Sunday, October 31, 2010

PENULTIMATE ALL CAPS (Blog Edition)

A couple of these are total giveaways.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.


Fake Worthless Internet Points (FWIPs) after Round 4:

  1. (22 Fwips) Michelle Younce

  2. (19 Fwips) Kenneth Yee

  3. (16 Fwips) Anne Austin

  4. (15 Fwips) Rob Greene and Eric Cooper

  5. (7 Fwips) Frank Manna

  6. (6 Fwips) Karen Cordano

  7. (5 Fwips) Davey Cruz and Don Corcoran

  8. (3 Fwips) William Atkins and Nathan Grow

  9. (1 Fwip) Kelly Bresnahan, Gabriel Soll, and Akaemi Barnett

Saturday, October 30, 2010

CAPS ROUND 3 (Blog edition)

Ignore this note when it shows up on Facebook; refer to the FB-posted one.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Scores after Round 2:

  1. (10 Points) Kenneth Yee & Michelle Younce & Anne Austin

  2. (7 Points) Frank Manna

  3. (5 Points) Don Corcoran

  4. (4 Points) Davey Cruz

  5. (3 Points) Rob Greene

  6. (2 Points) William Atkins

  7. (1 Point) Kelly Bresnahan, Nathan Grow, Gabriel Soll, Karen Cordano, Akaemi Barnett

  8. (0 Points) Everybody else!

Friday, October 29, 2010

CAPS ROUND 2










Rules change! You may only participate by Commenting, Buzzing, OR Facebook - no checking others' answers outside your method please. Points will be awarded separately. Lets see how that works. Still, here are the standings from Round 1:

Don Corcoran: 5 points
Davey Cruz: 4 points
Michelle Younce: 3 points (I thought Jeff would've gotten the Buster Keaton pic first, but M got to it before he did!)
Anne Austin: 3 points
Rob Greene: 2 points
Frank Manna: 2 points
Akaemi Barnett: 1 point
Karen Cordano: 0 points under the old rules, but would've been 3 under the new. Thus: 1 point
Gabe Soll: 1 point (again, zero under yesterdays rules, but he deserves one)
Wam: No points for just saying you think you know sommat without proving it!

Thursday, October 28, 2010

MORE CAPS










same rules: no internet searching. You may, however, pop a movie you own into your player and play it if you think you know but aren't quite sure. Lets say one point each for actor or movie, three points awarded for getting both right for each pic. First person to put it in comments either here or on FB gets the point(s). Davey Cruz is the man to beat from round 1. But since that was a warm-up round, no score awarded. This time it's for fake worthless internet points!

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

ALL CAPS

Here are a few screencaps from some of the hundreds of films I'm backing up to the HD so we can watch them anytime on the PS3. I'm thinking you can name them all, but maybe not.





Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

More Tea, Vicar?

A couple of weeks ago M and I had 'Date Day', where we send the kids to day care and school but then skip work and spend the day together. We went to Castle Howard, which was a lot of fun to wander through at 'adult-pace' instead of 'bored-kiddo-pace'. It was suitably impressive:

Castle Howard

Library, Castle Howard

Statuary Hall, Castle Howard

Garden, Castle Howard

Temple of the Four Winds, Castle Howard

Atlas, Castle Howard

More pics on my flickr.

Anyway, we stopped in the bookshop (as I am wont to do on such visits), and I picked up Know Your Sheep for the kids (its a picture-book of different breeds found in the UK) and More Tea, Vicar?: An Embarrassment of Domestic Catchphrases for myself. It is hilarious.

It is full of phrases like "All fur coat and no knickers" along with their origins, usage, and amusing anecdotes from contributors.

