Monday, July 30, 2007
If you see this guy on the street....
I know that they say you shouldn't post pictures of yourself in your blog, but I just couldn't resist. I'm not quite as "Homeresque" as depicted, but I'm working on it.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
More late night TV thoughts
Friday, July 13, 2007
A short short story.
Laika was dying. She was doomed to die, slowly, of asphyxiation and heat exhaustion, and the visitors had seen it all. Their ship had scanned earth for lifeforms, and found the surface teeming with life, almost everywhere, but only one life form was detected in orbit, and her life force was rapidly weakening. Her craft seemed to have little purpose, other than the slow death of the inhabitant, and the hearts of the watchers went out to her, and cursed the beings who had done this to her. Occasionally, the capsule would send out a radio signal of her fading life signs, mockingly. There was nothing to be done. Well, almost nothing. While the watchers were forbidden to interfere, no one was watching them, so they thought they’d have a little fun. Universal laws were made to be broken, or so they said. Once Laika was most certainly dead, they brought her craft onboard theirs. Reviving her was no great task, but, of course she would never be who she had been again, which was probably a good thing. They proceeded to improve her, and her craft, making it capable of safe re-entry, and making her, shall we say, formidable. They would trace her back to where she had been sent to her doom from, and return her there safely. When she was sent up she weighed around 13 pounds, and was a quadruped canine. When they sent her back she weighed 85 pounds, and could choose between quadrupedal and bipedal locomotion, and she was strong, fast, and smart. Very, very smart. Although she was not really who she had been, they implanted one thought in her new consciousness. Revenge. Her now glowing white eyes shone with joy for her task. Laika would be avenged by her own reanimated body.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
da Vinci, schma Vinci.
In the forward of the book, Dan Brown asserts:
“FACT: The Priory of Scion – a European secret society founded in 1099 – is a real organization. In 1975 Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Scion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci."
By now everybody knows the central secrets at the center of the book.
1 - The church has spent the last two thousand plus years repressing the importance of women in the church, and by extension, repressing women in general.
2 - Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, and had children, whose descendants walk among us today.
These assertions are made based on the author having read, and believed every single word of a book called “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, which is based on the assertions of the document mentioned in the forward to The da Vinci Code. The Priory of Scion is supposedly devoted to protecting the bloodline of Jesus, whose descendants include most European royalty. It’s all pretty tenuous to begin with.
Unfortunately, the document that all of this is based on has been conclusively proven to be a total fraud, perpetrated so the actual author could claim to be the legitimate King of France. Even more unfortunately, exposure of this fraud tends to discount these actual secrets:
1 -The church actually HAS spent the last two thousand plus years repressing the importance of women in the church, and by extension, repressing women in general. This isn’t actually a secret, anyway, so much as POLICY.
2 - Although Jesus and Mary Magdalene were probably not married, she was a very important disciple of Jesus.(She even wrote her own gospel.) Her not being noted as an actual apostle is a very clear indication that the churches repression of women started very, very early. And, yes, her being generally cast by the church as a prostitute sure does confirm the whole repression thing, doesn’t it?
So, although Dan Brown’s intentions were actually very noble, basing his assertions on fraud, rather than facts just serves to bolster the repression of the actual facts by obscuring them in a haze of nonsense and paranoia.
And on top of all that, the book is actually pretty awful. Not Stephen King awful, or even Michael Crichton awful, but pretty awful nonetheless. I hope the book I am waiting for at the library comes in soon, so I can read it instead. It’s about String Theory. Don’t get me started on String Theory. I’ll probably blog on it later.