I’m a Wii bit obsessed

I had written off the Wii as a fad, much like the Virtual Boy. I still think the PS3 is phenomenal, but when talking to my brother, it hit me: I will have kids in my house for quite some time (for probably two more decades). As it is, my wife and I have to wait until my daughter is in bed before we play the PS2 (my brother has the PS3).

I think I may be returning to Hyrule, hopefully after my birthday.

The Futile Ohm had a Wii on Sunday night. I was sort of winded by the end of a tennis-boxing match combo. It really did feel like I was tennis-ing, especially since I made a Mii with a big beard, crazy hair, and a distinct “boo” followed by “yor!”.

Here’s how realistic the controller makes things. In Medal of Honor, you hold down a button and do an underhanded toss. Your character on the screen rolls a grenade. Hold the same button but throw overhand and you lob a grenade into the Nazis. Craziness. I saw a video of a guy reeling in a fish by pantomiming fly fishing (in Zelda, not Medal of Honor).

Here is my vote for craziest/coolest.

Getting used to Nigeria

Here is an update from our sister in Nigeria:

Hey Everyone!

Just wanted to let you know what’s kinda going on.
Yesterday, Saturday, was a very full day. J, the other young American m here and is my roommate(literally), and I went to Bezer Home, which is the home where the women and children of Mashiah Foundation stay in the complex, at about 10. J has a Bible study with a few young Nigerian girls on Saturday morning. We just did an art project yesterday. Most of the girls don’t speak very good English, their native language is Hausa. And then J did a reading lesson with a few of them and I went down and played with some of the kids. After we went back to the apartment and ate. Then M B was supposed to pick us up to go shopping for Nigerian clothes for us. But one woman who works at Bezer home had fallen that morning and hurt her ankle so we had to go check on her. She lives in the slums of Jos. It calls Totanwatta (I’m not sure on the spelling) and M B says she usually doesn’t take people there that soon because it is so sad! It was just like the pictures off the adopt a child comercials and the magazines. The childern were so sad looking and they would follow us around because they do not often see white people and white women are even rarer.
After getting to the woman’s house we determined that her ankle was just sprained so after icing it and wrapping it we were off to the market. There were SOOO many people there it’s a lot like Chinatown to me… I liked it. I bought 3 pieces of fabric for dresses and I spent about 2850 naira (which is roughly $25) and J got 2 pieces. J already has 3 dresses but she will be here for MUCH longer than I will. Anyway we dropped them off at the seemstress and she said they should be ready by Thursday. I am very excited about that. Today J and I went to an Assemblies of God Church here. There are a LOT of churches here. And the music was good and the people were lively but they had a special speaker and he YELLED his whole sermon, it was mostly rambling and it was about 2 hours long. But it’s not the normal pastor so I may go back there. I’m not sure yet. Anyway J and I went and check on that woman again today and she is doing better.

Well tomorrow (Feb 26) I start with the vacation Bible school and we will see how that goes.

Hugh Hewitt’s Thoughts on Mitt Romney

While working on the church database, I was reading an article by Hugh Hewitt (the database takes a long time to log into). I thought it was kinda interesting about “okay prejudices” in the United States.

If you ask a list of people whether Barack Obama’s race ought to be a factor, they will shudder and collectively say, or shout, absolutely not. And they would be right to do so.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks to supporters at a rally, Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2007, at the state fairgrounds in Des Moines, Iowa. Romney officially announced Tuesday that he was seeking the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
If you ask a similar list of people whether Hillary Clinton’s gender ought to be a factor, they will shudder and collectively say, or shout, absolutely not. And they would be right to do so.

But pose the “Mormon question” to hundreds of Americans, and very few will look at you with shock or even curiosity. What is going on here?

Not surprisingly, I think that takes a book to answer in full, but the short course is that anti-religious bigotry serves a lot of agendas. The war on faith in America — the effort to drive faith-based people from the public square and faith-based arguments from polite conversation — has been under way for three decades, and is picking up steam. A Mormon is just a convenient target, and one that provides media pundits with a convenient cover. They voice their concern with Romney’s faith by putting that concern into the mouths of unnamed evangelicals.

MSNBC’s Chip Reid began an assault on Romney yesterday by noting that evangelicals have a problem with Romney. Some undoubtedly do, but many do not. The equivalent comment about Sen. Obama would be: Southerners have a problem with Barack Obama. Reid would never make such a foolish statement. But because it is an issue of religious bigotry getting mainstreamed, he didn’t think twice.

It isn’t just promoting religious bigotry as a mainstream objection to a political candidate, it is actually expressing it. I have written elsewhere about the stunning display of raw bigotry by Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate here. But he is hardly alone. And in fact most of the published attacks on Mormons for being Mormons come in the mainstream, secular press. The legitimizing of this bigotry is far advanced. Excuses are offered for it, but it remains bigotry.

