The Ramblings of an Ambling Mind

2:54pm: Agnostic vs Atheist
I stumbled upon this clip, viewed it, and liked 99% of the idea. I did not agree with the total conclusion.



Okay, Penn, my thinking as an Agnostic is from this stance:

( Cut to spare people my ramblings )
Thanks, Penn, for the deep thoughts.  Very cool of you, despite my disagreement with your conclusion.

6:40am: Writer's Block: It Is What It Is
"It wasn't meant to be."

I oppose the theory of predestination.  I tend to agree with Machiavelli -- "A man creates his fortune."  When things do not work out, I find it more productive and soothing to admit my faults in whatever event.  If I am too emotionally fragile at the time, I then have to buck up and be stronger.  THAT is my fortune, created wholly by me.

10:32am: Writer's Block: A Bitter Pill to Swallow?

...and therein lies the problem with America today -- the desire for everything to be quick, easy, and handed to us without having to work for it. 

I sometimes take pills to cut back the pain to enable me to exercise, but that is all that it should be.

* EDIT *

Consider what exercise is by definition (with the first two taken as they are applicable to the topic):

ex - er - cise [pronunciation: ek-ser-sahyz]
–noun
1. bodily or mental exertion, esp. for the sake of training or improvement of health: Walking is good exercise. 
2. something done or performed as a means of practice or training: exercises for the piano.

The word "exertion" finds it root with the word "exercise."  How much exertion is there in taking a pill?

Another synonym to add to the canon of excercise:  industry

If people want the benefit of a thing, they must make use of the thing.  Unless it is for maintaining health in weightless space travel or attempting to improve the health of a paraplegic or similarly handicapped individual, what benefit is there to a pill replacing exercise for the rest of us?  To give us more freedom to lounge on the couch watching television while gobbling down cheesy poofs?

A pill in place of exercise... I can see the unending infomercials now from more snake oil salesmen.

K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) -- get off the couch and do something -- anything that gets your body moving.  Hopefully, that's a pill that's not too hard to swallow.

* SECOND EDIT *

I WILL take supplements to improve the results of exercise.  They can't replace exercise, but they can increase the return.  Amino acids are your friends!  ...and steroids are not a pill... stay away from nasty unnaturals like that stuff unless you want your kidneys and immune system to eventually fail you...

7:19am: Early morning cat update
As of this morning, Ollie wants to play.  He has gone from couch potato to frantic toy chaser in the space a human sleeping cycle.

His desire to play has him hounding Ashe, a constant need to be near hear.  Pretty soon, I will be expecting that Jerry McGuire quote of "You ... COMPLETE ... me."

Needless to say, things are moving way to fast for Ashe.  She quickly opted for hiding in the basement.

Oh, and having a bad hair day, I put on a ball cap.  Ollie is fascinated by the ball cap and very wants to investigate it.  Being a cat must be easier and more fun than being human -- ANYTHING can be interesting.

3:37pm: Detente
( as the furball turns )

My life is ruled by cats!  ...and Toni...

3:48pm: Hmmm... how will this pan out?
So, Ashe came in and laid down in her hidey spot in my office, the spot between the computer station and the wall.  She got comfortable, and along comes Oliver who sits down on the ottoman behind me.  For a minute, I thought this was going to work out.  Ollie was just content.  Ashe was nervous but not moving.

...then Ollie noticed that she was back there and was just too damn curious.  I had to sit on the floor between them.  A little kitty backed into a corner was not going to be a good scenario.  So, Ashe sat there growling and hissing, and Ollie kept trying to figure out how to get back there.  He eventually gave up and left the room.  Ashe feels like she finally won one.

...this after the episode earlier today when she was approached by the BIG cat, decided to be pissy and scratch the BIG cat, who then gave her that very scary look and the nastiest growl she has ever heard.  She tried the scratching again, at which point the BIG cat picked her up, carried her to the basement, and clipped her claws front and back.  ...uh, just in case you did not figure it out yet, I'm the BIG cat... (cats do not think that they are little people -- they think that we are BIG cats)

Either her nails grow back very very fast on "she who is constantly sharpening," or I just do not cut them short enough.

