May 2013
21 posts
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Memo to the US: We may have the one of the best freight rail systems in the world but it’s terrible for passenger travel. I’ve taken trains all over the world, in first world countries and developing ones and I’ve never been bounced around as much as on this Amtrak train from Tampa to DC. I’d compare it to the 3rd world but any comparisons would be unfair because the 3rd...
“Following in the footsteps of former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum,...”
– Anyone regret slashing National Weather Service budget now? (via wilwheaton)
I seem to recall going on a twitter tirade about this. Could Republicans please stop trying to kill the National Weather Service? So many more lives would have been lost without all the advance warning.
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John Piper and Tornadoes, 2.0
One of the first blog posts I ever did on this incarnation of my blog was about John Piper’s insensitive comments after deadly tornadoes.
He’s at it again. This was tweeted at 11:58 pm on Monday, just hours after scores of people were killed in Oklahoma.
“Your sons and daughters were eating and a great wind struck the house, and it fell upon them, and they are dead.” Job...
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The one thing you should never ask a homeschool...
The local paper does stories on all of the high school graduations, and where the stories for the other school graduations follow the same formula—mention something from the speaker, go with a few quotes from graduates about going out into the world, the homeschool support group graduation story includes quotes from kids talking up homeschooling as a concept.
Don’t ask that question...
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What other fandom would a bunch of people accidentally get sent the season DVD with the season finale a week early and not have the whole plot plastered all over the Internet and the video on torrent? I didn’t even have to make an effort to avoid getting the Doctor Who finale spoilered. I guess all the River Song “spoilers” lines over the years sank in.
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Just watched the season finale of Arrow. So good. So many feels. If you didn’t watch the first season, go back and watch it now that all the shows are going into hiatus for the summer.
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Pawns in the culture war
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes — Morpheus, The Matrix
In the few days since I wrote my post about what I strongly suspect is HSLDA’s litigation...
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Nothing disappears from the Internet
I google myself from time to time to keep track of what’s out there with my name on it. In searching the other day, I came across a post that I had written on the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood discussion listserv back in college. I forget exactly why I had joined the group, I think because I was writing some sort of paper for doctrine on something related to submission and...
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Moi
If you’ve new to my blog by way of my homeschooling and HSLDA posts, welcome. Although I’ve been blogging on it a good bit lately, the homeschool stuff is a relatively minor subset of what I write about. Like most things on here, I started out mostly writing about it for myself because I’ve never really sat down and thought through my experiences. I’m pretty sure though that when you’re six years...
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Of fundamental rights, HSLDA, and homeschooling
I wasn’t planning on writing more about HSLDA but I was talking to my mom today about HSLDA’s refusal to do anything about child abuse and how it made absolutely zero sense to defend abusers. As I moved on to talking about how I feel that they’re using the Romeike family as pawns in their effort to establish homeschooling as a fundamental right, something dawned on me.
Notice...
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How do you even parody a song about a thrift shop?
Yesterday I posted about the rather horrible Christian knock-off of Mackelmore’s “Thrift Shop,” and made the aside that it wasn’t a parody because it wasn’t any sort of commentary on the original. That got me thinking, is it even possible to parody a hipster rapper who’s singing about shopping at thrift stores ironically? Trying to parody that seems like...
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You know what we need? A Christian version of...
No, just no. I mean, there’s even an unironic side-hug reference. Back in the olden days, the church was a driving factor in creating music and art. Today, we’re unironically ripping off hipster rap—and no, this isn’t a parody because it’s not any sort of commentary on the original. It’s time to do better and actually make good art.
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Can we all just agree now that Rule 34 should stay...
Because as hilarious as this Bravo Watch What Happens Live clip of Alyson Hannigan and Zachary Quinto being asked to guess whether picture thumbnails are from ordinary sci-fi fan art or the Rule 34 variety is, something just feels wrong when this shit escapes the dark and disturbing corners of the Internet. Like, this is the sort of thing that is supposed to stay on Deviant Art and the brony...
