Archive for August, 2008


I’m Praying for YOU! (Part I)

“I’m praying for you,” or “you and your family are in my prayers.” They’ve become the all-too familiar refrain of people who want to do or say something meaningful to someone in crisis, but don’t have the desire or the knowledge to actually do anything.

Admittedly, when one faces a deadly disease (or sees someone close to them go through it), there isn’t much you can actively do to get well. You can follow doctor’s orders, you can try to enjoy life, you can do any number of things to take your mind off of the impact that the disease is having, and will have on the rest of your life. For those who don’t know how to do anything else, there’s prayer.

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Syndication Changes (Or Not)

Since we’ve brought our new authors on board, you may have noticed some changes in the posts coming through your favorite feed reader. We’re updating more regularly, and the average post length is growing like a rogue Trapper Keeper.

In order to keep the RSS and Livejournal feeds from turning into a screen-killing torrent of word doom, we’re going to switch to syndicating summaries of the entries. You’ll have to click through to the site if you want to read the full-size posts.

Unless there’s a big a uproar, in which case we’ll think of something else.

EDIT: Okay, I lived with it for a few hours, and I can’t stand the arbitrary way the post summaries just cut off in mid-sentence. I’m going back to including the full text in the feed. I am giddy with my minuscule power.

As always, thanks for reading.

EDIT: And for putting up with my indecisiveness. Indecision. Nondecisionariness.



Big Announcement 2.0 – Seriously, Really Big This Time

After three months of nervously keeping it secret, I can finally share the biggest thing to happen to my life since I got married. No, I’m not going to drop out of law school to start a dating service for narcoleptic furries. My wife is going to have a baby.

The answer to your first question is February. The due date is sometime in mid-to-late February. If that wasn’t your first question… well, I’ve spent three months anticipating reactions to this announcement, so I’ll try to cover as many of them as I’ve thought of. If I don’t answer your particular question, or if you don’t like my answers, feel free to leave a comment. Or have your own god damn baby. Bonus ultrasound photo if you make it to the end.

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CNN screenshot juxtaposes Iran and Tennessee; connection: religion

I pulled this CNN.com screenshot at about 3:45 p.m. on Sunday 28 July:

Click To Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

The same weekend that Iran’s freakazoid religious police are hanging people for dealing drugs, being intoxicated in public, and committing adultery, someone in Tennessee goes to church and starts shooting. The grisly scene in Tennessee — where apparently even the Unitarian woo-woos aren’t safe — is the fourth time in 15 months that a freakazoid Christian went to a house of worship and started blowing people away.

My point, and I do have one, goes thusly: On the one hand, you have the state religion authorizing, no requiring periodic waves of particularly cruel, slow, public executions (i.e., suspension hanging by cranes) for infractions of social norms that civilized people would consider minor. And on the other hand, you have the quasi-state religion, kow-towed to by politicians and spoken of with superstitious reverence by the entertainment industry, that also isn’t safe from murderous fanatics.

The guy in Tennessee went to a Unitarian church because the worshipers weren’t Christian enough. That’s logic for you. They don’t follow Jesus as closely as he does — so he kills them. If that’s not a Christian message for you, I don’t know what is.

Ever seen a headline that reads anything like “Shooting spree at atheists’ gathering shocks community”? I sure haven’t. So in the interest of serious, in-depth research, I googled “atheist shooting spree.” Here’s what I got:

Click To Enlarge

Click To Enlarge

Here’s another recent headline for good measure: “Israeli parents forget daughter at airport.” The ultra-Orthodox couple — and ultra-Orthodox anything tends to involve keeping the woman at home as a baby factory, even in the States — had multiple bags of duty-free shopping, 18 suitcases, and 5 kids. Guess what got left behind? One of the kids.

[T]he parents were unaware they had boarded the aircraft with only four children instead of five until they were informed by cabin staff after 40 minutes in the air.

Let’s work this backwards: Forty minutes in the air + time spent waiting on the tarmac + boarding the plane and waiting for everyone else to board the plane (did they board early as a party with special needs?) = probably over a full freaking hour that they didn’t notice that one of their kids wasn’t with them! And a 3-year-old, at that! And because it’s that kind of blog, I blame their religion. Any freakazoid belief system that requires you to have so many kids that you forget — or “forget” — to take one of them on vacation with you should just be banned and its practitioners caned. The Yahoo! news URL references the comedy film Home Alone; instead, it should reference something like the documentary Jesus Camp.