I have been a fan of switchfoot for a long time now. Since their first album came out and I have seen them in concert multiple times. I highly recommend you check out their newest album released today: Oh! Gravity (iTunes|Amazon.com) released today. Go give it a listen at least 🙂
Monthly Archives: December 2006
Twisted Twist-Tie Twisters
I am rather certain the people who twist the twist ties on the children’s toy boxes are bitter, bitter people. I’m certain that they come home and they don’t kick their dog, mostly because they might have eaten the dog, but they sure are snippy with their kids. They’re also a few twist ties away from starting a stick version of World War III. I know they’re paid in rice and hookworms, but these people can’t be OK.
I told Jessica that next year we’re making all of our presents for everyone so that we can avoid any twist tie inflictions for others. Amazingly we got a very limited number of blister packed (AKA: Satan’s packaging) toys to open for the kids. I hope that you’re Christmas was blessed with no twist ties and no blister packs.
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas readers of this blog. I hope that you’re not actually reading this on Christmas because you’re blessed to be with your family celebrating the birth of Jesus. But if not, I hope that you have a good day 🙂
Here’s a very strange video proving I need to not eat so much sugar, its 15MB because I need to learn how to use some of this software.
Illegal Information That Should Not Be Posted to the Internet
Illegal information such as my sister’s recipe for peppermint marshmallows. I don’t know where she keeps it stashed, but just like the Colonel’s chicken recipe it should be locked up and forever banned from being published. Unless of course the military made it in large batches and delivered it to the middle east. I’m pretty sure it would take care of most of the problems there because people would be stuffing their faces with peppermint marshmallows instead of planning taliban terrorist things.
They’re great, but I think you just need to register with the state if you carry them on your person. And maybe you need a prescription to acquire them. Thanks, Becky 🙂
The Collective Buttocks of the Music Industry Have Spoken
In what can only be described as either insane or completely normal for insane people the Major music labels of America, AKA:” The people who would sue your grandma if they found out she had MP3’s on her computer – even if she didn’t know how they got on there,” are suing the Russian MP3 sharing site AllOfMP3.com for 1.65 trillion dollars. In case that sounds like a lot of money, you’d be wrong. Because in Russian Rubles it would be 43.378995 trillion rubles. OK, that’s the same amount of a lot of money.
Yearly music sales for the major labels is only $40 billion worldwide or roughly one fortieth of the sought reimbursement. Granted that the attorneys in this case, if their pipe dreams come true, will get a large chunk of that. So maybe a handful of attorneys join the world’s wealthiest billionaires, displacing Bill Gates as most hated human being because everyone else is jealous, or maybe this silly site is going to disappear, the Russians will not pay a ruble, and the RIAA will go about suing grandmas, teenagers, and complaining that music sales keep dropping because of the Internet. Surely no one could possibly be buying less music because they don’t want another Britney Spears album, they never wanted a Paris Hilton album, and they also did not want another new album for the asking price of $18.00 a disc. Oh, and nobody even whispered in dark rooms or in back alleys that they wanted a Kevin Federline album.
I of course keep knocking out number one hits like there’s no tomorrow. Like this.
Sarah Connor, Look Out!
The self checkout machines, yes the ones I wrote about before, had an error today when I went to the grocery store to buy a few ‘post-blizzard’ items. On the screen was a great geek/sci-fi present:
A robot that is going to terminate that has bypassed the security function. Ha!
Yeah! Bathtime!
Snow Storm Samba
Do you ever watch the news? Why? Woops, that was a bit negative 🙂 We’re having a snow storm here in Denver, you may know this. Its not a big surprise, it happens a couple times a winter and yet every time it happens the local news goes into full coverage. Full coverage goes like this:
Anchor: “Well, [insert weather person’s name here], what’s it look like out there?”
Weather Entity: “Its a blizzard out there! Snow is falling fast and hard.”
Anchor: “I hope we can get home!”
Weather being: “Lets check-in with one of the poor saps that we sent out there to stand in the snow so you can feel like you’re getting live coverage as a viewer. Leslanda, can you hear us?”
Leslanda: “Weather Person, I’m getting blown around here, there’s lots of frozen water that is forming puddles of frozen snow mass.”
Weather entity: “Leslanda, how are the roads? Are they clear?”
Leslanda: “There are many accidents because pretty much everyone around here forgets that snow is slick.”
And so they go forth with this nonsense like a scripted replay. Its like Dancing With the Stars only its a newscast.
It happens over and over every year. Because weather is news. And news sells commercials. And commercials sell sex. And sex sells pretty much everything – which means storms are good for business – if you can get out of your driveway.
Hermeneutics and Knowing Where You Need to Study
I was chatting with my Uncle Eric earlier today and had asked him where he got his deep insights into God’s word and he wrote some tidbits of wisdom into the IM window and I just had to share:
“Part of it is that I just read an awful lot. I also try to place myself in the place and culture and circumstance of a passage and let that tell me what areas I am just ignorant of and where I need to do more research. Until my knowledge of a situation can actually animate the characters and speak the words, I know I haven’t got the right information on the background. All too often we let our modern American preconceptions animate the characters and their motives.”
And later in the conversation:
“The thing lacking in our protestant hermeneutic is historical imagination. I don’t mean the wild, guessing kind. I mean the ability to drop ourselves into a situation and imagineer it into reality so that some interpretations are rejected out of hand, and others are cultivated until the real one is coaxed out.”
Good stuff, I thought. In short we need to think about what we do know so that we can begin to dig deeper into what we don’t know.
Easy Pickin’s
OK, so commentary on CNN articles is not as uncommon on this blog as I’d have thought it would be. But when they write articles like this one talking about bad statistical analysis, its hard not to say something. I quote, “More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study.” You do the math: someone’s leg is engaging in premarital sex without the rest of their body. Either that or their over-simplification of the percentage means that they stink at evaluating the quality of the statement. One more than nine is ten [if you didn’t know that before, I doubt you’re reading this]. Therefore saying more than nine out of ten would be like saying more than zero out of one. If you use a whole number ratio make sure that the whole numbers add up. The reason that the report later says 95% is because 95% works in a 100% scenario. If the number had been ninety percent, then I’d be OK with things, or maybe even 80%, but no, they had to involve appendages and non-whole bodies engaging in sex.
And I think that’s just wrong 😉