Archive for October, 2009
Attack of the lady beetles
Posted by Alex in Alex's Thoughts on October 21, 2009
It’s that time of year here in southeast Wisconsin. We’re in mid-October, which means the asian lady beetles are a-swarming. If you don’t know the difference between ladybugs and lady beetles, lady beetles are basically ladybugs except they’re orange instead of red. Oh, and they’re huge dicks that will bite the shit out of you if you give them the opportunity. Their bites aren’t particularly harmful to humans, but holy hell it’s annoying.
Do you remember that hilarious story a little while ago, where some fools tried to mug some pretty gals in short skirts and tube tops, but the gals turned out to be guys in drag? Cage fighters in drag to be more specific, who proceeded to destroy the wannabe thugs? Yeah, these orange bastards are basically those cage fighters and we’re the thugs.
I wouldn’t really care about them too much if they stayed outside, but they always manage to find a way into the house. Gaps in doorframes, through ventilation ducts, anything. I’m lucky in that if they come through the front door, they have another set of doors they need to find their way through. I live in a duplex with a pretty beefy foyer, so they’re stuck there for now. Pictures of the rat bastards are at the bottom of this post.
I had one manage to get into my office here the other night before the swarms rolled in, but I haven’t seen any others yet. I think he was just an omen. A herald of what was to come, riding a white stallion and blowing a trumpet of conquest, summoning the dogs of war to cleanse this world of sin and heresy with pestilence and flame.
Hopefully their crusade stays out of my bedroom. That would be nice.
86-year-old WW2 veteran on gay marriage
Posted by Alex in Alex's Thoughts on October 21, 2009
[via Boing Boing]
Mass Effect Galaxy: Meh
Posted by Alex in Reviews and Recommendations on October 19, 2009
I’m in a Mass Effect kick the last few days because a good friend of mine finally started up the game recently. We talked back and forth about it a little, so I decided to give it another playthrough. Yep, still an amazing game and it left me hungry for more. But since Mass Effect 2 isn’t out until January 2010 or somewhere around there, I had to get my fix somewhere else. I decided to hop onto the app store on my iPhone and pick up Mass Effect Galaxy.
My brutally honest opinion, in short, is that it is an awful game. Allow me to elaborate, however.
Read the rest of this entry »
Just watched Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist
…and I don’t feel like talking about it yet but holy crap how did I not know about Kat Denning before? Goddamn.
Theologian suggests God organized, not created
Posted by Alex in Alex's Thoughts on October 11, 2009
Despite being a born and raised Roman Catholic and going to Catholic schools all of my life, I’m not a religious person. I’m not particularly spiritual. However, I do dig Theology to some extent. It’s not a burning passion or anything, but it was always interesting to me what laid within the text of holy books. What’s on the surface is nothing compared to what can be hidden between the lines and beneath the surface. The books are utterly worthless at face value, but putting it into the context of time and culture is pretty fascinating.
Considering all that, I found this article from Telegraph.co.uk pretty awesome. Go read it, then come back here. Essentially, an Old Testament theologian set out to try and translate the Bible from scratch, and came up with a different translation for the very first sentence in the book.
She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world — and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.
How curious!
Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.
She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara”, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate”.
The first sentence should now read “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth”
I have to admit, that does make some sense in the context of the region and the time. A majority of the other creation stories from the place and period suggest there was already a universe (or a world) in existence. The gods didn’t create everything, everything was already there. What they did was set order to the world. They made it livable, hospitable. Humanity exists thanks to them, but they didn’t create something out of nothing. This resonates especially with the Mesopotamian origin story, as she lays out. Read the rest of this entry »