• Clan: McTiVo - SciFi/Fantasy

    Star Wars Episode 67: Carry On Smartly

    This is just teh awsum. Sailors and light sabers and Navy tradition: it’s all good. Also, there’s a break for snacks and some commercials. [kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=8791995853219747625" width="425" height="344" wmode="transparent" /] Episode 67: Seeds of Betrayal

  • Politics, Schmolitics

    Republicans Become That Creepy Stalker You Once Dated

    After the Election, Rebooting the Right – TIME When a party suffers the kind of beating the Republicans have taken in the past two elections, the public has not rejected one of its factions. It has rejected the party as a whole. Voters have turned on pro-choice as well as pro-life Republicans, on Senators who favored amnesty and ones who fought it. Evidently voters did not believe that Republicans of any stripe offered solutions to the challenges America faces now. You know that former girlfriend or boyfriend you dated for a while, that kind of stalked you after it was…

  • Hot Off The Presses - Mini-Posts

    Wait, Whut?

    BBC NEWS | Middle East | Jail terms for Israeli neo-Nazis Eight teenagers have been sentenced to time in jail by a court in Israel for carrying out a series of neo-Nazi attacks that shocked the nation. That’s what I thought you said. Some male teens will do anything to work off those crazy hormones…

  • Hot Off The Presses - Politics, Schmolitics

    Oh Yes He Did: Bush’s Nostalgia for 9/11

    President Bush delivered a speech at an international gathering in Peru earlier today, and waxed nostalgic about those warm and wonderful days immediately after 9/11, when the entire world was on our side and was ready to stand with us against a common threat. Excuse me, I need to get rid of a load of bile now. Because this same brush-clearing faux cowboy diplomat worked reeeeal hard to screw up our reputation world wide, totally squandering the goodwill that we had gained, and also totally squandering our short-lived sense of national unity. Thousands of lives were lost before the war…

  • Episcopal - Good and Joyful Things

    Schismatics Again: Why Wheaton? Why Not Quincy or PA?

    It seemed like things had been starting to move on the “Episcopal split” front, what with dioceses like Quincy, Ft Worth, and Pittsburgh shaking the icky liberal dust from their sandals. It seems like such a terrible waste of everybody’s time and talents. But then, I forget: homosexxxuls are teh evul! They do not deserve to live, let along marry! The Devil is constantly going about tempting people to decorate with pink flamingo accent pieces and sing show tunes! Anglican Primate ‘Disturbed’ by New Rival Body| Christianpost.com Nevertheless, breakaway Anglicans have expressed little hope that the current church bodies in…

  • Uncategorical Weirdness

    Uptime, Downtime

    The tech problem was solved this morning and we’re up and running again. However, we’re not terribly busy and so later today they’ll probably offer “downtime” or unpaid time off. I won’t be able to avail myself of it because I’m covering for someone who specializes in small groups. Ominously, there are now memos making the rounds about training for new accounts, more advanced training, and one-to-one feedback meetings. It’s the season when travel cuts back, but this is pretty quiet even for November. Ironically, this is the time of year when I get hit with small hotel blocks for…

  • Geek Out!

    Work Borked

    Lovely. Work is totally borked. Can’t work because the main system is run as a secure webpage, and somehow everyone’s logins and passwords have been lost. Some webpages work that are either within the firewall or company pages, but nothing “outside.” In about an hour they’ll start going around re-enabling the native version that everyone still has, mark my words.

  • Home Improvement - Moblog

    Floor Project From Hell V: The Stain in the Hall

    David installed the white-painted shoe molding earlier this afternoon, and even got through the angsty moments trying to get the floor brackets for the closet doors re-installed. Now all that remains is the quarter-round. We’d had a bad time with the oak trim that came with the floor product (actually, it was quite expensive) as it was such dense, hard wood that no matter how we pre-drilled and pounded and used an electric nailer, we couldn’t get the nails to go in all the way. So we regrouped, bought plain pine and it’s now all cut and mitred to fit…

  • Episcopal - Good and Joyful Things - Parish: Holy Moly (ECUSA)

    Speaking to the Soul: Talents Great and Small

    I don’t usually do anything remotely approaching scholarly discussion of the Bible, ever, but today’s Gospel reading is one that I find interesting and troubling. Here it is, starting from the part where the slave who was given one talent and hid it away, and now has to explain to the Master why he didn’t “double his investment,” so to speak: Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, `Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was…

  • Movies

    Quantum of Solace: Magnum of WTF?

    ‘Quantum of Solace’ stars Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Mathieu Amalric, Olga Kurylenko — chicagotribune.com Compared with “Casino Royale,” ” Quantum of Solace” is a disappointment. Craig anchors it, and Judi Dench’s M enjoys some fine, stern scenes, but director Marc Forster “Finding Neverland,” “Monster’s Ball,” “The Kite Runner” isn’t much of an action man. There’s plenty, but half the time it’s visually incoherent. Yep, pretty much. The review goes on to compare the Bond action scenes with the “Jason Bourne” movies’ action scenes, from which they were clearly derived. Actually, a couple of the “gags” were just like ones in…