Evil Is Underrated

Geek Hypocrite No Longer

2012-01-27T12:38:00.000-08:00

I've been languishing for three years now, toiling in an IT department utterly devoid of True Geeks. Nobody in my department has read the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, I'm the only person who played (and would continue to play, if given the opportunity) D&D, and my Cthulhu fish car emblem only received confused "what the heck is that" looks from my coworkers.

Sure, when I introduced my cohorts to The IT Crowd, it became immensely popular around here, but four short seasons of it wasn't able to displace their favorite shows like Two And A Half Men (pre-Kutcher, if that means anything) and Sons Of Anarchy. (They also like Big Bang Theory, but that doesn't count, because most of it's jokes are the audience laughing at the geeks, not identifying with them.) All my coworkers think Spaced is too boring , and they're all surprised that anybody still listens to Weird Al (and seemed to think it odd I went to see him in concert a week after I started working here). There's not even any point in attempting to spark a Star Wars versus Star Trek war (a generally quintessential topic in any computer department) here at work. You're better off sparking animosity by playing up the Battle Of Alberta, pitting our Oilers fans against the lone Calgary Flames supporter. Don't get me wrong, I like my hockey, but I'm pretty sure my coworkers long ago became deafened to my complaints that our IT department is not geeky enough.

That said, I harbour a deep, dark geek secret, of which I've been ashamed for at least ten, if not twenty, years. I'm not certain it's wise to admit this, especially on the internet, where nothing is ever forgotten, but this needs to be brought out into the light, in order to properly deal with and dispel the horror.

Over the last decade, I enjoyed the movies immensely as they came out, and I considered them epic triumphs of fantasy movie making, but it is time to reveal a terrible truth.

Deep breath. I can do this. Phew! Who knew this would be so difficult? Okay, here it is:

I've never actually read anything written by Tolkien. (Please let me keep my "White & Nerdy" hoodie!)

I started reading The Fellowship Of The Ring back in middle school, but I don't think I ever actually finished it. I certainly recalled almost nothing of the plot when I joined my wife, my cousin Shawn, and my mom in going to an Edmonton theater to see the initial Peter Jackson incarnation of the Lord Of The Rings released in 2001. At the time (and ever since then), I was too ashamed of admitting to my kith and kin (not to mention anyone else) that, despite being the family nerd, I hadn't read the series.

Fast forward to December 2011, when Peter Jackson gifted (or tortured, take your pick) his fans by releasing a trailer for upcoming film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I enjoyed the Lord Of The Rings movies so much, that I could barely contain my excitement at seeing the prequel laid out in similar fashion. However, there was one thought tempering my enthusiasm for the upcoming film.

A number of times in the following month I found myself reading and revisiting various nerdy internet discussions I had previously scanned over, mostly regarding how true Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy had (or rather, hadn't) been to the source material. Spurred on by those discussions, and driven by the fact that, almost invariably, original books are vastly superior to the movies inspired by them, I determined that I would read The Hobbit before the film was released.

Realizing that I hadn't actually read a book in years (beyond the 4th edition Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, plus various computer technical manuals in PDF form), I guessed that it would probably take me at least a month to read. Coupled with my well developed and vast capability to procrastinate, I decided that if I pledged to read The Hobbit in January, I might just have a chance of finishing it by the film's December 2012 release date. It turns out I need not have worried.

At first, I found the book a bit difficult to get into, as it wasn't quite what I was expecting. After over twenty years of D&D (and D&D-esque) books, manuals, and video games, a fair amount of the book seemed quaint, and even downright non-canonical in places. But Tolkien is one of the greatest sources for modern fantasy and role playing, and eventually I found I couldn't put the book down. Four nights after starting, I read the last lines of the book and flipped to review the map of Mirkwood that mark the final pages of the novel.

My thoughts? The book was good. I liked the characters and atmosphere. There wasn't quite as much detail or action as I was expecting, but overall I definitely enjoyed myself, and wonder why it took me so long to get around to reading even one book of this iconic series. I certainly will continue on to read the three Lord Of The Rings novels.

Mostly, though, I just can't wait to see how badly Peter Jackson screws the story up.

Two great things together

2011-12-22T11:37:00.000-08:00

...Can form one of the worst creations in the history of humankind.

I'm Canadian, therefore, I play and love hockey. I'm also a nerd, so I love comics and super heroes. Between those two interests, I have no idea how I missed this travesty. (I assume it's because I avoid the NHL All-Star game like the plague) I'm now struggling to figure out if this is the most awesomely horrid cross-promotion I've ever seen, or if it is a brilliant plan designed to suck out the final remnants of pride left in the game of hockey.

The NHL Guardians, presented by Stan Lee. Superheroes based on hockey teams? How could this possibly go awry?

I found a second video that is way overlong but shows all 30 Guardians in glorious computer rendering, and it helpfully points out each champion's super powers:

In case you don't want to watch the videos, I will note that there are a few things that were worth braving the hideous concept:

The Montreal Canadien looks like a red-themed Cobra Commander. Awesome!

The Vancouver Canuck looks like Batman, but with an orca fin on his head. Appropriately moronic for a Vancouver mascot!

I was disappointed to see the Islander doesn't look like Captain Highliner, and strangely, the Edmonton Oiler has a skill called "environmental empathy." Is that like "ethical oil"?

Clearly, there's no idiotic level that the NHL will not stoop to in an attempt to sell it's "product." Can we please get rid of Bettman, or at least request the league fire the current crop of ten year olds running the marketing department?

On this day...

2011-12-15T22:32:00.000-08:00

Ninety-five years ago, my grandfather was born in a small Canadian prairie town. He died this year, just under seven months short of his 95th birthday.

As I got older, I learned that he wasn't the perfect person I thought he was in my youth when he was spoiling me like his golden child. Despite this, he passed away with more friends than any other man I've known. He also still turned out to be my hero, even though he was one of the most obstinate, opinionated jerks I've ever met. The best champions are always the flawed ones, anyways.

We miss you, Earl. This whiskey's for you.

All dressed up...

2011-12-15T22:22:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens has died.

Love him or hate him (and I'd suggest a lot more people despised him than adored him), he was hard to ignore.

Hitch was a gifted wordsmith, and even though I disagreed with him on a great many subjects (outside of his atheism), I found it difficult to ignore his opinions. At any rate, the world is a lot less witty after losing him.

Good? Evil? Awesome?

2011-12-15T15:46:00.000-08:00

My wife sent me this the other day, and I think it's definitely worth passing along:

She's got good taste in humour and men!

We are the 99% (of Tolkien Fans)

2011-11-23T13:00:00.000-08:00

And as such, we should all support the Occupy movement, since we understand what happens when a great evil threatens the whole of Middle Earth.

(Thanks, Jamison Weiser)

If I were twelve years old...

2011-11-23T11:55:00.000-08:00

I would think that full-size MarioKart karts would be awesome. Thankfully, I have the mentality of a twelve-year old when it comes to classic video games, so I do actually love this video. Let's get those out of the showroom and onto the track and check out the performance! How long until these make it into the production line?

Token monthly post

2011-11-22T21:44:00.001-08:00

To the family members that continue to forward right-wing talking points, ridiculously outlandish stories, or emotional pleas to forward emails to raise awareness for a missing child/horrendous disease/conspiracy theory despite my varying snarky responses or links to Snopes, please accept the following video response. Remember it every time your cursor hovers above that Fwd button.

Monthly update

2011-10-25T13:56:00.000-07:00

I can't believe October is almost gone already, and without a single post yet! New content has been so sparse, it's starting to look like George's blog around here.

My excuse? I've just been crazy busy lately, playing hockey three times a week and, thanks to a huge phone project at work, spending at least one evening working overtime until 10 PM every week since the start of the month.

The phone project runs until the end of November, but I might quit one of my hockey leagues to free up an extra night, so hopefully I can get back to posting at least semi-regularly.

I've got a long way to go before I can catch up to some of the other blogging freaks out there, who manage to hold down full-time jobs, spend time with their families, play video games, immerse themselves in artistic hobbies, and still find the time to comment on substantial subjects at least two or three times a day. Maybe I just need to up my posting volume to 95% cute animal video filler. Right Jason?

History will never be the same

2011-09-28T09:07:00.001-07:00

I enjoy looking at old hand-drawn reproductions of cities and environments. Besides admiring the artistic talent required to create the pictures, viewing them is a method of traveling back in time to see what places may have looked like, letting you compare how human "progress" can affect the world around us. We can also gain insight into how people from those times viewed the events happening around them, evidenced by the number of recreations of disasters. These drawings remind us of the risks associated with carving a living from the planet, and can act as a warning that destruction can strike at any time, and sometimes from some unexpected sources.

Who could forget the Chicago Fire?
Or the trampling of Pittsburgh?
These images, and more, are available as prints from Mega Lazors. It's history, only geekier.

Adventures in all grain brewing

2011-09-26T20:56:00.000-07:00

Apologies to my four regular readers, this is another post on homebrewing.

I have now brewed four batches of all-grain beer. It's definitely a lot more work that using the beer kits that I have used since I started in January of 2010, but there's a certain pride that comes with making a foodstuff from scratch, and being able to honestly state, "I made this."

I started with two pale ales, followed by a brown ale, then back to another pale ale. I chose these recipes because they're relatively simple, and I want to get the techniques of batch sparging and boiling wort down before I progress to more difficult beer styles.

How have things progressed? Well, my first pale ale, I'm afraid to say, had all the hallmarks of rookie production. My efficiency was barely above 50% (meaning I barely got half the sugar out of my malt that I should have. I'd like to aim for 70-75%.), and my mash temperatures were too low, which probably explains why my beer only fermented about halfway before stalling. I also wound up with a lot hoppier flavour than I was expecting. It's not a big deal, since I like hoppy beers, but I just wasn't expecting it to be that bitter.

For my second pale ale, I was able to fix some issues with my mash temperatures, and I hopped it a lot lighter, but my efficiency was still floating around 60%. It fermented out fullly, and after bottling it last week, it seems to have turned out nicely. A little drier than I was expecting, but still good and within style guidelines. I racked my first, partially fermented pale ale onto this beer's "good" yeast cake, but that didn't seem to help at all.

I thought I did everything perfectly for my brown ale (although my efficiency was still around 60%) but it's fermentation has stalled halfway through, exactly like my first pale ale. This is almost a tragedy, because flavor-wise, this beer is exactly what I was aiming for. I've done a bunch of searching on the 'net and found some recommendations to fix a stalled fermentation. Hopefully it turns out.

My last pale ale, I don't know what I did different, but my efficiency hit 80%. I was expecting a starting gravity of about 1.042 and wound up with 1.054 instead. This means I was aiming for a 4.5% ABV ale, but I could wind up with a 6% ABV beverage (not that I'm complaining). I used yeast nutrient with and oxygenated the hell out of the wort, but I used a different yeast, a WYeast 1098 that that I washed from an English bitters kit I brewed in the spring. I created a starter for it to wake the yeast up, but two days into the fermentation, it doesn't look like there's a lot of activity going on. I'll measure the gravity Wednesday to see if things are progressing.

What do I think of all grain brewing thus far? Well, I love the technicality of it - there are just so many options you can change to affect the flavour of the beer, but it's almost a little overwhelming, especially when you're a rookie trying to troubleshoot problems with your fermentation. Now that the weather is getting too cold to spend six hours outside mashing and boiling, it'll be back to brewing beer kits for the winter.

I'll appreciate the simplicity of kit brewing for a bit, but I'll wager I'll be chomping at the bit to get back to all-grain in the spring.

I will, however, take suggestions on beer styles for my last all-grain beer to be brewed in 13 days' time. Any recommendations?

Cross-border Raidin'

2011-09-19T21:59:00.000-07:00

Yarr! Today be Talk Like A Pirate Day. It be apropos, too, since today, thanks to the landlubber Doc Dawg, I did find that the scurvy dog of a PriMin'ster o'Canada, Stephen "Blackheart" Harper, be happily makin' plans to be forcin' Canadian autonomy to walk the plank.

Seems th' Cons in power here been schemin' wit' the Prez o' them United States to allow the Queen's navy to cross the border soutwards, in return for allowin' the longish arm o' the Amerikin law to reach up in ta Canada, unner the guise o' chasin' down terrists an' protectin' the public from varyin' forms o'piracy. He s'posedly be doin' this inna hopes of convincin' that Republikin lap dog Obama to open up th' border to more trade. But the way the Yanks been tossin' their freedoms and due process overboard to the sharks be makin' me fear they be exportin' even more of the US-type prison system up northwards.

Seriously though, all pirate-talk aside, we all know precisely what is going to wind up happening if American police are allowed to chase criminals into Canada. American conservatives are freaking out about the thought of UN or Sharia law being implemented in the States, neither of which is even remotely possible at any point in the near (or distant) future. Ten days ago, Ed Brayton pointed out that the Patriot Act, which was supposed to allow National Security Letters and sneak & peek warrants to fight terrorism, has been used overwhelmingly in drug investigations. Seriously, it's not even close. They've been used 15 times to investigate terrorism, 122 times for fraud, and 1,618 for drugs. I expect the exact same thing to happen with allowing American police to come into Canada.

Love him or hate him, the whole Marc Emery extradition saga was a slap in the face of the authorities in the American drug war. Essentially, Marc Emery was arrested and extradited to the U.S. for sending marijuana seeds through the mail, something which is not a crime in Canada. Obviously, Canada has a slightly more relaxed attitude to drugs, especially marijuana, than the United States does. Hell, we briefly flirted with decriminalizing it in the early 2000's, until the United States flexed their muscle with the Liberal government of the time in a successful bid to kill the bill.

Stephen Harper has been working to introduce minimum sentencing rules and increase the penalties for drug offenses, especially targeting cannabis, and he's building more prisons, so one can expect that he's planning more legislation to fill those prisons. However, due to the general Canadian acceptance of cannabis use (a 2009 Angus Reid poll had 53% of Canadians agreeing with the statement, "The use of marijuana should be legalized"), it might cost him politically if he were to pursue a drug war with too much zeal.

If the Conservatives can't convince Canadians to embrace the war on drugs, the next best thing would be to almost literally import the American war on drugs into the Great White North. The ability of American drug enforcement to enter Canada while investigating drug crime is the simplest way to bring US drug law across the border.

I don't do drugs, but even the idea of that sends a chill up my spine. Most worrying: once American cops have their foot in the door, what's to stop them from expanding those powers? Once those powers are in place, what Canadian government could possibly stand up to the US government, the gatekeeper for our largest trade market who could decimate our economy in an instant by closing the border, and tell them their law enforcement is no longer welcome in Canada?

We are a hair's breadth away from becoming the 51st state in the American drug war.

Yar, even speakin' pirate-ese don't make me feel no better.

Black man hands out homemade alcohol

2011-09-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

After almost four years of being only moderately better than a hypothetical third term of George W. Bush, and seemingly doing little to implement any seriously progressive policies, President Obama has finally given me at least one big reason to support his presidency:

Homebrewing.

Excerpt from the White House food blog:

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama made culinary history when they served homebrewed White House Honey Ale, made with a pound of honey from the White House Beehive, to guests at [February's] Super Bowl Party.

I can't believe I'm just hearing about this six months late, but I have to say it's kind of neat to be able to claim I share a hobby with the President of the United States. Well okay, I technically share the hobby with the White House cooking staff, not the President himself, and for them it's actually a job, not a pastime, but at least we shared the same beer style for our first attempt at brewing!

(H/T to Balloon Juice)

Truth (in comic form)

2011-08-31T21:53:00.000-07:00

My career in online gaming started back in 1988, playing some text-based precursor to StarCraft on a local BBS. My gaming adventures eventually wound through games like NHL '95 PVP over modems, Diablo2 on Battle.net, Counterstrike, up to World Of Warcraft (all PC games, of course - as a true nerd, I don't do consoles).
Having such a lengthy history of online gaming is one of the main reasons I found this comic at the Oatmeal so compelling (click to see the whole thing):

Compassionate Conservatism, Example # 1,232,847

2011-08-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

President Obama to gay victims of bullying: "It gets better."

Family Research Council to those same kids: "No, it doesn't, you goddamned queers!"

Is it any wonder that North American youths are leaving Christianity in droves?

Beer, the "natural health product"

2011-08-22T11:05:00.000-07:00

Canada, being a weird conglomeration of liberal and conservative ideals, has a lot of restrictions on the production and sale of alcoholic beverages. That same conflicting set of ideals also has led to a relatively unfettered "health product and supplements" industry.

In my year and a half of brewing beer, I've had a number of people implore me to start selling my homebrew. In an admittedly cursory look into the type of licensing I'd require to begin selling my homemade suds, I've noticed that it looks like a very large and extremely pricey endeavor to obtain permission to produce and sell alcoholic products here in Canada.

Then I noticed this expired can of energy drink that was gifted to me about two months ago, which wound up being left sitting behind the speakers at my desk. Its label claims that it contains taurine, and is a "natural health product".

