Raf

Trying to catch up on the shows I never quite got into. Batwoman. The last seasons of Supergirl. Superman and Lois (which seems to be pretending it was never part of the Arrowverse, which is fine).

Ok, the broken toe was too easy. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. It's when Aragorn kicks the burnt orc's helmet and lets out a howl that was not in the script.

What is wrong with you? Here's how you handle that: "Oh, I see. Sorry about that. Thanks for clearing it up." And then "Please stop it"? You should have followed that advice first instead of acting like it's on the rest of us. It's on you. You said something incorrect. You were corrected. You doubled down. You were corrected again. THAT'S ON YOU, not us. And if you have a problem with continuing the discussion, ending the discussion is on you too. We're not children. Stop treating us like we are. ... Whatever, Next. ... A funny thing happened to the copyright on this series of movies. Someone accidentally left the copyright notice off the original. At the time, that put the movie in the public domain and cost the producers $millions. A handful of movies are considered official sequels, with the same director and writer. There are other movies that serve as sequels, the first of which was written by a co-writer of the original. The two writers amicably agreed to distinguish their sequels from each other by the inclusion or omission of a single word in the title of each. A handful of current TV series owe their existence to the original (and the failure to copyright it).

You're thinking of Kids. It's not Kids.

Apologies. I forgot that I was in the middle of a move. I'm out of actors whose names you'd recognize, save the lead anti-tagonist and his adversary (the good guy). They are played by, in no particular order: Peter Sarsgaard Hayden Christensen

"Doctor, I'd like to kiss you goodbye." "All right. But you're so damned ugly." *** "Chalk up another victory to the human spirit."

Fair enough, OldSkool. I won't beat the dead horse. We all know where I'm coming from.

Ok, THIS one cannot go unchallenged. You might be able to make this assertion of the gospels were written a day after the events recorded therein, or even a year. But it was decades later, by which time the majority of those named were dead (and many were not named at all). Wierwille's assertions were contemporaneous in comparison. Add to that the face that some of these characters are impossible to find because we have their first names only, and some came from places that don't actually exist (Indiana Jones and the Quest for Arimathea), and there's literally no way to verify the overwhelming majority of what happened in the gospels. The BEST you've got from history is that John the Baptist, Herod and Pilate actually existed and would have been in the position to see and do what is recorded in the gospels. No record that they actually DID those things, but that's only a problem for the Herod story. Dang near indisputable? Hardly.

The lead actor on this series had a history of not wanting to work with better-looking actors. The role of his sidekick was written for a teen heart throb type of actor, but when the lead objected, the part was rewritten for another actor, with whom the lead had collaborated on his previous well-known, long-running series. * In the series finale, the sidekick gets a look at his life thirty years in the future. He is told that he lived that long because he gave up smoking. Tragically, the actor who played him was a heavy smoker who died of lung cancer before the final episode aired.

WordWolf should go next because he had the other correct answer: They have never been in his kitchen. I am sure Cliff and Alex would approve.

Seriously?

Ben Affleck Dogma Salma (sigh) Hayek

5 is What's My Line 6 is Hollywood Squares

Each one was pregnant when they accepted their award

By design

Meanwhile WordWolf knows I know the answer. I love it.

Crazy People

Ok, seriously, everyone who was there for the original Mike wars, is this what I looked and sounded like? Wow.

So glorious to witness a Mike War and not be IN the damned thing. Some passing thoughts, most if not all of which I have already expressed elsewhere. 1. The Bible is not the Word of God. The Bible is not "a" book. It's a collection of writings. As such, it lacks the cohesion and self-awareness to call itself "The Word of God." It never makes the claim. It's not even an "it"; it is a "they." Every time the Bible mentions the Word of God, it is quite clearly not referring to itself. 2. PFAL can only be "God-breathed" if PFAL is wrong about what "God-breathed" means. 3. Declaring that something has "stood the test of time," whether that thing is PFAL or the Bible, is a joke. It's only stood the test of time because "you" ignore that it has not. The more closely you look at the Bible, the more it falls apart as science, history, morality, etc. 4. There really IS a hidden message in PFAL, one I've raised numerous times. It's not that PFAL is God-breathed. It's that Wierwille concocted his entire scheme AFTER concluding that the Bible was all bunk. He no longer believed the words Holy or Bible on the cover. It was all a grift from there on out. I tell you, the more I look at his life, the more that makes total sense. :)

Not very good news. It means the storm sits still for hours and hours, weakening, yes, but starting as a major hurricane and pounding away until it's out of energy. It would be one thing if it moved, like Wilma did, bang-pow-out-of-town. But this one is just going to sit there for hours upon hours until it's out of steam. That's no relief to anyone except those who WOULD be in its path if it kept moving forward (Georgia and South Carolina are projected to get a Tropical Storm out of this).

