I like clocks. I'm not sure why, especially in light of the fact that, like most people in my age group, I find analogue clocks difficult to read (more on this someday). But I just dig clocks.

So, if you hang out on the internet, you have to deal with time zones other than the one you live in a lot. What's interesting is that Microsoft has no real sense of this. This led to a great fiasco when, at a place I was working, the secretary tried to use Outlook to schedule meetings between people at the office (In Baltimore) and people in California, which were to take place in Las Vegas. So, the secretary would type in "Meeting at 2 PM", and Outlook would "helpfully" tell the person in California that the meeting was at 10 AM. And, of course, on the east coast, the meeting would really be at 5. And there was no way to convince Outlook to *not* do this. Of course, everyone says "Well, you want to schedule it for 5, because that's what time it will be where this computer is." But (a) No one works like that, and (b) it would show up in the Californian's schedule as 1 PM, which isn't what he wanted either.

Anyway, back to reality. I deal regularly with websites who schedule events on their own local clock, or on GMT. Now, honestly, in my day to day life, there is no reason I need to know what the current time is GMT, so, no, you arrogant geeks, I am not going to just set my own personal clock to GMT and insist that everyone I do business with act the same. So I found myself wanting a multi-time zone clock. Now, personally, I wouldn't mind having a bunch of clocks on the wall set to different times, the way they used to in news rooms (and probably still do, but they keep them off camera now), but even I realize that's a little geeky.

There are numerous programs on the interweb that can do this, but I really wanted something small and unobtrusive that wouldn't take up any real estate when I wasn't using it, that would be available at a moment's notice, and that wouldn't leave me spending six hours resetting all the clocks after a power failure (this is the downside to my really digging clocks),

Suddenly, I remembered something important: I am a programmer. Why not just write my own?

And so I did. This is beta software, and my goal was to go from 0 to working as quickly as possible, so there may be things I haven't accounted for, but it does seem to work. Check it out: TimeMan.

Here's how it works: Run the program, and a little clock will appear in your system tray. When clicked, a balloon will pop up for several seconds, displaying the current time in UTC, Eastern, Central, and Pacific (Some day, I'll enhance it to display the time zones of your choosing, but for right now, it displays the ones that I personally find useful). To kill it, right click the icon (this will make the balloon pop up too, because I was in a hurry) and select 'Close'. You can stick a shortcut in your Startup folder to automate the whole thing..

Anyway, all I ask for the use of it is that you drop me a line saying what you think. It does require the .NET framework 2.0, because making it work without it was more effort than I wanted to put in for this. In any case, enjoy.

Updated....
If you get an error when trying to run TimeMan to the tune of "couldn't find mscoree.dll", it means you need to download the .NET runtime stuff. You can get it here: Get the .NET Framework.

Last night's dream was unusual (well, maybe unusual for you, not so much for me) in that it was told in the third person. I think my affinity for TV and Video games has permanently damaged the way my subconscious views the world.

Anyway, last night's dream involved the characters from the new WB series Supernatural. I want to point out that I don't control what I dream, much, and can't be blamed for the taste of my subconscious. I only half-watch the show, since I don't really like it, but I'm giving it a chance because it has much in common with a number of shows I do like.

In this story, Sam and Dave Dean have been baited into going to find their non-canonical six year old sister (or maybe someone else's sister; I'm not sure), played by my own sister, age 6. Something or other goes wrong for them, and the FBI shows up, intent on taking them into custody. Dean (I assume, though which one is which is something I can never keep straight), gives up without a fight, in order to buy escape time for Sam, who hides in the little girl's bedroom (played by my own sister's bedroom, age 21).

