Saturday, July 01, 2006
Uhhhmm... OK, keep talking....
It isn't my intention that this should be a political blog, but events keep coming this week that beg for comment. I do plan on mentioning a few non-political items further on down.
No sooner do I comment on how chatty Bin Laden has gotten of late, and how that might not be a good thing for him, than he releases yet another tape. This one calling for more Sunni violence against Shiites. All of course in the name of settling the score for Shiite violence on Sunnis, which is of course a little hard to swallow in light of how many Shiites have died due to Sunni bombings.
Al-Qeada seems to have morphed into just another cult believing that enough bloodshed, death, and chaos on Earth will hasten Divine intervention and judgement. I would compare them to South Park's Underpants Gnomes; whose famous business plan:
- Collect underpants
- ???
- Profit!
- Kill Believers and Unbelievers Alike
- ???
- Victory!
Bin Laden even referred to the Shiites directly as apostates, again echoing my assertion in my last post that Islam is just a little to picky and exclusive for its own good. Given that Iraq's eastern neighbor Iran is largely Shiite and Iraq's western neighbors are mostly Sunni, its no wonder it has become ground zero in the struggle for Islam's soul. Many have openly opined that it took a prick like Saddam to keep lid on things and be a buffer between these two visions of Islam.
Christians might look on with bemused smug satisfaction, but as an agnostic I think it was the neutering of Christianity by secularism that made it the more benign religion it appears to be today. While Westerners and Americans in particular can be accused of being too eager to resort to war and violence to settle matters in third world trouble spots, it certainly isn't at the urging of the Church. If Islam's Imams in general held the same anti-war anti-violence sentiment, the world would be a far safer place today. For better or worse Iraq has become a huge experiment in whether Islam can be secularized and democratized -- another irony given that Saddam led one of the most secular Islamic societies in the region. Sunnis held higher positions is society, but I think this was seen mostly as a racial right, not a religious one. Perhaps someone more versed in Islamic culture could set me straight on this matter.
There is a new and seventh installment in Brink today. This time dealing with the quest for and impact of Cheap Access To Space At 1,500 words for today's entry I am definitely getting wordier. I suspect I may be tempted to go back and pad my earlier entries out to more like 2,000-4,000 words. At these lengths and with proper illustration and additional research, the planned 35 installments would be a good start on the makings of a book. On a related note the Shuttle failed to lift off today due to weather. I worry that the temperature stress of de-fueling the liquid oxygen and hydrogen and then refueling will stress that foam insulation too much once again. It isn't likely we will loose the Shuttle in its next launch, but I wouldn't be surprised if foam debris is once again detected. Debris that would be less present if the Shuttle had lifted off after her first fueling. Now that we are looking for debris with over 70 hires cameras on launch, we are almost certainly going to find some and have another round of hand wringing afterwards. Expect more Shuttle delays and redesigns as the program winds down. I suspect the ISS will never be truly completed. They'll probably just have to say "good enough" after five more Shuttle visits or so and call it a success to save face.
After a short blip upward on the scale the day before yesterday, my quest to shed pounds before going to Singapore seems to be back on track. Without Nian here, there just isn't much for me to do, but blog and go to the gym. Nian would argue I have a lot of other assignments I should be making progress on, but with two weeks to go before I see her again, I'm more concerned with being the robust, healthy, not-over-weight man she met before my unnecessary lung surgery. I'm still about a minute off my one mile run times, but other than that I'm totally back to my pre-op workout levels, and my runs are still steadily improving.
I hadn't been aware that sci-fi spoof animated series "The Venture Brothers" had a second season coming until just a week before the new episodes started. This show is definitely not for kids, it is basically an adult-comedy send up of the ground breaking animated sci-fi series "Johnny Quest" from the sixties. I won't go into details, but I have watched the second season, first-season-cliff-hanger-resolution opener three times, and it just gets better each time, especially the techno-montage beginning to the music "Everybody's Free" by Aquagen featuring Rozilla. This portion alone I have re-watched close to a dozen times as the most perfect and emotional music montage I think I have ever seen in a film, live action, animated, comedy or not (OK I'm exaggerating a little). The voice talents on this series are so over the top and perfect in their rolls that the glorious animated drawings are almost unneeded and the show could be done perfectly well as a radio series. I don't think there is any way my wife would care for this series and all its pop culture references from the 60's 70's and 80's, but it almost makes me glad to be 48 so I get all the jokes.
I recently finished Stephen Baxter's "Exultant" Quite the novel. Stephen is my current sci-fi addiction, no one does hard science fiction quite as well as he does these days. You almost have to a Masters in Physics to appreciate the care and research he must put into these novels.
In an effort to better round out my reading I have started Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," supposedly one of the greatest novels of the 70's. To be honest I'm finding its a bit of a slog, but at 150 pages in I'm determined to make it through the approximately 900 page tomb. I have certainly made it though longer books, and if you count series, stories that span muli-thousands of pages. I suspect the book just takes too much concentration to do on a stair machine, which is where I basically do all my reading these days in my quest to loose weight. With so many vividly described characters and such intricate scene descriptions it is easy to get all the players confused when you are struggling to keep your heart rate above 160.
My appetite for sci-fi will have to wait even further, as I have also just received my copy of "The Kite Runner," which is a novel my wife recommended. A romance set in war torn Afghanistan.