I hate energy drinks. They are basically over-priced sugar water with the extract of some obscure root or leaf that's supposed to either keep you awake, give you some kind of dexterity bonus, or polymorph your penis into the same shape as a tiger's genitals. Most of the herbs are pretty much benign, and of course offer no real effects other than placebo. However, labeling these drinks (not to mention a host of other herbal medicines and remedies, beyond mere sugary beverages) as "natural health products" essentially frees the manufacturer from much responsibility, especially when it comes to efficacy claims and performing tests on the product.

In Canada, natural health products are a relatively unregulated market, especially when compared to pharmaceuticals and alcohol brewing. Although there is a lot of noise coming from the alternative health industry that Bill C-36, passed in 2010, allowed the government to regulate the natural products and supplements industry a lot closer.

Typically, "health product" claims are fairly nebulous, as most snake oil salespeople always want to avoid assigning any quantifiable and testable quality to their creation that could be used against them, especially in court of law.

So here's what I'm thinking: Add ginseng, willow bark, dandelion leaves, or some other herb or additive that won't affect flavour or color to my beer, and begin marketing it as a natural health drink. Maybe I can get all the altie health nuts to join me in my crusade against government regulation of my health drink. After all, it's no more than steeped grain and herbs, infused with yeast and left to age for a month before bottling. What could be more natural than that?

Dandy Lion Pale Ale, anyone? Harnessing the twin powers of yeast and dandelions, it has been anecdotally proven to provide energy, improve joviality, maximize well-being, and has been noted to increase sexual attractiveness. Warning: consuming large quantities of this product can lead to loss of balance and social skills, vomiting and memory vacuums.

The response to every theist I've ever met

2011-08-21T12:45:00.001-07:00

It seems like any lengthy discussion about I have with a religious person about Christianity and the Bible always contains some comment along the lines of "things are worse now than they've ever been, which is what the Bible predicted for the end times."

Thanks to SMBC, I have a much more succinct rejoinder than my usual response:

Trolling for fanbois

2011-08-17T21:33:00.001-07:00

A buddy of mine linked to this picture entitled "How to inspire Nerd Rage":

Infuriating, ain't it?

Know Thine Enemy

2011-08-16T09:42:00.000-07:00

I'm sure it doesn't come to any surprise for anybody that knows me or has browsed this blog, but I tend to have a fair amount of discussions about religion, both online and in real life.

In meatspace, I've been having some casual discussions with a couple of Mormons, I have some religious coworkers that occasionally spark a conversation, and my wife has regular weekly visits from Jehovah's Witnesses.

One very common theme that seems to run through these discussions is that most proselytizers don't seem to have much first-hand experience attempting to convert atheists.

The most recent, and I think humourous, example was last week when the Witnesses came by to deliver their latest magazines for my wife. One of the ladies came up to the house, and her husband, waiting at the end of my driveway with a couple of his fellow religionists in his car, beckoned me to come over and talk.

After the typical pleasantries, he told me that he had a scripture that he wanted to share with me that he felt would be applicable to my "situation", since I am an atheist and don't believe in God. I've had lots of scripture thrown at me over the years, and although I was curious to see what valuable pearl of wisdom this gentleman had pulled out of the hot mess that is the Bible, I was a little confused by his selection.

He proceeded to read out James 2:19 (New World Translation), "You believe there is one God, do you? You are doing quite well. And yet the demons believe and shudder." I don't think that my facial reaction to this revelation was quite what he was expecting, so he followed up the scripture reading by commenting, "So this scripture show us that since the demons believe in God, don't you think it's reasonable that you should as well?"

I paused for a short second before I replied, "Well, no. Not really. I mean, I don't believe in the existence of demons." His friend in the back seat looked at me quizzically and commented, "Did you just say you don't believe in demons? What about angels?"

I replied, "Nope. I also don't believe in ghosts, leprechauns, and the tooth fairy."

The discussion then evolved into a short two-minute discussion on the nature of spirits and why I dismissed the existence of the spiritual, before the driver's wife returned and they had to leave to go drop off more magazines. So we said goodbye, and, as the vehicle pulled away, I couldn't help but grin widely as I returned to my deck to relax in the summer sun.

I have to admit, I found it amusing that they were so surprised that an atheist wouldn't believe in demons. Granted, atheism is not a monolithic block of beliefs, and there certainly are atheists that believe in spirits, reincarnation, and lots of other (what most skeptics would consider) ridiculous phenomenon. However, you'd think it would be a good idea to learn something about your target when you're trying to evangelize. I know I certainly wouldn't try to convince a Jehovah's Witness that their religion is incorrect by performing a thorough and blistering critique of transubstantiation.

But then, what do I know? I'm just an atheist.

Behind the Black Horizon

2011-08-05T16:31:00.001-07:00

My family experienced its third death in just over the last two months just over two weeks ago. The string of unfortunate circumstances (which should qualify as the pathetic understatement of 2011) started with my grandfather (on my father's side) passing away from natural causes at the end of May. Two weeks later, a cousin on my mother's side committed suicide. Fifteen days ago, the husband of one of my mother's sisters passed away from a heart attack in his sleep.

Three funerals in nine weeks has pushed me to post on what death means to me, an atheist.

What is death? Quite simply, death is the permanent interruption of the chemical process that we recognize as "life". Essentially, death is a part of existence on this planet of ours. We might be able to use medical and other technologies to lengthen our life spans and delay death, but it is an inevitability for each and every human. Large amounts of resources are dedicated to research into figuring out if technology will allow us to live forever, but I'm not so certain that eternal existence wouldn't be as much of a curse as a blessing.

So what do I think happens after we die? I haven't encountered any good evidence that leads me to believe in life after death. Consciousness is brought about by the electrical impulses of our nervous system, which is fed by a series of chemical reactions, which is in turn fueled by the food we take in. Any breakdown of that chain of reactions means the brain will cease functioning and die. I see no possible means by which those electrical impulses that form our personalities can survive outside of the device (our bodies) that houses them. I had no experiences from before my brain formed and began functioning, and I expect to return to that state of nonexistence after my body dies and decomposes.

I've been told by some people that this seems like such a bleak outlook, and that the idea of heaven (or reincarnation, the "New System", or becoming a part of the universe's "life force", etc) or any other type of afterlife in which they are reunited with their loved ones gives them the strength to go on in the face of such loss. At best, this seems like wishful thinking to me, and at worst, I find that it strips life of much of its meaning.

The idea that this life is nothing more than a precursor to an eternity of pleasure seems to childish way to deal with pain and suffering. I'm surrounded by religious family members that seem to dwell constantly on how terrible life is, and instead of working to improve their lives (or the lives of those around them), they are almost obsessed with how awesome it will be to die and find themselves in Paradise, or they express their sincere hope that Jesus will return and they'll never have to feel the sting of death at all. This even goes so far that one family member won't offer any ideas on what he'd like to have done at his funeral, because he's convinced he is never going to need one.

To me, that is a bleak outlook on life. The idea that the pleasures of this short life we live will pale to the perfect life we'll be blessed with after we die cheapens the entire experience we have on our little planet. For an analogy, imagine, if you will, that you spend hours toiling to make enough money to purchase or craft a thoughtful gift that you hope a loved one will appreciate very much. When the time comes to deliver the package, you are practically tingling with excitement as you hand them their gaily wrapped present. As they tear the wrappings off half-heartedly, you hope to see their faces light up with joy at that item you've worked so hard to obtain for them. Instead, your loved one looks at the object, then at you, then back to the gift. They shrug their shoulders and say, "Not bad, but Uncle Gerry is going to give me a much better one next year. See how flimsy this is, and notice how the paint doesn't match up here? The one I'll get later is going to be so much more perfect than this piece of thing." Yet when people talk of how wonderful the afterlife is going to be, this is what I think of.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that life is certainly far from ideal, and we in North America have it better than most humans have ever had life, but to gloss over the best that life has to offer in order to focus on the blemishes and spend most of your life wishing for perfection seems like such a waste.

So, if I don't hold to the fantasy that I'll ever see my friends or family again, how do I deal with it when my loved ones die? Quite simply, I recognize what it means when somebody passes away: I will never see them again. Hopefully, I have many cherished memories of that person, and some lessons in life that they've taught me, making my life that much richer for having known them. Those thoughts will help to carry me through the pain of losing a person I cared for.

Again, an analogy: a while back I did a bunch of work, toiling for a couple of hours to make some money, for which I had plans. Unfortunately, shortly after I received that money, it fell out of my pocket and I was unable to recover it. I didn't start fantasizing that once I died, I'd be rewarded with great riches in order to make myself feel better for losing that money. Instead, I merely resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn't be able to fulfill my plans that I'd had for that money, and instead found other ways to compensate for the loss.

Death is loss, albeit on a much more intense level. Losing a small amount of money is disappointing, while losing a loved one can be crushing. It is terrible to have to lose someone you care deeply about, but I find that the pain in feeling that loss is also a bit of a comfort, because the intensity of the sense of loss is an indicator of just how valuable that person was.

The worst part about the death of a loved one is that the universe continues to coldly unravel, regardless of the losses we humans encounter here on our rocky outpost called Earth. The whole planet does not grind to a halt to mourn for anyone. But for me, death serves as a reminder and the impetus to cherish and strengthen those relationships with family and friends that I do have.

Now, please excuse me, but I have to go call my Mom to see how she'd doing and tell her I love her.

Photographic awesomeness

2011-08-01T00:20:00.000-07:00

I just saw this shared on Weird Al's Twitter account (note: I don't actually follow Twitter, I just saw a link and had to click on it):

How awesome is that? Weird Al, John "Bermuda" Schwartz, Tim Minchin, Garfunkel & Oates, and Bo Burnham all together in one room - and they're all undead!

Why I don't believe in god

2011-07-29T13:05:00.000-07:00

The New Statesman has an article that consists of a collection of statements by an array of people who doubt the existence of god or gods. It is definitely worth reading, but I recently had a not-so-subtle reminder of why I don't believe in god.

My wife was flipping channels, and came upon a documentary on PBS about life on planet Earth. The show had just begun talking about the relationship between predators and prey. During this segment, there was one scene that was only up for about five seconds, displaying a young gazelle that had been felled and was being devoured by two lions. It was still alive, looking back over it's shoulder and pathetically flailing it's front hooves at the two lions that had torn open its belly and were already feasting upon the flesh of the small animal.

A horrific scene, but necessary for the lions to continue living. Scenes similar to it are played out thousands (if not millions) of times per day, from spiders feasting on insects, to housecats toying with baby birds for sport (this happened in my back yard on Monday - I discovered a neighbor's cat had been chewing on a featherless chick near my shed), to piranha consuming other fish alive. This has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, and will likely continue until our sun runs out of fuel and expands to the point where it envelops the Earth.

Who could possibly be so naive as to believe that a benevolent, caring god would create a system that requires so much pain and suffering?

*Edited to include the link to the New Statesman article that I neglected to insert

Making the jump

2011-07-25T15:19:00.000-07:00

After a year and a half of brewing beer using Brew House, Coopers, and Muntons beer kits, it looks like I'm edging towards the laborious exercise of all-grain brewing. It will turn brew day from an hour or two of light work (an hour for Brew House kits, two for Coopers/Muntons kits) into an all-day exercise of grain mashing and wort boiling. However, it grants me full control over what I'm producing, and allows me to say with pride (or shame, if I turn out a horrible beer), "I made this." No longer will I have to pretend that I did more than take somebody else's work and throw some yeast on it, then keg/bottle the results. I will now be horribly responsible for pretty much every step along the way (short of growing and preparing my own grain, hops, and yeast, of course).

This weekend I'll be making a mash tun out of a relatively new beer cooler, and picking up twenty-five feet of 3/8 inch copper tubing with which to fashion an immersion chiller. Once I have those two items, I'll order in some base and specialty malts, as well as pick up some hops. Then, the experimentation begins!

Hockey Nerds?

2011-07-12T22:18:00.000-07:00

It's no secret I love hockey and computers, and other than looking up stats online, I rarely get the opportunity to enjoy both of them together. Let's just say that when I'm strapping on the goalie pads in the dressing room, very few of the guys on the team get the point of my Splunk "I see dead servers" t-shirt.

So when I heard Mike Commodore had signed up with the Detroit Red Wings, I had to smile when I heard that he might try to use his name and choice of jersey number to stir up a little geek humour. He tweeted that he was thinking of debuting the number sixty-four with his new team this season.

What nerd worth his salt wouldn't enjoy seeing this circle around on the ice?

Puck Daddy has started a pledge drive to try and convince Mike to use that number for the 2011-12 season. So far they've received pledges of over three thousand dollars that they're offering to donate to a charity of Commodore's choice if he uses that number. I might just cough up US$64 (what's that in Canadian dollars these days - 20 bucks?) and actually watch a Red Wings game to see that jersey in the NHL!

H/T to Mike Brownstein.

Somebody check the crawl space...

2011-06-27T20:51:00.000-07:00

...Under Michele Bachman's house. Apparently she confused John Wayne, the actor, with John Wayne Gacy, the killer clown.

My wife is STILL laughing about that.

H/T Let Freedom Rain.

2011 Stanley Cup Champs

2011-06-15T21:52:00.001-07:00

Congratulations go to the Boston Bruins, who won the Stanley Cup tonight by defeating the Vancouver Canucks by a score of 3-0 in game seven of the NHL Stanley Cups Finals at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, BC.

Jeers go to the Vancouver Canucks, whose fans have spent the last two hours since Roberto Lungo's weak goaltending cost Vancouver their potential first championship trashing businesses, burning cars and furniture, and destroying the respectability of their city.

I'm not a Canucks fan, but I cheered them on in 1994 when they were a crossbar away from winning the Stanley Cup in game seven against the New York Rangers. After losing in New York, Vancouver fans also rioted and destroyed a section of their hometown.

Once is a fluke, twice is a trend. I won't again cheer for a team whose fans are such poor losers.

Stay classy, Vancouver.

(PS: I just hope those riotous idiots don't destroy the best place in Vancouver to down a couple of pints of microbrew beer, The Alibi Room)

All Quiet on the Western Front

2011-06-12T20:39:00.001-07:00

It's been almost a month since my last post, and for once, I have good reason. I had begun working on a couple of posts, but something important occurred that overshadowed everything else, made me put life on hold for a week, and prevented me from caring about the blog for another week after that.

My grandfather died on May 28th after 94 years of squeezing everything he could out of life.

I was really close with my granddad, even more so than with my actual father. There's a whole history there that I won't disclose here, because it's not all that interesting and because pouring out my pain to strangers on the internet isn't why I started blogging.

Suffice it to say that he was a great man and I'll miss him terribly. He fought in WWII, was injured three times while there, returning to the front to fight alongside his mates each time. He didn't talk much about his experiences there, but when lubricated with a little whiskey or beer, the tales would flow.

However, he was a lot more than a mere Bren machine gunner, helping to bring a halt to the Nazi menace in Europe. He was a fighter and a charmer at the same time, and although he was incredibly opinionated, he was always surrounded by friends and family. He could remember the name of somebody that he'd met once ten years previously, and wherever he went he always ran into one or two people to have a friendly chat with.

He was a hard worker, and played hard as well. He was always ready and available to help any friends or family members that needed assistance. He was always busy, but always made time for people. He was happiest when having a beer, offering up some anecdote about the past to those around him.

I'm not going to recreate the goodbye that I read out at his funeral, despite the fact that my wife says that I should put it up here. Maybe someday, but not today.

I just wanted to say my grandfather was my hero, and I miss him. The gates of Valhalla opened up a couple of weeks ago to welcomed the arrival of a Celtic warrior.

Surprising? Nope.

2011-05-21T00:08:00.000-07:00

Well, here it is, midnight PST, making it past seven PM in New Zealand, yet it looks like Harold Camping's apocalypse is at least an hour late.

It's amusing that after two thousand years of failed predictions, people are still expecting the Jewish Zombie Apocalypse (you know, Jesus returning to the Earth). Harold Camping was able to put together an advertising campaign with over three million dollars in donated cash. Three million dollars that could have gone to something important, like (as Jesus commanded) feeding the hungry or clothing the poor. It's disheartening to see such large numbers of people willing to waste their lives and huge amounts of resources in the vain attempt to warn people of imaginary dangers, especially when we risk catastrophe from real perils like climate change, pollution, disease, reliance on non-renewable resources, etc.

Attempting to get people to worry about the consequences of tossing out a few bits of plastic becomes that much more difficult when they're terrified that hidden demons or dragons are chomping at the bit, waiting for the signal that will free them to unleash waves of disease, suffering, and death upon the entire populace of the Earth, save for an invariably small number of "true believers" who will be magically protected from the apocalypse.

People have such short memories that they cannot recall the hundreds, if not thousands, of failed predictions regarding the apocalypse. What will it take to convince humankind to abandon superstition pushed by con men and begin to recognize the real problems that we face as a species on this planet?

In which I increase my Nerd Cred

2011-05-11T13:29:00.000-07:00

I managed to run of to Kamloops on Saturday to catch PZ Myers in the final talk of the Imagine No Religion conference hosted by the Kamloops Centre For Rational Thought and Center For Inquiry Okanagan.

While there I managed to snag a few photos:

PZ was dressed up to enjoy the err... warm-ish late spring weather. He's much less tentacled and fiery in person than he appears on Pharyngula.

Jen McCreight of Blag Hag was showing her preparedness for the after-party.

