honesty might not be the best policy

This happened to me a few weeks back. I know I call myself truevil and all but really, I almost always use the normal moral codes. After this particular incident, I was seriously considering honesty is not the best policy.

I'm at uni and my course requires practical classes. These classes usually last for 3 hours. My motto for prac classes is "let's get this bitch over with and get the hell out of here" and it serves me well. I usually finish the prac 1 hour early if I get a demonstrator who has the same motto for prac classes.

In my opinion, there are 2 types of demonstrators. The sympathetic deomonstrators and the not so sypathetic demonstrators. The sympathetic ones usually just tell us lazy bums student the answer and let us get the hell out of the lab so that he/she can get the hell out of the lab. The not so sympathetic ones just don't do that.

Not only did I have the not-so-sympathetic demonstrator that particular day, the lecture materials for the prac that we were supposed to be doing wouldn't be covered until the end of the semester. So I went there with basically a blank mind, which is usually the state of my mind every single prac anyway.

So I did my usual magic of finishing the practical part of the prac in one hour and wrote up the results in 3o minutes. By that time I thought I'd be out of there one hour and a half early. Man was I wrong. Not only did we get held back, we got an earful for not understanding the "mechanism of the reaction" which we hadn't and still haven't learned.

So where does honesty come in you might ask. Well, I confessed to the afforementioned demonstrator that I didn't know about that particular reaction and I got an earful about how I was supposed to be on top of all the materials regardless of when it would be covered, yada yada yada... If I didn't say anything about not knowing, I wouldn't have to listen to that particular lecture about being on top of everything and I would have gotten out of there a whole minute earlier with my pride intact. After I got out of there, I swore I would never be honest again.

However, when I come to think about it, it wasn't that bad really. True I got yelled at rather unjustly but then I was also at fault there for not whole heartedly prepare for the prac and for not shut my mouth when it counted. So the lessons to be learned here are:

• Be prepared
• Don't incriminate yourself if you don't have to
• Honesty might not always be the best policy. And
• Get thick-skinned sometimes so you don't upset yourself.

Needless to say, I've been putting these lessons to use ever since.

this week's weird blogs

Following up from last week's extremely popular, comment attracting [2 comments in comparison to the average of 0 comment other post attracted], blogbusting success of weird blog links here's this week's weird blogs.

Here Now
Before you click on that link, be sure you are

• Not homophobic
• 18 years or above
• Like comics books
• Don't normally drool when you see muscular men. [I'm just worried about the welfare of your keyboard, that's all. And I don't drool, ever! I might when I'm old and senile but I haven't drool since I was 6]

Stefano
Something is definitely wrong with "random" blogs today. Blogs with the general theme of half-naked men seem to pop up more than usual. This blog is, allegedly, from the Czech Republic. The author, at first glance, seems to be extremely obsessed with his body. I'm not very sure if the pictures featured there are actually pictures of the author. Why am I not sure? Let's just say that I can't afford to actually read the damn blog on account of it showing an excessive amount of "flesh" and I am using a university computer. How weird would it be if people catch me looking at half-naked men regardless of my sex?

Coincidental cure
This is yet another trigger-happy oops, shutter-happy asian blog. Not actually a blog really. More like a place to dumb pictures. What makes this blog qualify for the strange blogs series is the fact that the pictures were taken in Melbourne.

ilOve derrPERSON sercetlyBUDD...
I know that I've already posted a typical Asian blog last week but I just can't resist posting a link to this blog. This blog is blasphamy!
First, there is the music. At first I thought that it was some sort of ringtone with someone singing but then I realized that it's the theme song from "Laputa: the castle in the sky" which is my second favourite Hayao Miyazaki's anime after "Spirited away". And the singing voices sound amateurish so I suspect that those voices are of the author and her friend.
Second, there is the language. I had to practically translate the author's version of English to plain English to understand what the hell the author was writing about. Try this:

ToDae wen ii cum to schthe weather is very windy n wan to rain so all my
classmates like very sleepy after my common test .................. after tat i
was cal to go down wif mira to see teacher coz i nvr go to the camp n only got
two day mc so flame..............rite
tat y i dun like to go sch litter beat
must stay bck until 6 or see parent so wierd rite.........
i m dam boring at
sch like no mood to study..................but nvrm bear for 1 more yearthern ii
cn do wat ii wan
the story will be contiune ............................

