In case I haven't made myself clear in the past, I love New Zealand.
First there was Lord of the Rings, which showed me that New Zealand is where I want to live (also that I want to have lots of little hobbit kids with Rosie and run around barefoot). Then there was Flight of the Conchords, which showed me that New Zealanders 1, hate Australians 2, are really funny and 3, get to say "yis" and "bid" instead of "yes" and "bed".
Today, New Zealand has amazed me again. The Weta Workshop (the guys who did lots of the special effects for Lord of the Rings) have made a woman into a mermaid. I don't mean for a movie. A woman who lost both her legs to an illness wrote them asking to make her a mermaid so she could swim, and they made her a functioning mermaid suit. Like, she can put it on and use what remains of her legs to move the tail and actually swim.
So, the other night Dan Anderson and I were at a friend's house playing air hockey. I'm not sure exactly how it came to this, but one of us got the bright idea of playing without the mallets. We balled up our fists, put them vertically on the table (as in with our arms directly above the hands) and used our fists to hit the puck. It was like bare knuckle boxing, but with air hockey.
This was actually really fun, if somewhat painful and stupid. It made for a much more calculating game, as you had to decide how much it was worth trying to hit the puck on that particular pass, or if you would just let it bounce back and let your opponent take another shot.
One of the pucks we used was not round, but an octagon with pointy corners. That was definitely the hardest. I still have a red mark on my right hand from where I tried a little too hard...
Science has come out with a huge surprise today. It turns out that when women dress in revealing attire, such as bikinis, men tend to objectify them more. Yep, it's true.
Brain scans show that when you show men pictures of women in bikinis, the part of their brain associated with tool use is activated, and the part associated with interpreting other people's intentions and feelings is shut off.
Well, folks, it's time. Science has brought me an invisibility cloak, it has brought me energy guns, and now it has finished the hat trick by bringing me a jet pack. That's right, a jet pack.
I think I'm going to quit my job and become Booster Gold.
Well, folks, I should be working on a presentation for tomorrow about how a fetus protects itself from its mother's immune system, but instead I'm playing around on Youtube. So, here you go. I'll pretend there's somebody reading this blog if you pretend that this counts as a post. Deal?
Today is my old buddy Charles Darwin's birthday. Because I go to a religious school, and because I am surrounded by woefully uninformed English majors, I have heard a lot of silly things about evolution and religion.
This week I heard someone say that we should all have the "courage to believe" in a strict creationist viewpoint despite heaps and heaps of evidence to the contrary. This person went on to say that anyone who believed in anything other than the 100% creationist theory - that God sat down and individually crafted every life form on earth - was not a true believer in God.
I disagree. I am a very religious person, I believe in God, but I have trouble with the idea that He sat at his workbench and made each individual creature. First of all, I just don't think that God is a micromanager. But that is an argument for another day, because it isn't the main thing that bothers me about this idea. My biggest beef with this is that it proposes a very different God than the one I want to believe in. Let me explain with a couple of examples.
First, chickenpox. I just can't believe that the same God who asked that the children be brought to Him would also create varicella zoster- the nasty little virus that has no other purpose than to torment people (especially children) with highly contagious rashes.
Next on my list are several kindsofwasps that, through various chemical means, can turn another bug into basically a zombie, generally to keep it alive long enough for the wasp's kids to eat it alive from the inside out. I don't really believe in a God who would create critters like that.
These are just two of the many examples of things that don't make much sense if you think of a loving creator individually crafting them, but make perfect sense if you think of them from an evolutionary perspective. All in all, the God who strict creationists believe in sounds a lot like this one:
Now, lest anyone think different, I should set the record straight that I do believe in a loving creator. I just don't believe in a micromanaging loving creator. I believe that He created the universe, and everything in it, but that it is very possible that He used evolution as a tool to create. I do not see how these models are mutually exclusive. If you would like to read a great book about these two going well together, I would check out Finding Darwin's God by Miller (I reviewed it a few months ago).
So, one thing I have always loved is reading conspiracy theories. I'm not sure why. They're just fun. Lately, some of these have had some bad press, as the "immunizations cause autism" set of theories has recently been debunked pretty handily.
In light of that, gmail brought me this beauty: the Milk Conspiracy. Yep. The milk conspiracy. Apparently big dairy is taking all the nutrients out of your milk by pasteurizing it. I'm not sure what exactly they stand to gain by doing this, but I am sure that it is truly evil.
Dr. Douglass also says he has proof that raw milk tastes better. I'm not sure how you prove something like that, but I admit that I am very curious. Not curious enough to give this nutcase my email address (you have to to read the report), but curious.
So, for anybody who has ever wondered why I am opposed to the enlightened European health care system, wonder no more.
Kim Petras, a German teenager, was Tim Petras until a few weeks ago. After psychologists determined that Kim was actually a girl stuck in a boy's body, she got a sex change. And the German health service paid for it. Seriously.
So, if we go over to a socialized health system here in the good old US of A, does that mean that my tax dollars are going to pay for things like this? Am I seriously going to have to fund sex changes so that little Kimmy can -and I quote her words here- "wear tight jeans" and "enjoy swimming and bikinis"?
Last night my ward had an activity playing quidditch. It was surprisingly fun, despite what Lewis Black would say.
We had one goalie per team, three chasers (people who scored goals), two beaters (people who carried baseball bats and hit beach balls at the chasers) and one seeker (who went outside to find a hidden tennis ball). Did I mention that the whole time, every player has to hold a broom between their legs?
Yeah, it was pretty fun. And surprisingly demanding physically.
Last night the guys and I watched The Empire Strikes Back. It is such a great movie, but every time I watch it I notice some new thing that George Lucas went back and messed up for me. Last night I noticed that Boba Fett's voice has been changed. Check it out. This is what he sounded like when I was a kid:
and this is what I heard last night:
It's just not cool. That guy has been the voice of Boba Fett for 30 years, and ol' George just went back and changed him for no good reason. All I can say is this: George, quit changing my memories. I liked Star Wars just the way it was.
Today, New Zealand has amazed me again. The Weta Workshop (the guys who did lots of the special effects for Lord of the Rings) have made a woman into a mermaid. I don't mean for a movie. A woman who lost both her legs to an illness wrote them asking to make her a mermaid so she could swim, and they made her a functioning mermaid suit. Like, she can put it on and use what remains of her legs to move the tail and actually swim.