I even managed to obtain proof that God exists! Mr. Deity (aka Brian Keith Dalton) was very pleasant, and not at all as temperamental an immortal as I was expecting.

I also met the president of the Center For Inquiry Okanagan, and was invited to check out their post-rapture party, and was informed that they'll soon be hosting a talk by a scientific ghost hunter. That could be interesting. (Spoiler alert: he hasn't found any evidence of spiritual activity yet!)

Even though I missed almost all of the conference, I got a chance to chat with a handful of participants for a short while, meeting skeptics from Edmonton, southern BC, and even Philadelphia. I'll definitely try to make the next organized meeting in the area.

I'll also bring a better camera than the crappy one built into my Blackberry.

Of all the stupid...

2011-05-07T11:28:00.000-07:00

Damn it! Due to my inability to read dates on a website, I missed PZ Myers giving a talk over in Kamloops last night!

I wonder if I can sneak into his talk tonight at 7PM? Unfortunately, there isn't a phone number I can call to check, and I don't think I'm going to risk driving two hours to be turned away at the door.

Bah!

Return of the VIC

2011-04-22T22:11:00.001-07:00

Odin. My. God.

The eight-year old kid in me just had a massive nerdgasm. I know, that sounds completely inappropriate, but I can't think of any other way to describe my reaction when I saw this:

The Commodore 64 is back in production. It's been updated of course. The internals include an Intel Atom dual-core 1.8 GHz processor, up to 4 Gb RAM, NVidia ION2 512Mb on-board graphics, and Ethernet, SATA with RAID 0, 1, JBOD. Unfortunately, there is no tape drive, just a slot or tray-load DVD (Blu-ray optional) drive on the left side.

The O/S is Ubuntu 10.4, and they claim that Windows can be also run on the hardware, but you'll have to purchase it separately, of course. Most awesome of all, the operating system supports an 8-bit Commodore emulator (selectable at bootup or run from within Ubuntu), allowing us older nerds to reminisce about the old days of spending (what felt like) hours typing in BASIC commands in order to get the screen to print out "Hello, world!"

They will also be bringing out updated versions of the Amiga as well. I'll probably never pick up either unit, but it's fun just having a look for the nostalgia value.

Scenes From My Youth: Now Orchestrated!

2011-04-20T13:02:00.000-07:00

Last week I finally received the opportunity to spend time in the company of a couple thousand fellow nerds when I dragged the wife along to Video Games Live in Vancouver. (Truth be told, my woman watched the PBS special on VGL and immediately demanded that her next birthday present be the chance to see it in person. I can't say I was disappointed to hear that.)

We arrived in Vancouver and dropped off our belongings (and dog) at our hotel a couple of blocks from the concert, ate dinner, then walked on over to the show venue an hour before curtain time.

The building was full of nerds, LARPers, geeks, gamers, role playing gamers, goths, and all the other societal misfits that you expect at such an event. From what I saw the ages ranged from ten to about early-to-mid forties, revealing that I was truly amongst my element.

The show started with a costume contest that had about nine people dressed up as various video game characters. As the contestants walked out on the stage, they were led a couple of girls in spandex outfits, dressed up as Psylocke and Rogue from the X-Men, and I immediately assumed they would win the contest. Girls in tight clothes, dressed up like popular comic book characters - how could they lose? However, the judge of the contest was the crowd, which was filled with video game nerds, not regular people. The winner of the competition was selected by who could prompt the loudest cheers from the audience. Although the superheroines placed well, they were ousted by the mob's favorite costume: a tall, lanky kid dressed up in a pretty good recreation of Altaïr ibn La-Ahad from Assassin's Creed. Other noteable costumes were a young woman dressed up as Tifa from FFVII, a gentleman with an imaginative splicer costume from Bioshock, Doctor Mario, and a very well done Link from Legend Of Zelda.

The music began with in medly of early video games, starting with Pong, then moving on to classic music from Space Invaders, Asteriods, Pac-Man, Tank, Defender, Frogger, Battlezone, Centipede, Guantlet, Ghosts 'N Goblins, and a whole range of arcade games from Dragon's Lair to Outrun. I lost track of the huge number of games represented during this montage.

What followed was a grand collection of orchestrated music (with a choir performing vocal work) from some of the greatest video game franchises in gaming history, including Mario Bros, Castlevania, the Legend Of Zelda, Metal Gear Solid, God Of War, Tetris, World Of Warcraft, Sonic The Hedgehog, Halo, Street Fighter II, Final Fantasy, and Silent Hill.

Interspersed between the longer songs played by the symphony were short video clips such as mashups (Donkey Kong vs. Mortal Kombat was my favorite) and top ten lists of the worst video game titles and most painful voice acting in a game.

There were also solo performances, with video game pianist Martin Leung playing the theme from Super Mario Brothers while blindfolded, followed by a medly of music from the Final Fantasy series. Laura Intravia played a suite of themes from the Legend Of Zelda on her flute (while dressed up as Link, and competing against Navi, a doll attached to her shoulder by a wire).

There were so many musical standouts from the show that it was difficult to select a favorite. The God Of War theme, accompanied by video clips from the series, was every bit as epic and intense as the games themselves. Laura Intravia crafted an amazing performance as Lady Silvanas during Lament Of The Highborne from World Of Warcraft. One Winged Angel from FFVII was every bit as spectacular live as someone coule hoped for. Finally, the second encore to finish off the evening was Tommy Talarico and Laura hosting an enjoyable sing-along with the crowd to Still Alive from Portal.

There were lots of entertaining non-musical moments that were worth noting, as well. Tommy had people hold up their cell phones instead of lighters to show support for a slower song, when he noticed somebody in the back waving a laptop. When it was pointed out the machine was a Mac, the crowd booed loudly, and Tommy commented, "You can't play games on that, can you?" There were funny and timely catchphrases and commentary called out from the crowd as well, such as "The cake is a lie!" as the intro video to Still Alive began; another person lamented "My car!" at the end of the Frogger Vs Grand Theft Auto mashup; and (in response to Tommy stating that "some people believe video games cause violence"), "Kill those people!"

My wife and I both enjoyed ourselves, and will attend VGL again at some point. It was nice to spend an evening reminiscing about the games I played growing up, presented in a relatively mature manner. Although gaming has become much more mainstream than when I was young, and I certainly can't devote the same amount of playing time and effort I used to give games, it was still nice to share the experience of classic and new gaming with a small horde of fellow video game lovers.

If you're a video game geek and you haven't experienced Video Games Live, I recommend heading to a show, or at least taking a peek at it on PBS or Youtube.

What would make me believe (in Jesus)?

2011-03-23T22:42:00.000-07:00

George posted a link to a theist website that asks three questions of atheists. I assembled this post in my head before I read George's (and anybody else's) reply, so that it wouldn't colour my own response too much.

Question one: What would it take, or what would have to happen for you to abandon your position of atheism and come to a theistic view; not just an agnostic possibility of God, but an actual belief that a Deity does exist?

Good, reproducible evidence is pretty much the only thing I can request here.

I can't really consider unexplained phenomena as evidence for God, because history has shown us that events humans used to consider as only explainable by premising deities turned out to actually require no divine interference. Unfortunately, the more we seem to examine the universe in detail, it seems that any version of a god, other than the nebulous "prime mover" that originally sparked the creation of the universe, seems completely unnecessary and more and more unlikely.

For the same reasons, I consider miracles to be poor manifestation of a God's existence. Ignorance of the cause of a certain unlikely occasion is not evidence for anything other than... ignorance.

I'd like to say that personal revelation would be nice - maybe the clouds parting, and a booming voice announcing to me that it was the creator of the universe. But I'm too aware of the weaknesses of the human mind, and that such a thing would most likely be a result of a psychotic episode. Otherwise, how could I be sure that my experience was more realistic than that of Mohammed, Joseph Smith, or any run-of-the-mill schizophrenic?

Question two: What would it take for you to believe Christianity is true?

Which version of Christianity? There are over five thousand different sects of Christianity, which makes this question a little too simplistic to answer accurately.

For instance, whatever evidence that might convince me that Jesus was an actual historical figure that was able to come back from the dead after a couple of days of actual death and and decomposition would have to be coupled with a enough evidence to overthrow pretty much all of modern science to show that the universe is less than 10,000 years old and that the myth of Noah's ark actually happened for me to believe in any of the myriad of young earth, biblical literalist Christianities.

Question three: Why would your answers to the above be sufficient to convince you theism is true, and that Christianity was true?

Like gravity, wavelengths of radiation outside of our ability to detect them with our natural senses, and dark matter, it all comes down to the evidence.

As an atheist, I have a natural inclination to require more evidence for religious claims (not just Christian claims, mind you, but from all religions) than might be fair. Because of this, I figure the most reasonable I can be would be to require the same kind of evidence that I'd request before I believe that intelligent aliens are visiting Earth in technologically advanced spaceships.

If a UFO landed on our planet and the inhabitants of the vessel made contact with a large swath of humans, including media and scientists, and gave us a reproducible explanation of their origins, how they arrived on Earth, etc., I would have a difficult time denying the existence of intelligent aliens.

If God wants to visit us, making himself available to the media and scientists, giving us a scientifically valid and confirmable explanation for how the universe works, the origins of life, and human history, then it would also be difficult to deny his existence.

I appreciate what seems to be a non-judgmental request for information from atheists about their beliefs, but these three questions seem to me to be missing one very valuable point: the Christian God is all-powerful and all-knowing. Even if I don't know what would convince me that He exists, Yahweh does, and he supposedly has the power to make me aware of his existence. That He has refused to do so, even though I actively sought Him out for a number of years in my life, is among the best evidence that God doesn't exist. At the very least, He doesn't seem interested in spending eternity with me, and, in return, I couldn't care less about Him.

Why democracy is ultimately doomed

2011-03-19T19:21:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I went in to work for the seventh day in a row in order to finalize our Cisco telephony inplementation (short story: it went well, everything looks to be working well, thus far).

While eating our butter chicken, rice and Naan bread we ordered for lunch from the best Indian restaurant in town, I overheard two of my coworkers chatting about one of the candidates for local office. One guy said, "he seems like a pretty good guy." The other responded, "dude, he taught my nephew karate. I'd totally vote for that guy."

Since I can't keep my nose out of discussions that don't necessarily concern me, I interjected, "What are his policies? Is he conservative, liberal, or what?" My inquiry was met with embarrassed silence, so I pressed further, "So you're telling me you'd vote for a guy when you don't know anything he actually plans to do if he grabs the reins of power? It's enough to think you'd want to drink a beer with him?" A different coworker tossed in the helpful comment, "Why not? It worked so well for the Americans with George W!"

Sadly, this seems typical for most people. They can tell you the intimate details of the latest indiscretions of dozens of celebrities, but they don't know the policies of a politician they'd be willing to vote for.

I guess the one saving grace is that neither of those coworkers are likely to actually vote. Still, it's no wonder that sociopathic assholes are able to dominate in politics the way they have these past few years.

Happy Irish Day!

2011-03-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

It's on this day, March 17th, that certain parts of the world celebrate everything Irish. Mostly for an excuse to drink alcohol, since that's apparently the most Irishness of activities.

It's also a day that those of us with any amount of Irish heritage can pretend that we're 100% Irish, so long as there are no actual Irishmen around to point out we're not really Irish. I'm fully aware that I can't live up to the Irish stereotypes of having the gift of gab, being able to remain ~~coherent~~ ~~standing~~ semi-conscious after consuming massive quantities of liquor, and being willing to fight over the tiniest of minor insults, but that doesn't mean I can't heft a pint of stout and hail the old Emerald Isle tonight!

The best thing about St. Patrick's Day, however, is that it also gives me a chance to show off a picture of my grandfather who gave me my Irish last name, and since I'm his only grandkid that shares that name with him, it makes me his favorite by default. I'll be celebrating the heritage he granted to me by imbibing a little whiskey and the last bottle of my first stout that I brewed and bottled last February.

Slainte!

Under the trailer park lights

2011-03-16T21:38:00.001-07:00

I have a personal anecdote to add to George's post about what seems to be a common pastime for some people: being discovered passed out in their cars from alcohol overindulgence in places that are relatively distant from where the driver obviously departed from (especially McDonald's drive-thru lanes).

Dude, I grew up in low-income apartments and trailer parks - these stories are fucking common.

Seriously, about a month ago, I was leaving for work and discovered a car parked across the small road that leads from my local neighborhood to the main road. I was forced to drive around this Dodge Caliber that was idling in the street, almost getting stuck in the two feet of frozen snow that had been plowed onto the sides of the road the night before. As I pulled up close, I realized that the vehicle that I'd thought was empty was actually occupied. I could see the driver leaning way over into the passenger seat.

I drove past and turned to head up the street on my way to work, when I figured I'd better check to see if this guy was actually okay. I pulled over to the side of the road, got out and walked back to the car to make sure the driver wasn't hurt. I looked in the open driver door window to see the driver had his seat belt on and was doubled over into the passenger seat. His left hand was hanging out his window with an empty Nestle Crunch wrapper held in it, while his right hand was wrapped around a generic gas station paper coffee cup in his lap.

I asked him if he was okay, with no discernible response. I yelled at him and received more silence in return. I grabbed his arm and shook him very strongly, and he barely even flinched. I didn't notice the smell of alcohol, so I was worried that the guy might have had a heart attack, entered a diabetic coma, or had some other health issue. I should have remembered that I was inside a trailer park.

I called my wife (since he was only 50 meters from my house) and asked her to contact emergency services to check in on this guy so that I could head off to work. My wife came out to watch over the driver while the fire department and an ambulance made their way to the scene. She pinched him hard and he flinched a bit, but didn't stir. My wife grabbed the coffee cup to keep the man from spilling it on himself and immediately noticed the strong smell of booze. The cup had a small amount of what was probably whiskey in it.

Interestingly enough, as soon as the flashing lights from the emergency vehicles arrived, the guy came fully alert. I guess police arriving to assist when you've passed out while drinking and driving has a way of sobering a person up quickly. Especially after the BC government recently passed some of the harshest DUI penalties in Canada.

At first I was worried that the guy would be okay, because I hadn't realized he was merely drunk. After I found out he was driving hammered, I began hoping that the cops would nail him to the wall, since he was obviously so inebriated that he could have killed somebody and not even noticed.

My only regret? I should have snapped some photos of the dipshit to spread around the internet.

My teen years distilled

2011-03-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

In a Lance Mannion post about him attempting to educate his young boys about comic books and lessons about life, he made a comment that I think perfectly represents me in my Christian teenage years:

I wanted to tell them that the world is full of young men who are afraid of everything. They are afraid of women, of sex, of their own urges and desires. They are afraid of other men. They are afraid of what they might be themselves. They are afraid they are weak, useless, powerless. And when people who are this afraid dream, they dream of not being afraid, but their dreams aren’t of achieving self-command and of gaining mastery of over their fears. Their dreams are of instilling fear. They dream of gaining power over what makes them afraid.

I hate to take a quote out of context but I'm a terrible writer, which is why I have to find people who are good at the wordsmithing trade, so that I can steal their descriptions of the world around me. This is a perfect distillation of how I remember my teenage years: being afraid of fucking everything.

Oh sure, like most teenagers I had attitude, snark, and more than a hint of belligerence oozing out my pores (which really hasn't changed in the sixteen years since), but as most adults can admit at some point in their lives, it was all youthful bluster. Keeping everyone else at arms length, seeming at the verge of a violent outburst at the slightest provocation, and making fun of anything and everything was a coping mechanism - a method of covering up inexperience, ignorance, fear, and a little bit of stupidity by offending anyone and everyone around you, in the hope that they don't examine you too closely, lest they discover the child hiding in the flesh of a young adult.

Christianity, at that point in my life, offered some solace. After all, if your invisible friend is the creator of the entire universe, the deity that drowned the entire populace of the world save for eight of his chosen people, and the galactic emperor that will soon slay all those who oppose him, it helps to alleviate some of the apprehension about stepping out to make your mark in the world.

Unfortunately, experience can slowly reveal to the observant that the great sky fairy doesn't have your back and, indeed, seems to be perfectly absent - almost as though he was never really there to begin with. It slowly began to dawn upon me that the driving force that helped me through the difficult times in my life were my own strengths, buttressed by support and advice from family and friends.

At any rate, Lance outlined possibly the greatest reason why I wouldn't ever desire to relive my teenage years again: since high school, I've learned that fear doesn't have to be the default reaction to change or uncertainty.

Oh, and if you're not following the writings of Lance Mannion yet, do yourself a favor and head on over there. I've stolen so many ideas from him that the least I can do is send one or two people to browse his writing.

Google can be used for evil

2011-03-02T08:19:00.000-08:00

I was reading a news alert in GMail regarding Rupert Murdoch placing a bid to buy a large UK media company, when this advert popped up:

The Ultimate Tea Party - www.heartland.org - The Patriot’s Toolbox is the #1 source for Tea Party activists

Targeted advertising? Not working so well.

I second that motion

2011-03-01T12:31:00.001-08:00

I was reading an interesting post over at Dispatches From The Culture Wars about a virulently anti-gay preacher who was arrested for masturbating in his vehicle parked next to a children's playground.

