Ricky, Ricky, Ricky

Just read an article where Ricky Williams, the running back for the Miami Dolphins, has failed his 4th drug test. This comes after a him retiring because he failed the third one and being forced out of retirement because he was going to have to repay his gazillion dollar signing bonus. I just don't understand this sort of behaviour. I suppose these guys just think they're invincible but maybe I would too if I made the kind of money they did for what little they do. No, I take that back. Walter Payton understood the opportunity he was given when he was drafted from some no name college and so did Jerry Rice. They worked their asses off to stay at the top of their game as long as they could because they knew the gravy train would come to an end someday. Ricky and some of the younger guys don't seem to have the same sort of sense of purpose. They seem to want to take things as they come and that's fine as long as you are willing to accept the consequences. It's just a shame to see anyone with talent squander it. A co-worker of mine has a son who was very close to making it to the big leagues as a catcher. He decided to quit when things got a little harder and his mother let him. Kids need someone to nudge them in the right direction. The idea that children (and I mean until they're about 30 or so) know what's best for them is not fair to them. So many times, kids ask parents and other adults for advice and what they get is "You need to do what's best for you". Well, if the kid knew what was best for them, they wouldn't be asking the question. I'm the first one to say that one of the biggest problems in the youth of our time is that they don't take responsibility for their own actions. Adults need to understand they have a responsibility to the younger generation to focus them on the right path not let them figure the path out by themselves.

Holy Kanye

I've been sick since last Thursday or so and I haven't felt much like writing anything but there's a bunch to write about. Like Kanye West saying he should be a character in the Bible. Is this guy that stupid or is he just trying to get a rise out of people? Either way, it's inexcusable. One, no-one's going to rewrite the Bible just so they can stroke your ego and two, who the f..k do you think you are. How 'bout his little temper tantrum at the Grammys? I didn't watch them but I did see the incident the next day. What happened to "It's an honor just to be nominated". This kid hasn't got the talent that Bono has in the stuff that's under his left hand's pinkie's fingernail. He hasn't realized that he just a record company stooge. There's no there there.
Moving right along, am I the only person completely bored with the Winter Olympics? It seems as though NBC is only interested in showing us these made-up sports like Snowboard Cross and Speed Skating Pursuit. It's like watching poorly designed video games but at least they have objective scoring systems. Any activity that has a entirely subjective scoring system like Half-pipe, shouldn't be considered a sport. Sports are activities where someone wins because they are faster, stronger, can jump higher, etc. Don't get me wrong - I think it takes a lot of dedication, hard work and talent to become an snowboarder but it's not a sport any more than gymnastics is. At least ice skating is starting to get the big idea with their new scoring system but the result is that the performances are a bit flat from a aesthetic standpoint.
I think all the great movies have already been made. Maybe I'm jaded but I haven't seen a movie that told an original story in a very long time. I think the last one was "The Secret of Roan Inish". The rest have all been rehashes of other story lines. A message to Hollywood - DON'T MAKE ANY MORE REMAKES OF GREAT MOVIES UNLESS YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN YOU WON'T SCREW THEM UP. All it does is detract from the original. The Steve Martin remake of "The Pink Panther" is horrible. I don't understand how no one else could see that. Before it came out, there was some PSA with Steve Martin as Clouseau and I could tell right there he wasn't going to pull it off. There is never going to be another Peter Sellers. The pity is that a lot of kids are going to go to this movie and probably like it ok because they haven't seen the original. So many people under 30 haven't seen the really great movies and what's worse, they probably never will. I'm going to compile a list of must see movies. It's like literature, you have to be grounded in the classics before you can understand the modern writers. Here's a few to get started with.

Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb- A widely thought to be the best dark comedy ever. Directed by Stanley Kubrik early in his career.

Edward Scissorhands - A modern day fairy tale that makes me tear up a bit everytime I see it.

Blade Runner - The best sci-fi movie of all time. It has everything- love, action, intrigue, great effects(before CGI) and the final scene with Rutger Hauer releasing the dove makes me think about my own mortality and redemption.

The Godfather - I read the book before I saw the movie and while the movie didn't include everything from the book, it captured the feel of the book exactly. Brando, Pacino, Duvall and Caan are all at the top of their game in this one.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest I don't think Nicholson gave a better performance in a movie until "As Good As It Gets". I totally didn't see the end coming.

