Welcome to this week's cornucopia of internetty goodness. If I may say so, it's five-star.
- I love this idea. I bet you will, too. Maybe include a tract? Which one?
- Another reason not to learn French. (My DAOD sent me an article about this a couple of weeks ago... but it was, y'know, in French.)
- Reader Julie points me to this and this, indicating that it's iPods, too.
- Here is a list of top ten iPhone annoyances, with their fixes or workarounds. Several involve jailbreaking, which I think is a bad idea.
- Back to French. This story ends up: "Religion of Peace" 0, Some French Guy 3. I doff my chapeau to you, monsieur.
- Under the "if you can't say anything nice" and "don't speak evil of the dead" principles, I haven't said much about the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy, who is said to have found Chappaquiddick to be a continuing source of great jollity. I already offered my thoughts when Kennedy's brain tumor was diagnosed. I am always sincerely
saddened when someone goes to the Throne with no sign that he's prepared for what he's about to face. - HSAT, some readers understandably fear that Kennedy's death will further spur the nightmare of government takeover of the health insurance industry, and of more of our lives. Ironically, some of the "problems" Kennedy's beloved creeping totalitarianism supposedly addressed are problems caused by his own previous legislation. However, that may not be the case. Objectively, of course, it was a horrible and unnecessary idea when Kennedy was alive. Kennedy's death doesn't improve the idea itself.
- Apparently-unrepentant adulterer Governor Mark Sanford may soon wish he were a Democrat. In that case, his behavior would have been a resumé-enhancer.
- Eager to save us money, reader Laura Kelleher points us to a "red-neck Playstation." It's uncomfortably reminiscent of my office in the summer.
- Well well well. Turns out we have a new entry on the list of Movies I Don't Want To See. Ever. Under Any Circumstances.
- This part is for my dear wife, the formidably omnicompetent Valerie. We've been undergoing the pains of remodeling for some time. It can be uncomfortable. But none of it looks anything like this.
- MSM Death Throes Progress Report. So, Newsweak does a feature on the seventeen biggest liars in history. Before you go there, just guess. Go on, guess: Is Richard Nixon on the list? Is Bill Clinton? Post your answer before you go. Back? Now mouse-over the tabs for your answer.
- Ahh, yes. As Yuletide draws nigh, here's an album Mrs. Phillips simply must toss into her Amazon cart. The Phillips family will thrill to hear the beloved troubador's stirring and heartwarming rendition of "The Little Drummer Boy":
Muhhh mih muhh muh
Muh mummina mum....
- Oh! Dude! Too true! (Click to enlarge)
- I think this is just amazing. I've wondered where Google Maps get the data they use to show freeway conditions, and I think that's my answer.
- OTOH it is sobering. In malicious hands, this mind-boggling technology would enable a totalitarian regime to exert a death-grip on its populace. Within a generation, we'll be so intertwined with these technologies that it will be difficult to do without. This is significant to those who think that the book of Revelation is about, you know, actual "things that are and those that are to take place after this" (Revelation 1:19), and not just "bloop bloop bleep whatever."
- One more riff: John's original audience would have had some trouble envisioning how anything like Revelation 13:16-17 could ever actually happen. We don't.
- And now, to a completely different topic. Umm... I don't think so. No.
I think it goes on a bit too long, but here's a treat for our hardcore Lego fans... followed by more of the customary graphical merriment.
Posts
52 comments:
Random thoughts:
I have seen Phil Johnson with out his beard. I am amazed at how he bears a striking resemblance to Ebert without it.
It looks like you found that bad house listing site. Did you see the one with the perpetual, 365 days a year Christmas decorations?
I thought that dog dressed up like the Enterprise was Neil Shay's dog, then I saw the beer cans they used as warp engines.
I would add Mike Warnke to the list of the biggest liars.
If you guys like the idea of giving servicemen a Starbucks card, you will really like movie trailer called "The Way We Get By.
Sorry. I should have added the explanation of the movie trailer.
