Month: November 2006

Randy Milholland, creator of online comic Something Positive, claims that a Google search for “baby penguins” can cure a bad mood.

I’m just passing that along. No linkie – you’ll have to do the hard work yourself.

My weekend, in numbers:

• 3 day weekend (thanks, Veterans!)
• 4 – surprises for the author in my NaNovel
• 10 – miles run on Sunday
• 12.75 – dollars spent on food at Sunday’s Blazer game (thanks, Gina!)
• 97 – points scored by the Blazers on Sunday(no chalupa)
• 103 – points scored by the Dallas Mavericks (which brings their record to 2-4)
• 6,293 – seconds it took me to run the above-mentioned 10 miles
• 6,992 – words written on my NaNovel. A marathon!
• 7504 – calories eaten (not so good)
• 20,333 – total words written on my NaNovel

Ken and I are going to the Blazer game tonight. A friend of Tracy’s was generous enough to gift me with an invitation to join her in a suite at the Rose Garden. I’ve never been in one before; I’m assuming it’s a nice way to catch a game.

They’re playing Dallas tonight. I know very little about the team this year, having given up hope for the Blazers two seasons ago. But I guess they’ve been winning some tough games, and not giving up, and showing heart and all those sports metaphors.

Should be fun… I’ll report back about how it turned out.

Dear Dad:

I had the strangest dream yesterday. You were driving along, staring straight ahead at the road, not looking left or right. You were going along just over the speed limit, not enough to get busted, though. You were on SR 14 in Washington, just on the other side of the river from Oregon.

I was in a car, with my friend Ken, in his little red Corolla, and we were on SR 14 in Washington, too.

And you glanced at your fingernails, as if checking out a manicure or somethin’, and you slowly pulled away from us. All without looking over.

It was a funny dream.

…or was it?

Today’s musical accompaniment has been “Future Soundtrack For America”, which was great in 2004, then became almost too painful to listen to, but is great again; and Green Day’s “American Idiot”, which is has a whole new, less bitter, meaning for me today.

Over and over and over again.

And I’m dancing a lot.

I guess I’ll have to re-start my political blog again. Turns out winning is energizing and anti-demoralizing. Who knew? Now I’ve got lots to say again that isn’t angry!

Want to know just how different the 110th Congress is going to be?

Introducing the first-ever Muslim Congressman, Representative Keith Ellison, from the great state of Minnesota.

It should surprise no one that he ran, and won, as a member of the Democratic Party. Y’know, the party of inclusion.

Hey, maybe we can all get along.

Bye, Rumsfeld!

The Donald becomes the first recipient of Lunar Obverse’s “Yellow Undies” award. I hope (oh, how I hope!) that there will be many, many more.

Don’t let an IED hit your ass on the way out!

And, sadly, Bush had to reverse himself, after defending Rumsfeld time and again. But when the Army Times, Navy Times, Marine Times and Air Force Times newspapers all join in calling for the Defense Secretary’s resignation, truly… it’s time to go.

Wait, did I say “sadly”? Sorry, it’s hard to read what I’m saying while I’m wearing this huge grin on my face.

I hope our president likes the taste of crow…

Good news comes in threes, they say. But I’ve lost count of all the good news for our country that I’ve heard in the last 24 hours. Still, if there’s more to come, I’m so ready for it.

Truly, this is the best day of my political life.

This month’s Wired Magazine deals with The New Atheism, and includes this telling quote from the author, Gary Wolf:

I RETURN FROM OXFORD enthusiastic for argument. I immediately begin trying out Dawkins’ appeal in polite company. At dinner parties or over drinks, I ask people to declare themselves. “Who here is an atheist?” I ask.

Usually, the first response is silence, accompanied by glances all around in the hope that somebody else will speak first. Then, after a moment, somebody does, almost always a man, almost always with a defiant smile and a tone of enthusiasm. He says happily, “I am!”

But it is the next comment that is telling. Somebody turns to him and says: “You would be.”

“Why?”

“Because you enjoy pissing people off.”

“Well, that’s true.”

This type of conversation takes place not in central Ohio, where I was born, or in Utah, where I was a teenager, but on the West Coast, among technical and scientific people, possibly the social group that is least likely among all Americans to be religious. Most of these people call themselves agnostic, but they don’t harbor much suspicion that God is real. They tell me they reject atheism not out of piety but out of politeness. As one said, “Atheism is like telling somebody, ‘The very thing you hinge your life on, I totally dismiss.'” This is the type of statement she would never want to make.

This is the statement the New Atheists believe must be made – loudly, clearly, and before it’s too late. I continue to invite my friends for a nice, invigorating stroll down Logic Lane. For the most part, they just laugh and wave me on.

If we, as a society, don’t offer respect to those who believe in a real Easter Bunny, or laugh at the followers of Marshall Applewhite (nervously, because they’re all dead now), why is belief in the God of Abraham accorded more respect?

Since the central tenet of Christianity is that only by accepting Jesus Christ as one’s “personal savior” can one enter Heaven, it’s apparent that Christianity is unable to co-exist with religious beliefs that counter that idea. People who claim belief in Christianity but pretend to tolerance are, in the view of the New Atheists, and in my own view, fence-sitters. Toss in the other things that Christianity requires one to believe, like the Virgin Birth, or global floods, or multiple forms of immortality and resurrection, ideas incompatible with the evidence that surrounds us today, and the practice, let alone the idea, of tolerance is pushed to its limit.

Post-9/11 (and 3/11, and 7/7, not to mention the Iraq Occupation and the rude introduction of the various Islamic sects like the Sunni and Shia), Americans can no longer ignore the fact that there are other religions than Christianity in the world, and that those religions are just as fundamentalist as Christianity can be.

The irony is that making a case for the natural world view, one that rejects supernaturalism, is seen as evangelical. It creates embarrassment, not only for those listening to the arguments but those making the arguments, also. When I, myself, bring up the topic I chuckle nervously and call it “evangelical atheism”.

But I think that the embarrassment stems from the deep, irrational taboo we have against contradicting others’ god-belief, unless we are promoting an alternative god-belief. I think that this taboo is no more rational than the belief that someone with chocolate-colored skin is somehow a “lesser” human than one with pinkish skin.

And I believe that this taboo can be overcome. What bothers me is that it may not be overcome – and I fear the consequences of that.

And it bothers me not a bit that I now borrow a phrase from a radical religious leader to draw my intellectual line:

“Here I stand. I can do no other.” – Martin Luther

Democratically-controlled House of Representatives, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

I like it. Got a nice ring to it. Say it with me:

Subpoena power.

There’s gotta be some urine-soaked tighty-whities in the White House tonight.

In other news, the bOregonian is calling Measures 39 (prohibiting public transfer of property to private hands) and 44 (expanding prescription drugs under the Oregon Health Plan) as passing – both of those got my vote, too. Everything else is failing, which is also how I voted.

Sadly, Connecticut (and the world) appears to be still stuck with Joe “Joe for Joe’s sake” Lieberman. Wanker. That’s my only major disappointment tonight, though.

In other news, I haven’t felt this good on Election Night since… since… um, ever. (In ’92, I voted for Perot – don’t be mad, I was a crazy Libertarian)

I must have felt last night’s earthquake last night.

But at the time I just thought it was the neighbors upstairs falling down on the floor.

I should have known something was up when Smacky came running in from the bedroom.