He does not hide for long, however, and soon peeks out in preparation of making his move. The FBI Agents must have been trained by the guards in Castle Wolfenstein, since they don't notice him hiding in plain sight. Outside, the rain has picked up, and some of the stones are coming loose, making the way treacherous (The setting is, it seems, my childhood home, relocated to the top of a pyramid in Chichen Itza). Sam starts to rescue the little girl, but then decides not to (the reason for this is hinted at later) after an unseen conversation. Instead, he hops in a truck and drives away, leaving the agents bumfuzzled. (In fact, I get the distinct impression that these FBI agents are intentionally playing along, since they seem to really know deep down who the heroes are in this story, and they're only trying to catch them in the first place because it's important to the narrative structure.)

It's sort of implied that he rescues Dean immediately thereafter, but this happens offscreen as the narrative follows the little girl. She's taken back to an FBI installation where they've set up what could be loosely termed a boarding school where the children and younger siblings of heroes from Speculative Fiction Walking-The-Earth shows are kept in protective custody. (Presumably, this is where David Banner's sister, Kwai Chang Caine's nephew, and Cade Foster's son go, though they won't be appearing in this dream. There is a twelve-year-old kid who mentions something about his dad looking for a one-armed man, but he gets cut off).

She deals with a complex robotic vending machine. It seems determined to give you what it thinks you want, rather than what you actually want. It's voice activated, but responds to any command as "pick something you think I'd like", so it's a race to pound out the number code for the confection of choice before the robot picks something else for you. We are told, either in a voice over or in her conversation with the Sympathetic Female Agent Character, played by a cross between Gillian Anderson and that new girl on CSI: NY, that she's perfectly happy to be here, since she's effectively an orphan and even she knows that Walking The Earth is no kind of lifestyle for someone her age, so she'll just ride it out here with the other kids until the series finale where there will surely be a touching reunion scene.

I gather the narrative was intending to follow the Sympathetic Female Agent Character from this point, but all she got as far as doing before I woke up was to retrieve from the vending machine a stale, cloth-flavored creme-filled chocolate cupcake and eat it. Very slowly.

I'm kinda foaming at the mouth just now. I have to think a lot more before I have some solid concrete thoughts on this, but I ought to blog it, because those whom it concerns directly, well, can't

My gf just read me the text of this article, as it's the high school she attended not so many moons ago...

Daily Record - Local News - Blogging ban provokes a debate over cyberspace

Reader's Digest Version: If you go to Pope John, you are not allowed to blog. Not on school time. Not on your own time. If you are a student and they catch you having a blog, you will be suspended.

So, the first thing I'm going to point out is that this is a private school, so a lot of the usual legal objections don't apply. Of course, pretty much all the usual moral objections still apply.

One of the many great things about the way we've set up our country is that its public schools could not pull a stunt like this.

Maybe you're having a hard time understanding why this is a cause for concern -- I'm not even all up in arms on a First Ammendment basis. It's not like that. This time, it's not even about freedom of speech. It's about overreach. To illustrate my point, here are some things that they could equally well suspend you for doing (these are not, to my knowledge, actual offenses at Pope John, but there is no legal reason they couldn't be):

* Wearing clothes which violate the dress code. Not at school, but, say, at the mall with your parents on a Saturday.
* Watching an R rated movie in your living room on a school holiday
* Working on Sunday
* Having sex with a member of the gender of your choice outside the bounds of holy matrimony
* Reading an unapproved book on your summer vacation
* Listening to that heathen and devil noise called "Rock and Roll"
* Having an unacceptable Body Mass Index (Pope John High School: No Fatties)
* Living in an orange house.
* Proposing, on your own time, that the Earth goes 'round the sun, and not the other way around

I half-salute their intentions; who doesn't want to keep kids safe? But me, I happen to think the school's control over the lives of its students should extend no further than the final bell (excluding school sponsored extracirricular events). (Cliche time: Shouldn't what the kids are doing on-line be their parents' call? I am very troubled that if I wanted a blog, and mom wanted me to have it, my school could veto it.)

Think about it, won't you?

And remember, Thoughtcrime is death.

Look, I don't need to justify myself to you. I HURT MY BACK. And yet, it doesn't stop me.

