Andre Ware's Lack of Metaphorical Awareness

As if watching  the Gators stumble and bumble for 'pret' near a half didn't bring enough angst, broadcasting gods cursed me with Andre Ware color commentating.

Mr Ware apparently has never met a metaphor he could not mangle..

"On the field with smeltering heat."  Andre, buddy, think you meant "sweltering."  While know smelters produce very high heat, the verb should read as "smelt" unless one means a small fish and thus a noun.

"Wrap your hands around that," about FL receiver, Jeff Demps, who runs a 9.96 100 meter dash.  Usually one wraps one's head around concept of fastest college football player.

Touchdown!!!  TD!!!

Gators tie the game!

Sheesh, Gators tie game at end of first half.

Weeping silently.

Palin Agrees With Me: More proof God exits and has sense of humour which escapes me

[Book burning is antithetical to American ideals. People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation – much like building a mosque at Ground Zero.

I would hope that Pastor Terry Jones and his supporters will consider the ramifications of their planned book-burning event. It will feed the fire of caustic rhetoric and appear as nothing more than mean-spirited religious intolerance. Don’t feed that fire. If your ultimate point is to prove that the Christian teachings of mercy, justice, freedom, and equality provide the foundation on which our country stands, then your tactic to prove this point is totally counter-productive.]
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=427813493434

[Koran Burning Is Insensitive, Unnecessary; Pastor Jones, Please Stand Down http://is.gd/f1si7]

Holy Modal Majesty, what will happen next?

When a Constant A'in't: "Confirmation that alpha is changing would have profound implications for physics."

When can a constant become a variable?  When you measure it in two different directions.

[Precise measurements on the light from distant quasars suggest that the value of the fine-structure constant may have changed over the history of the universe. If the quasar results are eventually confirmed, our concepts of space and time are sure to change our fundamental understanding of the universe.

The fine-structure constant, or alpha, is the coupling constant for the electromagnetic force. If alpha were just 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars wouldn't be able to make carbon and oxygen, which would have made it impossible for life as we know it in our universe to exist.

A new study show{s} (sic) that alpha seems to have varied a tiny bit in different directions of the universe billions of years ago, being slightly smaller in the northern hemisphere and slightly larger in the southern hemisphere. One intriguing implication is that the fine-structure constant is continuously varying in space, and seems fine-tuned for life in our neighborhood of the universe.]  emphasis added, found at the Agonist.

Which explains why I can't adopt atheism 'cause lots in Universe my little tiny brain can't conceive, Steven Hawking notwithstanding.

Coupling constant from Wiki made my brain hurt.

Brazilian City Makes Food a Right

[Back in 1993, the newly elected city government of Belo Horizonte, Brazil declared that food was a right of citizenship. At that time, the city of 2.5 million had 275,000 people living in absolute poverty, and close to 20 percent of its children were going hungry. Since the declaration the city has all but wiped out hunger and only spends 2% of the city budget to do so.

So how did they make it happen?...

Once the concept of food as a right took hold a variety of different methods for getting healthy food to the people emerged. Entrepreneurs are given the chance to bid on high-traffic plots of land to sell produce. In return they agree to sell 20 or so fresh produce items at 3/4 of the going market price, and the rest of their produce can be sold at the market price. Three large scale "People's Restaurants" serve healthy meals to 12,000 people a day for the equivalent of $0.50, and innovative school programs ensure that students are well fed.]
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/03/brazilian-city-makes-food-a-basic-right-and-ends-hunger.php

Jesus, what sick communist freaks want to feed human beings?

Found at 13th Juror.

6 And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water."

[Hot water discovered around a giant carbon star requires a new theory for the chemistry around stars to be explained. The new theory could significantly alter our understanding of what materials exist in interstellar space, and where water and life could exist in the universe...


With the launch of Herschel satellite in 2009, it was finally possible to test the theory because astronomers could collect information about the temperature of the water around the star. They found water vapor of all different temperatures around the star, which refutes the vaporized comet theory. Water could only get hot if it is closer to the star than where the comets and icy planets would have existed.