"On call 24/7 for the past six years, three senior citizens have made history by greeting nearly one million U.S. troops at a tiny airport in Maine. Filled with unexpected turns, their uplifting and emotional journey demonstrates the meaning of community at a time when America needs it most.
"
I'll give it a try:
Yes, I'll assume "Tricky Dick" is on NW's list, and, am almost CERTAIN that Mr. - "that depends on what your definition of IS is" - Clinton is NOT on said list.
You peeked!
I know you didn't. Nicely-done.
Oh Dan, that fly-slapping game is destined to be as popular as the kitteh game from weeks past.
Um... what is DAOD?
A Bob Dylan Christmas album is just one of the most depressing things I can think of.
But the story of the French hostage who killed his captors and escaped cheered me up. Love the policeman's quote, "I cannot understand how this good story happened..."
Julie
Dear
And
Only
Daughter
Caroling in the Wind?
Tangled up in ... jingle blues?
You have to admit, there are possibilities.
Oh my gosh, now you did it.
Sleigh Lady Sleigh
I'm so sorry.
The question is: will Carl add it to his collection?
Regarding the passing away of Senator Kennedy: My fear is that now Massachusetts will get a second voting senator.
Ahhhh, thank you.
I didn't think you meant "Defense Administrative Orders and Directives."
Wow...is Hollywood really that desperate?
That graph totally explains Long Islanders. The use of turn signals is completely beyond their comprehension. Unfortunately, my brilliant engineer hubby seems to be losing more turn-signal-activating brain cells the longer we live here.
Hehehe...Bob Dylan Christmas album...
I'm not a Trekkie, but that dog costume is impressive.
Personally, I think almost every politician who has ever lived should be on that list. It seems to come with the job.
MesaMike: ROFL!...if it weren't sadly a prayer.
The Regret poster is hilarious.
And I do love the Starbucks card idea! I just reconnected with one of my best buddies from, believe it or not, third through sixth grade, and he's now a commander in the Air Force, serving in Afghanistan for a year, and he has a family of daughters just like ours. That really made the reality of the sacrifices our soldiers make a lot more personal.
And having commuted through the heart of L.A. freeway apoclyptic madness every day for five years (Santa Clarita to Santa Monica and back), I can testify that using turn signals is actually a sign of weakness and mental instability.
Wait...this meta is getting too lighthearted...must...restrain...must...not...make...people...wince...
AARRRGGHHH!!!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10320096-38.html
Oh, well. Have a great weekend. ;-)
Only two comments, on things I just don't get:
1. It's as if some people think that having to use turn signals is a violation of their civil liberties, or is going to run up the gas bill, or something. I just don't get it.
2. Bob Dylan. When I was younger, I listened to and enjoyed the whole gamut of 60s and 70s music: everything from Joan Baez to early heavy metal. But I could never, ever figure out what people see in Bob Dylan. I just don't get it.
Right there with you, Stefan. I often envision Great Moments in History. Like when the first designer was greeted with, "Say, that polyester leisure suit looks sharp!"
Another would be the first time someone told young Zimmy, "No no, really... you have a nice voice."
More Dylan X-Mas Possibilities:
Snowy Day Women # 12 & 35
Mr. Jingle Bell Man
Snowin' in the Wind
Just Like a Snowman
Stuck Inside the North Pole With the Reindeer Blues Again
Okay, I'll stop...
I like it!
Slow Sleigh Coming
Ok, one comment about the wonderful "not computer people" paragraph:
Where's the "did you reboot the machine?" balloon after the start box?
Speaking of apps...
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-08-28/
"Say, that polyester leisure suit looks sharp!"
Yeah, '70s fashion is something else I just don't get. Fashion designers got just a little too, um, influenced by the psychedelic culture, I guess.
Just one more bit of evidence that we're living in a fallen world in need of a Redeemer!
I totally love the fridge near the toilet idea. I mean you gotta have a cold drink, right?
I don't use my mail application much...gmail web app seems a lot better. I do use contacts, which syncs with Google contacts, only because I need to store names with phone numbers.
