Bet you thought I would forget a day…HA! It goes a little something like this:

The California-based Church of Scientology was founded on the teachings of the late American science fiction (emphasis mine) writer L. Ron Hubbard. (Full Text)

What do YOU believe in?

Today’s thought has a nice Zen quality that can help calm the raging mind that this modern life afflicts most of us with.

There’s no fire like passion,

no seizure like anger,

no snare like delusion,

no river like craving.

-Dhammapada, 18, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Someone over at MetaBaby used one of our LlamaTails one that site. The site’s concept is interesting, in that, anyone can make a new page on the site and anyone can then edit that page. An interesting Internet art project, if you ask me. You didn’t ask me, but if you did.

A new g33ky Internet “sport” is making it way around development departments and IT groups around the world, it’s Googlewhacking.

Google’s index of web pages is the largest of all the major search engines. For most searches Google can return literally a million pages that matches your search term.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the keywords that return only one single result on Google. Gary Stock is busy finding these combinations in near obsessive-compulsive manner. So much so that he’s created a game, complete with rules, that he calls “Googlewhacking.”

Googlewhacking is simple. Find those search terms that return only a single result on Google. A few of his examples are, microsoft crenelation, orchestrator bamboozling, metronome dewpoint, and plectrum irradiation.

While writing on this new “sport,” I was able to uncover my own Googlewhack: Llama esemplastic. Of course now that I’ve written about it, as soon as google indexes this site again, it’ll no longer be a true whack.

Can you discover any Googlewhacks?

As a married man, I know well the value of complementing my wife’s appearance quite often. I find it strange that she thinks that I wouldn’t like the way she looks. Does she think that I would choose to spend my time with someone I don’t find attractive. Anyway, this quote caught my eye:

Whether the fashion is Twiggy or Kate Moss, most men don’t want skinny women. Those skinny models are found in women’s magazines, never men’s.

The full text of the article quoted above can be found here. I only wish women would pay attention to stories like this instead of that bullshit they’re reading in Cosmopolitan.

I read about this yesterday, but there’s more solid news today. Nearly 700 people died when a Nigerian Army armoury exploded. Many of the dead drowned as they waded into the nearby river to escape the flames. It appears that in the rush to make the armoury safer, the blast was triggered. This is just another example of cruel fate laying death and destruction at the foot of the African continent.

All of this famine and war and cruel fate, yet the countries of Africa are able to unite under at least one god: soccer. Witness the pageantry of the Cup of Nations in contrast with the parade of death in Lagos.

Gotta hand it to the sailors of the USS Greeneville, they know how to stay in the news. Leave it up to the guys who killed several Japanese sailors while showing off, to run into one of their own ships while they were trying to pick up what I guess were two naval uppity-ups. I’m not in charge of course, but the first thing I am doing is checking the front-end alignment on that sub.

My favorite part of the entire article is near the bottom, where the author nonchalantly mentions that

“In the summer, the Greeneville scraped the bottom of the harbor in Saipan, a Pacific island in the U.S. commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, while trying to maneuver.”

I’m sure this problem, like anything can be traced back to television. These guys are watching way too many reruns of McHale’s Navy.

One of my favorites of all time:

A little education

Is a dangerous thing

- John Milton

I am reminded of this quote by all the talking heads I see on the news programs these days. If you have ever been to Afghanistan or anywhere east of Iraq, you can be an expert on TV. And if you have even sang the Marine Corps Hymn, you are elevated to almost god-like status when CNN comes a-calling.

*Note: I guess no one noticed, but I misquoted Milton yesterday. It should be correct now.

The International Bible Society announced Monday that America’s best-selling modern Bible is about to get an update using gender-neutral wording, despite past criticism of that idea from conservatives.

Some changes include: “sons of God” to “children of God” in Matthew 5:9, and “a man is justified by faith” to “a person is justified by faith” in Romans 3:28.

Also, these changes will be included: “Jesus blessed him, though he would have blessed him even if he were a her because giving blessings have nothing to do with gender.”

“And God created Adam, not because he thinks men should be first, but because Eve wanted to be fashionably late.”

We haven’t touched on the spectacle of the Tyson-Lennox brawl and I sat down to write a little piece on it. In the course of my research, I found that Jim McCormick had already written a piece that says everything I was going to say. Of note in particular is Jim’s transcription of Tyson’s post-brawl bellowings toward the reporters in the room. Truly Classic.