The new explanation for the water is that high energy ultraviolet light from nearby hot stars is penetrating the atmosphere of the carbon star and breaking apart the carbon monoxide molecules. Breaking these molecules apart would release oxygen that could react with the abundant hydrogen to form water.]
Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/tag/leen-decin/#ixzz0yxvaiRBm

Genesis 1:1-10

Pistol Packing Pastor Plans Protest; Pleases Prose Promoters of Alliteration

[The Times' Damien Cave caught up with Pastor Jones at his Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, where the he wore jean shorts and had a .40 caliber pistol strapped to his hip. In Jones' "dank, dark office" a poster from Braveheart hangs on the wall, along with a portrait of former President GW Bush. And just like fellow Freedom lovers William Wallace and Bush, Pastor Jones says he and his church are being persecuted. Oh, those poor, extremist right wing Christians. But this will not stop Jones from hosting his "International Burn a Koran Day" on September 11, because he needs to "send a message to Islam and the pushers of Shariah law: that it is not what we want."] emphasis added
http://gawker.com/5622395/koran+burning-preacher-wears-jean-shorts-and-pistol-knows-nothing-about-the-koran

Burb, baby, burn, even though this might cause deaths of American troops and has caused riots in Afghanistan, where they just happen to revere the Qu'ran.  Yay, that means Pastor Jones will support General J C Christian's burn a Confederate flag day.

Stuffed Pony As Suspicious: Blown Apart

[Authorities today blew up a stuffed pony suspected of being a "suspicious device."

Then officials declared the toy "non-threatening."

Students at Waterbridge Elementary School were on a "modified lockdown" while the Orange County Sheriff's Office investigated the toy, which was found near the school on Whisper Glen Court around 11 a.m.

No one was allowed in or out of the school.]
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/os-orlando-school-locked-down-20100907,0,2870924.story

"Creating Liberated Spaces in a Post Colonial World"

[From a Western vantage point it can be easy to assume that the way we approach Christianity is normative or perhaps even correct (I am speaking as a white, privileged American here). We call our theology, well, theology, and give modifiers to other people’s theology as if they were somehow inferior or partial theologies. Asian theology, African theology, feminist theology, liberation theology, postcolonial theology — all become electives to be dabbled in or ideas to be scorned as heretical in light of the traditions that place our perspective firmly at the center of perceived truth. But in doing so we deny the voice of the church and the truth of Christ’s message. We end up only hearing theology spoken from the mouths of the privileged and the powerful. But Jesus did not come to only bring good news to those who rule the world.

For instance, it is hard to advance a truthful theology of suffering when we are the ones forcing others to suffer. In our country, where some Christians say they are being persecuted if a salesperson says “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” we often lack even the most basic point of reference for understanding how people from different cultural settings who’ve lived through oppression and grief approach their faith.

For example, theologian Chung Hyun Kyung comments on the influence on Asian women’s theology of Western colonizers telling them God is love while beating, starving, and raping them.] emphasis added

http://blog.sojo.net/2010/09/01/creating-liberated-spaces-in-a-post-colonial-world/

Guess people forget that do unto you thing while busy doing others.

Why Do 20% Americans Believe Obama Foreign Born?

Short answer: stupidity.

Somewhat longer answer: because they consume the "news" from tabloid headlines at the supermarket checkout line where just last night I learned, "Obama IS a MUSLIM!!!" courtesy of the Globe magazine.

“Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.”

 Ambrose Bierce quotes

Yay, I Got Trolled!

Left a msg on a Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul video on YouTube .


Got this in reply from whtpwr, probably a pseudonym for whitepower: "You f***ing fag. Why dont you ask Stevie why he doesn't speak out against human rights abuses towards South Africans Whites, and the Palestinians??He's a racist nigger lover, that's why." (edited for 1 vulgarity)


My reply went thus: "Dear Whitepower:


You write as a total moron and insecure loser blaming others for your failure.  Little Steven sings against INJUSTICE, not races.  How's Obama working for you?  Listen to some blues, drink a beer, and chill.


Peace:
empireofdirt77]"


Gosh, I love the intertubes.  Don't know why I replied save for smile it put on my face.

Forever

Jan Brewer: "We have did what's right for Arizona."

"We have did what's right for Arizona."

"King Harvest Shall Surely Come:" The Band

"Glad to pay those union dues
Just don't judge me by my shoes."

21st Century Slavery; In FL, "Shocked I Tell You"

From Coalition for Immolakee Workers Top Stories 3 September 2010:

[Recipe for Slavery: Take US farm labor relations, add "guestworker" visas, and voila... Forced labor!

Federal prosecutors in Honolulu unseal indictment charging forced labor ring active in 13 states including -- yet again -- Florida;

Multi-state operation involves guestworker recruiting giant Global Horizons in what prosecutors are calling "the largest human trafficking case in US history"...

Labor Day weekend will be celebrated with a little more meaning this year by 400 farmworkers from around the country whose bosses were charged yesterday by Justice Department officials in Hawaii with "conspiracy to commit human trafficking."

