Racquetball

Holy Cow!!! I'm in the finals!!

I've been playing league racquetball for a few years now, and have done respectably well, but I've never made it to the finals before. Today I beat my arch-nemesis Jerome. He's a wily old fart, and I've beaten him in games before, but never in a match. Today I beat him in the semi-finals 15-11 and 15-1.

Finals are Monday evening. You'll know who won soon after.

I messed up the link in the original post

Yes this is a winter landscape, but not an earthly one. Believe it or not, this is a shot of the landscape in a polar region of Mars! Pretty cool eh?

For more information and more incredible pictures, check out this site http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_007962_2635

I'm glad I didn't have a mouth full of coffee when I watched this

Road Runner Funny Clip - For more funny videos, click here

Get some balls!

Here's another posting taken from Andrew Sullivan's blog. Considering that he is a gay, religious, and somewhat neurotic conservative, I sure do like his stuff. (Maybe his gay, religious, and conservative impulses have something to do with his neuroses)

Where in the world is Obama?

Obama desperately needs to turn things around before he (and America) become toast. He campaigned on change and being everything that Bush wasn't. Throughout his campaign, he exuded a cool and calm and competent demeanor even when everything seemed to be melting down around him. No drama Obama. But he could give one hell of a passionate speech and connect with people in a way that could bring a tear to the eye of even a hardened political cynic like me. He could connect with ordinary people who struggle with jobs and healthcare costs and who ordinarily view the government with suspicion and cynicism. He could connect with the people who followed politics on a deeper level and were greatly concerned about the rise in the power of the President, the shredding of the Constitution, and the rise of money and power on Wall Street. For the last year, he has hung on to that calm cool and cerebral demeanor, but the passion and connection with the people of any sort are gone.

Here is the current state of the Union:

-Healthcare reform looks like it's dead.

-Wall Street continues its shenanigans with record bonuses while unemployment is over 10%.

-Iraq is off the radar screen, but maybe not for long.

-Afghanistan is in the middle of a military surge.

-Guantanamo is still open, and indefinite detention without trial is now Obama's official policy.

-And Haiti, let's not forget Haiti.

So Obama's probably got more on his plate than any President ever, and unless he truly was a superhero, there's no way he can fix everything at once. But one would think that he would fix some of the problems, and one would think that he could retain some of the popular and populist support that propelled him into office.

Here are a few things (not necessarily in the order of importance) he could do:

-Tax the hell out of Wall Street bonuses rather than proposing wonky fixes no one understands.

-Ram healthcare reform through congress. If nothing is done, Obama and the Democrats will still be tarred with the brush of failure.

-Blame Bush more. People have forgotten that Bush created the economic mess. It took two terms of Bush (and arguably at least one term of Clinton) to create the mess we're in. No reasonable person could expect it all to be fixed in a year.

-Blame Bush more. Bush created the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.

-Repudiate rather than embrace the Presidential powers that he inherited from Bush. Close Guantanamo and either try or free the current inmates. And while you're at it, investigate and try former Bush administration officials for war crimes.

-Give Haiti some real aid. While the rubble is still being cleared, give incentives to business to open a few sweat shops there. While do all our t-shirts have to be made in Vietnam anyway? Provide boatloads of propane and stoves for cooking and start a major reforestation effort to restore the land to agricultural productivity. Set a goal of spending 10%/year in Haiti of what we're spending in Afghanistan.

And finally, bring back the passion and conviction. Use the power of the bully pulpit. Grow some cajones. Don't try and compromise with your opponents. Just do what has to be done and if you fail, you'll go down in a blaze of glory.

Video at 11

Have you ever wanted to lose six pounds, cleanse the body of all those nasty toxins that have built up over the years, discipline the mind through fasting, and watch rarely seen video of your inner being? It's easy and cheap! All it takes is thirty hours of your valuable time, a $14 prescription for Colyte, a $30 co-pay, and an appointment with your local colonoscopist!

