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Friday, May 19, 2006

---"The Da Vinci Code: Bored to Tears", Lots of Beer Cans in Utah 


But seriously, folks....
Focus on the Family: Decoding 'The Da Vinci Code'
Some Christians have gone far out of their way to actually research this wildly popular anti-Christian fantasy. The representations in Brown’s book range from the hilarious to the pathetic---which was obvious to me, at least, on casual inspection of the book’s cover. If anyone is reading this blog, feel free to educate yourselves.
See especially:
Focus on the Family: Articles on 'The Da Vinci Code'
Such as:
The Top 10 Errors Found in 'The Da Vinci Code'
The Gnostic Gospels and the Canon of Scripture

[Even the usual suspects from the History Channel and Discovery---where they sit around and talk about hokey Biblical numerologies like they were something new and different and without apparently blushing at all---have been having to suppress giggles while discussing the "evidence" for 'The Da Vinci Code'. Can we please get back to dinosaurs and WWII now?]

But then again...
FOXNews.com - How 'Bout a Cold One ... or Two ... or 40?
A property manager in Ogden, Utah investigating an abandoned townhouse entered to find beer cans----70,000 beer cans---piled in the living space. This corresponds to a case a day over the eight-year tenure of the previous occupant, who evidently never threw any of them away.


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Wednesday, May 17, 2006

---“The Da Vinci Code” Stinks, Bumper Satellite Report from NASA, The Universal Construct 

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.


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Saturday, May 13, 2006

---Bush Invited to Islam, "Da Vinci Code" Strikes Out, Chopstick Wars, Jupiter's New Spot, The Last of the Hummers 

An unnecessary courtesy
President says his letter to President Bush was invitation to Islam - Irna [found on BlogsNow]
In his regular projectile pronouncement for the week, the Iranian president claimed his letter to Bush last week was not an attempt to justify Iran’s nuclear policy, but to invite Bush to accept Islam. This is doubly preposterous, since G.W. has already fully embraced Islam. He delivered a virtual Islamic sermon to a joint session of Congress in the wake of the 9-11-2001 attacks.

If you hadn’t already guessed, the “da Vinci Code” is a clumsy fake
No Gospel in "Da Vinci Code" Claims, Scholars Say
Even the National Geographic has had trouble getting its “scholars” to support the “da Vinci Code” hoax currently being perpetrated in theaters and in one or more best-selling novels. As I understand the two minutes off the end of their TV documentary I grudgingly watched the other night, the originator of this currently most popular insult to legitimate Christian faith concocted the whole mess back in the 1920’s and placed it in a Paris archive so he could dramatically “discover” it two years later. No comment, apparently, as to why a 20th Century work of fiction should be more or less credible as a historical document than one from the 2nd Century.
Today I saw “da Vinci Code” jigsaw puzzles at Target, which supposedly revealed encoded “secrets” when completed. My reaction was almost as bad as the one I had to seeing the collection of blackened knuckle bones in the “treasury” at Notre Dame in Paris.
[...or was it the 1950's? Okay, so I'm having trouble taking this seriously. What's next? Is the Comedy Channel going to start doing "History" and "Science"?]

More on the “Chopstick Wars”
FOXNews.com [AP]- Shortage of Chopsticks Worries Japan as China Goes Ecological - Science News | Current Articles
Okay, that’s something of an exaggeration, but Japan has faced this crisis for some years now. The insistence of the Japanese consumer on using genuine disposable wooden chopsticks has been apparently denuding whole forests on the mainland to make the billions of the eating utensils required yearly. I’m not sure why more renewable bamboo isn’t good enough, but plastic seems to be too slippery for many Japanese diners. After my occasional attempts to use the ‘sticks for eating Asian foods, I’m not sure what has prevented the whole population from starving to death.

Jupiter gets a new red spot
Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | Hubble snaps baby pictures of Jupiter's "Red Spot Jr."
Right before the virtual eyes of astronomers, Jupiter has developed a second “red spot”, below and to the East of the big one first seen by Galileo. See pictures.

Arnold will be so disappointed
FOXNews.com[AP] - GM: End of Production Line for Hummer H1
The civilian-commercial version of the classic military HumVee will go out of production after the 2006 model year. Despite its prominent role in all sorts of juvenile automotive fantasies, the 10 mpg fuel consumption and environmental unfashionableness have doomed the H1.


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Thursday, May 04, 2006

---Moussaoui Goes Away, al-Zarqawi Follies, Comet Breakup, Craters and Dunes on Titan 

Promises, promises....
My Way News/AP - Moussaoui Offers Final Diatribe in Court
The judge in the case promises that we won’t have to endure any further public comments after this one.

My Way News/AP - Video Shows al-Zarqawi Fumbling With Rifle
U.S. intelligence has obtained the uncut version of al-Zarqawi’s recent video, and is apparently yucking it up about his fumbling efforts to operate an automatic weapon and his choice of footwear. In defense of the hellish mass-muderer’s military skills, the weapon appears to be a U.S. Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW, which I think would be classed as a support light machine gun rather than a "rifle"), with which he’s probably not that familiar---and he must not have had any helpless women and children or wedding parties to practice on before he shot the video.

Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | Hubble provides spectacular detail of a comet's breakup
SPACE.com -- NASA Says Comet Fragments Won't Hit Earth

We have spectacular Hubble photos of the breakup of comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3. NASA sources dismissed any possibility that any of the fragments would threaten Earth.

New Scientist SPACE - Breaking News - Colossal dunes swathe Saturn's giant moon
JPL: Catalog Page for PIA08425

The latest Cassini flyby of TItan returned new SAR images of the bright “Xanadu” region, which is detectable with telescopes on Earth. The images show more circular features which may be impact craters and more “sand” dunes. It isn’t clear what “sand” is made of on Titan. Cassini had a 5-hour power outage while returning data from the flyby which caused the loss of some science data. NASA has speculated that the outage was caused by “cosmic rays” hitting the power switch. How many college students have tried that one during finals?


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