Tonight's IT is from the archives of "Pictures taken at parties with my cell phone camera that my friends probably won't kill me for posting on the internet."

Brassiere-Man's powers may be pretty great, but, um... Worst. Superhero. Costume. Ever.

[3 points]

Okay, I know I haven't done this in a while. Lots of trouble keeping them in my mind for the length of time it takes to get downstairs to the computer.

But today, dear readers, I remember a thing or two. It involves... My basement.

There was quite a lot I've forgotten of this dream, but at the climactic scene, I entered my basement carying... A Fish.

In the dream this fish was identified as a cod, but it looked a lot more like a beige grouper. But my plans for the fish were cut short when I found that the shelving I had painstakingly (really; I smashed the hell out of my thumb with a masonry hammer while putting the damned things together) put together had been smashed down, turning my worldly possessions into a gigantic pile. I set myself to the task of reassembling my shelves. This plan, however, I abort, realizing that it would be easier just to load an earlier saved game.

This done, I hang the haddock-shaped cod, and set about curing it for dinner. To this end, I cut into the 50 pound bag of salt I keep in the basement, and stuff salt into the gaping maw of the fish. But I notice that there are blue chips in the salt. About these, I ask my dad, who dismisses my concerns. Thus allayed, I move on to stuffing a catfish similarly.

For some reason, this set me on a quest to find a 7-11, but that's a tale for another night.

Lying here in the darkness, you hear the sirens wail: sombeody's going to emergency, somebody's going to jail.

Well, severe back pain prevented me from attending Karaoke Friday, but I managed to get out tonight, and here's what I sang:

1. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Greenday
2. Mr. Brightside, The Killers
3. Power of Love, Huey Lewis and the News
4. If I had $1,000,000, Barenaked Ladies
5. Turn the Page, Metallica

Now, next week's list will probably be conspicuous in its absence, since I will be forsaking Karaoke in favor of going to visit the woman who sets my life to music. So, rather than stiffing you guys for two out of three weeks, I'm going to super-size this week's list with the contents of the CD I am mixing right now for a couple of friends, on the occasion of my having remembered that they asked me if I could provide them with a copy of a particular song a few weeks ago. (For [4 points], guess which one it was. The rest are just there because I hate to not fill a disc to something near capacity). So...

6.. The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes, Elvis Costello
7. Tonight and the Rest of my Life, Nina Gordon
8. Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits
9. New York Minute, The Eagles
10. Behind Blue Eyes, Limp Bizkit
11. Somebody Told Me, The Killers
12. Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley
13. Feed The Tree, Belly
14. Maria, Blondie
15. Get Out of This House, Shawn Colvin
16. Only In My Dreams, Debbie Gibson
17. Save Tonight, Eagle Eye Cherry
18. Take Me Home Tonight, Eddie Money
19. Bittersweet Symphony, The Verve
20. Live Anyway, Quiddity

By request, my results at politopia.

I hurt my back today. Work faster, guys.

Wired News: Mighty Mice Regrow Organs

I know, I know. It's late. But the woman I love was in town this weekend, so I had better things to do than feed you jackals. So, here's your thought of the week.

This week's thought is courtesy of Hal Lindsey's There's a New World Coming, a 1974 graphic novel (though back then, they still called them "comic books") adaptation of a bit of heresy prophesy proving conclusively that the rapture is absolutely certain to happen some time during the 1970s.

Premillennial Dispensation would gat a lot more supporters if they'd all take to calling it "The Great Snatch"

I love a good parody.

Boy do I love a good parody.

I also like good theology, even if I disagree with it.

World O'Crap has reported
on Hairy Polarity and the Sinister Sorcery Satire, a sort of big budget Chick Tract about the "very real dangers of sorcery and witchcraft."

This is not good satire. It is not good theology. And at $2.50 a copy, it's not even a good value.