8:22am: A Tail of Two Kitties
( Big cat calm and pettable, little cat VERY unhappy and jealous )

7:42am: The Cold (and furry) War
The warning notations have ceased for the time being.  Other than wapping my post-petting-Ollie-scented hands, Ashe has stopped hissing.  Ollie's solitary baritone growl was a one time deal.  However, there is now the pacing around spying on each other, the long stares, the hiding in safe places out of the way, the unending sniffing of the intruder or the long-term squatter.  Ollie has been brave this morning, coming downstairs unbidden to explore Ashe's most frequented room -- my office.  He is nervous about it, so I am getting a repeated kitty swirls about my office chair.   ...while Ashe maintains her defensible position on the chairs at the dining room table.  I suspect that future toleration of both in the office simultaneously will involve Ashe on top of the computer station, and Ollie elsewhere in the room.

...but for now, Ollie keeps exploring the living room and kitchen as Ashe seethingly observes... which causes Ollie to retreat to the office, get pettings, and then muster up the nerve for another scouting mission. 

At some point, he will learn that there is a kitty door in the basement door.  It will be a tight fit for him, but I think he can manage it.

8:27am: Writer's Block: Proven by Science
( behind the cut for the sake of my friends page viewing )

4:42pm: Oliver Major
As requested, we have uploaded some photos of our new boy.  His name is Oliver Major, neither name being one that we chose but how he has been addressed previously.  He was named Oliver by the breeder and Major by the lady who had first adopted him.  To avoid confusion, he is for us Oliver Major, a big constellation of a cat.

We got some surprises with him.  After getting him home, Toni noticed that he had fleas.  Ugh.  Plus, he has a lot of dandruff ...or a lot of hardened hair oils since he is a Maine Coon, a breed that has an oily coat to deal with the harsh winters in Maine.  So, I made arrangements today for him to go to a pet groomer, and they advised me to come down and get some Capstar for him and for our little girl.  This is a pill that will begin to kill all fleas on the animal after six hours of ingestion.  Other measures are then needed, such as a flea bath, flea spot, and repeated treatments of their living area.  As we went through this last August, it just seems to be a repeat, but the discovery of Capstar will make this more manageable.  Plus, we caught this right now instead it getting out of control first, the way we discovered it last year (and where did those fleas come from for our ever indoor kitty?)

The funniest thing is that we had no trouble getting our little girl to take her medicine.  I bought some Pill Pockets and gave her one with a handful of treats.  The greedy girl gobbled them up, including the Pill Pocket.

Oliver, however, just has not been eating yet.  He is still stressed from the transition, so we had to stress him again by holding him and shoving the pill into his mouth and making him swallow.  This made him unhappy, but he quickly chilled as evidenced by the photos.  He went to the closet, and I brushed him.  What a love lush!

11:25pm: Carnegie Museum and Frostop
Yesterday, Toni and I went to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Museum of Fine Arts.  Despite both of us aching in our personal arthritides from the extensive walking, we very much enjoyed the visit and were very impressed with the reconfiguration of the dinosaur exhibits, which have departed from the age old and unscientific establishment we saw for years.  The T-Rex display was stunning.

From the perspective of a conservationist, the taxidermy displays are sad but so very important as many of these are the only representations will we see of power nature has created.  The ever stunning lion attack on the dervish always grips me each time I enter that hall.  The preservation of a dodo and a passenger pigeon hit me of the loss mankind has created and threatens to do so again and again.

Of course, my favorite area is an area of castings from Greek, Roman, Gothic, and Renaissance sculpture and architecture.  The originals are in more prominent museums throughout the world, but without the ability to travel, I was gifted with the opportunity to tour these stunning works while in Pittsburgh.

We ended with touring the hall of fine arts.  Most of the Medieval pieces in Pittsburgh are German and Flemish.