The Torch

I think I've heard just about enough about how biased towards the left the media is. Every radio talk show host and all of Fox News is crying about the Big, Bad Leftist Media and how they are corrupting the truth. The real problem in this country is that we don't have enough sense as a population to know when we are being fed bullshit. We should all be ashamed that we allow someone else to tell us how to think about a particular issue. I quit watching the news on television about 15 years ago and cancelled my newspaper subscription not long after that. It's not that the leftist media's is turning our minds to mush with its propaganda, it's the ignorance and stupidity of the American people to allow them to do it. The media can't exist in a vacuum. Someone is buying those newspapers, watching television or listening to the radio. Don't think for a minute that just because Rush or Sean tells you something that it's completely true either. I've heard both of them turn a conversation around to make it sound like they wanted to. Face it, these guys are doing this to pay the bills and if they don't succeed in galvanizing you against a common enemy, mama don't get no new dress and babies, they be cryin'. Bill O'Reilly touts himself as being even-handed and while he does a pretty good job of it most of the time, I think he can be very patronizing to people who disagree with him .
Turn your televisions off, you stupid, stupid people. There's no way anyone can do justice to a news story in the time allowed in cable or network news. Don't believe that what you read in the newspapers is the whole story. It's a bit better than television but they're still only telling you want they want you to know. Talk Radio is probably the best of the traditional media for getting the whole story but you have to be able to cut through all the rhetoric and get to the meat of the issue. It amazing to me how these guys can take one issue and stretch it out for 3 hours. The internet, however, is the Holy Grail of news gathering and distribution. Here you have a melding of the medias into one instanteous feed of information from as many or as few sources as you like with as much or little editorialization as you can stand. You can get the news at whatever time is convenient for you and in whatever format you choose and it's absolutely democratic. The torch has been passed.

F...ing Catholics

Wouldn't you know just as I finish my diatribe, there's some fringe Catholic group out there saying that they'll pay $1000 for anyone who can prove the earth orbits the sun. The trick is that they will determine whether or not you're right. Yeah, right. They're some nutcase group that claims the Bible says the earth is the center of the universe partly because some ignorant Pope made a proclamation against Galileo that they interpret as "ex cathedra" or infallible and partly because their literal interpretation of the Bible would be made irrelevant. First of all, there's nothing in the Bible that says anything about the Earth's relationship to the Sun and secondly, Popes are only infallible when they are speaking on matters of morals and faith. Thirdly, they're idiots!! They also hold the same line on evolution, the Big Bang, etc as the F...ing Christians. They're even worse than the F...ing Christians because they should know better. Either they weren't taught properly or just chose to ignore what they had been taught. For heavens sake, a Catholic priest was one of the people intimately involved in the formation of the Big Bang theory and Copernicus was a cleric as well.

It really gets on my tits how reasonably intelligent people can chose to be remain so ignorant. While at my mother-in-law's this weekend, we got into a discussion of how a particular syndrome was heriditary and was actually an adaptation to enviromental stresses of an entire population. My contention was that we had pretty damn good proof of evolution in our lifetime. My mother-in-law just chose not to discuss it and dismissed it out of hand as though I was some 8 year old who didn't know what I was talking about. This is a college educated woman who keeps up with current events, watches C-span and definately seems capable of understanding the concept yet her religious and cultural inhibition is preventing her from accepting the truth. Not everything we were told as children is true. Unfortunately, many of us were taught by people who either didn't know the truth or didn't want to know the truth. I am very fortunate and thankful that my parents (both came from large, rural, conservative families), upon recognizing my thirst for knowledge, encouraged me to learn independently. The Catholic grade school I went to was also progressive and had programs for children to learn at their own pace. As a consequence, I don't take anything for granted and I always corroborate information before I will accept it as truth. One of the things my mother taught me was to never believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.

Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum

I'm a musician and home recording studio owner and I usually lurk a bit on the recording user groups to pick up some tips and offer some sage advice. A discussion I came across today involved an individual who downloads "cracked" versions of recording software and makes copies for his friends. These software packages are fairly expensive but they have the capabilities to literally turn a spare room into a professional recording studio and it takes many hours of development by quite a number of people to produce them. The audacity of someone to take someone's hard work and diminish it like that is absolutely unconscionable. If anyone should appreciate the consequences of piracy, it certainly ought to be musicians. Movie, software and music piracy takes food out of the mouths not only the designers, artists, producers, movie studios and record companies but all the people involved in the production of the particular media. And as usual, as things tighten up, the people at the bottom of the pay scale suffer the most.