Jesus H. Christ! Instead of 'today when I come' (which is grammartically incorrect since it should be today when I came), she had 'ToDae wen ii cum' which freaked me out a bit when I first saw it considering the definition of the verb "cum".
I know the story "will be contiune..." but I'm not sure I have the courage to return to this blog. One good thing though, it doesn't have any pictures.

2 weeks and counting

Yeah, it's the Middle East conflict again. Is there anytime when there isn't any sort of conflict in the Middle East? I wasn't gonna do a post on this topic since I was convinced that no good would have come out of this conflict. However, my sauces point out to me that this is an oportunity to rant about religions without using my usual approach of religions = illogical hence God doesn't exist.

What happened to God will protect his people? I don't see any god protecting anyone in the Middle East and I mean on both sides. There's been a few Lebanese civillians killed, and there's been a few Isreali killed and I doubt the reason for those deaths would be because they didn't believe in their god enough. The reason, I suppose, is they were at the wrong place at the wrong time.

From as far as I can remember, there's always been some sort of conflict between the Arabs and Isreals. I always thought that the whole conflict was about the "holy" city and the West Bank [or was it the South Bank?] that Isreal took from the Palestinians. That's a very simplified reason, I know, I got it from my sauces, hence it can't be 100% true.

[before you point out the typo, it's not exactly a typo. I have my sauces you know, fish sauce, tomato sauce, barbecue sauce... I'm no professional journalist hence I ain't have sources, I have sauces, see I'm sooo witty :D]

So I went on searching for the answer, just out of curiosity and also to confirm my possibly-wrong assumption that all this ugly bloody war is a holy war for a holy city. And man was I wrong.

There is no exact reason. Or rather, I couldn't find an exact reason. Some sources say that this started since the crusades in whenever as depicted in that movie with Orlando Bloom [what was it? city of heaven? Oh, Kingdom of Heaven]. Other sources say that this all started in the 1920s with some Palestinian riots at, guess where, Jerusalem. So this might not be a holy war for a holy city but it sure looks like that and it did start in the stupid holy city.

See what havoc religions can wreak by just labelling some piece of land "holy"? Especially when 2 religions label one piece of land holy. People can't share, it's in our instinct, we're all selfish primates born full of ID like Freud said.

If you're still unconvinced that this pointless bloody war is a "holy" war, I'll leave you with this, Hezbollah, the group of people who Isreal is eradicating with some collateral damage, can be translated into Party of God.

Should there be a separation between religion and politics?

How do vampires work?

If you actually monitor my all consuming panel on the left hand side of this blog somewhere, you'll see that I read quite a lot of vampire/werewolf novels. It was a natural progression from fantasy novels. I've read quite a few, if you ever want my advice on what's good and what's not, ask me.
What I don't get is how do vampires work? Now, different series have different types of vampire but in the whole they all agree on these points:

• Vampires are undead.
• They don't breathe
• They don't have a heart beat.

The undead concept baffles me but not as much as the whole "no breath" concept. If they don't have respiratory functions, how the hell do they talk? In the last episode of Buffy season 1, that episode when Buffy died for the first time due to drowning, Angel couldn't do CPR [due to lack of aforementioned breath] but he could talk just fine. How does that work? It'd be more logical if all the vampires have those machines that talk for them in monotone, but then that would shatter the image of mysterious, sexy vampires, wouldn't it?

Vampires' hearts don't work. So I assume they don't have a blood circulation since there's no pump to pump anything. So then what's the purpose of eating [ie. sucking blood] if there is no mean to distribute the nutrients [ie. some poor victim's blood] throughout the body?

I suppose logic and fictions don't mix that well.

while I was surfing...

This is a new series of posts that I hope I'll have time to keep up here. Basically, it's gonna be a collection of strange blogs that I come across when surfing.
I have this habit of clicking on the next blog button on the blogger bar. It's useful for discovering blogs I suppose. Not so useful when people deliberately hide the goddamn bar. I hate blogs that hide that bar. Why can't the authors leave the damn bar where it's supposed to be? I get crossed everytime I come across such blogs.

