Watching the tears stream down Tim Tebow’s face, that’s what.

Public school students in Texas, for their part, are more even-keeled. One student at a Dallas High School was quoted as saying, “Whatever. You know what I’m sayin’?”

Um … no. We have no idea what people in Texas are saying.

The first one is perfect for the Star Wars collector that has just about every action figure ever made. Yes, it’s a little known fact that Kenner came out with The Force action figure in early 1978. Like The Force, the Kenner version is an energy field that surrounds and penetrates all living things in the universe, and it’s a most valuable addition to your collection if still in the original packaging.

As every Star Wars geek knows, however, The Force comes in two distinct flavors. The Dark Side is known to have caused Anakin Skywalker to become the evil Sith Lord, Darth Vader – and Kenner is said to have released a limited production run of 128 Dark Sides between August and October 1978. I had two of these – both in mint condition, but I couldn’t resist temptation, so I opened one. Other than being disturbed by other’s lack of faith, I thought it worked out quite well.

Let me know if you see any other cool Star Wars toys, and I’ll keep you posted if I find more too!

There are times in your life that you have to engage in self-reflection. You know, that introspective soul searching we occasionally do in order to understand who we really are, what we want out of life, or just to get a bit more happiness or satisfaction out of life. Thankfully, Facebook can help. If you really want to dig deeply into the nooks and crannies of your personality, then consider taking a Facebook quiz or three. Be warned, some revelations may be unsettling.

First off, I wanted to validate my self-esteem and sense of identity, so I took the “What’s your ghetto nickname? quiz and the “What’s your Native American Indian name?” quizzes. Eerily, I found the results to be strikingly similar: “Stank Bug” and “Little Brown Cloud” respectively. Any close friend or family member can vouch for these results, and this told me I was clearly on the right path to a better understanding of me.

Next, I wanted to learn a bit more about my personality, so I took the “Which Harry Potter Character Are You?”, and “Which Tarot Card Are You?” quizzes. From the titles of these, I assumed they would speak to the aspects of my being that sincerely love and respect all things magical and wondrously mysterious about the world. Interestingly, I learned that I’m a forgetful geek like the Potter character “Neville Longbottom”, although I possess the “childish innocence” and “mystical cleverness bereft of reason” characterized by “The Fool”. Truly, I was getting somewhere. So I dove in and took quiz after quiz, popping through them like some ancient pac-man gobbling 8-bit dots.

I could recount all the wonderful and exciting things I learned, but that would take way more time than I want to spend. I’ll just hit some highlights: my hidden superpower is teleportation, my eyes say that I know how to fold a map correctly, I would most likely be arrested for helping a Harvard professor break into his own house, and I should probably move to Dublin.

Some Facebook quizzes don’t provide you with much actionable information. So my lightsaber is green, so what? Does it really matter that I’m not country, I’m as mature as a 15 year old, my emoticon is >=D, or I should get a patriotic pinup tattoo? Probably not. I learned that some of these quizzes are just there for fun. Seriously, I was surprised too, but there it is. Some people use Facebook as some kind of diversion rather than to become fully self-actualized.

So finally, inspired by my wife, I was able to come up with my own Facebook quiz. I thought it was time to give back, to provide something of equal or greater value than what I was able to receive from going through countless other quizzes. I created something that would let us peer deeply into ourselves, and determine how we really see the world. Of course, everyone should take the new “Which Photoreceptor Are You?” quiz today. You’ll be surprised at how similar we all are.

The other day I was thinking how awesome it would be if everything revolved around me. Seriously, if I were the center of the universe, then all problems – worldly and otherworldly – would take a back seat to my own. When I moved, I would move the universe. When I shake, I would shake the universe. Each time I would fart, a new brown nebula would be born.

Early humans had a similar desire – to not only matter, but to be VERY IMPORTANT. Indeed, some went so far as to codify our self importance into our religious beliefs. For example, it was a matter of Christian faith for over a thousand years that the Earth stood at the center of God’s universe. We had that special place, because we we mattered to god. Earth was His creation and therefore VERY IMPORTANT, and being His children, we were also VERY IMPORTANT.

But then some uppity know-it-alls had to mess up that pretty picture. They used mathematics, and careful measurement and upset a common assumption that had been in place long before the world was declared round. And that, according to an astounding flyer I recently received in the mail, is where western society began to break down.

Yes, I just got a serious-looking pamphlet about the Geocentric Bible, which claims that scientists have been wrong for 400 years, and that the Earth is really still at the center of the universe. By still, I mean “continues to be” although you could take that to mean “motionless” and that would, um, still be correct.

