Author: chrisbenson

I don’t have any strong feelings about other people’s reactions to Mel Gibson’s new movie, and I didn’t plan to blog about it at all, but the building where I work shares a parking lot with a Baptist church, and they’ve got a big poster up on the wall near their front door with a picture similar to this one, and it says, ‘Dying was his reason for living.’ How messed up is that?

Maybe he lived to teach us about something, or set an example? Or how about this quote from John 10:10: ‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.’

Bottom line? Thousands if not millions of people have died horrible, painful, drawn-out, torturous deaths, often at the hands of the church itself (he was probably lucky the Sanhedrin turned him over to Pilate), but if he was who they claim he was, it’s a big deal. I’ve phrased it that way on purpose because I know Jesus never laid claim to divinity and he did tell his disciples that with faith, the least among them could do everything he did and more. And all that crap about original sin and a new Adam came straight from Paul, the misogynist epileptic psycho whose best moment was when he recognized that women look much cuter in hats than men.

I need to go back and read the New Testament again.

I won’t be going to see the movie because the images I already have in my head from the website and the reviews are straining my psychological tolerance for witnessing human suffering.

If you feel strongly, as I do, that people shouldn’t be tortured and/or put to death, you might want to take your ticket money and mail it to Amnesty International.

I’m blogging to you live via Wi-Fi from a Dataflex developer’s summit in Carson City, so I’m just going to drop a bunch of linky-doodles on you:

• Advice to Yourself at 13
• Good Article from Fast Food Nation
• God Hates Shrimp
• Stubborn Old Man Dies in Own Yard
• Soviet Exploration of Venus (link fixed)
• Will US ever have a Fair Tax?
• Elmore Leonard’s Rules for Writers
• Like a Hole in My Head (NOT for the Squeamish!)
• This is where I live…

I’ve had this idea for a long time that it would be a cool cartoon for someone like Bizarro to have a beggar whose sign would say ‘Will beg to differ,’ instead of ‘Will work for food.’ I even e-mailed his syndicator, but I guess either they didn’t tell him or he wasn’t interested.

If anybody out there is interested and can draw a decent cartoon with this idea, I believe it to be original and I’d love for someone to use it – just let me see the result, OK?

While I was looking for a picture of a beggar to fold, spindle, and mutilate, I accidentally ran across a site called beerisgoodforyou.com – Got Beer?

I was just reading a news article about an outbreak of infections in some kids who had their upper ears pierced in a mall in Oregon, and I’ll be darned if it don’t turn out there are risks associated with punching holes through people.

Here’s what the National Institutes of Health have to say about Piercing and Tattoos.

I get right around 200 spams per day now, and I’m often amused by the senders, the subject, or the content – it’s really scary, but I’m beginning to consider spam glancing a form of entertainment, and I’m toying with the idea of having an occasional “Worst Spam” award, but I’m torn, so please feel free to comment.

Yesterday, what got me was the sender’s name, Pusillanimity G. Romanticizes – reminds me of Phoebe from Friends calling herself Regina Philanges. So here’s todays winner, from my good friend Feminism I. Tobaccoes:

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Luck relies on chance, labor on character.

sensually If we cannot end our differences at least we can make the world safe for diversity. if you do not wish to be invited3 again: gambles

Man is a two-legged animal without feathers.
Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits. falconries (DELETED URL)

Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear.
Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.

J-walk told me I should go look at Grow-a-Brain, and I do whatever he says, so here’s a link to a really cool page of theirs, growabrain: Beatles Archives.

This is too cool not to blog – Dialect Survey Results as a map. Do you pronounce the sound in aunt like the a in ant, the au in caught, or is it the same as ain’t?

You probably won’t believe this, but I’d love to believe that President Bush is a capable, competent representative of a powerful collective of 300,000,000 free-thinking individuals. I’m just havin’ a little trouble with that. See, I’m not sure this man understands the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion. Some people don’t, you know.

I mean, when he asked for $87 billion, I did a quick calculation ($87,000,000,000/300,000,000) and figgerred this was about $300/head * me+my wife+my daughter, and got $900 to fund the Iraqi reconstruction. Well, OK.

So I was reading this article from some financial site like Motley Fool, and it turns out I really was confused about the distinction between the budget deficit and the national debt. See the deficit tells you the difference between what we have available to spend and what we plan to spend, and the debt tells you what we already owe our own bondholders and other nations. It’s kinda like, you know you make $35,000 a year, but you spend $37,500, which means that at the end of the year you owe $2500 on your Visa at 13.5% interest. So that year, you have a $2500 budget deficit and a $2500 debt.

But it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that if you keep this up, next year you’ll have a $2500 deficit, but a $6000 debt, and so on.

So my understanding is that we currently have about a $500 billion deficit, and a $7 trillion debt. What that means to me and my family, if I understand this at all, is that we owe somebody somewhere around $75,000, and Bush is a) cutting taxes and giving rebates, and b) asking for more spending. At least the Democrats have the god-given sense to ‘tax and spend’ instead of just spending.

For an extra-special Asparagus Pee perspective, consider this: A trillion is a million million, so if there were 7 million millionaires in America, our national debt would take all 7,000,000 of their fortunes.

Looks like our daughter is going to need some dental work, so here’s a joke I thought of earlier today: ‘Four out of five dentists recommend chewing Trident Sugarless Gum. The other guy, who has a much clearer understanding of his own business model, recommends sucking on sugar cubes.’

I don’t really think about gay marriage all that much in my day to day life, because I’m not gay, and I am married. But recently, I seem to keep butting my head against this issue wherever I turn as something that needs to be thought about. (I should probably mention that we live exactly 121 miles from San Francisco.)

I think the main problem is not the whole gay vs. straight dilemma, Christian morals, or ‘American Values,’ but rather, the fact that in our society over the last 91 years, taxes and social benefits have been deliberately structured to benefit married couples who own property and bear children.

Now, after several thousand years, marriage has a lot of baggage associated with it. I guess the bible folks still think the man and the woman cleave together to become one flesh. I think there may even be an element of ‘Adam gets his rib back,’ which neatly mirrors the ancient Greek ideas about needing both halves to make the Platonic whole, which in the vernacular becomes ‘my better half.’ (Despite the fact that Greek philosophers were generally homo-pedophiles.)

So my bottom line is, I think they’re fighting an uphill battle to call it ‘same-sex marriage’ but I believe with all my heart that serious same-sex alliances should be granted all of the rights and privileges of temporarily married wannabe breeders, or else the straights shouldn’t get any special treatment. (As long as the Government wants to reward me for gettin’ hitched, buyin’ a house, and gettin’ it on, that’s fine, but let’s spread the love, OK?)

My very best and only real friend in the world was a gay man who lived a confused life filled with shame and died of AIDS about 10 years ago, so don’t you dare even ask me about a special amendment to the constitution to document our idiocy about same-sex couples.