Monthly Archive

Ever try to shine a little light on something only to find that anything you say is completely overshadowed — possibly by the mind of listeners or readers who effectively place themselves into an eclipse? It happens. Even so, like the sun eclipsed by the moon, if we keep trying then maybe we can get through to those who are receptive.

Today some people experienced a solar eclipse, an image of which is seen here. Interestingly enough, people’s belief systems kicked into high gear today. Associated Press reports that a newspaper in India “advised pregnant women not to go outside during the eclipse to avoid having a blind baby or one with a cleft lip.” Also, “food cooked before the eclipse should be thrown out afterward because it will be impure and those who are holding a knife or ax during the eclipse will cut themselves.”

How’s that for superstition? Reminds me of The Simpsons episode last night where Homer wound up in some country acting as a missionary trying to convert people to Christianity. It was hilarious actually, but I won’t go there…

Instead I’ll leave you with the sage words of Mr. Stevie Wonder, from his song Superstition:

“When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way. No, no, no.”

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Here’s a list of our available Wordpress plugins:
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Around the United States thousands upon thousands of Latinos are marching in protest against proposals for changes in immigration laws and the potential treatment of immigrants who are already in the country, even if “illegally.”

What struck me about this issue is the history of the United States. In reality, the Europeans and others who came to the United States hundreds of years ago all came here “illegally.” They were not invited, nor necessarily welcome. They took it upon themselves to overrun an entire nation to commit genocide and other horrendous crimes against natives and at the same time brought another race of people along whom they enslaved. The bottom line is that the entire country was founded by bunch of racist elitist illegal immigrant criminals.

But some several hundred years later it’s a different story. This reminds me of Heinz’s Dilemna. Read this and think about what you would do:

A woman was near death from cancer. One drug might save her, a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The druggist was charging $2000 for the cure — ten times what the drug had cost him to make. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money but he could collect only about half of what it the druggist charges. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or to let him pay later, but the druggist said no. The husband became desperate and broke into the man’s store to steal the drug for his wife. Should the husband have done that? If so, why? If not, then why not?

So, what’s your answer? Post a comment to share your thoughts.

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There are roughly 275 million people in the United States, and 37 million of them live in poverty. That’s 13.45 percent. Meanwhile the United States gives BILLIONS of dollars to other countries for a variety of purposes, including money for them to build up their militaries and “nucular” arsenals. I find it so very hard to understand this mentality.

The neoconomy stinks to high heaven and all the way back down into the bowls of hell. The talking heads say the “conomy is improvin” and that job growth is happening. But what they don’t tell you is that most new jobs created are rock bottom wage jobs — e.g. flippin’ McPoison burgers and stocking shelves at Wally World.

Meanwhile the big powerful rich companies (many of which are posting record profits) are outsourcing more and more jobs overseas where they can get the same work done for a fraction of the cost. In fact, Dell Computer just announced that they’ll hire an additional 10,000 people in India to staff call centers and testing labs and of course Dell enjoys the huge profits back in the USA without giving much back to the people who afford them their advantage.

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More weird weather: In the USA spring is now on hold as snow falls on the midwest and high winds and rain rip through the south. Meanwhile in Queensland Australia a category 5 cyclone - one of the worst in decades - tore ashore leaving hundreds homeless and countless others without essential services. Check out the ABC News video report for more info.

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Adobe, (formerly Macromedia), said that critical security vulnerabilities were found in its Flash, Shockwave, and Breeze software, and the holes could let the bad guys take control of your systems. Time to update your browser plugins. If you use Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, or other modern browsers then your system is very likely to be at risk. Here’s the notice and download page.

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Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day. Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way. Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town, waiting for someone or something to show you the way. [...More...]

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NOTICE: This plugin has been retired. If you really, really, think you need it so bad that you’re willing to send email in an attempt to talk someone into giving you a copy then fire off a message to subscribers-only [at] edwards (dot) org stating the reason you want it and how you intend to use it.

This (now retired) plugin is designed for Wordpress 1.5 and later (although it might work earlier versions.) It lets you hide parts of posts from readers who are not logged in. No template modifications are required. Read the rest of this entry »

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While I make my supper I thought I’d toss out some comments about that Da Vinci Code book. I’m still amazed when I see news stories about it or hear people talking about it. For some very, very strange reason, some people don’t seem to register that it’s fiction. Read that last word again: Fiction. When people place any amount of faith in fiction as fact then that is the exact moment that fiction becomes garbage and the mind becomes a trashcan. One of the worst things we can do is lie to ourselves. Believing something without verifying it is to lie to one’s self. . . Read the rest of this entry »

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We’ve just released the Subscribers-only v1.0.2 plugin for Wordpress. Plans for an upcoming version were made known too. Want to charge your readers for access to your content? It’ll be possible with this plugin, and it’ll be very easy to implement! Read about it on the Subscribers-Only Plugin page.

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Sometime in the next few days Mozilla will release Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1 (2.0a1). Let’s hope they fix the memory problems! Some new features that will appear in the alpha release include improvements to the “Places” infrastructure, extension blocklisting for those extensions with security problems, a search plugin format changeover, spell-as-you-type for English, an Atom feed parser, and improved feed detection. By the time 2.0 is released in its final version later this year it’ll also have anti-phishing technology. The current anti-phishing technolgy being tested is developed by Google…
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Spring has sprung. But don’t tell that to everyone who is still experiencing snow and other weird unseasonable weather — what’s up with the weather these days anyway? Freak floods and torrential rains, blizzards, droughts, massive hurricanes, terrifying tornados, everywhere around the world people are experiencing one or more of these things. Or haven’t you noticed?

