It’s time for the WBQotW to get back to its roots. Back to the days when a mysterious phrase anonymously scribed on a white board would both entertain and confuse those who found it.

I’m happier than a wooden spoon at a spelling bee!

I really do love my job, but weeks like this are my least favorite part. I’ve been working double-days again trying to get an important project done by Friday. I’ll have to be within walking distance of my PC all weekend, either at work or at home, because some of the project stakeholders will be testing my new code and if they find a bug, I’ll need to fix it right away. The product goes live on Tuesday.

Sorry, Mom. I can’t come to Amarillo. Happy Mother’s Day!

There’s been some chatter in the news lately about this Puerto Rican ex-convict who’s gotten rich through blasphemy. An Orlando TV station did a short piece on him, including a video and a slide show.

His web site is in Spanish and has only a small English section. But using Google’s translator, I was able to read a little bit of the site. Essentially, the guy claims to be God incarnate and that his teachings “replace” those of Jesus Christ. His followers joyfully display “666”, the mark of the beast mentioned in Revelation, some even getting it tattooed on their wrists.

It’s amazing to me the lengths to which people we go in order to feel religious, or included, even when ten minutes worth of reading would defeat the whole premise on which they are hanging their spiritual well-being.

I often feel that the success of cults like this shines a spot-light on the fact that the modern Christian church does such a bad job of reaching out to people who are looking for an answer. But I could be wrong. What do you think?

I’ve got over a dozen links lined up for my big global warming post, I just don’t have time to write it. Gah!! Darned real life. It’s always ruining my fun.

I got this from my Uncle Robert. I thought it was well worth sharing. I changed the order to put my favorites at the bottom of the list. (See, I’m a comedic genius like that.)

AMAZINGLY SIMPLE HOME

1. When choking on an ice cube simply pour a cup of boiling water down your throat. Presto! The blockage will instantly remove itself.
2. To treat high blood pressure simply cut yourself and bleed for a few minutes, thus reducing the pressure in your veins. Remember to use a timer.
3. A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.
4. Avoid cutting yourself slicing vegetables by getting someone else to hold while you chop. (Unless you have high blood pressure. Then you can kill two birds with one stone.)
5. Avoid arguments with the Mrs. about lifting the toilet seat by using the sink.
6. If you have a bad cough, take a large dose of laxatives. Then you will be afraid to cough.
7. You only need two tools in life – WD-40 and Duct Tape. If it doesn’t move and should, use the WD-40. If it shouldn’t move and does, use the duct tape.

This is SO me.

Just because I have a short attention span doesn’t mean…

When mass killers meet armed resistance is an article posted a couple of weeks ago in response to the VTech shootings. It tells the real story (the one that never seems to make the news) about several mass shootings in the last few years in which armed private citizens put a stop to the killing. This is an absolute must read for anyone who thinks that gun control stops crime.

The only thing gun control does is provide criminals with the confidence that they will not meet any resistance. Arms carried by legal, law-abiding citizens break that confidence and stop criminals in their tracks.

I found a pretty articulate rendition of the case for relativism in Scott Adam’s “Dilbert Blog“. (Caution: He uses dirty words.) Scott feels strongly that free will is a myth and talks about it often. In this post, he (perhaps unintentionally) ties his crusade to defeat the free will myth to his Liberal relativism.

If you think about it, wars are generally fought because of a false sense of certainty. Usually some leader thinks he is a God, or talks to God, or descended from the Gods, or thinks God gave his people some particular piece of real estate. The leader’s opinion is the most certain in the land. People flock to certainty and adopt the certainty as their own. The next thing you know, stuff is blowing up.

That’s certainly true, and I don’t deny it. (Liberals are not stupid. I just don’t agree with their solution to the obvious problem.)

You can take any major problem in the world and identify a key culprit who has more certainty than he or she should. For example, Osama Bin Laden is certain that Allah exists, and he’s certain that humans can know what an omnipotent being wants us to do. That hasn’t worked out well for anyone.

How about the problem of discrimination? The root cause is a bigot’s certainty that ethnicity is more important than individual differences. He shouldn’t be so certain. You don’t need to completely change a bigot’s mind to cure discrimination; it would be a huge step to make him doubt he can accurately judge people by their ethnicity.

Ooh! He even used the bigotry concept from my big Liberalism post. He’s putting himself neatly into the Liberal mold.

Again, I agree that making disparaging assumptions about a person because of how they look is a dangerous thing. But I believe even Mr. Adams would agree that, when used intelligently (with discrimination) that sometimes you can, in all correctness, call a spade a spade.

There aren’t many ideas that have the potential to change the world. But the idea that we have no free will has to be on the short list. Once you accept free will as an illusion, it necessarily makes you wonder how certain you are about the rest of your reality. When you lose your own irrational sense of certainty, you are less likely to discriminate, to judge, and to believe a lunatic leader who tells you he’s certain.

Did you catch that? “Your own irrational sense of certainty.” So anyone who is certain about anything is irrational? Even when you are certain that there is no free will? See, he starts off in the right direction (i.e. question authority, question your own assumptions, question your faith), but then he suddenly makes a sharp left turn and assumes that any “certainty” (in other words, any absolute truth) is irrational.

