Category: General

There’s so much talk about how the US is losing its edge and how we need to improve our schools. Yet we seem to do everything we can to make sure that good teachers are discouraged and talented people are forever kept away from even considering teaching as a profession. The story that’s got me angry today is a CNN report of an Indiana school teacher who is being transferred for allowing the school paper to publish an editorial advocating tolerance of gays. Rather than being fired, she is being transferred to another school where she will not be allowed to teach journalism. What a great lesson we have there! Advocate tolerance for gays, or any unpopular group for that matter, and either lose your job or be barred from teaching something you love. Yeah, that’s the way to make our schools and America great. In the end, I cannot see how God is going to bless such a close hearted land as the US has become. That we get the good things that we do is nothing less than either evidence of a graceful god, or that this universe is mad and meaningless. Our bad schools are no one’s fault but our own. We’re just getting the schools we deserve.

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, the gun debate rages on. This isn’t anything new, but this time around, the notion that armed students or professors would have prevented the massacre is getting significant play. Admittedly, it is plausible, and some might argue, even cool that some heroic student would have just blown Cho away thus ending the carnage before it could fully blossom. The view that an armed populace is necessary for general safety immediately reminded me of the Star Trek episode entitled, “A Piece of the Action.”

In this episode, the Enterprise visits a planet that has chosen to based their society on the old Chicago gangs (Al Capone, etc…). The different gangs are constantly fighting each other for territory which, apparently, necessitates an armed populace. Every adult is armed, even moms have a machine gun stashed in the baby carriage. Would we really be safer in such a society? I don’t know, but I do know that there is one scenario that people have left out that bears mention.

We all assume that if there were other armed students, they would have acted to stop Cho. But it is certainly possible that some of them could have decided to help Cho! There are a lot of angry and disaffected people in our world, and just like looting seems almost infectious after a blackout or disaster, why shouldn’t some people choose to take part in the developing carnage? A lot of the time it just takes one “deviant” to show the way and push others over the edge. We see this with copycat crimes all the time. So in this worst case scenario, there could easily have been far more deaths than actually occured.

I remember growing up that when my dad took a newspaper into the bathroom, we were in for a long wait before he came out again. This is a tradition that I have continued in my own family, though my bathroom tends to be stocked with gaming mags rather than newspapers. Today I feel I have taken this tradition to a new height, quite unintentionally.

I finished the second of the two anime music videos I had planned to enter in the Anime Central AMV contest just in time last week. So I’ve been pretty happy the last couple of days since it did not seem that the second one was going to be completed on time initially. Well I’d just transcoded them to an mp4 format my iPod could play and resynched the pod when nature called. Without thinking too much about it, I took the iPod along with me and wanting to check the playback, watched the AMVs on the crapper! A new era of bathroom “reading” has begun!

Right now we have a strange juxtaposition of things in the media. On the one side of the page we have embattled Don Imus being barbequed for calling the NCAA Champion Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed hos”. While on the other side of the page, we have a triumphant Larry Birkhead celebrating his paternity of a child with another man’s dead woman/companion(???) which puts him in line to control a fortune of millions of dollars. Hmmm, who’s the real ho here? Strange world we have here, honor is dishonored while dishonor is honored. T_T

During some semi-random channel flipping last night, I came across an episode of Cheaters on G4. In this “reality” show, they follow around a lover/spouse that the other thinks may be having an affair with another person, that is, cheating. As near as I can tell, the entertainment value rests in the usually violent reaction the cheated on significant other has toward the cheater. Then shortly before I could flip away, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before, the cheater and the cheatee were both guys!

Since this was clearly not something I would have expected, I decided to watch the show and see how it all turned out. It was pretty much the same as you’d see for a heterosexual couple. The guy being cheated on was very upset, and crying his heart out. Regardless of what you might think of homosexuality, you couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy. The cheater, as is often also the case, seemed pretty clueless about what he’d done. And, of course, the cheated on significant other immediately lunged for the interloper his lover had been cheating with. Also, the cheater always seems to find someone who looks remarkably like their current lover to cheat with. The only thing that was a bit different was just how brazenly unrepentant the interloper was. That guy was a real little bitch! :3

So there you have it. Whether men cheating on women, or men cheating on other men, it all makes for some delicious trash TV! I guess it doesn’t matter as long as the ratings targets are met.

Radical Islam, meet Radical Christianity! Complaints from Catholics and death threats directed at the artist, Cosimo Cavallaro, have lead to the cancelation of the My Sweet Lord exhibit which featured a nude Jesus sculpted from chocolate. This is just silly. There’s nothing wrong with a sculpture of Jesus posed as if on the cross made of chocolate. And as for being naked, well in all likelihood Jesus was naked when He was crucified. That was part of the shame and humiliation of the whole thing. Cardinal Egan should know better than to be a part of the kind of fanaticism that can only chase people away from Christ rather than lead them to a relationship with Him. Oh well, I guess he thinks that chocolate bunnies for Easter are just fine, but a sweet chocolate Jesus is just too much to bear!

