House of the rising Moonglum

Nothing quite compares to Finnish Death Metal. LORDI will show you the way. The power of their song will show you the way. On the day of rockening none shall stand in the way of their angels. At the time of the Arockalypse they shall be the first Finnish band to win Eurovision.

So, now that we know who Lordi is, are they really Death Metal? Well, let’s ask the experts. Ugly? Check. Nordic? Check. D-e words? Demons, and bonus points for the day of Rockening. Singing from the bowels of your lungs? Hmm… Not so sure about this one. “Rock ‘n roll angels bring thyn Hard” is pretty top of the lungs, but “Rock Hallelujah” is straight from the bottom, or dare I say the BOWELS of the lungs. OK, Lordi counts as death metal.

Plus I love their costumes.

It appears that the astronomer for the Roman Catholic church has come out with a statement that Creationism is ‘a kind of paganism’. I assume that this sort of thing has to be run by the Pope before it gets released, so hopefully this actually is the stance of the Roman Catholic Church. “Religion needs science, just as science needs religion.” Now that’s the kind of old time bible story that I can really get behind.

While you’re at it, get the journalists who publish the leaked info as well.

My favorite line from the article?

“Mr. Gonzales said that the administration promoted and respected the right of the press that is protected under the First Amendment. ‘But it can’t be the case that that right trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity,’ he said.”

I could be wrong, but I believe what he is saying is, “Majority rules trumps the constitution.” I believe that is _exactly_ what the first amendment was supposed to protect against.

I have chatted with a number of people over the past few weeks about how the zoning laws work in the great city of Chicago. There are only very specific people who are allowed to request zoning changes. From 17-13-0303-A those people include the mayor, the aldermen, the commissioner of planning and development (the group that reviews the requests) and the person who actually owns the property in question. Then there are a bunch of disclosures, and the P&D committee makes it’s recommendations to the city council and they all vote yes on those recommendations. Err, I mean they carefully consider the matters with respect to the purpose of the zoning laws (17-1-0500 for those following along at home) and vote on whether or not the proposed changes meet those intents. In reality though, this is Chicago and you don’t piss in someone else’s yard. If an alderman puts forward a zoning change for their ward, you let that go through.

What this really ends up meaning is that if you can get your alderman to make the proposal for you, you win. Similarly if you propose a change and the alderman doesn’t want it, you lose. Suffice it to say, this gives the alderman a bit of power, and a lot of people complain about it. Generally though, people just fork over campaign donations and hope that helps their changes go through. The question then is, is your alderman corrupt, or just working the system? The Chicago Journal just had an interesting article which looks and some warning signs that your alderman may be corrupt. I have seen many complaints about my new alderman (Joe Moore, brought you Foi Gras ban) but one thing that I find refreshing about him is that he actually looks for community input on matters of zoning change. Now of course, it is part of the standard procedure for letters to be sent out to neighbors, but those tend to get “lost in the mail”, so I think this is a nice gesture. Of course the real question is whether or not he ever listens to their recommendation. That is something that I can not speak to.

I love conspiracy theories. I admit it. I love to read up on inconsistencies of public versions of stories and try to come up with theories that more accurately fit the data. Whenever there is a momentous time in our country’s life, there are people who will never believe the official story. Sometimes these people put pretty crazy stories out there. The grassy knoll. NASA not actually going to the moon. The latest of course are about 9/11. This was a truly traumatic time for the country and the people certainly wanted answers. The 9/11 commission was supposed to provide all those answers. Of course piecing together a catastrophe of this magnitude is a difficult process and there was no way they could get every detail correct. The more I read though, the more incongruencies I come across. This must be true since people will be looking for those small errors, and I wouldn’t expect the government to answer every single one, but some are more glaring than others.

In particular, given the information that we currently have access to, there are some real questions about how the attack on the pentagon happened. I find this particular conspiracy theory to be particularly annoying because there are a number of sources of information that could immediately answer those questions. Specifically there were a number of private cameras that captured the attack which the FBI immediately impounded and has been unwilling to show to the public for the past 5 year.

Well it looks like they have finally been prodded enough, and have decided to release the tapes. I haven’t seen these videos yet, but hopefully they will put this set of questions to rest once and for all. The thing I find particularly annoying about this one is that it is so easy to disprove. So the government should have either ignored it, or released the tapes. Instead they released three useless frames of video. I simply don’t understand why they would have done something like that. Either give full disclosure, or don’t disclose anything. Don’t do this trickle of info to keep the conspiracy theorists going, because that is all it does.

