Some may not call this a “Summer Reading List,” but as it is my reading list that I compiled over the summer. A few I’ve read before, but I figured they’d be good to go through again. I’ve marked through the ones I’ve already finished reading this summer.
A friend sent me this song last night. I have listened to it at least 40 times so far! I could not find a good place online that had the lyrics correct, so here they are as best as I could hear in the song.
Brothers and sisters, have you heard the news?
The storm has lifted and there’s nothing to lose.
So swap your confirmation for your dancing shoes,
Because there never was no God.
Step out of the darkness and onto the streets.
Forget about the fast, let’s have a carnival feast.
Raise up your lowered head and hear the liberation beat,
Because there never was no God.
There is no God,
So clap your hands together.
There is no God.
No heaven and no hell.
There is no God,
We’re all in this together,
There is no God,
So ring that victory bell.
No cowering in the dark before some overbearing priest,
Not waiting until we die until we restitute the meek,
No blaming all our failings on imaginary beasts,
Because there never was no God.
No fighting over land your distant fathers told you of,
Not spilling blood for those who have never spread a drop of blood,
No finger pointing justified by phantoms up above,
Because there never was no God.
There is no God,
So clap your hands together,
There is no God,
No heaven and no hell.
There is no God,
We’re all in this together,
There is no God,
So ring that victory bell.
And I know you’re scared of dieing man and I am too,
But just pretending it’s not happening isn’t gonna see us through.
If we just accept that there’s an end game and we haven’t got much time,
Then in the here and now we can try and do things right.
We’d be our own salvation army and together we’d believe
In all the wondrous things that mere mortals can achieve,
Well I’ve known beauty in the stillness of cathedrals in the day,
I sang “Glory Hallelujah! Won’t you wash my sins away?”
But now I’m singing my refrain and this is what I say,
I say there never was no God.
There is no God,
So clap your hands together,
There is no God,
No heaven and no hell.
There is no God,
We’re all in this together,
There is no God,
So ring that victory bell.
I’ve had a number of religious debates with friends online lately. This video pretty well sums up a lot of my thoughts from those debates. Here is a transcript of the video.
A friend today posted on Facebook that the Admiral Twin Drive-In Theater had burned down before she ever got around to going. She was unhappy that she would probably now not get to see a drive-in movie. I decided to go on Wikipedia.” I searched for “drive in theater” and was instantly brought to the page for Drive-in theater. Skimming through the article, I found nothing about current theaters, but the “See Also” section of the article contained a link to List of active drive-in theaters.
This list contained theaters for Australia, Brasil, Canada, United States (broken down by state), and India. Listed under Oklahoma were Admiral Twin Drive In Theatre in Tulsa (uh-oh, this is out of date), Beacon Drive-In in Guthrie, Chief Drive-In in Chickasha, Corral Drive-In in Guymon, Tower Drive-In in Poteau, and Winchester Drive-In in Oklahoma City. Now, I was afraid this list was outdated since they still listed the Admiral Twin, but then I read the small description under Admiral Twin which stated “Note: The Admiral Twin burned down on 9/3/10, no word on if it will be rebuilt.” So short a time after it happened and Wikipedia has already been updated. Almost any other website listing something as random as current Drive-In Theaters would have been out of date much longer.
Is Wikipedia always accurate and update-to-date? No. But I have found over the years that it has given me far more right correct answers than incorrect answers. When everyone can edit everything (basically) on the site, it is bound to have inaccuracies at times. This same editing power, though, is what has allowed it to become one of the most vast and up-to-date repositories of knowledge I’ve ever found.
Surprisingly, this post has nothing to do with Pahrump being the nearest point from my house where prostitution is legal. This has 100% to do with the politics of Pahrump.
First, what happens in most of the United States when an election ends in a tie? There’s a special election to resolve the tie. In Pahrump, however, the tie is resolved via the casting of lots. Granted, this is true for any tied election in Nevada as Nevada Revised Statute 293.400 states “the county clerk shall summon the candidates who have received the tie votes to appear before the county clerk at a time and place designated by the county clerk and determine the tie by lot.”Here’s a link to more information about this story.
Second, there is currently a dispute between the Nye county sheriff’s department and the district attorney’s office. A sheriff deputy arrested the district attorney in May for misuse of public funds. The problem is that the district attorney refuses to prosecute himself on the charges. More information can be found here.
I found both of these stories amusing and I figured you might also.
This was a pain to find the correct links on YouTube when I watched it, so I figured I would put all of the videos together in a blog post so that you could more easily access them. This is a debate between the Archbishop of Abuja, John Onaiyekan; British MP, Ann Widdecombe; Christopher Hitchens; and Stephen Fry.
I happened to find this quote from Al Bundy today while surfing the web. I found it to be somewhat inspirational. I figured that you might also.
So you think I’m a loser? Just because I have a stinking job that I hate, a family that doesn’t respect me, a whole city that curses the day I was born? Well, that may mean loser to you, but let me tell you something. Every morning when I wake up, I know it’s not going to get any better until I go back to sleep again. So I get up, have my watered down Tang and still-frozen Pop Tart, get in my car with no upholstery, no gas and six more payments to fight traffic just for the privilege of putting cheap shoes on the cloven hooves of people like you. I’ll never play football like I thought I would, I’ll never know the touch of a beautiful woman, and I’ll never again know the joy of driving without a bag on my head. But I’m not a loser. ‘Cause despite it all, me and every other guy who’ll never be what he wanted to be, are still out there, being what we don’t wanna be, forty hours a week, for life. And the fact that I haven’t put a gun to my mouth, you pudding of a woman, makes me a winner!
I can’t take it anymore. I am sick of politicians trying to win over voters by calling legislation “common sense.” I can’t really blame them though since it seems a large section of the American population is far too willing to say “Hmm, I have no idea what they are talking about, but they said it’s ‘common-sense legislation’ and common sense is good, so the legislation must be good!”
What really set me off about this finally is that while I was driving home tonight, I heard a clip of Obama from some recent speech where he said “we’re going to enact ‘common-sense’ regulations on Wall Street.”
Anyways, I am just sick of hearing about “common-sense conservative solutions”, “common-sense gun regulation”, “common-sense bank regulation”, “common-sense Wall Street regulation”, “common-sense healthcare reform”, “common-sense drug regulation” and any other legislation crammed down the throat of America as “common sense.”
Government officials, stop trying to dupe us into thinking that this crap is good for us. Start trying to sell legislation to the American public based on its merits, not on buzzwords. Treat us like we have some fracking common sense of our own.