The big battle we’ve all been waiting for has finally commenced, as Viacom sues Google over copyrighted content on YouTube. If the two sides don’t wimp out and settle, we may finally have an answer to the question of whether or not YouTube can be held responsible for the fact that its popularity is largely founded on the presence of use uploaded clips of copyright protected content.

I’m not a lawyer, but I would guess that as long as YouTube has not explicitly stated in any way that their business plan depends on or benefits from illegally uploaded copyrighted content. They’ve probably been fairly careful about this consciously at least. But there is little doubt that Viacom will try to subpoena thousands of internal emails (the subconscious if you will) in an attempt to show that YouTube and Google did acknowledge the dependence on what Viacom alleges is an illegal business model. In the absence of any smoking guns like this, a judge may find him/herself having to decide whether to serve the letter of the law (Google wins), or the spirit (Viacom wins).

Just screwing around before I watch Adult Swim. Am I surprised, not really, but I wasn’t even trying very hard.

Goodbye CompUSA, I’m not sure I’ll really miss you… CompUSA is closing half of its US stores, including what I believe is the last Chicago CompUSA on Chicago avenue next to the American Girl Place. I’m not sure I’ll miss them though, because over the years I’ve found that CompUSA has always been the most expensive place to buy anything. You name it, it costs more than the same thing at Micro Center. This was particularly frustrating because otherwise, CompUSA was the most convenient place to get computer hardware and supplies. I guess they just couldn’t compete, or just didn’t find their niche. In the end, it looked like they were trying to compete in the same consumer space as Best Buy or Circuit City, but without being able to offer the same kinds of discounts. Sadly, even now with the 10% to 30% discounts of the store closing sale, the prices still suck!

Or maybe I should say ordered to maid *sweatdrop* or something like that after she’s been sentenced to mopping floors at New York’s Sanitation Department after being convicted of assaulting her housekeeper with a cell phone. I don’t usually follow this sort of thing, but hey, any excuse for a little eye candy on a cold day! Seriously, I still don’t like it that a. big name celebs usually get off easy for things that sometimes draw serious jail time for us ordinary folk, and b. sentencing people to community service gives community service a bad name. Community service is an honorable thing that all of us should be engaged in anyway. It is not a punishment! I used to mop floors after school in highschool at a nearby Catholic school for girls. The money was good, and the fringe benefits were, ahem, pretty nice. I will always love those short skirts! <3

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve been tempted to create my own MySpace page on a number of occasions, but always stopped short primarily for aesthetic reasons. In 10 Reasons I Didn’t Start a MySpace Account, John invites the MySpace love! His reasons include annoying music, pages with too much stuff on them, long load times, and poorly chosen backgrounds. For me, all of these are under the heading of aesthetics. Other reasons, like people getting hurt, and vapid communication, are sadly, not unique to MySpace. There’s plenty of that in the real world. In the old days, one might say that art is just imitating life, but MySpace isn’t really art. I’m afraid that MySpace, and similar sites have actually become a part of life. So it’s only natural that the failings of life should be exhibited therein.

This morning for some reason the kids are all cranky! They’re just screaming their heads off, and I don’t have a clue as to what the problem is…Ugh. Sometimes I think of them as little bits of code I wrote based on my own. So it’s fun to watch them interact and go at it without too much interference from me. Yeah, I’m being a coward today! I feel pretty good about how things are going at work. My Ruby on Rails projects are moving along better and better as I get a grip on using the framework. Now if I can just kick my XNA project into gear, things would be perfect.

In the midst of all of the uproar over Tim Hardaway’s anti-gay remarks, George Takei has created a public service-like announcement that could be Hardaway’s worst nightmare. But don’t worry Tim, gay people don’t hate you, oh no no no!

I remember a few years ago, when I was between jobs, feeling very much like a housewife. I started doing all of the wifey sort of things like picking up the kids from school and more housework. Well it may be disputed whether or not I was doing all that much more LOL, but clearly I was finding myself in places frequented by stay at home moms. At the time it was not a happy feeling at all, even though many of those moms were pretty hawt!

Now my own wife is in a similar situation and is similarly unhappy. There are a lot of attendant reasons for the unhappiness, but for now at least, it seems that I have a faux housewife so to speak. There’s nothing wrong with being a stay at home mom, if that is your choice. But in our case, I think rough times may be ahead, at least for a short time. Oh well, at least we got a wonderful Mardi Gras King Cake out of it! She’s a great cook!