Creationism; The Non-Science Holds Science Fair: The Results are In.

1st Place Winners of the
Fellowship Baptist Creation Science Fair:

Elementary School Level

1st Place: "My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey)"
Cassidy Turnbull (grade 5) presented her uncle, Steve. She also showed photographs of monkeys and invited fairgoers to note the differences between her uncle and the monkeys. She tried to feed her uncle bananas, but he declined to eat them. Cassidy has conclusively shown that her uncle is no monkey.

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Middle School Level

1st Place: "Life Doesn't Come From Non-Life"
Patricia Lewis (grade 8) did an experiment to see if life can evolve from non-life. Patricia placed all the non-living ingredients of life - carbon (a charcoal briquet), purified water, and assorted minerals (a multi-vitamin) - into a sealed glass jar. The jar was left undisturbed, being exposed only to sunlight, for three weeks. (Patricia also prayed to God not to do anything miraculous during the course of the experiment, so as not to disqualify the findings.) No life evolved. This shows that life cannot come from non-life through natural processes.

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High School Level

1st Place: "Using Prayer To Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria"
Eileen Hyde and Lynda Morgan (grades 10 & 11) did a project showing how the power of prayer can unlock the latent genes in bacteria, allowing them to microevolve antibiotic resistance. Escherichia coli bacteria cultured in agar filled petri dishes were subjected to the antibiotics tetracycline and chlorotetracycline. The bacteria cultures were divided into two groups, one group (A) received prayer while the other (B) didn't. The prayer was as follows: "Dear Lord, please allow the bacteria in Group A to unlock the antibiotic-resistant genes that You saw fit to give them at the time of Creation. Amen." The process was repeated for five generations, with the prayer being given at the start of each generation. In the end, Group A was significantly more resistant than Group B to both antibiotics.

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My only thoughts: Are you kidding me?

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Check out the Terry Schiavo CD:here
There are some rocking tunes...on that CD...they'll rock you to death!

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Silent Party

For those seeking tranquillity at Glastonbury, a dance tent packed with clubbers is not an obvious sanctuary.

But this will be the silent disco - 3,000 festivalgoers are to be issued with headphones this year so they can turn the volume up to 11 without waking the neighbours.

The quietest party in town is a response to the problem of noise pollution at the festival, which has traditionally led the district council to issue a licence for the festival on the condition that its main stages and tents shut down on the stroke of midnight.

The Guardian

What the F*#k?

OMG!

When did my last name become a meeting-ground for the Christan Right and Terry Schiavo?

Censor This!!!!

Examples gleaned from Newspapers...um do you think censorship is out of control???


# A Detroit airport customs inspector ordered the seizure of artwork, including 33 passports for the art project “State of Sabotage,” two ink pads, four rubbers stamps and photo-fastening equipment. They were in the luggage of artist Robert Jelinek and headed for an exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. The inspector believed the items violated a prohibition against articles advocating treason, insurrection or forcible resistance to U.S. law, and if not that, they were either obscene or immoral.

# In Pilot Point, in northern Texas, police threatened to prosecute an artist who painted a mural on the exterior of his gallery depicting the creation of Eve, whose breasts were bare. To stay out of court or jail, the artist covered Eve’s breasts with “Crime Scene” tape. The police said the artwork violated a local law that criminalized the sale or display of hard-core pornography to children.

# Veterans for Peace and a Quaker group set up tables in a Cookeville, Tenn., high school with material about the war in Iraq and military careers and alternatives. School officials banned the “offensive material” and imposed new restrictions on future appearances at the school. Military recruiters and other groups remain exempt from those restrictions. The officials said they acted after receiving calls from some parents who thought some of the banned material was “anti-American” and “anti-military.”

# America (The Book), on the best-seller list for 15 weeks, ran into trouble with library officials in two Mississippi counties. The satirical book by comedian Jon Stewart had on one page a photo with the faces of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices superimposed over nude bodies. “Our libraries are not a trash bin for pornographic materials,” said one official. “We’re not an adult bookstore,” sniffed another.

# In Houston, the mayor didn’t wait for the library to act. He summarily ordered the public library to remove from open shelves 12 copies of another best seller, a porn queen’s autobiography. “We didn’t see a need to go through a long bureaucratic process,” said Mayor Bill White. All the copies were immediately checked out by library patrons and a long waiting list began to grow.

There are countless other such examples just from the last few months, including the Minnesota state senator pushing a law regulating the sale of video games to minors who reportedly responded to a question about the constitutionality of her bill by saying, “Who says children have First Amendment rights? How is that relevant?”

From the Weekend & In the News

....It's finally Spring in the MidWest!

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Kicked some serious ass this weekend. Scoop Jackson, Ms. Kitten Kennedy, and Senorita Marnie McCuen are in the Twin Cities for a party flyby and what some have called Dooosh Dank 2005.

