|
Website of the Week
For those who are gluttons for listening punishment, here is my official myspace musician page.
Local Pump Price of Unleaded Gasoline:
$3.52/gallon
Price Per Barrel of Oil:
$125.96 (previously $107.90)
last modified May 11, 2008 at 18:16
I was perusing our kids' encyclopedia yesterday and came across some interesting word histories (from memory):
March: The first month in the Roman calendar, March was considered the best month for waging wars after the long winter. Since Mars was the god of war, they named it March. This also explains the Sept-, Oct-, Nov-, and Dec- prefixes that reference the months number (7,8,9,10).
Nickname: In old English, it was "eke name", literally "an extra name". After saying "an eke name", it gradually came to be called "neke name" and then "nickname".
Oxymoron: From the latin, oxus- meaning "sharp" and "moros" meaning "fool". So the meaning in and of itself is an oxymoron.
Can someone please explain to me how it is that when I wake up in the middle of the night and walk across a pitch-black house, I will trip and stumble across anything that presents itself with fifty feet of my path...yet, when one of my children wakes up, she can walk through that same darkness completely unscathed?
I am becoming more and more aware at how shallow my understanding and knowledge of history is. How can a person in one lifetime learn about about all of the extraordinary events and lives of the people that make of the complex tapestry of our past? That is, short of being a history professor who lives to be over a 1,000 years old?
When I get to Heaven, (I know you will probably laugh at this, but) one of the things that I look forward to doing is watching, God willing, in some form or another the Devil's fall from heaven, the Creation of the universe, every story in the Bible, and all the events of history. To see God's plan being worked out, bit by bit, would be, for lack of an adequate expression, truly amazing and glorifying to God.
It's a shame that what passes for history in high schools is some boring blah blah taught by a coach that allows half of the class to be used for study hall. If you are lucky, you might get a few hours in college when pursuing your degree. You are hard pressed to find someone knowledgable of current events, how much more historical events.
/ends rant, takes breath
Blessed are all who fear the Lord,
who walk in his ways.
You will eat the fruit of your labor;
blessings and prosperity will be yours.
Your wife will be like a fruitful vine
within your house;
your sons will be like olive shoots
around your table.
Thus is the man blessed
who fears the Lord.
May the Lord bless you from Zion
all the days of your life;
may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem,
and may you live to see your children's children.
Peace be upon Israel.
[NIV]
Apparrently, people are looking for pictures of that NBA star who is accused of doing some bad things.
Look at my link tracking page, if you don't believe me.
The whole debate over whether or not there are WMD in Iraq and the legitimacy of the war if they are not found reminds me of a scene from The Princess Bride.
Inigo and Fezzik have just found the Man in Black (Wesley), but it appears to be too late. The Six-Fingered Man had jacked up his torture machine to full power and allowed it to do its dreadful work on the Man in Black.
Inigo and Fezzik take the Man in Black to Miracle Max whereupon Max pokes and prods and pronounces him "mostly dead".
Max asks Inigo why he wants him alive. Probably owes you money, right? Inigo then makes up a story about the Man in Black's wife being crippled and his children on the brink of starvation. After Max sees through this lie, Inigo confesses that he wants the Man in Black to help him avenge his father's death at the hands of the Six-Fingered Man. Max does not buy this story either still thinking that it must be about money.
Using a bellows, Max fills the Man in Black with air and asks him "Why is it that you are still alive? What is it that makes you want to go on living?" Max pushes on the Man in Black's chest and hears the man mumble "True Love." Of course, Max reinterprets the statement as "To Blave" or "To Bluff".
Miracle Max's wife then bursts in on the scene calling Max a liar and saying that Max is afraid to practice miracles because Humperdinck had shattered his confidence by firing him.
Inigo interrupts their argument saying that they want to stop Humperdinck's wedding to Buttercup.
Max inquires, "Wait. Wait. I make him better, Humperdinck suffers?"
To which Inigo replies "Humiliations galore!"
Max is ecstatic. "Now,that is a noble cause!"
The legitimacy debate is so wrapped up in the existence of WMD that we are missing the truly noble cause: ridding the world of a sadistic trio of bloodthirsty and sadistic men who have demonstrated a willingness to attack their own people, their neighbors, and the United States. Their removal, in and of itself, is the greatest noble cause of this war.
