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Monday Morning Philosophy

Random Thoughts

Throughout my life, I have attempted to encapsulate large groups of my beliefs into one or two phrases that I feel sum up the whole of the thing. Religion is one of the places that I’ve done this, however whenever I say my summed up phrase to someone, they never get it.

“I don’t believe in God, but god believes in me, and sometimes that’s enough.”

The first part is misleading, intentionally, and loses a bit when its spoken because I can’t speak in uppercase and lowercase, I’m stuck with just speaking. I don’t believe in God, big “g”, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc… Organized religions, in my experience, fail, not because they accept certain limitations in their system, but because they preach and teach those limitations to others, and to a degree their structure is designed to support the continuation of the church, the physical buildings, over the continuation of the faith. But I do believe in a god. I believe that there has to be something out there greater than all that I can see, because if there isn’t… well, I don’t like the idea that this is it. Even if the “next world” is just another go round on this one, or its to spend a term as undefinable quantum energy sliding through the time space continuum until I pass through a singularity and report for my life in a negative universe… Doesn’t matter, I believe in “something”, some days its more definable or specific than others, but its always there.

The next part is the meat of it all… whatever exists out there, whether it be a scientist looking in his petri dish swirling around some chemicals or an undeniable force that guides and binds the universe, its smarter than me. And hey, I’m pretty damn smart, if not always the most intuitive. And since it created or guided or is the universe, it will never give to me more than I can handle. I might disagree sometimes, and there are days when I have broken down in tears because of the strength of my disagreement, but I do always manage to get back up, bear the new weight and survive. I even win sometimes and lighten my load. There have been times that solutions are a long time coming, or were obscured by other problems. But never, not once, have I, when it comes down to facts, ever been given a life that I cannot handle if I choose to handle it. God has given me this because it has faith in my ability to handle it.

That leads us to the final part… Given the other two parts, that I believe in something out there greater than me and that it will never burden me more than my ability to cope, my faith in those two tenets mean that no matter how rough life may get or how crappy a situation may be, I know that given effort and time I will be okay.

And sometimes that’s enough…

The Definition of Insanity

Random Thoughts

The clinical definition of insanity is the repetion of the same task expecting a different result. Like, if you have a button that turns on a red light, pushing it over and over again expecting one of those times for the light to be green instead.

So, at work, there is a woman who asks me to create an entry in our database. She does this about once a week. Every week she provides me with the name of the record. Every week, I ask her to send me more information and list about twenty fields that need to be filled out. Every week she replies with the information I need and says she forgot.

The question is, is she insane because she keeps sending me one piece of data expecting me to be able to create the record or am I insane for expecting her to learn and give me all the information in the first email?

Parents versus Parenting

Random Thoughts

Normally, I love kids. I even wouldn’t mind having a few someday. But there are also a great many times where I hate parents. If your kid wants new bike, and you say ‘no’ and he throws a fit, that’s understandable. If his fit includes running around throwing things in the store and kicking people and you do nothing, it’s no longer understandable.

Years ago, I worked at Kroger, a grocery store, and as a college student sometimes I worked day shifts (unlike the high school kids who all worked in the evenings and on weekends). During the day a grocery store gets a pretty large number of mothers with their children. Most kids are fairly well behaved, and when they do misbehave, most parents know how to punish the kid to make them, at the very least, sit in the cart or walk behind mom and pout.

