religion

"Pew found that Jews, Mormons, atheists, and agnostics are better informed about religion."

i don't doubt it at all --- i know much more about christianity than most christians, that's for sure --- one of my favorite tomes is belcher's the religious denominations in the united states: their history, doctrine, government, and statistics, with a preliminary sketch of judaism, paganism and mohammedanishm, published in 1854, the full text of which is on line here --- it is a magnificent display of the anarchy of religious beliefs ---

endangered species

the bristlecone pines are the oldest trees in the world, some nearly 5,000 years old and have always been one of my favorites --- i saw some in utah that i'm sure weren't that old, but they were impressive anyway, just for being able to live and grow under the most extreme conditions --- pine beetles and rust could do them in

"god's big mouths"

hitchens on eddy long and dr. king's legacy:

"Men like Bishop Eddie Long are fouling the legacy of the civil rights movement....The day can't be far off when Long follows the traditional script and starts to yowl for prayer and repentance. And this would all be the greatest fun if it didn't also involve the degradation of the King family and the steady erosion of the real memory of the civil rights movement, which is not safe when left in the keeping of God's bigmouths and tree-shakers."

redecorating ansley mall

looks like a major do-over going on

8:21 pm

everything is now damp and cool

6:27 pm

nice storm just rolled through --- and more rain, the precursor of which dampened my walk home

12th and midtown condos

above the loew's hotel are several floors of condos, the last to be finished of the current crop, just as the economy was going to shit --- but the open door midway up (center rear) and the furniture on the balcony says that they have finally sold at least one ---

quiet

the quietest place that i've ever been, i think, was bryce canyon at sunset --- so quiet i could hear the blood moving through my head

m.f.o.t.a. is sad

the rains came, although i'm surprised at the number of die-hards with umbrellas --- very few of the vendors have closed up yet --- in addition to the porta-potties and atms, there are now, for your convenience, portable sinks

a very messed up individual

julian bond has a lot to say about eddie long:

... the level of homophobia among black Christians remains high because many believe that gay people choose to be gay and, if they wanted, could choose not to be gay. 'That's nonsense and silly,' he said. 'But it's made campaigning for gay rights in black communities very difficult because of the religious bias. But I think that's lessening.' If one of the most powerful black preachers in the nation, who has preached vehemently against gay rights, actually turns out to be gay himself, there will have to be a lot of self-reflection taking place among the much larger black church community — and that could be good for those seeking equality for LGBT people. 'It's sad to say, but if the charges against Bishop Long are true, it's going to be a victory for gay rights in black America. A sad victory,' Bond said.

you just gotta wonder what it must be like to live with eddie the "raving homophobe," as bond put it, and eddie who liked him some young men, all in the same brain ---- talk about cognitive dissonance

thnx andrew

Publish Post

slightly different perspectives

 i don't always get to stand in the middle of the street when checking out the architecture

m.f.o.t.a.

it was winding down by the time we got back from blue ridge, but excellent people-watching opportunities nonetheless

 

metropolis storefront

pink clouds and white tents

looks like a good day coming up, and maybe the last of the 90s --- nice and quiet on peachtree this morning without the martha buses

the street

that's gonna be a lot of little white tents if they're setting them up all the way to north avenue ---

midtown festival of the arts

they closed peachtree a little bit ago and all the vendors are scurrying around flinging up tents and what not --- maybe 30,000 people, which is probably too many, but it will be fun to watch --- the showing of driving miss daisy on the street in front of margaret's house on saturday night might bring out a whole lot of people, in addition to the drunken college stundents at taco mac and hudson's

pray the gay away

thnx joe

6:20 pm

in front of metropolis

licensing bloggers

"According to The Media Note, Saudi Information and Culture Ministry spokesman Abdul Rahman Al-Hazza announced last night Saudi time that all Saudi Arabian web publishers and online media, including blogs and forums, will need to be officially registered with the government."

i wonder how long until some republican suggests that here?

and then there were four . . . .