One of the surprising and encouraging aspects of my research and interviews through 2006 was the number of evangelicals and Roman Catholics eager to stand up and denounce the assault on Romney’s beliefs — beliefs which the same speakers do not share. They recognize, however, that theological debates should never degenerate into assaults on religious liberty or the right of any citizen to hold any office for which they are qualified.

Will Romney’s religious faith hurt his candidacy? That remains to be seen, but if it does, it will have hurt the country much more than him. The bigotry that was thought to have been buried in 1960 will have been exhumed. It will be difficult to kill a second time.

Good Guy Physics vs. Bad Guy Physics

My friend (who is a cartooning genius) works with other geniuses (geniusi?). They’re working on Horton Hears a Who right now (my friend’s working on some of the backgrounds and environment, I think). Here is an e-mail that has been circulating around the offices:

Dear Timmy,

I was watching Star Wars the other night, and began to wonder something. Stormtroopers are clones of Jango Fett. Boba Fett is also a clone of him. Given that, why is it that stormtroopers can’t manage to hit anything when they shoot, but Boba can?

Mat
Woodend, Victoria, Australia, Earth

Dear Mat,

This is simply a case of good-guy-physics vs. bad-guy-physics. Good guys always hit what they aim at, often with a minimum number of shots, and bad guys can’t hit the broad side of a barn (particularly if the barn contains good guys). To demonstrate the truth of this, take a look at _Attack of the Clones_. In this movie, the stormtroopers are good guys, and they hit large quantities of Count Dooku’s allies. Once they have been co-opted by Sidious and Vader, however, they immediately begin to suck, and by the time they get around to chasing Luke and Han down the corridors of the Deathstar, they regularly have difficulty hitting the walls.

Now, Boba Fett is a different case, which requires the application of an entirely separate branch of bad-guy-physics. This branch is roughly equivalent to fluid dynamics in that chaos theory is a factor. Bad guys who have proper names can _sometimes_ hit what they aim at, depending on complex laws governed by butterfly wings in China, which side of a paleobotanist’s hand a drop of water will roll down, and most importantly, the desired plot outcome. Just as apparently random events can be mapped to form beautiful patterns known as fractals, the hit ratio of bad guys with proper names will, when viewed from far enough away, form a pattern (in this case, George Lucas‘ scripts, which may or may not be considered a beautiful thing, depending on your age at the time Episode IV was released and how you feel about Jar Jar Binks).

As an interesting side note, the Star Wars movies demonstrate several other principles of bad-guy-physics, including the Law of Conservation of Evil (which is why one Sith Lord always has to die before you can get another one), and temporal anomalies (cf. Han Shot First).

Hope that clears it up!

– Timmy

Woohoo! Movies made by Star Wars fans.

Booyor the Shot Put Judge

So I wanted to help the Track and Field team (and make some extra money). They always beg people to work meets and say how easy it is. I showed up with no training to a junior high district meet.

I was in charge of the Shot Put Pit.

I knew that you put flags in the ground and that there was a measuring tape involved. I had to mentally (and quickly) travel back to my 8th grade PE with Mr. Cushing. I also recalled seeing stocky Russians grunting in Athens. I think you also had to hit the ‘A’ and ‘B’ buttons alternately in Nintendo’s Track and Field.
Our big guy stepped up first. He launched an 8 pound ball 40 feet. I was still in awe when he threw his second ‘Put’. (Or is it ‘Shot’? Which is the ball?)
I found the entire crowd staring at me. So was our big guy. He had been unstable in his throw.
“Was it a scratch, coach?”
“Yeah, sure. Yes. Yes, a scratch…so do I just put a line in the second box?”
Imagine me walking around with a clipboard and flags yelling out “26 11″ for 26’11″. Once I yelled “20 3″. The kid was like, “What? 23″?
I had the help of craters to figure out where the Put/Shot had landed. I hope by next week the grass has grown back. It looked like the French countryside after some Sopwiths had strafed it.
The kids were great and helped me get measurements. I think that it went smoothly by the time it was girls shot put. The coach from the other school just had a smirk and only shook his head once.

I also busted Cheech from smoking on school grounds. I prefaced it with, “Hey, man…” to increase chances of being understood.

Now I just have to get used to hearing a starter’s pistol being fired every few minutes at school. I’m quite thankful for the school that I work at. Other schools, if a starter pistol goes off, half of the crowd may have already drawn their “starter” pistols.

Wilting Cemetery Heroes

Man, Ted is a cool villain. And we had seen online Wireless’s powers. It’s like Gary’s Dr. Link character in Mutants and Masterminds. But when the grass wilted when Ted said goodbye to his dead wife. Very cool.
Timestopping the tasers and flying away? Petrelli rocks.
Rap music is all that blocks out Dale’s super music. Brain bruising from the Haitian.

But the top detail?
Stan Lee as a bit part…excelsior!