Then one day I met the devil. Satan entered Kroger wearing a powder blue short sleeve shirt, a loose diaper and unmatched socks (one pink, one white). Mother grabbed a cart and began shopping. Satan took off. About five minutes later, the store is filled with a thunderous crash as Satan has pushed over an entire display of ketchup bottles. Satan starts screaming, everyone runs to make sure she’s okay. And Mother starts yelling at people about how dangerous it is to have broken glass around children, acting as though it wasn’t her child that broke the bottles. Clean up begins, Mother returns to shopping, and Satan disappears again. About five minutes later, yelling erupts from the cereal aisle. It appears that Satan has discovered that if you hold out one arm stiff straight out to the side and then run down the cereal shelf you can make all the boxes fall on the floor. Then Satan discovers that the same applies to the cookie aisle. When Satan turns her eyes toward the aisle with the wine bottles, the store manager steps in, sweeps Satan into her arms and seeks out Mother. Mother immediately starts screaming that the store manager let go of her child at once or she’ll press charges. Satan is set down and disappears again. Fifteen minutes later, it is discovered that Satan has been quite because she had to poop. After removing her diaper. On the floor of the magazine aisle. And is now content with rubbing her poop on the pretty people pictured on the covers of the magazines. I spot Mother, pull her aside, explain what is happening and say, “If you don’t spank your child, I will.” Needless to say, she was agast… stunned that I would dare make such accusations about her darling child who was so sweet and would never do anything to hurt anyone or anything. She’d simply had enough of our store’s lack of quality customer service, scooped up her child, and walked right out of the store swearing that she would never ever shop here again.

Later, I got called into the manager’s office. It seems the woman called back and claimed that I spanked her child. I explained that I didn’t, I’d only threatened to spank the child after discovering the poop incident. I got an official write up placed in my work file and told that it was against policy to threaten customers, and the only reason I wasn’t being fired was due to the fact that they were happy that I had insulted the woman and caused her to leave the store.

Two weeks later, Mother returned with Satan in tow. The store manager met her at the door and invoked the store’s right to refuse service. She was very upset, and I distinctly overheard her say that she didn’t know where to go shopping now that she was barred from all seven of her local grocery stores. She began to cry. Meanwhile, Satan was pushing empty shopping carts into the parking lot and two bag boys were desperately trying to stop them from hitting cars.

I often think back to that day when I see unruly children and the parents who have tuned them out, and I know, deep down where it really counts, that should I even become a parent I definately won’t be like them.

This rambling inspired by this article on CNN. Here’s to you Mr. Making Parents Take Responsibility For Their Children Guy. A real American hero.

The Colorado Kid

Reviews

This one is kind of a puzzler… not the book itself, but how do I review it… The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

It was a good read. The characters and the story were interesting and I enjoyed turning the pages. If this is representative of the kind of work I’ll find in the other Hard Case Crime books by other authors, then I’ve found another series of books to read.

And really, I can’t say more than that without spoiling the book, so read on only if you want to…
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Simon Green`s Nightside

Reviews

While skimming through the Fantasy & Science Fiction section at my local Books-A-Million one day, searching for new stuff to read, I stumbled across and interesting series of books. At least insteresting in their cover are and book jacket description, and by an author I hadn’t heard of, so I thought I’d give it a shot. That book was Something from the Nightside. It was a fun little noirish detective novel type tale with a bit of magic and demons thrown in to the mix. The first book was good enough that I picked up the next two (Agents of Light and Darkness and Nightingale’s Lament), both of which have been better than the first and good enough that I’m going to keep picking up the rest of the series, of which there are two or three and more on the way.

They make good short reads, and I definately recommend them. Now, stop reading unless you want spoilers…
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Sex and Violence on TV

Random Thoughts

I stumbled on this article over at CNN. Okay, I didn’t really stumble on it, I read the Entertainment section over there a couple times a day and the picture of Emily Deschanel drew me in. First off, she’s cute. Second, she plays the lead on the TV show “Bones” that I happen to enjoy a great deal.

Anyway, the article points out that during the last week in September, if you watched all the shows broadcast by the six major networks in primetime, you would have seen 63 dead bodies, which is an increase over the 27 dead bodies in the same week in 2004. Frankly… so what?

