…to ashes

It’s Ash Wednesday again and you (may or may not) know what that means: yup, today is the day when the charcoal bunny hops to the houses of all practicing Catholics and smears an ashy cross on their foreheads. This is an ancient custom in which we are exhorted to remember that we all come from ashes and to ashes we shall all return. The visual effect of this is something akin to the zombies in “The Serpent and the Rainbow”. To me it has always looked a little creepy. Today also marks the beginning of the Lenten Fast, or Lent where traditionally Catholics abstain from eating red meat until Easter weekend. While this obviously means different things to different folks (or nothing at all to some of you) to me, I tend to think of it as the last mass celebration of faith that hasn’t been commercialized to death. Yeah, I know, major chain restaurants are gonna start pushing their fish and poultry menus, but, other than that, you’re probably not going to hear much about it. That, by itself, was enough to catch my attention – particularly in a culture where political correctness dictates the how and why of mass-market holiday cheer and trendy, conglomerate churches close their doors to the faithful on Sunday because it was also Christmas morning… and no one wants to go to church on Christmas, right? feh

In any case, my personal religion (and interpretation thereof) is fairly fluid; not a strict set of doctrines and laws but rather a loose set of guidelines that I use in my personal relationship with God. It’s in this vein that I participate in Lent by giving up for 40 days something or things that I like. This year I have a veritable laundry list:
-1. I will give up smoking. (yikes)
-2. I will give up beer and malted beverages. (Wine and liquor are okay, its just beer that is not good at all for my doughy physique)
-3. Unhealthy snacking. I will be allowing myself a day of celebration every week where crap-foods are allowed. Remember, moderation in all things. Except smoking. That’s right out.
-4. I will give up fast food. Yup, this one is gonna kill me.
-5. Pornography and all the happy stuff that goes with it. I shan’t elaborate=)
-6. Lastly, I will be giving up a bit time each evening to sit with my boys, perhaps with my guitar, and quietly interact with them.

So there it is, my contribution to spiritual harmony during this holiday season.
LaChaim!

Geek Life

Did you know that gray hairs apparently grow faster than regular hair? Wtf is that? I shaved my dome to bare skin a while back and yesterday I noticed, poking up above the skyline like an evil Space Needle, was a gray hair! It was literally twice as long as the rest and required immediate clipping so I rolled 20’s and was able to dispatch the fiend with haste and prejudice.

What else is new? Ah, new shoes! I’m the guy who only buys shoes once every 5 or 6 years, so while I had a little time before my psyche class/group therapy yesterday I ambled over to the shoe place, scored a natural crit, and nabbed a new pair of sneaks! Sweet.

Lets see, what else...? grr, this past weekend I hooked up the water line to my fridge so we can have filtered water and unusual ice cubes on demand. While it seems like this is the kind of thing a person could attempt unskilled (me being multi-classed as a father, hubby, ass-hat driver, IT toon, furniture repairman, student and erstwhile Paladin… you’ll notice ‘plumber’ is nowhere in this list) evidently the DC for this is much higher than I expected. Shoddy, unskilled workmanship produced a midnight encounter with a loose hose and 100 BILLION gallons of water. Fortunately, our party had plenty of towels and a bucket and the next day I rented a carpet cleaner to suck up the rest of the mess. *sigh*

Also new (for me) is a free internet service called Pandora. This is just plain awesome as it puts together up to 10 ‘radio’ stations for you based on a song or artist and plays music similar to the kind you’ve listed. For example, my ‘Dar Williams’ station gave me a song from Dar I was unfamiliar with, a song from Catie Curtis and one from Edie Brickel right off the bat, all similar in their tone. The same was true for my ‘Fountains Of Wayne’ and ‘Cowboy Junkies’ channels.
This is particularly useful for me as I generally don’t listen to music on the radio so my only exposure to new songs or artists are from my friends or from TV shows. Now, I just have to be sure not to fumble on my RIAA check =)

Thanks Guys=)

I think you guys have nailed it for me. A fundamentalist base sets itself up in such a way that it has overwhelming control over both public opinion and policy. Combine that with the numbness Travis spoke of, out-and-out apathy and the approval of the silent majority and you wind up with an Orwellian cocktail designed to erode civil rights. Toss in some dogmatic ice-cubes and suddenly you have a group like the muttaween wandering the land, in broad daylight, and in full view of the government. This situation could be a symptom of an ass-hat fervor, which could potentially lead to the behavior that started me thinking about all this.

