Saturday Morning Cartoon Time

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When you’re  a child, time is divided into categories: breakfast time, school, recess, dinner time, bed time. Time is this nebulous concept, because there seems to be no standard for the divisions. It’s only when we learn about hours, minutes, etc. that we start to develop a sense of length in time.

There’s time enough in a day to do a lot of things. But there’s also time enough to waste. One great stress reliever is to just veg-out in front of some cartoon fun.

Cartoons even have their own sense of time. I was watching Transformers with my boy and the Decepticons and the Autobots both have ways to travel through space and time. Its fun to imagine what you would do if you had one of those portals. My day job would be so much easier. Flying through space as if there’s no time barrier at all. That would be amazing. And vacation time? Forget about it! We could go visit our family and friends all over the world with the travel time at its ultimate minimum. Leisure time at maximum.

In fact, as far as Saturday morning leisure time is concerned, if I had a portal system, I wouldn’t even have to leave the couch ever. I’d open up a portal big enough for the cereal cupboard, get the cereal out, then open up portals to the bowls and spoons. And forget the fridge, I’d open up a portal to the cow and get milk on my cereal straight from the udder!

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Well, and now with that thought, I’ll leave you to have fun with your own imagination…What would YOU do with a portal through space and time? The possibilities are immense!

Love Is A Sandwich

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Don’t quote me on this, but I’ve heard that within the Japanese language there is no word for love. They have words for respect and admiration and even extreme like, but no word with a direct literal meaning of love.

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This is interesting to me (and you, my one Japanese reader), because we know that love is inexpressible. Unlike my mustard calligraphy above, love is not so easily spelled out. By the way, for my non-Japanese reading readers, the word in mustard is the Japanese for sandwich. And yes, I misspelled it. According to my friend Shin, I missed a character in the middle. Funny…like an incomplete sandwich.

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But you were probably wondering why a sandwich is love and why love is a sandwich. You’re probably thinking lunch is a sandwich, not love. Love is love, unless you’re really hungry, and then you might embrace a sandwich like a long lost lover. That’s what you’re probably thinking. That’s what I was thinking. If we just thought of it that way, we’d be right, but we wouldn’t be very philosophical.

Let’s consider how we make a sandwich: we build it.

So the Japanese language isn’t necessarily incomplete with its lack of the word love, is it? Since love is built, we could possibly start with admiration, and advance from there to respect. These are only concepts though. Love can’t be given in words alone, like a sandwich can’t be made with bread alone.

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Love has to be shown through actions. At least in my philosophy, that’s how it works. You could tell someone you love them their whole life, but if you never did anything to show it, would the words even be true? Isn’t compassionate service is one of the highest functions of love? For love to be complete, like a sandwich, you have to put all those layers together, put it on a plate, and serve it.

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Oh yeah, and add a little cheese. 🙂

Introduction to Fisking

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Because I’m planning some fisking in future archive elements, I thought I’d break down the mechanics of a fisking, especially for those who may not have heard of fisking. The idea is fairly straight-forward. It’s a method of reducing long, wordy documents into bite-sized bits that can be proven or disproven on their own.

The method of fisking is sometimes considered to be a way to show how every point of a written piece is wrong, but even that is wrong. A fisking can show agreeable points as well as illogical points. Some people focus on the negative. That’s not necessarily the reason for a fisking, at least not when I do it.

The method is named after a man, Robert Fisk, who was a journalist from England. He deserves his name on the method, and in my personal opinion, his name fits the method very well. His name sounds a little like the word fix. Those things that need fixing, may also need fisking. No written piece of seriousness should be considered beyond fisking. If you’re making statements (like this one), then you need to be able to back them up with facts.

Scientific discovery, for instance, is founded on curiosity and questioning. How many facts are needed to make a statement true? How many scientists make a scientific community? How many lies make a person a liar? How long does one have to spend in a university until the mind is sufficiently wiped? How many spies have been brainwashed in less than an hour? How far will I take this tangent?

That’s far enough.

It’s time to look at the process. Let’s say someone made a statement like this instead of the question above: “Spending time in a university will wipe your mind.” Then they back that statement up with two following facts: 1. “I’ve personally witnessed the downward spiral of my friend who went to Eyemafraida U.” 2. “Going to university is expensive.”

Then the fisking goes like this, with the original statement in regular text and the rebuttal in italics:

Spending time in a university will wipe your mind.

Presented as fact, this statement is more of an opinion. The statement is a broad generalization, including everyone, because it excludes no one. How did the person come to this conclusion? Read on…

I’ve personally witnessed the downward spiral of my friend who went to Eyemafraida U.

This is one person, not everyone. Assuming the witnessing wasn’t biased, this “fact” still only includes one instance. It’s difficult to base a generalized rule on a single outcome.

Going to university is expensive.

This may be true on its own, but it’s irrelevant to the mind-wiping topic. When talking about minds, you can’t rationally tangent to bank accounts and make an accurate conclusion.

