So Much Relief

You know, whenever I have a really bad day, it's nice just to watch a video of someone doing something so stupid or screwing up so badly. It's not out of sadism or anything like that, I just think things like that are hilariously funny so it cheers me up.

I hope this video does that for someone:

15 Minutes of Shame

You guys, in your comments, should post videos that have done this for you.
But no stuff from failblog, because I have viewed every single page on that site. Literally.

The Familiar

Ha, that title totally sounds like a band name.

I have lived in the same house in Dallas, TX for 21 full years as of sometime next month, or at least my mom has. I have intermittently moved out because of college or stuff like that, but never for more than a few months. It's still my "home," if you know what I mean. Anyways, I was driving today and I realized something funny.
There's a stretch of highway about a half a mile from my house, one of the most important highways in the city. I am obviously very well-versed in this city, so you'd think that I drive over this stretch of highway all the time, especially since it's by my house. I often use this particular highway to get back to my house or go from my house, because it's just that close and is a major transit point.
Typically, though, I get off the highway to go to my house before I get to the part of the highway which is closest to my house. I exit right before this stretch coming from either direction, so I never drive over it.
Well, this week I'm staying at someone else's house nearby, but not close enough to take the same exit. So, tonight, driving back from Kristen's house, I had to drive over this one stretch of highway that I never see to get home.
It was like I had never been here before. Here was this major transit within walking distance of my house I had hardly ever seen before on a road I used almost daily for 21 years that was practically foreign soil.
It's amazing how something so close can be so unknown.
It reminds me that it is impossible to know everything about anything at all.
I could spend my entire life studying a speck of dust and never know every atom or what it was going to do next, much less an entire city.
It makes me excited.
I tend to get bored with things easily.
But there is such a possibility that the pursuit of knowledge is an infinite, endless pursuit. If you're actually a living breathing being, and not just an apathetic machine, every year and every holiday season and every visit to the town you thought you had pegged should change you and make you see something new.
You don't have to believe that Disney-esque crap about enjoying the small things or finding your own special personal peace. Stopping to smell the flowers is overrated, because flowers are far from the mot interesting things there are.
There are things within your range of sight this very second that are fascinating, and you haven't even considered it.

Don't ever call yourself my friend and say you're bored with life. I'm excited enough about little stretches of highway and wondering how scientists discovered that dogs enjoy the taste of dog food.

Being baffled and confused and lacking knowledge is fun.

Deep and Weird

Well, I hope all of you are enjoying your Winter Breaks.
I haven't blogged much lately, partially because of icky finals and mostly because my internet has been broken.
Stupid 'puter.
But, it is now fixed.
Also, check out my most recent link.
36 is thinking of doing "Worst Christmas Traditions" next year for the J. Alvin Christmas party, and fruitcake has a very strong chance of making the cut.

So, obviously, things are easier to destroy than they are to create.
It took me four hours to build my big, fancy LEGO house and ten seconds to smash it with my baseball bat.
So, in that sense, creation is more important and meaningful than destruction.
I think that creation is associated with goodness responsibility and destruction with badness and disorder.
But, at the same time, destruction is necessary because things decay.
Think about it this way:
If I built a house one day, and I made it entirely out of wood, then after 60 years or so, the wood would rot. I would then have to either remove the bad parts of the house, thus destroying, and add new ones, thus creating again or I would simply tear down the house and build a better one.
In that case, and in many cases, it seems that the purpose of creation is not only to make, but to make new and to make better.
So, think about it this way, God created our world with the intention for it to be good and to last forever, but he knew that sin would enter the world and corrupt all of these good things.
This made it possible for God to remake the world, thus keeping only the good things, which would be the parts of the house that stayed good after 60 years, and improve it.
So, destruction is only necessary because of the fall, but it also makes a greater and more powerful creation possible.
So, sin itself isn't a good thing, but God is so powerful that, by overcoming sin, he makes what is good even better.
The world is going to be remade.
There are things that suck.
But we have a lot to look forward to.
Isn't that neat?

*Ahem* It's been a while

Yeah, I took some down time from blogs because life was crazy.
Plus there's something about studying that makes me think less deeply.
Maybe that's bad.
Paper writing is very thought provoking, though, as it should be.

So, today I wonder about gambling.
I can't decide if I think it's a sin or not.

I went to Las Vegas once, and I think the most depressing thing I have ever seen was a woman in a wheelchair and on a respirator gambling what was probably insurance money for her healthcare at a slot machine. Gambling in this sense is very sinful because you are wasting your resources on an addictive and completely non-productive habit.

On the other hand, people do gamble for a living, and do so productively. Especially in like World Poker Tour and stuff like that, because those do, to an extent, require skill and hard work.
Obviously, things like this are not the most admirable jobs in the world, but being uninspiring is hardly a sin.

Gambling as a whole though is very destructive.
It results from a corrupted desire for money, and money that you "earn" from gambling is not exactly something you worked for.
The problem with this is that it gives money a value that it just doesn't deserve.

Money was originally created in order for people to specialize in certain things like making shoes or sewing and still have necessities such as food. One person provides something valuable at an efficient rate because they specialize in making that thing, then they supply that one thing for a large group of people. Therefore more things total are produced and produced better.
Money is used as a way to establish how much they deserve in return for their specialized contribution; in other words, money is a representation of the value of one person's contribution to society.

So, when gambling, either the casino or the gambler acquires more money.
Did either of them contribute something valuable to society?
No.
I mean, maybe entertainment. I certainly don't find gambling that entertaining, though.
So, it is a sin?
Ummm.... sort of.