Step One: Give up privacy of communications records to the federal government.
Step Two: Use those records to track down who leaks by looking into the phone records of reporters who break stories about your breaking the law.
Step three: Run an accountability free government based in secrecy without any fear of leaks bringing your mistakes or crimes to the public eye.

Am I the only one that stands in awe of the violence that has been raging in Brazil? I have never heard anything about the PCC before, and it is unclear what their motivations are. But it really does remind of the bad old days in Colombia. Only without the financial motivations. And no popular support.

Just messed up. Another sign of the coming apocalypse.

Turns out that the 6.6.06 billboards popping up everywhere are advertisements for the upcoming Omen remake. Just thought you’d like to know.

(The problem with a new millennium is that you get a bunch of these, 1:23am 4/5/6 (or pm), 1/1/1, 2/2/2, 1/2/3, you get the idea. I remember when 8/8/88 happened, there were some old ladies who always got together on those dates for coffee even though they hadn’t seen each other in years. If they are still alive I hope they don’t live too far apart because they will be seeing a lot of each other this decade.)

You have to free your mind, so come on, check this out.

Things I learned today: My programming output quadruples when listening to Bon Jovi. I fear that it may shorten my life-span though because I can feel my fingers shaking and my heart is going a million miles an hour.

“My heart beats like a drum … and I’ll never let go cuz there’s something I know deep inside, you were born to be my baby, baby I was made to be your man.”

Due to a strange series of events, Ehud Olmert is now leading a new party in governing Israel. He is interested in continuing Sharon’s work in unilaterally withdrawing from contested Palestinian territories. They have started by having police evict illegal settlements. They have also reduce travel restrictions on Palestinians and have increased the number of permits for Palestinians working in Israel. We will see how many settlements he will be able to actually dismantle politically, but I think that in the long term this is the most viable solution for Israel. The three (main) things that could stop it from working now are Hammas doing something stupid, the Israelis not having the patience to see it through (this is a long term solution, and the violence will continue in the mean time), and political machinations that prevent the plan from being followed through on (there are powerful opponents to this plan).

But it is a step in the right direction.

I know the Claypool fans drank from the kool-aid bowl, but I still think he was a good shot at cleaning up the county at least a little bit. But now we are left with no one running the county. This was pretty much my worst case scenario. If he is still incapacitated come the next election, I wonder if they will run him again, or hand pick someone from their own ranks?

Ugh.

I was just reading an article on the Da Vinci Code move, and read two of the more interesting quotes on the whole thing that I have read in a while. The first has to do with Christianity and I think speaks to something of the prevalence of evangelical christianity making more noise than more mainstream groups:

“We are a Jesus-haunted culture that’s biblically illiterate” and harbors general “disaffection from traditional answers.”

Just earlier today I described some fellow Christians as “superstitious”, but I think I like the phrase “Jesus-haunted” better. The problem is combining that with biblical illiteracy and you end up with a bunch of people who think that having faith only requires saying certain words.

The other quote I liked has to do with the difference between fact and fiction:

“Merely because an author describes matters as being factually correct does not mean that they are factually correct. It is a way of blending fact and fiction together to create that well known model ‘faction.’ The lure of apparent genuineness makes the books and the films more receptive to the readers/audiences. The danger of course is that the faction is all that large parts of the audience read, and they accept it as truth.”

I was sitting next to someone on the plane last week who was reading the Da Vinci Code. I loved the book and he clued into that and kept asking me which elements were “true” and which were not. Since I am not an expert on art or architecture I just had to tell him that it was best to assume that most of it was fiction, but based in fact. If there was something he found interesting he was going to have to look it up when he got back. You see, the book isn’t truthful, it is truthy.

So, I have my banking set up so that most of my bills pay themselves automatically. Very helpful for things like not paying your rent late. Except this time for some reason they didn’t have my rent on time. So I looked up my rent check online. Well it turns out that for some reason, this time (but none of the previous three years), my landlord provided a partial match for an offshore money laundering organization. Don’t know quite how that works with a Chicago address, but there you go. Well, the bank cleared it on their own and sent the check on (with only minor delays), but I did have to call them up to find out what happened for my own edification. Your tax dollars at work. On the plus side, they offered right away to write a letter to my landlord explaining the situation if they were going to try to stick me with a late fee.

*heh*