Now, because of the way I initially gun everything through my “everyman’s” frame of reference, after reading your comments I went about preparing a response. And then it hit me. The situation I just described exists today in our nation: The so-called “Minutemen” operating along the U.S.-Mexico border. These folks have taken it upon themselves to patrol the border and detain and/or eject whomever they believe are crossing illegally, sometimes violently. A decidedly ominous parallel.

It seems almost laughable to consider that, in the extreme, a group like this could evolve into a roving, patriotic police checking green cards on us ‘brownies’ and menacing anyone without a yellow ribbon magnet affixed to their car somewhere… until you look around and see the state we’re in now. Little old ladies accosting hippies where they live, a grieving mother’s shrine to all of the war fallen vandalized…
-I seem to have strayed off-topic here=/

In any case, you guys have helped me think through an awful subject and in doing so helped me to avoid facing up to my own prejudice and hypocrisy and for that I thank you=)

Addendum-

Here’s a bit I came up with this morning whilst arguing with myself: Saying that Islam has a predilection for violence because of the muttaween is like saying Christianity is inherently violent because of the Ku Klux Klan… Does this mean that the ancient cycle of violence will eventually die down after a civil-rights renaissance? On the other hand, the muttaween is all but sanctioned by the various governments that are in essence, if not in fact, theocracies. Doesn’t this lend a bit more credibility to the muttaween? It seems to me that the most support the Klan ever got was a long, blind eye from a few ass-hat congressmen, a governor here and there and David Duke.


Perhaps I’m just letting my pessimism cloud my judgment here.

Thank you Trav, it's good to hear from you=)

- back in this post i asked for input from anyone who cared to throw in and my good friend Travis answered my call readily. this here be my response to his comments:


Thank you for responding on this T, I really appreciate it and I can see how my post was unclear. I’d like to say that I did it intentionally to help spark debate on the subject but in honesty, it was just sloppy writing on my part. …However it does bring up a extraordinary point: In the past 25 years there have been no other groups implicitly tied to a single religion that have been responsible for so much hate and misery. And I’m not just talking about suicide bombers and death-threats to publishing houses. I’m talking about women who get stoned in the street if her husband accuses her of adultery. I’m talking about little girls getting beat to death by a roving religious police (called “muttaween” - sort of a murderous neighborhood watch) for not averting her eyes at the right time or allowing too much skin to be seen, even if she has just had the misfortune of being raped and her clothing is torn. And, if I can be allowed to more firmly snug the ass-hat onto my own head, if bloody, reactionary violence isn’t at least more acceptable to Islam, where is the public outcry against this behavior?

You are right though, I don’t think that the Protestant or the Catholic religions are directly responsible for the ass-hattery in Ireland nor do I honestly believe Buddhism was responsible for the ‘killing fields’ in Cambodia. I say to myself, “It must be the same with Islam.” But, what do you call it when the radical sub-groups are the only ones doin’ the talking? To me, it’s analogous to Christian fundamentalist groups blowing up abortion clinics all over the world, continuously, and the Christian Coalition issuing a press statement saying that ‘while they deplore the violence, its God’s work being done.’ Sadly, the only differences here are the scale of the acts and the fact that other Christian groups from all across the world spoke out against the violence. Where is the outcry from the Islamic world?

Also, in the case of the Crusades, if there were at that time a worldwide organization capable of stopping the violence, wouldn’t it be their responsibility to do so?

In any case, intellectually, I believe Islam to be a religion of peace and tolerance and a focus for spirituality.

I have decided.

Sort of. Alright, let me start of by saying that I simply do not understand racial prejudice and intolerance. At all. Maybe it comes from an enlightened state of being brought on by growing up in a multi-cultural household. Or, maybe it comes from living (for the most part) in the 2nd most liberal leaning state in this great union. Perhaps it just comes from watching Star Trek my whole life, I mean, c’mon, when was the last time you saw an Aryan Nation booth at a trek-con? However I come to it, I seem to have a fairly broad tolerance for the differences between myself and people of other cultures and races.

Now. With that out of the way, let me say that I am very close to aligning myself with the far right and declaring that radical, Islamic, militant fanaticism needs to be stamped out. I mean, at what point do the arguments for tolerance, cultural diversity and freedom of religion become moot? At what point does the world, as a community, say that the violence happening in the house next-door needs to be stopped? When do we, as socially conscious citizens, decide that the protection of innocents supersedes the moral imperative of being tolerant of a group practicing their religion? I don’t know, but if we are not there yet then I think we are approaching that time quickly.

