The inaugural JimDandy UFC Drink and Feed Fest went off without a hitch. UFC 85 was good, and the beer was cold. Now that the details have been ironed out, you are all invited to UFC 86. Or 87. Whichever is more convenient.
Special thanks to KD and the Vulcan Ninja for making the event and making it special. And to Chad Erasmus Anderson, great guest appearance.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Adam Daifallah - Wrong and Wronger
Give Adam credit, when he is wrong, he is really wrong. But this kind of cultural myopia and denial of reality means he is bound to be a television pundit.
Apropos of Barack Obama's nomination as the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party:
Anyone still clinging to the tired myth that America is a racist country can no longer claim to be serious.
And here is the "wronger" part:
Obama inspires a lot of people (I'm still trying to understand why)
What a sad little world Adam must live in. I suppose he takes inspiration and hope from tax cuts, custom suits made in Hong Kong, and anytime the hoi polloi takes a shot to the balls.
h/t to CC
Apropos of Barack Obama's nomination as the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party:
Anyone still clinging to the tired myth that America is a racist country can no longer claim to be serious.
And here is the "wronger" part:
Obama inspires a lot of people (I'm still trying to understand why)
What a sad little world Adam must live in. I suppose he takes inspiration and hope from tax cuts, custom suits made in Hong Kong, and anytime the hoi polloi takes a shot to the balls.
h/t to CC
Monday, June 02, 2008
London and UFC Historical Trivia
Before there was mixed martial arts UFC, there was kick boxing. As I recall, London in the 1980s was gripped with kickboxing fever as local fighters contended for the title.
Challenge to you london guys, name London's greatest kickboxer of all time! He was so big a celebrity that he was on the scale of Karen Baldwin; he was interviewed on both CKSL and CJBK and I am sure Monitor 96 even had a story on him but I usually fell asleep during Monitor 96... which is a problem when you are painting a house and standing on a forty foot ladder... That was the magic of the host, Bruce something I think. For the record, I also believe that Pete James of CFPL was skeptical of the legitimacy of kickboxing as not one London Knight was in the sport not did the UWO mustangs field a team. Plus, I am guessing that pete would think that they didn't do that kind of thing in London in the 1950s so they should not be doing it in the 198os.
Challenge to you london guys, name London's greatest kickboxer of all time! He was so big a celebrity that he was on the scale of Karen Baldwin; he was interviewed on both CKSL and CJBK and I am sure Monitor 96 even had a story on him but I usually fell asleep during Monitor 96... which is a problem when you are painting a house and standing on a forty foot ladder... That was the magic of the host, Bruce something I think. For the record, I also believe that Pete James of CFPL was skeptical of the legitimacy of kickboxing as not one London Knight was in the sport not did the UWO mustangs field a team. Plus, I am guessing that pete would think that they didn't do that kind of thing in London in the 1950s so they should not be doing it in the 198os.
The Voyage: Roz Savage: Rower, Writer, Speaker
Roz Savage is attempting to be the first woman to row across the Pacific. Follow her progress on her blog here. Yes, she is blogging from the middle of the Pacific. Well, not the middle just yet. And she might be doing some podcast appearances with her sat phone. And uploading videos to Youtube Ain't technology grand?
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Wii, Wee fun at best.
My kids turned up the other week with a Wii in tow. Their mother, my ex-wife, had bought it for them and let them bring it to my house. So I got to play Wii sports. It is a strange type of video game where it seems that all you do is swing your arm and then it gets kind of random from there. Your Mii players don't actually move anywhere which is actually as step down from even RBI baseball. In fact the baseball game has one player pitch and one bat but other than two arm motions per play, there is nothing to the game. You could roll dice and read off what the outcome is from a table... oh wait, that's a board game from 1920.
The best part was getting to the bowling game. Again, you use one arm motion to roll the ball and lots of exciting things happen. my 13 year old son and 9 year old daughter think that the game is cool and a great way to demonstrate sweet skills. So to show them up I had their 3.5 year old brother play. He mostly figured out how to move his arm to roll the ball and he got three strikes and got over 100 his first time out. The older siblings decided that the little guy must be a natural or a savant or something. I tried to explain that there is nothing remarkable about the little guy's natural ability to bowl on Wii. Instead it is an index for the complete lack of skill and strategy in Wii games.
