Toadfish Monastery

No, Harper Lee, inventor of the Tequila Mockingbird, invented that.

Al Gore invented the gila monster.

Spring forward, Fall back!



On the TV news
Lies, lies, lies, lies, and more lies

Actually I have heard of Byte magazine. I even had a subscription once. But at one Byte per month, it took two months just to get one article. (And that was only when the article was "an." When it was "the" it took three months, and four months for "this" or "that.")

The sibling below me has petitioned Congress for a Letter of Marque and Reprisal, as provided for under Article I Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.

- Allenbatrachus

Quote from: Agujjim on October 13, 2006, 09:14:26 PM
In Calgary, ugly ain't got nothing to do with it.  It's rare to get turned away (as a white male) unless you're flagrantly breaking 'dress code' (light coloured sneakers will do this, or 'skater'-type clothing (hoodies)), or occasionally when they pull the 'over-25' age limit, which is generally on the busier nights.  Age is never a factor for girls* unless the liquor board is about.

In that case, I retract my point. When I think of the "club with the line and the guy at the door" what comes to mind is the ultra-trendy clubs in certain large coastal U.S. cities where attractiveness (or, as allowable substitues, celebrity and/or obvious wealth) is the main requirement. I regard patronizing such places as its own punishment -- whether one gets in the door or not. But clubs that are actually fair about letting all well-behaved appropriately-dressed people in, except for exclusion based on race, are a different matter.

Legal action appears a likely consequence of these reports. Is there a Canadian counterpart to the ACLU?

Best,
Allenbatrachus

Isn't that a shame! Don't you hate it when that happens? All you want to do is go to a nice club where only attractive people are allowed in, because you need a break from being in the presence of ugly people all the time -- but they don't let you in just because of your race!

My heart bleeds.

- Allenbatrachus

Duct tape unites all

----------

Twenty thousand seeds
From just one sycamore tree

Quote from: Quasimodo (The Meromorph) on October 09, 2006, 09:36:22 PM
You may also want to click on the 2nd of the faint icons on the very top right of the forum page.

Zounds!

My vision hasn't improved so much with one single click, since the last time I turned off Fox News!

Thanks!

Best,
Allenbatrachus

Though it was not mentioned by name in the narration, the Imax movie "Galapagos" features several shots of toadfish, including one in which a head-on view of a toadfish is projected full-screen - which is, in a typical "Omnimax" aka "Imax Dome" theater, about 20 meters wide.

Reassuringly, I can attest that the toadfish, even when projected from ultra-high-resolution 70 mm film in a proprietary ultra-wide-angle format onto a 23-meter dome by a 15,000-Watt xenon arc lamp, remains humble.

Best,
Allenbatrachus

Quote from: Sibling ChattyI've never heard of a Christian group that says that people that lived before Christ would go to Hell...

With an AKA like Al Dante, I should know about all this stuff. (I'm not saying I do. Just that I should.) So, let me enlighten you...

Many Christian traditions hold that everyone who lived and died before Christ went to hell (although the righeous, in some traditions, went into a less punitive subdivision of hell sometimes called "the Limbo of the Patriarchs" -- which may or may not be different from the limbo for unbaptized infants that the Pope is talking about. In any event, the Limbo of the Patriarchs is now empty, so it doesn't really matter whether the Pope abolishes it or not.)

Why is that part of hell now empty, you ask? Well, when Christ died, and rose on the third day, what did He do with all that spare time? I bet you thought He spent it at His analyst's (or his chiropractor's) office working through his cruci-fixation, right? But no. Apparently He spent that time going to hell to rescue the righeous and bring them to heaven. This event is called "the harrowing of hell," and in some versions it's been embellished into a heroic epic of sorts, where Christ had to fight all kinds of Gandalf-Balrog-style battles to free hell's captives. The tradotion of the harrowing of hell is reflected in some versions of the Apostle's Creed:

...Suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into hell.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father...

This ingenious tradition not only explains the time delay for the resurrection on the third day, and what happened to the righeous before Christ, but it also gives millions of kids a rare opportunity to say "hell" in church.

However, some versions translate the line as "He descended to the dead" which is apparently just as reasonable a translation. And some denominations -- including the United Methodists -- omit the line entirely.

Actual Biblical justification for the tradition is, as one might imagine, rather sparse. IIRC, there's a line here and there about Christ "leading the captives" and another about His "triumphal procession" and things like that which have been interpreted to refer to the harrowing of hell.

- infernAL
(Ooops, I said I wasn't going to do that here...)
- Allenbatrachus

That IS funny! It says I should install Windows Media Player! Like, right, I'm going to install that crap on my mac! Ha ha ha ha! What a laugh!



- Allenbatrachus

My opinion:

Screw the moon.

Screw mars (for now).

Materials science is where it's at. Figure out how to make buckytubes miles long, or something better. Then tool up until you can buy two-by-fours made of the stuff at Lowe's.

Then, space elevator.