Here's an example. += I Leave in A Moment of Mine =+
I think the author meant "I live in a moment of mine". Beware, this is a typical asian blog which means heaps of personal pictures, heaps of fancy scripts. I didn't know you can make your pictures roll on the blog. But then again. I hate posting pictures so there's no point learning how to make them roll.
Things to watch out for in this blog:

• The number of pictures with some kind of birthday cakes
• Pictures of Asian boysband "hotties" [who, in my humble opinion, look way too feminine to be male]
• Weird grammar and
• lots of "..."

So that's an Asian flavoured blog. Next, an ambitous project by an unnamed author. I am proud to present, the biography of Paris Hilton.
Gosh, I laughed so hard when I came across that blog. I always believe that Paris Hilton should really get a life that doesn't have anything to do with being an airhead, oops, I mean heiress. But whoever writes this blog is seriously in need of getting a life. Why not write a biography of anyone who has even a smidgen of talent. Anyone but Paris Hilton who is just a spoilt rich brat.

The next blog is interesting, eye-catching. All thanks to a picture of a chopped up, very dead mermaid. This blog deserves extra credit from me for not removing the blogger bar. Usually with blogs this "modified", the bar would have been removed. But then I suspect that this blog has some links to a few pop-up windows that suddenly ...popped up the moment I opened the blog. No extra credit then.

milestone

I've been delaying this post for as long as I could since last Wednesday. This is in fact the 150th post of this blog and I thought it'd be nice if I have something great to say to mark the milestone that this is.

However, as it is always the case, I suddenly find myself with nothing exciting to say. So how's this for an extremely bad milestone?

question of the day

Do you know that the first reported cases of HIV are from chimpanzees? I mean HIV was first observed in chimpanzee in the 1930s. My question of the day is, how did it get to human if the it can only be transmitted through sexual intercourse and blood sharing?

By the time I finished forming that question I've got a pretty good answer. I suppose someone was a sicko and actually did it with a chimpanzee. That's the most obvious answer I can think of. However, researchers in the 1930s didn't agree with me.

1930s
• Researchers believe that sometime in the 1930s a form of simian
immunodeficiency virus (SIV) jumped to humans who butchered or ate chimpanzee
bush meat in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The virus becomes HIV-1 the most
widespread form found today.

Is it just me or did you come to the same conclusion I did?

disturbing fairy tale

I've always thought that Sleeping Beauty is the most useless princess of all the Disney's princesses. Other princesses like Snow White or Cinderella have to go through some sort of ordeal and then meet their Prince. What does Sleeping Beauty have to do? She only needs to listen to her fairy god mothers and not get near any spindles. But no she has to prick her finger and fall into a deep sleep and wait for her prince to rescue her. My point is, she doesn't do anything!

That was one of the reason why I picked up a fairy tale retelling trilogy which retells "sleeping beauty" with a twist. The main reason was that those books were written by Anne Rice. I was thinking, what can Anne Rice bring to a boring story of a sleeping princess? I have nothing to lose by reading that trilogy so I started reading it and gave up after about 4 chapters.

What can Anne Rice bring indeed! She made a boring girly fairy tale into a disturbing tale that I will never never even touch again. What she did was, instead of Beauty being woken up by the Prince's kiss, she woke up when the Prince raped her. Then the fairy tale took a nose dive into the sadomasochistic sex realm which was where I gave up reading and mentally threw the book down the toilet. I prefer the Disney's version of Sleeping Beauty, thank you!

the most useless princess

I've just had one of my off-days. I'm sick, I have a headace the size of Africa and to top it all I have a blocked nose and a sore throat. This combination is lethal when you have lectures in the afternoon. I was half asleep through most of the lectures and hence I got time to ponder upon the question of "what would happen if I can sleep for a whole week, straight?". So one question lead to another and I was thinking about Sleeping Beauty after 5 seconds.

I've always thought that Sleeping Beauty is the most useless princess of all the Disney's princesses. Other princesses like Snow White or Cinderella have to go through some sort of ordeal and then meet their Prince. What does Sleeping Beauty have to do? She only needs to listen to her fairy god mothers and not get near any spindles. But no she has to prick her finger and fall into a deep sleep and wait for her prince to rescue her.

