Would you like to see something funny?

This, right here? This is pretty funny.

But this is funnier.

And I find this to be most amusing of the three.

Test

Testing out the post-by-e-mail feature.

We're all winners, deep down.

I hope that my kids will end up with the same attitude towards the awards for participation that Big Nate has.

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Now playing: Yoko Kanno - Farewell Blues
via FoxyTunes

Isn't it a great day for baseball?

Went and saw the M's play at the company's expense. Not just that, I got to sit in a "Private Suite" with the wife and a bunch of folks from work with their significant others. It's kinda like a luxury box style-sort-of-thing. Catered food (pizza, chicken, hot dogs, hamburgers, tasty beverages, chips, etc) HDTV and all from almost exactly behind home plate in the second deck. It was fantastic.

The game went well too. Ichiro went 3-4 with a run and an RBI. Griffey drove him in with a double in the bottom of the 8th to score the go-ahead run.

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Now playing: Living Sacrifice - 180
via FoxyTunes

For my brothers and my dad

Washing machines... of the future!

Kill the Rooney Rule

Mike Tomlin is the head coach of the Steelers because he's black.

He's a good coach, but the reason he beat out the in-house contenders of Whisenhunt and Grimm was because they were white and the team's owner and instigator of the "Rooney Rule" couldn't pass up the opportunity to hire a black coach. Think about it, would Dan Rooney, who lent his name to the rule that requires at least one non-white person be interviewed for a head coaching vacancy, decide to then not hire that candidate? No, because then he would have been excoriated for hypocrisy: that he wanted to interview but not actually hire them. He was caught in a trap of his own making and forced to hire Tomlin.

He was fortunate enough to get someone competent, but I think it's clear enough that Whisenhunt would have been an even better choice. Tomlin took an already successful team back to the play-offs and then to the Super Bowl. Whisenhunt took a perennial punching-bag, a team that was synonymous with failure and ineptitude, and turned it into a champion.

So now that the brilliant team owners in the NFL have enshrined racial prejudice as a policy in their league at the position of head coach, they seem to think the appropriate step is to expand their policy of judging people by the color of their skin and mandate that non-white candidates be interviewed for General Manager vacancies as well.

(In that ESPN article I linked, the only possible reason to note that Rooney is a "lifelong Republican" is to attempt to forestall arguments against this considered expansion of institutional racism. Since Rooney is going to serve as an ambassador in a Democrat administration and, more importantly, endorsed and campaigned for that self-same Democrat for president, I'd say that he's a little less than a "lifelong Republican". It would be more accurate to say he was "a Republican until the most recent presidential election.")

England is dead.

An absolutely horrifying story via The Corner about the police forcibly preventing neighbors from trying to help save a family trapped in a burning building. I understand the point of view that it was dangerous and the police wanted to keep the casualties to a minimum, but I don't think I can ever fault anyone for risking their life to save a child. Nor does it seem reasonable to stop someone from trying to rescue a child unless it is truly and obviously hopeless, which this situation does not seem to have been. What has happened to England? 20 or even 10 years ago it would have been a story about how the police and neighbors went into a burning building to try to save the family inside.

Some animals are more equal than others.

Now there's a sentiment PETA can get behind, it seems. In Virginia alone, PETA kills thousands of dogs and cats every year that are adoptable. An average of almost 6 a day. I suppose we can at least be reasonably assured that the killing is done in an ethical way.

Via NRO's Media Blog.

They do draw the line somewhere.

Who'd have thunk it? Episcopalians do have some standards, apparently. While they are willing to ordain women, have homosexual bishops and goodness knows what else, they apparently draw the boundary of their heterodoxy at allowing their priestesses to be Muslim.

I'm glad to see that, for the time being at least, they are willing to distinguish themselves from Unitarians.

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Now playing: Joy Electric - Pictures Of You
via FoxyTunes

Co-operating or co-opting?

An interesting article looks at the spate of relatively recent religious references and motifs in science-fiction. I'm not sure what I think about it all. On the one hand, it's heartening to see that many people have enough familiarity with Christianity to include such references in their pop culture entertainment. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I like Darth Vader being the product of a virgin birth and the connection of Christianity to the Matrix has always seemed much more tenuous to me than how it seems to be perceived by others.

If I still have any readers, I'd be interested in your thoughts.

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Now playing: The Echoing Green - Waterfall
via FoxyTunes

Wait... what?

I couldn't quite believe it, but there's video to prove it. At least at the moment; the web is a transitory thing.