 another lawsuit against eddie long

an ajc report suggested the possibility of ‎"a public trial that stretches on for years, dragging his reputation through the mud"   ---  one can only hope

the sun at the equinox

from astronomy picture of the day

the changing viewshed

of the two transmission towers on the hill at tenth and spring, the tallest was not being used and i think had been condemned --- it's slowly coming down --- that's it on the left in july --- it was exceptionally tall for an unguyed tower

crazy animals

guinness and dexter love them some company --- a lot of the time when my phone rings, it is a visitor calling for for me to buzz them in, so that whenever the phone rings, the boys head for the hall, more or less as you see them here --- they'll hang around for five or ten minutes before deciding it's a false alarm ---

choices and lifestyles

"What you actually do when you move out of a city is move into a car."  ~ David Owen

it's scenes like this that i dread every time i have the misfortune to experience a freeway

building new

leave it to those crazy europeans, this time the danes --- i could definitely enjoy living there i think

zombified atlanner

another new teevee series for me to miss ---

22 september

ma was born this day in 1921 --- we wished her a happy birthday down there --- nice rain as i was leaving town, with a rainbow as i passed the airport --- tonight is the equinox and there's a full moon going on too

praise the lord

after all his marches and sermons denouncing gays, and he was diddling teenaged boys all the time --- another christianist hypocrite, or is that now officially a redundancy? --- son of a bitch ---

agreed

"Pie rawks balls. If everybody had a nice slice of pie every day, the world would be a better place."

mapping people

here is a fascinating series of maps of forty american cities based on the 2000 census, showing racial composition of the city with each dot representing 25 people

damn the republicans ---- again

actually we could damn a few democrats, too, but mostly it's the republicans --- i am so sick of our civil rights being used as a political football ---

7:52 a.m.

mornings are really pretty fine these days --- now if it just weren't 95 in the afternoon

reading

i've had the kindle for a little over two weeks now, and i gotta say that i really like it --- i'm reading a lot more of the times and the constitution, the latter of which i rarely read at all --- it is so much easier to skim the headlines, even if you don't get every single thing (ads!) that you get in the dead-tree version ---however, the kindle may have made my reading even more indiscriminate than it's always been --- e.g., normally i would not be inclined to think about reading sherman's memoirs of the civil war, since military history is not my thing, but there it was for 99 cents or something, so i downloaded it right after i did charles dickens and thomas hardy, the complete works of whom i acquired digitally for 2.99 each  --- sherman's memoirs turn out to be quite interesting, and he himself comes through as an extremely intelligent, well-educated, and civilized soul, that somehow the scraggly-ass photographs of him during the civil war don't quite convey ---   he was in california in  the late 1840s, just as the gold rush was getting underway, and his account of that is the best of the whole thing ---anyway, if you are a total pervert about reading the way i am, you probably need one --- no more lugging a book around and having to have both hands free to use it --- i can walk the dog and read now, should i choose to take my multi-tasking to that level --- amazon really need to work on their formatting and proofing, but i can trade some crappy formatting and some typos for the convenience

the tea party madness

too many people are seeing the tea partiers as advocates for reining in "out-of-control federal spending" --- that's not it at all ---- 

This isn't a debate about the size of government. It's a debate about whether the government, as we know it, should really exist. Any Republican who approaches their job as a legislator with the idea that their [the Tea Partiers]  ideas can help craft more balanced legislation is completely missing the point. This is Government Shutdown-politics, plain and simple.There's a kind of inexorable logic behind this kind of movement, and it doesn't allow for positive governance. It rejects the very idea that the Congress exists to identify problems and craft legislative solutions. The idea of compromise is completely rejected.

also, it would have been a little more believable if the tee party had started their thing while bush was spending us into oblivion with tax cuts for the rich and two unnecessary wars ---

take back america

godwin's law clearly governed there toward the end, but still outstanding, especially the hair

thnx andrew

the downward spiral

Over the last two decades, U.S. scientists and engineers have discovered or pioneered the science behind one blockbuster product after another — from flat-panel screens and robotics to the lithium batteries that run next-generation power tools and electric cars. . . . Yet in almost every case, production, jobs and most of the economic benefits that sprang from those breakthroughs have ended up overseas.