I really don’t know alot of true couch potatoes, people who will watch anything that’s on TV with no regard to its quality. Most people I know watch a handful of shows or more, but if a show is sub-par they’ll stop. They may give it a few extra weeks hoping it gets better, as I often do myself, but can only take being slapped in the face so long before they walk away. That said, if people watch a show, it must be what they want to see… as long as its not grossly inappropriate (showing snuff films and real rapes to five year olds) why should anyone care what people watch?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for making “good, quality” television for the whole family, but I’m also very strongly for parental responsibility. Any kid who watches a TV show that his parents aren’t aware of or haven’t viewed themselves needs more parenting. If I had a kid, he probably wouldn’t be allowed to watch some of the shows I do, or at the least he’d have to watch them with me and I’d make sure we talked about any subjects that come up.

Here is a nice little quote from the article:

“Yet the PTC, which frequently files complaints with the Federal Communications Commission about network fare, admits that its focus has primarily been on sex, not gore. One reason is that there’s no government agency concerned with these issues, said Melissa Caldwell, the PTC’s research director.”

And it makes me ask, “Do we need a government agency concerned with these issues?” If there is something I don’t want to watch on TV, I won’t watch it. If there is something I don’t want my kid to watch on TV, I won’t let my kid watch it. The one thing I really don’t want is some tax funded agency that I pay for and have little to no control over deciding that I or my kids shouldn’t be allowed to watch a show. I think the government has gone about as far as it needs to in mandating that all TVs had to have V-chips in them to allow the blocking of TV broadcasts based on TV ratings. One the other side, I think the TV networks need to expand the ratings, make more levels and divide them up. Don’t just rate a show TV-MA because its violent or because it has other adult themes, rate the show TV-MA-Violence or TV-MA-AdultThemes, and then have the monitor software allow me to say, “You know, my kids can deal with all the sex on TV that can be thrown at them, but I don’t want them watching TV-14 or higher level violence.” or even “You know, guns and sex are okay, but no bad language in this house.” Basically, give me the tools to be as arbitrary as *I* want to be, but don’t try to force someone else’s arbitrary ideas on me.

TV to some extent, and movies to a large extent, need to take a look at the computer game industry ratings and head that direction, and all of them need to keep going, providing more tools for parents and other people. Then we just need to courts to come in and start legislating personal responsibility by throwing out any case where someone watched TV or a movie or played a game and accidentally saw something they didn’t want to see because they forgot to use the tools provided to them.

Yeah, it sounds nice… but I won’t be holding my breath…

Thinning the Herd

Random Thoughts

A couple weeks back ‘Night Stalker’, one of the TV shows I was watching this fall season, got cancelled. I really liked the show, but I could also tell why it wasn’t doing so well… it was a dark, slow show that was more mystery than action. What made it worse, however, was that the last episode they aired was the first part of a two part story. Son of a …

Today, word came down that ‘Threshold’ has been cancelled. If you look back a couple of posts here you’ll understand why I’m not surprised. I mean, the show had potential and I really wanted it to be great, but it was just so boring. As usual, the most recent episode was pretty good, and it ended with a good opening for stuff to finally happen, but it won’t… you can’t build a show anymore, you either are a winner out of the gate or they cancel you before you finish the first turn.

Fox has also cancelled ‘Reunion’ which was an odd little show… a murder mystery told over the span of 20 years, each episode being the events of one year that promised to eventually lead you to the 20 year high school reunion of six friends where one of them gets killed. It took them five episodes just to reveal to the viewers which of the six was the dead one, and that was my only complaint on the show… I think the story would have told better if we knew who the dead one was from the start because only now does the show become really interesting as lives unfold to show motive as to why one or more of the remaining five would want to bump one of their friends off. Only, we may never know. Fox hasn’t announced if the show is being pulled, only that it is cancelled. They might finish out the season, or they might do a couple episodes to quickly tie it up… or they might shut down production and never reveal the murder plot, which would completely suck.

Television Network executives probably wonder why sales of TV shows on DVD are so high, even for shows that didn’t do so well when they aired, but this is the reason… its almost not worth it to watch broadcast TV anymore, because no matter how good you think a show is, a focus group or the Nielson ratings might think its crap and it gets cancelled. So why bother? Why not just wait for it to come out of DVD in a complete set and then? At least you know what you are getting into.

