Hm. Apparently I am deeply distrusted by most Americans just because I don’t need mythology to get through the day. American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology. From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households,… Read more →
Year: 2006
Bachelor Weekend continues
Bachelor Saturday kind of disappeared: I stretched out Saturday afternoon for a short nap, and then woke up at 2AM. Apparently I needed an 11 hour nap. I rattled around the house for a bit, watching a couple of decent flicks (The Big Empty which was weird but fun, and Layer Cake which I quite enjoyed) and then went back… Read more →
Bachelor Weekend
Tomorrow at 7AM Trish and Sarah are headed off to Ontario to visit Sarah’s grandparents until Tuesday. That means I’ll be bachelor-man for four days. It is a sign of my advanced adulthood that what I am most excited about is not the potential for sloppy drunkeness, or rowdy behaviour, but rather the notion that I will be able to… Read more →
I am not making this up
I had no idea what was happening. I had come home from poker Tuesday night around half an hour after midnight, and had puttered around for a while, finally going to sleep around 1:30, and the next thing I knew Trish was screaming at me. I kind of expected Trish to wake me up on Wednesday, as she does each… Read more →
No Virus Keeps Me Down.
Instead of resting and recovering tonight, I opted to instead go into town and be a part of the Halifax comic scene. At one point, if I had been carrying a video camera, I could have shot a 15 minute short feature, in one take, that would have won awards. Awards, I say. I would have titled this feature “The… Read more →
I Can Shoot Fire From My Hands!
You know who really talks with his hands? Donald Rumsfeld. It’s like he’s doing some kind of hand jive in every picture you see of him. And the one’s I’ve been seeing lately show a disturbing trend. First, he’s got this kind of “Look, nothing up my sleeve” pose, that just makes me think he’s trying to misdirect us from… Read more →
I need to write something SERIOUS with that…
The good news Friday, which was somewhat overshadowed temporarily by my illness, is that my birthday gift from Ralph arrived. This year, he made me a gorgeous fountain pen, turning some box elder (a.k.a. “Manitoba Maple“) to produce a really wonderful item. The pen’s cap is threaded, so you can screw it on to the pen (I assume this is… Read more →
“Celebrating” St. Patrick’s Day
This year was pretty clearly the worst St. Paddy’s Day of the decade for me. I was already mocking myself on Thursday night because my plans for celebrating were basically: 1) dress Sarah in a green shirt 2) go see V For Vendetta which is a much less rambunctious celebration than it has been for most of the last decade.… Read more →
Yes, that is my wife. Yes, that is my daughter.
(Note: This is pretending to be about politics, but is really about MY WIFE and MY DAUGHTER being in the newspaper. So, if you don’t care about the political stuff, keep reading until you get to that part!) I know I go off a lot on American politics here, way more than I do about the homegrown kind, and there’s… Read more →
More head-shaking… but with an optimistic ending
Well, the news today on the Feingold thing is pretty amusing, in a “laugh so I don’t cry” way. Democrats are literally scampering for cover, and avoiding the question, in an attempt to avoid upsetting people. I know it’s been said almost to death, but they are never going to amount to anything until they stand for something. Here’s snippets… Read more →
Future generations will shake their heads…
That Ted Rall, he’s such a kidder. Oh. Wait. It appears he’s not, and we’re really in that retroactive legalization period. From the NYT, last week: Moving to tamp down Democratic calls for an investigation of the administration’s domestic eavesdropping program, Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday that they had reached agreement with the White House on proposed… Read more →
QOTD
From a friend, visiting the national capital: “so many bureaucrats, so little fire” Read more →
Countering errant nonsense
As a kind of response to the recent heart-breaking polls, I present a classic article from Scientific American, 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense, which in turn presents 15 common anti-evolution arguments and then proceeds to answer and refute each one. Here’s the list of “common arguments” that are answered: Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or… Read more →
Grabbing viral video
Have you ever been watching a video on Google Video, or YouTube, or somewhere and wanted to snag yourself a copy of the video? Maybe you want it because you want watch it again later and don’t want to lose the URL. Maybe you want to convert it to some other video format for another use. Maybe you want to… Read more →
Impeachment Forum
Remember that post about the Lapham’s essay on impeachment, and the report, etc.? If you were interested in that, you should see SixThreeFive.com, which tells you how to do your bit for impeachment. It also hosts an audio and video that you can dowload of the recent Harper’s Forum on the subject of impeachment. The forum was entitled “Is There… Read more →
