Indiana Jones and the Abandonment of Everything Before It

I just got back from Indiana Jones and the Crystal Cathedral.  Great googly-moogly this was a complete re-hack of the previous movies just look at all of the similarities:

 

Raiders of the Lost Ark, Last Crusade or Temple of Doom Crystal Meth Sameness
Older Harrison Ford Younger Harrison Ford 60%
Witty lines Witty limes Fruity
Nazis Reds 100% same, only different
Wrath of God Wrath of trans-dimensional aliens 0% sameness
Double Crossing Double Crossing much sameness
Sean Connery Picture of Sean Connery 10%
Indy as Junior “Mutt” as Junior -9000%

I could go on with the similarities, but as you can see by the above chart there’s so much in common between the past Indiana Jones movies and this one that if you’ve seen the first three, this one’s a re-run.

Actually, its totally different, which was either refreshing, or not. Either way, we enjoyed the movie on an entertainment level, but were let down because we wanted to have that nostalgia come back, but instead found the difference too great to just feel like we’d come back to see another story in the same series.

Kudos to Steven Spielberg for not casting ET as one of the aliens – or having reese’s peanut butter product placements within the film.

Also Kudos for magnetic materials being attracted to the highly magnetic aliens only some of the time. It made for more suspense wondering when something would be attracted and when something would be artificially non-metal.

Also, Also Kudos for having the noise of a small class rival that of a full auditorium sound effects people, it was awesome.

That’s The Fork Calling the Knife Cutlery

In what is an ironic twist of science meets computers meets religion a “scientist” used a “computer program” to determine the origins of “religion” in “Michigan”. You can read an article about it here if you want to. I’ll pick some excerpts to poke holes in or poke fun of below in case out of context quotes are your thing:

The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others.

I got confused when I read this line because I was pretty sure this was the definition of journalism. Clearly the journalist who wrote this has the intellect to determine that because no time machine has been invented and mass produced and marketed yet that one of the clear issues this concept faces is that a computer program does not equal verifiable information. It also indicates that when you use the word assume, and the author does, that you’re not using facts, you’re using assumptions. I’m going to assume the author is a chimpanzee, though this is not a fact, it is merely an assumption. Or the author has a religious gene, but its being portrayed in the temple of the media.

The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people – those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.

Here the author is clearly implying things about people with marketing degrees and those who blog. Marketing bunks and bloggers debunk, right?! Don’t sell them what they need, sell them what they want. Or maybe this is a typo and he meant ‘reel information’ and ‘unreal information’ as a euphemism to fishing stories involving fish that get bigger and bigger. I can’t tell.

“[Now] you can be a Lutheran one week and decide the following week you are going to become a Buddhist.”

Ah, the classic argument about the issue of ‘being’. Philosophy at its finest. If you’re being a doctor and then the next week you are being a mechanic you better not force your co-workers to call you doctor when you’re tinkering with transmissions. And if you get sweaty on your brow asking bubba to come over and wipe your forehead like you might request a nurse to do is just out of the question 😉 But seriously, being a Lutheran and then being a Buddhist the next week is improbable if you’re truly being something. The change will more than likely be gradual and involve a disinterest rather than be this quick. A quote of generalization about religious attitudes from a less religious professional does not a good article make. Unless of course you want to pass along unverifiable information to people because of a genetic disposition. In which case those pants make you look fat, Mr. Callaway. I can’t prove it, but I’m willing to publish it on the internet for religious reasons – its in your jeans.

More Barns In More Places

We’re in Kansas any more. We entered the state in the AM and will finally be out of it in the PM. It is a sad state to drive the width of because the only things to break the horizon are grain silohs and barns. Periodically a town will dot highway 70 with overpriced gas and pornography for Roman people who are 30 (XXX).

The girls are being mostly good and my iPhone is getting mostly good reception. I just want the wind to stop blowing so that the car doesn’t feel like we’re going to Oz Oh, and Kansas is the boyhood home of Bob Dole, who became a congressman and got out of Kansas to represent the state in Washington DC, a much more populous place, but you can drive through it just as slowly due to traffic and construction.

Praying for Spam

I have been getting some interesting blog spam lately.  It doesn’t get published because of Akismet, but the latest rash has been coming from a ‘guy’ named ‘gary’ who has any number of problems that need prayer, but most involve the word pray or prayer an inordinate amount of times and usually also involve ‘DD’ in the content.  Maybe ‘Gary’ needs a breast enhancement and is raising money to do so via blog spam.  Example:

URGENT………………..

Kindly request to have prayer groups passing on praying the wisdom and strength from God for 9 to 20 departments need to be assisted to reach DD by Aug 2008. My family are in a financial difficulty and need to seek for ways of confronting with wisdom and ways.Let the honor to God
(from: Gary)

Maybe I should pray for ‘Gary’ to have a supernatural man-boob growth so that he’ll stop spamming my blog.  Of course the problem with that is that ‘Gary’ might then just spamming my blog comments with weird trans-gender link requests instead.  So maybe I should pray that God would give ‘Gary’ access to a good counselor or a friendlier inmate.  I don’t want to make too many assumptions, but an inmate would definitely be involved with some places that want men with ‘DD’.

