bopo.net

Sometimes someone does something you should have thought of first but does it better than you ever could. This photo set on Flickr is just fantastic. (via Warren Ellis)

There’s a church in Chicago that’s been advertising all over the CTA recently, and its tagline is “This is church? Come and see.” It’s all well and good, but it creeps me out a bit since the second half of that line is used in Revelations whenever another seal is opened and something ass-kicky comes out.

If you don’t watch Lost, this won’t mean anything to you at all, but since returning from the other side of the island, the Tailies sure have had their own little Final Destination experience. At this point, I bet Bernard jumps every time he hears a coconut drop.

Snakes on a Plane was awesome. Maja Ivarsson is hot. This is the catchiest song I’ve heard since Kelly Clarkston’s “Since U Been Gone”. Please help me.

For a little while now, I’ve been keeping track of what I read with a WordPress plugin called Now Reading. It’s pretty slick, lets you assign ratings, steals uses images from Amazon, etc. Other than showing the current book over there in the sidebar, I’d been hiding it from the world. I got a little bored tonight, though, so I decided to open the library up to everyone.

Unfortunately, if you dig down past the first page it looks like ass. The thing claims that some of the books don’t exist, and the margins are really screwy. The former I think is non-alphanumeric characters and mod_rewrite having a tussle, the second is just wonky HTML/CSS. It will improve as soon as I can get back to it.

Anyway, both of those books by David Mitchell are fantastic. Go read them.

Photo by Klara Kim.

UPDATE: Turns out I had to insert a missing <div> in order to get Now Reading and the Barthelme theme to play together nicely in the library. Yay.

Sometimes when my cats aren’t chasing each other around my place or destroying things I own, they sit still and look cute. Aww.

I tend to loathe reality tv, but I’ve been watching Treasure Hunters and enjoying the puzzles and riddles in between chunks of hating humanity.

This guy’s post sums up a lot of what I was thinking about writing. The Fogal family (or at least how they’re edited by NBC) is more or less the embodiment of everything I dislike about religion in general and Christianity in particular. Of course, they talk a great talk. The father (a pastor) has that soothing, sort-of-condescending voice like the dad in Footloose. The mother talks a lot about how much she cares about everyone, does the the yes-woman thing, and thanks The Big Man Upstairs every few seconds. The daughter mostly cries.

Their motto seems to be “do what I say, not what I do.” One of the challenges involves canoeing past a certain number of markers on a river and finding something. At one point they have trouble portaging a canoe, so the guys from south Boston help them out. The two teams (plus a third) end up traveling together and decide to stop at what might be the next to last marker but maybe not because no one’s sure how many they’ve counted so far. As the other two teams hit the shore, the Fogals blast past them (knowing there’s one more marker, mind you), and leave the other two teams behind. Assholes.

If only that were the worst, though. In the first episode, one of the tasks was to snorkel around looking for a container, dive down and get something out of it. There were nine teams doing this and a container for each. One of the Miss USA girls found one, came back up, chatted briefly with the Fogal dad, began to swim away and HE REACHED INTO HER CONTAINER, GRABBED THE ITEM AND SWAM AWAY!

But early in the first episode, the Fogal dad rationalized all the crappy stuff he was going to do (or had done, who knows how these things are filmed). He said (and I’m paraphrasing here), well, it was a competition for a lot of money, and he was going to treat it like one, so if that means a little lying or other stuff the Bible sort of maybe mentions that people shouldn’t do, it’s ok and he’ll do it, because he knows Jesus will forgive him.

And there it is. Christianity’s giant loophole, where you get to be a total asshole and treat everyone like shit, but hey, it’s fine, man, I’m forgiven, so I’m a smug asshole, too.

Anyways, it’s hard to imagine the Air Force team – which has been kicking serious ass so far – will win (tv shows need a twist, right?), but right now I don’t see how they can’t. They’ve got a great balance of intelligence, stamina, teamwork and discipline. But, hell, they probably get railroaded by the Fogals.

And also, Brown family, I think it’s cool that you got on the show and everything, and I don’t want to pick on your weight, but did you really thing you had a chance of winning the thing? It’s an adventure/treasure hunting show. Like Indiana Jones. Who would have died five minutes into his first movie if he was as big as you guys. Sorry.

Since getting cable service from Comcast a couple months ago, I’ve had a single free HBO channel, HBO East. It had a halfway decent line-up, although recently it put The Perfect Man in heavy rotation, and to paraphrase David Cross, I’d rather hear the death rattle of my only child than see the opening credits of that movie.

I never knew if it was an accident or one of the “Here’s a taste, don’t you want more?” teases. Last night I turned the tv on and it was gone, soon after the season premieres of Deadwood and Entourage. =( Well hello there, Azureus, how have you been?

The gallery is back. Lazyest Gallery was incrediby easy to set up and install. Highly recommended. Of course, there aren’t any new photos yet, so here is a cell-phone pic of my friends’ daughter Gwen.

This website grapher is pretty cool. Mine turns out to be pretty boring. Look at all the crap WordPress crams into the <head>.