Monthly Archives: October 2008

McCain couldn’t agree more…

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Funny, I haven’t seen too many rallies where Obama encourages derision for his opposition. What better than to see McCain fuck up while pandering to those remaining parochial assholes who still support him.

(alternative title for this post: Michael Scott for president!)

McCain is angry and creepy

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I know this is hardly an original thought but it bears repeating. Can you imagine him at the table as POTUS negotiating some kind of international accord and blinking like crazy as he plans the next thing he’s going to say without paying attention to the conversation at hand? What a douche. He looked as if his head was going to explode for half of the last debate.

I am so looking forward to:

  • Obama winning the election. There will be a sigh of relief across the world when this happens, because almost everyone outside of the US has always hated Bush as much as Americans finally seem to now (it sure took you all long enough)
  • The ignominious self-destruction of the Republican party as they all totally lose it blaming the crap out of each other, the media and the American people.
  • The fact that Republicans could lose to a black guy with a Muslim sounding name– it’s like a total repudiation of the xenophobia they have fomented over the last eight years.
  • Political speeches where your president doesn’t feel obliged to point out that the US is unequivocally the greatest, free-est, best-est country in the world– that’s really insulting to ALL THE OTHER COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD in case you hadn’t realized.
  • The word elite losing some of its pejorative sting. It’s good to be elite… duh!
  • Knowing that the person with the power to command a nuclear arsenal can also remember how to pronounce it (haha I’m being an elitist!)
  • Simply knowing that the hideous Sarah Palin is NOT a mere heartbeat away from becoming President.

So I guess there will be egg on my face if McCain somehow wins from this position, but if he does then my embarrassment at being wrong will be the least of my concerns.

What is Hell like?

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… and who will be there?

  1. If there is a Hell, and it is overseen by the fallen angel Satan/Lucifer, why would he be so terrible to those whom God has also shunned? If he seeks to challenge God, why would he be so willing to do God’s will and torment the sinners for all eternity? Why not throw a big party and welcome his brothers in exile?
  2. Will we actually feel physical pain? Will this pain be inflicted by demons or other entities?
  3. Is it possible to be promoted in Hell? eg from a torturee to a torturer? If Hell is so perverted and horrible it seems possible that the worst sinners might be treated like celebrities, so actually the minor sinners would have the worst time of it, being goody-two-shoes by comparison.
  4. … or will there be multiple levels/circles? ie is it reasonable to expect that the torments suffered will be proportional to the sins committed? If this is the case wouldn’t it imply that Satan is more of a judicious prison warden than a godlike being of pure evil?
  5. Will the damned be tormented for all eternity? If so, isn’t that a bit much; a finite amount of sin punished with an infinite amount of torment?
  6. Is it possible to commit a sin in Hell?
  7. Is it possible to redeem oneself?
  8. Is there any reason why the damned should be expected to feel anything other than complete and utter loathing for a God who would dish out justice this way?
  9. Any chance one could choose anihilation/oblivion over eternal torment?
  10. Why exactly would a loving God create a Hell to torment his flawed creation?

What is Heaven like?

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I want to know what I’ll be missing while I languish in eternal torment. I’m really curious. Because even if I could make up the best possible description of what heaven would be like it still wouldn’t be somewhere I would want to be.

  1. Does everyone like you there? Do you like everyone else? That’s hard to imagine, since there are perfectly nice, virtuous people on earth who nevertheless are completely boring and/or annoying, and I can’t imagine why you would suddenly want to hang out with them. Especially since, in heaven, you would think you would finally be free of all the boring/annoying people you had to deal with on Earth.
  2. If you get brain-damaged on Earth, do you get your mental faculties back in Heaven?
  3. Do you get your dead pets back? If so, does that mean they have souls?
  4. What if you really loved someone who didn’t make it? How could you really enjoy Heaven if the ones you cared most about couldn’t be there? That seems like a kind of torment.
  5. Do you get to talk to Jesus much? Seems like he would be really popular and incredibly busy. Maybe he could be everywhere at once so we could all hang out with Jesus all the time, but then you would never have anything to talk to him about, because he would already know about it, because he was there.
  6. Is it possible to commit a sin once there? Is it possible to even contemplate sinning? If not, does that mean that God’s precious gift of free will was only temporary?
  7. Do you have a physical sense of self? Arms, legs etc? Can you eat? Eating’s a pretty fabulous thing, it would seem pretty crummy if we couldn’t do it any more. If you can eat there, does that mean you would shit as well?
  8. Like eating, sex is a pretty big deal here on Earth, would there be sex in heaven? Between heterosexual married couples only? Could you get married in heaven?
  9. What about sleep? That’s nice too. I would miss it if I couldn’t sleep.
  10. Are there property rights in heaven? Would you stake a claim in a particular spot? Would a spot be allocated for you?

Google is still cool

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Their front page is still one of the smallest and simplest on the internet, with about a hundredth of the cruft found on their "competitors’" front pages (I use quotes because I wonder if anyone is really considered a competitor to Google in search– probably not). This minimalism carries pretty well across their suite of web applications too… nothing they produce feels like a kludgy copy of a desktop app.

I particularly like the special searches which allow you to "search" for the answer to an equation or conversion

unit conversions: 6 litres per 100 km in mpg –> 39.2024306 miles per gallon

mathematical: e^(pi*i) –> -1

time zones: time in Sydney or Sydney time –> 8:01pm Thursday (EST) – Time in Sydney, New South Wales

The latter is particularly useful I think, because every other web site that does time zone conversion seems to have multiple dropdowns to fill in and still expects you to know which time zone a place is in and whether it’s daylight savings or not.

I like that they let you view PDF results in HTML, since generally I am looking for actual searchable information and don’t care so much for the formatting, and like many people I wince when I realize I’ve just made the mistake of clicking on a pdf link.

There are only a few things that they don’t get quite right IMHO. Chat in gmail seems rather flaky at times and can fail to send messages without telling you exactly which parts were lost. It would be nice if the "define:" keyword could return a result that felt reassuringly comprehensive rather than a smattering of sources not necessarily useful or reliable– if only they had an arrangement with the OED or something similar. Gmail load times seem to be growing longer (a couple of seconds for me); I assume because they are packing more functionality into the javascript.

Maybe they are trying to take over the world, maybe they are becoming a little bit evil… at this point I don’t mind, because they are still charming :)