Four weddings and two funerals

That's the total number I've been to of my own free will (so not counting the weddings of relatives my parents dressed me up for and dragged me along to as a child). It's a pathetically low number for somebody my age, but there's a simple explanation. Some time ago I stopped going to weddings or funerals, and for the same reason: I hate it when somebody else is the center of attention.

Tuna

Chicken of the sea:








Tuna of the land:

George vs. George: A philosophical question

My son's kindergarten class is learning about US presidents this week and my son, not yet grasping the idea that people don't live forever, asked me "How come George Washington is dead but George Bush is alive?"

And to be honest, I really didn't have a good answer for him...

Missing Words

There are some words in the English language that don't have the opposites you would normally expect: for instance, "Inept"; "Disgruntled"; and my favorite, "Unkempt".

This post doesn't really have a point. I just wanted to say that I would be a l0t more gruntled in my life if my son was more ept at keeping the house kempt.

Does Tom Cruise Walk? A Defence of Stationism

There is an insidious movement afoot intended to deceive our children. I'm talking about the claim that movie stars such as Tom Cruise walk all by themselves. This so-called Theory of Ambulation is being foisted on our kids, and it's time we Stationists fought back.

Now at first sight the Theory of Ambulation idea seems seductive, but ask yourself this: Have you ever seen Tom Cruise walk? Many people will say, "Of course! I saw him walk in Top Gun, and he did a bunch of walking in Mission: Impossible too." But look more closely at the evidence. What you actually saw in Top Gun was a lot of separate pictures, each showing a stationary Tom Cruise in slightly different positions. Yes, it looks convincing when you see a movie, but that's because somebody went to a lot of trouble to arrange those pictures in a certain order and then flash them in front of your eyes extremely quickly to deliberately create the illusion that he's walking. It's all a conspiracy, artfully designed to hide the truth!

So if Tom Cruise doesn't really walk, how do we explain the pictures? There are two possibilities. One is that Tom Cruise was found by chance in all those positions by some photographer who took the pictures and arranged them to make a "walk". Of course, it's obvious to everybody that the probability against random changes in his position somehow ending up in a "walk" is astronomical, so we can readily dismiss this theory.

That leaves only one logical possibility: In between each picture of Cruise that you see, some external agency adjusts his position. The resulting sequence of pictures is what we mistake for walking. Now, I'm not saying that the external agency is God... but I'm not saying that it isn't.

In light of this disturbing evidence, isn't it only reasonable that Stationism be given equal time in our schools alongside the Theory of Ambulation?