Booyor’s BLOGgh!

Here are some rumors that I’ve seen:

• Matt Damon as Kirk
• Adrien Brody as Spock
• Gary Sinise as McCoy
• The guy from LOST as Sulu
• JJ Abrams as Director

Eww.

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.

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.

So many people are obsessed with libations. My article remains #2 on MSN.

There is a crazy flash game called Dragon Fist. You can be almost any cool martial arts guy, complete with signature moves. (Almost meaning no Chuck Norris, Stephen Segal, and Jean-Claude VanDamme.)

As I was searching for free books by Thomas A’Kempis and Augustine, I came across this.

I can’t believe that I actually read this in the original old English. College was crazy.

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.

My wife may be popular on the Internet (yikes), I got beat by nephew and daughter. 4,000 views!

You have to check out Jeremy’s Justin Timberlake. He already has 2,000 views (while William has 1).

Here’s the comment I don’t get:

lol funny, but i gave you a 1 just like everyone else.

Thank you, eldr1ntravvv.

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.