Video at 11.

Massachusetts

If I were part of the Democratic leadership, I don't know what I'd do about Martha Coakley's loss of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat to the teabagger Scott Brown. I don't know if I'd try to ram the Senate healthcare bill through Congress so it doesn't need another Senate vote, or whether I'd scrap the whole thing and start over. Democratic officeholders will be tarred with the bill no matter what happens, so on one hand they may as well go for it. On the other hand, they've done such a crappy job of selling the bill to the general public that they should stop digging the hole that they're in. I don't know.

What I do know is that the Republicans have made the country ungovernable with their obstructionism. There's nothing that the Democrats can do on the major issues facing the nation like global warming, financial regulation, deficit reduction, fiscal stimulus, unemployment, etc., etc. With far smaller majorities, Bush was able to roll the Democrats because he was ruthless and always managed to get a few "conservative" Democrats on his side. It seems unlikely that Obama can get any "liberal" Republicans on his side, mainly because there aren't any. Even Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe have maintained party discipline.

I think that Obama should say to hell with bipartisanship and do what he can with executive orders and use of the reconciliation process in Congress. If he's going to be a one-term President anyway, he may as well get something done what he can while he still has some power. Who knows? He might even succeed in creating some change we can believe in.

District 9

I watched District 9 this afternoon, and even though I'm not usually a big fan of sci-fi shoot-em-up thrillers, I quite enjoyed this one. It came with good credentials with Lord of the Rings producer Peter Jackson at the helm. The premise is that an alien spaceship comes to Earth and hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa. Why any self-respecting aliens would choose Johannesburg isn't explained, but it doesn't really matter. The spaceship just sits there without any aliens making it to earth. When humans finally enter the spaceship, they find tens of thousands of starving and sickly creatures, and create a refugee camp called District 9 for them near the slums of JBurg. Twenty years later the aliens, dubbed prawns because of their shrimp-like appearance, are becoming restive, and the humans nearby are also getting fed up with with these ugly and repulsive creatures living nearby. The action starts with a plan to move the prawns to District 10, a couple of hundred miles from any major population centers. The main protagonist is a low-level bureaucrat tasked with moving the prawns to their new home. It's quite something watch his transformation from a not very nice, bumbling civil servant, into a true hero.

The movie is done in a combination of cinema verite, newscasts, surveillance video cameras, interviews with journalists, and more conventional shooting styles. There are also the usual cool, but now pretty ordinary, special effects. The film works well as a fast-paced action thriller, but if you look a little deeper there are all sorts of undertones of the evils of the military-industrial complex, race relations, and redemption.

I quite enjoyed it, and would highly recommend it.

And while I'm on the subject of movies, check out Roger Ebert's best films of the decade. Roger Ebert has been reviewing movies forever at Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Siskel and Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times and more. He's still reviewing movies even though he's suffering complications from thyroid cancer and can no longer eat normally. For a moving first person account of his troubles, click here. His list of movies contains some famous ones, and some I've never heard of, but one stuck out. Silent Light, that Mexican-Mennonite movie I've previously written about made the list! Maybe Ebert's got some Mennonite blood in him, or maybe all the medications and lack of food had something to do with it.

It's out of this world!

This is one of the most amazing photos I've ever seen, and it's even more amazing when you find out what it is.

You can find out more here.

You'd think I'd know better

After my episode a year or so ago when I lost a crown to Milk Duds, you think I'd know better than to taunt the dental-industrial establishment by chowing down on some peanut brittle. But noooo! I not only have to learn lessons the hard way; sometimes I have to have essentially the same hard lesson twice.