Today, we spent our vacation day in the car for over ten hours driving to and from Huntington, West Virginia.  Why?  To adopt an adult Maine Coon.  Upon arriving in Huntington, we grabbed a bite to eat and some cold frosty root beer at the Frostop, the same style of root beer stand as we once had in Ford City when I was a little boy.  ...back to the cat... we picked him up and took him home.  He was so uncomfortable the entire way home, panting from the bumps and noise.  Winding the windows up helped calm him, but this left him warm as the air conditioning is currently undercharged.  Once we got him home, the big monster hid under our bed but just loved being petted.  ...our little girl, however, went into an absolute hissy fit.  Our solution is for Ollie to stay upstairs with Toni for tonight, and for me to be sleeping on the couch to make myself accessible to the little miss easily upset.  This is going to be a long haul getting her to accept him, but it will be worth it once she does.  Her calming down will be good for him as the big boy is so easily dominated.  "Gentle Giant" is an apt term for the fellow.

Okay, off to "bed" (on the couch) with me.

10:41pm: Zoo visit
Today, we took Kailyn and Tyler with us to the Pittsburgh Zoo.  We had picked up four free passes to the zoo when we worked the SCA demo there at the request of the zoo, so I we scored a vacation day from spending a Saturday fencing and entertaining kids.  (Yes, I was a zoo exhibit.)  It was an enjoyable overcast day free of rain, and we had a very good and relaxed time.  More of the zoo was opened to us this time than on previous visits.  We were disappointed that the rhino refused to come out to be viewed, and the polar bears ditched us to get lunch.  The lions regularly entertained the many kids there by roaring.  Toni could not decide which she liked better -- the elephants getting a shower with the constant antics of the baby elephant or the sea lions with the constant antics of the newborn sea lion.  As always, my favorites were the big cats. 

Afterwards, we went home, and I grilled turkey tenderloin with accompanied taters (precious), broccoli, and corn while Toni baked a cherry tart.  The kids went home a little bit after that, leaving me to nap for a bit before heading out to mow the back yard.

6:21pm: I took a quick jaunt to Northern PA
Last week, my first week off involved doctor visits, fixing things, and headaches.  Good points were visits from friends, such as meeting with youngmrp for burgers on Wednesday and having Norman and Roy over on Thursday for grilled tenderloin.  This week started much the same -- doctor appointment for Toni, but today, we went and did something.  We drove up to St. Mary's, PA to tour the Straub Brewery.  Toni very much enjoyed the tour, and we were given free beers right off of the line before pasteurization, which made Toni very "happy."  We then picked up a few souvenirs in the gift shop.  We then drove home via a detour through Allegheny National Forest, which treated us to an unexpected encounter of slowing the car to let a very large dark chocolate fisher cat cross the road.  We stopped in Cook's Forest State Park to let Toni pet some horses, and she picked up a brochure on commercial cabins near the park.   Based on their prices, I think that we will shoot for camping in a cabin at nearby Clear Creek State Park, which are very reasonably priced for state residents, but that will have to wait until next fall.  This year, the cabins are booked, and we have a full schedule with the upcoming reign.  Next fall, we will enjoy a rustic weekend in the country.

2:48pm: I sense a train wreck coming
...must watch... can't turn away no matter how bad it is!

I stumbled upon this notation in IMDB.

Tales of an Ancient Empire

It looks bad -- really bad.  How bad?  It is an excuse to unite the "talents" of such "greats" as Christopher Lambert, Kevin Sorbo, Ralf Moeler, and Lee Horsely reprising his role of Talon from The Sword and the Sorcerer.  Yes, this spells an absolutely horrid feature, and like a train wreck, I just gotta see it.

9:40am: Moments of Funny
After a long wait, I finally got to see Hellboy 2 last night (Toni had a headache and slept with her head in my lap).  I bust into extended laughter when Hellboy and Abe Sapien broke into drunken song along with Barry Manilow (and promptly woke up Toni as a result).

8:37pm: 10,000 B.C. reviewed
Last night, Toni and I caught 10,000 B.C. on Demand.  When I had first seen the previews, I already had critique of what I was seeing, although I was stil interested in it.  The movie could be fun, and it was; however, it required massive suspension of belief to be fun.