So given how well my thoughts on UFC and atheism have been going over lately with this blog's audience, if you guys continue to be Wii fans, then enjoy flexing your arm and getting random scores and outcomes. What fun! Exercise and fun non-systematic outcomes!
The best part was getting to the bowling game. Again, you use one arm motion to roll the ball and lots of exciting things happen. my 13 year old son and 9 year old daughter think that the game is cool and a great way to demonstrate sweet skills. So to show them up I had their 3.5 year old brother play. He mostly figured out how to move his arm to roll the ball and he got three strikes and got over 100 his first time out. The older siblings decided that the little guy must be a natural or a savant or something. I tried to explain that there is nothing remarkable about the little guy's natural ability to bowl on Wii. Instead it is an index for the complete lack of skill and strategy in Wii games.
So given how well my thoughts on UFC and atheism have been going over lately with this blog's audience, if you guys continue to be Wii fans, then enjoy flexing your arm and getting random scores and outcomes. What fun! Exercise and fun non-systematic outcomes!
Time to get JD: back on track -- why atheists are as flaky as the believers
Over the past few weeks I have become concerned that my good friend and volatile blogger, David, has lost his blogging way. Cutting critiques of conservative thought and policy, aggressive debate with christians, and commentary on the comic book world has given way to extended man-crush style worship of UFC.
To help turn the ship back on course, I offer up this suggested reading: Daivd Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (Hardcover). This book was reviewed in JD's former favorite media source, the Globe and Mail (I don't think the Freeps saw this book coming).
I love this observation by the book's reviewer:
"Nothing infuriates atheists more than the observation that people who scorned traditional religion in all its varieties were responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the last century...
"Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, not the Vatican."
So, committed atheists, who now represent as much of a third of Canadian society, if you can't use your science to "prove" your conviction, then what do you really have?
Here is an excerpt from the book in the G&M review:
Claims and questions
The idea that we must turn to the sciences in order to assess our religious beliefs owes much to the popular conviction that so long as we are turning, where else are we to turn to? The proper response is a question in turn. Why turn at all? And if we must turn, why turn in the wrong direction? To ask of the physical sciences that they assess the Incarnation, or any other principle of religious belief, is rather like asking of a rather powerful Grand Prix racing car that it prove itself satisfactory in doing service as a New York taxicab.
The claim that the existence of God should be treated as a scientific question stands on a destructive dilemma: If by science one means the great theories of mathematical physics, then the demand is unreasonable. We cannot treat any claim in this way. There is no other intellectual activity in which theory and evidence have reached this stage of development.
If, on the other hand, the demand means merely that one should treat the existence of God as the existence of anything would be treated, then we must accept the fact that in life as it is lived beyond mathematical physics, the evidence is fragmentary, lost, partial, and inconclusive. We do what we can. We grope. We see glimmer.
From The Devil's Delusion,
Chapter 3.
To help turn the ship back on course, I offer up this suggested reading: Daivd Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (Hardcover). This book was reviewed in JD's former favorite media source, the Globe and Mail (I don't think the Freeps saw this book coming).
I love this observation by the book's reviewer:
"Nothing infuriates atheists more than the observation that people who scorned traditional religion in all its varieties were responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the last century...
"Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, not the Vatican."
So, committed atheists, who now represent as much of a third of Canadian society, if you can't use your science to "prove" your conviction, then what do you really have?
Here is an excerpt from the book in the G&M review:
Claims and questions
The idea that we must turn to the sciences in order to assess our religious beliefs owes much to the popular conviction that so long as we are turning, where else are we to turn to? The proper response is a question in turn. Why turn at all? And if we must turn, why turn in the wrong direction? To ask of the physical sciences that they assess the Incarnation, or any other principle of religious belief, is rather like asking of a rather powerful Grand Prix racing car that it prove itself satisfactory in doing service as a New York taxicab.
The claim that the existence of God should be treated as a scientific question stands on a destructive dilemma: If by science one means the great theories of mathematical physics, then the demand is unreasonable. We cannot treat any claim in this way. There is no other intellectual activity in which theory and evidence have reached this stage of development.
If, on the other hand, the demand means merely that one should treat the existence of God as the existence of anything would be treated, then we must accept the fact that in life as it is lived beyond mathematical physics, the evidence is fragmentary, lost, partial, and inconclusive. We do what we can. We grope. We see glimmer.
From The Devil's Delusion,
Chapter 3.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)