I hate to say this (and end up agreeing with Mike), but I totally agree. I think the concept of the "absent Christ" is much ado about nothing. If he's not absent, why y'all looking forward to his return? The problem I see with the "absent Christ" is that it's not a Biblical term. The Word never claims to take the place of the absent Christ. Rather, the Word IS Christ, and it is how he maintains his presence while we await his bodily return. One thing I remain proud of is my effort, those many years ago, to distinguish between what I thought Wierwille got right and what he got wrong, using the Bible as a measuring stick. Sometimes I was right and sometimes I was wrong, but I never rejected something just because VPW said it. I'm not trying to give people whiplash here, and I apologize if that's the result. Take my comment with all the salt you need. My point is that the absent Christ, in context, wasn't the outrage ex-Way critics made it out to be. At worst it was a poorly worded attempt to magnify the Word of God. In my humble opinion.

So at this point it looks like I'm on the outskirts of this storm. It won't be great for us, but it could be a whole lot worse. I'm on the southeast coast of Florida, and this storm (Hermine? Ian?) Is headeded up the west coast of the state. That means a lot of wind and rain, but hurricane conditions? Ok, maybe...

By the way (no pun intended), if you had told me in 2002 that 20 years from now I would be an atheist and oldiesman would be a Catholic, I'd have said you were insane.

It was late August of 2012 when I confronted myself about my wavering faith. I was coming to terms with my sister's impending death (from ALS) and my son's autism diagnosis. A lot of people don't believe me, but those two issues did not lead me to doubt God. Rather, they exposed the doubt that was already in my heart. How? I remember asking people to pray for my sister, but I don't remember asking to pray for her healing. And not once did I pray for my son's deliverance from autism. Just for strategies and help coping. That's how I remember it, anyway. I could be mistaken. But I do know at some point in both those experiences, the notion of a miracle was not seriously entertained. I think one of the things people don't understand about losing faith is that it's not a decision. It's never one thing. It's a realization. Over a great deal of time I realized I was not praying the way I used to. Years of asking for something and getting nothing taught me to ask for nothing. The long, slow realization about the nature of the Bible could not be overcome. And, as a straw that broke the camel's back, my search for evidence that first century believers in a position to know for a fact that Jesus was raised went to their deaths rather than renounce that faith... turned up not a solitary shred of supporting evidence. I finally realized there was no longer any belief that I held that could qualify me as a Christian. I had to sort through my thoughts and feelings. Reject God outright? No, I would have to know EVERYTHING to know that (spoiler alert: that's bulls#!t). So I told myself I was agnostic. Then I realized that being agnostic is not incompatible with being atheist. One is a "lack of knowledge" claim. The other is a "lack of belief" claim. You could be both. Most atheists are. I eventually came to the conclusion that the agnostic/atheist dichotomy was not a discussion worth having. Most people don't subscribe to it, and you end up sounding defensive for no reason. When it comes to the existence of any god worth discussing, I am an atheist. Period. When it comes to the existence of some abstract concept of gotchagod, I'm agnostic, but only to the extent that such a god defies definition and testable attributes. Why am I not agnostic? Because Yawheh is a fictional character whose attributes changed over time according to what his creators needed for storytelling purposes, much like Superman and Captain America. He had a wife once. Israel went from recognizing many gods, of whom Yahweh was fiercely jealous, to acknowledging only one, which mad His jealousy wildly irrational. All those other gods? Oh, they didn't exist. Or they were demonstrations of Satan's power. Except Satan is an imaginary character too, whose attributes are comically vague. He bad. No good things. Accuser. Needs Yahweh's permission to murder Job's family. And Yahweh GRANTS IT. What the bloody... Anyway, back from THAT tangent. So now it's been 10 years. Now and then I feel an urge to explore some facet of what I once believed. Not often. For example, I believe the 12 are largely fictional characters. Not all of them. Peter, James and John were real. Judas was a fake. Paul (who certainly existed) refers to Jesus being seen of "the 12" not because Judas was still alive after the crucifixion, but because the story of his betrayal had not been made up yet. But they're just mental exercises at this point. My main concern with religion is that government stays out of its way and that it stays out of government's way. I guess we can say it's not a phase.

Great idea, George. We can all post map screencaps when storms emerge, but this is a great way to keep us posted all the time