Hey, the Happy Boys are getting hitched: Amazing race to the altar” href=”http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/OttawaSun/News/2005/05/11/1034518-sun.html”>Ottawa Sun Online: NEWS – Amazing race to the altar
Pity they have to go to Canada to get married, but a radio station is picking up the tab for the ceremony and the reception. Mazeltov, gentlemen. May your lives be filled with joy. 😀
Our Preziduhnt is very busy. He leads the Free World. He is very smart. He reads books. He likes to read them to little children.
He likes to ride bikes. Ride, ride, ride Mr. Preziduhnt! No one will bother him during your nice bike ride. They know how busy and smart and fit to lead the Free World he is.
They won’t bother you during naptime, either
Colorado Springs is a very, very, very religious place, and the Air Force Academy is a little too cozy with the leadership of Focus on the Family, the Navigators (knew one in college… very scary) and the Officer’s Christian Fellowship.
The academy had that little rape problem a while back, and now apparently they have a little religious intolerance problem, too. When a recent tolerance program was shown to a ranking officer, he responded “Why is it that the Christians never win?”
A study conducted by the Yale Divinity School (another hotbed of mainline, non-evangelical, non-fundamentalist theological error) noted the entrenched Academy culture presented “challenges to pluralism.”
Captain Morton said she had decided to step forward without authorization from the public affairs office because: “It’s the Constitution, not just a nice rule we can follow or not follow. We all raised our hands and said we’d follow it, and that includes the First Amendment, that includes not using your power to advance your religious agenda.”
She added, “I realize this is the end of my Air Force career.”
Yes – she’s a mainline Christian Lutheran chaplain, and they don’t want her kind in the modern evangelical US Luftwaffe, anyway.
my husband David gripes about the coming series finale of Enterprise. I’ll be very sorry to see the end of this series, not only because it’ll be the first time in years that there is no Star Trek-universe series in production. I’ve really enjoyed the current season, even after wandering away in boredom after the previous one. And the last few episodes have actually been enjoyably kick-ass. The TWOP recapper Keckler thought the episode was a simplistic snooze worthy of a D and fake fangirly hyperbole, I disagreed only because they had the presence of mind to cast Peter Weller as the deliciously bad bad guy, and Eric Pierpoint in a return engagement as Reed’s black ops contact.
Talk about cross-pollinization – there you had Robocop, Buckaroo Banzai, George Francisco, and various Babylon 5 and Voyager/DS9/Next Gen characters in two convenient packages. Plus I see now that Buffy is represented in the person of the Federation flack giving a speech, too.
Yes, I’ll miss this show after all, dammit. Just when it was getting good, it’s gone.
…with the outcome of the finale of the seventh season of Amazing Race.
Even though they didn’t actually “race around the world” and the teams had timetables going into the final legs (ugh, that sickens me, a purist).
And I really couldn’t be happier for Uchenna and Joyce, coming in first and making that big vein pop out in the side of Rob’s head.
And I really couldn’t be happier for Rob and Amber coming in second, although I could make an exception if they’d come in third instead.
And I really couldn’t be any more “meh” for Ron and Kelly, except now he can make his dash for freedom. Run, Ron! Ron, run!
And now I’m going to bed, because I’m exhausted from all the screaming and so on that’s been going on here.
Aw, it was good to see the Brothers Awesomov and the Happy Boys and everyone else, even Ray and Deana. And it was quite obvious from all the chanting and stuff going on that you all were happy with the result too.
The applause for Rob and Amber was slightly more than a polite golf clap, but not the thundering, screaming, jumping cryfest that it was for Uchenna and Joyce. And that made me cry for happy, too.
One last word. Uchenna, dude, that last driver was a hard-ass. You nearly lost the million for the want of $15. Plan accordingly with that new-found fortune, and I hope you took up a collection later from your fans amongst the other racers to give your driver a tip.
Dammit, I want a piece of the totem pole from the finale of TAR3, where Gerard had to spin animal faces to work out the correct order that animals had been special guest stars that season (that was a season with humorous donkeys, camels, and so forth):
Amazing Race Charity Auction on eBay
The 2 hour finale is tonight. There’ve been spoilers circulating forever that indicate that one of my least favorite teams evah win it all; if this happens it won’t cause the psychic wounds that Flo’s win did, but I’ll be all pissed off and resentful going into TARless TV withdrawal.
And of course, the charity is a children’s one. Why can’t it be a nice animal charity?
Yes, I’m a grump, and proud of it, too.
Lately at Holy Moly, we’ve been kicking around the idea of how to welcome people. Do we do it well, or do we do it badly (and risk a snarky write-up in The Ship Of Fools “Mystery Worshipper” annals)? This is something we’ll have to work out in the coming weeks.
With that in mind, I was pretty horrified but unfortunately not all that surprised to run across this:
WAYNESVILLE, N.C. – The minister of a Haywood County Baptist church is telling members of his congregation that if they’re Democrats, they either need to find another place of worship or support President Bush.
I ran across this story at via TBoggs. There’s an “action items” diary at Daily Kos on it.
Another article raises the tax-exempt issue succinctly, which was endlessly debated on the original dKos thread:
Chan Chandler, pastor of East Waynesville, had been exhorting his congregation since October to support his political views or leave the church, said Selma Morris, a 30-year member of the church.
