There is nothing damning about happening to be an atheist, but there are plenty of things wrong with insisting upon it.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
A joke that I gotta share here...
Courtesy of good friend Jason Overby...
Cop: "Your eyes look red. Have you been smoking pot?"Heh-heh, clever :-)Guy: "No but your eyes look glazed, have you been eating donuts?"
AVATAR tops TITANIC as new king of the world
Honestly never thought I'd see this happen: James Cameron's Avatar has officially dethroned his own 1997 Titanic for the domestic box-office record.
It'll probably last only as long as it takes Cameron and crew to make Avatar 2, which'll make even gads more money :-P
Weather word from those in the loop...
Sources are telling me that authorities in North Carolina and Virginia are preparing for a possible 16 to 24 inches of snow this weekend.
Thought y'all would like to know.
Taking daughter to church could land daddy in slammer
Except that Reyes did so in violation of a judge's order that he not expose his daughter to anything but Judaism. For taking her to church (after previously having her baptized there) Joseph Reyes is now possibly in "contempt".
Here's more on this very twisted story...
Joseph Reyes knew he could be accused of defying a court order barring him from taking his daughter to church. But he did it anyway and now he is facing contempt of court charges and jail.The judge is clearly respecting one establishment of religion over another in this matter, and is thus a most wild violation of the Constitution.The 35 year old, holding his 3 year old in his arms, walked into Holy Name Cathedral on January 17. A news crew videotaped the act of defiance.
"I have been ordered by a judge not to expose my daughter to anything non-Judaism," Reyes told a news reporter. "But I am taking her to hear the teachings of perhaps the most prominent Jewish Rabbi in the history of this great planet of ours. I can't think of anything more Jewish than that."
The prominent Jewish Rabbi that Reyes referenced was Jesus Christ.
Just before Christmas, a judge issued a temporary restraining order specifically barring Reyes from exposing his daughter to any religion other than Judaism after Reyes had his daughter Baptized without the knowledge of his estranged Jewish wife.
Now the lawyer representing Rebecca Reyes (formerly Rebecca Shapiro) has filed a Motion for Criminal Contempt, asking that Joseph Reyes face criminal charges for defying the judge's order.
The hearing date is set for February 16 and Reyes has launched a new Web site www.christianfatherdefensefund.com to raise money for his defense.
He hopes that he will receive contributions from sympathetic fathers and other individuals who find it unconscionable that a judge would tread into the area that seems to violate the constitutional right guaranteeing Freedom of Religion.
"My daughter is half Jewish," says Reyes. "Just because my marriage is ending should not mean that I can't go to church to worship with my daughter.
"I'm a Christian, and I was Christian when Rebecca and I got married. No judge should have the right to force me to attend a synagogue to be able to pray with my daughter and no judge should have the right to stop me from going to church with my daughter."
His attorney, Joel Brodsky, says they will fight.
"My client should be allowed to take his daughter to church," says Brodsky, who happens to be Jewish. "In every way this is wrong. Freedom of religion is absolute and no judge should be able to interfere with that freedom."
That said, the religious life of the child is something that should be the jurisdiction of the parents, regardless of the legal status between them. And it should be between the BOTH of them to resolve this out of mutual love for their daughter.
Why is the Internal Revenue Service buying shotguns?
Here's the call for quotes that the IRS has put out. The agency says that the shotguns are for its "Criminal Investigation Division".
I could understand (kinda) investigating crime, insomuch as I do acknowledge that the IRS is still a legal entity despite my beliefs on taxation. But there's a far difference between investigating a possible criminal and approaching said possible criminal in a way that entails possessing means of self-defense if necessary.
Or I guess it could mean that the IRS is going to attempt to make war on moonshiners. But after what happened to Popcorn Sutton last year, y'all can be assured of where my sympathies in that would be.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
LOST Season 6: First post-episode reaction
JEEBUS CRIPES CRISPIES WITH MILK!!! TONIGHT'S LOST SEASON 6 PREMIERE WAS FORTY-EIGHT FLAVORS OF INSANITY!!!
We wanted the @$#%-ing answers? WE'RE GETTING THE @$#%-ING ANSWERS BAY-BEE!!!!!
Hey, what's John Lennon doing hanging out with Fu Manchu at the Temple?
This is better television than we darned well deserve.
Must. Watch. Again.
"LA X": LOST Season 6 premieres tonight!
This was where Lost left us last May, with this final scene from Season 5's finale "The Incident"...
(That's a high-resolution screen capture. Only the best for my readers!)
The final season of what has been called the greatest television drama series ever begins tonight on ABC. At 8 p.m. EST is a recap show, followed at 9 by the two-hour Season 6 opener "LA X".
And yes, I've got my DHARMA Initiative snacks all ready :-)
Bostic, North Carolina: Birthplace of Abraham Lincoln?
