Does this mean I've seen a Lego minifigure die?

Lego Thestrals:

And a Dolores Umbridge minifigure:

And how cute is the Lego Sirius-head-in-the-fire??

Centaurs, Thestrals, and Umbridge, Oh My!

Check out the new trailer for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix below. It'll give you chills! The movie looks great--and it better be! It's my favorite of the HP books (so far, anyway!).

Take a tip, Al Gore

I just finished watching the 2-hour special Idol Gives Back, American Idol's charity drive that will probably raise over 100 million dollars (including corporate donations) to fight disease, poverty, and illiteracy across the United States and in Africa.

Given the state of television these days, and knowing I was in for two hours of celebrities in a semi-unrestrained live telecast, I was a bit apprehensive about the show. I braced myself for lectures about wasting money on fighting wars while people are starving at home. I braced myself for lectures on why Americans are responsible for all the suffering in the world.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. The tone of the show was exactly right. The video clips of children both in this country and in Africa were heart-wrenching, and sometimes even difficult to watch. But the producers let the video clips speak for themselves, and without passing judgement on the audience, allowed us to grow to care about the children whose lives we have the power to change. The show was full of excellent vocal performances and laced with humor (picture a deadpan Eric McCormack telling the audience, "If everyone who ever voted for Sanjaya gave just one dollar, we could do so much good.") It never felt overwhelmingly sad or hopeless. In fact, the whole mood was one of hope and encouragement.

If only more people could understand this secret! John Denver and Steve Irwin understood it: Don’t rail at people for destroying the environment, for cutting down trees, for endangering species; share your love of the mountains and the forest and the animals with them. Make them love these things so much that they can’t bear to see harm come to them.

The remaining six Idol contestants sang a song called "American Prayer" at the end of the show. Two lines in the song completely sum up this philosophy:

Don’t kick at the darkness;
Make the light brighter.

From my Starbucks cup:

The Way I See It #230

Heaven is totally overrated. It seems boring. Clouds, listening to people play the harp. It should be somewhere you can't wait to go, like a luxury hotel. Maybe blue skies and soft music were enough to keep people in line in the 17th century, but Heaven has to step it up a bit. They're basically getting by because they only have to be better than Hell.

--Joel Stein, Columnist for the Los Angeles Times


Is this why the LA Times is failing? This is the best they can do? And seriously, a luxury hotel? This is what he can't wait to get to? Sad. Very sad.

Oh, and check out #220 (For some reason, I can't get the link to go straight to #220, but you can use the previous/next buttons to find it.)

OH MY GOSH, OH MY GOSH, OH MY GOSH!!!!

A new Harry Potter movie, a new Harry Potter book, and now this all in the span of a week? How will I contain myself???

I scream, you scream

We all scream for free ice cream! Get a free cone at participating Ben & Jerry's today! Mmmmm....

Pop Quiz #2

Here’s another pop quiz, but I guarantee you can get this one right if you think about it hard enough. It does contain major spoilers for Jericho, though, so if you haven’t watched this week’s episode, or if you plan to ever watch the show, don’t read any further.



On the television show Jericho, the group/groups responsible for dropping several nuclear bombs in various major cities all across the United States, with the successful goal of throwing the U.S. government into irreparable chaos was/were

A) Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, or some other terrorist group that would love to see us destroyed.
B) North Korea, Iran, or some other country that would love to see us destroyed.
C) several cells of American anarchists.
D) several groups of American religious fundamentalists (i.e. Christians).
E) several Domestic militia groups.
F) C), D), and E) with fake FBI badges, as orchestrated by the Department of Homeland Security, using the CIA as dupes and nuclear weapons brought into the country by the U.S. government.

*Sigh.* Well, I was watching too much TV anyway. I guess it wouldn't hurt to cut this one off my TiVo Season Pass list. It’s not even so much the subject matter that offends me; it’s the ridiculous notion that this is supposed to surprise us anymore. The writers in Hollywood are so keen on venting political frustrations that they don't realize that everything they're writing has become horribly cliché. What would really surprise me, at this point, is a show that had the audacity to go outside the “we are the enemy” box that has become the status quo of every show on television for the past several years. I’m tired of it; it bores me. Come up with something new, people.

Late Papers

Sorry it took me so long to grade your papers. But, you see, when you're the professor you can be late without any penalty at all, so ha-ha.

You all fail, except Amy, who has mastered the art of regurgitating what the postmodernist professor wants to hear, and is therefore correct.

According to the book, facts are "revisable data about the world." Is it just me, or when you think "fact," do you think solid, true, incontrovertible?

Now, they do have a somewhat reasonable explanation for their definition. For instance, they give the example that it is a fact that humans cannot regrow limbs. However, someday in the future, humans may be able to regrow limbs, in which case we would have to revise our data, and the facts would change.

But I think the way they use this term is terribly confusing, and leads students to the idea that truth is sort of a floating concept, and nothing is ever really absolute. I'm not sure if poorly-explained concepts such as this are partly what led to postmodernism, or merely a result of it. Maybe both.

Pop Quiz

Can you answer this question, from the test bank for Conceptual Physical Science (edited by Paul G. Hewitt, John Suchocki, and Leslie A. Hewitt)?

In science, facts
A) are absolute.
B) may change.
C) mean very little.
D) are more important than theories.

I'll grade your answers tomorrow...

I would like my certificate, please

Do you want to hear something sad and pathetic? While watching/mocking 24 last night, I realized that somewhere along the line I have come to think of the bad, warmongering, judgment-impaired crazies in the President's administration as “The Republicans,” and the good, peace-loving, rational, sane ones as “The Democrats.” Even though they certainly must all be of the same party, and since we know David Palmer was a Democrat, it stands to reason that his brother would be too, which means they—yes, even the crazies—are all actually Democrats. How's that for the completion of my course in Television Brainwashing 101?