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So that’s how fisking works. You can see how it presents each sentence and each point clearly, and then subsequently proves or disproves each on its own merits. Can fisking be done poorly? Of course. Can it be done incorrectly? Absolutely. Can it be done to create a bias where none may have existed before? That’s for sure. It may be even more true that fisking can be ignored. Do people read any more? If fisking helps encourage people to read, then I’ll participate in it. I hope people learn the thrill of reading, even if it’s through an extensive rebuttal process. I also hope that people can see the value of debunking. To paraphrase a great scientist: Finding the truth behind science will require us to let go of what we “know” and to debunk the “facts” as they’re fed to us. On to fisking!

Living Healthy While Killing The Neighbors

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This is my house, where I live. I don’t have diabetes, but the children in the neighborhood do.

As you can see, someone stole my welcome mat. If I ever find out who did it, they’re going to meet the tiny flying products of my shotgun. I make my own shells, and I lace the shot with granulated cane sugar and chocolate chips. I don’t know firsthand, but I’ve heard that when you get hit by my shot, it stings, but you suddenly crave a glass of milk.

By the way, the first welcome mat got stolen too, so I glued this new one down. They must have really wanted that mat because they busted it right out of the frosting glue and took it anyway. I don’t really question why someone would take things off my house or my porch. Everything’s so yummy. Even things that have sugar inside are coated with sprinkled sugar.

Also evident in the picture, you can see I’ve xeriscaped the yard. Nothing needs watering. I prefer to save the water for the farmers who actually need it. I’d rather have things grow like wheat, oranges, and avocados—things I can actually eat.

What you can’t see in the picture is that I have a fully complemented fitness room on the second floor of the house. I believe in being fit. I believe in living healthy.

6 Funny Video Games

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The 6 Funniest Video Games (In my humble opinion):

 1. Worms Armageddon

What’s so funny about worms trying to destroy each other? What’s not funny about worms trying to destroy each other? They never bleed. They’re never fully destroyed. In the process of blasting each other, they say hilarious things, like, “Grab your pineapples and run!” You can change the worm’s accents to the voice of your choice. You can hear them with a Scottish accent, an Indian accent, or even a Cyborg accent. The weapons will make you laugh, from the Banana Bomb to the exploding Sheep. Some of the actions will make you laugh, even when your team is getting the brunt of the punishment. Worms wiggle across the screen. They fall and land face down in the dirt. They get blown up and they spin as they’re flying through the air. Their lips flap as they get blasted. And sometimess you can make them skip across water, like skipping a stone. With all the funny actions and crack-up voices, Worms is one of the funniest games ever.

 2. Crossy Road

The main fun about this one is that when you lose, you laugh. It’s funny to get run over, or blown up, which of course makes you want to play another round. When games are funny, they can be addictive. Crossy Road is my latest addiction.

 3. Rayman, Raving Rabids

It’s no coincidence that this was made by some of the same people who made Worms Armageddon. The hyperbole is strong with this game. The far-out scenarios are hilarious. It’s a fun world to enter, with rabbits that are psychotic—and there’re lots of ‘em. There are different mini-games within the game, but the really fun one is where you have to hunt the rabbbits with a plunger gun. The rabbits come out of flying saucers. They come at you dressed like super spies. They fly around dressed like Superman. They even show up as killer robots. When you shoot them, the plungers stick to their faces and blind them briefly. You end up knocking them down and they just poof and disappear. No blood. No guts. No realistic violence. These are the elements of funny video gaming.

 4. Angry Birds

Even though the unnatural physics of this game can make you angry sometimes, the idea of slinging birds at loosely constructed bricks and wood beams is fun enough to keep a person going back for more, and more, and more. I have to admit, the exploding birds are my favorite. It’s very satisfying, and funny, to watch a bird blow up in the face of a green pig.

 5. Skylanders

The makers of Skylanders, Activision, took great effort in building a world. Their efforts paid off with a variety of characters, and some great voice actors adding their voices to the game. (Patrick Warburton, Hope Levy, Laura Bailey, Richard Steven Horvitz, Courtenay Taylor, Hunter Davis, and Liam O’Brien, to name a few.) One character in particular is a young mole who reacts to all of the playable characters in funny ways. The best one is the reaction to Hex, an undead character. She prompts him and he says, “You are one scary lady…lady.”

6. Plants vs. Zombies

Throwing peas, corn, and watermelons at zombies is terribly funny. This video game came around when zombies were extremely popular in the media. And the folks at Pop Cap did zombies right. They came up with a variety of goofy zombies (that’s better than horrific, isn’t it?). They also came up with a variety of plants. The plants are the weapons. It’s an engaging game. You have to click on suns and money and plants. It starts to move really fast, but while you’re engaged by the strategy there are funny things happening. Your plants get eaten. The zombies get bigger. They start to put on armor. The zombies even dance after they’ve “died”. A cool note about this game is that it has a soundtrack that reminds me of the Love and Rockets song “Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven”.