With Uday and Qusay dead, the Iraqi people are letting their guards down and breathing more heartfelt sighs of relief. Angela Phelps, writing in NRO, discusses the psychological impact of their deaths and the morbid fear that these sons inspired during their reign of power.
However, it wasn't until late 2001 that I truly grasped the depth of evil in the Iraqi leadership. An article from the September 2001 issue of Maxim magazine, of all places, detailed the gruesome legacy that President Bush later revealed to the world in his State of the Union address last January 29. The article was the most disturbing one I had ever read, and still is. It recounted a story of Saddam's son Uday, who was known for preying on young, beautiful Iraqi women. One woman in particular, a college student, who refused his advance, was quickly taken from her home, hauled off to a remote compound in the desert, and for months experienced rape and torture.
When Uday finally had enough of her, he decided upon a creative disposal. Ordering his guards to stop feeding his Dobermans for two weeks, he had the girl stripped, lathered with honey, and fed to the starving animals. I doubt Uday or his father batted an eye.
And this was just one example of the Hussein family's high esteem for women. Sure, this is one of the worst cases reported, but a number of Iraqis have told me that not a single family escaped the terror of the Saddam regime. If only they could be sure that Saddam Hussein was gone for good, they'd be shouting their stories from the rooftops. You can be sure of that.
If you are like me, then you have a hard time remembering exactly which poker hands outrank the other poker hands.
For the record, the rankings are:
1. Royal flush
2. Straight flush
3. Four of a kind
4. Full House
5. Flush
6. Straight
7. Three of a kind
8. Two pair
9. Pair
10.High card
I will soon be adding two new political blogs to my blog roll:
Coultergeist
*Ann Coulter joins the fray. Billed as "her thoughts on issues and ideas of the day". No doubt, this is quite an understatement.
Southern Appeal
* The random musings of a Southern Federalist. Who is that Southern Federalist? Jonathon Adler himself.
You Buffy fans crack me up. You should watch more quality programming, like Stargate or that other Sci-Fi show with Kevin Sorbo.
Kobe Bryant has put himself into a bad situation and has saddened a lot of his fans, but I am glad that he is admitting that he did a terrible thing by committing adultery and its impact on his family.
I guess the question of the moment is that IF he is telling the truth about it being consensual sex, what motive would she have had to make up a story about being raped.
Interestingly enough, there is news today that she overdosed on sleeping pills a couple of months before running into Bryant when she discovered that her long-time boyfriend had been cheating on her. This could be devastating to the power of her charges against Bryant. The defense will no doubt argue that her 'attempted suicide' was an attempt to gain attention and that she is using the rendezvous with Bryant as another desperate attempt to gain attention.
The defense will no doubt use this as the needed motive to thwart her claim of rape (or "nonconsensual intercourse").
Quentin Tarrantino has a new movie that is to be released in two parts. For me, his movies have been either big hits [Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown] or complete misses [From Dusk Til Dawn I&II].
"Kill Bill" is the story, told in chapters, of the world's deadliest female assassin, who survives being shot on her wedding day and, after five years in a coma, seeks revenge on the man who tried to kill her. The film's samurai-style fight sequences were filmed largely in China and take place in everything from a nightclub to a snow-covered garden to a suburban home.
I guess I'm just not with it. Am I getting old? Will my kids one day think that I am out of touch? Every song I hear on the radio sounds like crap. Country....crap. Pop....crap. Rap....well, you get the idea.
***
These Hardee's commercials are getting to me. Probably not the way the restaurant folks would like. Let me put it this way, if I were suicidal, these commercials would throw me over the edge like the Hulk throwing a brick. I don't want to hear an actor trying to sound like a pausing, hem-hawing regular guy while trying to convince me to buy a hamburger. It's annoying. Very. Annoying.
***
I wonder if people will look on the disappearance of my last two months as something significant. Maybe I have been given a second chance by the powers that be to get my act together. Maybe it was the federal government. Did I say something that revealed a national secret? Is someone else using my last two months on their blog and claiming that it is their own original thoughts? I smell scandal.
Yesterday, I discovered that my site had been usurped by some Indian girl named Syaki. Plus, there were pictures of her and her family to boot. Today, I feared the same, but discovered that my site was back minus the last two months.
Half a loaf is better than none, I guess. I hope not too many of you were scared away by all the confusion. By the way, I have been pretty busy the last couple of weeks involved with several teams at work. Also, I have had "pink eye" for over a week (actually in both eyes) and it does not seem to be responding too well to the antibiotics the doc prescribed.
|