The material basically writes itself. This is a 32-page piece of propaganda designed to teach our children that magic and sorcery is real, and that it's dangerous and evil and you should not read or learn anything even tangentially related to it. World O'Crap has already taken it to task more than enough, and I wouldn't bother restating the obvious (except to point out that if you do manage to convince children of the premise, you've blown your chance to convince them of the conclusion), except that there's this one little thing that really speaks to why the theology is bad.

Page 5. This is where it happens. The password, letting you into the Evil Inner Sanctum is "knowledge". That's right, folks. Knowledge is evil. Now, our hero does go on to reframe this in a sound byte that, if you don't think about it too much, sounds convincing:

The search for knowledge over wisdom was a big mistake to begin with.

That should sound familiar, because it's a paraphrase of a pretty well-known adage. The problem is that the emphasis is all wrong. While they attribute the line to Proverbs, it's actually an old Japanese proverb. Their point: knowledge (actually knowing stuff) is bad. "Wisdom" (that is, what the people in power tell you) is good. Knowledge without wisdom isn't great, no. Wisdom and knowledge are supposed to work together. But that's not what they want. They want "wisdom" to the exclusion of knowledge. Knowledge without wisdom is useless. Wisdom without knowledge is opinion.

Even though I place it in the spot of prominence, that page wasn't really the one that triggered my attention. What got me was the middle frame of page 3:

Then again, mom says just reading about witchcraft is how she got into, too -- and I shouldn't fill my mind with this stuff.

Same problem as before, and it runs deeper if it's less overt. When I read this line, I knew what we were in for. Knowledge is power, I think most folks would agree. But it's an evil power for the folks who wrote this. What can you say about a belief system that tells you that even the simple knowledge of something will pervert and corrupt your soul? What you don't know can't hurt you, I suppose.

This just doesn't make any sense. If something is dangerous, shouldn't you try to learn as much as possible about it, in order to steer well clear? Let's extend this philosophy. Take navigational hazards off of maps, because the knowledge will, siren-like, attract navigators to their watery grave. Get rid of poison warnings, because they'll only tempt you. And for the love of God, don't tell people about safe sex. Oh, right.

Once again, the message is: ignore reality. Knowledge is bad, it'll only lead you astray.

Like I said before, if you accept that God created the world (because if you don't, there's no problem), then it's important that we pay some attention to it. That's what we're for. Getting rid of knowledge is a form of denying the world. And that's not good theology. At the very least, it's not good Christianity.

You can know about things you don't approve of. It doesn't turn you evil to know about witchcraft (insofar as it exists). Knowing how a condom works isn't going to compell you to have sex. The fact that nice Mr. Johnson next door seems exceptionally friendly with nice Mr. Smith isn't going to fill you with an insatiable thirst for the manlove.

I don't happen to think these things are particularly evil, but, despite my knowing a thing or two about them, I feel absolutely no desire to engage in a full two-thirds of them. So, if I, who think that none of these things are particularly evil (maybe a little evil, but so many things are. Like, "wearing a garment woven of two cloths" evil) don't feel any desire in that direction, how in the world would someone who actually was convinced these were "eternal brimstone" evil, be swayed?

And since a lot of folks would question my Christianity, I'll lend a little force to it by finding more or less the same sentiment by someone whose faith is harder to dispute than my own:

Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unapproved, and leave
No spot or blame behind; which gives me hope
That what in sleep thou didst abhor to dream
Waking thou never wilt consent to do.

So, less than 48 hours after getting the replacement TiVo, it started acting up. A few times an hour, the image would freeze, then the drive would emit an audible 'click', then it'd go back to normal. This came and went, but it seemes to be getting more frequent.

Then, sometimes the encoding would break down during playback. Ghost images, dropped audio, that kind of thing. I am going to assume that this is the same thing, only with the momentary freeze and click happening during recording instead of playback.

So, I considered my choices: call TiVo and deal with all that crap again. Or: take matters into my own hands.

Guess which one I chose.

So yeah, it cost a little more, but Friday afternoon, a 300 GB Maxtor Quickview arrived on my doorstep. Foolishly, I stayed up all night performing a TiVoToMy.