My point is, she doesn't do anything! And expect someone else to rescue her out of the hole that she digs herself! What would feminists say about Sleeping Beauty?

scammers must think we have crap for brain

I was a little bored so I went to check my spam mail box. Ok, the truth is I didn't get any email so I checked my spam mail, what's so bad about that?
Anyway, I found this ridiculous spam.

Dear Friend,
I know that this mail will come to you as a surprise but honestly I do not
intend to surprise you. In introduction my name is Richard Uduku I write this
letter in respect of my intention to transfer and invest the sum
of US$18,000,000.00 in your company which I inherited from my Father who was a Politician and oil/Gold dealer from Guinea Bissau .But unfortunately he was shot
dead by his political opponent during one of his business trip to Cote D Ivoire.
I am now left with my only surviving mother who unfortunately has been
critically ill since 2 months after the death of my father because of the shock
of his late husband's death. And because of how my dad's political opponents has
been trying to eliminate our entire family, I then had to run out of my country
with my mum for our dear lives.
The fund in question is now with the Financial Firm where it was deposited
and all it's Documents are still intact with me. In view of this plight, I
expect you to be trust worthy and kind enough to assist me ,I hereby agree to
compensate your sincere and candideffort in this regard with 20% of the total
fund and 5% for expenses,which may arise during the transaction.
Whatever your decision is please contact me immediately through this email richard_uduku@she.com
Best Regards.
Richard U.F

This is good enough material for a soap opera. What's with politician dad got axed by political opponent and a mother who's critically ill. And they have 18 millions bucks which they can't access and have to ask for MY help! The whole spam just yells SCAM at you, doesn't it? Even my webmail client has enough sense to put this in the spam box.
These scammers must be either really dumb to come up with this scenario or they think that we have crap for brain.

Yes, I'm still alive

I hate to disappoint but I am in fact still alive. I was so very damn happy with my exam results that I stopped doing everything uni-related and found myself some extremely good books and sat down and read them.

Do you know that Fight Club the movie was first a novel? Yeah, it's a novel by a Chuck Palahniuk [really weird family name if you ask me]. Fight club is on my favourite movie list and it's probably one of my top 5. And no, I don't really like blood and violence that much. And no, I really don't find the pseudo-philosophy of the movie particularly appealingl. But I like Fight Club anyway because it is FUNNY. The book is definitely better than the movie and probably took me less time to finish too.

During the break I had a chance to watch Donnie Darko again. Hell, I still couldn't make up my mind if the movie is a sci-fi movie about time travel or if it's just a thriller about a disturbed teenager. So in order to make up my mind I went to Wikipedia to read up on this. As it turned out, the director's cut version is longer and hence has more time to develop the plot. Now I'm definitely sure that this is a movie about time travel. I should really get one of those director's cut version to watch next holiday.

holy shit! I pass

Yeah. I pass. I've been brooding and dreading these past 3 week because I knew I did shit on my exams. There were more at stakes than just passing and not having to resit the damn exams. My scholarship was at stake here. I need credits for everything. And after the exams, PP in particular, I was damn near a panic attack.

Forget VCE, I've had more stress these past few weeks than I've ever had during the whole goddamn stressful year 12. The scholarship was supposed to make me feel less stress, not more! Forget with power comes responsibility, 3vil g3nius says with free money comes stress.

So I passed. Ha ha, I passed, everything was above 70% so I get to keep my scholarship and get to have more stress at the end of the year. However, I'm happy.

The results are supposed to be out tomorrow noon but I checked tonight anyway and my heart was beating like I'm being chased by a godzilla. Waiting for the damn results to load was a real adrenalin releasing experience if you ask me.

Now I can go to bed stress free. Am I happy or what?

Costello hearts Howard

Another direct result of my getting up early this morning was I got the scoop on the Sunrise team's gossip on the 'conspiracy' behind Tom Cruise's daughter, Suri and caught a few pieces of news of the Howard-Costello relationship leadership debate.

