Envious About Tree Guts

My budy Trint has a home made rock climbing wall. He has outlined the construction in a rough sort of way and taken lots of pictures. Of course the worst part of this is that I have a garage, too. Maybe I could talk to my dad about the best way to have a rock climbing wall that goes into the rafters in my garage… just kidding, Jessica. I know we don’t have the money now. But I have the desire.

Pardon My Hurlage

I just got a letter from ‘St. Matthew’s Churches.’ That would be a letter requesting I pray on their ‘prayer cloth’ then have someone else pray on the ‘prayer cloth’ and then send the ‘prayer cloth’ back in an envelope (hopefully with some money) with some checkboxes checked for what we need prayer for. I put quotes around ‘prayer cloth’ because its a cheaply printed picture of a very white Jesus with his eyes closed. And, if I have enough faith Jesus will open his eyes and look at me.

Yuck! This scam is rather annoying, here’s an article talking about the organization. Seed faith my rear-end. No amount of money that I might pour into some random ‘churches’ is going to bring money to me. What a blind bunch of morons that are sending in $26,000.00 or more a month to this group of schemers. Check out some of the schlockery in the ‘letter’ they send:

  1. “Read what God is doing here at St. Matthew’s churches.” And by ‘here’ they mean at their attorney’s office where the checks go. Not at their California mansions where the grand schemer lives.
  2. “Dear… Someone connected with this Address,” I swear I’m not making that up. It says someone connected to this address. They don’t even have their software putting names on these things.
  3. “Now, we must talk to you about something we see, in the Holy Spirit, concerning you and your family’s needs.” Oh, boy! They’ve got special revlation – what is it? “God’s holy blessing power is in the enclosed anointed prayer rug we are loaning you to use!!!” Yippee!!! Now they’re loaning out God’s blessing to “Someone connected with this address” so that we can have ”
    “holy blessing power” in our lives. Gee, surely this isn’t a scam.
  4. “You … are about to be blessed through this unusual, Bible Faith, Church, Prayer Rug…” Unusual all right! It is ugly, printed on paper, and can be recycled. I’m hoping that God will bless me for being environmentally sound with my recycling of this prayer rug.

I could keep going but I’m going to stop. I have to draw the line somewhere, and there’s already enough heresy in this one blog post to cause God to smite my site with a database failure [yes, that too is an attempt at humor].

The upside with all of this is that I know I’ve been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies (Ephesians 1:3), I’ve been given discernment against those who would use religion for personal gain (see contentment: 1 Timothy 6:6-8), and I have a good sense of humor that makes this entertaining. Poor folks who fall for this junk.

I’m praying for my superhero costume to go with my unicycle.

A Perfect One-Liner

My friend Robin set up and delivered a perfect one-liner via Instant Messaging. Here it is:

Robin: So, Time Magazine has some Brain Calisthenics and articles about staying focused, etc..
Robin: I skimmed the article, did the first exercise, then got bored.

The Lion, The Witch and What Not To Wear

Sorry about that strange play on words. Actually, no, I’m not. But it was something that needed to be done. I had to figure out a good play on words to offset the mundane topic of a movie that has been heaveily hyped by the Disney people. Jessica and I broke out of the house yesterday and saw the film whilst my parents baby-sat. Wow. We got out of the house. It felt good.

The movie was great on a lot of levels, the least of which was the actual witch, who looked like the Borg queen in the Star Trek movies. Not because she was attached to all of the borg, but because the actresses looked similar to me. For some reason both acresses have a similarly machabre look, similarly have weird things sprouting from their heads, and both of them are women, which helps the whole thing go along a lot better than say comparing Aslan to Captain Picard!
The Queens of Heck

The cast did a pretty good job of presenting the characters with an added exception of the the dward who was the sled driver for the queen. He reminded me too much of Deep Roy from the Willy Wonka movie last year wherein he was the Oompa-loompas. I kept waiting for the sled driver to sing a song about Edmond being a bad boy. He didn’t.

The special effects in the movie were top notch and while I knew some things were done with CGI there was in incredible amount of energy put into not making everything feel like CGI. I highly recommend seeing this movie for its technical merits alone. The battel scene could have been compared to some of the work in Lord of the Rings, but instead I’ll say this: they did a good job of mounting the tension and having things play quite differently from Lord of the Rings: kudos to those in charge of that decision.

This was a movie worth seeing and on a scale from 1 to 62.5 I would rank it a 52.369. It had some lame parts wherein Peter has no clue how to hold a sword, but there is also a really, really good portrayal of the animals, fictional or otherwise, as being quite real and touchable. The interplay between Earth and Narnia was fantastic and I must say that I’d love to play hide-n-seek in that house if I could. I would get so lost that no sons of Adam or daughters of Eve could find me in that big place.