I am neither dim nor reactionary and I am familiar with many of the arguments but because of the unusual (for me) way I feel in this matter I can’t help but think that there is something fundamental I’m missing here. And so I am asking for your opinions on this. Please. Because moral dilemmas suck and I would appreciate your thoughts.

(Written by Kevin Griffin and Tom Drummond)


Will you fight
For the cause?
Can you teach the savage mind
Their ways are wrong
Help them see
What they want and what they need?
And if we have to twist their arms
They know not what they do is wrong

And if you said I would go to heaven
Now, maybe I'll try
And if you said I would go to heaven
Now maybe I'll, maybe I'll, maybe I'll try

Heretics and hypocrites
Wear the same face throught the years
Of telling lies
And laying blame
Damn the fire then feed the flame
Don't dance, or sing, or try to think
Their image is planted in your head

And if you said I would go to heaven
Now, maybe I'll try
And if you said I would go to heaven
Now maybe I'll, maybe I'll, maybe I'll try

Ivy is just a dog
With a heart that's noble as
The greatest man
Who ever lived
Won't you please help her learn?
And if we have to twist her arm
She knows not what she does is wrong

And if you said I would go to heaven
Now, maybe I'll try
And if you said I would be a rich man
Now maybe I'll, maybe I'll, maybe I'll try

Maybe I'll try.
Maybe I'll try.





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Impartial? feh

It was recently remarked that I use my ‘bad-movie formula’ (or bad movie formula) to keep from having to watch stuff I don’t wanna. Yeah, that’s me. There is a lot of perfectly good stuff out there that is simply not on my radar. Call it my post-Ring II defense mechanism but its difficult for me to get past what I know (or what I think I know) and try new things. And up to now, it’s worked out pretty well in as far as I can tell. The upshot is a circumstance in which everything involved sucks and it works for damn-near everything- Politics und politicos? They all suck. School und work? Sucks. Burning down KFC’s because of an insensitive cartoon? Stupid AND sucky. Smoking and/or quitting smoking? Top 2% of suckiness.
The best part of all this is I’m rarely surprised by the sick, sad world we live in. However, when I am surprised, in those extraordinary flashes when my Cassandra-like prognostication fails and I’m proven utterly wrong, it’s delightful. It rocks. Such was the case when I viewed Underworld: Evolution. Yeah, I know… a sequel begat from a sub-par movie born out of a genre more fractured, hackneyed and derivative then any other in the horror film pantheon. So I’ll come right out with the verdict: it didn’t suck. Here’s the breakdown:

Who was involved? Kate Beckinsale. She’s purty. Everyone else is b-list or lower… not that that’s a bad thing or anything, I just don’t care enough about them to piss on them right now. Except for director Len Wiseman, Kate’s lucky man. Len was also responsible for directing the first opus and it’s my opinion that he should seriously start thinking about another career. Don’t feel bad, Len, I don’t play tennis because I suck at it… find something you are good at or just stick to defiling Kate.
What company was involved? That would be Sony Screen Gems and a look at their credits between now and 1999 (when the company’s properties started being directly responsible for movies since 1974) is anything but stellar. I thought ‘Arlington Road’ was interesting but the rest is suck-tastic.
When was it released? January ’06, that’s right… the poop-chute for the vast majority of awful movies.
How long did it take to get made? No idea but the way cheesy Hollywood works we can safely assume that it was green-lighted immediately after the original’s release… in 2003.

The story, such as it was, wasn’t so much a sequel as it was simply a continuation of the original- like a 106-minute alternate ending or a reeeealy extended edition… like the ‘Matrix’ sequels; nuthin’ new, just more of the same stuff. Not super, but, if you liked the original and wanted it to be longer, this here’s for you. Now, why doesn’t it suck? Well, I liked the original as an action/horror genre movie. I mean the story and acting weren’t great and it screwed with some of the more familiar vampire conventions but I didn’t watch it expecting something smooth like ‘The Hunger” or even something mediocre and funny like “Fright Night”. Naw, it was what it was: blood, guns and fangs and so is it’s sequel. The best part tho was this: it was free! When you don’t have to pay for a crappy thing, it becomes less crappy! And that changes the equation. Yup, the internet is a vast and wondrous thing and it's nice to be wrong occasionally=)

*TRUE* Vice President Dick Cheney Blows His Load All Over Face of Another Man!