Lessons learned: There is a known issue with some linux kernels not getting past the partition check when probing Maxtor hard drives over 120 GB. This would have been a nice thing for the folks at Weaknees to mention, because I, thinking it was doing the mfs equivalent of an fsck, let it sit there and idle for six hours before I switched it off, did some googling, and found out. So, reboot with DMA turned off. (In case this page turns up in someone's Google search, the answer to your problem is to type "linux ide=nodma" at the boot prompt) Yay! Shell prompt!.

(Oh, another lesson learned: Frankly, cable select is your friend. Turns out that at least two of the drives in my host machine had their master/slave jumpers set, which rather limited my options in terms of how to wire up the drives without changing the laws of physics.)

So, I typed in the magic commands, and it began the transfer. Now, I don't know if it's because I had DMA turned off, or if it had more to do with the fact that 100 GB is a honkin' lot of data, but the instructions I was working from said "This process will take some time." As it turns out, "Some time" means "twenty-nine hours". So about 20 minutes ago, I finished bolting down the drive (Who in the world thought it would be a good idea to use Torx screws? Is it just to keep me out? Because it didn't keep me out. It just pissed me off.

The tivo is back up, and it hasn't clicked yet. I have tried watching some of the salvaged shows, and they still play back in the broken (2) way. For the moment, I choose to assume that this is because the drive hiccuped while recording, and is not a symptom that the brokenness goes beyond the drive. I'll know soon enough, I hope.

One thing I should point out to those who would do this at home: enlarging your drive like this will make the TiVo slower. While this gives me hope, in the sense that, if you will recall, TiVo has the processing power of a 386, so there is no fundamental reason I can't make a PVR out of the pile of ancient computers in the basement, it's a bit annoying, and I may add "increase the TiVo's ram" to my list of future projects. But that involves soldering. Soldering scares me.

My girlfriend sent me a couple of e-cards a week or so ago. They were very cute and sweet, and not unlike my girlfriend in these respects. I tried to find one to send back to her, but could not find one quite good enough to reflect the depth of my feelings. What I did find was compelling proof that the greeting card industry has gotten too damned big. From Hallmark's e-cards site:

Happy Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And God bless us, everyone.

I like big spiders and I cannot lie. [3 points]

And in case you didn't get the joke in the title:

Partial Karaoke Lineup (omitting some recent duplicates):
01. Scar Tissue, Red Hot Chili Peppers
02. She's Like the Wind, Patrick Swayze
03. I don't want to be, Gavin Degraw
04. Nowhere Man, The Beatles
05. It Had To Be You, Harry Connick jr.
06. Paycheck Woman, Cletus T. Judd

In lieu of repeating the same entries I've been making for the past several weeks, this week's list will be padded with "Songs no one knows the proper name of". (Random schmandom)

07. The Bad Touch, Bloodhound Gang
010. Bring Me To Life, Evanescence
011. Indian Reservation, Paul Revere and the Raiders
012. The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down, Cliff Friend and Dave Franklin [and 4 points]

Random X will be on vacation next week (or, perhaps, truly random for once), since Karaoke is on vacation. I will instead be taking my sweetheart to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. Mmm.... turkey legs...

http://photos.trenchcoatsoft.com/thumbnails.php?album=2

New pictures of The Weapon are up. As you can see, I've installed the top and base panels. On the woodworking front, all that's left is the front and tops of the control boxes, then it's drywall, plexiglass and rubberized molding.

And, of course, the delicious computery innards.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're God. What kind of a universe would you make? Aquinas, not knowing about inertia, thought that God's constant input was required to keep the universe from popping back out of existence. This is because Aquinas was an Aristotelian, and therefore believed that all things naturally "wanted" to return to a sort of "default" state. That's why things fell: they liked being on the ground. It was home. Aquinas's theology told him (and the science bore this one out) that the universe hasn't always been here, so for Aquinas, "existence" was not the default state of the universe. So, applying Aristotle's methods, if the universe's default state isn't existence, it should naturally return to non-existence, unless some force is applied to prevent this. That force, said Aquinas, is God.