Hearing about the hypocrisy of people like that isn't much of a surprise, but what I really liked was one certain comment in the thread below Ed's post:

The only hostility I feel towards Christianity or any organized religion, is premised upon the fact that some are so arrogant as to believe they have the right to not only criticize law abiding citizens for being different, but the power to force us to conform to their ways. Gay people never show up at my house early in the morning trying to convert me to homosexuality. Gay people never try to take my civil rights away or my human rights away due to my gender as a female, Gay people do not assume the worst about me because I am not Gay, nor act as if I must have been born stupid because I do not accept their homosexuality as if that were the one true path to salvation.

Posted by: Seeing Eye Chick | March 1, 2011 11:32 AM

I have no idea who Seeing Eye Chick is, but the only response I can come up with is, "Amen, sister."

One secret to great home brew beer

2011-03-01T11:25:00.000-08:00

Like many scientific breakthroughs, I've accidentally stumbled upon something that seems to drastically improve home brewed beer. It turns out to be something that is simple in theory, but very difficult in practice.

The tale of my discover goes thusly:

A couple of weeks ago my wife determined that she was sick and tired of the mess that I've made of our spare room, which she has so kindly allowed me to take over as my nanobrewery.

Of course, my first duty was to begin sorting through all my bottles which were scattered about rather haphazardly. Hidden under a desk to shield them from light (if you aren't aware, UV light is bad for beer - it breaks down hop oil and is responsible for the skunky aroma some beers get), I discovered three unlabeled one litre pot-stopper bottles. One contained a thick, black brew I easily identified as a stout I brewed last March. The other two contained what looked like light ales, but I have no idea which ones, since I've brewed about a dozen batches of "lighter" ales since I started this hobby in January of 2010.

My friend Lee came over, and as soon as I mentioned that I had a couple of mystery bottles, he demanded that we immediately open one of them to see what elixir was contained within. (Note: he's a British ex-pat, and so he has no compunction whatsoever of drinking a room temperature beer.) So to satisfy my friend's curiosity, I grabbed a couple of full pint glasses and pressed open the plastic cap on the bottle. It jumped open with a pleasantly loud "thump", and I poured out the contents into the two glasses. It was perfectly clear and beautifully carbonated, looking like a store-bought beverage crafted at a professional brewery.

We took a drink, and, all modesty aside (modesty? I've heard of it!), it was one of the best beers I've ever tasted. It turns out that bottle was from the third beer I ever brewed up, which was bottled last March: a honey blonde ale. What was surprising was that the rest of the batch (which wound up being drank within three weeks of the date I bottled it) had never fully carbonated. But over 10 months of aging, it had carbed up perfectly, and the flavour had become incredibly complex, with a strong, but not overpowering honey taste.

So the secret seems to be: age, age, age. Basically, you need to bottle or keg your beer and don't drink it for a long time. If you love beer the way I do, you realize how futile a task waiting can be!

NOTE: Okay, so I can't really take credit for this discovery - two of the most common rules about homebrewing I've found on many beer forums are: 1) Sanitize and 2) Be patient (let it age!) But who doesn't love adding their own anecdotal evidence to a body of data? Besides, the volume of posts on beer has been disappointingly sparse on this blog so far, so I had to do something to rectify the situation!

Also, Brew Your Own magazine has an interesting article, "The Effects of Storage Conditions on Homebrew Quality", in their current issue, stressing that how you store your aging beer is also very important. Unfortunately, the article isn't available online. Essentially, the point seems to be that aging beer in a fridge or dark, cool place (like a cellar) with a stable temperature is the best way to either maintain or improve flavour over time. A location with variable temperatures seems to negatively effect the taste of beer.

Back to the grind

2011-02-24T20:30:00.001-08:00

I was quite surprised tonight when I logged in and realized it's been three weeks since I posted anything! That (along with a long-winded comment over at George's site I spent my lunch hour on) prompted me to post something that's been sitting in my inbox as a reminder to make a comment on (I often email things of interest to myself - sadly, they rarely seem to actually make it onto the blog).

Anyways, over at Pharyngula, PZ posted a link to Paula Kirby's Feb. 15th column on "Faith - the ultimate tyranny." I recommend reading the column, but I'd rather focus on one comment left over there:

This piece sounds less like a cry for freedom and more like a rant against authority. For people like Paula, a rule by definition is a bad rule (which amusingly enough is itself a rule). They consider concepts like obedience to be abhorant by their very nature. And througout this rant about the follies of submitting oneself to the tyrany of religion, Paula misses the whole point of freedom.

Freedom is not the ability to do whatever I want whenever I want without any consequences. If my thoughts, words, and actions never affect the nature of an outcome, then I am a slave to that outcome because I have no way of altering it.

On the contrary, freedom allows individuals to know what the choices are, to know what the consequences of those choices are, and to have the confidence that choosing a particular choice will result in its corresponding consequence. Thus freedom permits an act of free will to alter the outcome.

Religion concerns itself with the nature of the God to Human relationship. It teaches that certain thoughts, words, and actions bring us closer to God or distance us from God. Religion shows that we all have the freedom to seek God or to reject God. By rejecting the authority of God to give us a choice that is articulated via religion, we reject our own freedom.
POSTED BY: DEVIVMAN | FEBRUARY 15, 2011 6:06 PM

This comment is a great example of a Christian is so close to "getting it," but they missed the mark because their allegiance to their Great Lawmaker must take precedence over everything else.

Most atheists (or most people, for that matter) don't consider obedience to be "abhorrent." Otherwise, how could society even function? Not all atheists are anarchists (nor are all anarchists atheists). However, what many atheists (not all of them, either) consider bad, or at least negligent, is mindless obedience. The idea that we should behave a certain way because it was decreed upon us from on high, that our every choice must be monitored without any justification or examination of why that must be, is generally undesirable to most freethinkers. We're no longer children - we can understand why a certain act might be considered wrong or right if it is explained to us. "Because I'm the God and what I say goes" should never be a good enough reason, in the same way a child should never let a parent off the hook for an explanation when they say "because I'm the mother/father, that's why!"

The idea that "freedom is the ability to do what I want whenever I want without any consequences" is a total strawman argument. Few atheists would argue that there is such thing as a consequence-free action or decision. Instead, what a belief in God does is take away some of the thought process that goes into decision-making. It creates a cognitive shortcut by making the decision maker more worried about what God would think of a certain action than what the actual, real-world consequences that would occur. Instead of actually thinking through what would happen if a person were to take a certain action, the desire to turn choices into black and white options, for fear of being condemned for making the wrong decision can become the major impetus behind the final decision that gets made. This can actually prevent people from learning how to think critically about their situation, instead having them hobbled by expecting to always be told how to make their decisions.

This is one of the myriad reasons why I eventually left Chrisitianity: I slowly discovered that what the Bible had to say affected very few of the decisions that I had to make day-to-day in my life. The Achilles heel of many beliefs is irrelevancy; once you realize that there's many more important things to think about while making a decision in life than whether a deity approves or not, it's easy to toss the Bible aside and begin focus on sorting through the shades of grey that make up the real world.

Beavis and Butthead Returning?

2011-02-03T21:09:00.001-08:00

It's apparently true. The original is not even 20 years old yet (and it has only been off the air since 1997 - I can't believe that show lasted 4 years!), but it's looking to make a return. I'm curious as to how successful it'll be. Metal isn't nearly as popular now as it was when B&B was mocking pop music back in the early-to-mid 90's (and even then, metal was on a long, slow decline, being taken over by the emergence of rap music into the mainstream). I think the show's saving grace is the popularity of snark and pop-culture bashing these days, as evidenced by shows like TMZ.
I hate to admit that I kind of liked the show back in the day. I even bought Beavis & Butthead Do America when it came out on VHS! It was a lot like South Park: mostly just plain offensive, with a couple of intelligent, subversive comments about North American culture sprinkled here and there. Add in the occasional metal song and a lot of mocking of popular music, which made for a couple of decent episodes.
This next decade should be amusing at least, watching as the best and worst of the 1990s gets brought back for this generation to either claim as their own or mock incessantly.

Advertising in the 21st Century

2011-02-03T15:18:00.000-08:00

I know this has been talked about all over the place ad nauseum for a while now, but I have to admit that I love Google ads. Targeted advertising is much better than the usual scattershot methods of the past. I'd rather be inundated with requests to purchase things that I might actually be interested in, rather than garbage that I couldn't care less about.

The system works fairly well, too.

When I'm looking at a post or email regarding homebrewing, I get ads for equipment to make beer/mead/wine at home.

When browsing the subject of computers, I get ads for hardware and software.

And when I'm looking at science or atheist related posts, the vast majority of ads are along the lines of "how to pray the rosary", "evolution is a fairy tale", and "learn about Jesus today."

Wait, what?

My Atheist Testimony - Part 1: Getting Saved

2011-01-31T11:20:00.000-08:00

Okay, this is my third re-write of this story. I've been waffling on writing this tale for a while now, but since George has offered his "atheist testimony", I suppose this is a great time to complete the tale of my deconversion. I'm also trying to curb my Lance Mannion-esque capability to require three hundred words to say "hello" (sadly, I have none of his wordsmithing skills - while Lance can make those three hundred words interesting, the experience of reading my prose is most similar to receiving repeated blunt force trauma to the kidneys with a frozen rainbow trout). Since every time I attempt to craft this story, I seem to hit two thousand words before I get even a quarter of the way through it, I'll be chopping out a lot of detail that might be interesting to narcissistic little me, but probably boring to most other people, and splitting this post into at least two parts.

The original impetus for this tale is from a comment made by my sister-in-law. A while ago, I was having a discussion with a handful of my wife's family that subscribe to the Jehovah's Witness faith (her father, sister, brother-in-law, aunt and uncle). During the discussion, when it inevitably came up that I'd been a huge Bible-thumper in my teens, my sister-in-law mentioned that she'd always wondered what happened to cause me to doubt the Bible and the existence of God. This conversation occurred over a year ago now (at least I think it was - there have been a few discussions over the years, and my fallible brain has done a good job of mashing them all together into only a couple of memories), and I've been planning to recount the story of my deconversion ever since. So let's get this exercise in navel-gazing started!

When I was growing up, I basically had two completely different families, at least as far as religion went. My father's family was decidedly non-religious. As far as I can remember, the closest I'd ever heard any of my Dad's side ever talk about religion was my Irish grandfather cursing out the Catholics ("Those fucking dogans!") for stealing his parking spot in front of his house while they attended the church a few buildings down the road.

My mother's family was quite religious. Her grandparents were very devoutly Catholic (my granddad is still a member of the Knights Of Columbus), although my Mom converted to Pentecostal/evangelical Christianity when I was quite young. I can't recall religion being discussed often (besides, what kid pays attention to that?), but it was very obviously important to my grandparents, and my Mom followed suit with slightly less ostentatious displays of religiosity.

Because my parents divorced when I was a mere two years old, and my Mom and I moved away from my hometown for about half of my youth, neither side of my family was a huge influence over me, although my mother did her best to make sure that I stayed connected with both sides of my family. It also helped that maintaining strong family ties was extremely important to both clans, and despite the distance, my family was always welcoming and loving. The one exception is my Dad - after he remarried, my relationship with him became almost nonexistant for a number of years (but to save space and stave off boredome in my readers, I'm not going delve into detail on that subject). To this day, I enjoy regular contact with most of my family, though I'm closest to my Mom and my grandfather on my Dad's side (where it helps that I'm his only grandchild with his last name).

When it comes to religion, I have vague recollections of going to a Catholic preschool and elementary school for a couple of years, then transferring to a public school when we moved. I remember going to Pentecostal-type churches when young, having Christian entertainment (I was particularly fond of my "Bullfrogs & Butterflies" and "Nathaniel The Grublet" tapes - thirty years later, I can still remember some of the lyrics!), and going to vacation Bible camp in the summers. From what I can remember, I said my prayers, read my children's Bible stories, and was a good little Christian child. As much as one can be through those years, anyways.

The biggest difficulty for Christianity to overcome in me (especially the Pentecostal, the literalist "Bible-says-it-therefore-I-believe-it" version) was the fact that I'm a nerd. A geek. It took me 30 years to come to terms with that fact, but looking back, it's undeniable. I've also learned to embrace my nerdiness.

In elementary school, I loved science class. I couldn't get enough of dinosaurs, astronomy, geology, and these new things called "computers" that my elementary school had just received a couple of. I was good at math, pretty good at English (THAT wouldn't last), and smart enough to be put into the Gifted Program, which gave opportunities for more challenging science classes!

As I moved up to middle school, "Nathaniel the Grublet" and "The Black Hole" tapes were replaced by Weird Al Yankovic and Metallica. Owl magazine and Encyclopedia Brown was
replaced by Discover magazine and Dungeons & Dragons. What little youthful interest in Jesus I had was pushed aside by computer games like Wizardry and Ultima. During this time, the Satanic Panic hit, and since my mother was a member of an evangelical church at the time, all of a sudden I wasn't allowed to play D&D anymore. I even remember receiving the infamous "Dark Dungeons" Chick tract from someone at church! Mom wasn't pleased with Slayer and Megadeth, but it was a small part of a very eclectic music collection of mine, so she left my music alone.

At that point, I was only vaguely Christian. I went to church, but it was because I was forced to. I secretly played D&D with my friends and told Mom I was playing Car Wars isntead (which was only a lie 3/4 of the time - but I think she knew that). When I was with Christian friends, I acted like a (movie approximation of a) Christian. When I was with non-religious friends, I wasn't a Christian. I was doing what nerds generally do best: rebel in a passive-aggressive manner.

That all began to change when, ten days before my fifteenth birthday, we moved a thousand kilometers away to a small, isolated community of 5,000 people. I was a socially awkward teen with no friends, but my Mom found an evangelical church to join, and she continued to make me join her in going to services. It turned out to be an easy way to make friends, since I was fairly shy and bad at meeting people, but I was familiar with Christianity, though I informed them that I wasn't "saved." Most of them didn't seem to mind, and set out trying to convince me to accept Jesus. I also managed to make a handful of friends outside the church, so I got to resume my nerdy enjoyment of science (especially astronomy and biology) and D&D. But, with a good amount of my time spent with Christians, it took six months for the inevitable to happen.

I still remember the night I got "saved" pretty clearly. I was your typical angsty fifteen year old with few friends, and an absent father. I had been pretty depressed around that time (as fifteen year olds tend to be, no matter what their environment is like), and had been spending a fair bit of time alone. A lot of that time I was angry at my Dad, since I felt abandoned by him. That night at youth group, after the worship service and sermon, there was an altar call. The youth pastor implored, "there's somebody here who needs to forgive someone in their life". (Seriously, in a room with about 20 teenagers in it, could you possibly come up with a more generic, cold-read of an altar call?) I was looking for a way to get out of the depressed funk I was in, so I went up and acknowledged to the youth pastor that I needed to forgive my father. I had a bit of a cry, along with the pastor and a couple of my Christian friends. At that point, the pastor asked if I wanted to ask Jesus into my heart, and I acquiesced. He asked me to repeat a prayer that I can't recall the exact words to (but if you've heard one salvation prayer, you've pretty much heard them all), which I did. The youth pastor looked up at the crowd and nodded with a smile, and the youth group went nuts.

I was now one of them: a born-again Christian. And I would jump in with both feet.

Next: Part 2 - Christianity Insanity

Why I Love Cartoons

2011-01-29T15:19:00.000-08:00

A good cartoon can manage to do any number of things: pull on heartstrings, angry up the blood, expose the idiosyncrasies of everyday life, create a cheap laugh, or (my favorite) mock stupidity. And this can be accomplished in a handful of panels (or less). I'll leave it to readers to figure out why I love this Sinfest cartoon.
I know I've been neglecting the blog lately. I've been extremely busy with real life, and thanks to a blogfriend, I've got a big post in the works. Stay tuned!

Reliving My (Christian) Youth

2011-01-10T01:12:00.000-08:00

For no particular reason, I've been going through some of the music I used to listen to during my Christian teenage years. Have a listen if you want to see what Metallica-forbidden Jesus freaks were listening to in the late 1980s to early 1990s...

Dollar vs. Dollar

2011-01-07T10:42:00.001-08:00

Republican congress gets seated, and the Canadian dollar jumps to overtake the American dollar in value. Coincidence? Probably, but the liberal in me wants to think the world market is hesitant to invest when the American party that caused the lion's share of the USA financial crash (which helped trigger a crash in the world's financial markets) has retaken some control of the govenment.

The Dunning-Kruger effect in action!

Anything I Can Say, You Can Say Better...

2011-01-06T22:52:00.000-08:00

Remember my little rant from a couple of days ago about the state of politics in (North) America? I found a post over at Driftglass that puts my thoughts into a beautifully succinct single paragraph (emphasis mine):

"But this simply is not that country: not some feisty middle-brow Camelot with a couple of equally wacky, equally flawed and equally honorable political philosophies contending in an arena with rules and referees. Instead,...this is a country where one political party is ruled by loathesome men with grotesque motives on behalf of a tiny clique of plutocrats and bulwarked by an electoral army which is kept constantly tweaked to the point of near-riot by a carefully-cultivated media cocktail of rage, ignorance, bigotry and God."