I know, I’m reading into it and putting words into his mouth, straw man, blah blah blah. But the foundation is there. The basic, flawed reasoning underpins nearly everything Adams writes. I love his comic strip. I enjoy his blog. But I disagree with his underlying belief. I agree with the observations, but I disagree with the hypothesis.

The reason Bin Laden is bad is not because he his certain of his beliefs. It’s because his beliefs are wrong. Dogma is not in and of itself evil. You have to look at what the dogma is based on. You have to investigate. A Liberal would say that faith in anything is irrational. I say that blind faith is irrational, but faith is necessary.

You must be willing to inspect your faith. Be willing to test it. The Bible teaches us to be sure of what we believe. That is, don’t just believe. Know what you believe and why you believe it. The Bible says there will be false teachers and because of that, you have to question the authority of any teacher. On this point, Adams and I come a bit closer to agreement.

You can introduce some doubt into your life and still keep your religious faith, morality, and all of the social and psychological benefits you always enjoyed. Faith would be meaningless without a pinch of doubt to give it context. In particular, it would be helpful to doubt that your religious leaders know the mind of God. A little bit of doubt can be a healthy thing.

There have been a glut on CGI animated features in the last two years. Everyone wants to jump on the Toy Story wagon and get their 100 gazillion dollars. But guess what happened. Most of those movies are crap. Lo and behold animating a bad story, no matter how amazing the animation, produces a bad movie.

I can count on one hand the number of movies I’ve quit watching half way through. Now, among those infamous few, I can include “Happy Feet“. Warner Brothers must have had a colossal advertising budget because the hype for this movie was truly Titanic. But when it came down to it, it was boring! And I don’t mean boring like there was too much time between the good parts. I mean boring like I made it over 30 minutes into the show and there were no good parts. No continuity, no laughs, and no “toe tapping” despite the promotional claims.
I may be in the minority on this one. It did win some awards and what not. But I really thought the whole story was just dumb. The music was … nice … I suppose. I’m not a real fan of musicals, but Tammy is and she was even more disappointed than I was. The characters were very one-dimensional. Rather than try to develop the characters, the script relies on caricatures, so you just know that the Elvis-sounding dad is a fun loving guy who’s not very reliable. You just know that the gang with Mexican accents are party animals. Yeah. Well, that doesn’t really work for me. And the whole “ugly duckling” rip-off plot line was just too weak to support an already weak script.
The animation… one word: Amazing. It’s really beautiful. But like I said, pretty pictures do not a great movie make. Happy Feet made me sad, and for that it gets one grin.

Disney’s latest entry, “Meet the Robinsons“, was less dazzling visually. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still really well done. It just doesn’t raise bar as every previous Pixar movie has. I like the animation. It’s much more classically cartoonish. It doesn’t pretend to be real. It’s just fun. But it didn’t blow me away.

Even without jaw dropping technology, this was a really fun movie. It was fast paced, very witty, full of action and laughs. The complete opposite of Happy Feet. Even though the root moral of the story was the same (Be content to be who you are. Don’t try to be something you’re not.), Robinsons was fun. It was original. It let us be silly. Happy Feet, perhaps, was just too serious all the time. There’s nothing wrong with booger jokes once in a while as long as there’s more to the movie that just booger jokes (*cough*Shrek*cough*).

The characters were pretty well developed (not great, but good enough) and the story allowed you to think a little. I had the “mystery” figured out after about 30 minutes, but that’s how I tend to be. It’s okay as long as I don’t tell Tammy how the movie is going to end when it’s less than half over. That usually gets me a very painful elbow in the ribs.

Over all, it was just what it should have been. A funny, clean movie, with a little suspense and a good moral. (I wonder how much of this improvement in morality stems from the absence if Michael Eisner. Just a thought.) Anyway, this movie easily earns its three grins.

I expected Dreamworks’ “Over the Hedge” to be 90 minutes of tree hugging and fart jokes. The commercials and previews did not impress me at all. But, when I went to the DVD kiosk at the grocery store, Happy Feet was taken. “Oh well. Let’s give it a shot. It’s only 99¢.”

The guys who marketed this should be fired. They lied to me. There was only one green skunk cloud in the whole movie and it was good for the plot, not just a crutch. I was completely taken by surprise. There was absolutely no explicit tree hugging or anti-suburbia finger waging. Instead it was a multi-layered, character heavy plot in which each of the ensemble of characters got their own development and their own chance to teach us a lesson. The over all moral of the story was great, but each character had a lesson to learn. Trust, honesty, self-esteem, tradition, self-control, pride… And to top it all off, it’s just laugh-out-loud funny!

I also didn’t know until I watched the DVD extras that Over the Hedge was based on a comic strip of the same name. That’s always a plus in my book because it usually means that there’s someone who loves the characters driving the creative process, keeping the script true to their original creation.

For once, Dreamworks has put out a movie that I will probably own in the same time frame as a Disney movie I probably won’t own. The animation quality was good, but again, not jaw dropping. They did some pretty impressive work with the fur, but that ground was broken in Monster’s Inc. What they did manage to do was get a lot of really talented comedic voice talent together with a brilliant script. The poked fun at things that are easy to laugh at without hurting anyone’s feelings. (America’s obsession with food and draconian housing associations are always fair game in my book.)

All I can say is that this movie really clicked. It has “it” and for that, I give it four grins.