Anyway, Friday night Marnie, Paul and I went to the Bell and saw a wonderful 1974 polemic documentary by Peter Davis: Hearts and Minds. This fascinating movie is made more so by the lack of narration and its' use of images and interviews instead of a biased narrator. Stacked full of interviews with Georges Bidault, J. William Fulbright, George Coker and stunning archival footage from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. After the movie won its Academy Award, the next Oscar presenter, Frank Sinatra, denounced it. A polemic indeed.
In sizing up the situation in Vietnam, president Lyndon Johnson once famously said: “The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people.” This is where the title of the documentary comes from and was also of importance to Marnie and I, seeing that we wrote a song for The Field that within its lyrics discusses the reuse of Johnson's phrase by G. Dubya Bush.

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From the Weekend...

Moving on to Saturday...after a hip-hop throw down at Mel's Beauty Bar (Kitty's best friend from High School is Mel), we moved on to Ba-sik at First Ave. for a little dancing...ugh...um...let's leave we said almost as we entered First Ave...I'm all for First Ave re-opening and kicking ass...but really band dance music and a bunch of teens? no fun on a Saturday...so Poop de'la-Scoop and Schrein-time and I headed over to St Paul for some serious partying...
We arrived at Ms. Kitten's hip-hop karaoke party with the party almost over, quickly, Scoop and I grabbed the mics and threw-down with some wack rhymes and drunken lyrics about Dubya, Terry Schivao and the Hearts and minds of the Christian Right. Now, I don't normally throw my hat into a Karaoke party, but this one deserved me throwing my whole ass into the mix...The owners of the party house had replaced the basement floor with a Saturday Night Fever lighted dance floor:

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In the News...

File Sharing gets it's day in the Supreme Court tomorrow, March 29, 2005. The case is against Grokster and Morpheus. The Movie Studios and Music Industry, wants to make it illegal for companies to create software in which illegal music/movies/tv can be traded via the net. I'd have to say that whatever happens in the highest court of the land won't make a smidgen of difference in my ability to download music/movies/tv. For the record, I love to support local and independent music and buy as much local and independent stuff as I can. It feels good to know the music is going right into the pockets of the local/independent artist. As far as other music, music supported by massive industries, I have no problem downloading Radiohead or the latest Beck album. I download them, listen for a few weeks and then buy the album if I like the full album. (for the record I've bought all of Radiohead's albums and all of Beck's albums...on Vinyl and CD...). I also have no problem downloading TV shows and some movies...

I think the problem with the current court case is although the Supreme Court may be the highest court in the land and can actually enforce most of it's ruling...ie. Gore -vs- Bush, this lawsuit is unenforceable. If the courts make file-trading software illegal (which would be detrimental for the computer industry and I'd argue the movie/music/tv industries in the long run...since this software IMHO is the future of these industries...), people will create new programs that are even harder to detect and more invisible to the SnoCap's and BigChampagne's out there.

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Accountability?

Saturday The Times reported that the Army would not prosecute 17 American soldiers implicated in the deaths of three prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld has been filed by the ACLU and Human Rights First, A NY-based group. The suit charges that Rummy personally authorized unlawful interrogation techniques and abdicated his responsibility to stop the torture and other abuses of prisoners in U.S. custody. It contends that the abuse of detainees was widespread and that Rummy and other top administration officials were well aware of it.

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Lawlessness should never be an option for the United States. Once the rule of law has been extinguished, you're left with an environment in which moral degeneracy can flourish and a great nation can lose its soul...NEWS FLASH: AMERICA HAS ALREADY LOST IT'S SOUL...THANKS KARL ROVE!!

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To what extent will Karl Rove lie to America to get what he and Bush want?

dreaming

Lo! First day of spring, the B-DuB calls to my spirit!


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Go there!

Scalia

Juvenile Death Penalty :

"If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again," Scalia told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think tank. "You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility."

"Why in the world would you have it interpreted by nine lawyers?" he said.

"Abortion is off the democratic stage. Prohibiting it is unconstitutional, now and forever, coast to coast, until I guess we amend the Constitution," said Scalia, who was appointed to the court by President Reagan in 1986.

Yahoo.com

Where I Began -- v.1

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Downtown Stillwater, 1873. These stairs are now concrete but they still lead up the crag and perch you above the womb of my childhood and early-adulthood wanderings, the limitations of my small town perspectives, and of course the beauty of the --
St. Croix River National Scenic River Valley -(map). The St Croix is part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System.

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The National Wild and Scenic Rivers System has only 11, 303 river miles in it -- just over one-quarter of one percent of our rivers are protected through this designation, and this protection is often contended.-great river fact site

I encountered my first job at the base of these stairs. I worked at a pseudo Italian (pronounced with a strong 'I') family owned restaurant, Vittorios, washing dishes for about $5.25 an hour. The place was built around the caves, the 'grottos'. A brewery once made and stored beer and ice in the grottos during the summers. Now sniffling tourists eat cheesy pizzas in the grottos. While employed at Vittorios, I saved up for 6 months to buy my first guitar and begin my musical ramblings. This is where adulthood began for me. This is where one of the first towns in Minnesota was founded.