(Cribbed almost entirely from CNN.com)

The campaign contributor accidentally shot and wounded by Vice President Dick Cheney during a weekend quail hunt is "doing well" and will be released early this week, a spokesman at Christus Spohn Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, said Monday.

Peter Banko told CNN that Harry Wittington, 78, took "quite a bit of spray" in the face, neck and upper torso but is recovering nicely after he was wounded Saturday afternoon on a vice presidential friend's south Texas ranch.

"He rested well last evening and is in stable condition in our trauma ICU," Banko said. "We'll know a little bit better later this morning, but he should be released within the next day or two. He's doing well."

Whittington, an Austin attorney who gave $1,000 to President Bush's 2000 campaign and $2,000 to his 2004 re-election bid, was among a handful of people accompanying the vice president when the accident occurred Saturday afternoon.

Cheney visited him Sunday afternoon at the hospital, "and was pleased to see he is doing fine and in good spirits," spokeswoman Lee Anne McBride said.

New Plaything

Now, I know, I should be setting up encounters and honing my esotericism but I just couldn’t deny my blogger-envy anymore and just had to fool around with this Castpost thingie=)


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More Than Meets The Eyes

I don't know if this is real or not, but, it's being billed as "test footage" on the pirate sites'... either way, it looks cool enuf for me to renew my promise to Michael Bay- fuck it up and you'll die horrifically=)

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miles of smiles

this

plus this

plus this

plus this
plus this

...equals geeky fun on Saturday night=)

I Don't Get It

Really. Honestly, I don’t get it.

Chalk it up to my ethnocentricity but I just don’t get what all of the hubbub is about. Okay, the cartoon is offensive, there’s no doubt about it, but, people are rioting about it. Heh? It’s a political cartoon. Its purpose is to annoy somebody somewhere, right? Now newspapers and television news reports won’t even show it, not even so we can decide for ourselves if its offensive or merely inane. Ug.

And there is talk of self-censorship on the part of political cartoonists and their editors. Censorship. Really. Over a cartoon.

I asked someone today what the big deal is here and they told me, “Extremists are stupid. Lets play some Katamari.” Now, this was from one of the most liberal people I know and, try as I might, I couldn’t come up with reasonable counter-argument. Extremists ARE stupid and it seems to me that religious extremists are reaching the top rung on the anti-Mensa ladder. Where the hell is the restraint? The understanding? The tolerance? Why is it that the only time I ever hear about the Islamic community is when some 12-year-old girl gets beaten to death for not wearing enough clothes? Or in conjunction with radical/terrorist activity of some sort? Sure, it’s easy to knee-jerk to the far right and blame the liberal-bias media or promenade to the far left and blame, well, the mainstream media, but that’s not solely where I get my news. Like many of you, I get my news from many different sources, left, right and centrist and the results are nearly always the same: some journalist telling me about how Islam is a religion of peace and the Quran preaches tolerance and how some idiot walked into an internet café and blew him or herself up. Because an Imam told him to. Now there is a 30K dollar bounty on people connected with this set of cartoons. Great, now the SAS has to go put fresh paint and carpet in Salman Rushdie’s old place. And, btw, where is this level of moral outrage when it comes to horrific prisoner abuse?

Now, again with my ethnocentricity (or theocentricity) but to my mind this is like a local bishop telling me to go kill a bunch of folks because a political satirist made a joke about choir-boy-groping priests.

"choir-boy-groping priests..."

So I don’t get it. Why not just boycotting the cable channel that aired the show containing the remark? And what's the contrition like for missing Bill Maher and accidentally hitting Ann Coulter? (Bless me father for I have missed my mark…) So, I’m trying to get it and I’m trying to be open-minded although I only have my limited frame of reference to try to make sense of things.

But I may have a solution, or a partial solution. They (we) need a spokesman. They (we) need the equivalent of Martin Luther King, Jr. elucidating from the rooftops that the gun-toting, anti-Semitic, anti-west jihadists do NOT represent them. Loudly. Forcefully and with conviction to any idiot with a camera. *sigh* Where are you Rev. Mohammed Luther King-Ali Jr.? We need your help.

I have always asserted that there will eventually be a karmic realigning of sorts, a snapping back to purpose, if you will. Call it ‘coming down off our collective sensationalistic-reactionary purple haze’ or even checking in with our common sense on a global scale. But it seems like it’s a long time in coming if it’s coming at all and I’m starting to despair.

Sweetness

Yesterday was my 12th wedding anniversary so I thought I would share with you, my hypothetical reader, a few of the things I like about my darling wife.