Well, I guess on the bright side, I’ve got three more hours a week to do something else…

Evolution Revolution

Random Thoughts

Intelligent Design isn’t the stupidest idea to ever be put forward, but its got unique issues of its own. See, the Theory of Evolution that is taught in schools today is not the original theory proposed by Charles Darwin. It bears similarities, but over the year as science has been able to find evidence the theory has been tweaked. Evolution doesn’t deny God. It’s still quite possible that the series of events, of mutations, that we perceive as Evolution is actually a brilliantly designed plan of God that is unfolding over millions of years. There is plenty of room for God in Evolution.

Intelligent Design, on the other hand, holds that some facets of living creatures, like the eye for example, are so complex that they could not have evolved through the course of millions of years of mutation, but had to have been created “as is” by some force outside or greater than the Universe. While Evolution can prove that small mutations occur and can trace genetics through many generations of an animal, Intelligent Design can’t prove that “stuff just happens”… unfortunately, it can’t be disproven either until someone builds a time machine and goes back to see if eyes evolved or if they just showed up.

That is my problem with Intelligent Design… it wants to be science, but because its core theory cannot be in any way proven by the scientific method, its supporters strive to redefine science to allow Intelligent Design to fit. That’s exactly was Kansas did… their school board redefined science to allow for more than just natural and observable phenomenon to be included. The caveat here is that by doing so they have technically opened the door for ghosts, and leviathan elder gods, and more to be considered perfectly good science. Essentially, what they have done is allowed non-falsifiable (things that are impossible to be shown as being false) theories to stand. Part of the scientific method is that your theory has to be either true or false, it has to be defined such that if a given condition arrises, the theory will fail. Intelligent Design doesn’t have that, at least without time machines… If, one day, a new organ appears in an animal that cannot be linked to mutation, then ID is correct. However, if no new organ ever shows up from now until the end of time, ID might still be correct. There is no event that can occur under which the result is that ID is false.

Over at the University of Kansas, a few teachers have decided that enough is enough, and are putting together a new class to study the mythology of Intelligent Design. And its were it belongs… One day Zeus might show up proving that the old Greek myths were correct, but if Zeus never shows up it doesn’t prove them false. That’s what myths are, things believed to be true but utterly unfalsifiable. Intelligent Design belongs in religious study, it belongs at church, until such time as they revise their “theory” to allow for the possibility that its wrong.

9 0 2 1 Oh no you didn`t!

Random Thoughts

Just about every Tuesday I can be found down at the North River Tavern (formerly Taco Mac By The River) matching wits with the trivia gods… or at least having some food and drink and conversation while playing trivia for house cash. We do fairly well, our team, winning one of the three cash prize places every couple of weeks. Winning third place nets you $20, and its almost worse than winning nothing… splitting the money five or six ways barely takes a bite out of the bill. Second place at $40 is better, but first place at $60 is where its really worthwhile. Food and a soda will run you $10 at the tavern, so a five or six man split on the winnings means you eat for free and only pay for alcohol. It works out well for the waitress too, with $10 to $15 less to have to spend it means each person will be tossing in an extra couple bucks into the tip pile, quickly pushing a 20% tip into the realm of 40% or better.

Thursday nights, the North River Tavern runs trivia again, and sometimes we go. While Tuesdays is sort of a ‘General Knowledge’ type trivia with all sorts of categories, Thursdays is theme night. Well, this week’s theme was ‘Beverly Hills 90210’. Some of our team didn’t make it, not being thrilled about the topic, but I’ll admit I watched the show… 6 of the 7 seasons anyway, I got bored of it at the end. The show was fun to laugh at.. the plots were ridiculous, and the only person worth rooting for was David Silver. For some reason Brian Austin Green’s character just had this underdog quality that made you want to see him overcome his hardships and win a little bit… everyone else on the show you wanted to see tortured and burning in hell because 99 times out of 100 their problems were their own damn fault and never should have happened to begin with.

