can this guy write about anything other than religion or grammar? ja wohl, el presidente. eventually.

so why is there such obsession and infatuation with religion and knowing what someone's religious and spiritual beliefs are? and why are so many lightning fast to judge? didn't the bible say something like "judge not, lest ye be judged?" i don't know for certain. i never got past the parts that said to stone the gays and rape the women.. why can some of us not just be? for example, what if a jew ran for president? a buddhist? or god (which god? i dunno) forbid, a muslim? they would have no chance. though there is a chance that a black guy with a weird (to many americans) name may (he better) be elected el presidente. i'll get off this religion thing, ok?

some letter written by albert einstein is being auctioned for a 5-figure price. it concerns some of his views on religion. good enough. in this composition, einstein calls religion the "product of human weaknesses" and the bible "childish." here's where it is http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24598856/?GT1=43001 (the article, not the letter -- my german is a bit rusty). the most complex german i know is: dein atem riecht wie hollisches sauerkraut. there should be an umlaut over the o in hollisches, if it's even spelled correctly. and i know those germans capitalize their nouns - that's why i stopped taking german; my lone german professor couldn't understand my anti-capital letter stance. the sentence that stuck in my memorie means "your breath smells like sauerkraut from hell." no offense.

i found the einstein article on msn.com along with a few other articles that i did not read because i couldn't stomach getting past the headers: "britney on last night's mother" (i think video clips were ready to roll as well), and "is the idol audience dwindling?" and you know what? i bet thet more people clicked on those two smaller side-headings than the top articles on einstein's letter or the thousands dead in myanmar and china. oh, britney.. oh, idol.. when will you both disappear? pop culture, celebrities -- excuse me while i go vomit. i'm not claiming to be too good for such things (well, actually, yes i am); there just happens to be so much more out there. i watch tv, and i understand the desire, and seemingly necessary need, to unwind mindlessly in front of the idiot box when i arrive home from work. but i'd rather watch almost anything than reality tv and the freakin babies on all of them (i guess you have to be a cryer to be selected to be on any of them) or some crappy show just because it has some really unintelligent, untalented chick who makes plenty of bad decisions. fascination of the abomination? i suppose that's part of it. other reasons? don't let me keep going.

more often than not i find myself watching some form of news (guess that means i've gotten old), especially countdown with keith olberman on msnbc. he's my favorite person to watch on tv. great rolling stone article on him here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13559914/the_most_honest_man_in_news

so, yeah, i watch msnbc - i'm a bedwetting liberal. don't know what that means, but i've been saying it for years about left-wingers and think it sounds better than the trite "bleeding heart" (better a bleeding heart than none at all - ah, an oldie but a goodie). to each his own, i know. seriously i do. some people live for that excrement that is produced by that fox noise/fixed news channel... so you know how cable channels are roughly bunched according to genre? sports channels are clustered; same thing with news channels, right? well, in the (surprise, surprise) exceedingly conservative town of augusta, georgia, the same concept applies.. sort of. the news channels are grouped in the 20s or 30s somewhere. msnbc is well-hidden at channel 176, a channel many cable subscribers do not receive. coincidence? nope.

my current read: lynne truss's eats, shoots and leaves. my rant last week on the semi-colon (;) convinced me i finally need to read it. and my life partner (hello, life partner) had it handy. i'm only about 50 pages into it, and it just gets my goat. not a day passes in which i don't see some painfully obvious misuse of some punctuation mark or some mistake of simple grammar. brutal, man.. then i ask myself why i read such things if i know they're going to make me angry. i'm a peaceful man! sidenote: i hate exclamation marks also, but you see that i was getting worked up and had little choice but to use one. the book itself makes me quite happy; just thinking about "cd's and dvd's" or someone in his "20's" for example, makes my head swim, as i know it does to lynne truss.

it's funny how one's mind can wander when merely sitting down to write a few sentences and how those few sentences can turn into 5 or 6 paragraphs. the voices in my head are much more jumbled than the words written here. i just hope they're moderately readable.

later skaters,
mr. falcon