The change from the geocentric theory to the heliocentric theory damaged our viewpoint of the Bible. Genesis 1:1 is literal, and so is Psalm 50:1 “the Lord … Called the earth from the rising of the sun”. Both the earth and the sun are in the same sentence and it is the sun that is moving around a stationary earth

I think there’s some truth in that quote, but not what the purveyors of the Geocentric Bible claim. By adopting the heliocentric view, our view of the bible changed – and whether this is “damage” remains to be seen. Rather than interpreting the bible literally, most people interpret it allegorically, or thematically. Indeed, the bible is literary work that has profound scope and scale, and interesting characters that lived in ancient times. It may be the source of your faith – but it is clearly not 100% factually accurate.

One of the subjects that the bible fails us is in astronomy, since, if biblical claims of geocentrism were accurate, not only would our understanding of the universe be false, any sort of space program based on such faulty understanding would be impossible. That would mean – no weather or communication satellites, no moon landings, no probes to mars or the other planets. Nothing. All of these technological feats are only made possible in a universe in which planetary bodies move in predictable elliptical orbits, and gravity works as we think it does, and the planets and asteroids are where we expect them to be when our space probes get there. Since our universe has a successful space program, then our universe is incompatible with a literal interpretation of every verse in the ancient text of the Bible. Maybe we need to reconsider the veracity of the text rather than our lying eyes.

The earth has not rotated since the day of creation nor will it rotate until midway through the tribulation period.
The firmament carries the sun around the earth faster than the moon because the moon is closer to the earth, the center of the universe. “If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness” (Job 31:26). The sun never walks, but runs; “…the sun. Which…rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race” (Psalm 19:4,5).

Another small issue with the geocentric theory is that it posits that the entire “firmament” of the universe revolves around the earth once per day. In this quote, from the Geocentric Bible Foundation, we see that celestial objects closer to the earth move more slowly than those that are farther away (the moon walks while the sun runs). What about objects that are farther away than the sun? Since we know that many stars and galaxies are at least 12 billion light years from the earth, they would have to travel at least 74 billion light years per day (assuming a circular orbit around the earth with a radius 12Bly). To accomplish this, these object would have to be traveling just north of 856000 light years per second. That’s around 20 trillion times the speed of light, which according to the known laws of physics, is about 20 trillion times impossible. Somebody’s wrong by … well … an astonishingly colossal margin.

Could it be that the theory that has distant galaxies whizzing about at 20 trillion times the speed of light be wrong? Is that possible? It certainly conflicts with direct observation and established physical principles – of this universe. Yeah – that could the problem right there. Modern physics allows for the possibility of alternate realities – different universes that are similar to our own, yet differ in some critical way. For example, in another universe, this blog has quite a fan base. It’s also possible, that is some corner of the multiverse, there is a universe in which the sun and stars rotate around a stationary Earth. Yes – quite possibly in some other universe. In ours, however, those galaxies don’t revolve around little, old, but still VERY IMPORTANT, us.

In order to continue offering the best in equipment and network practices, we constantly conduct data center audits to keep you, our valued customer, on top of the latest innovation the market can provide.

In keeping with this practice, we have determined the server your VPS is hosted on requires an immediate upgrade to avoid service interruption due to potential hardware failure.

To avoid any potential service degradation and to simply provide you with the fastest solution, we had to schedule an immediate migration to a new server that already meets those performance requirements as previously mentioned to keep you in best practices.

This affects your VPS and this is what you need to be aware of:

- This means that the IP Addresses you were using have been changed.

Your NEW IPs for the VPS are as follows:

And the email continued, listing my new IP address and other pertinent account information. After a four long days, I was finally able to get back into my account, and everything seemed fine. That is, until I saw that another customer posted an email they received on a web hosting forum. Lo and behold, they too required an immediate upgrade. On further digging, it appeared that our hosting provider was sold to another company – and my user account with it.

Normally, that wouldn’t bother me too much, but this whole thing looked like a scam. Why not simply tell your customers what’s going on instead of making up some cock and bull story about “offering the best in equipment and network practices”? Seriously – it would have been ok if they hadn’t lied to me.

So we’re moving over to a new server and hosting provider, and thing are looking better. Let me know if you see any problems with the site.

Welcome 2009. I thought I’d comment on something that doesn’t seem to be getting a great deal of play in the media just now.