Six people in the US were charged in the case, including four employees of Global Horizons Manpower, Inc, a labor recruiting company that specializes in the overseas recruitment of "guestworkers," foreign workers brought to the US to work in agriculture under an H2A visa for temporary employment in agriculture. Two more people based in Thailand were also indicted in the case. This is not the first time that Global Horizons has been accused of violating farm labor protection laws.

FBI Special Agent Tom Simon described the latest case to KITV News in Hawaii, where the indictment was filed:]

United Farms Workers

Who hid MY blogging knife?  Great Cesar's ghost, gotta blog something to make me smile.  So much outrage; How I wish 't'were satire.

"The Agnostic Cartographer"

Words have meaning, especially labeled lines applied to maps, usually when human-drawn lines serperate: peoples, tribes, clans, even distant cousins coming from common forefathers, from Ishmael and Issac.

"One fateful day in early August, Google Maps turned Arunachal Pradesh Chinese. It happened without warning. One minute, the mountainous border state adjacent to Tibet was labeled with its usual complement of Indian place-names; the next it was sprinkled with Mandarin characters, like a virtual annex of the People’s Republic."  http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1007.gravois.html

(Cartoon from Maddowblog.)

Mars Google

Wow, as if Google Earth ain't cool enough, found Google Mars @ Suburban Guerrilla.

Who'd a thunk it in July '69 when my mama made us children walk out on the driveway to look up at the moon when men walked right then, we could wake up in the 21st century and go to anywhere on Earth or Mars?

Attached pic from Mars Rover found at Nasa multimedia galleries.

“To be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk"

Prominent Souther Baptists criticize Glen "Elmer Gantry" Beck: [“What concerns me here is not what this says about Beck or the ‘Tea Party’ or any other entertainment or political figure. What concerns me is about what this says about the Christian churches in the United States,” said {Russell} Moore, dean of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in an Aug. 29 post on his blog, "Moore to the Point."

“It’s taken us a long time to get here, in this plummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck,” Moore continued, referring to the late evangelical theologian many consider the intellectual father of the Religious Right. “In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined ‘revival’ and ‘turning America back to God’ that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.”

Meanwhile, {Robert} Parham, in a commentary for the Newsweek/Washington Post “On Faith” website, said Beck had used the rally to fabricate “a pottage of civil religion that says America has a divine destiny and claiming that a national revival is beginning."

He observed that Beck referred to American founding documents such as the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address as if they were as divinely inspired as Scripture itself.

“What is important to Beck is belief in God -- God generically -- not a specific understanding of God revealed in the biblical witness, but God who appears in nature and from which one draws universal truths,” Parham said. “Not surprisingly, Beck only uses the Bible to point toward the idea of a God-generic. He does not listen to the God of the Bible who calls for the practice of social justice, the pursuit of peacemaking, the protection of the poor in the formation of community. Beck has little room for God's warning about national idolatry and rejection of fabricated religion.”] (emphasis added)

Nuff said.

Man Bites Dog: Billionaire Loser Sues News for Reporting Facts

Thank the Founding Father's FL primary election season has ended.

Well, almost.

Billionaire failed candidate for FL senator, Jeff Greene, "is preparing to sue The St. Petersburg Times and The Miami Herald for libel, claiming that articles they published cost him his bid for the United States Senate."

Publishing the truth can in many circumstances provide a defense against legal action for liable.

Presumably if I blogged the statement, "I have no proof of Jeff Greene spawning in Perdition and perpetually puckered brow result of plastic surgery to remove his horns, nothing but a despicable demon carpet bagger spitting on those he considers his lessers," that might make defamatory statement, because although literally true--I have no actual proof of Satanic parentage, just a churning in my guts whenever seeing his face--the preposterous hyperbole propounded could verge on defamation.

Great Mencken's ghost, when did this fool decide to run for public office, 31 December '09 during a cocaine and Cuervo fueled Bacchanalia?

Did he forget people had pictures of his party boat debauchery? (Google it yourself.)

Did he forget his consistent degrading and demeaning behavior towards his employees, damaging a protected, precious Belize coral reef, and illegal trip to Cuba?

Two good things about his candidacy: he now has less $ to pursue delusional dreams of getting elected, and he did bring a smile to my face at times.

Little Steven "Tounges of Angels"

"I've done my penance in Babylon.
Among the tribes, I organized.
We stood side by side
Fighting the righteous fight."



Little Steven saved my life.

Little Steven Cover of "Solidarity"

"Everybody wants the same thing."

"American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right."