I've always wanted to be able to explain this to people who think that only the artists and the media companies are the only one affected by piracy. Hopefully, this will strike home. Let's set the stage by assuming you've spent you're life learning to become a master bakery chef. The culmination of your career is opening your own bakery with the finest pastries that only you have the recipe for. People flock to your store every day to buy the things only your bakery makes. Things couldn't be any better. New big house, great cars, only the best schools for your children and lavish gifts for your wife. Then, all of sudden your business starts to fall off and you can't understand why. Your regulars aren't coming in anymore to get their favorite pastries and breads. The banker is calling about your mortgage payments and your children have to wear hand-me downs and thrift store bargains to public school. Your wife has to sell back her jewelry you worked so hard for and you're having to lay off people. After a bit of investigation, you find out some interloper has been taking your free samples, running them through his recipe analyzer and giving the recipes out to his friends. The very things you've put your soul, heart and life into have been reduced to just a copy of a recipe. That's what piracy does - it reduces the hard work of people who trained themselves for years to learn their craft to cheap copies.


I do understand that some bands want their fans to download their songs and I don't have a problem with that because they chose to do that. It gets their music out there and helps bring fans to their shows. The prevailing rational is that if people download the music off the internet, they'll want to buy the CD because the audio quality is better. The problem with that is a lot of people who download are not audiophiles. They're completely happy with the lower audio quality. There's no way an Ipod is going to sound like a CD played through a proper home or car stereo, regardless of how good your headphones are. One of the reasons popular music has become so formulaic is that the record companies need every song to pay off because their profit margins have been squeezed. There's very little room for letting an artist develop.


Music is just the tip of the iceberg. Downloading movies from the internet is even more of a travesty. Every person credited at the end of a film is making their living by working in the motion picture industry. I don't think this is going to be the end of movies but I do feel it will force the industry to find cheaper ways to do things which means the people at the bottom of the food chain will have to find something else to do and the ones left with jobs will have to do more without any more compensation. Movies are going down the same road popular music has. So many of the motion pictures coming out now follow a proven formula for fiscal success but don't challenge viewers the way films used to. Even if the movie blazes a new trail artistically, the studios have to package so that people will think it's just like all the other run of the mill films being churned out by Hollywood.

Oh, you've got to be kidding

The situation with the Muslims all over the world reacting to the cartoons of Mohammed in the Danish newspaper has been taken to a new level. It wasn't enough to demonstrate in the streets or burn Danish embassies. Now the word on the Muslims street is that America is ultimately responsible for what happened because as the ultimate sinner against Islam, we have set the example for Europe. Danish people couldn't have possibly come up with something like all by their little selves. Afghanis are actually protesting and 4 of them were killed today in an attack on a US base in Afghanistan. The deaths came at the hands of Afghan police and US troops were only involved to the extent that they tried to scare the protesters off by firing into the air. The really interesting part of all this is that the original cartoons were published back in September of 2005. Why is it just now that it's becoming an issue? Because Al Jazeera and radical Muslim leaders have chosen to make it an issue and have even gone so far as embellish the evidence. One of the cartoons that are objected to is actually a photograph of a pig that has been doctored to look as though it was cartoon depicting Mohammed as a pig. I am of the opinion that if you can't laugh at something, you are probably taking it way too seriously. I'm reminded of a Triumph the Insult Comic Dog character bit from the American Idol tryouts in Hawaii. He's talking to a girl who credits Jesus with all here success and so on. As she is performing her song for Triumph, an actor dressed as Jesus walks into the shot, taps here on the shoulder and says " It's not going to happen" and then walks away. I thought it was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen yet I'm sure there are some people who would be aghast at the idea of Jesus being involved in such a trivial manner.
Hopefully, Europe will begin, as a result of the riots in France, the London and Spanish subway bombing and the recent uproar over the cartoons, to understand that we are dealing with a group of people that don't want to be assimilated into any culture. Their intent is to convert us or kill us. You can't reason with madmen. We are quickly approaching a crossroads where we will have to either let radical Islam conquer modern civilization or defend our future. There are other groups that are on the verge of true radicalism on the same level as fundamentalist Islam. Anyone who would bomb or burn an abortion clinic is really close to bombing businesses who hire gay people or burning down people's homes who don't agree with their religious beliefs.
On a seperate note, what is the deal with people co-opting famous people's funerals to make political hay. The circus surrounding Coretta Scott King's funeral is absolutely embarrassing. Instead of honoring her life, one person after another took the opportunity to get on their soapbox and criticize the current administration's policies with Bush sitting right there. Politics has no place in a church and religion has no place in politics.