Abby’s First Gum Experience

This morning I gave Abby a small piece of spicy cinnamon chewing gum because I could tell that she wanted to have some gum. She has delt with spiciness well so far, so I wasn’t afraid of burning her mouth out or causing her life-long emotional harm for one small piece of gum. She agreed with me that she would not swallow the gum and with delight in her eyes she took the piece of gum from my hand and delicately placed it into her mouth and started chewing. About 45 seconds later it was in the trash for being too intense, but she didn’t swallow it, which is better than I can say for my vague recollection of my first gum experience. She did well for not enjoying the intense flavor.

When I was a little boy I think we tried to promote the most outlandish lies about gum and how long it sits in your stomach and how it will kill you because it turns into a fire breathing porcupine that is guaranteed to erupt out of your stomach one night while you’re asleep. Needless to say I was rather worried to learn what my fate would be after swallowing my gum. I’m still here, so you know that I survived the fire breathing porcupine. Whew!

New Years Resolphbphbphbt

So we had a goal of losing some weight and keeping it off this century. Unfortunately we’re off to a bad start having been sick all week long. This thing has been tenacious like nothing else. However, I’m glad for our relative well being as one of my friends in Texas had to have emergency appendicitis surgery last night. Hopefully he’s well – I haven’t heard one way or the other yet.

Other goals for the year were to become trillionaires by the 8th, which is tomorrow. We’re 1.0 × 10-12 of the way there 🙂 I don’t think we’ll make it, but it was low on the list. Along with a disgusting amount of wealth we wanted to try to become invincible – we’ll have to wait and see how this one goes – I’ll let you know if we’ve not achieved this goal. I’d also like to spell correctly all the time, have perfect grammar and not have to be reminded all the time about how much my math skills have weekened since graduating from second grade and dropping out of elementary school.

What has weirded me out this last week is that Jessica continues to discuss Abby’s education. As if Abby actually will be educated. I’d prefer her to stay little and be my baby girl from here-on foreward. Evie, also, is not allowed to get older. Well, not really, there would be some benefit to them growing up, but I love my little girls. I think we’ll just keep having to have babies as time goes on, though Jessica wholeheartedly agrees with the contrary idea: no more kiddos.

My resolution for this year will be this: to blog with more pictures of my girls. My Nikon 5700 has just about driven me crazy. I’m ready to send it to Nikon and say, “Take this camera, and shove it.” It has just been a frustrating experience more times than not. Such is life. At least we have our cheap 3 megapixel camera that takes decent snapshots, which is what we need to document the craziness of our little girls.

OK, I better get off the blog, Jess is off the phone. See you later.

Microsoft Windows Media Format Patch

Some of you may be running Windows. If that’s the case you’ll want to install this update right away if you’re using Internet Explorer: Download details: Security Update for Windows XP (KB912919).

Here’s the thing: Internet Explorer is a security nightmare. If you are running Internet Explorer it looks at files with any sort of graphical extension and then ignores the fact that it is a graphical extension with a specific name and then tries to render it how it thinks it should. Thus, if someone runs the Windows Media File exploit on an image ending with GIF (a different graphics format) Internet Explorer ignores that it can’t render the image as a GIF file and runs the Windows Media File executing the attack!

Please, after installing that patch, install Firefox or Opera.

Being Rich Does Not Mean You Can Run

In what has to be one of the most awkward moments in video gaming history last night at the Consumer Electronics Show(CES) in Las Vegas Bill Gates played a video game with Steve Balmer on the X-box 360. When the boxing announcer (who was actually going to call the video game’s fight) called out Bill Gates bill ran out onto the stage in what can be described as a mobile seizure. It was Bill Gates, the richest man on the planet (as far as monetary value is concerned), running like he had never run in his life and this was his first stab at it. He came out flailing his arms while his legs wiggled in a motion that must be described as a run since it was faster than his walk.

Steve Balmer came out screaming to get the crowd hype and then Bill Gates beat up Balmer on the screen while the announcer pretended to announce the game while instead he read some propaganda that was on the screan/teleprompter. In short it made me glad to not own an X-Box 360 and not want to buy one lest I start to look like Bill Gates or Steve Balmer.

Being rich does, however, mean that Bill Gates could pay off the International Olympics Committee to get them to change the rules for olympic running so that all athletes need to run like him, so that the next Summer Olympics have a recorded moment where two announcers actually say:
Announcer 1: “We’re seeing a lot slower running this year in the olympics.”
Annaouncer 2: “Yes, ever since the Gates rule was put in place things have really slowed down.”

Dang. That’s just wrong.