much of the research behind those discoveries has been funded by the gummint, i.e. me and you, but this is your free-enterprise system at work so i don't know why anyone would complain ---

a list

i like it when my lists look like this --- clean dog, reasonably clean house, restocked on roots and berries, wo' out tires (peeling tread wo' out) replaced, this, that, and the other add up to an unwasted weekend all in all, even if i've been too lazy to walk over to the arts festival, but that's mainly because the dog is not welcome there --- i'm generally ready for the upcoming week, which will include the fall equinox on wednesday, september 22, at 11:09 pm ---

more tomitronics

you may now view a short history of ebenezer here

callanwolde

it was a great night at callonwolde, benefiting homeless kitty cats and puppy dogs --- it is difficult to believe that forty years ago, the house sat vacant and homeless people were building fires on the floors --- however, i really really hate the way they have enclosed the wonderful colonnaded courtyard that was at the center of the house's u-shaped plan

yup

thnx doug

dog habits

the cocker spaniels were always underfoot whenever i was in the kitchen --- guinness finds it more convenient to observe from the comfort of the sofa

filtering the flood

Our culture worships attention. We assume that, when we’re faced with a really hard problem, the best response is to stay focused, to lavish the dilemma with deliberate thought. And so we order a triple espresso, or chug some Red Bull, or snort some Ritalin. The point of these chemicals is to sharpen the spotlight, to keep us fixated on the task at hand. But is this a good cognitive strategy? Is distractability always a bad thing?
. . .

People bemoan the infinite distractions of the web, the way we’re constantly being seduced by hyperlinks and unexpected search results and arcane Wikipedia entries. And yes, that’s all true – I just wasted 30 minutes, for instance, searching for that Kierkegaard quote. (I ended up on a Danish culture website, which led me to a photography collection of Danish modern furniture…) But the problem isn’t distractibility per se - the problem is distractibility coupled with a failure to curate our thoughts, to monitor the relevancy of whatever is loitering in working memory. Think of the internet like an epic cocktail party, filled with chattering 24/7 conversations. Our goal shouldn’t be to ignore everything beyond earshot – that would inhibit our creativity, and keep us trapped in a very narrow world. Instead, we should keep on searching for those smart voices, so that we can remix the right data inside our head.

sometime the internet can certainly give the feeling of "drowning in possibility," but personally i kinda like that side of it, most of the time ---

 

will fall ever get here?

spray on clothing?

Manuel Torres joined forces with scientists at Imperial College London to invent the spray, which forms a seamless fabric on contact with the body. . . . The spray consists of short fibres that are mixed into a solvent, allowing it to be sprayed from a can or high-pressure spray gun. The fibres are mixed with polymers that bind them together to form a fabric. The texture of the fabric can be varied by using wool, linen or acrylic fibres.

 watch the video

too much

colbert's may be the most inspired

vertigo

switch it to full-screen to watch --- what it doesn't do is explain exactly why these guys needed to get to the top of a 1768' antenna --- if you are afraid of high places, you might not enjoy it so well

"e shoppingus unum"

And the plot of pretty much every reality show is the same: ordinary middle American Joes with poor taste meet silver-tongued, fake-boobed Hollywood/New York shopping expert, who tells them what a shitty house they’ve been living in and what ugly shoes they’re wearing, and hands them a bunch of cash so that they can shop themselves back to superficial respectability. The public seems to have a limitless appetite for this awful stuff, which makes me wonder if it’s possible to clinically diagnose an entire country with depression.

i think it is --- i like matt

poor birmingham

Jefferson County is essentially the world’s worst credit card story. The local pols ran up massive bills to build a “Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants,” then saddled future voters with a blizzard-worth of rate hikes, punitive fees and late charges. Alabamans who should have paid $250 million for their new sewer system now owe over $3 billion, thanks to their corrupt politicians and the greedy carpetbagger banks who dragged these local hicks into deadly derivative deals.

banksters and ignorant politicians (the latter of which is not necessarily an oxymoron) are a lethal combination

not far from the equinox

signs of life

they've started work on the new arden's garden at p'tree place and crescent --- it will be good to have a little activity on that corner --- the cereal bowl should be announcing soon for the small storefront next door on p'tree place

emory roundabout

a great way to treat this intersection --- meanwhile, the city of atlanta has stupidly messed up all the great semi-roundabouts at va-highland and all through morningside, turning them into conventional stop-sign intersections

bringing home the bacon

the company that is managing the atlanta housing authority's juniper10th highrise for the elderly has apparently received recovery act money to renovate --- built in the early 1970s, it probably needs renovation --- without it, we would have many fewer walkers and wheelchairs on the sidewalks, which are a critical part of the ambience of midtown