That is almost my entire post in a nutshell. Go read the whole thing.

The Memory Hole Strikes Back!

2011-01-05T21:13:00.000-08:00

I use Firefox, and I use a lot of tabs. I mean a LOT of tabs - Firefox usually eats up between 250-500Mb of memory and takes a minute or so to fully open when I restart. The reason for this is that I like to keep an eye on some sites that I occasionally post at, especially those places where you can't (or I'd rather not) subscribe to the comments.

One such site you might remember was Christian Governance (formerly "Christian Government"). Well, a few days ago I noticed one of the pages I never bothered to close started coming up with a 404 error - page not found. I kind of chuckled to myself because I figured that they must have closed down or changed domain names again. For some reason, I didn't close the tab. I then noticed a few minutes ago that the page started loading again, so I revisited it, and found the post back up again, but with the comments section completely wiped out. Unfortunately, the Google cache has been updated to the latest version without the comments. Even more unfortunate, I can't recall the comments happening at that post.

I posted again there, asking where the comments disappeared to. I'm curious what the excuse for the use of the memory hole will be (if one is forthcoming). Anybody else surprised that a Christian website that claims to hold personal responsibility as a virtue will drop an entire section of comments if they don't like the direction a conversation is going?

A little further digging confirms that, yup, the two main threads I posted on a while ago have been scrubbed clean of all comments. Yet again, my neglect to obtain a screenshot of comments at a fundy site has come back to bite me in the ass.

All that time wasted arguing with closed minded ignoramuses, with nary a record of my brilliant wordsmithing saved for future reference!

In The Year Two Thousand (and ten)

2011-01-04T22:12:00.000-08:00

Jason has posted an interesting video from National Geographic, outlining the fact that we have reached seven billion people on the planet. This number will continue to rise exponentially, which raises real questions about how we are going to provide clean water, food, and power to all those people.

As usual, there are a number of interesting comments over there, (and I'm really interested in reading DuWayne's post on world security when he posts it) about how we are going to manage to provide food, clean water, and power to such a massive number of people. Sadly, I have to say I don't really hold out much hope for making progress in being able to sufficiently support such a massive and growing population, at least not in North America. Certainly not at this point in history.

The way our society works right now, we have an uninformed, disinterested electorate, who spends more time worrying about what celebrities are doing with their spare time than what their government is doing to effect their lives, and what corporations and banks are doing with the environment and the world economy.

Government is basically a rich political class that is increasingly using secrecy, propaganda, and fear in order to manipulate the 40% of the population that actually vote in order to keep the politicians in power. The politicos then use that government power to enrich their corporate friends, who in turn throw money back at the political sphere in order to keep their paid cronies in office. Sadly, this corporate ownership of the political sphere seems to be pretty much the same across most of the spectrum. Politicians that truly wish to fulfill a mandate to reflect the will of the people find their careers ending early.

Fixing problems with food and water distribution, and making power cheaper and easier to produce threatens the power & financial structures of the most powerful corporations and financial institutions. Since those same interests are what provide the vast majority of political funding, it makes sense that most politicians are not suicidal enough to actually attempt to bring any true reforms into the financial or corporate sectors.

On top of that, the media has become complicit in all of this. In order to keep all-important access to political figures, large news organizations have become little more than government mouthpieces. Reporters in the US have been tripping all over themselves for the last 18 months to cover what should be a ridiculous, fairly crazy and relatively small group of angry Republican white folks* (rebranded as the Tea Party) that protested against the Obama administration. However, those same news companies essentially ignored much larger, anti-Iraq (and Afghanistan) war protests back in the early 2000's. Remember the greatest, most catastrophic oil spill in history: the BP oil spill? It took months to close the hole dumping millions of gallons of oil into the ocean, and by the time it was finally capped the media had all but moved on. Six months later, and somebody brand new to the North American mass media probably wouldn't even be aware that such a massive disaster took place so recently.

In short, we're fucked. Politics, like investigative journalism, science and most other things worth doing, is hard. And the last thing that the majority of people these days are interested in is doing anything more draining than finishing a day at work, followed by flopping their fat asses down on the couch and vegging out until it is time to head back out to work.

That critique includes me: I'll fully admit that I rarely do more than complain on the internet or to coworkers about political and scientific ignorance. I'm also not nearly as dedicated to following politics as I was when I was younger. (I wonder if that's because I used to be very conservative, and I recognize how little chance there is of reaching out successfully to my former bretheren.)

I guess the old saying really is true: we get the government we lazy, ignorant idiots deserve.

Oh, and here's the video:

* - Republican white folks? But I repeat myself!

Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T00:03:00.000-08:00

It is now officially 12:03 PST, so happy 2011!

The last three days at work were hell, thanks to what looks like a problem with our antivirus solution and Windows terminal server 2003. What was supposed to be three work days that I could use to enjoy the World of Warcraft expansion cap level raise to level 85 turned into five days of work (fifteen hours on Thursday - yay!) compressed into three.

It was almost enough for me to start pushing for some version of Linux instead of Windows - But I'm not a complete idiot.

Anyways, welcome to the year 2011, almost two thousand and twenty-three years after Zombie Jesus claimed he'd come back to claim the Earth as his kingdom. Ironically, 2010 turned out to be the year that one of the "prophets" that came to my church back in the early 1990s passed away. This prophet had stated that Jesus would return before he died, that this generation was the "chosen generation". (Why that would turn out to be the lazy, increasingly nonreligious Generation X I grew up as a member of, I'll never know.) I guess he was a false prophet that we should have stoned to death, if he weren't already dead.

Umm, where was I? Oh, yes: Happy two thousand and eleven!

Have A Slayer Christmas

2010-12-30T15:23:00.000-08:00

This is one of the most amazingly awesome things I have ever witnessed...

Newspaper Letters For Fun And Prophet

2010-12-30T13:28:00.000-08:00

Last night the wife pointed out a couple of letters to the editor in our local newspaper that she figured I would find rather ridiculous.

She was right.

I am planning on sending off a reply letter in response to one writer (people can be wrong off the internet, too!), but I figured that this letter is perfectly ripe for a bloggy, snark-filled fisking.

"In response to the letters to the editor of Dec. 15 Capital News, in regards to whether God delivered the miners or not, or whether God even exists, I understand how you feel. I understand your logic."

Somehow I doubt that you understand how non-believers feel, nor do you truly understand logic.

"I, as a born again believer, have a real relationship with God, and because I love him I, and all others who believe the same way as me, would want to defend God with everything that we are."

I'm sure children with an invisible friend also considers that a loving, real relationship, too. They also might desire to defend themselves from criticisms of their incorporeal buddy. Yet that doesn't actually make their invisible friend real or of any value to others.

"Yet God does not need defending."

But you don't stop after this sentence. You keep going in order to defend that which apparently needs no defense. This can't bode well for the content of the rest of your letter.

"He is God and there is no one like Him. We cannot control Him and the decisions He makes."

We also can't see him, hear him, or discern any real effect he might have in the universe.

"We don’t always understand why He does things the way He does, but He always has a purpose in what He does.We always want Him to do things our way, but He is God, and He is the one calling the shots."

Well, considering that nobody's been able to show God "doing" anything, those are rather nonsensical statements to make.

"I can make anyone believe there is a God who loves and cares about them, but I can’t tell you that if you just look around, you can see God in every day life. Just the fact that people went to help those who were trapped in the mine shows care and concern for their fellow man."

So, because people care for other people, God exists? Got any other non sequiturs you'd like to pass along as religious "wisdom"?

"Commandments in the Bible are to 'love your neighbour [sic] as you love yourself.'"

Don't forget "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" and "slaves obey your masters".

"As you can’t see the wind or emotions or thoughts, you can see the evidence of them all the time. It is the same with God. You don’t need miraculous signs to validate His existence because you are a miracle."

There's six billion people on the planet, with thousands more born every day. Talk about lowering the standard for what qualifies as a miracle.

"Knowing that you have millions of nerve cells, an autonomic system which works without you doing anything, just tells me that I am here by design."

The fact that your body tries to fight off invading bacteria and viruses means somebody or something has a plan for your life? If He had a plan for your life, why doesn't he just keep those dangerous microbes from hurting you? I guess if you've got nothing else you might as well keep those non sequiturs coming!

"An intelligent design working through science because He is the author of science."

If God is the author of science, how come he never put any good science in the Bible? He could have saved immense amounts of suffering and lifetimes of effort by outlining the scientific method for us, or revealing the germ theory of disease for us, or even at least giving us the proper cooking temperature for pork. Instead, all we got was orders to not wear clothing made from two different types of fiber and warnings to avoid boiling a young goat in its mother's milk. Consider me underwhelmed.

"I am one of a kind, and there is no one exactly like me in this world of billions of people. So I would like to put a challenge out to you. Ask yourselves some questions like: Where did good and evil come from?"

Good and evil are human constructs that we use to explain the difference between people who follow societal laws and norms, and those who don't.

"Why are the laws of the land based on Ten Commandments?"

The first two commandments are "love the Lord thy God with all your heart" and "thou shalt have no other gods beside me". What Canadian laws are analogous to these two commandments? The answer is "none". Our laws are based on English Common Law, which traces its roots back to pre-Christian Roman Law.

"Who keeps the planets in perfect order in the universe?"

Gravity. While I agree that gravity is a cool theory, I don't think it qualifies enough to be granted personhood.

"Who created emotions within the human heart?"

The heart does not contain emotions, that would be a product of the brain (You'll notice we consider other animals to have emotions, too). As for who created emotions, that would be evolution, as a by-product of increasing intelligence. Again, an excellent, well-supported theory that shouldn't be considered a person.

"A lot of people ask themselves where did God come from. As with Darwin’s theories, and Christianity, we have to take them both by faith."

Umm, no. There's a big difference in assuming your invisible sky fairy exists because of an ancient book edited together from a bunch of oral histories, and examining physical evidence to come to a reasonable scientific conclusion.

"The choice is yours. God will never push His way into people’s lives but will let them believe what they want."

Tell that to most of his followers. Also, have you actually read the Bible? Specifically, the Old Testament? God had a reputation of being quite the bully. Thankfully, these days he seems pretty much absent. Must be all the science laying about, waiting for him to reveal himself. Science is Yahweh's kryptonite!

"If they want to know Him, He will reveal Himself to them, and if not, He will not force Himself on anyone. He is a gentleman."

So if God hasn't revealed himself to you, it's all your fault because you don't want to know him! Also, forget all that killing the unbelievers in the name of God that is a major theme throughout most of the Bible! Lastly, what kind of "gentleman" tortures people for all eternity for not believing in Him?

"I hope for all of you who have written God off as a figment of imagination, that you will take a risk and ask those questions and other ones and see where it takes you. Jesus took the challenge of becoming a man on the planet, dying a horrible death because of love for what he created; rising from the dead so we can live a victorious life."

Zombie Jesus came back for our brains, and it looks like He already got to yours.

"I would rather believe in a God who loves me and cares about my life than to believe nothing, having no hope in anything except yourself or science which cannot change the heart of man."

Yes, we understand that you'd rather believe in an invisible sky fairy than have to understand all that hard sciencey stuff that explains things. Thankfully, there are curious, hardworking people who will use science to try to drag our society into the next century of progress. You don't have to come along if you don't want to, but please stay out of the way.

"I would like to see a man create something out of nothing. It takes God."

Ahh, the "turtles all the way down" defense. But you're wrong, man DID create something out of nothing: he created God.

Interesting Beer Dispenser

2010-12-30T08:24:00.000-08:00

It's an interesting way to fill a beer cup, no skill in pouring required. However, filling a beer cup this way creates no head and so the aroma of the beer doesn't get properly released. Mind you, considering the beers being poured in the video are Bud and Bud Light, there's really no aroma (or flavour, for that matter) to be released.

Leave it to Budweiser to come up with an interesting and novel way of pouring their beverages, but doing nothing to improve the bland, watery concoctions they pass off as "beer".

Blackberry Troubleshooting

2010-12-29T09:48:00.000-08:00

Here's some dry British wit (do they have another type?) about problems with Blackberries and other fruit-themed technology.

Slightly New Look

2010-12-29T09:20:00.000-08:00

Well, due to some complaints (well, only one - thanks George!), I've made some style changes to the ol' blog. Hopefully this will look a little bit better in Firefox (and the other browsers). Unfortunately, the alterations won't make the content any better, but like basically every movie coming out of Hollywood lately, perhaps if it's pretty enough nobody will notice the lack of substance!

Secularism Is Bad, Except When It's Not

2010-12-18T09:05:00.000-08:00

Okay, let's be realistic: the Pope says a lot of dumb things. I mean, it's difficult to take seriously a man that claims the ultimate moral authority derived from his invisible friend that he alone is able to talk to, yet spent years enabling and covering up child sexual abuse. Morality? Apparently the Pope's heard of it.

Anyways, Pope Benny has apparently been putting his Direct Line To God to good use. But not really. He condemned religious violence committed against Christians in many parts of the world. To be one hundred percent serious, I agree that nobody should ever be murdered for their beliefs. I might disagree with his claims that Christians are the "most persecuted religion" in the world, and I was a little bothered by the fact that his holiness only seemed to be concerned about the safety of Christians, but if there's one person that's allowed to preach to his choir, I suppose it would be Benedict.

Unsurprisingly, after his initial comments, Pope Benny's thought process ran off the rails:

"I also express my hope that in the West, and especially in Europe, there will be an end to hostility and prejudice against Christians because they are resolved to orient their lives in a way consistent with the values and principles expressed in the Gospel"

Yeah, because if there's one thing noticeable about Christianity in the west, it's how Christians are terrified of sharing their religious views with others. Christians in Europe and North America find it nearly impossible to drum up public and political support for their views. Perhaps if Christians would like to be well regarded, they could actually try following some of Jesus' teachings, because I certainly don't remember Jesus commanding his disciples to use political systems to crowbar Old Testament rules onto people who might hold different values and viewpoints.

"May Europe rather be reconciled to its own Christian roots, which are fundamental for understanding its past, present and future role in history ..."

What about the Pagan roots that existed long before Christianity came along and displaced it, in many places by violence and force? Is it not fundamental to also be reconciled to the worship of Odin in order to understand how Wednesday got its name? Yeah, we know: the only thing that's important is Christianity, because acknowledgment of druids and the gods of thunder won't help fill the Vatican coffers with more gold.

Benny goes on to accuse "aggressive secularism", claiming that it is as bad as, if not worse, than religious extremism. Seriously? How many secularists do you hear calling for the decapitation of people who convert from agnosticism or atheism to Christianity or Buddhism?

Here's what the Pope's comments boil down to: non-Christians need to be more secular, because secularism is good. However, Christians don't need to be secular, because... well, I'm sure there's an important reason. I mean, it's not like Christians ever slaughtered swaths of people who didn't hold what were considered "orthodox" beliefs, right?

Yet More Compassionate Conservatism

2010-12-13T20:12:00.000-08:00

Via Mike the Mad Biologist (linking to the excellent Crooks And Liars), we have example number 10,543,886 of how the average Teabagger views the poor, thanks to National Review editor Kate O'Beirne. At a Republican strategy meeting, she mused thusly:
"You know, I mean if that’s how many parents are incapable of pulling together a bowl of cereal and a banana, then we have problems that are way bigger than… that problem can’t be solved with a school breakfast, because we have parents who are just criminally… ah… criminally negligent with respect to raising children."
Seriously, she just equated the inability to feed your kids a decent breakfast to child abuse. Are you one of the eight million Americans whose job ceased to exist in the last three years? Perhaps you have a chronic, debilitating illness, mental issues, or are a single parent attempting to raise children on your own after having your significant other die or walk out on you (or any combination of the above)? Well, too friggin' bad! There are rich people who need a three and a half percent tax break, so it would be appreciated if you and your progeny would just quietly go off and starve to death in the dark. Being capable of feeding your kids is something you should have thought of before you became peasants!

And Kate was so close to actually coming to an important realization, but sailed on past before any thoughts resembling awareness could form in that selfish lizard brain of hers. Yes, the United States certainly does have problems that can't be fixed by a school lunch/breakfast program. Unfortunately, while there is a black man (who also happens to be a ~~Democrat~~ Moderate Republican) occupying the White House, the New Teabagger Republicans have absolutely no desire whatsoever in assisting to resolve those problems. They'd much rather do nothing or continue the same behavior that contributed to the implosion of the American economy.

What I find even more infuriating (but not surprising at all) is that Kate can't even figure out why feeding children has bipartisan support:

"And yet, that’s the kind of program that has huge bipartisan support with very little thought about why we’re now feeding children."

Seriously, what kind of monster has to think about whether its acceptable to feed hungry kids? How much do you want to bet little Katie here is pro-life? Oh, look, two minutes of Googling reveals the opening sentence from the abortion chapter in her book, "Women Who Make The World Worse":

"Modern feminism's biggest enemies are the smallest humans."

Of course, to Republicans, once those babies are out of the womb, they're on their god damned own! To hear the wingnuts tell it, upper class tax cuts are more important than hungry kids, lowering the deficit is more important than getting people back to work, and austerity is the Republican answer to over thirty years of declining wages. Seriously, is there any horrid, inhuman political policy these selfish pricks won't offer their 100% support for?