Nitpicking

My daughter, who is in her last year at college, called me today and was filling me on a discussion they were having in one of her classes. It seems it had to do with how just a few people could influence public policy and opinion if they squawk loudly enough. She made the point that no-one from here could go to any foreign country and demand people treat them a certain way just because they were American. Yet we will allow just about any special interest group to tell us how they have been demonized and that recompense needs to be paid. The problem, I think, is that we are too concerned about the feelings of individuals to see the forest for the trees. Public policy should be directed toward the good of the entire group, not to placate individuals. Sometimes I feel we don't want to hurt people's feelings but really in the long run, if you look at what is best for society at large, some people are going to get their feelings hurt. We have 300+ million people in this country and we can't do what's best for most people if we are constantly being cajoled into pandering to the 10 or 15 percent of them who make the most noise about the issue de jour. We've lost our priorities as a society. We have people who are more concerned about whether animals are being treated humanely in medical testing than they are about children going hungry every night. AIDS is certainly a serious problem but there are at least 20 things that are more likely to kill you than that. All it takes is right celebrity to jump on the bandwagon and whatever it is they are interested in becomes the most important issue on the planet. I feel we need to prioritize our focus to first of all to end hunger. It is absolutely within the bounds of current technology and there is really no reason for anyone to go hungry for one day much less die of starvation. Once we have that problem licked we can start to educate people. You can't learn anything on an empty stomach. Then we can tackle the next priority which in my opinion is to make sure every person has a proper education and the means to learn independently. Come on folks, there is no way our or any society can minister to individuals. That's what families and friends are for. We all need to take some responsibility and understand that while the conditions that created our current circumstance may have been out of our control, the possibilities of our future circumstances are completely within our grasp and only determined by how we react to our current situation.

Here we go again! F...ing Christians #5

I just read an article about some Bush appointee to NASA that has tried to insert intelligent design into official NASA documents and insisted that every mention of the Big Bang included the word theory because it wasn't proven fact. No it's not proven fact but it is the best at describing the current conditions in the universe and the conditions that existed at the beginning of the universe. Until there's some data suggesting Einstein was full of shit, I'll stick with the Big Bang. I don' t understand how people can still deny things that are staring them right in the face. I do believe we have an intelligent designer but not in the way these F...ing Christians do. God does not meddle in the affairs of men and he didn't meticulously design every detail of existence. I feel He(She, It, Whatever) started the ball rolling and since He(She, It, Whatever) is all powerful, all knowing, etc., He(She, It, Whatever) knew exactly how everything was going to turn out. God knows everything that has happened and everything that will happen. "Wait a minute! How can we have free will if God knows everything that is going to happen?" The matter of free will could also be a consequence of the Big Bang. Einstein's amazingly accurate predictions involve a situtation where at the crossroads of a decision, event, etc. there is a time where both outcomes are equally possible and a universe exists for both choices. Both universes overlap in the same time/space continuum until the choice is made. At the time of your choice, for instance, of vanilla ice cream over chocolate, your existence continues into the vanilla universe while the you that chose the chocolate is forever in the chocolate universe. This means an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of outcomes. In some universe, Hitler won WWII, in another the Challenger is still operational. Remember, with God all things are possible.

I'm also starting to think that Bush is a little too Christian for my tastes. The woman he appointed for the Supreme Court was a born-again and if his appointees are like this guy, I'm more than a little concerned. We don't need a bunch of Watts running around making proclamations about what is acceptable and what is not from a religious point of view. This sort of person is just as bad as a died in the wool liberal. They're always right and you're some sort of idiot or demon for thinking differently. I am always open to other's ideas and I don't have a problem with people challenging mine as long as it's done in a logical rather than emotional manner. I guess I'm more of a libertarian than anything else. If you don't get in my way, I won't get in yours.

