Idiomatic Expression

I am headed out of the country for a couple of weeks so unless I find a cheap Internet cafe in Taipei, there won’t be any updates until the middle of December. If you are really bored you can track the flight with trip.com’s FlightTracker.

The schedule is
Wednesday Nov 27th 8:30am United Flight 845
Monday 2nd 2:20pm (~3:20am EST) United Flight 844

I plan on taking lots of notes and will hopefully have the time to post about the high / low points of the trip when I return.

If anyone has any special request for items from, or pictures of, Taipei you have 24 hours to let me know.

Apparently I am now officially an adult! The top of my current want list has changed from an Xbox to a 3-in-1 leaf blower vacuum mulcher! If you have seen the pictures of my new back yard, the reason for this should be obvious. After around 8 hours of raking over three days I am still not half way done with my backyard! If you take a look at the back yard. I have finished up to about the row of evergreen hedges. I also did the front yard, which is much easier as I was able to rake the leaves directly to the curb. In the backyard I have to make large piles, then rake them onto a tarp to be carried into the front yard and dumped at the curb.

Hopefully I will be able to convince Katherine to buy something like the following on the way home from acupuncture tomorrow.

This sounds strangely appropriate for me.

Which Founding Father Are You?

This was stolen from Rick Wash, but he isn’t using a blogger with trackback functionality.

I am experimenting with a new thumbnail program called Thumbnailer 5. It seems to have all of the functionality I need built in, including batch modes so that I can transform the entire folder of pictures to something other than 1600X1200 with only a couple of clicks. The pictures are from the last month or so including some of my pictures from Columbus, the house that I am moving into and… *drum roll* Burrito Gopher. Checkout the extended entry for a bit more explanation to the random pictures, otherwise, here they are.

Random Pictures from October - November 2002

In an odd combination of religion and environmentalism the Evangelical Environmental Network is kicking off a What Would Jesus Drive television campaign in four states (North Carolina, Iowa, Indiana and Missouri). They believe that when buying a car the bible’s call for stewardship and justice translate into buying “…the most fuel efficient and least polluting vehicle available that truly fits [your] needs and does not significantly threaten [your] safety or the safety of others. ” Hopefully the ads will be coming to VA soon as I would love to see them.

I am not sure if I buy into Jesus driving a Toyota Prius (I think he would probably prefer a car with better acceleration and handling perhaps a Mini Cooper S), but if it helps convince people to buy more fuel efficient cars then I am all for it.

Some of the fact sheets are quite good; well the ones that aren’t entirely based on scripture are quite good. Not being a big fan of scripture I can’t comment on the references they quoted.

More information about the founders of What Would Jesus Drive? can be found at the Protecting Creation website.

Please comment on what you think Jesus would drive and why.

A very positive article about the movie “Jackass” entitled “The Rear End Of Civilization As We Know It” (washingtonpost.com) is up at WashingtonPost.com. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes to help entice you into reading the article.

“‘Jackass: The Movie’ has been lambasted as the end of civilization, but you get the sense that it exhausts critics more than it offends them: ‘As much as I laughed throughout the movie, I cannot mount a cogent defense of the film as entertainment, or even performance art,’ managed a stymied movie reviewer, Rene Rodriguez of the Miami Herald. ‘Jackass’ is gloriously critic-proof, a triumph of blessed stupidity.”

“What we are witnessing here, like the tropical cicadas that crawl up only every 17 years or so, is the final fruit of punk rock America. If you’ve ever had a punk band crash for a night in your apartment, you know what absolute gentlemen they can be, counter to everything that may have happened earlier onstage.”

I did go see this movie a couple of weeks ago and I laughed so hard that it hurt. Luckily there was no vomiting in the theater. A couple of my friends have been incredulous that I would want to see such mind-numbing filth, but it takes me back to my punk-rock / skateboarding roots where my friends and I did stupid stuff (to a lesser degree of course) all of the time. Besides it has a guy in a Panda suit landing an ollie kickflip to 5-0 stall on a planter in Japan. What other reason do you need to see this movie?

Let me start out by confessing that I am not a Democrat or a Republican. I find the hardliners in both parties to be pretty ridiculous. Which is why I am not particularly happy with having the Presidency, the Senate, and the House controlled by one party. It is especially distressing now, at a time when the controlling party may get a chance to appoint a number of nominees to the Supreme Court. It is hard to have a system of checks and balances when two braches of the government are indebted to the President for their jobs, and thus inclined to give him a blank check.

For the past four years I have felt that the Democratic Party has lost its focus, and has been battling so hard for the middle ground that they were afraid to upset anyone by actually stating a clear position on any issue. As a result in the last two elections the campaign slogan for most democratic candidates seems to have been “Vote for me, at least I am not a Republican.†Perhaps this unwillingness to commit to a position on anything has been part of the reason for the large number of negative campaign ads. After all if people are busy throwing rocks at the Republican candidate, they probably won’t have much time to ask the opposition candidates any troubling questions which may require a deviation from assistant-prepared pre-sanitized scripts.

Peter Beinart, Editor of The New Republic, has some of the same views and does a much better job at expressing them in his article
“Civil War”. It also has some interesting insights into what may be the future of the Democratic Party.

Not only can you make a silk purse out of a sows ear, we have been able to do it for over 80 years now!

WTF! The article tells us why the company decided to do this, but still… WHY!

With all of the things that you could spend your money on why pay scientists to make a silk purse out of 100 pounds of pig ears! The polio vaccine wasn’t invented for another 30 years, maybe they should have been working on that! If we hadn’t distracted these scientists with making silly purses maybe their collective brainpower could have been put to real use.

Without stupid scientist tricks like this, I bet you I would already have my flying car and my hover board!

I am getting increasingly pissed off at the campaigns that canidates for congress this year. Especially the career politicians that spout the party line whenever there is a microphone within five feet of them. It is even more annoying when the political answer makes no sense, or doean’t address the question asked by the interviewer. Members of the Democrat and Republican parties are equal offenders. Perhaps it is the 90% negative ads for this year’s elections are coloring my views, but it seems to me that the Congress Critters have been particularly ridiculous this year.

I am also really annoyed at the ads that say “Senator so-and-so voted against the BLANK ISSUE ten times last year so how can he call himself a good candidate for you the people?†Campaign managers seem to banking on the fact that most people can’t remember their high school Government classes.

Under the current New Mexico constitution it is illegal for idiots to vote! This sounds like a great idea to me and think of all of the money we could save. We would probably only need about 23 ballots for each state. Or better yet, if we can find those 23 non-idiots per state why not just force them into the Senate or the House based on seniority and random chance. It can’t be any worse than our current method of choosing representation.