A few nights ago I had an irrational urge for some peanut brittle. I don't normally have a sweet tooth, but for some reason the thought of caramelized sugar and nuts was irresistible. Maybe I was just bored. So I got on the internets, pulled down a recipe, and went out to get some nuts. I made the peanut brittle pretty much according to the recipe, except that I substituted Roger's Golden Syrup for the recommended light corn syrup. It turned out pretty well, but was more like a really hard toffee rather than the peanut brittle I was expecting. Maybe it had something to do with the syrup substitution. I was careful while chewing it, knowing that I had already lost one crown in a similar situation. But unfortunately I wasn't so careful when it came to breaking off a chunk of the stuff with my teeth. There was no pain, but the tooth felt funny to my tongue. At first I thought that a chunk of the toffee/brittle had stuck to my tooth, but I wasn't so lucky. One look in the mirror showed that I'd broken off the front half of the crown.

Oh well, there goes another $1100 I didn't really want anyway.

And yes, I'm growing back the facial hair. I've been shaving it all regularly for at least a year and a half now, so I think it's about time I took at least a partial break and grew some winter facial foliage.

The Onion Strikes Again!

VH1 Reality Show Bus Crashes In California Causing Major Slut Spill

Thoughts on the Knicker-Bomber

I can't remember where I first heard or read the name, but "knicker-bomber" must have come from some British blogger. It rolls off the tongue rather nicely, doesn't it?

This attack should be met with derision and laughter rather than fear. Is this the best that the mighty all-evil Al Qaeda can do? The guy couldn't succeed in bringing down an airliner, but he did at least succeed in giving himself some serious burns in a very sensitive area. If he had been successful and made his way to paradise, I wonder what the 72 virgins waiting for him in paradise would think when he arrived without his junk.

There have been many calls from the right-wing fear mongers to torture this guy. His own father tried to turn him in, and even though his warnings went unheeded, do they think that he would have done so had he known his son would be tortured?

Sometimes I think that Republicans are either nuts or have serious a serious memory disorder or both. They're criticizing Obama for waiting a couple of days to make a public statement about the attempted bombing. Have they forgotten that it took Bush six days to respond back in 2002 to the Shoe Bomber? They are criticizing Obama for prosecuting the guy rather than sending him to a black site somewhere. Have they forgotten that the Shoe Bomber was tried in regular American courts and is now serving a life sentence? Have they forgotten all their cries of treason when anyone criticized Bush on any national security issue?

So now we're going spend a few more billions on full body scans for everyone. I wish someone would put this all in perspective. In the US, something like 30,000 people die every year in car accidents. Something like 20,000 people are murdered every year. 40,000 people die prematurely every year because they lack health insurance.

How many have died from terrorist attacks? Let's get real.

Things I missed in Sunday school

I just finished reading the Book of Genesis, Illustrated by R. Crumb. For those of you too young to remember the 60's and for those of you who lived them but can't remember them, R. Crumb is an illustrator and irreverent comic book artist whose work includes Keep on Trucking, Fritz the Cat, and the cover of Janis Joplin's Cheap Thrills album.

It should be noted that Crumb only did the illustrations. He did not change the text with any additions or deletions. Some of it's from the King James version, and some from other translations, but it's all there.

I knew that the Old Testament is filled with sex and violence and that God could be capricious, mean, and pretty stupid for an all knowing being, but I'd never read the Book of Genesis from end to end before, so I wasn't directly familiar with the whole book. Quite frankly, most of it doesn't make sense, or if it does make sense, it's impossible to pull some deep moral meaning out of the stories.

Right off the bat, he's got two versions of the creation of man. Chapter 1:26-27 - Then God said,

"Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea.... So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

In Chapter 2:7 he created man "...from the dust of the ground and breathed life into the nostrils..." It's not until Chapter 2:22 that he made the woman from Adam's rib. In the first chapter, he makes man on the sixth day; in the second chapter he makes man, "before grasses of the field had yet sprouted," which would be on day three. Oh well, the Bible never was all that great on consistency, but to me the really weird part is the version in the first chapter when God say, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness..." US??? OUR??? I always thought God was supposed to be the one and only. But wait, there's more.

Get a load of these lines from Chapter 6:1-4.

"When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, "My spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal, his days will be numbered to a hundred and twenty years."

