HeartBreakLogNews

Rotten Tomatoes: The Da Vinci Code
Okay, I expected this to be an unintentionally hilarious waste of time, but the stunning critical failure of “The Da Vinci Code” movie in preliminary screenings is actually surprising. The old “Tomatometer” reading of 6% , with only one positive review so far, metaphorically represents a movie that’s blackened, hairy, sagging into a nauseating puddle of runny, smelly, goo on the countertop..... I haven’t used RT for very long, but I have gotten the impression that a movie that ranks in the 20-30% range can be considered an unwatchable stinker. This puts such fare as the “Resident Evil” movies, and indeed some of the straight-to-Science-Fiction-Channel SF/F dregs in a whole new light. Not that I’m going to actually watch any of them, just respect them differently in light of a major, expensively produced, massively casted, heavily marketed film being even worse than they are. Many of the fan reviewers are also beginning to backpedal, reassuring us that this is "just fiction".

"You know a movie's a dud when even its self-flagellating albino killer monk isn't any fun. "
-- John Beifuss, COMMERCIAL APPEAL (MEMPHIS, TN)

How did millions of people manage to simultaneously step off the metaphoric curb with this idiocy anyway? In addition to documents faked in the 1950’s by a noted megalomaniac (Come on, people! He wrote himself into the “bloodline”! A clue, ya think?) who placed them in Paris archives so he could “discover” them later , the “bloodlines” argument is apparently also based on a series of blatantly anti-Christian gnostic texts such as the “gospel of Mary Magdalene” and the “gospel of Philip”, according to recent documentaries by the History Channel. Publication of an incendiary challenge to Christianity based on “evidence” from these old gnostic texts (eg. the "gospel of Judas") is like writing a biography of Ronald Reagan based on interviews with Robert Hinkley. Basing such challenges on gnostic texts which have been “interpreted” with the benefit of holes rotted or eaten in them that conveniently remove contradictory information ---such as the portion of the text of the “gospel of Philip” used to suggest a blasphemous intimacy---is an insult not only to Christian faith, but to legitimate scientific and historical inquiry.
Indeed, the principal damage that this miserable hack job may do is to make the Vatican and Roman Catholicism look good. As usual, when anyone who lacks any actual understanding of Christianity wants to discuss or investigate or confront Christianity they immediately turn to the Vatican, as if they would have the slightest idea of what Jesus said or did. Evidently Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, etc. aren’t sophisticated enough to be hiding anyone’s babies. Fortunately, most of us also have more important things to do.

Why should a new deception lend credibility to an old lie told about God, when everything anyone needs to know about Christian faith is freely available (http://www.biblegateway.com/)? It's not a puzzle, it isn't in code, nobody needs to flog themselves to figure it out, and the latest major movie about it got much better tomatometer scores in spite of being favorable to Christianity. If you need more help to understand it, just ask (James 1:5)!

SPACE.com -- NASA Releases Summary of DART Mission Mishap
My Way News - Report: Spacecraft Crashes Into Satellite
New Scientist SPACE - Breaking News - Spacecraft collision due to catalogue of errors
NASA’s automated rendevous satellite failed because somebody neglected to install a software patch to correct a critical flaw in its GPS navigation system. This caused the vehicle to calculate that it was edging away from its rendevous target when it was speeding towards it. The result was that DART rammed its target into a higher orbit, then put itself into a safing orbit because it had used too much fuel. The mission’s management is credited with being inexperienced, arrogantly rejecting outside input, and making a major contribution to another humiliating failure for the space agency.
I’m beginning to think I can see a pattern here....

New Scientist SPACE - Premium- Was our universe made for us or not? - News [Unfortunately, I don’t have a subscription.]
This is really spooky. If quantum theory, strings/membranes, uncertainty, and all that weren’t bizzare enough, and the notion of everything starting at an infinitesimal point and accelerating outward for no really indentifiable reason that can be logically verified, now it’s all starting to circle around to the Beginning.
This is another discussion of the “Cosmological Constant”. The observed value of the Constant is far lower than quantum theory predicts, or something like that. This leads to a growing suspicion that our Universe is a peculiar construct, built for the specific purpose of producing life.
Decode that.

// posted by JJR2 @5/17/2006 09:35:00 PM; || Permalink for this post || to this post ||