F...ing Christians, part 4

It's time to wrap up my manifesto on why I feel Catholics should be segregated from other Christian faiths when it comes to discussions on capital punishment, evolution and so on. It's difficult to discuss this without sounding preachy and I hope I've done a good job of this. This last installment is going to probably upset people more than the previous ones.

Undeniably, the Roman Catholic Church is the only Christian denomination that can show continuity all the way back to Christ himself. It's not a matter of opinion, it's called world history. Christ told Peter when he changed his name that Peter was the rock on which his church was to be built. While it's true that the Church fathers chose to include the Gospel that mentions this in the New Testament instead of others, it also has basis in tradition. Peter writes as the head of the church and Paul recognized him as such. The lineage of popes continues on until this day with Pope Benedict.

What does this really mean? To me it means that the Church Jesus founded has weathered every storm that has come its way and perservered until today. It has as much relevance as it did 2000 years ago as witnessed by the sheer numbers of practicing Catholics in the world. People who leave the Church because they can't find enough mysticism or whatever it is they are looking for haven't looked enough. How many other churches can boast of levitating monks or priests who can bi-locate? How is it that no other Christian faiths have any verifiable miracles or visitations? These are not coincidences. God has made it clear to me that He is the creator of all and that regardless of what science discovers, it will only bolster my faith in His creation. If you have the faith that God is the perfect being(spirit, person?) He must be, then there is nothing that impossible for Him.

F...ing Christians, part 3

The real reason some people don’t believe in evolution is that they can’t get their minds around the fact the not only is evolution a proven fact but it is also the consequence of God’s unimaginably incredible creation. The Catholic Church has supported both the Big Bang Theory of the creation of the universe and the Theory of Evolution for at least 50 years now. One of the biggest problems some people have is distinguishing between the definition of theory in the strictest sense of the word and the scientific definition of theory. In the world of science, a theory is a group of postulations that most closely describe a given set of phenomenon. If something arises that challenges those postulations, the theory is not thrown out, it is modified to address the differences. Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity have been tested rigorously over the last 85 or so years and have passed the tests in every case. The technology in modern day conveniences like television and computers are based on Einstein’s theories. Kind of disquieting to thing that things we use in our everyday life are based on theory, huh? Most people would say at that point that they don’t need to be called theories any more and should be called laws. Scientists, however, are very skeptical people by profession and will continue to call it a theory until every possible challenge has been exhausted, which would be never. There will always be someone out there with another bright idea about how the world is put together.

In regards to evolution, the empirical evidence is overwhelming and it makes me laugh when the creationist’s explanation for dinosaur fossils that appear to be from before the time God created the “heavens and the earth” is because He put them there to test our faith. As I said before, we were given the faculties to question our existence for a reason. That reason is to discover how great God’s creation really is. Everything we discover in science reinforces my belief that God is really omniscient, all powerful, all caring, all merciful and all the other alls you can think of. People who have a problem with scientific discoveries contradicting with their faith either don’t want to expand their mind to grasp the idea that God is all that or they don’t have the capacity to. The latter is excusable, the former unconscionable.

Many of the fundamentalist religions want God to be a creator who is only able to create one planet in the entire universe that harbors intelligent life and on that one planet he was only able to create one species with the intellect to understand him. Well folks, I got news for you. The statistical chance that we are the only intelligent civilization in God’s grand creation is infinitesimal. The line from Carl Sagan’s book and the movie of the same name says it all “What a waste of space.” We may not even be the only species on the planet capable of understanding the concept of a creator. All the hallmarks people have used in the past to separate man from the rest of the animal world have all fallen away one by one. Language used to be the determining factor but we now know chimpanzees, dolphins, parrots and even octopus’ all use language of different types to communicate. Tool using has also been sent packing as chimps have been observed fashioning and using tools to gather food.

I am anticipating that the discoveries of the next few years will further bolster my belief and faith in my God. Sometimes I wonder if the people who are so against evolution and the theories surrounding the creation of the universe are worshipping the same God I am. Their God seems to be vengeful, spiteful and limited in power. My God is capable of all things.