little over ten years ago. Here’s the link to the trailer (in Quicktime format): even this short preview makes for some powerful stuff.

Kinda ironic that I’m just now finding out about this movie, ‘cuz today I started reading Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story ...

The past few months I’ve been blissfully unaware of anything happening on the Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith front. But when Ain’t It Cool News screamed that they had a ton of RotS pics I succumbed to the temptation. Still don’t know most of what happens in this next movie (one of the reasons I had to retire from TheForce.net: spending almost 3 years before Episode II came out and learning EVERYTHING about it beforehand lessened my enjoyment of the final product) but the below image has good vibes coming out of that ugly face…

Gotta love Vox Day: for one thing he’s a brilliant Christian thinker. That focus on things from the eternal perspective makes his essays noticably bereft of the temporal goals that muddle the minds of many other essayists. He’s also a published science-fiction writer, which merits his being way up on the geek totem pole of respect and awe (am trying to figure out where I fit in this scheme of things: I’ve written some sci-fi but haven’t sought to publish it, but am almost finished making a short sci-fi film that will be distributed… so maybe I’m a “quasi-master geek” 🙂 And he’s one of the darned few columnists that I make it a point to read every time he’s got something to say: there ain’t many real intuitive thinkers in this world since Thomas Aquinas back in the day, and I like to study what few masters that ...

‘Nuff said. That and also: May the mistakes of 2004 give us wisdom in 2005.

(Hey, I can be hopeful, right? 🙂...

Found a piece by John Gleeson in the Winnipeg Sun titled “Christianity rises again in 2004”. From the title alone I knew this was going to be headed in the way wrong direction. An excerpt:

Even in Canada, where secular liberalism has ruled for decades, 2004 has seen an unprecedented outpouring of scriptural argument as part of the national debate over same-sex marriage. Never in recent history have so many Canadians publicly stated their unswerving commitment to Christian principles…

Part of this new, vocal Christianity is undoubtedly a reaction to the rhetorical zealotry — and actual threats — of Islamic extremists. And part of it has to be a reaction to the increasingly shallow popular culture that surrounds us.

Gleeson is trying to frame Christianity within temporal boundaries… which isn’t where it belongs at all. Hence, he continues the sin that many Christians – cogent of it or not – ...

Maybe it’s because the end of the year usually elicits reflection on the past twelve months that I’ve been putting the serious thinking into overdrive lately. So here goes one more (probably not the last before 2005 hits).

The American people are idiots. The men, women and children of the United States are too lazy and willing to be led around like they had a chain through their collective noses to deserve freedom at all, for the most part anyway. Actually, they don’t want freedom to live and think for themselves: they want someone else to do it for them. So it is that the American people have become a slave race.

For the past several months we saw most of this land’s citizenry get whipped-up into a frothing frenzy over two men who wanted the White House. How often did it occur to us that neither one deserved what ...

And the 9.0 earthquake in Southeast Asia two days ago proves it. The biggest quake in 40 years was so strong that it slowed down the Earth’s rotation by approximately 3 microseconds. It was a release of more energy than all the nuclear weapons that all the world’s nations have ever produced. It might have moved the island of Sumatra 100 feet from where it originally lay. One estimate has the death toll at 60,000 and possibly climbing to 100,000 or more. The Christmas 2004 earthquake will go down as one of the worst disasters in human history…

…and this is supposed to pale in comparison to the threat of undisposed styrofoam cups?

There’s no need to go over what’s already been said in the wake of this tragedy: our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Southeast Asia that got hit by this thing, and unfortunately ...