The War Of The Moral Compass And the Golden Compass

Why does this thing I read in Snopes demand to be put up? It doesn’t surprise me, not in the least, but every time the logical part of me says it doesn’t need to be talked about, another part of me screams that it does.

There’s apparently a movie coming out in December called the Golden Compass, and a bunch of religious folk are sending up in arms emails about it, telling their fellow Christians to boycott the movie. Bla bla bla. They say the book on which it is based is written by Phillip Pullman, an English writer who is an atheist, can’t stand C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books and wants to write a rebuttal. For this, they say that no good Christian should watch it. But here’s why something in me screams that I have to blog about this whole campaign. They say the reason no one with any religious belief in them should watch the movie is because people may like the movie, which is watered down, and then go buy the book on which it is based for their kids for Christmas, selling Atheism and dooming the kids to want to kill god.

How is what Pullman is doing any different than sending the kids to Sunday school, forcing the bible on them, simplifying things to the point that they will understand it in the way you want, thus getting them to believe in it? I think if you’re going to make your kids read the bible, at least let them read the other side.

And this really speaks to how stupid the religious higher-ups think their “sheep” are. Well, they do call them sheep, after all. They think reading one book is going to turn them from being pro-God zombies to anti-God zombies. Come on, guys. It’s a book. It’s designed to make them think. Oh yeah, that’s bad too in the eyes of religion. See what I mean about this whole thing being not that big of a surprise? Oh well, it’s written down. Now that other part of me can stop screaming.

Fahrenheit 198451

Here’s some advice. Just don’t go to Britain. Don’t even go near it, and if you’re there, get out, if you can that is. Why? Cops want to increase surveillance to the point that if you even go in a direction that might suggest that you might be up to something, they will chase you down.

Apparently, all the CCTV’s aren’t good enough. So now, they want to centralize their data, make them good enough for face-recognition, and recognize patterns and start tracking the person who apparently fits the pattern. Are they going to get out the mechanical firehouse hounds of Fahrenheit 451?

And if you’re a kid in a British school, you might be RFID tagged like warehouse inventory. Isn’t that special?

I hope that the servers being used to store all this potential data die from overload before they can really use all this. IT’s too much!

Spineless Robber May Have Less Of A Spine Now

Wow. I’m sure the robber in this story wasn’t expecting to be shot in the neck by a 75-year-old blind man. I’m wondering if the shooter was Carey McWilliams’ grandfather. I guess that blind man was a good shot. The shootee is in serious condition with a bullet lodged close to his spine and they don’t know whether they should take it out or leave it in. Well, that’ll teach him to mess with an old man, that’s for sure. I still can’t believe the shooter was able to walk into another room, grab his gun, come back, threaten the dude, and shoot him. The robber really underestimated his opponent. Bad, bad mistake.

More Parental Disasters

I wouldn’t bother writing about this particular loser, except I know I’ve ranted about the number of crappy parents out there before.

He was driving drunk, in the wrong direction down a busy highway, with some open booze, in an uninsured car with an invalid license plate…oh, and his two-year-old daughter just hangin’ out in the back seat with no seatbelt or anything on. *Collapses in a heap.*

>Travelodge: A Good Naked Sleepwalk Isn’t Far Away

>Ok, sleepwalking must be on the extreme upswing, and wearing pyjamas must have gone out of fashion, because in the UK, Travelodge staff have been trained to deal with naked sleepwalkers. What I find the weirdest about this whole thing is sleepwalkers don’t just sleepwalk, they come out into the lobby asking for newspapers or wanting to chekc out. I think the most I managed to utter the one time I sleepwalked was something about Steve being a sneaky devil. I certainly had no idea where I was going, and managed to almost collide with my filing cabinet. I wouldn’t have made it to the hotel lobby. How do these folks get all the way to reception and manage whole sentences? And why are there so many? And why are they all naked?

Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest

Wow. This is just stupid. Not a single person in this story looks smart. Not a one.

Lets’ begin, well, at the beginning. It all started in the town of Swanville, Maine, when an 18-year-old woman decided that the only way to get rid of those bastard fleas would be to shave the cat. Appalled by this, her brother tried to stop her. What did he do? He tried to cut the chord that led from clippers to electricity. He didn’t try to unplug the clippers. No no no. Get a knife and hack the chord was his solution. Luckily for all involved, he failed, only succeeding in cutting himself, because she kicked him. He supposedly retaliated by choking her and pushing her down. She called 911 and said he hit her, and they’re looking for him through the woods, even with dogs!

Oh come on. Deploying tracking dogs for a scrap between siblings that she started? Give me a fucking break. I’m sure he’ll come home at some point and they can talk to him then.

My oh my, don’t visit Swanville, Maine. Your IQ might suffer for it.

Now That’s A Lucky Boy

Picture this. A three-year-old kid somehow gets out of his apartment at 3 a.m. and wanders into the street wearing only a diaper. It’s cold out. He ends up on a traffic island. He gets rescued by a sex-offender who was convicted of assaulting a four-year-old boy, and he is returned, unharmed, to his home.

That kid is one very, very, very lucky kid. Those parents seem a little slow, and are apparently facing child neglect charges. But holy crap that kid is lucky. Hopefully, he never gets loose again. He might not be so lucky next time.

These People Aren’t Smokin’ In The Brains Department

Most of this article was pretty uninteresting. It said that a lot of women in West Virginia smoke while pregnant. Apparently these women just don’t know it’s bad, and campaigns to bring them up to date on this just aren’t working. Other women are suffering from depression, so that wouldn’t be a really easy time to quit either. But there is actually a pocket of women who say they smoke while pregnant so their babies will be smaller and delivery will be easier.

Can I strangle these women? I hope they’re ready for the lifetime of consequences this could creat for them. Wow. that’s all I can say.