Damn cults

A very impressive Minnesota legislator has decried the upcoming speech by the Dalai Lama in front of the Minnesota Legislature as promotion of a cult. That cult being, of course, Buddhism. I posted this to MeFi and this discussion resulted. Metafilter is still the best site on the web, but the volume can be rather overwhelming. I have become rather attached to thread 1142 and usually go there first.

It's quite literally all I can do to not post another entire day about Cheney's scornful dismissal of energy conservation measures, or the Bush administration promise to unilaterally abrogate the ABM treaty if Russia doesn't amend it to allow National Missile Defense, etc.

Maggie thinks that many of my links are too geared towards men and geeks. Well, sorry. I don't mean it to be - this site is just a big reflection of my own interests and current preoccupations. She suggests that I should make a "girl's link" week or something. I would do that but I don't know exactly what to do with it. I mean, Lia is a girl, and has a blog, and I like what she does. Maybe I can get an inspiration. But, in that vein, I want to put a link that my wife will actually like, so allow me to introduce the "Jumping the Shark" page. This is the site that documents when each of just about every TV show that has ever aired went downhill (or Jumped the Shark, as the parlance goes). I'll specifically point you to Little House on the Prairie, which is Maggie's favorite show. The comments on this page start boring and quickly get very interesting as later posters reference earlier posters. Example:

" Well, what REALLY made this show shark-bait was them showing the usually sensitive and caring Alice Garvey getting stuck in the middle of the inferno, pick up the helpless baby and SMASH THE WINDOWS USING THE HELPLESS BABY LIKE A BATTERING RAM!!" …
"But Alice DID NOT use that baby as a battering ram!! She was holding the baby in one arm and ramming her other elbow through the window. Check it out if you don't believe me!!!" …
"I have to agree with the above posters concerning the Great fire /Baby as Battering episode as the point where the show JTS'd. But what I can't understand is all of this hand wringing over the baby used as the battering ram. Hey, people, life was tough on the 19th century American frontier!" …

I watched this particular episode off the TiVo and I have to throw my weight behind the "baby as battering ram" camp. Not only that, but Alice and the baby were going to die, anyway. Why the hell didn't she just toss the baby out of the window? I mean, what's the worst that can happen? The baby will die? For that matter, I would have just yelled "KOOL-AID!" and jumped out the window myself. Sure beats burning to death inside a blind school. Speaking of which…

The most ridiculous moment in TV history? When Mary and Adam take the kids from the school of the blind to the circus...HELLO!!!...What the hell were they doing there???? "Listening" to the circus???

Bwahahahaha!

Old, older, oldest, whoops!

4600 years ago the oldest metropolis yet found in the Americas was founded. This is so long ago there was no pottery around at the time, which is why earlier archaeologists didn't bother with excavating it. However, the oldest living thing on Earth was already nearly 200 years old -- Methuselah, the bristlecone pine. Older than that was another bristlecone named Prometheus. Back in '64, a student named Donald Curry was doing some core samples and his coring tool broke. Rather than waiting for another one, he CUT IT DOWN. At 4900 years old, this thing had survived Ice Ages, amazing droughts, storms, maybe even a Sabre-tooth tiger sharpening its claws on it- and it was killed by a stupid human in the name of SCIENCE?!?!?!?!