I can't believe I was ever so cruel and heartless as to be a big "c" Conservative. Despite the fact that I grew up as the son of a single mother who made $10 per hour at her highest paying job, I used to hold similar views to that of our Randbot friend Kate. My mom managed to keep food on the table for the majority of my youth, but there were a few times where the cupboards had nothing but baking soda and dust on the shelves. I wouldn't wish that kind of struggle on any family, but I can't say I get upset at the thought of seeing empty husks of humanity like Kate O'Beirne suffer through such a difficult life for a few years in the hopes it would open their eyes.

More Compassionate Conservatism

2010-12-10T21:55:00.000-08:00

Via Ed, I found out that Elizabeth Edwards passed away. I think she did a very good job of publicly dealing with the destruction of her marriage by an unfaithful husband, followed by showing a fantastic strength in dealing with the breast cancer that would eventually cost her her life. Elizabeth also made a final posting on Facebook that at least a handful of Christians have been skewering:

Edwards writes that she has "been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces--my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope."
"These graces have carried me through difficult times and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined. The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that," Edwards writes.

To any sane person, that sounds like a pleasant, honourable final farewell to offer a bunch of (mostly) strangers on a personal networking site. However, to the batshit religious, apparently even the period of time before her corpse has cooled is the perfect opportunity to condemn the poor woman.

I'm not talking about the perpetual evil morons of the Westboro Baptist Church, who have decided that this is yet another high-profile opportunity for them to protest and draw attention to their hateful, bigoted views, and announced they'll be picketing Elizabeth's funeral. Instead, other slightly-less insane wingnuts have determined that now is the time to dissect her recent (and not-so-recent) statements in search of the appropriate codewords in order to determine if Elizabeth was the Right Kind Of Christian. This sport needs to be played so that it can be publicly determined if Ms. Edwards will pass through the Pearly Gates, or be condemned to the horrors of Hell. Of course, to the hardcore right-wing Christian Taliban, anybody that hasn't learned that the Old Testament commands them to decapitate every person that holds any opinion that could be remotely considered "liberal" is not a True Christian Patriot, and deserves the worst torture that they can imagine the cruel little bronze-age god Yahweh can dream up.

Her crime, if you can't discern it yourself, was that she didn't show enough subservience to the imaginary sky fairy so popular with some 75% of the North American populace in her final public remarks.

This Christianity Today article was thankfully free of actual commentary on Elizabeth's beliefs, but it was obviously a "we report, you decide" bullshit article, designed to give only the "important" information necessary to allow the True Christian readers to determine that Ms. Edwards was not One Of Them, and must obviously now be realizing her mistake of not being sufficiently Conservative Christian.

Donald Douglas at American Power, however, was quite willing to "Go Ghoul", and feed upon Elizabeth's corpse the way Zombie Jesus would have feasted upon the brains of the living (had He actually existed):

Clearly Elizabeth Edwards wants to put her faith in something, be it hope or strength or anything. But not God. I wonder if it's just bitterness, that's she's been forsaken by more than just her estranged husband --- that's she's been forsaken by Him. And imagine if she'd have become First Lady. Americans generally expect outward expressions of faith in our presidents, Christian faith especially, and thus in our First Ladies as well. The Democratic base obviously doesn't care, as we can see in the "wow factor" expressed by the author at the American Prospect. Being anti-religion is cool, so Edwards' non-theological theology gets props from the neo-communists. Still, at her death bed and giving what most folks are calling a final goodbye, Elizabeth Edwards couldn't find it somewhere down deep to ask for His blessings as she prepares for the hereafter? I guess that nihilism I've been discussing reaches up higher into the hard-left precincts than I thought.

Thankfully, many posters at both sites have heaped much deserved abuse on the writers for attempting to use a recently-deceased public figure to grind their own personal religious axes. Much like running into actual Liberal Christians, it's nice to know that not all Bible thumpers are horrible, hate-filled assholes.

So, thank you to Elizabeth Edwards, for being an excellent example of grace and resilience under trying and deadly circumstances, and for indirectly exposing the cruelty of some religious extremists.

Compassionate Conservatism

2010-12-08T20:56:00.000-08:00

Once again, Rush Limbaugh has opened up the gaping maw that acts as his mouth and expressed the more of that great compassion that conservatives hold for those less fortunate than them:

In case you refuse to listen to the blowhard (and I can't blame you), here's the money quote:

“If people can’t even feed and clothe themselves should they be allowed to vote? Should they be voting?”

Of course, according to the prosperity gospel that many right-wingers subscribe to, poverty is merely proof of the laziness and moral turptitude of the lower classes. A True God-Fearing Patriot would take a minimum-wage job at Wal-Mart, work hard for forty years without health insurance (because Jesus will heal you if you wish hard enough, apparently), eventually working their way up to Owner Of Wal-Mart (it could happen!) and eventually become rich beyond compare! Such is the American/Canadian Dream According To Wingnuts.

I don't really understand how that's supposed to work, but when it comes to political, financial, or social policy, conservatives don't tend to be details-oriented. Apparently between 30-50% of the population can be easily fooled into believing that they, one day, will also be rich, so long as they pull themselves up by their bootstraps by working themselves nearly to death for the table scraps tossed at them by the rich. Couple that to the idiotic fear that some loose slut of a single mother or non-Christian, un-white foreigner might obtain social assistance, and it's apparently easy to get people to vote for the most tea-baggiest of political elitist jerks.

Let's be realistic though - this is nothing more than a rich Limbaugh doing his best to strengthen the grip of the upper class on the reins of power and take the opportunity to help remove the possibility that those dirty lower classes could threaten to ascend to their level in society (or worse, drag the rich down). Are we really shocked by yet one more example of conservative hypocrisy, where they shriek about the evils of intellectual or liberal "elites", yet have no problems with financial or conservative "elites" openly calling for the stripping of rights from the poor?

One thing I'd like to ask Rush though, is what about farmers who receive massive subsidies from the government? What about soldiers in the military? Politicians themselves? Private businesses that exist exclusively or mainly on government contracts? These people obviously can't run a successful business in the free market, so why stop at poor people receiving food stamps.?

Limbaugh's point is that poor people are obviously incapable of taking care of themselves, so therefore, they shouldn't be allowed a voice in politics. Secondly, landowners and/or people with large amounts of equity supposedly have a greater stake in ensuring that society maintains some semblance of stability. But how true can this be? Rich people have an abundance of assets that they can use in order to curry favour and build support. Poor people can't afford to donate much to politicians, nor can they purchase the same caliber of lobbyists (assuming they can afford any lobbyist) that rich people can afford! Therefore, the only voice that the poorest classes of people even have in government is their vote. (For an excellent discussion on the idea of property rights, check out this post from Ed at Dispatches From The Culture Wars.)

Therefore, in response to Rush Limbaugh, I propose the following: people who own multiple homes or have a net worth in excess of $250,000 dollars are ineligible to vote. Those who either own a single home or have a net worth between $100,000 and $250,000 dollars get one half a vote. People that are renting and have a net worth of less than $100,000 receive a single vote. Homeless people, especially the mentally ill, are able to vote as often as they like.

I know that last bit might seem odd, but here's my reasoning: letting mentally handicapped people perform the majority of voting likely will result in our current political process changing very little, since politicians and the upper class are apparently already able to take advantage of large numbers of people insane enough to vote against their own interests.

Comic Book Truth

2010-11-26T21:04:00.000-08:00

Sometimes comic artists are able to capture reality just perfectly:

Seriously, this comic would 100% accurate, if we could convince corporate CEOs to release a commercial that honest about the recent economic situation!

Oh, and if you like webcomics, go and check out Sinfest - it's one of the six comics I check out every Friday as a way to finish off a work week.

This Seems So Familiar

2010-11-20T12:23:00.000-08:00

In this video, the role of my wife talking to our cats and dog will be played by Stephen Fry:

I swear, there are some days where my house sounds almost exactly like that! Plus, our dachshund looks almost exactly like the one in the video (but isn't nearly as well behaved.)

Photographic Evidence

2010-11-18T22:12:00.000-08:00

Here are the before and after photos where I shaved clean for Movember:

Not only do a look like a complete tool without facial hair, but the entire fucking world knows it now. My favorite part is the rash I got from shaving my chin for the the first time since 1995. December can't come fast enough so I can cover up this ugly mug again!

I'll be back on the last day of November to post a photo with my mustache. The first and last one I'll ever grow!

Movember Sacrifice

2010-11-01T22:04:00.000-07:00

In support of prostate cancer research (I mean research to prevent and treat it, not research to spread cancer it!), I've made a huge personal sacrifice - I have shaved clean for the first time since 1995, and will be growing a mustache for the first time ever.

This is the goal of Movember: getting men to grow a porn 'stache to raise money for a good cause. Since one of my grandfathers was diagnosed with prostate cancer last year, coworkers were able to guilt me into shaving off my goatee in order to disgrace my face by growing a mustache for the first (and only) time in my life!

I'm too ashamed to post pictures right now. Plus, my chin is cold and how the hell do guys do this every day? I just about frigging sliced my lips open a dozen times while trying to get those stupid little hairs right at the edges of the mouth! Seriously, after one month of this torture, I'm growing back to the goatee!

Oh, and if you'd like to show support for my outward display and Beardly Sacrifice for men's health, feel free to donate!

Here's hoping that the Norwegian in me comes out so I can at least rock the 'stache for one month...

Vancouver In Review

2010-10-16T21:54:00.000-07:00

It's been a week since I returned from a work-related excursion to Vancouver. A week doing Cisco training isn't what I usually envision as a great way to spend time in the city, but I did attempt to make the best of it. Substituting beer for meals in brewpubs turned out to be a great way to spend afternoons. I went with four coworkers, but I spent most of the time visiting with friends and recovering from a cold the last evening of the week, so I really only joined them on two evenings after training.

I was happy to spend Tuesday and Wednesday evening meeting up with a couple of friends that I knew in high school, but hadn't seen in 13 and 15 years. It's fascinating the way our personalities have stayed relatively static, but horizons and viewpoints (not to mention waistlines) for all three of us have widened a lot since those days when all three of us shared very religious teen years.

Subjects of discussion ranged from what each of us has been doing since we last met up, to how our religious views have changed (for the record: one of us is now an atheist, one is now a quasi-Christian that doesn't believe in religion, and the last is still very religious, but much more of a Liberal Christian), our work histories during that time, and of course, what we know or have heard about the fates of other friends or church fellows from those days. It was surprising how easy it was to spend three to four hours on both evenings just chatting away and catching up. I also found it curious how quickly each of us seemed to re-establish our friendship, almost as though we'd been together only a month or so previously, rather than up to fifteen years ago. Of course, lubricating ourselves with Leffe and Granville Island Pale Ale certainly didn't hurt the discussion!

The second best part of being in Van, after catching up with old friends, was trying out different pubs. The first night we arrived at the hotel on Granville, my coworkers and I located Johnnie Fox's Irish Snug only a block away. We pretty much went there every afternoon after work, where I would down a couple of pints of Guinness, while my coworkers would order Guinness & blacks. When we first walked in, I wondered just how authentically Irish the pub was, but after a couple of glasses, while taking in the live Celtic music, we realized that almost everyone in the place had an Irish accent, except us! I'll take that as a pretty good sign that our Guinness was being poured properly, and that the Irish stew I ordered was as Irish as it could be!

I also got the chance to head down to the Irish Heather to try out their cask aged ale, and to marvel at their selection of over 250 whiskies. The absolute topper, however, was the Alibi Room, and their twenty-five taps of microbrewed ales, plus three cask aged ales to choose from. There wasn't a single Molson, Labatt, or Budweiser in sight! Coupled with an excellent, and relatively reasonably priced menu, the Alibi Room was a little slice of beer snob heaven!
All in all, it was a fun trip, and a coworker let slip that I might wind up heading back for some more Cisco training in Vancouver before the end of March. Now that I have a few haunts to choose from, I'm actually looking forward for my next chance to head down to Van!

I'm back!

2010-10-12T22:50:00.000-07:00

But I'm busy Poe-ing at my new favorite Canadian Christian Reconstructionist blog. I think I've made a couple of fun comments, but I think I took it a bit too far at least once.

Unfortunately, I have a long way to go to meet the brilliance of Mad The Swine over at Dispatches From The Culture Wars!

I'll have an update on the Vancouver trip later.

Away From Keyboard

2010-10-02T21:31:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be partaking in some geek training this week, so posting might even be lighter than usual until the second week of October.

I'm sure you'll be fine without me.

Happy Blasphemy Day!

2010-09-30T22:04:00.000-07:00

Today, I just have the urge to say one thing: your god sucks!

That's right - Agdistis, Ah Puch, Ahura Mazda, Alberich, Allah, Amaterasu, An, Anansi, Anat, Andvari, Anshar, Anu, Aphrodite, Apollo, Apsu, Ares, Artemis, Asclepius, Athena, Athirat, Athtart, Atlas, Baal, Ba Xian, Bacchus, Balder, Bast, Bellona, Bergelmir, Bes, Bixia Yuanjin, Bragi, Brahma, Brigit, Camaxtli, Ceres, Ceridwen, Cernunnos, Chac, Chalchiuhtlicue, Charun, Chemosh, Cheng-huang, Cybele, Dagon, Damkina, Davlin, Dawn, Demeter, Diana, Di Cang, Dionysus, Ea, El, Enki, Enlil, Eos, Epona, Ereskigal, Farbauti, Fenrir, Forseti, Freya, Freyr, Frigg, Gaia, Ganesha, Ganga, Garuda, Gauri, Geb, Geong Si, Guanyin, Hades, Hanuman, Hathor, Hecate, Helios, Heng-o, Hephaestus, Hera, Hermes, Hestia, Hod, Hoderi, Hoori, Horus, Hotei, Huitzilopochtli, Hsi-Wang-Mu, Hygeia, Inanna, Inti, Iris, Ishtar, Isis, Ixtab, Izanaki, Izanami, Jesus, Juno, Jupiter, Juturna, Kagutsuchi, Kartikeya, Khepri, Ki, Kingu, Kinich Ahau, Kishar, Krishna, Kuan-yin, Kukulcan, Lakshmi, LetoLiza, Loki, Lugh, Luna, Magna Mater, Maia, Marduk, Mars, Mazu, Medb, Mercury, Mimir, Min, Minerva, Mithras, Morrigan, Mot, Mummu, Muses, Nammu, Nanna, Nanse, Neith, Nemesis, Nephthys, Neptune, Nergal, Ninazu, Ninhurzag, Nintu, Ninurta, Njord, Nugua, Nut, Odin, Ohkuninushi, Ohyamatsumi, Orgelmir, Osiris, Ostara, Pan, Parvati, Phaethon, Phoebe, Phoebus Apollo, Pilumnus, Poseidon, Quetzalcoatl, Rama, Re, Rhea, Sabazius, Sarasvati, Selene, Shiva, Seshat, Set, Shamash, Shapsu, Shen Yi, Shiva, Shu, Si-Wang-Mu, Sin, Sirona, Sol, Surya, Susanoh, Tawaret, Tefnut, Tezcatlipoca, Thanatos, Thor, Thoth, Tiamat, Tianhou, Tlaloc, Tonatiuh, Toyo-Uke-Bime, Tyche, Tyr, Utu, Uzume, Venus, Vesta, Vishnu, Volturnus, Vulcan, Xipe, Xi Wang-mu, Xochipilli, Xochiquetzal, Yam, Yarikh, Yhwh, Ymir, Yu-huang, Yum Kimil, Zeus - they all suck! And humans are stupid for believing in fairy tales.

But do you know what else sucks? Your copies of The God Delusion, Skeptic magazine, A Brief History Of Time, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and Doctor Who. You know why they suck? Because nothing is fucking sacred, that's why!

Freedom of speech needs to be protected, but ideas do not. In life, there is no freedom to not be offended. If somebody's opinion offends you, either respond with your own opinion or don't listen/read/watch. Responding to offense with threats or physical violence is the domain of immature children, and should have no place in civilized society.

Edit: What I find really sad is that I started out compiling a list of every single god that I could find that humans have ever worshipped, and the list I have above is only a tiny fraction of the deities I found. After wasting over an hour trying to craft, edit, and format such a massive number of entries, I decided to trim it down to the selection of more "major and/or popular" gods you see. No wonder it seems like secularism is a constant, uphill battle against the forces of ignorance!

New Popular Music Video

2010-09-28T21:44:00.000-07:00

Well, you're not likely to hear this on the radio, and that thought makes me very, very sad...

Just Because...

2010-09-25T00:13:00.000-07:00

I put this up for no particular reason other than I like the song, especially with updated political and pop culture references!

The evils of Perfection

2010-09-23T21:44:00.000-07:00

You've heard the saying, "Perfection is the enemy of the good". Here is a slightly different opinion on the idea of "Perfection" and how the ideals created by perfection are completely unreal and can cause depression, self-hate, and all manners of personal illness. The quick summary that I took away from that essay (and my summary doesn't do that essay justice at all - go read the whole thing) is this: so many people get so wrapped up in the fake perfection we see in people all around us, we can abuse and hurt ourselves for not meeting those same ideals, not realizing that nobody is actually perfect.