This all makes a kind of sense, as Aristotelian arguments tend to, but it turns out that the premise is flawed. A few hundred years after Saint Thomas was writing, Newton got beaned by an apocryphal apple and worked out that things don't fall because they like the ground. It's the falling that requires a force, because, in the absence of an external force, things tend to stay where you put them.

Which means that, even if the universe still required a miracle to set it in motion, it does not require a continuous miracle to keep it in motion. Now, some people might say that this detracts from the glory of God, since in this view, the miracle of creation happens just the once, and does not require a continuous miracle to keep it here. But I think Aquinas would have approved. Why? Because Aquinas was acutely aware of the fact that God is really good at His job. That's how he proves that God didn't outsource the creation of the universe. Sure, a persistant universe only requires one miracle as opposed to infinity miracles, but it's a much better miracle. Would you create a universe that required constant effort to keep it from popping out of existence? Would God?

Aquinas also says something else interesting about God. He says that God doesn't break the laws of the universe. But surely God can do whatever He wants, right? Well sure. But He's the one who made the laws. If He ever found himself wanting to break them, that would imply that the laws weren't the way he wanted them, which would, in turn, imply that he'd botched the job. And God did not botch the creation of the universe, because, as previously stated, He is very good at His job.

You might have noticed by now that we're well on our way to deism. Because all we really need out of God is the one big miracle right at the beginning that summoned the universe into existence. Anything God were to do afterward would be tantamount to a patch (Critical Update: God has released a Hotfix to address security issue KB 2 Cor. 2.11), and would imply that God hadn't done adequate beta testing.

Fortunately, there are ways out of this line of thinking (Good old Free Will to the rescue), but that's really beside the point. Personally, I am not a deist, but for the purposes of this argument, I will assume that the universe would appear essentially the same to us whether it be the product of the god of deism, the god of theism, or, for that matter, no god at all (at least, to those persons who had not received the gift of the Holy Spirit).

My point is this: when God created the universe, he did it right. Which means that He set it up in such a way that it did not require constant divine fiddling to keep it in order. It is no less miraculous, no less amazing, that God should create a universe with physical laws which give rise to a system by which a whole lot of hydrogen can, given enough time, eventually turn into advanced lifeforms like engineers than it is that He would create a universe that all works and hangs together, and then goes back later and God-blasts humans directly into existance. In fact, it seems even more amazing to me. Which do you think is a greater feat of engineering? Cobbling together a widget, or inventing a machine that produces widgets? Whose name comes to you more quickly, the first guy to separate cottonseed from fiber, or the guy who invented the cotton gin [2 points]?

So, no, people who believe in evolution aren't de facto atheists, and we'd really like it if you'd stop calling us that. And evolution isn't opposed to God, or even to Creation (insofar as "God zapped the universe into existence out of nothing). The only thing it conflicts with is one fairly particular -- and peculiar -- interpretation of scripture. And no, it doesn't dismiss scripture out of hand. Only a bizarre interpretation of scripture whose proponents insist is "literal" (No, it's not. The Bible is a mixture of parable, history, metaphor, and editorial. Self-proclaimed "literalists" don't take everything in scripture literally, they just use the term to give force to their own interpretations). "God would have said something about us coming from monkeys," I've heard. Well, how clever of you to know what God would have done. But more to the point, what exactly would you have Him say? Scripture isn't a biology textbook. In order for a concept like that to make any kind of sense at all, Genesis would need a 200 page preamble explaining the basic principles. Have you ever noticed how much the bible doesn't say? It doesn't say a lot about the other planets, or about computational linear algebra, or nuclear physics, or quantum mechanics, or the Americas. Or football. Sagan pointed out that the absence of evidence isn't the same thing as the evidence of absence. The Bible isn't a blueprint for the universe, it's not trying to be. In the best case scenario, it's just a summary of those things God judged relevant to our salvation (In a less good case, it's a heavily editorialized transcript of what some devoted people might have thought God wanted us to know that bears as much resemblance to actual revelations of Divine Will as your average FOX made-for-TV movie).

