Batman vs. Superman

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A Batman vs. Superman movie? Who would you cast as Superman? Who could possibly fill Christopher Reeve’s massive shoes? Who, for that matter, would make a good Batman? I personally wouldn’t mind seeing Michael Keaton back in the batsuit.

Brownpau Photolog

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Oh, and I’ve gotten the structure for the photolog down pat, so there’s a new visual treat for y’all.

In truth, it’s almost scary, how easy these digital cameras have made it to publish photos online. The prospect of visual data-overload is suddenly more real than it was back in the days of prints and scanners.

(Update, 2004: Photolog was integrated into main blog as part of the flow.)

PHP referrer list

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Update: I’m now using Dean Allen’s Refer, and it’s excellent.

I was about halfway through writing up my own compact referrer-listing script in PHP, when I belatedly found that LittleGreenFootballs already has one, using almost exactly the same routines I was writing. Hmmm, should I be lazy just download theirs, or continue on mine and add MySQL functionality?

Egocentric Hyperreactionism

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Anonymous Nietzschean Commenter says: In any case, at the end of the day, I really cannot fathom how anyone can live with such cartoonish drivel: some criminal rabbi died 2000 years ago and you think he did it for you – a little bug momentarily alive on a rock in space – so that you won’t die like everything else that has ever lived? And you believe this at the expense of hating everything we are while actually here? *That’s* “egocentric hyperreactionism,” don’t you think?

Ad hominem arguments (e.g. “cartoonish drivel”) aside, there is a significant difference between Christianity and the nominal mythology which the commenter mistakenly associates Christian thought with; Christianity has the benefit of witnesses. That is, people who recorded what Jesus told them, on documents whose contents have survived practically unscathed to this day.

Secular liberalism would have you believe that Jesus was just a fictional construct — the character of a play, the creation of a control-obsessed “church,” or a rehash of older Greek legends; but any reputable archaeologist will tell you that there is far more than enough documentary evidence to confirm the existence of Jesus, even if you have no belief in his miracles or his Deity.

And what does the documentary evidence hold? It tells us that Jesus made outrageous claims to Deity, that he promised eternal life to his followers who put their faith in him, that he was indeed killed by Roman capital punishment … and that shortly after the body disappeared three days later, his followers saw him alive.

I strongly believe in this. The faith to which I hold, strange though it may be in the eyes of the world, has been the channel for miraculous changes in my life and the lives of others. I fail to see where Nietzschean Commenter comes from by labelling the Christian ethic as one of “hate and terror,” when it is precisely those negative qualities of mind which Christianity has inspired me to leave behind. Of course, revulsion to — and vilification of — Christianity is to be expected from an adherent to Nietzsche’s signature hatred for the “weakness” of Christian love… but from what fundamentality of thought is the perception of “weakness” based on, and to what end?

Key word: “evolutionary.” ;)

Can you hear me now?

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Verizon Wireless is really trying to pull an “Energizer Bunny” with their current ad campaign. (“Can you hear me now? Good!”) I suppose they’re hoping to pummel the average consumer into subscribing to their service by sheer force of annoyance from the repetitive hook.

Likewise with that Mazda “Zoom zoom” kid.

(For more happy happy fun fun, do a Google search for any of the above terms. I haven’t found any slash fiction yet, though.)

Update: Verizon Guy’s real name is Paul Marcarelli. Just so you know.

Dave Barry and 2-year-olds

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Plan a birthday for your two-year-old, by Dave Barry.

The first thing you must decide, when planning a birthday party for a 2-year-old, is: Should you invite the 2-year-old? Because a child that age can put a real damper on a party. And probably your child doesn’t really understand that he or she is turning 2. One of the best things about small children is that they have no clue how time works. My 2-year-old daughter believes that everything that has ever happened, including her birth and the formation of the solar system, occurred “yesterday.”

I have a friend named Helene who made excellent use of this phenomenon when her children were small. If they wanted to do something that, for whatever reason, they couldn’t do, Helene, rather than argue, would tell them they could do it on “Tuesday.” If her kids wanted to go swimming, and it was January, Helene would say: “We’ll go swimming on Tuesday!” And they were satisfied, because they had a definite answer, even though it actually had no meaning. (Airport flight-information monitors are based on the same principle.)

More on Tuesday.

Movabletype 2.2 and Trackback

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MovableType 2.21 installed! The db conversion to MySQL was surprisingly fast, with minimum problems. (Just one error because I forgot to properly CHMOD my template reference files.) Now I need to figure out this Trackback thingummy. As much as possible, I want to do this without popups.