RE: Ted Kennedy - is anyone else fascinated by all the yammering about his amazing ability to reach across party lines? Nick Allard waxed eloquent in the Seattle Times:
"There was a certain degree of collegiality and senatorial courtesy, and also of rising above partisan stakes and trying to find a common national interest, and I think he was certainly the champion in that regard," said Nick Allard, Kennedy's counsel on the Judiciary Committee in the mid-1980s.
Huh? He must have dozed off when Kennedy ushered in the era of partisening senate judicial hearings and being the first to BORK a Supreme Court nominee (with a few well-placed pot shots at Reagan):
"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.
America is a better and freer nation than Robert Bork thinks. Yet in the current delicate balance of the Supreme Court, his rigid ideology will tip the scales of justice against the kind of country America is and ought to be.
The damage that President Reagan will do through this nomination, if it is not rejected by the Senate, could live on far beyond the end of his presidential term. President Reagan is still our President. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate, and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and on the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.
Yeah....that sounds just exactly like a "certain degree of collegiality and senatorial courtesy, and also of rising above partisan stakes and trying to find a common national interest."
Oh, you're kidding me. He was relentlessly partisan.
And you did what crossed my mind: quote from Kennedy's disgraceful Bork-speech. That alone would have discredited him, in a sane society.
In a sane society.
Oh, and one more thing and then I'll shut up at the risk of being a blog hog. Yesterday, I posted this on my Facebook:
Two quotes I read on blogs today about Ted Kennedy:
1. “[O]ne has to acknowledge that the poor, the downtrodden and the meek were at the center of much of his life’s work.”
2. "The same could be said of Karl Marx, yet based on the effect of his ideas, none hated the poor more than he."
(HT: Denny Burke's blog)
Someone I'm just barely acquainted with and whose friend request I probably should have considered more carefully, wrote this in response:
"What ideas of Ted Kennedy effected the poor negatively? The legislation for the mentally ill last year? The increase of minumum wage? The work he was putting into health care reform? Hmm... Ted Kennedy was no more like Marx than he was like Christ. He was a man who felt strongly for his ideals just like Marx and Christ."
Ugh...along with Bush Derangement Syndrome and Palin Derangement Syndrome, we now have Kennedy Derangement Syndrome, which works in the opposite direction of BDS and PDS.
Knockin' on St. Nick's door.
I don't like to speak ill of the dead, but I don't like it when people tout Ted Kennedy's great moral charachter. This is the first time I've heard of him joking about the night Mary Jo Kopechne died. If he had merely made a phone call, she might have lived.
The Dems might get some movement using Ted Kennedy's name, but if they ram this through they'd have probably done it anyways.
KennedyCare: Robbing live seniors to honor a dead one.
They can't be that good at deception. They all got caught.
They didn't get caught in the deception, the crime was discovered and ultimately traved back despite their deception.
Kennedy was a pompous _ss.
How anyone could have voted for him after the dead woman materialized in his car is beyond me.
Love H&T days. It's always fun watching the comment thread get all wee-weed up.
The veneration of St. Edward has been utterly nauseating. Between Kopechne, his single-handed destruction of the judicial appointment process, and consciously deciding to abandon his 'faith' to garner votes from pro-aborts, he should have been dismissed from public life long ago. Who is this guy a hero to, exactly?
Not sure where I read it, but someone likened the donkeys breaking out St. Ted to promote their hideous power grab disguised as 'health care' to the movie Weekend at Bernie's. The similarities are eerie, right down to the sickening feeling I get from watching it unfold.
That picture of the pants doesn't quite do it. Perhaps a moving picture will suffice. I'd much rather watch that than the Andy Griffith movie. Why, Matlock? Why????
Obsessive banned stalkertroll OSO committed another act of cyber-rape, asking me to remind you what a waking nightmare it would be for the government to control health care. Self-righteous, lawless, humorless bureaucrats, empowered to demand an accounting for every detail of your finances, diet, behavior, and personal life; empowered to barge in unwelcome (as he himself thoughtfully illustrates for us); enabled to communicate every detail of your life to every other branch of government.