The relationship between Howard and Costello at the moment is like a bad marriage. Both want to wear the pants but there is only one a pair. So after 10+ years, Costello has had enough and said "I want to wear the pants now before I'm too old to fit in them". Little John wouldn't want to hear anything about it. He's fond of those pants and he's grown attached to them these past years. So Costello called Howard a liar and the press got a field day.

Meanwhile, Kim Beastly Beazley is rubbing his hand and do that 'mwa ha ha ha ha' laugh that those evil villains do.

Seriously, Howard and Costello should have kept their feud under wrap. It's bad for the image of the party if their leaders are at odds with one another on national TV. But then they might have been keeping their feud under wrap for a few years now and Costello has finally had it. You can't blame Costello for it though. Poor guy, playing the bridemaid for so long in hope that Johnnie would kept his promise.

The whole thing just makes me wonder. So it's ok if John Howard lied to the whole nation [children overboard incidence] but it's not ok if he lied to the treasurer. Talking about double standard.

scary toy

3vil g3nius was up early this morning, well, early enough to catch the last half hour or so of Toasted TV anyway. What 3vil g3nius noticed during that half hour was that, one third of the half hour was devoted to toy ads. That's a staggering amount of time if you ask me. Anyhow, the toys were scary. There was this remote controlled, fully motorized crawling baby that looked like it's contemplating murdering the kid who's holding the remote control. Too bad I can't find a picture of that murderous doll on the internet. That ad scared the sleep out of me.
And then there was the creepy Barbie face.
Barbie dolls with fully intact bodies with hands and unnaturally long legs I can stand, just the face is out of the question. What's more? There are make up underneath the face so that kids can paint on the face or on their faces.
This is what Walmart said about this toy

With unique 3-d faces and hair, cool makeup, body jewelry and more, the Barbie Fashion Fever compact styling face gives girls everything they need to create a variety of different looks. Includes body jewelry, lip gloss, eye shadow and liner. Blonde hair.

Character:	Barbie
Age:	5 Years,6 Years,7 Years,8 Years,9 Years,10 Years
Toy Collection:	Barbie Fashion Fever

Note that this is for kids from age 5-10. What the hell kind of message are these people trying to get across? Would you give your girls who is eight make-up to play with? Next you'll be buying them high heels for their 9th birthday.

"scientific" argument for the existence of god(s)

I said yesterday that I was out of ideas. However, I didn't know that I'd find my muse for yet another atheistic rant. So we have established that god and science don't mix well. God is used to explain everything that we, silly humans, can't explain scientifically.

Before we knew why the sun rises in the East and sets in the West we've come up with a very original answer: god did it with his divine power. The Greek, smarty pants they were, came up with another neat god idea: Helios and his chariot. And then there was the lightnings. We attributed lightnings to gods again. But then how could a loving god created something so devastatingly evil as lightnings to kill his children? And along came yet some other smarty pants who said that lightnings were the way god carried out his wrath upon the heretics. That argument created a hilarious situation. The thing is before we knew that lightnings are just massive electrical pulses, lightnings seemed to hit exclusively on churches. I wonder how did the Church persuade the people at the time that they were not devil worshippers.

So for hundreds of years, god is THE answer, the ultimate answer for everything from big questions like why the universe exists [god wants it to], how the universe came to be? [god created it], why are humans intelligent [god created us this way] to the not so big questions like why are donkeys so dumb and why do women have periods [apparently because Eve persuaded Adam to sin hence descendants of Eve have to be 'punished' every month, unless they're pregnant of course. However, this explanation can be cut short to God hates women so he punishes them every month]. We now know how to answer those question scientifically, well, except for that question "why does the universe exist", it's always easier to answer the how's or the what's. People now demand scientific answer, not generic religious answer [well except for those fundemantalists who would still insist on the existence of a god even if someone came up with the scientific proof for the nonexistence of a god, those stubborn fundamentalists].

So some smarty pants again came up with the idea that if they can prove scientifically that god exists they'll persuade people back to the righteous way of life. They even use the 2nd law of thermodynamics to prove their point.

So what does the 2nd law of thermodynamics say? It says something along the line of any closed system will tend towards disorder. Sort of like my room, if I don't exert force [ie. clean it every week] it will definitely be in a state of total chaos [ie. disorder]. Anyhow, these smarty pants argue that the 2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts the theory of evolution. Since the 2nd law of thermodynamics is always right hence the theory of evolution must be wrong, hence god created humans.