Spam is one of those blessings within a curse because you hate the spam, but it brings such immense humor with it.  I think that we should kill all the spammers, but after they’re dead they should be forced to go out on stage at comedy clubs and then further forced to read out loud their emails.  Well, some of them anyway, I don’t think we need some of the more perverse letters read, but you could go with any number of the financial transaction spams and get people rolling.

Hicks

My grandparents have a pond on ther farm in Northern California.  A mere thirty miles from the rocky cliffs of Mendocino.  I think that Mendocino is a Spanish word for hippies and liberals, but since I only took two first year courses in Spanish you should probably look that up.  Yes, I took the first year course twice.  Es muy bueno.  El queso es viejo y tiene molde.  Anyway, my grandparents pond supplies the water that comes out of their faucets.  The water tastes like fish swim in it.  The fish do swim in that water, so I feel good about it tasting like pond water.

The problem is that I’m on a business trip down to Grapevine, TX.  The water here tastes like fish swim in it.  After being filtered by a multi-dollar filtration system that I’m sure the city paid good money to have put in incorrectly.  The water has probably been filtered with a fish net and a pair of used pantyhose.  I know that sounds cruel, but you’ll find that they have signs that indicate that the water is ‘Superior’ by some random test that is performed by drunk people who have had their tongues cut out.  The drunk tongueless people find the water superior to the toilets that they were reversing into the last time they stepped past drunk and into vomiting mode.

The upside is that our friends the Mason’s gave us several bottles of contraband.  I believe we have several bottles of bottled water that has been filtered to the point of tasting like nothing.  Nothing is exactly what water should taste like.  It shouldn’t taste like fish, kool-aide, teriyaki or Coors.  Oh , or perier.   But God has grace so that when we defile the water with labels like ‘Coors’ or Naive ‘Evian’ the water doesn’t just turn into air through an instant evaporation process so that we’re smitten for suggesting that God’s creation wasn’t good enough.

I just wanted to let you know that I like water… I just like it to taste like water and not sushimi gone awry.

Oh, and I’m thankful for the Mason’s giving us water that you can drink and be proud of.

Mind Games for Driving

I’ll be driving to Indiana this upcoming Thanksgiving week.  The best part of the drive is the mind games I have to play with myself to make the drive endurable.  I like the destination enough, its the road that makes me just a bit batty.

Colorado has a speed limit on the highway of 75, if the roads are dry and iceless then you can do a great jaunt to Kansas.

Kansas is the state that sucks.  The most out of the drive.  It is like driving across an empty piece of paper that is 410 miles long.  There are ruined old shacks sitting in the distant empty fields and porn towns (gas station + adult store with ‘town name’ sign at highway intersection).  To make my way through Kansas a little more exciting I’m going to poke my eyes out and drive with cruise control on.

Illi-noise, which is a special state where relatives live, is the dumbest state of speed limits that are falsely low.  Instead of the speed of geniuses 75 MPH, they have a speed limit of 5 MPH.  I know that doesn’t sound probably, but once you’ve been driving through Kansas at whatever your vehicle will do Illinoys’ 65MPH speed limit seems like a drug induced psychedelic experience of pain.  I think I’d prefer to have a porcupine stuck in my shoes when I’m not looking than drive 65 through Illinaise.  If you live in Illinoose how fast do you drive on the slow-ways?

Indiana has a speed limit of something I don’t recall.  I think its 70.  However, since I’m usually exhausted when I’m driving through it it doesn’t matter.  I play the game with myself that Indianapolis is about half way through the corn state so that once I’m getting into it or out of it I’ve accomplished something.

What things do you recommend to make the drive more sane?

Contrary to the Rumors I Have Not Been Acquired by Google… Yet!

Good golly Google is gobbling up web web properties like the interwebs were just one huge yard sale of properties for them, Microsoft or Yahoo!  Of course other companies like Cisco are more judiciously making acquisitions.  I don’t want you to be afraid that RPDRND and its web properties are being gobbled.  Nope, nobody wants a piece of this pie.  Apparently they’re not nuts over this kind of nuttiness.

Such is life, I guess I’ll just have to be happy with being second rate 😉

In Case Your V@9!n@ is a Roller Coaster

Why on Earth do advertisers demand that commercials have weird, weird, weird implications?  The latest maxi-pad (feminine napkin) commercial drives me bonkers!  Who decided that they should describe a woman’s body part as a roller coaster?  At what point in time does the average woman find herself in a situation where she thinks, “I have got to get a maxi-pad that can handle this Jennifer Garner/Alias type activity.  Periods & my daily commute simply don’t mix.”

This sort of thing scares me mostly because I know they’re working on a more extreme commercial with tree chippers and chinchillas.  I don’t know how they’ll fit, but its coming.

Funniest Cruise Story Ever!

My old boss (and sort of boss now that I’m a contractor for the same company) wrote about his latest cruise – he’s still on it – but its been painfully stupid.  You can read about it here.

I would encourage you to leave a comment of your own cruise experience if you’ve been on one because it’ll surely be read by others who find this post amusing!