I have a problem with stupid writers who have no concept of simple things such as geographics.  The "hunters" came from the north, which by presentation was obviously Ice Age Europe.  They traveled south, and upon leaving the glacial mountainous regions, they immediately descended into warm jungle environs.  These gave way to desert.  The bad guys being pursued flee on ships traveling on a river, which the natives refer to as "the long snake," which flows north.  They are joined by the local tribesmen, who are negroes.  Crossing the desert to circumvent to the "eye of the snake," the army gathered by the heroes (which include Masai warriors) brings them to the construction of a pyramid built by slave labor and captured mammoths.  The rulers came "from the stars" or  "across the great water after their homeland sank" (i.e., Atlantis). 

In case you have not previously had an interest in Stone Age development, here are the simple problems with this plot.  The glacial north is Europe.  The brief travel to the Sahara cannot be done by land or be brief.  The later establishment of Atlantians sailing from the Atlantic clearly demonstrates that the Pillars of Hercules is still a wide straight connecting the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea and not a land bridge.  Additionally, during the Ice Age, the Sahara was not a desert but was instead a vibrant green land.  Pyramid construction in Egypt did not begin (with the step pyramid) until the Bronze Age with the Third Dynasty, and true pyramids of the sort demonstrated did not appear until the Fourth Dynasty with Snefru's Red Pyramid around 2575 B.C.  Finally, Mammoths would not have been in Egypt as they were an Ice Age megafauna dwelling in colder lands, not hot deserts.  Additionally, the Cro-Magnon hunters from the north demonstrate the astounding gift of amazing ability as warriors despite failing to have a war-like culture or any training in hand-to-hand combat -- still, they clearly out-man their trained warlike enemies.  ...oh, and the "white spear" of the leader comes apart and has a keenly sharp steel sword inside, yet this is the Stone Age.

How could this have been done better with the plan crafted?  Have it take place in North America.  The glacial mountains could be the Northwest region.  The "great snake" could be the Colorado River, and the desert Southwest entering into Mexico.  A step-pyramid as built in Meso-America in deference to the true pyramid in the movie would be appropriate.  This would, however, eliminate the presence of Negroes and instead focus on precursors of the Olmecs.  The same possibility could be utilized by beginning in the Andes region and progressing into desert of Chile where Stone Age pyramids were uncovered.  Heck, it would have been most interesting if they had decided to step away from pursuing anything so expected and instead make use of the mound-building Missippian culture of North America as a basis (the Ohio/Mississippi conduit was referred to as the Great Snake).

As the movie was written, it obviously did not take place on Earth but an alternate world.  The entire thing could have been summed up by Col. O'Neill and SG-1 arriving through a Stargate at the end and establishing contact with another lost human world.

The movie was fun.  It was also quite ridiculous and not in the tongue-in-cheek fashion.  We are glad we did not pay to see it and waited for it to come out free on cable.

5:34pm: Hackers make a funny
My mom sent me this news item this morning. 

In this photo provided by Chris Nakashima-Brown, an electronic road sign is seen in Austin, Texas on Monday, Jan. 26, 2009. Two electronic signs intended to warn motorists of construction near the intersection of Lamar and Martin Luther King boulevards were changed yesterday by hackers.

8:35am: Redefine the issue and make some headway

As of late, folks have gotten rather heated about Proposition 8, and yesterday, the Keith Olbermann video was being posted in blogs everywhere.  His speech was impassioned, and he made good points in encouraging people to wake up and recognize the limitations of conventional dogma.  This is in line with the same outrage expressed by many about the inequality and hypocrisy of denying everyone the same rights of marriage.

However, this crusading misses the point of the real issue by campaigning on the wrong ground.  "Marriage" is a religious institution and governed by religion.  The unfortunate difficulty is that this religious institution has been adopted as a legal status.  This does not work because any religion that recognizes its members as within their jurisdiction should be free to perform marriage according to their strictures -- whether this be gay, polygamy, or whatever.  Guess what?  That just does not work well with the Constitution as all men are then NOT created equal and are NOT free to believe their own religions.