Without looking at what's right and what's wrong, I must say that it's a very big leap from 'the theory of evolution is wrong' to 'god created humans'.

Now, let's look at what's right and what's wrong. The 2nd law states that any closed system will tend towards disorder. These smarty pants forgot to think about closed system. The thing is, we're living in an open system with energy constantly come from the Sun. So does the 2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts evolution anymore? No. End of argument.

blah blah blah

Question: Is this another atheist rant?
Answer: no, are you disappointed? The truth is, I can't just rant on and on about the nonexistence of god. That's a bit weird. Can't I just state that god does not exist and move on to some other topics? But don't be discouraged, I'll be back with a vengence before long
Question: Are you gonna talk about "crises" again? Don't get me wrong, I love your wits and all but you suck when you talk about politics.
Answer: well thank you! I'm extremely motivated by your question and I will treat you to another crisis post. No, really, do you really need ME to tell you about thing that you can read in the newspaper?
Question: So what the heck are you gonna write about?
Answer: um... something?

So I've come to this point in blogging when I have absolutely nothing to talk about. Isn't that sad? the 3vil g3nius has nothing to talk about. Let's talk about what I'm doing now.

• I'm on a break, a break that will end this week. Grrr, I hate uni. Have I told you how much I hate uni? May be not. Here's a piece of wisdom from a one-semester uni veteran: uni sucks.
• I'm reading a psychology book and it's one of the reasons why uni sucks. I have to do psychology next semester and write an essay. You know I just love essays. Anyhow, I'm convinced that Freud, for all his genius, was sexually frustrated. Extremely so. Read his Psychoanalytical personality theory. He made everyone out to be seeking to have sex and produce offsprings. What's with the Oepidus complex? That's just sick! I get the Id, ego and superego theory. It's neat but sex motivates everything? That's just too sick! How does he explain homosexual people then? No, don't answer that.
• I'm sleeping 12 hours a day. The problem with sleeping so much is that when you wake up all you want is to go back to sleep. Sleeping is my absolute favourite hobby. For me sleep can solve everything. Some people turn to food or drugs or whatever for comfort, I turn to sleep. At least I won't be a drug junkie or an obese person right? See I do see the brighter sides of things from time to time.

Pirates of the Caribbean: dead man's chest - a review

Ok, I'll try to not give away anything for those who haven't seen this movie yet. If you like the first movie, you'll love this one. I had so much fun and it's not because of how handsome Depp and Bloom are. Only one thing I don't like about this movie, there's no complete closure at the end. That undoubtedly has a lot to do with the 3rd movie coming out next year. Next year! These people are really trying to kill me here. Why can't they release it at the end of this year instead??

Anyhow, the special effects of this movie are just awesome. Especially with the huge octopus and the crews of the Flying Dutchman. This movie kicks Xmen 3's ass. Bring on the next instalment!

What I don't get is the review on the Herald Sun. They gave this movie only 1 star when The Age's reviewer gave 3 stars. I thought The Age usually gives stricter ratings. My ratings: 4.5/5. I deducted 0.5 for not having complete closure. At least for Lord of the Rings you can read the books. Here you can only wait!

Verdict: if you only see one movie this year, this has to be it.

in which YOU get a break from my angry atheist rants

I was reading this article on about.com about angry atheist. The article was just trying to resolve the myth of angry atheist. I was hoping the reason was something like atheists aren't angry, they're so hyped up about not believing any crap that they appear to be angry. Surprise surprise, the article didn't mention anything about that. The whole thing boils down to atheists are angry and there are many reasons why they're angry and by the way there are some non-angry atheist too, the end. The whole article kinda defeat the purpose of the word "myth".
So that article got me thinking, am I just another angry atheist? Of course I am, look at this blog, three quarters of the recent posts are about how ridiculous christianity is and how absurd the bible is. And that leads to the second question, what am I going to do about this? Don't get me wrong, I'm proud to be an atheist and even an angry one but being angry all the time just can't work. It's gonna do something to my moods. So, today I'm gonna have a break from the absurd existence of a God and talk about something else.