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Above is the apex of those 100+ year old stairs looking across the river valley to where I grew up...a country bumpkin in Houlton Wisconsin...the landscape is of course alot of farms, a drive-in movie theater/hippie outdoor volkswagon new-age church, a wooden shack which was a gas-station, trailer court, and the cement block with no windows...strip club...the restaurant attached "burnt down". I spent many summers stalking imaginary animals through those forested bluffs and shoreline.

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Historical Stillwater Lift Bridge looking across to Houlton Wisconsin

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I went to High School in Hudson Wisconsin. Here's the decommissioned sanatorium that is near the current Hudson Middle School and near my parents cabin on Bass Lake. High School was a weird experience. I'll leave it at that... I want to focus on the River and the landscape.

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The St. Croix River was used heavily for industrial transportation and service in the early years of Stillwater, Houlton and Hudson. Mostly Log Jams populated the river in those days. I once read, in a book called Haunted Wisconsin about a man and a myth that he would listen to the drowned corpses talk with his ear pressed against their cold ear, to find the lost drowned in the St Croix. The log jams and general deforesting of the St Croix River Valley reshaped the 100+ year old gigantic pine forest with a deciduous landscape.

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This is what the landscape looked like in 1873 from Houlton looking back across the river toward Stillwater. The Court House and a few Churches still stand from that time period. Obviously this photograph is from before there was a drawbridge spanning the St Croix River, even before a dike was built from a quarry located 100 feet from the home of my childhood front door. Now Minnesota and Wisconsin want to build a 8-lane mega-bridge to span from bluff to bluff. They have been trying for 10 years. At one point true bureaucracy showed through and both states approved a bridge and put the construction process in motion without consulting with the U.S. D.O.T.. As soon as the D.O.T. discovered this error 10 years worth of work was lost and both states were forced to renegotiate the inter-state highway. ummm. duh...it's an inter-state-highway...might need to consult with the US DOT.

Anyway, the bridge is still in the proposal phase and there are alot of concerns with the marring of a National Scenic River to me and 1000s of local Stillwater and Houlton residents. Then you figure in the economic windfall for developers in the undeveloped farmland of Houlton. It's a big money issue and my jaded perspective makes me think that when big money gets involved constituents voices get alot harder to hear above the din of big money changing hands. The planned development once the mega-span-bridge gis erected is straight-up undiluted suburbia. No land covenants will protect the open landscape where money is king. I fear the day when I drive out to my parents house and get lost in the suburban landscape.

more another day...

Chinese Democacy

The Most Expensive Album Never Made?





What a joke:

The process was drawn out even further after Mr. Rose hired two new musicians - the guitarist Buckethead, a virtuoso who wore a mannequin-like face mask and a KFC bucket on his head, and the drummer Brian "Brain" Mantia - whom the singer directed to re-record all the music that their predecessors had spent months performing.

With the band's return, Mr. Rose's machinery cranked up again. One internal cost analysis from the period pegs the operation's monthly tab at a staggering $244,000. It included more than $50,000 in studio time at the Village, a more modern studio where Mr. Baker had moved the band. It also included a combined payroll for seven band members that exceeded $62,000, with the star players earning roughly $11,000 each. Guitar technicians earned about $6,000 per month, while the album's main engineer was paid $14,000 per month and a recording software engineer was paid $25,000 a month, the document stated.

Label executives were losing patience. Interscope turned to Mr. Zutaut, the original band's talent scout. Could an old friend succeed where so many others had failed? He was offered a roughly 30 percent bonus, he said, if he could usher the project to completion within a year.

But Mr. Rose's renewed energies were not being directed toward the finish line. He had the crew send him CD's almost daily, sometimes with 16 or more takes of a musician performing his part of a single song. He accompanied Buckethead on a jaunt to Disneyland when the guitarist was drifting toward quitting, several people involved recalled; then Buckethead announced he would be more comfortable working inside a chicken coop, so one was built for him in the studio, from wood planks and chicken wire.

here for more: NYTimes.com

Age--125yrs

I Love Digital Collections

The New York Public Library has digitized over 275,000 images from their colletions, and made them freely available available online. The NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.

New Bang?

New vibrating condom, Vibe 4U – a battery-operated silicone ring that fits over a normal condom to make it pulsate.

New musical condoms. Fitted with a mini electronic device connected to tiny sensors, the condom produces songs which get louder as the sex becomes more passionate, while the choice of tune is determined by the position.

Also new is the ice condom, containing a special lubricant which cools to create an icy feeling.

For those who prefer a little heat, there are the warming condoms, which use the same principle but in reverse.

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what the hell? I mean I'm all for pleasure and pain if that's what people want...but a musical condom? Can I get it with some Nelly or 50-cent In the Club? What's next Condoms with CNN updates? An O'reily Hour Condom?