Found a curious item on the CharlotteObserver.com site about Bostic: a small town an hour's drive west of Charlotte here in North Carolina. Longstanding local folklore has it that Abraham Lincoln was born in a cabin atop what is now a tree-covered hill in this Rutherford County community, and not in Kentucky as the history books say. There is even the Bostic Lincoln Center: a small museum dedicated to the legend (which is not without its own supposed body of evidence). Either of the links will tell you more about the allegation, which is rife with all sorts of old-fashioned nineteenth-century ribaldry!
Hmmmm... fascinating, on numerous levels. I'm not saying that I do believe there's an iota of credence to the claim though (which Geoff Elliott of The Abraham Lincoln Blog describes as "bad history" and calls the Bostic Lincoln Center "one of the worst examples I've yet seen").
But I also know that history is never as clean and cut as the books make it out to be. Real life is a messier affair than most published chronicles. After all, we are talking about nothing more or less than people. So who knows?
Just gonna file this one away as a odd anecdote about the life of Lincoln, and pass this along for your perusal :-)
Bill Watterson gives interview about CALVIN AND HOBBES
I'm not gonna hit the "publish" button on this post without saying that in my opinion, Calvin and Hobbes is the all-time greatest comic strip ever. Hard to pin down a favorite "arc" but the one about the snow goons stands out in my mind as classic Calvin :-)
BIOSHOCK 2: The Uber Edition!
BioShock 2 finally comes out next Tuesday! Don't even think of buggin' me for the next few days after that, 'cuz Lord willing I will be in line before midnight next Monday evening to get my pre-ordered copy and then spend the rest of the week once again immersed in the sub-Atlantic dystopia of Rapture.
We already knew that 2K Games is coming out with a Special Edition of BioShock 2 and in this video 2K community manager Elizabeth Tobey unboxes the whole package. And then she reveals the BioShock 2 Uber Edition.
Make sure you watch the entire video...
Monday, February 01, 2010
LOST: Return of the DHARMA Initiative food labels!
We're a little more than 24 hours away from the return of Lost! Want some DHARMA Initiative munchies for your Lost party?
Here's the zipped-up collection that I put together a few years ago of a lot of the DHARMA labels that some people have created. And if you want a buttload more DHARMA Initiative stuff you MUST visit Max Pictures' blog 'cuz that dude has made some that I'd never thought of!
Still snowed in
Main roads are fine. Secondary roads are now passable. However I live on, like, a tertiary road.
Still trapped inside. More ice and snow on the way. Time is beginning to blur and become a meaningless concept. I hear things... I'm hearing things. Funny things. Personal hygiene... what? Maybe I really died in a car crash on the way back home with the pizza the other night and this, all of this, is some terrible purgatory... or worse.
Thank God I've got the gun and plenty of Cheetos.
"GOD HATES #TAGS"! Westboro Baptist nuts mocked at Twitter HQ counter-protest
Awright, what the hell has Twitter done to get the Westboro Baptist Church idiots to picket outside its corporate headquarters?
Whatever the "God Hates Fags" bunch's purpose in being there was, a lot more people showed up with some extremely clever signs mocking the "church"...
Also said to have been there was a "GOD HATES #TAGS" sign! Hilarious :-)
Click here and here and here and here and no doubt many other pages popping up documenting the hilarity, which reportedly was enough to drive the inbred progeny of Fred Phelps off the scene!
('Course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my own encounter with the Westboro Baptist loons a few years ago.)
Fifty years ago today: The Greensboro sit-ins begin
It was fifty years ago today, on February 1st, 1960, that four freshmen students from North Carolina A&T strolled in to the Woolworth's on North Elm Street in Greensboro, North Carolina for a bite to eat.
The lunch counter was segregated, as were many places throughout the country at the time. Only white people were served at it. Ezell A. Blair Jr., David Leinhail Richmond, Joseph Alfred McNeil, and Franklin Eugene McCain were black. They could order food at the Woolworth's and eat it there, but they were expected to stand and not use the stools and chairs reserved for white people.
Blair, Richmond, McNeil and McCain sat down anyway...
The four young men weren't served their lunch, and eventually left. The next day they came back and 27 friends joined them. The next day, even more people arrived. And very soon the sit-in movement spread like wildfire throughout other cities across the country.
A few months later, segregation was finished. The Woolworth's began serving everyone at the lunch counter.
On this fiftieth anniversary, The Knight Shift and its proprietor gladly tips its hat to Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain. If more people had the simple gumption that these four demonstrated a half-century ago, this would no doubt be a far better world.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Meet David Morris and his backyard observatory
David and I first met because of our mutual love for astronomy. But David, being David, took his passion to the max and pulled off what most amateur astronomers only dream of: his very own observatory! Here's an excellent write-up in today's News & Record about David and his homebrewed facility, which he has christened Smithstone Observatory.