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I like Firefox Web browser, but ever since the release of 1.5 versions it has become a memory pig in a big way. In previous versions of Firefox it handled memory differently. These days it’s a full-blown hog!

Some say it has memory leaks, and other say that the “memory leaks” are not really memory leaks but instead are the result of “features.” LOL ! What kind of “feature” requires 300MB of memory?

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The plugin lets you mark posts for subscribers-only. You define which roles are allowed to read subscriber-only posts. In order to read posts marked for subscribers-only a person much register at your site and login.

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The comedy never ends!

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann named Bill O’Reilly the “Worst Person in the World” for the second year in a row. O’Reilly apparently blew a fuse when a caller to his show, Mike Stark, referred to Olbermann on the air. O’Reilly immediately cut him off completely and then said he had Stark’s phone number and that “Fox Security” would pay him visit!

Can you image it? A knock at your door, “knock knock.”

You respond, “Who’s there?”

The answer comes, “Fox Security.”

You respond again, “No really, who’s there?”

The answer comes back again, “Fox Security, and his name isn’t No’Really, it’s O’Reilly!”

You then fall down ROFLYAO and then get up to run and grab your video camera. . . ‘cuz that’s gonna make a fantabulous vidcast for your Web site!!!

You can listen to O’Reilly’s response to Stark with the Flash player below.

[display_podcast]

This clip is courtesy of Stark, who posted it at his “Callingallwingnuts” Web site. He apparently subscribed to O’Reilly’s premium service in order to get access to the unedited clip — e.g. this clip was not aired and was instead edited out of the live broadcast.

Hey, remember when the circus only came to town once a year and the whole family piled in the station wagon to go into town to see it? Those were the days.

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Space.com is reporting that scientists have discovered a gigantic crater in Egypt — the largest seen so far in the Sahara! According to the report:

The crater is about 19 miles (31 kilometers) wide, more than twice as big as the next largest Saharan crater known. It utterly dwarfs Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is about three-fourths of a mile (1.2 kilometers) in diameter.

Researchers at Boston University (Farouk El-Baz and Eman Ghoneim) discovered the crater in satellite images, however they aren’t sure when the impact occurred.

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Now this is funny. The Star-Telegram reports:

Bill O’Reilly, host of The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, was miffed when the campaigning John Kerry skipped his show and headed straight for The Daily Show couch. O’Reilly admitted, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that he “took it personally.”

“I mean, you’ve got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night . . . .” he told Stewart, apparently a little irritated by the slight. “Eighty-seven percent are intoxicated when they watch it.”

(It was later pointed out that, according to Nielsen Media Research, Daily Show viewers are better educated than O’Reilly’s audience - more likely to have completed four years of college.) [...]

Talk about eating crow…

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Jupiter has a “new red spot.” The spot began forming in 2000 so it’s not exactly new. Well OK, in comparison to the possible age of the solar system it’s new. Anyway, Space.com writes that “red junior” started to appear “when three smaller spots collided and merged.” Even without the red spots Jupiter is one very strange planet.

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If you like easy listening music, or maybe if you’re a Pink Floyd fan then check out David Gilmour’s latest masterpiece. It’s due out real soon.

You can listen to some cuts from it and see some video from the studio during recording sessions at his Web site, davidgilmour.com. There are a lot of great guitarists, but none of them compare to David Gilmour in my humble opinion. “The work” he does is absolutely amazing and beautiful.

He’ll be on tour in Europe as well as in the USA and Canada but so far it doesn’t look like the tour will bring him near where I live.

So I wish I was there.

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This is a picture of a chocolate raspberry cheesecake. I made it, and it tastes SO good. Very easy recipe. Just smash one package of grahams, mix with a stick of melted butter and maybe 1/4 cup of sugar. Press that into a pan — spring form pan if you have one. Then mix two 8oz. packages of cream cheese with 2 eggs and another 1/2 cup of sugar, plus about 1/3 to 1/2 cup of cocoa powder.

Pour the mix into the pan and bake it at about 325 - 350 degrees for maybe an hour. When a knife or toothpick comes out clean then it’s done. If you want your cheesecake to be more moist then put a pan of hot water in the oven while you bake the cake. The water will help keep that cake moist and prevent the top from cracking too much.

Get a package of frozen raspberries, I guess about 8 to 16 ounces. Cook them in a pan with a cup of sugar until the mixture thickens. To test it, get a little bit on a spoon, let it cool, and if it sets up sort of like jelly then it’s good to go. Pour that over the cheesecake and refrigerate it until cool — typically overnight. Then try not to eat it all in one sitting. Good luck on that latter part!

For a real kick try a cup of hot chocolate with cayenne pepper in it. Just put little pepper at time, taste testing it along the way to make sure you don’t put too much. If you like spicy stuff then I bet you’re gonna love hot-hot chocolate.

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The other day I read a quote by W.C. Fields. The guy comes off basically like a sour-puss and in general I don’t necessarily like his style of comedy — each to their own.

But this particular quote struck me because it was spot-on for how I felt that day:

“Start out each day with a smile and get it over with.”

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About? It’s about time.

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