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days - and also afterward - when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

What the hell is going on here? Sons of God (again, I was taught that there was only one Son of God) coming to earth and knocking up the beautiful daughters of men? And then limiting the offspring's lifespan to 120 years so that God doesn't have to deal with a bunch of immortal half-humans? That story I had never heard before.

One story I had previously heard about (from Megan the Elder) occurs in Chapter 34. This is really nasty! Dinah, the daughter of Leah and Jacob, went out to see "some of the daughters of the land." Shechem, the son of the Prince of that land, sees Dinah and defiles her. But he falls in love with her, and wants to marry her. After lengthy negotiations between Shechem's father Hamur, and the sons of Jacob, they reach a comprehensive agreement to share land, cattle, and women. The kicker was that all the male members of Hamur's tribe had to become circumcised. They did, and on the third day, "while they were still hurting," Jacob's men came into town and killed all the men and looted the town taking all the women and cattle for themselves.

Now what could the moral of that story possibly be?

Anyway, Crumb's Genesis is a work of art, and I highly recommend it.

And thanks to my old friend John for recommending the book to me.

Christmas in Edmonton

We had a great time together in Edmonton. It's not all that often that Mom and her kids and most of her grandkids and her great-granddaughter get together, but we did it this Christmas. Mom was in good shape, even making buns and cinnamon rolls. As is usual with our Mennonite heritage, we didn't drink that much, but did we ever eat! Marian and Pete did a great job of keeping us well fed and entertained. I didn't take a whole lot of pictures in Edmonton, or at least pictures that are worth keeping. Here's one of the few that made the cut.

One of the attractions of Marian and Pete's place is watching the birds at the various feeders in their backyard. This year, we were witness to a cold-blooded murder. Or at least a bird-feeding of a different kind. A merlin, a.k.a. a pigeon hawk, swooped down and grabbed a sparrow who was too busy eating the free seed to notice death was lurking nearby. The merlin retired to a nearby spruce tree where he had his Christmas lunch.

As I noted earlier, it's not in the Mennonite tradition to drink much as these kinds of gatherings. But there are some of us who like to bend the rules and push the edge of the envelope. I went out for a wine and beer run, and as I often do when buying beer for a crowd, I bought a bunch of different kinds. Dev had the bright idea to do a blind taste test and see who was best at identifying the various beer we had available. She and Megan labeled the bottoms of a half-dozen glasses, filled them with the appropriate beer, and away we went.

It should be noted that I was in great fear of being exposed as a beer fraud. For most of my adult life, I've loved drinking beer and prided myself on my discriminating palate, but I'd never done a blind taste-test before. So it was with fear and trepidation that I did the test. The beers were these:

Czujsko - a Croatian beer

Castle Lager - a South African brew Pete and I learned to love in Zambia

Hophead - a Canadian super-hopped microbrew

Alexander Keith's IPA - an IPA that's been brewed in Newfoundland forever

Heineken - needs no introduction

Czech Mate - a pilsner from a Saskatoon microbrewery

We were all essentially given the identity of the Hophead. Not only is it super-hopped, it's far darker than the rest of the beers.

After the first round of sips, I was absolutely sure of three of them - Hophead, Heineken (always tastes sweet to me), and Alexander Keith's IPA. I had drunk this IPA on several occasions, and it is definitely not a northwest microbrew style IPA. In fact I've always thought it was downright bland. It took another round of testing the remaining beers to pick out the Czech Mate. It isn't really a pilsner-style beer by my definition, even though it's quite good. I was pretty sure I picked it out because I could taste the microbrew edginess that big brewers somehow get rid of. So I was left with another round of Castle and Ozujsko. I've always liked Castle because it's light and crisp with a touch more hops than you'd expect in a mass-produced beer. Ozujsko is more like a Northern European lager in the Beck's tradition.

So how did I do? Well, alone among the seven or eight competitors, I was SIX for SIX!!! My reputation and self esteem, are still intact!