Then, screw taking off from the bottom of this hole with rockets. That ain't technology, it's pyromania. "Let's move around by blowing up a bunch of explosives inside a can with a hole in one end." It's like sending express mail by setting up lines of catapults and flinging the mail from one to the next. It can be done that way, but never well.

A space elevator... now that would be a giant leap for mankind. Especially for BASE jumpers.

- Allenbatrachus

Press Secretary Downplays Terror Threat
Points out that disease, accidents, natural distasters pose much greater risks to Americans

EDIT: Here are a few more, for U.S. politics season:

Candidate calls incumbent "too tough on crime"

Candidate apologizes for inaccurate attack ads

Candidate, expecting large turnout of young voters, vows "no more pandering to seniors"

Poll: Few voters give a crap who their State Treasurer is

Day after election, supporters mobilize in force to remove their candidates' signs, stickers from city

... and one more for the business section:

Newspaper ads "not cost-effective," study says.

- Allenbatrachus

Sibling Chatty, thank you so much for your reply. I didn't mean to stir up bad feelings you're trying to get past. I promise that if I do take this on, I'll take it on myself alone. I won't come asking for further advice and I won't come crying to... I mean, I won't give you the satisfaction of saying I Told You So!

And I so much appreciate everyone's concern for my well-being.

You might be interested to learn that hanging out in vipers' nests has become something of a hobby of mine. I'm becoming the Steve Irwin of message boards. (Hmm, that might not be the best analogy to make right now...). My great experiment during the summer (which started out as a [NAME OF SECRET SOCIETY FORBIDDEN] "espionage" project) was to spend a lot of time at a Creationist bulletin board called (remove the spaces; I don't want searches on names from there turning up my posts here) e v o l u t i o n i s d e a d.com. Arguing the pro-evolution side, of course, but more interestingly, in the process, seeing whether I could subvert the whole tone of the place, promote respect for both sides instead of the customary perpetual shouting match, and get actual civil discourse going. All with no mod authority or support whatsoever. Check out the posts by "M y r i a d" there if you want to see some of the results. (For a while my sign-off, "R e s p e c t f u l l y,  M y r i a d," was occasionally made fun of, but after 50 posts or so everyone realized that I was sincere. But was I really? The better the spy, the harder it is to tell.)

Sibling Bluenose, you're very perceptive. The subtext that you noted in my previous post is real. But it's there for a different reason than you guessed. I wanted to be clear that I was asking for Chatty's permission to mod there, and I wanted Chatty to feel free to deny that permission for any reason, even if just for a speck of petty revenge, without having to wonder if saying "I'd rather you didn't" might be denying me something that I actually really wanted. That speck of petty revenge is the least I owe her. So I slanted it the way that I did. Which is not to say that I actually do have a yen to mod there. It's an unpleasant job I'm willing to do if I think it would serve any useful purpose.

As far as the current state of omnia, traffic has been generally low. MPTrooper and Cap have gotten into a couple of political disagreements in U.S. and World Politics (in which I found myself on Cap's side in one, and MPT's side in the other). No dramatics so far.

However, given the humility of my siblings in atruistically NOT saying "Don't give those rat bastards the time of day!!!" or anything such, what will decide me is the results of discussion about religious tolerance policy that I initiated in the mods forum over there. Which includes my posing challenging but reealistic "what if" scenarios. (And I've just now asked openly, is allowing mockery of Christianity as in the FSM book the reason for the admin policy change?) This has gotten a few people thinking and already uncovered some philosophical differences between the admins. (Of course, my intention is to clarify the policy, not sow discord. Though the better the... never mind.)

I don't care if any or all of these posts of mine get back to omnia. I'm already openly discussing my concerns about the religious tolerance policy there. (One interesting point that came up, that I'll follow up in the appropriate place here: though "practice what you preach" sounds like a good idea and a guard against hypocrisy, it's simply not always possible. For instance, if one's principle is "don't preach" then one can either practice it or preach it but never both.) If they don't like that I respect Dee Dee's work enough, and owe her gratitude and loyalty enough, to ask her permission to mod there, they can dump me. One result of the policy discussion might even be finally giving them a clue about why the Toadfish (individually and as a group) left, which I doubt any of them has had any comprehension of so far.

Again, thanks.
Best regards,

Allenbatrachus

Seig... HEIL!

Oops, was that the right salute? (At least I wasn't holding the beer stein in my right hand... it would have spilled, despite the little pewter lid.)


The sibling below me lives in fear of fear itself.

Reporting at long last (to what appears to be a very mixed metaphor, some sort of combination monastery and pirate ship), this is Allenbatrachus the Grunting. Known OT as Al Dante.

I'm planning on phasing out Al Dante and using Allenbatrachus or Al Grunt here. And I'm NOT going to get started on doing "-AL" sign-offs like this:

- uneconomicAL

...here, because it got to be a real pain in the ass, often taking longer to think of an adjective ending in AL than it did to write the post. (That's the great thing about humility, isn't it? It teaches itself. EventuALly.)

Best,
Sib Al Grunt