Puts me in mind of another joke. (My apologies to any friends who have strong feelings about Illinois.)

Champ Clark loves to tell of how in the heat of a debate Congressman Johnson of Indiana called an Illinois representative a jackass. The expression was unparliamentary, and in retraction Johnson said:

"While I withdraw the unfortunate word, Mr. Speaker, I must insist that the gentleman from Illinois is out of order."

"How am I out of order?" yelled the man from Illinois.

"Probably a veterinary surgeon could tell you," answered Johnson, and that was parliamentary enough to stay on the record.

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Now playing: The Echoing Green - Sanctuary (Razed In Black Mix)
via FoxyTunes

Quick hits

A couple links from John Derbyshire in The Corner. The first needs no commentary other than to say that it's hard to imagine having something worse befall you in this life.

The second surprises me a little. Mr Derbyshire is such a fan of Samuel Johnson that I wonder this didn't occur to him.

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Now playing: The Echoing Green - She's Gone Tragic
via FoxyTunes

"I'm not dead!"

It's just been a crazy busy month at work. And, it's carried right to the end of the month so the next month can start out busy and just keep the madness rolling.

Whee!

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Now playing: The Echoing Green - Sanctuary
via FoxyTunes

More like aluminum

*sigh*

First he acquiesces in the inference (watch the clip, if you don't get that from the transcript) that the Republican party is similar to the Nazis, and now he says abortion is A-okay. Someone remind me why Michael Steele was a good choice to be head of the GOP?

Baseball Trivia

Which baseball player who played for only one team, has the most HRs?

Answer here.

Time for a reminder

The time will come when future generations look back in horror that we ever allowed the aborting of babies in a similar fashion, though with a greater abhorrence, to the way we look back in horror at the time when our nation considered others to be less than human because of the colour of their skin. The difference will be, to my mind, that those who compromise with evil now are guilty of a crime of greater magnitude than those who compromised a century and a half ago. Every political compromise should be taken with the goal in mind of eventual elimination, not of reaching a permanent consensus in the middle-ground.

If it ain't broke...

Yeah, I never found Dr Holsinger's (4th down the page) explanations of why it was better to use BCE and CE very convincing either. And consider that I went to an avowedly Christian school.

Standards?

Why would I bother to defend my standards when I can merely obfuscate via hypocrisy by ridiculing you for having standards at all?

From the forests of Endor

Still the single greatest comic ever.

Turn that phrase.

My youngest brother is a pretty smart guy. And, while everything he said in this post was pretty good, the phrase that really caught my attention was "grow some common sense, and see [FDR] for who he was - the economic equivalent of Jim Jones". It's magic!

Men of culture

"The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetites.
...
Henry Ford's observation that history is bunk is a perfectly proper observation for a bourgeois industrialist, and it was followed with equal propriety by another: 'Creeds must go.' Technology emancipates not only from memory but also from faith."

~ p. 112
Ideas Have Consequences

And no one wants that.

I ventured back the Reading Room for a bit tonight. (Hope that wasn't a mistake; I can easily lose a lot of time reading posts there.) And one post struck me. I've discussed various things with Beren IV previously, and while I think he's quite intelligent, he seems to fail to grasp some of the things I argue because he doesn't approach from the proper perspective.

Anyway, he wonders about the believability of a story that doesn't have more people die from objective hazards. That is to say, why do people in LOTR not die just from bad luck or the accumulation of chance? I didn't read all the replies, and because I didn't, I'm posting my thoughts here instead of there.

There is a very simple answer, which is that it is necessary for the plot that the heroes not die at the wrong times. Even in true stories, we don't read about the people that die at the beginning of what would be the tale. Because then there isn't any tale. No one wants to read a 20 page book about a hero who falls, unluckily, to a chance arrow just as he sets out. Even in real life we only read the stories of men who lived long enough to accomplish something.

So when we start a book, we begin with an expectation that the hero, or one of the heroes will survive throughout or at least until right to the very end of the book. So much suspension of disbelief is required to even get the story going.

My favourites are the vending machines

An aptly named website with the nastiest as well as the most enticing unhealthy foods you can imagine. And some you probably wouldn't have thought of yourself.

Honorifics

"Honorifics are mere flummery, to be sure, but one must not overlook the truth that they represent an effort to distinguish between men and men of parts. When not abused, they are an explicit recognition of distinction and hierarchy, a recognition that cannot be dispensed with where highly organized effort is required."

~ p. 160
Ideas Have Consequences