Sheer waking nightmare.
I really liked Bob Dylan. Oh..and Joni Mitchell. Forget the big stuff like Chicago.
Ok...here ya go.
Gotta Serve Santa
I dreamed I saw St. Nicholas
LIve a Rolling Santa
Love Minus Zero/No Christmas
Stuck Inside of Christmas With the Toy Instruction Blues Again
I'm a big fan of the carpeted bathroom. I mean, who doesn't want carpet in their bathroom?!
Oh, that's scary, Mark!
I'll have to remember that when I go out, I need to take the tin-foil hat off my head and put it on my phone.
I came to the comment thread to say, that article about Google maps made me double the foil layers in our tin hats this morning. Thanks to MMike, I'm going to make wee little foil hats for our phones too!
"Sleigh Lady Sleigh"
Dan, you're going to keep doing that to me until I ruin my computer. Do you know how hard it is to clean salsa off of a keyboard?
As for obsessed, banned stalker-troll OSO, I am beginning to wonder if it isn't afflicted with a bit of masochism. He keeps getting zapped, and keeps coming back for more.
I really do wish Blogger would update their system to enable banning by IP.
Whatever it is, it's about him. It is an appalling spectacle. I don't even read what he wrote, it would be poor stewardship of my time. Immediate deletion, unread.
Methinks that OSO, claiming to be from the land down unda, is, in fact, an Obama Administration-appointed, Internet-Division, potential-terrorist-watching(determined by profiling), DJP-watchdog.
We're being surveilled!
NLB,
Hailing from that corner of the world myself, I can testify to the fact that there is a particularly virulent strain of BDS at work there.
Too much sun and beer, too little news other than CNN International, and too small a population to dilute its effects. It's sad. And it's why I left and would never move back.
BTW, Dan, you really are a guy with truly amazing talents.
You don't even read what the aforementioned, he-whose-name-we-will-not-utter, OBST writes, yet, you are clairvoyantly able to share an accurate translation of what he posted with the rest of us, in an uncannily creative and humorous fashion.
Brilliantly entertaining!
As we say around Casa Phillips, "Another unmarketable talent."
Yeah, I can relate.
Around Casa Westy, I'm the who needs SpellCheck-guy, aka Chief Picker of Nits.
As with any public figure who dies so publicly, there's always the hope that there was a point prior to death where they came to embrace the truth of the Gospel and to rest in that. If there was no hope for even Ted Kennedy, then there was no hope for me. And so, as a sinner saved by Grace, one hopes for the same for others.
We hope.
I read some words of people who testified to him being a man of "great faith" and what that seemed to mean to them. I watched part of the graveside service tonight. I heard the contents of his letter to the Pope, and it was just so sad. In that letter, I heard the heart of a man who knew he was going to die, was fully aware of his sins (he called them "shortcomings") and seemed to be honestly seeking salvation through the only route he believed in - through the prayer of a Pope and his efforts to "turn around" and do some good for people, including his family. He sounded like a vulnerable human being, a man like most any man in the world today when faced with eternity, hoping against hope for salvation through his works and a prayer from someone he perhaps felt might have God's ear.
Just...sad. And an occasion to reflect on the beauty and value of the blood on that cross, and especially of the grace that ordains certain works for me to walk in as His workmanship, not to have to somehow "measure up" to other people, but to go directly to Christ and His cross and His word. A perfect opportunity to repent of our own works-oriented nature that creeps in on us and just cling, empty-handed, to the cross. What a great Savior we have.
Amen, Barbara.
This is one reason the RCC has so much blood on its hands. Whatever the apostates and apologists try to argue and argue endlessly, the fact is that The Church{tm} encourages Roman Catholics to look in many, many places other than Jesus Christ alone for salvation.
And so they go to their graves what a false hope that cannot save - like my friend's dying unsaved father, who was assured of salvation by the priest and his magic scapular.
Could not be more antithetical to the apostolic Gospel.
This is a really good tract Dan.
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