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She blinded him with whiteness - 2008-07-25
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9:52 p.m. - 2007-12-28
This is going to be one of those boring "What I did today" entries. It'll actually cover some of yesterday and today, but I thought I'd get the boring warning out there first. Anyhoodle. Took the kid to see The Water Horse yesterday. I thought the film was lovely. Wolf was less sure. He was upset by the war parts. Mick was disappointed the monster was so cute. A big fan of Nessie, Big Foot, and the rest of the tabloid ilk, Mick gets all jut-chinned over skeptics. He and I have duked it out a lot. Mick accusing 'mainstream science' of suppressing true evidence and only looking to debunk. The mainstream is 'out to get' the believers and is working night and day to discredit all the evidence. Rightie-o. Paranoid much? My feeling is applied scientific method hurts nothing. If these beasties are real then why not shine the bright spotlight of fact finding and reliable proofs on the search for them? Bring me something besides some sloppy plaster casts of 'footprints' and the Patterson-Gimlin film. As a strict Darwinian and a big fan of statistics I say if there's a sustainable breeding pool of Big Foot then somebody would have hit one with a car by now. Shot one while bear hunting. Something. You trying to tell me we can find the bones of T-rexes but we can't come up with a single Big Foot skull? Same deal with Nessie. They can find the fricken Titanic but nobody can locate a Pleisiasaurus in a lake? Yuppers, there's some delusional thinking going on here. (More on delusional thinking in a moment.) I certainly understand the need for magic and mysteries. That's what movies are for. I willingly suspend my disbelief, my cranky realist's mind and happily play Quidditch with Harry Potter. And don't ever show me the green screen, I don't want to know about it. But when it comes to belief off the silver screen then you'd best bring me some DNA, a fossil record or a carcass or count me out. With the assassination of Benazir Bhutto I finally accepted that ugly and crazy is the new normal. Not that humans have ever been all that beautiful or rational, we are a flawed species, but I grew up believing things would keep getting better. There would be more peace, more cures, more freedom- political, intellectual, societal. Instead in the last 20 years I've seen the rise of more irrationality, more strident screamers, more acts of brutality, and pretty much the overthrow of reason by nutballs with 'holy books' that supposedly give them permission to terrorize, kill, supercede the writ of law, hijack the political system, stage witch hunts on college campuses, and attack freedom in any guise that shows the barest glimmer of disagreement with their particular brand of irrational superstition. The believers in the Big Sky Daddy are running things now and my, my, my haven't they just made Heaven on Earth? Feh. So much for the Age of Reason. Welcome to the New and Improved Dark Ages …now with Nukes! I joke because I must or drown in tears. On the home front I've actually discovered a treat that wasn't improved with the addition of chocolate. Now there's some heresy! Not improved by chocolate? It truly is a world gone mad. See, I tried this recipe for Chocolate-Pecan Pie Bars. Sort of a hybrid. A bar cookie topped with chocolate laced pecan pie filling. Sounded like it would be to die for. Mick was drooling in anticipation. The cookie part was basically butter with just enough flour and sugar to hold it together. The topping was the traditional egg/corn syrup/sugar mix of a regular pecan pie only with chocolate melted in. Add pecans. Dump that on the browned crust and bake some more. Should have been wonderful. It's not. It's not awful, but it's not as good as just chocolate smeared shortbread or plain old pecan pie would have been. Live and learn. At least that motto still holds true here at the Hobbit House, even if so much of the world seems to have adopted 'Close Mind. Hold Book in Clenched Fist and Beat Others to Death With It' as their new motto.
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