Went to an all-nighter at the drive-in last night.

We saw 4 films, which I would rate as follows:

1. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — 4/10
2. Thor — 8/10
3. No Strings Attached — 7/10
4. Paul — 9/10

I knew Pirates was probably going to be crappy. I’d heard around the web that in spite of its big box office numbers, it was just not that great… and it was all true. The pleasant surprise was No Strings Attached (which has sketchy numbers at Rotten Tomatoes) but turned out to be a funny romcom – even if it turned out formulaic in the end. I had actually said to SWMBO that I wished we could go home and catch a nap between Thor and Paul… and I am very glad we couldn’t! In retrospect, I wish we could have just showed up about 137 minutes late.

Obviously, these are just my opinions, Read the rest of this entry »

I changed the permalink structure of this site. It has broken just about every past link to specific articles on the site through facebook, twitter or anything else.

It wasn’t a mistake, I knew this would happen. I’ve been putting off the change for some time because I didn’t want to lose all the auto-generated bit.ly links and such, but it had to be done in order to accommodate a change I would like to make to navigation someday in the future.

I tried to work out a redirect method, but I’m not with it enough today to write the little script to handle it, so for now – there’s the search function if you want to find something specific. The other option is to manually edit the old URL which has /archive/yyyy-mm-dd/postname.php and make it /yyyy/mm/postname.php.

I’m not sorry. It’s very un-Canadian of me.

But what harm could come of believing in something as silly as “The Rapture”?

Just this:

Or this.

Or this.

Of course, Christians will cry out about being “persecuted” and that the actions of a small minority like Harold Camping and his followers should not reflect on the majority. Oh, Christians, we’re so sorry you’ve had it so bad since the Crusades didn’t turn out how you wanted.

So tell me again why we have campaigns for things like “Back to Sleep” when crib death happens in such a miniscule number of cases (Odds: 1000 to 1 against at least)? How many kids actually got hurt going down stairs in baby walkers – yet they were banned (Odds: 15000 to 1)? How many other minor, rare dangers do we make against the law, “just to be safe”?

I’m becoming more Hitchens-minded every day.

Religion.
Poisons.
Everything.

Living your life by a moral code accepted by millions isn’t a bad thing, as long as you understand that the moral code written in religious books comes from man and portions of it are obsolete. Living that code out of fear of punishment (or desire for rewards) from a magical sky wizard or wizards, however, is just plain foolish.

When it comes to parents harming or abandoning their children for religion, shouldn’t we do something about it?

After all (and I’ll use the most hated phrase I know from the fear-brokers of the world): THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

There is a contest on StarTrek.com and the prize is one of these:

I’ve wanted one for ages. It isn’t trivia or a skill/knowledge thing; the question is:

“What kind of pizza would you cut with the Star Trek Enterprise Pizza Cutter?”

This is my answer:

It’s a random selection since it’s a “Sweepstakes” and not a best-answer thing, so it won’t matter that I spend a half an hour photoshopping a Romulan Bird of Pizza.

But hey… I had to enter. It was a moral imperative.

*EDIT*

I added to the above image to show the proper use of the product:

In the last week to ten days, I’ve purchased several electronic items. Most have been very inexpensive although a couple were quite costly (that’s another blog entry altogether). Note that I said “inexpensive” – as in reasonably good quality but on sale or reduced in price, and not “cheap” which implies something completely different.

3 out of 5 have been defective.

All my life, in spite of taking very good care of my things, I have had a higher failure rate than average. If there is a faulty item on the shelf in a store, I seem to always be able to pick it at random. I’m not talking about clearance or open box items, either. I am talking about factory-sealed, unmolested, apparently untouched-by-human-hands-since-manufacture things.

Almost everything I have to return is something electrically powered. It’s like I have a dark little cloud floating over me… and the cloud is made of some kind of bizarre electromagnetic field powered by static electricity. The number of BRAND-NEW items I have had to take back to the store and exchange is ree-donk-you-luss.

Do I chalk this up to some kind of silly superstition? The wife has picked up on the trend, so when we are purchasing anything in the store, SHE selects the item and she takes it to the cash so that my “curse” doesn’t affect it. It’s to the point that when buying something, I will handle the display model, or the one the clerk takes out of the box, but I won’t buy that one – because I touched it, and now it’s cursed.

I’m sure it is strictly just a load of coincidences. I’m not, by nature, the kind of person who believes in fate or bad luck. I constantly look for scientific explanations for things; I’m a chronic analyzer. I feel like there is a rational and predictable cause of everything that happens, and there are patterns even in chaos.

Therefore, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that I’m a mutant with an intermittently-active, electricity-disrupting superpower that occasionally overloads or destroys things that have to be plugged in and/or run on batteries.

If only I could control it, it could come in very