Every once in a while, you just need a good fart joke to make you laugh.

“as a private citizen”….These words must be magic.  These four little words have the power to allow the head of a tax-exempt religious organization with tens of thousands of members to throw his weight behind a political candidate without jeopardizing his organizations status.  I challenge anyone to find another group of four little words that protects millions of dollars from the IRS.  Bet you can’t.  Now that’s power.

But at what point does someone stop being a private citizen and become synonymous with the organization they founded and lead?  How do you separate the man from the mission?

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So today I voted in the Texas primary elections.  One nice thing about elections here in Texas is they open up the polls for “early voting” about two weeks before the actual election day and they leave them open until the Friday before the actual voting day.  This gives voters a chance to stop by pretty much any early voting location and cast their ballot.

I went to a Randall’s grocery store.  I showed up at about 11:30am only to be told the polls didn’t open until noon.  So I went and got a haircut and came back right at noon.   If that sounds like a fast haircut, you’re right…she really should have spent more time on my hair…it’s not the best haircut I’ve had.  Anyway, when I went in to vote I was greeted with a line of people.  I patiently waited my turn which took about 15 minutes.  You show them your drivers license or your voter ID card.  They ask if you want to vote in the Republican or Democratic primary.  Nearly everyone at this location was voting in the democratic primary.  In the 30 minutes I was there, I only saw one person who was voting in the Republican primary.  Probably not unexpected as this is Austin, an island of blue in a sea of Texas red and the democratic race is a more hotly contested battle.  Although, given all the evangelical happenings here in Texas, I’m curious to see how McCain does against Huckabee.

While I was in line, many people were coming into the store to shop and one boy of about 10 years of age saw the line and confidently stated “Obama’s gonna win!”.  He wasn’t arrested for campaigning in a polling center and everyone went about their business.

I must say though, there were more people in line for this primary than I saw at the last general election.  And when I left, the line was nearly out the door which was about twice as long as when I arrived.  This is a good sign.  Let’s hope this trend continues into the November elections.

If you live in Texas, you have until Friday February 29th to vote early, so go ahead and do it.  They make is easy and convenient so there’s no excuse not to.

After having recently finished reading Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy, The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, and being intrigued by his concept of death and the afterlife, I came across this film appropriately named After Life.  The premise of this film pulled me in to adding it to my Netflix queue and moving it to the top of the list.  If only I’d done some more digging into this film, I may not have been so eager to see it.

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Rocket Science is another teenage angst story about a boy who stutters and doesn’t fit in at his school.  He is recruited into the debate team, that’s right – the debate team, by a female member of the team and she tries to help him overcome his speech issue.  But that’s not really the story going on and not her intention…it’s a ruse to make you think it’s a story about overcoming the odds.  And that’s just one of the ploys to try to make this film appear off-beat and hip.

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When I sat down to watch Maxed Out, I was hoping for a film that would shed some light on why we are so in love with debt, or a film that showed the history of the credit card and loans over the years and how our attitudes about debt have changed, or a film about how the credit card companies have our legislators in their pockets or a film about how the credit card companies prey on the problem borrowers, but I didn’t get any of these films.  Instead, I got a jumbled mass of all of these with no depth on any of the topics.

If only the movie would focus on one of these in the 90 minutes they spend jumping around the issues.

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Change can be good.  Every once in a while change is needed just for the sake of change.  I was getting a bit tired of the look of this site (click on the thumbnail to the left to see it) so I decided to update it.  I spent a few weeks looking at a variety of themes for both Serendipity and for WordPress and I finally decided to combine some elements from multiple themes and add my own customizations to create the new look.  It took me a few additional weeks to figure out all the CSS stuff, but I think I’ve got it looking pretty good.  I’ll probably continue to make some tweeks over the next few weeks as things crop up, but the major lifting is done.

But I want to give credit where credit is due, so below are the themes from which I borrowed some elements and modified some things to create the look you see today.

Andreas09 Theme from AndreasViklund.com – this was the theme I previously used for this site and I’ve borrowed some elements from it for the new one, mostly for the center content section and styles.

iTheme by n-design studio – I borrowed the background image and calendar gif from this theme.  I really liked the look of iTheme but didn’t want to make the move to WordPress.  Also, it’s a fixed width theme and I really wanted a fluid width theme.

Spiffy Corners – I found this site to help me create the rounded corner style for the menubar.

Thanks for the inspiration and for letting me borrow some of the design elements.  Now lets get back to the content side of this site, because content is king right?  Alternatively, in the immortal words of Billy Crystal as Fernando Lamas…”it is better to look good than to feel good….You look marvelous!”

Well, it’s one week until the Oscars, the one award show I actually like to watch.  What I like about the Oscars is they seem to not be so biased toward popular opinion, but more toward art.  This is highlighted in the fact that none of this years Best Picture nominees was a huge box office success.  The best performer among the five films was Juno at #21 in total box office receipts for 2007 with the next closest being No Country for Old Men at #42.  If you want to see the list, you can check it out here.

Ok, there are a few awards each year that are given just because someone’s been neglected.  You remember Martin Scorsese finally getting best director for The Departed.  Not his best movie, but they gave it to him anyway, just because he really deserved it for a lifetime of work and he probably got passed over when he should have won for Taxi Driver.

That not withstanding, the Oscars are pretty tied to the art of movies.  Now the Grammy’s could take a lesson from the Oscars and actually try to pick music that has some art to it instead of the banal crap they choose to highlight each year.

But I do have a problem with the Oscars this year.  My problem is that I haven’t seen even one of the films up for best picture.  Usually I’ve seen at least a couple of them, but this year is different.  So what is a movie lover to do?

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I posted a Roy Zimmerman song on Darwin day earlier this week and while looking for that song, I perused through a few of his other songs.  This one I hadn’t heard before and it made me chuckle.  Enjoy.

I nearly missed it!  I was at work listening to KUT.org in the background when host John Aielli reminded me during his morning show, Eklektikos, that today was Darwin Day.  I had completely forgotten.  In honor of the day John was playing a variety of music with the theme of “survival”, so to follow that theme I thought I would post a few video’s about survival.

But before I get to that, just a few words on what Darwin Day is about.  Charles Darwin was born on this day in 1809, that’s 199 years ago for those who are math challenged.  This day is set aside to celebrate his life and achievements, not the least of which is his concept of evolution through the process of natural selection.  But that’s a bit narrow of a description of Darwin Day.  It’s really a more generic celebration of science and its contributions to the advancement of humanity.

Ok, with that out of the way, let’s see the videos…

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