Let's talk about the current crises [weird word, crisis, the plural form of crisis is not crisises but crises, weird] in the world. So North Korea has finally showed the US how much it loved the US of A huh? What a fireworks show for Independence day! Too bad your fireworks show was a big dud. Even the people in Alaska couldn't see squat of your fireworks. May be some Japanese fishermen might have seen something of NK's big bad Taepodong-2, a supposedly deadly long-range missile that can reach Alaska and/or LA. What is the deal with those North Korean anyway? They pretty much advertised to the whole world that they have a missile that can strike the US and the said missile failed 40 seconds into the test. Talking about big overture, little show!

That wasn't much of a crisis for the US in my opinion. Now they can laugh their head off about how stupid the North Koreans are and cut all sanctions to NK. Oh and persuade the rest of the nations to cut all sanctions to NK in the process too. May be the North Koreans have something up their sleeve, may be they're trying to lure the US into some false sense of security and then kaboom, a few nuclear missiles to all the US's buddies near NK. Just my humble theory.

What's other crisis? Oh, that new Isreal airstrike that killed Palestinians. I figure this should be ranked higher on the crisis scale over that long-range dud crisis since there were actually some human casualties. However, it didn't make it to the front page. May be it's what I call the the-boy-who-cried-wolf complex. No, I'm not implying that they're lying about people dying in the middle east. It's like you hear too much about the Palestine-Isreal conflict and you figure there are always some kind of airstrike or terrorist attack going on over there so you tune out anything that has anything to do with middle east. Or may be it's just me.

Any other crisis? Of course there are, people dying in Africa, people starving in Asia, Falun Gong practitioners being killed and their organs harvested for sale in China, ... Oh well, it's just another day. And tomorrow is yet another day.

Talking about tomorrow is another day. I suppose I've always been a bit cynical and pessismistic but I really don't get those people who blogs about "tomorrow is another day". May be they're all positive all the time and they're just super hyper positive. But you can't be positive all the time. There is no way that anyone can be positive all the time. It's just like you can't be negative all the time. Me? I might have a the-glass-is-never-full view of everything but I manage to be positive sometimes so those the-glass-is-never-empty people have to be negative sometimes. I suppose I need to find out about what those people write in their tomorrow-is-another-day blogs. It's a shame that those people always have to write in Chinese or some other language. I rarely come across similar blogs in English that's talk about similar things and manage to not try to sell me some obscure self-help books on how to be positive.

The 3vil g3nius's extremely short guide to be positive:
Tatoo positive signs (ie. plus signs, do not, I repeat DO NOT tatoo crosses, 3vil g3nius does not condone the practice of tatooing religious signs) all over your body. Then you can always be positive or at the very least, remind yourself to be positive.

You want proof? Here's your proof.

So this person asked me if I could prove that God doesn't exist. I'd love to say that I gave him one hell of a good answer for that question. But I didn't. I asked him if he could prove that God exists thinking that offense is the best defense and he gave me a few answers that I must say are extremely stupid. They went something like these:

• The bible proves that God exists
• My family believed in God for generations, therefore God must exist
• See this world, this universe? Aren't they complex? Only God can make them so complex. Therefore God exists.
• Miracles happen. There must be a reason for those miracles. Therefore God must exist.
• No one saw the Big Bang. Therefore it didn't happen. Hence God created the universe and God exists.
• Communists do not believe in God. Communists are wrong. Therefore God exists.
• Nothing has meaning without God. Therefore God exists.
• etc.

Aren't those reasons just going from one absurdity to another? Even me, a person who don't know too much about philosophy or science and who aren't very good when it comes to writing persuasive essays, can counter those idiotic arguments.

