Author: Brian

Reading Roger Ebert’s post titled “When a movie hurts too much”, I’m reminded that, at least since my mother’s initial run-in with cancer, through the nerve-wracking days when my niece was born and had to spend extra days in the hospital, to my mother’s second and final run-in with cancer, and brought to complete sad fruition when my sister’s father-in-law went to a hospital and never left two summers ago…

I can’t watch any movie scene set in a hospital room without at least tearing up.

The only exception is watching “Scrubs”, but that’s rarely about actual hospital stuff. But if they show a patient, in that distinctive bed, and the little monitor is beeping…. yeah. Tears.

These three songs came up on my iPhone this morning, and each one earned a second listen, even though they all evoked different feelings and memories in me.

First, Moby’s “At Least We Tried”:

Second, Bad Religion’s “Honest Goodbye”:

Finally, Bob Marley’s “Satisfy My Soul”:

I love random music because it’s a hotbed of apophenia.

On this day one-hundred and fifty-seven years ago (1 July 1850) Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin gave a joint reading of their papers to the Linnean Society in London, outlining their independently-reached theories of the process of natural selection. Natural selection was the first plausible mechanism that explained the alreadyobserved process of evolution, or change in species over time, and in fact explained the rise of new species from the contingent history of previous ones.

As P.Z. says, that makes today a scientific Independence Day.

G’head and celebrate by blowing some fireworks up or somethin’.

I love Schoolhouse Rock even more today than I did when I was a kid.

Do you know all the words to the Preamble to the Constitution? I do. And I tend to sing it, just as it’s sung in this song:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_TXJRZ4CFc&hl=en]

We, the People,
In order to form a more perfect union,
establish justice
ensure domestic tran-quil-i-tee hee-ee-ee,
provide for the common defense
promote the general welfare, an-nd
secure the blessings of liber-ty
to ourselves and our posteri-ty,

Do ordain and establish
this Constitution
Forrrrrr
The United State of
Am-er-i-caaaaa!!

“Right On!” indeed.

Senator Ron Wyden will support a fillibuster of the tragically unconstitutional FISA rewrite.

Thank you, Senator Wyden.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZYuRk1pFO0&hl=en]

…OK, now I want to try that. Off to the mall!

“Whoo! Yeah, sexy! How you doin’?”

I turned my head to the right as I walked home. From the sidewalk I could see the woman who had just called out to me. She sat in a lawn chair along with several others, visible in the back yard of a house in my neighborhood.

Yes, she was looking at me.

“And whatcha got in that bag?” she yelled out again.

I kept walking.

I had donuts in the bag.

Sure, you’ve heard of imdb, the Internet Movie Database.

But have you ever heard of imFdb? The Internet Movie Firearms Database?

See, the “F” stands for “Firearms”.

If you ever watched a movie and thought, “hey, what kind of gun did Rambo use?” this would be your first best resource. Unlike, say, the bajillions of other sites that would come up in a Google search, the imfdb focuses on guns.