During the landmark 2008 US Presidential Campaign, Republicans across the US took a strong, wrong-headed stand on energy. What was their proposed solution to soaring gas prices? Simple – open previously off-limits areas around the US coastline to oil exploration and drilling. They even had a three syllable catch phrase that started at the GOP convention and was repeated at rallies across the country as the general campaign wore on. “Drill baby, drill”, they chanted, with the same wild-eyed conviction that a mob chasing the Frankenstein monster might have as it cried, “Kill, kill, kill.”

But then the bottom fell out of the US economy as the sub-prime mortgage bubble burst and investment firms on Wall Street lost billions in the blink of an eye. What may end up being the worst financial crisis in US history began. The US Treasury was granted enormous power as a $700 Billion (that’s $700,000,000,000.00 if you’re interested) bailout of various corners of the financial world was passed in congress. But within this turbulent storm of a fiscal meltdown, there was, to me at least, one interesting thing.

The price of oil began to fall.

And fall.

And fall.

In July and August 2008, one of the biggest features of the US consumer economy was an ever-increasing domestic demand for oil, combined with the fact that we import over 40% of that oil from foreign sources. By October and November, the economic pain Americans felt translated into cost cutting, and we began starting to drive and fly less often. By mid December, unleaded gas fell to $1.50 per gallon in some areas of the country. Cheap gas was here at last.

Interestingly, it wasn’t an increase in domestic supply that caused the worldwide oil price drop. Similarly, the difference wasn’t the “signal” that Republicans had wanted to send to the countries that “don’t like us very much” of our intent to drill off the outer continental shelf, and thereby increase domestic supplies.

Nope, in that crazy dance of energy supply and demand, the current economic crisis has shown us one thing most clearly: Demand drives energy prices at least as much as supply. Americans on a large scale were forced to conserve due to tough economic times, and oil prices plummeted to compensate for the decreased demand. Now that gas is cheap, Americans are starting to buy more. In response, the prices have begun to creep up again.

Drill Baby, Drill? That may be something to consider once the supply of oil begins to dwindle, but in late 2008, we saw what can happen when we conserve instead. The main problem is, however, that mobs don’t get wild-eyed over responsibility and clunky slogans like, “Conserve Baby, Conserve.”

This made us chuckle.

We’re glad that John’s handling the economic crisis with the intensity of a psychopathic astronaut.

You’re at a party, and the lights are flashing, the music is pumping, and people talking, laughing, clapping, dancing, and then a rumor starts: somewhere, out of sight, someone might have puked. Like a wave it moves through the crowd, touching everyone as they consider, “Oh no, I may be next”, and they swallow nervously, not wanting it to be true, but with that tentative swallow, they know the truth: they could indeed.

In true whisper-down-the-lane fashion, everyone does their part to pass the rumor, but the details change and morph as it goes, and the rumor becomes more grandiose, more twisted. First someone simply puked in the kitchen, then they puke on someone in the kitchen, then they puke while dancing with kitchen knives, then someone is almost stabbed and pukes in self-defense, and then … It doesn’t end, but builds and self-organizes. The rumor becomes a living thing.

Then the rumor is on everyone’s lips, as they share their own distorted versions, and argue over the details that don’t add up. Witnesses to the event are brought in and consulted for historical accuracy, “No, there were no knives involved”, and “no, it didn’t really look like tapioca pudding.” But in the noise and growing hysteria, these observations are misheard or misinterpreted, and are then woven back into the narrative, giving it new life: “Yes, a witness just confirmed that it looked like some kind of awful pudding.” Someone else gags, and the crowd holds its collective breath, as everyone hopes to keep their bile down.

And then there’s the confirmation, indisputable evidence that at least part of the rumor is based on actual events: Someone finds a small, puddle in the kitchen that smells badly. It doesn’t really look like tapioca pudding, but there are little pearls in it that could once have been nourishing. But it’s strange, and maybe there’s too much of what was clearly someone’s salad, and there’s an overabundance of saliva.

Even after it is cleaned away, there’s a nagging odor in the air: it’s not quite vomit, but not quite not either. Like that odor, the fervor of the rumor wanes, but doesn’t quite go away as the unanswered question lingers in an otherwise festive night. Some ass drank too much, or too fast, and now we’re paying for it with our suspicion and doubt, and our own internal efforts to control the reaction we feel in the back of our throats. We accuse one another of being the perpetrator, start new rumors about someone else’s guilt. Fingers are pointed and voices are raised. How could you, or you, or you, be so inconsiderate? How could he, or she, or they not control themselves better? You’re disgusting. I always thought you were a pig too. Way to go, pal.

And feeling much better, the dog is back in the yard, eating grass again.