• "The Bible proves the existence of God". If the Bible proves anything, it proves that the Bible is an outdated, self-contradicting work of fiction. To say that the Bible proves the existence of God is just the same as saying "the Da Vinci Code" proves the existence of the marriage between Jesus and Mary Magedalene or saying that comic books prove the existence of Superman and Spiderman.
• "My family believed in God for generations, therefore God must exist." Yeah, your family also told you that Santa Claus and Tooth Fairy exist. Go figure!
• "See this world, this universe? Aren't they complex? Only God can make them so complex. Therefore God exists." Of course the universe is complex. It took million of years for the Universe to get to this point. The complexity of the universe doesn't have anything to do with God. He didn't just snap his finger and the universe came into existence with all its complexity! Contrary to the popular Catholic belief that God created the univers/world in 6 days, he didn't. Creationism didn't happen, the Big Bang did. Can you prove that creationism happened? No. Can I prove that the Big Bang happened? I can't but someone already did. Link.
• "No one saw the Big Bang. Therefore it didn't happen. Hence God created the universe and God exists." Again, offense is the best defense, did anyone see God created the universe? I rest my case.
• "Miracles happen. There must be a reason for those miracles. Therefore God must exist." What sort of miracles are we talking about? The I-had-cancer-and-was-about-to-die-but-then-I-had-chemotherapy-for-2-years-and-was-cured sort of miracles? Of course it is a miracle! It's a miracle because without the medical advances we had nowadays you would have died. You should thank the scientists who researched for a cure for that miracle.
• "Communists do not believe in God. Communists are wrong. Therefore God exists." This argument probably came from that period of time when the USSR banned all religions in Russia without much success. The other communists countries learned from the USSR and didn't outright ban all religions, they just go about killing religious practitioners of a particular religion secretly. However, let's not get into freedom of religious practice now. The argument above is wrong in so many ways. First of all, "communists do not believe in God" is absolutely bull. They ban religions because they are/were afraid that religions might get more followers than their party and thus can stage a revolution if needs be. Therefore, banning religion or secretly eliminate some particular religions is a way to ensure their party's hold on the country, it's the communist version of pre-election campaign. Secondly, to say that "communists are wrong" or communism is bad is just like saying "capitalists are always right" or capitalism is always good. It's a generalization and it can't always be true. Hence the whole argument just go out the window.
• "Nothing has meaning without God, therefore God exists". I must admit, God can be the answer for many unanswerable questions, a very lazy, unoriginal answer. As I posted in FKAB's post, whatever we cannot easily understand we call God: this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues. I must also admit that when I became an atheist I was plagued with questions about the purpose of life if there is nothing afterwards, no rewards, no punishments. I'm still looking for the answer but it's not important is it? I'm living and that's all that matters, not what's gonna happen after I die. Back to the argument, everything has a meaning with or without God. It's just that without God, you'll have to think harder, look deeper to find the meaning.

So there, my humble attempt at disproving some absurd proofs. Does it persuade you to become an atheist? I think not. I was, am never good at persuading anyway.

Big Brother, thy name is controversy

Since when isn't BB about controversies? Last year there were the indecent incident of some housemate rubbing himself on some other housemate and the prime time pole dancing sessions. That created an outrage all right. Or enough of an outrage to make my school decide that we poor students have to write an essay on the negative effects of reality shows. I've been hating the damn stupid show ever since. Not that I liked it in the first place.
This year instead of indecent rubbing there was an alledged sexual assault. Some dickhead in the house decided to slap another inmate housemate with his dick and got himself and his mate evicted. The police have since dropped the charges as no one have pursued legal actions. It's strange that the woman who was alledgedly sexually assaulted defended her assaulters saying the whole incident was "just for fun". I don't see the "fun" in being assaulted by 2 brutes, do you? These people should really get a life. If the BB house is so boring why did they apply to get in there in the first place? But then again, this indecent incidence is just another publicity stunt. By this time next year nobody's gonna remember who smacked who with what.
I reckon the newspaper opinion page's gonna be full with call to put a stop to the whole BB show just like last year. However, I think public outrage's not gonna give BB the boot. Next year BB's gonna be back with a vengence. Maybe they'll do live execution instead of live eviction. That'll maintain the state of constant controversy.

Links:
BB victim says it was all in fun
BB housemates went too far

this is just great!

Just when I decided to barrack for England now that the Aussies are out, they lost! It's like any team I cheer for will lose or something. Not that I believe in jinxes. I hate being disappointed so I won't support any team again.
At least Brazil is out. I never really like them.

it is ok to love Jesus

In fact, it is ok to love both Jesus and God at the same time and they're both men. It is ok for men to love Jesus and God. But it is not ok for men to love other men. Curious, very curious indeed.