Those of us who believe in evolution aren't trying to oppress anyone's beliefs. But Creationism, Creation Science, Intelligent Design, and all the other titles it goes under isn't science. It shouldn't be presented as science, it shouldn't be presented in the context of science, and it shouldn't be presented on the same footing as real science. I deny all the claims of anti-evolutionists: evolution is not de facto irreconcilable with religion; even if it was, this wouldn't mean that you had to choose sides. But most importantly, I deny that faith is served by ignoring the evidence of science. I don't mean that "you have to choose, so choose science." I mean that you don't have to choose, and ignoring the evidence of science isn't just bad science, it's bad religion. Really. When you start saying "Yes, science says this happened, but that conflicts with scripture, so science must be wrong," you're ignoring the reality of the world. That's not religious devotion, it's lunacy -- and it's borderline heresy.

When I was very small, my mother, whose religious education was a little spotty, but probably well inside the mainstream, told me that God created man because He was lonely. Of course, that doesn't jive well with our notion of a perfect God, and it's not really supported by scripture. I can't exactly recall where I got this notion, it was either in my "Philosophy and Theatre" class or my class in St. Thomas, but my understanding of why God created man is this: we are here to witness the universe. Not, as some have concluded from similar starting points, specifically to be impressed by how cool God is (God, being perfect, does not need us to stroke his ego), but because, having created a whole universe, God thought it was proper and fitting that there be someone around to enjoy it. As a writer of sorts, I rather like the idea of God as a Divine Novelist, though like all analogies to God, it's not a tremendously accurate one (But, as Aquinas himself said, when we speak of God, we must perforce only ever do so analogistically). If the universe is God's novel, we're the readers -- and if you're a good writer, your goal is less for the audience to read your book and think how great you are for having written it, and more for them to read the book and, well, like it. And understand it. What I see a lot of the big religious arguments turning into these days is a lot of people who like to go on about how great the Author is, but who keep skipping over the bits in the book that are too complicated for them. God created the universe. Evolution is one of the things he put into it. And it's a really, really amazing book. I recommend it to all my friends. I like to think that the Author wanted me to read it, not just leave it on my shelf and admire the binding, and I hope He's pleased that I've taken such a deep and critical interest in it. I've even written a few book reports on it.

Oh, and that quote at the beginning? From the man who killed God himself: Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, a pretty interesting monograph on the big Book.

Here are some other people who have thoughts at least as good as mine on the subject:

http://iamachristiantoo.org/?p=194 points out that the rejection of evolution is based on fear, not faith
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2005/07/creationism_sna_2.html has something to say on the rejection of reality in the name of faith
http://www.livejournal.com/users/bradhicks/118585.html on the matter of God performing tiny continuous miracles to keep the universe afloat, and why this is a lame idea.

Photographed from the rust stains in my shower. (Contrast has been enchanced. My shower isn't really that rust-stained.)

Some people get Jesus. Some get Elvis. I get Easter Island Head Playing Tennis.

And even though I know how very far apart we are, it helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star.

So, Karaoke, as it turns out, is way less fun when your girlfriend isn't there. But she knows I miss her, and now the rest of you do too.

1. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Greenday
2. Superman, Five for Fighting
3. Hot in the City, Billy Idol
4. Somebody Told Me, The Killers
5. Don't Dream It's Over, Crowded House
6. Accidentally In Love, Counting Crows
7. The Boys of Summer, The Ataris

Plus three songs I have to learn:
8. Mr. Brightside, The Killers
9. I Don't Want To Be, Gavin Degraw
10. Wake Me Up When September Ends, Greenday