At the end of the essay, the author offers this challenge:

Will you help me spread "Real"? Tell us below just how perfect you aren't. You never know who might be alive tomorrow because you were real today. You never know who needs to feel like they aren't alone in their inability to be perfect. Even if you comment as an anonymous guest, please comment. Tell us what you struggle with. Tell a sad or dark secret. Get vulnerable. Get real. Let's see if we can get 10,000 people showing the world that we're not defined by perfection.

Okay, here goes: one of the biggest reasons why I haven't been posting as often as I'd like is that I feel like it takes me way too long to create a new post. I make a post, then reread it anywhere between three to ten times in an attempt to catch spelling and grammar errors, and to help meet technical writing standards, which is a subject that I struggled with in college.

So this is me being real. I'm not re-reading this post or editing it later if I find a mistake or a sentence or two that I think can be rephrased better. Who knows - maybe after reading this essay I can convince myself to be a little less "perfect" and get some more posts up.

Edit: Okay, I re-read my post, but I didn't make any changes to it, even though there were about three sentences that I really wanted to rephrase. Don't hate me! ;)

Too much stupidity in the world

2010-09-20T22:52:00.000-07:00

I'm still crazy busy with work and personal life, and it doesn't help that I've been distracted by a handful of stupid topics on the interwebs that have popped up recently. From rich folk bitching about a nonexistant tax hike to minor celebrity teabaggers, I've got over a half dozen lengthy diatribes full of indignation started but not yet ready to post.

It's high time I realized that I can't cover everything that I'd like to, and start picking one or two things to deal with at a time, and leave some of the heavier lifting to the professionals.

My kind of holy book

2010-09-16T12:29:00.000-07:00

I usually detest those smarmy, generic, and touchy-feely religious commercials you see for the Mormons, Catholics, Scientologists, ect. But here's one commercial I find compelling:

Busy-ness

2010-09-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

After some wife-related health issues last week that required my full attention, I'll be spending most of my spare time at the Vancouver Canucks Young Stars Tournament in Penticton. Expect things to be quiet on the blogging front until the end of the week, at least.

I'm sure you two fans can find something else to read in the meantime.

Beer Is Life

2010-09-06T13:36:00.000-07:00

This weekend I kegged my Oktoberfest/Altbier and set it in the fridge for cold conditioning. I can't wait to have some friends over to share it over some Bavarian sausage, sauerkraut, and schnitzel at a little home-spun Oktoberfest celebration!

I also racked my India Pale Ale from primary to secondary, dry hopping it with 28g of Cascade pellets. It's going to be quite good, but I want to see if I can let it age for at least a month in the keg before tapping into it. Sadly, it looks like it's going to be more of a North American IPA style and not as much like Bass as I was hoping. I think I might try picking up one of the Coopers or Muntons Pale Ale kits and hacking it with British hops and a couple of those enhancement kits to turn in into a 6+% hoppy mess of an IPA.

At any rate, I also fired up my Pilsner and Munich Dark Ale kits yesterday. Gotta get the fall brew schedule up and running!

The Forgotten Disaster

2010-09-01T22:13:00.000-07:00

Humans are fickle creatures with extremely short memories. This spring, the world was witness to one of the greatest human-caused disaster in history when the BP Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig exploded and began spewing what would turn out to be millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Yet, even before BP managed to cap off and stem most of the oil pouring into the sea water, people started losing interest in the horrible disaster. Perhaps it was due to the feelings of helplessness about being unable to help, or maybe the massive scope of the disaster was just so overwhelming that people no longer wanted to be reminded of the horrors that have been (and continue to be) wreaked upon the Gulf coast ecosystem. I am no particular news junkie, but I have barely noticed any coverage of of the BP spill in the mainstream media since BP announced that the flow of oil had been stemmed back at the end of July.

Amazingly, in less than one month, one of the most devastating disasters in human history has all but disappeared from the mind of the general public. How can this be? Counterpunch has an excellent report, Slow Violence In The Gulf And The BP Coverup, on the what has been going on regarding the oil spill since July 30th, and it turns out that BP has had much assistance in slipping the destructive results of their corporate malfeasance out from under the attention of most of the North American citizenry.

From the article:

Three vanishing acts are being played out in the Gulf: the disappearing of the oil from the ocean surface by Corexit, the disappearing of the story by the media blockade, and the disappearing from view of the shadowy private contractors who are making a mint helping BP and the Coast Guard keep a cover on the clean-up.

The short version is that BP has been spraying millions of gallons of dispersants (made by a subsidiary company to save money) in order to lessen the amount of obvious surface oil, especially at night in order to avoid reporting on the aircraft spraying poisonous Corexit into the waters of the already-devastated Gulf. They then have their own consultants issue ridiculously-positive reports on how all the damage has been almost fixed.

Next, BP has done everything in its power (and with help from the coast guard and private security companies) to prevent reporters from gaining access to affected areas. Individuals hired to assist in the cleanup must sign non-disclosure agreements or risk losing their jobs. Jobs that are critical to the massive numbers of people out of work because of the devastation done to the Gulf economy. On top of that, major media organizations seem to be completely uninterested in keeping the public informed on what kind of progress is being made in cleaning up the millions of gallons of oil spread throughout the ocean.

Naturally, the United States government has been compliant beyond all reason. The Obama administration has been almost completely unwilling to fight back against the lies and obfuscation from the rival Republican party, but the way they have allowed themselves to be used by BP in order to convince the American public that the spill is under control and the worst of the damage has been dealt with is almost sickening. The Democrats essentially handed over control and responsibility of the Gulf environment cleanup to BP, a company that has done everything it can over the past 30 years to prove that it has no regard for anything other than profit margin.

Anyhow, read the whole article. If it doesn't infuriate you, you're either BP president Tony Hayward or a horrible human being (but I repeat myself).

(H/T to Mike the Mad Biologist)

Republican Evil, Democrat Stupidity

2010-08-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

One thing that I've been learning in increments over the past decade as my political views have slowly shifted from almost wingnut-grade conservatism (hey, I used to subscribe to BC Report magazine!) over to moderate liberalism is just how prone members of the right wing of the political spectrum are to near weapons-grade projection.

Case in point (from Kim Lehman, a member of the Republican National Committee):

If you are able to successfully ignore the Twitterer's rampant stupidity, where she manages to ignore Obama's outright statement (within the exact speech that she refers to) that he is a Christian, and replaces his words with her own mistaken belief that he is a "secret Muslim" (it's a conspiracy!), you'll notice that she accused Politico of being paid large amounts of money to "protect" and support the Obama presidency.

Most people would think that the reason this Republican uttered such a statement was to merely strike a rhetorical attack, intimating that the only reason someone would ever defend Obama would be due to financial renumeration. That makes sense, right? Well, as it turns out, Republicans have been very busy purchasing articles and opinion space from right-leaning websites and bloggers in order to guarantee their support. The specter of Karl Rove (I know he's not dead, but he's certainly a Creature Of Darkness) rears its ugly head, and a Republican again accuses their opposition of performing an immoral act that they themselves have done a number of times. "Attack the enemy at their strengths" is a lesson they've learned well!

There's a second lesson to be learned here: Conservatives throw money at their supporters to ensure their continued fealty, yet the Democrats seem to prefer lobbing invective at their supporters in vain attempts to stop criticism for acting too much like Republicans. The GOP will use anything they can to "encourage" their base to vote: fear, racism, lies. Democrats will do anything they can do to demotivate the people that put them in power, for fear the Republicans will say mean things about them. This is merely another example of the Republicans revealing themselves as cynical opportunists and the Democrats proving that they are complete morons.

Shenanigans and Goings-On

2010-08-23T15:10:00.000-07:00

I feel kind of guilty because not only have I been neglecting my own blog, but I haven't been able to dedicate the amount of time that I'd like to in order to join Jason, Stephanie, George, and the rest of the crew in responding to the nonsense claims of some astrologists. They're approaching the five hundred comment mark, and with me missing the last couple of hundred posts, it's going to take me a couple of hours to catch up, with what the current conversation is. Not to mention the time I'm going to need to actually investigate the raping of reality and reason that I'm certain the astrology supporters are engaging in.

Unfortunately, joining the fray is going to have to wait - I have an India Pale Ale that needs starting (I have a 2L WYeast 1098 yeast starter bubbling away for it right now), an Oktoberfest that requires racking from primary to secondary, and a Cream Ale that should be kegged. Well, from the representation that the skeptic side of the conversation has, I'm willing to wager the only thing that I'll be able to supply that is missing thus far would be my not-so-unique brand of snark. Oh well - to the brew kitchen!

Update: Brew day is complete! Now that my beer supply is on its way to being replenished (I still need to drop off my Cream Ale keg for cold conditioning, and to pick up a Pilsner kit), maybe I can head over to Lousy Canuck for some brain-cell destruction at the hands of the Funky Fraud and his rubes, er - I mean, "followers"!

An Open Letter To America

2010-08-12T22:54:00.000-07:00

Hello, citizens of the excellent country to the south! As a member of the Great White North (you remember us: that country above you, often times referred to jokingly as "America's hat"), I just feel like I need to write you a little letter. Between you and I, I don't mind the jokes you make at our expense, since we Canadians tend to have a bit of an inferiority complex and we certainly enjoy a little self-deprecating humour now and then, I must admit I am starting to worry about you, our bigger, more independent brother.

Our countries both grew up out of the British Commonwealth, but we obtained our freedom in different ways. As the older brother, you got into a big argument with our former parents, and stormed out angrily after bloodying the British empire with a blow to the nose. In a huff, you struck off under your own power to find your way in the world.

As the goody-two shoes smaller brother (ever the favorite), we remember the way you left, but we could never bring ourselves to lash out so angrily against our parents, even though sometimes we wanted to. Therefore, we stayed with the Brits, and slowly, eventually moved out of the British home. Sure, we've got a close relationship with them, Mom (the Queen) drops in to check on us once in a while, and sometimes they'll drop off some used submarines for us to use, but we like to think of ourselves as fully independent now

Anyways, I've been keeping an eye on the political atmosphere within your borders for the past few years. Indeed, it's near impossible to avoid seeing what goes on in the USA, as awash in American media as we are up here. What I have witnessed happening down there makes me fear for both our countries.

I feel like I'm watching your political process completely break down. There now seems to be three political parties in the United States: extreme right-wing (Republicans), center-right (Democrats), and completely oblivious (the vast majority of voters).

The Republicans recently oversaw what could quite possibly be the worst decade in American History, squandering the good American name around the world, starting two unnecessary wars, and throwing the entire economy of the planet into turmoil. Now that they are out of power, it seems the only activity that they're interested in is doing anything to make the new American government fail, no matter how that affects the county they claim to love and care for. From the outside, it looks like they've been taken over by an American version of the Taliban, which completely throws off the balance of power in your great country.

The Democrats are still struggling to deal with the fallout of thirty years of Republican policies. Unfortunately, they seem to be attempting to counteract those policies by adopting Republican policies from twenty years ago (which, ironically enough, the current Republican party refers to as "socialism"!). The supposed American "left wing" seems to be more worried about placating the people who are showing up to rallies holding racist signs and carrying automatic weapons than leading America out of one of its darkest decades. The Republicans are fond of arguing that one shouldn't "negotiate with terrorists", yet the Democrats continually seem to be always attempting to build bridges with the extremist American political party that doesn't seem to care about the health of the USA right now.

Your scariest political "party" are definitely the Completely Oblivious types. The political environment has gotten so extremist and obstructionist that it has forced a small percentage of Americans to become rabid partisans, while causing the remaining, vast majority of citizens to stop caring at all about politics. The Republican partisans are completely unable to deal with reality, the Democratic partisans are pretty much ignored by their own political party, and the remainder of the citizenry are either easily swayed by fear-mongering or are more concerned about stuffing as many calories into their faces as they can while they watch amateur idiots sing or dance on fake reality television shows. Even the impending destruction of the American Dream doesn't seem to be enough to wake them from their stupor!

Top top this all off, you have now seemingly have only two types of news stations: right-wing attack news, and infotainment. Flipping through my American news channels, I have the choice between either wacko wingnut talking points or celebrity scandals. Right-wing news has essentially become an extremist Republican arguing with a slightly less extremist Republican over how to properly demonize the commie/nazi/anti-christ Democrats; mainstream news has become a muddle where two sides of any argument are presented with zero fact-checking or followup questions so as to avoid accusations of "bias"; and left-wing news has become no more than a couple of half-hour shows on public television channels that nobody watches. Where the hell has that hard-hitting American news that debated the issues, presented the facts, and held politicians' feet to the fire gone? It's almost like George W. Bush sent all of your investigative reporters to Guantanamo Bay, and Obama can't figure out whether to let them out or send them to be tortured to death in a Syrian prison!

Anyways, I know that some of this rant has been harsh - there's more than a small amount of demagoguery present in it, some points in it might be incorrect, and I've definitely been guilty of slinging a number of insults about, but I only said all this because I care about you, America. The main reason I care is, as the "little brother" in our relationship, I'm starting to notice some of your dysfunctions surfacing north of the border we share with you, and I'm worried that if America destroys itself from within, Canada might just follow your example.

Please step back from the abyss, America. The world needs you to be healthy and whole, and, even if we don't always get along with you, we do love you. Thanks for listening.

On drinking and posting

2010-08-07T22:48:00.000-07:00

There is one simple rule regarding drinking a substantial amount of alcoholic beverages and posing messages to your blog: don't do it!

On that note, I'll post some substantial posts this week that are guaranteed to increase the amount of regular readers I have on this site. Of course, those are certain to be dreams of grandeur, not that I care right now.

Have a good weekend!

Nerds vs Fundies

2010-07-25T23:24:00.000-07:00

Spending my teen years as a fundie nerd (or is it "nerdy fundie"?) made for a very lonely time. Most nerds bunch together with other high school misfits, such as the drama kids, gay kids, exchange students, etc. Since I was an opinionated fundie as well as a nerd, it meant I was too closed-minded to really hang out with many of those outgroups - I'd piss them off with my semi-constant Bible-thumping.

Now that I've shed the fundamentalist mindset and fully embraced my inner (and outer) nerdliness, I recently saw something that made me extremely pleased. Since I detest my previous religious background now, you can imagine my amusement when nerds at Comi-Con 2010 lined up to counter-protest against the odious Westboro Baptist Church, who for some unknown reason thought it would be a good idea to protest there this year.

Obviously, the brains behind Westboro have zero clue as to what the strengths of being a nerd are. Thanks to comic books, Weird Al Yankovic, and years of being left out of "mainstream" cliques, geeks have learned that one of the best ways (if not THE best way) of dealing with hostile opponents is a combination of parody and mockery. When a group of hideous IRL trolls like Westboro threaten to bring their horrid anti-gay, pro-murderous deity sideshow to protest your event, the best thing to do is not give them the satisfaction of getting you upset and screaming at them. Don't try to engage them - dress yourself up in a caricature of them, then point and laugh at them.

That is exactly what happened.

Nerds fucking rule!

Here's a selection of my favorite photos from the counter-protest.

Nerf chaingun from the future!

2010-07-21T15:55:00.000-07:00

Did you know that Nerf makes a chaingun? That's pretty cool all by itself. Now, how awesome is it when said chaingun gets converted into a 500-rounds-per-minute futuristic Nerf weapon of mass destruction?

Video:

Before:

After:

I think I just had a nerdgasm!

Sagittarius!

2010-07-20T12:57:00.000-07:00

I figured that this sort of fits what's been going around here lately. Plus, I'll take any opportunity available to link to a Weird Al song!

Funky Frauds Must Protect Their Financial Interests

2010-07-19T21:31:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like Jamie Funk isn't interested in my attempt to actually discuss astrology instead of insulting each other. He deleted my original post where I entered his contest for a free reading, then he wiped his multiple responses where he took a martyr's pose, stated that astrologers had been murdered and persecuted for centuries by Romans and Christians, then said that it was time for astrologers to "fight back" against the skeptics that wish them harm. Later, he said there would be no way I could ever win his contest, but that I could purchase a reading from him for double the price (his "skeptics special") and he would inform me as to why my life was so pathetic and miserable. In a later post he made a vague threat, stating that my miserable life was about "to get much worse." I then responded by apologizing for my first hostile post in the thread and indicated that if Jamie would come down off his cross, I'd drop the attitude and actually browse a couple of posts that he requested I read. That last response also went down the memory hole.

So, now the dissection: Am I angry? No. How could I be angry about denialists doing what denialists do? I might as well be upset at a flag for flapping in the breeze - it's what the flag was designed to do. What experience can be taken away from this brief exchange? Two things: First, astrologers have thin skins and are quick to break out moderation if they don't like your attitude - even if you attempt to rectify it. They have to protect the sanctuary of their echo chamber, or else risk losing followers, a valuable source of income. Second: When arguing with creationists, astrologers, and conspiracy theorists, always take a screenshot! I checked the Google cached page, and it showed my first prickly post, but not Jamies acidic responses.