Because I know we're long overdue for some bathroom humour on this blog, here are some of the "Loophemisms" (get it?) that the book lists:

  • Go and check the blackout
  • go and check the plumbing
  • go and check the price of wheat in Chicago
  • go and drain one's radiator
  • go and empty the ashtrays
  • go and empty the teapot to make room for the next cup of tea
  • go and lower the level
  • go and partake of a minor comfort
  • go and pick a daisy
  • go and pump ship
  • go and wring out one's socks
  • go and see a friend off to the coast
  • go and see if ones hat is on straight
  • go and see the man I joined up in the army with
  • go and see the Turk - Mustapha Pee
  • go and shake hands with the wife's best friend
  • go and shake the dew from one's orchid
  • go and sit on the throne and rain over my subjects
  • go and telephone Hitler
  • go for a wee walk
  • go to do a job that no one else can do for me
  • go to the smallest room
  • go where kings go alone
Got any other favorite loophemisms you care to share with the internet?

Monday, October 11, 2010

On Ehfarism

Does everything, in fact, happen for a reason?

People may say "everything happens for a reason", but I tend not to. But its not like I've never said it. The subject came up recently when corresponding with a friend who had experienced some recent personal tragedy. As often happens in such situations, one of the things people said was "Everything happens for a reason" (hereafter ehfar). This was interpreted by my (agnostic) friend as "God does things in people's lives as part of his (somehow ultimately fair) plan". Here are some adapted thoughts from our correspondance about it.

First off, "everything happens for a reason" is not an equivalent statement to "life is fair.". Not even the deeply devout believe life is fair. That's not what anyone means when they say ehfar, at least not in my experience. Here are some things that ehfar might mean instead, depending on the speaker and the circumstances:

1) in the strict sense of physics and chemical reactions, every thing that occurs does so because of some other thing having occurred previously. There are those who take this to it's deterministic limit and believe that the paths of all atoms, from distant black holes to the photons coming through your screen to your thoughts and mine, were written in the initial trajectories of the Big Bang. I believe in free will, because I believe in a thing called a soul, so I don't go that far. But even though I believe I and you and lots of other forms of life make choices, those things still happen for 'reasons'. As you might expect from me, I take a phrase like ehfar and immediately think;
a) Well, what is everything?
b) What is a 'reason'?
c) I'm giving you a free pass on 'happens', but I wouldn't have to.
Here's as simple as I can make it: At some level, every occurrence (thing), however small or great, occurs (happens) because it was enabled, caused, or otherwise influenced by the occurrence of other things (a reason). Vague, and perhaps over-reliant on sophistry, but probably true.

2) another thing that is sometimes meant by ehfar is akin to my friend's above interpretation but subtly different. Sometimes people who believe in a personal God actually do mean to say that everything that occurs does so because He either causes it to do so or allows it to do so. It is difficult to reconcile the idea of a loving God with a being who would stand idly by while women are raped, children are killed, and people generally commit grevious injustices to each other. Each religion attempts to reconcile this apparent paradox in it's own way, with varying degrees of logic or success. Let's just leave it at that. The details of those reconciliations vary, but even the strongest "it's all part of God's Plan for you" advocate wouldn't go so far as to say that all plans are equal (at least during mortality - some reconciliations depend on the balancing effects of a judged afterlife experience).

3) another, less spiritual meaning that is sometimes expressed by ehfar is the idea (or perhaps more accurately hope) that one day, after the present experience is gone, one will be able to look back on what has transpired since and at least accept that the destination achieved by traveling that road is an ok place to be. This hope does not always hold true; many lives take a tragic turn from which even a partial recovery is impossible. However, someone who says ehfar in this way isn't actually trying to state a fact: they're expressing a hope. That hope is that the listener will have future experiences and that these future experiences will be acceptable in place of whatever might've been that now cannot be. This is, I think, the usual meaning of the phrase.

Anyway, as you well know, ehfar does NOT mean that everything that happens happens for the greatest possible good or happiness of the most people possible. We would live in a very different world were that so. I don't think that's what anyone who says ehfar means.

Furthermore I don't even typically say ehfar so I don't know why I've just spent so long defending those who do. But it was nice to spend some time thinking about it, and maybe it helps you deal with the ehfarists in the future.