I love your eyes.
I love your smile.
I love the way you care for everyone in your life, barring none.
I love the way you stomp your little feet when you are angry.
I love the way your ass looks both in and out of jeans.
I love the way you made the things that are important to me important to you.
I love your laughter (even when its directed at me).
I love the way your hair smells.
I love the way you are always trying to improve yourself.
I love that we have interlocking body parts.
I love that you are smarter than me.
I love going to bed with you.
I love sleeping next to you.
I love that you are a clueless microbiologist.
I love watching our favorite shows together.
I love riding in a car with you, singing at the top of our lungs.
I love watching you interact with our boys.
Mostly, I love your awesomely huge heart and I would not trade a single moment of our married life for all the hot chocolate in the world.

I love you bebe=)

Rambling Man

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I’ve been engrossed in other media forms for about a week and a half – much to my delight=) lets see- on advice from my friend Evan I checked out what was happening in the DC comics universe and the new Stephen King zombie novel (ty Shareaza, you slow-assed but incredibly wealthy bitch) along with a few others. So for the last few days I have been lost- immersed, if you will- listening to Clive Owen reading “Cell” to me or watching the interactions of some of my favorite comic book characters. Btw, if you haven’t given comics a fair shake as a story-telling medium you should- forget whatever misconceptions you have about crappy, four-color, melodramatic serialized storylines that always seem to end with a villain caught in a bat-rope or with a steel girder wrapped around him and go over to Evan’s blog and pester him mercilessly about a tale that’s right for you. Truth be told, all of my positive comic book experiences comes from his wealth of knowledge with only one or two exceptions.
If you are feelin’ frisky and want to try exploring on your own, here are a few suggestions:

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman
-Thoughtful, compelling and thoroughly absorbing- if you are a fan of Neil Gaiman’s fiction you should not miss this.

The Watchmen by Alan Moore
-A multi-layered narrative about superhero archetypes and how they would function in a semi-realistic world. If for no other reason you should pick this up for the chapters dealing with Rorschach.

The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman
-Zombie movies generally deal with the event, i.e. the thing that causes the zombies to get up and get their groove on, and the ensuing 48-hr struggle for life… this book asks the obvious (and less explored) question, “What do we do now?” If you like the zombie genre you should definitely give this a shot.

The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
-Ah, everyone’s favorite Caped Crusader (with all ‘POW!’ and the ‘CLANG!’ and the ‘BIFF!’) has retired and is living the good life… until Frank Miller steps in and describes for us in details both stunning and subtle just how frickin’ crazy Batman is. Not a little crazy like how if my car isn’t perfectly centered between the lines when I park, I’ll sometimes spend a minute or ten straightening it, no… deeply disturbed like with the gradual realization that there is no Bruce Wayne and that there may have never been one to begin with.

Starman by James Robinson
-I remember when Evan suggested this title to me I tried to figure out if it was someone I had heard of before and I said, “Oh, you mean that guy with the staff and nothing else interesting about him, right?” Well, being the good’un that he is Evan didn’t react violently or even caustically (as I prolly would today in any similar situation), he even went so far as to dig his entire collection of Starman comics out and piled them neatly on my desk. And I am very glad he did because I still haven’t read a story that appeals to me in as many ways as this one did. Very funny, very poignant, very human and all in a visual medium that had some familiar faces as well as new ones.

The only warning I may throw at you concerning this particular medium is this: whenever possible read the stories in the graphic novel form rather than as a collection of serialized monthlies. I was fortunate enough to have Evan as my guide for the most part and was therefore able to either read for myself entire story arcs or posit questions at him to fill in the holes. Not so with monthly serials…. Not only do you have to wait a month for your next 22-page fix but also often there are major story devices or dramatic elements that are not resolved in the title you are reading. Now, I understand the reasoning behind this and I’m cool with publishers making an extra buck or adding extra exposure to other titles but to me it’s a little like the crossovers that you see on television (something happens on Law and Order that gets concluded next Tuesday on SVU) with this glaring exception: you have to pay extra to get the rest of the story. That sucked. It could be said that this is all moot cause I get my comics free off of P2P systems but I don’t think it makes the point less valid. The little bit of Catholic guilt that’s hard-wired into me and usually tells me to go buy or at least rent the things that I bootleg was entirely silent in this instance. In fact, it made me not want to go and buy them, at least in the monthly form. So, stick to the graphic novels and save yourself the heartache. Or, at least the neurosis.