People who gamble do so either because it's fun, or because they want to acquire money that they have not earned. In either case, it's selfish and destructive.
The greed and desire for money that must come before gambling is absolutely a sin.
Gambling itself might not be.
Sort of in the same way that sex can be good or sinful, depending on the context - marriage or not.
It's just that there are far less instances in which gambling is good and entertaining in a pure way.

BIG P.S. - Go check out the random link for this week. It's absolutely amazing.

My Life is Complete if Someone Buys Me This! ...not.

So, they have reached a new plateau of lame inventions:
The USB Toaster.

Plug it into your computer and you can put that picture of your dead Aunt Mary's left shoulder blade you've been saving right on your toast and eat it.
As cool as this thing is, I think everyone who actually spends whatever ridiculous price they charge for this item should be forced to spend an equal amount to a charity, just from sheer waste of money.
There are so many things that I feel guilty spending money on because I don't feel they're valuable - like textbooks - and I feel like so much of my life requires money. And I'm not talking about things of sentimental value, like flowers, because that's a great investment. If you at any point spend money for the good of someone else, like flowers, then that's amazing because it means you value that person's feelings more than money.
At the same time, however, money should be valued as a means of meeting basic needs for yourself and others. Keep in mind that money itself is not a need, it is merely a way of attaining needs. This was an idea invented by people so everyone could have different jobs and still eat.
Now we have rich people buying psychic toasters and poor people eating rice 3 times a week if they're lucky.
I'd much rather be the guy who first and foremost provided for his family, then helped provide for someone else and still sacrificed enough to buy his wife flowers.

I wouldn't even be able to eat a piece of toast with a picture on it, anyways.
Especially not if it was like a bunny or a baby or something.

Hmm, okay also because none of you read the little sidebar thing, I'm just going to start posting the joke of the week and the random link of the week and stuff as individual blogs...
Starting after I finish that major paper... heheheh.

Word Count

I'm curious: how many times have I ever spoken the word 'the?'
I'll bet it's tons of times more than obscure words like marmalade and insubordination, and more similar to other articles ('a' and 'an') or conjunctions and super common colloquialisms like 'and' and 'so' and 'like' and 'really.'
I mean, I probably speak multiple thousands of words a day, and articles and conjunctions plus pronouns and names are the vast majority of the words.

Now, think about this.
The English language, the largest language by vocabulary that has EVER existed, has over 1 million words, not including different conjugations of the words.
The average high school grad has an active vocabulary of 15,000 words. 30,000 is recommended to get a good score on the SAT, and most college/grad students have near 40-60,000.
The estimated variety of language in Shakespeare indicates that he knew and used 18-25,000 different words in his collected works. Now, he wrote some amazing stuff, with some words that make absolutely no sense to me. His writing speaks of a depth of knowledge of the use of the English language, and he uses some very creative verbs in unique ways, and I generally find that he uses words that I do not see every day, and were probably similarly uncommon in his time. He was actually the first person to write a serious work of literature in English, which was considered the lower class language of the time compared to Latin and French, the languages of the court and the nobility.
Now, my question is this:
Why does modern art and literature and poetry SUCK in terms of literary creativity!
I'm not talking about coming up interesting things to say, I'm talking about using creative ways to say them.
I mean, seriously, when was the last time you heard a song or a poem that wasn't about a woman who left you or gazing at the sky or crying tears of joy or sorrow or whatever?
You could probably come up with a list of 500 words that if they were removed from the English language, we wouldn't be able to communicate at all, especially songwriters!!
Although that might be nice, because then maybe Bono would stop talking.
Among them, boring, too-many-meanings verbs like : set, have, do, and go.
A language with a MILLION WORDS ought to provide us with a better way to express what we want to communicate than the 3-6% that we actually use.

Maybe that's why no one understands anybody else; we learn a certain amount of words and then stop learning how to communicate.

Catholic

So, I had a conference with a Roman Catholic speaker yesterday. He spoke on the Christian intellectual tradition.

For the record, I don't typically approve of Catholicism - partially because it screams of legalism to my angsty teenage mind, and partially because they put so much faith in their traditions and their strict lifestyles and so little emphasis on their passions.
I don't dislike Catholics, but I certainly feel like they are incredibly guilty of being hereditary Christians instead of choosing the faith intentionally. Obviously, there is some of this in evangelical and Protestant Christianity, as well, but it seems like the majority rather than the exception in Catholicism. Maybe this is just my perception instead of my knowledge.
Anyways, that's not the point.

I didn't agree with all that he said, but he responded to a question that I had in a very enlightened way.

All of you Jesus freaks who read this know that atheists and evolutionists and all of our non-Christian friends love to say that we don't have an objective point of view on science because we always look at stuff through our God perspective, so we can't ever say anything about science because we're biased.
I asked him whether or not our scientific approach was valid, that Christians can approach science from our point of view and still say something.

He responded by saying that while it is impossible to be truly objective, and that especially the atheists are not objective, the Christians were the ones who came up with the idea of objective point of view, and the ideals of science in the first place. People with faith in God are the only ones who can believe that the rules of the universe are consistent and unchanging, because God must have designed them that way. God is the only one who can break those rules, because He is all-powerful.

That makes so much sense to me. I think I'd heard it all before in separate parts, but hearing it all together so succinctly was just nice.

I know this post is really philosophical and up in the sky, but it's important to me to know this stuff.

I'll just rant on the wrongs of Catholicism later.