When confronted with Creationist thinking, I am always amazed at the zeal with which the practioners jam square pegs into round holes -- a militantly strict Biblical interpretation of natural history. Why are Creationists so quick to give god so little credit? Evolutionism and the Big Bang theory offer ample evidence of powerful, undeniable forces at work, an endlessly emerging intelligence that exists whether we understand it or not. If god exists, and if god is all-knowing and all-powerful, what does it matter if the universe and everything in it was created 6000 years in a poof of divine magic, or if it evolved over millions of years. Why would time matter at all to god? It's not like he wears a watch. God is not threatened by Evolution. Creationists are.
Bob Rhubart: Humor. Opinion. Comment. Rants. Neurosis. Sometimes all at once.
Friday, December 19, 2003
Friday, December 12, 2003
This Yahoo news story reminds of a company I worked for many years ago. One Christmas, after years of never receiveing any kind of holiday cheer, my colleagues and I were surprised to find a $30 bonus in our pay envelopes. Not a lot, but it was a step in the right direction, and we were grateful. But the next week there was a note in our pay envelopes. It turns out that the bonus was only supposed to be $15, so the company deducted the $15 balance from our checks.
Sometimes all you can do is laugh.
Thursday, July 03, 2003
The greatest nation on earth, and this is how we spend our time? No wonder there are people gunning for us. Fun's fun, but loading a car with thousands of dollars worth of high-end audio gear to play a few seconds of a single tone raises the bar on stupid, pointless activity.
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
Ananova: Celebrities: "Michael Jackson has burst into the office of his local Congressman wearing a Spiderman mask - to complain about the lack of fast-food restaurants near his Neverland ranch."
If this story involved any other celebrity, I'd think it was horse poop. But Michael Jackson is the Chuck Yeager of weird, so the idea of him bursting into a politician's office demanding to know about fast food really doesn't carry the shock value one might expect.
Really, Jacko in a Spiderman mask is less frightening than Jacko without the mask. The guy has had himself surgically tranformed into a B-movie version of an alien. Kind of a cross between LaToya and one of those little dudes from the final scenes in "Close Encounters." That nose stopped having anything to do with human anatomy long ago.
It's like this: Imagine that Jacko had a special machine built that would make him look like Diana Ross. And imagine that ten minutes in this machine would make Ernest Borgnine look like Diana Ross. Michael Jackson looks like he lived in that machine for several months, emerging as a hyper-Diana. An Extreme Supreme. And he has kids. An army of psychiatrists won't keep those kids from one day showing up on a roof with a rifle.
Tuesday, February 25, 2003
A very interesting article on the holes in the music industry's case against file sharing.
Think of how business -- any business -- was being conducted in 1990. Now think of how business is conducted today. Technology in general and the Internet in specific have changed the business world in profound ways. The problem with the music industry isn't file sharing and MP3s, it's that for some reason they stopped flipping over their calendar pages back when we were trying to kill Saddam the first time.
A recent TV news story mentioned that there are five major record labels. Five. And how many radio stations are left? With precious few exceptions (thank god for KPIG!) you can visit any city in the US and you'll swear your radio is picking up the same shopworn, homogenized crap you left town to escape.
Is it an evil conspiracy? Not really. It's business. But it's business that's clinging to what was, with no thought for what can be. The future of the music industry is indeed in question. To be more precise, it's the "industry" part that's headed into the tank. The music will thrive in its absence, and people will make money -- without the need for the record companies that are currently making so much noise.