Bless you, i09. I linked a contextually-appropriate blog entry on a UFO thread, and your readership has delivered! It has been a record-breaking day for my little puddle next to the Great Blog Sea. I hope that you enjoyed your visit, and will come back .
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Your Aardvark horrified his wife and Number-Two-Son on Saturday night by turning on Sharktopus, the SyFy channel's much-ballyhooed movie. (I am amused...Blogger thinks "SyFy is mis-spelled. Imagine that.)
Roger Corman's schlockfest was precisely as dreadful as we had dreaded with bated breath.
I will not bother with the script...it's about a sharktopus, after all. The CG effects are precisely what you should expect from a SyFy Saturday night feature. The lighting and surface detail of the shark head reminded me of nothing less than a Lego shark. No. Mega-Blox. The effects artists were apparently unfamiliar with continuity as a cinematic concept. From shot to shot, the critter would be wet, then dry, then wet, with no intervening dunking. The logic of this bio-engineered beastie defies apprehension: a shark's head, with octopus arms behind. Octopus arms with blades on the ends that it knows how to use. AND, it can walk on its arms on dry land, swarming up trees and architecture with no obvious need for sharkish gill-breathing.

Why would anyone make a thing like that?

Having spent a measurable portion of my life seeing it, I believe that Corman owes me summat. "Roger", himself sez, "Roger, have I got a story for you! A manic-depressive bio-engineer with too many hyphens in his life cobbles together the Octo-Shark, a cephalopod with a great white shark-head grafted onto each arm. It'll be COLOSSAL, I tells ya...."

Shouting while ducking the goons applying the straitjacket "DID I MENTION THE NARWHAL HORNS...?!"

In light of current mumphing about the CLASSIC "Punisher" movie starring Dolph Lundgren (hey, remember when it was the only game in town...?) here is the Dolphster in the

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Norton Anti-Virus - Lundgren vs Unicorn - Deny (2010)

Aardvark Versus the Ants

I am currently enjoying a stay at the Baton Rouge Crowne Plaza. Bonnie P. and Tajia are around, being helpful during dealer room hours. I came not expecting to have room-mates, though.

No, your Aardvark is not practicing moral turpitude. I refer to the little beggars currently scarfing down my pizza. I ate some of my dinner, then got a mighty craving for chocolate. I went down to the hotel shop and availed myself. Upon returning, I found movement on the small sofa in the room, around my Domino's box. Ants, Mr. Rico, zillions of them! I moved the box to check the situation, and got myself well bitten for my efforts. There is a caravan of ants moving from the wall under the window, going under and within the sofa (which explains the odd bites I suffered last night when I sat on the sofa to relax a little while). The appropriate personnel are at home abed, so no fumigation is forthcoming tonight. I am receiving a free breakfast. We shall see what happens.

Here is a link to an excellent Radio Drama, Leiningen Versus the Ants. Very good listening, being a story of mankind versus army ants in South America. Enjoy!

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UPDATE:

After another call to the front desk, the facilities guy came up with a can of Raid. Lemony death to the ants. Hurrrrr hurrrrrr!

The con this weekend is Louisianime. We are doing far better here than we did in Wooster OH at KitsuneCon. Far. Better.

"Goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them."-- Dr.Henry Jones





Everything about the proposed Koran-burning points to the problem of a maverick church group utterly ignoring the authority of the Scripture it purports to follow.

"Pastor" Terry Jones of the the "Dove World Outreach Center" in Gainesville, Florida is doing this profoundly stupid act apart from any clear directives from God's Word (though between his title and the name of the group, I have no clue why this should surprise me).
The New Testament does not promote inter-religion warfare, only the preaching of the Gospel. The ONLY time the burning of books occurred was when the Ephesian Christians repented of their occult involvement and chose to burn their own sorcerous tomes.

Many also of those who had believed kept coming, confessing and disclosing their practices.
And many of those who practiced magic brought their books together and began burning them in the sight of everyone; and they counted up the price of them and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. (Acts 19: 18-19)

That is some serious repentance. They repented of their own sins, and chose to destroy the implements thereof. I am leery of church-related practices that hearken back to the German book-burnings of WWII. It's just bad form, and the press it receives serves to further inoculate the world against hearing the Good News of Jesus Christ.

The Apostle Paul did not lead the believers to hang the Emperor in effigy, nor to burn his latest best-seller, nor even melt down silver statues of Diana. Jesus, who warned against the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, did not encourage the faithful to stone little models of it. Jones is taking it upon himself to behave badly in reaction to the 9/11 bombings, never mind that it will infuriate millions of adherents of Islam, and render them even more difficult to reach with the Gospel.

Great job!

The church, the "Dove World Outreach Center" is acting against its own name, unless it wishes to reach out with unreasoning hatefulness. There is no love of God evident in this dog-and-pony show, just a little man giving the digitus sinistrus to a rival religion, and thereby trading a ministerial collar for a Star Trek red shirt.

The better to be a martyr with, my dear.

Glenn Beck and I share some things in common, most notably that we both make Wonder BreadTM look like pumpernickel. This makes it doubly ironic that Mr. Beck has a much firmer grasp on the finer points of Martin Luther King's vision of racial relations than do the Al Sharptons, Jesse Jacksons, and their cadre of racialism-mongers. Beck's 8/28 message sought to renew the call to examine content of character rather content of melanin. Sharpton's rally message was essentially "black, black, black, us, our". Of course, this makes sense in that the "civil rights leaders" make their daily bread by maintaining the drumbeat of disaffectedness.

While there is a...distance between Beck's message and the Tea Party movement -though overlap will naturally occur- but he himself has a movement, not political, but moral and Constitutional. His message is pure. (Bear with me, here.)



Luther's followers were so odious that he wished to kill off some of them. Luther's message was pure. His revelation of justification by faith in Christ as taught in Romans was freeing to him, and to Western Christendom. His followers turned it into an "ism". Alexander Campbell and other Restoration leaders wished to get back to the simplicity of New Testament church life. Their message was pure. Many of their followers have reduced the vision from the simplicity of grace and truth to a pharisaical once saved-never saved play-it-safe system that robs the faithful of joy. Any leader with insight or a truth learns that that truth can be hostage to the whims of the followers. The Restoration leaders pointed to the Bible. Now we point to their writings; books, sermons, and letters. Truth once removed.

Beck is at heart a Believer. He believes in God and Christ, and some other bits we may not understand. He is a Believer in the Constitution, and that it works when applied. He believes in the Republic, and that it is what the founders gave us, if we could but keep it. Perhaps we can rescue and keep it still. Beck's vision is pure. He must ride herd to make certain that followers do not bend his message to their own political will, and dilute and sully it. Partisan mumphing will kill any restoration of the Republic, which the darker-minded suspect may be the point. Keep your enemies close, and your friends closer. Often, they can be your real undoing.