Updates from Nigeria

Amidst all of the hard-hitting news coverage (like the girl who has been hiccuping for 3 weeks), this will also be a place for friends and family members to get updates from my sister-in-law until she gets back in the country. She is going to Nigeria to work with an orphanage. We had a prayer night to send her off at my in-laws’ place. She leaves on Wednesday morning.
She asks that people pray for:

  • For her to have courage while she puts her trust in God and people who she has not met before.
  • Safety. The place where she is going to stay got robbed at gunpoint recently.
  • How to cook, especially in a place she hasn’t been before
  • Her health. She’s been sick for a while and has just recently been feeling better.
  • That Jesus would be honored in all of her interactions with people that she encounters.

Ultimate Alliance – Haiku Showdown

It is a fantastic game. My wife and I beat it today. Here are some quotes that play during the credits:

“A haiku:
I hate broccoli
I think it really sucks
Why is it not meat?”

- Deadpool

“Evil ninjas. They just won’t leave me alone.”

- Nick Fury

“I am a simple man. I just happen to rule a country and fight evil on a daily basis.”
“Was Wolverine in here? It smells of cheap cigars and beef jerky.”
- Black Panther

“I can be an action hero, too. It would be most enjoyable. ‘Anyone else want a piece of me?’”
- Uatu the Watcher

“Why do I always have to die?” [sound of flames] “Maybe the Assistant Producer shall feel the wrath of DARK PHOENIX!”

- Jean Grey

McCutchen Whiskey vs. MacCutcheon Whisky vs. Free Will vs. Determinism vs. the Wolf Man vs. LOST

Cloverfield Monster
Some things that I learned/thought about now that I saw how many people were searching my site for LOST answers:

  1. Whisky is what you’d call it if you were a Scotsman.
  2. McCutchen was a guy from the Civil War. (He was promoted to Captain in the Ohio army in 1861. No mention of whiskey.) But MacCutcheon is what’s on the label that Desmond holds.
  3. Aldo, the guard for the Others, was reading A Brief History of Space and Time by Stephen Hawking. Black Holes…the Black Hole with Maximillian and V.I.N.C.E.N.T…20,000 Leagues Under the Sea…Hermann Weyl thought of Wormholes and time conundrums in 1921 when researching electromagnetism…Swan station, where Desmond stayed, was experimenting in electromagnetism (the plane falling from the sky, right?)…time travel caused by magnets?
  4. Desmond Hume is struggling through the same stuff that David Hume wrote about. Desmond thinks that he can change the future, or at least delay it. He keeps trying to save people, even though he knows that they will die. The crazy jeweler has the same type of time travel stuff and lets the guy die, knowing that he would die some other way, too (she’s seen them all, which suggests that she tried to help in the past). This lends itself to fatalism and a, “Meh.” outlook on life.
  5. David Hume was Scottish as well. He was influenced by John Locke (a character’s name on LOST as well as a philosopher).
  6. David Hume believed that causation was dumb.
  7. Okay, so I may have oversimplified that. David Hume thought that causation lead to unmet expectations. Events are not connected to each other (Event A happens and so then Event B happens). They are merely random experiences. He argued against induction. Just because the sun rose yesterday does not mean it will rise today. Too many assumptions.
  8. He was a nihilist who also said there was no designer of the universe because the designer would need a designer (and on into infinity). (Because there can’t be anything outside of the universe. I’m glad that the true designer is also an interacter even though he is beyond design. There is a distinction between creator and created. When we get to Heaven, we still won’t know everything because we’re not God. We’ll still learn, and imagine what we’ll learn, because we’re still human. We won’t angelfy or anything. (Yet we know some things now that the angels don’t know.))
  9. Like Francis Galton (the Nazi-inspiring eugenicist) and Charles Darwin, David Hume had some interesting words to say about other races. Here’s from his essay, “Of Natural Characters”:
    (Begin non-Booyor sanctioned quote)
    “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; tho’ low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ‘tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.”
    (End non-Booyor sanctioned quote)
    But he doesn’t support slavery. He just sees them as a separate species. Yeah, thanks, buddy.
  10. Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Christiaan Barnard, and Ernest Everett Just could school him.
  11. Hopefully Desmond (now my favorite character, since Mr. Eko died (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje played a character in ABC’s re-telling of 20,000 leagues under the sea)(where there was another character named MacCutcheon) does not share the same views as David Hume.
  12. Desmond is living life upside down and backwards after being re-born-ish when blown out of the hatch. The polar bear comes back in the painting, the Buddha statue is upside down, and ‘ETSAMAN’ shows up again. (‘Namaste’ backwards.)
  13. Mittelos is the name of the research group that approaches Juliet in the first episode of the season. ‘LOST time’, anyone? Mittelos also means ‘indigent’ – without material wealth – in German. Yeah, you can start laughing. It’s a Saturday.
  14. ‘Namaste’ can mean:
  • The Spirit in me meets the same Spirit in you.
  • I greet that place where you and I are one.
  • I salute the Light of life in you.
  • I receive the free spirit in you.
  • I recognize that within each of us is a place where peace dwells, and when we are in that place, we are One.
  • My energy salutes your energy.
  • The life in me sees and honors the life in you.
  • May the life within you be strong.
  • The light within me sees and honors the light within you.

Dark matter may have been found.