Anyway, our team, three members strong, managed to get first place. Woohoo! Go us! Of course, we aren’t complete 90210 geeks or anything, out of a possible 1120 points, we snagged first place with a whopping 220. So no, we aren’t the biggest geeks in the world, but we were the biggest geeks to show up Thursday for trivia at the North River Tavern.

Surface, Threshold and Invasion

Reviews

This Fall TV season saw the premier of three shows about aliens: Surface, Threshold and Invasion. Let me give you a quick rundown on them…

Surface is about a female marine biologist (or something like that) who runs afoul of an unknown invertabrate while in a mini-sub, deep in the ocean; a man goes spear gun fishing with his brother who accidentally spears a huge underwater beast and is dragged really deep after losing his oxygen tank; and a boy finds a weird egg in the water. It turns out the government already knows about the beasts and is quick to start shutting people down… but they don’t want to be shutdown.

Threshold is about a weird 4th dimensional object that appears to a bunch of buys on a Navy ship and messes with their DNA. A woman who consults for the government on contingency plans is called to action as her plan, called ‘Threshold’, that details first contact with aliens is put into play. She assembles a team and starts looking for the missing crewmen while trying to stop them from using the alien signal to bioform and terraform our people and planet.

Invasion takes place in Florida, and during a big hurricane, a bunch of lights fly up out of the sea and it appears that in a bodysnatcher-like way lots of people have been infected or replaced by aliens. As the town recovers from the devastating storm, weird stuff beings to happen.

Okay… from the initial descriptions, I put my money on Threshold for the win. For one, it had no kids. Invasion is practically about families, and one of the three main people in Surface is a kid raising an alien which is just all too ‘E.T.’ for me. Threshold sounded like a solid story about a government organization assembled to face an alien threat. That’s why I’m so disappointed that it has sucked so far. I mean, this week, which is the 7th or 8th episode of the season, finally revealed that the alien signal is terraforming as well as bioforming, something I assumed from the get-go since it was manipulating people on a genetic level and plants aren’t so different. Plus, it had all the actors… Charles S. Dutton, Carla Gugino, Brent Spiner, Peter Dinklage and even William Mapother who did a great job as Ethan on the first season of ‘Lost’, and Brian Van Holt who I just saw on DVD in ‘House of Wax’ where he did an excellent job. It’s these people that keep me watching the show at all… the plot is moving forward so slowly though. Ugh.

I also had good hopes for Invasion. I love a good bodysnatchers movie, and this one had a cool twist in that the people who’ve been ‘snatched’ aren’t really sure what’s going on themselves. Then there is the lynchpin of the story, that the town sheriff is also one of the snatched, but he got snatched years ago, so he’s kinda sheparding the newly snatched into dealing with what has happened. To top it off, the show is created by Shaun Cassidy, whom I gained massive amounts of respect for back in 1995 when a little known show called ‘American Gothic’ hit the air, about a sheriff who might be the devil, a boy who might be his son and the product of a rape, and all the ways in which the sheriff controls the town. I loved that show, so I just knew this one would be good, even if it ended up getting cancelled after one season like ‘American Gothic’. But again, I was let down… again this past week was the 7th episode or so, and finally the story started actually going somewhere. Maybe it’ll get better. In the meantime though I think I’ll go buy ‘American Gothic’ the complete series on DVD.

This brings us to Surface. I would have bet hard earned dollars that this show was going to blow. Dinosaurs in the ocean? Come on, we can do better than that! The whole plot just seems so… silly. And yet, by their 7th episode they are in full swing. We’ve seen the baby alien, we’ve learned some of its abilities, we’ve seen glimpses of the big ones and the wreckage of what they can do, we’ve got a full blown government conspiracy to cover up their existance and even the government turning on their own leading scientist when he begins to feel they need to start going public. We’ve got families being broken apart and the whole thing is spiralling on a collision course with something… I’m not sure what yet exactly, but this show is definately going somewhere.

So that’s my review of the alien shows this season…