I went back to have a look at the progress at the original thread "Dealing with Skeptics and Assorted Trolls" (I'm done linking to the Funky website), and it looks like Jason and George W.'s requests for evidence and/or an explanation of how astrology could work had been met with little more than jeering, insults, and claims that Jason & George are arguing against strawmen versions of astrology. Strangely (but unsurprisingly), when they request correction on their apparently false view of astrology, all they receive are more insults and claims that essentially boil down to, "Science doesn't know everything" and "Astrology is very old, so it must be true!". Things are progressing pretty much exactly as Jason said it would.

The one scary thing to come out of this exchange is how close I came to volunteering my personal information for Jason's intelligent offer for what could be a valuable experiment: he would obtain birth info from five individuals and submit one random person's data to Jamie. Jamie could do a personality chart, and Jason would return it to the five volunteers for review. Each would report back on how accurate an assessment it was of their personality, after which it would be revealed whose birth information it was. It would be an excellent way to see exactly how well Jamie's "art" works (or doesn't, as it would probably be). Of course, it's easy to see why Jamie would never agree to this experiment, isn't it? Falsifiability isn't something a fraud could ever subject themselves to - he has to make sure he only practices his art for those that already believe he has a "gift", so that confirmation bias can "prove" his powers.

I'll wager this is going to end quickly, with a whimper. After which, the astrologists will feel vindicated because they've banned or chased off skeptics attempting to shine the investigative light of science on the quackery of astrology. Then, the astrologers can return to making a comfortable living fleecing the gullible in the darkness. At any rate, considering Jamie's actions thus far, I don't think I'm that interested in proceeding further along with this waste of time.

I'm a troll again!

2010-07-18T00:08:00.000-07:00

Well, for the second time in my relatively lengthy (albeit minor) career of posting on discussions around the internet, I've been labeled a troll!

The first time was posting at a Blogging Tory site, owned by a... "colourful" (and more than a little bit racist) gentleman named Neo Conservative (I refuse to link to him). I had tried to engage him (quite pleasantly, at least so I had thought) on a post he'd written that was critical of a neighborhood holding a candlelight vigil for a murdered local child. Instead of responding to my criticism of his opinion, he merely linked to my sparsely-outfitted Blogger account (before I had this blog linked to it), called me a troll, and refused to address my comment further.

This time, I wrote a highly critical opinion on astrology over at Lousy Canuck, where Jason was having a spirited debate with Jamie, a practitioner of that "esoteric art" (I then followed that up with a post here at home.) Obviously, my opinion didn't please Jamie at all, and I have been branded a troll yet again. I was originally determined to stay out of it and merely toss a little invective in from the sidelines, but I think I'll try jumping into the conversation and seeing where it goes. I want to see if Jamie considers me a troll or merely a skeptic.

EDIT: Troll it is! I found a series of snarky little responses to my joining in on Jamie's free reading contest (in which I took what was apparently a joke about levitation as a construction tool seriously - do Poes count against New Age believers?). I was even vaguely threatened in one of his responses (not physically, I'm certain - I think Jamie probably meant he was sending a curse or negative tachyon burst in my general direction.). I tried dropping the hostility-dripping reply I was thinking of and broke out some apology and a touch of humility (but only a touch!) in order to see if I can draw something interesting out of what has mostly been a pissing match between Jamie and I thus far.

Pilgrimage fail?

2010-07-17T22:04:00.000-07:00

Well, this afternoon my step father joined me on a 4 hour pilgrimage southwards to view that holiest of Canadian relics: the Stanley Cup! Duncan Keith of the 2010 Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks brought the cup into Penticton, and the city mayor declared July 17th, 2010 as "Duncan Keith Day". Keith also brought along his 2010 Olympic Team Canada gold medal, and his father carried in his Norris trophy that he won as top league defenseman at the NHL Awards ceremony.

We were hoping that they would give the general public a chance to get up close and personal with Stanley's Mug, but unfortunately, that didn't happen. Right after the ceremony and speeches praising Mr. Keith for his excellent play, great accomplishments, and all-around wonderfulness (seriously, the accolades and compliments were even getting to be too much for Duncan - he kept motioning for the crowd to sit after the mayor initiated a standing ovation for him), Duncan whisked the Cup off to the side of the stage where he snapped off a long roll of photos with the local minor hockey teams. From there, he was rushed behind curtains into the bowels of the SOEC, and the show was over.

I wasn't able to get any close photos of the Stanley Cup, but I did get to touch and get some excellent pictures of the Norris trophy.

Overall, the ceremony was nice, albeit a little over-the-top when it came to the compliments given to Duncan in the various speeches from Duncan's father, the mayor, his minor league coach. (Although, to be fair, Duncan did seem genuinely modest, plus he personally donated $10,000 to the Penticton hospital. I guess a little vocal fellatio for him from local bigwigs can be forgiven).

Pics, or it never happened:

Duncan Keith carrying the cup onto the stage.

In this pic you can see Duncan is wearing his 2010 Olympic gold medal, and his father carries the Norris trophy.

The Norris trophy for top defenseman up close.

Secular Chritianity FTW!

2010-07-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

Over at I Hate Church is a post titled "Stop pitching your church, no one cares". As a non-Christian, I can certainly agree with the title and spirit of this post. An excerpt:

Quit pitching friends and neighbors your church! Stop treating them like brain dead, late night infomercial addicts and talk to them like humans! If your God is so awesome, prove it! If God makes your life so magical, show your friends. People are tired of being pitched and sold to, give em the real deal.

Finally, a Christian who understands! Most unchurched are not interested in being repeatedly pressured to attend this church or that parish. We don't enjoy being informed we're going to hell, or that Jesus died for our sins - trust me, we've heard it all before. Between the Baptists, Evangelicals, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Catholics, it can sometimes feel like you're under siege if you don't attend church. On top of that, the message is ridiculous to us. You might as well be telling us that Spider-Man loves us, or that Superman died for our sins.

That said, please feel perfectly free to be the hand of your God in society. Since he can never seem to find the time or inclination to come down off his heavenly throne to offer any assistance or help, it's up to the rest of us (including you Christians) to help feed the poor, clothe the sick, volunteer to help clean up the BP oil spill, etc. One important thing to remember, though: keep your preaching to yourself, unless one of the people you're assisting makes an inquiry about why you're doing these things. Feel free to take advantage of peoples' curiosity, but don't expect nonbelievers to sit through a sermon because you washed their car or gave them a sandwich.

People braver than I

2010-07-16T20:45:00.000-07:00

Over at Jason's place, he's currently taking on somewhat of a debate with a self-described professional astrologist named Jamie Funk, who, along with his girlfriend Marina, is doing a decidedly poor job of arguing his position against Jason, Stephanie Z, and a few other regular readers of Lousy Canuck.

It's a little confusing to follow, since Jason is attempting to cross-post between his site and the Funk site, since it seems Mr. Funk is doing some editing of Jason's posts, claiming that Jason is playing cut-and-paste on multiple threads on the Funk site.

Jason and his group have my support, since astrology is so obviously ridiculous that I don't think I'd have the patience to deal with the peddlers of such trash. The one thing that I'm realizing is that anti-science is the same, whether it be astrology, creationism, anti-vaccination, or anything else; it takes a lot of work and research to counter the claims of denialists, yet the supernaturalists get to make up any damned explanation they feel like out of thin air to defend their point of view. That said, it could be interesting to watch, should any true discussion evolve out of it.

I've asked the wife to make me popcorn while I dispense a couple of wheat ales from the kegerator. Fun!

EDIT: I've taken a(n admittedly quick) browse of the Funk website, and it seems to be the standard tripe that you'd expect from your run-of-the-mill astrologer/prophet: general and vague predictions of future events (seriously, I didn't see a single mention of a specific event - it's all vague "love could happen" or "violence could be possible" bullshit), coupled with a LOT of "in-depth" analysis of past events, and how the Funk version of astrology "correctly predicted" said events. It's disturbing that people can fall for such obvious fakery, and it almost makes me angry that a comfortable living can be made off of making shit up and dressing it up as reality.

That said, I entered the Funk contest for a free reading. I'd be fascinated to see what kind of predictions they'd make for me. I'll wager that if I was able to wrangle some concrete insights or predictions about my life from them (and I doubt they'd be foolish enough to do so - they do claim to be "professionals") that they wouldn't even be successful to 50%.

Edit 2: Edited to note that Marina is Jamie's girlfriend, not his wife.

143rd Birthday

2010-07-01T17:55:00.000-07:00

Today marks the 143rd year since confederation brought together four British North American provinces into a single country known as Canada. Happy Birthday!

iPhone 4 destruction!

2010-06-27T21:57:00.000-07:00

This blog seems to thus far be not much more than a bunch of links to some superlative videos. I pledge to start putting some real content up, but, until then, accept this video as my personal opinion of the value of most Apple products!

Piracy and the internet

2010-06-26T21:26:00.000-07:00

In "celebration" of the latest copyright protection law recently introduced the the Canadian Conservative government, here's on of my favorite clips from The IT Crowd:

Douchebag culture explained!

2010-06-26T00:28:00.000-07:00

I'm getting a little old and out of touch with "youth" culture these days, so it's awfully nice that Garfunkel and Oates put together a guide explaining how to be a perfect douchebag.

Entertaining and informative!

My past returns to haunt me

2010-06-24T22:51:00.000-07:00

I'm totally stealing this from Jason, who totally stole it from Everything Is Terrible, who snagged it from the Christian variety show Fire By Nite that I used to watch in youth group back in the early 90's. I don't remember this specific skit (which, I believe, is a mashup of a recurring skit from a bunch of episodes), but I can't imagine there was any way I could have found it enjoyable without first receiving a frontal lobotomy. Oh wait, I was trapped in the depths of religion at the time... Speaking of brain damage, about the only thing I can remember from Fire By Nite was the "Satanism Unmasked" two-part episode that delved into the evils of Satanism, metal music, and Dungeons & Dragons. Those episodes even had interviews with teen murderer Sean Sellers, who unsuccessfully attempted to use his conversion to evangelical Christianity to avoid the death penalty for murdering his parents.

At any rate, enjoy! Just remember, once you've watched it, you can't UN-WATCH it!

Oil, water, and politics

2010-06-19T22:09:00.000-07:00

Okay, quick and dirty on the BP disaster: BP outsourced to another company to set up and monitor the Deepwater Horizon, and this company was basically criminally negligent on safety regulations. BP then lied to regulators about its ability to prevent and recover from an accident as far down as the Deepwater Horizon well. Then, after an explosion destroyed the well and oil began spewing directly into the Gulf of Mexico, BP lied about how much oil was being released by the broken well, and spent more on trying to control how they were being portrayed in the media than they spent on trying to plug the leak.

In response to the disaster, the Obama government in the USA announced that they would place a moratorium on water drilling for the time being. The only reason they were willing to take this action is because of the huge public disgust with BP has made the Republicans hesitant to demonize the Democrats, and we all know how terrified the Democrats are that the GOP might say something mean about them!

So, how is that moratorium working out? Infuriatingly, not so well. Officials are still approving offshore drilling projects! And the best part? If those projects wind up being denied after the fact by the government, then the oil companies receive awards from the government for the value of the bid, plus interest!

Here's a tip to the Democrats: if Americans had wanted the Republicans in power, they would have friggin' voted for them! So stop acting like them!

(H/t to the Galloping Beaver.)

On blasphemy and international might

2010-06-18T21:06:00.000-07:00

As you may or may not have heard, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is under investigation in Pakistan for contributing to blasphemy against the Islamic prophet Muhammad because Facebook allowed the event Draw Muhammad Day to occur. If found guilty, he could be facing a death sentence in Pakistan.

I found the news and link above at Jason's place, and one of the comments there caught my eye: "This is insane. The reach of Pakistani Law extends only to the borders of Pakistan."

This may be a very true statement, but what if it wasn't that way? I know that Jason's original point to the post was the disturbing barbarity of execution for the expression of a point of view contrary to religion, but I want to focus on what could be possible if Pakistan was a world power, on the level of China or the United States.

Currently, individuals or groups that are considered enemies of China or the USA (plus some other nations) can, according to the laws of those countries, can be captured on foreign soil, moved across international borders, held indefinitely without charge, tortured, and even murdered. The only reason that this is possible is due to the military power and well-funded and connected intelligence agencies that such governments have access to. International law and the laws of sovereign nations are of limited value against the interests of an aggressive, powerful country. Just look at recent WTO or United Nations rulings and votes that have gone against the United States for examples; the USA government essentially ignores such rulings and proceeds to act in whatever manner pleases it.

Now, it is not very likely that Pakistan is likely to reach the superpower status of China or the USA. However, we need to remember that there are religious extremists in America (and, to a lesser extent, Canada) that have similar view to the violent Islamists in Pakistan. A number of Christian Reconstructionists, extremist Christians, and various other Christian militants feel that the USA needs to become (or was originally intended to become) a Christian theocracy, where non-Christians (and even the wrong types of Christians) would be, at best, second-class citizens, gays could be either imprisoned or killed, abortion would be a crime punishable by death, and military power should be available to serve the desires of violent, end-times theology.

Once again, it's not very likely that these Christian extremists will seize control of the United States government any time soon. At least, certainly not to the degree the Pakistani government has been taken over by militant Islam. That said, you don't have to search hard to find examples of extremist ideology (Tea Baggers, anyone?) represented among US government senators (especially Republicans). Militant religion has been chipping away at the secular societies of the West for decades now, and have gathered support in certain parts of the most powerful government(s) in the world. What happens if they grow enough influence to drastically affect public policy?

Those who value freedom of religion and speech, need to fight for secularism, transparency, and limits to the power of their governments, or we could find that there may eventually be no safe place in the world to express views contrary to extremist ideology.

What child could possibly resist this toy?

2010-06-14T12:34:00.000-07:00

I don't know where this picture was taken, but I can't decide whether this toy is horribly, pathetically cheesy or fashioned from Pure Awesome!

I have to say, the glow-in-the-dark hands make it look like Jesus has some creepy reptilian hands in the light.

Hat tip to PZ Myers (as if HE needs more traffic).

This too shall pass

2010-06-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

Who doesn't love a good Rube Goldberg machine in a music video?

UFC 115

2010-06-12T18:31:00.000-07:00

This evening the UFC makes its first foray into Vancouver, BC. Since it's only a few hours' drive away from home for me, I would have loved to go to it, but the event managed to sell out within 30 minutes of tickets going on sale, and there's no bloody way I could have afforded tickets from a scalper. So it looks like I'm watching from home or the local pub.

The main card is Rich Franklin vs. Chuck Liddell. I like the way both of them fight, but I'd have to say I like Liddell a touch more than Franklin. However, I think this bout is a faceoff between two has-beens. Chuck has lost 4 of his last 5, and his jaw certainly isn't what it used to be. In the opposing corner, Rich used to be one of the best middleweight fighters until he ran into the wall that is Anderson Silva. He's basically trying out light heavyweight since The Spider looks to finish his career undefeated in the UFC middleweight division. Either way, the LHW division of the UFC has so many contenders, it's almost a bit of a waste to toss these two in the mix. If the fighters stay on their feet, Chuck had a slight edge, but on the ground Rich will likely take the fight.

Next is Cro Cop trying to recapture his glory days against Patrick Barry. I just don't know if Mirko has the heart for MMA anymore, but I'd like to see him unleash those bone-cracking leg kicks at least one more time.

The last fight that I'd like to see is a local boy, Rory McDonald making his second UFC appearance against Carlos Condit. I think Carlos has the edge in standup, but if Rory can take him to the ground he can most likely work in a submission.

Either way, let's see what happens.

Dog days of summer

2010-06-12T16:16:00.000-07:00

Well, summer finally hit today. When I got up a 6:45 this morning there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the weather has remained like that pretty much all day. The temperature hit 28 degrees Celsius, and other than mowing and making root beer, I've been spending the day on the deck with a few pints of homebrew German Pilsner, my woman, and my laptop. Good times!

Predicting the future...

2010-06-11T20:44:00.000-07:00

Basically, here's what readers (I expect there to eventually be 3 or 4 of you browsing this site regularly) can come to expect from this blog:

* Political & social commentary - What egomaniac doesn't think that their opinions on life and politics are important? I look forward to gifting the world with my cracking wit and movie star good looks!
* General geekery - I'm a nerd and proud of it. Computers, video games, science, D&D, and general nerd culture will hopefully be regular content of posts here.
* Hockey & MMA - I may be a nerd, but I love hockey and I've been a regular watcher of the UFC and mixed martial arts since its "official" inception in 1993.
* Music - I like my music. MY music, not yours. Your taste in music, if it isn't like mine, probably sucks.
* Atheism, skepticism, and general non-religious belief - I'm an atheist, formerly an evangelical Christian. I like to talk about religion, lack of it, and how it affects society.
* Miscellaneous - This is the internet, and even though this isn't Twitter, I'm going to try to become more narcissistic and talk about stuff that interests me.
* Family information - I know that posts about family life and pets can be really boring, so I'll try to keep that for a minimum, but like I mentioned above: as a budding narcissist, it's my job to post on my life.

That's it in a nutshell. Feel free to comment on anything I write, whether it be criticism, support, or just to toss your two cents in on any subject. Most of all, just try to have a little fun!