The solution is to make marriage a point of religion and governed by religions with no legal status attached.  As a result, divorce and annulments are handled by the church, not the state via judges, and the decisions of the church in such instances has no affect whatsoever on legal status.

Now, to handle the aspects of legal status and how this affects taxation and insurability, the status needs to be changed to an expansion of Head of Household.  One or more persons would in this scenario surrender their exemption status by becoming dependents of the Head of Household, and breaking from the household would be akin to the current divorce system with property division, support clauses, etc. declared in such proceedings much as they currently are for marriage.  The processes would be pretty much what everyone wants; however, the "moral/religious" issue becomes moot as each are then recognized by their own people.  Consider that the Roman Catholic Church does NOT recognize a Protestant marriage despite both being Christian religions.  How would a Gay church marriage differ from this distinction?  Also, consider that forcing recognition of religious marriages upon a religious community is as Unconstitutional as denying another group the same benefits of religious union granted to another religious group.

Change the battleground and win the battle.  The government cannot solve the problem of religious acceptance.  They can solve the problem of legal status.  Redefine the argument.

7:29am: Yeah!
Ben posted a teaser trailer for his film "Marlowe." The plus for me is that while footage of my character actually having any level of a fighting clue was edited out of the film, some effective fighting footage with me was used in the trailer -- a redeeming moment of not being a total goober on film.

3:11pm: Baseball?
As of late, each time we have looked for something familiar on the local FOX station in the evening, we have instead been greeted with Major League playoffs and now the World Series. I'm not a baseball fan -- I liked playing it when I was a kid but have never gotten into it as a spectator, so it is a broadcast for me to avoid.

However, here is a "baseball" broadcast that I cannot help but enjoy...

7:58am: Klatubannamarammanickelodium


Why good morning, Dr. Bejjani.  Are we doing this again?

...but of course we are as you could do it no other way...

A little frustration to start my day.  Doesn't the hippocratic oath forbid you from torturting others?

9:29am: Dear PA-C
You suck.  Really.  I am amazed that a physician would think that you can handle the duties of dictating when you have a complete inability to separate words whatsoever.  Do you have any self confidence?  Can we really blame this assanine lack of comprehension on a Pittsburgh North Side accent?  Heck, as someone who comes from a family of notorious mumblers,  * I * find you intolerably incomprehensible -- you make my father and brothers seem like the Greek orator Demothenes by comparison.  I am amazed that you were able to be hired as the interviewer could not have possibly understood what you said in response to questions without asking you to repeat your answers four or five times and thus should have considered you to be an absolute ignoramous. 

Okay, I think I can help you out.  Follow these instructions:

1.  Raise your arm so that your open palm is parallel to your face.
2.  Strike with great force using the open palm on your face.
3.  Rotate the hand and connect with the opposite cheek in a return motion.
4.  Repeat until you get a clue and start ennuciating.

...yes, I am sure that you are a wonderful person... but that does not help me understand what  #$#%&*#  you are saying.

10:06pm: Penance Letter meme
Be careful of your wisecracking, young jedi...  unique_name_123 gave me a doozy of an assignment for wisecracking in her meme post...

Okay, take two at a much higher level of difficulty...  You know the drill.  It goes like this...

Comment on this post.
I will give you a letter.
Think of 5 fictional characters with names beginning with this letter.
Post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

I was given the letter ... "7"

Oy!

Methinks this is my Kobayashi Maru scenario...

( my solution to this puzzle )
....and thus, I defeat the Kobayashi Maru scenario...
 

4:15pm: Letter meme

1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

I was given the letter J

( My Js )

11:22am: Supreme Court meme

"As was demonstrated in an interview with Katie Couric, Sarah Palin is unable to name any Supreme Court Case other than Roe v. Wade. The Rules: Post info about ONE Supreme Court decision, modern or historic, to your lj. (Any decision, as long as it's not Roe v. Wade.) For those who see this on your f-list, take the meme to your OWN lj to spread the fun."

( The first one I could remember )