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HSLDA and child abuse
I’ve made no secret that I don’t exactly have the most positive opinion about the Homeschool Legal Defense Association’s brand of religious fundamentalism but I never thought that HSLDA was covering for and protecting child abuse. For all of their scare tactics, and for as much as I think that a legal defense organization is unnecessary in a post-Tim Tebow world, I always assumed...
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Eisenhower Anti-Gay Executive Order Turns 60 →
Just a friendly little history lesson about the real-world consequences of discrimination. Eisenhower’s executive order banning LGBT people from the federal civil service happened 60 years ago this month. For the most part, the ban went away in 1975, but it wasn’t officially done away with completely until 1995 when Clinton was president.
Flashing forward to the present, I...
April 2013
23 posts
6 tags
Heads up
Sometime in the next week or so some of what I’ve written here, as well as some new material, will be posted on the Homeschoolers Anonymous blog. You may be asking why, when I’ve already gone on record that my homeschooling experience was largely positive, I’m contributing to a site that chronicles some of the problems that people have had with the homeschool subculture.
The...
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Wake me up when final exams are over. Wait, that won’t work if I just sleep through everything. Oh well, get back to me in a week or so and I’ll be much happier.
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#CNNFail
I get a lot of my breaking news from Twitter, since I’m not really around a TV much during the day. Last summer when I was traveling around Asia, Twitter was my news link to what was happening back in the US. Twitter can be incredibly useful in some situations—I found out the Bin Laden was dead before the traditional media was running the story, among other things, but it’s also...
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Fear
And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows. — Matthew 10:28-31
We...
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Irony
The Daily Beast has a story about homeschooled kids who have grown up and are blogging about their negative experiences. I didn’t have the kind of negative experiences that those kids had, although I’ve definitely seen the kinds of problems that the article discusses. I think most of us who have grown up in homeschool circles have seen the problems and have stories we could...
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One more thing
A few days ago I wrote a post on what I would like to tell straight Christians. The following is a followup expanding some of the ideas I touched on in that post, particularly more of what is behind my frustration with people trying to force “Washed and Waiting” on anyone in the Church who has found the strength to come out.
—-
Most of the time I’ll give bad theology a pass. I know it’s...
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youknowyoureafloridianwhen:
North Miami mayoral candidate says someone is using Vodou on her
Oh my. Living in Florida is nothing if not entertaining (also known as the reason I bought Carl Hiassen novels when feeling homesick living abroad—they reminded me of home).
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About that whole FEMEN "Topless Jihad" thing
I haven’t commented on any of the FEMEN topless protest stuff in Eastern Europe because I don’t particularly understand the point of protesting topless and figured that maybe it’s just a cultural thing that I don’t get. I did kind of get Amina Tyler’s decision to do the photos she did in Tunisia because if you feel like people are going all modesty police on you and...
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"Stop telling us to read Wesley Hill," and other...
I’m really tired of writing about this stuff, I feel like I’m beating a dead horse, but because I don’t want to cut tons of people out of my life I keep seeing things pop up on Facebook that frustrate me. Here then, is my stock response that I think I will just turn into copypasta or linkspam. I’m tired of debating people but I feel like I’m derelict in my duty to let...
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March 2013
21 posts
1 tag
Well, that is something to consider...
Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t write that parody of bad fanfic turned best-selling novel after all. Then again, if my stories become famous enough that I end up tied to those characters to the rest of my life, I’d be hating the world I created while rolling in dough, which would certainly cushion the blow. Then again, if James Franco can do Rule 34 Star Trek Kirk/Spock slash and call it art,...
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A few years back I was tossing around the idea of writing a chick lit parody until I read a ton of chick lit as research and decided that it was so over-the-top that it was un-mockable self-parody. I think that I’m going to give another go at it, but throw in some leather and whips and sell it as an e-book. I figure the more over-the-top and absurd I make it, the more people will eat it up...
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The Nielsen Family is Dead →
swordgirl:
Haven’t gotten a chance to read this yet, but it sounds promising.
We were a Nielsen family when I was little. The Nielsen guy came to our house a bunch of times before he finally convinced my parents to be a Nielsen family. They stuck the Nielsen box in a really nice wicker picnic basket because that was supposed to make us not notice that it was there so that we wouldn’t...