“He preached a sermon on abortion and homosexuality, then said if anyone there was planning on voting for John Kerry, they should leave,” she said. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard something like that. Ministers are supposed to bring people in.”
Repeated phone calls to Chandler today have gone unanswered and he was not available at the church or his home to comment on the allegations.
It’s not clear whether the church’s tax-exempt status could be jeopardized if the claims about Chandler are true.
The Internal Revenue Service exempts certain organizations from taxation, including those organized and operated for religious purposes, provided that they do not engage in certain activities, including involvement in “any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”
Valerie Thornton, a spokeswoman for the Internal Revenue Service, said she could not comment on the East Waynesville situation specifically, but noted that “in general if a church engages in partisan politics it could put their tax-exempt status in jeopardy.”
The story seems to have hit the national and international wires. I bet coffee hour tomorrow is going to be interesting, what with all the news media camped out on the steps of the church.
David and I were having a discussion about “the coming theocracy” just last night over dinner. He’s convinced it’s whoey. I’m convinced it could happen. This was kicked off by several events yesterday, including:
Religious Schools Train Lawyers for Culture Wars. This was a story with the author of this book:
God on the Quad : How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America. In the NPR “web extra” question and answer section, she makes it sound as if the rise in religious higher education (new colleges opened, enrollment way, way up) isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and that intellectual rigor and racial diversity are not lacking on religious university campuses. However, the law students interviewed for the story scare the hell out of me.
Every now and then I check back at TheocracyWatch.org
. And every time I do, I get freaked out by the wealth of evidence. The “theocratic right” want to take over. They want dominion over all. And they’ve been working for years toward this goal.
So yeah, I was debating with David last night that a Handmaid’s Tale-style takeover could happen. What I’d like to see is an SF TV series based on just such a thing, if only to counter all the “Rapture/Left Behind” type movies and series and get apathetic non-voters to get as freaked out by this shit as possible.
Meanwhile, a major part of the “message” of the theocratic right is that “homosexxxuls bad, God-fearing Christian straight (parent) good.” And that all God-fearing Christians must work for the Dominion of God and Jesus over everything. And though they’re a minority, they know that an apathetic majority won’t bother to defeat them at the polls, until bit by bit and year by year, they take over just about everything.
About the time David and I are elderly old fogeys, there might be a knock on our door.
Our only hope is that the pendulum of political opinion in this country will swing the other way, as it always has when extremists at either end of the political spectrum get a little too much power.
Former Farscape star Claudia Black told SCI FI Wire that her character in the upcoming ninth season of Stargate SG-1 will bedevil Michael Shanks’ Daniel Jackson for the season’s first six episodes.
Oh, good. David and I really, really enjoyed their interaction in last season’s “Prometheus Unbound” and we’re looking forward to Claudia’s new ones.
Can’t wait to see Vala alternately beat up and jump all over Dr. Daniel Jackson. He needs a little shaking up, we think.
Best quote of that episode, by the way, has become a family joke.
“[significant pause]…ow?”
I’m so confused. I have so many questions, and answers are unlikely (until at least next week, when the finale of TAR7 airs).
The mini-recap is up at TWOP:
In a significant change from previous seasons, the Race course turns back to the West and heads from Turkey to London. Rob and Amber and Ron and Kelly beat the first direct flight by two hours when they find a connection through Frankfurt, so those who fell behind last week are ahead this week.
In London, a trip to Abbey Road leads in turn to a Detour that presents a choice between riddle-solving and boat-dragging. Surprisingly enough, both of the lead teams choose the riddles, and they both execute them without difficulty — Rob and Amber with the help of a cute Brit they locate along the way.
Following that, there’s a bus-driving Roadblock that challenges everyone’s steering capabilities, and it takes everyone who tries it several attempts. But Rob and Amber finish up the leg in first place — again — and pile on with an ill-conceived decision to Yield Ron and Kelly. Despite the Yield, Ron and Kelly finish in second place, and Uchenna and Joyce and Meredith and Gretchen fight it out for last.
After the trailing teams weirdly choose the physical Detour option, Meredith and Gretchen fall somewhat behind at the Detour and even possibly even farther behind at the Roadblock, and when they find themselves in last place again, there are no more chances and they get the boot at last. They were nice people, but that was overdue.
So the final three are Ron and Kelly, Rob and Amber, and Uchenna and Joyce, which isn’t a bad result, in terms of narrowing it down to the strong performers. Next week: the two-hour finale, complete with screaming and hollering.
Again, I’m so confused about the directionality thing, but at least the Season of Rob and Amber is almost over. Can they possibly milk this stunt casting thing any further? How different would things be if they’d been eliminated much earlier in the season?
Oh, wait, that’s more questions. The answers are
The next season of TAR will feature the much-vaunted “Family Edition.” Pardon my total lack of enthusiasm for this re-tooling – if and when it airs, I’ll be rooting for whichever teams feature an interesting and entertaining mix of personality and train-wreck watchability, not for the ones with the kyooot widdul kids.
What I chose to do with my life and my body is my business, as long as I’m not infringing on other people’s rights and privileges or expecting them to pay for my choices. Maybe the real question to be asked is not “Why am I CF” but “Why are you so worried that I am?”
Chances are I know this website’s author from the old days – it’s a nice WordPress site, too. I got there via one of the blogs at the *beep* blog listing of the local newspaper The Daily Herald.