Today Kim and I watched most of The Number 23, that tense paranoid thriller-drama inexplicably starring a totally serious Jim Carrey.

It's like the Blair Witch Project, in the sense that it's one of those movies that people watch it and either rave about it and love it, or they just hate it to the core. I remember The Number 23 getting such polarized reviews back when it came out, but I only watched it today for the first time.

I didn't get to actually finish it because my cab for work showed up way earlier than expected, but Kim and I were talking about it and I was like, whatever, you can walk around adding anything up and finding 23s everywhere if you're looking for them. And to illustrate my point I picked a random car stopped at a red light and added up the numbers of its licence plate... and it actually added up to 23. Which was admittedly kind of freaky, but anyways.

But this kind of reminded me of how religion and faith work, and quite possibly how my faith has/had been running all this time. The human mind can and will find meaning and answers in literally anything if it looks hard enough, often seeing patterns that just aren't there, and discovering significance where there is none.

At the end of Luc Besson's mazing and heartbreaking film about Jean of Arc, The Messenger, the ambiguous 'devil slash conscience slash angel' character played by Dustin Hoffman appears to Joan in her prison cell and questions her about just why she believed that finding a sword in a field necessarily had divine designs behind it, leading her to embark on her doomed career as a warrior for her god.

It was at this point that Kim began searching for a heavy, blunt object to strike me with for having taken a perfectly good chat about a movie and somehow finding a way to turn another normal discussion into another delerious rant about God and Christianity, and I don't remember what happened after that, but I woke up at work with a headache.

And then I realized that today is the 23rd. Bugger.

bbc: internet regulators have rejected plans to create a domain for pornography websites ending with the .xxx suffix.
not all of us are stupid enough to actually believe you really did want to protect minors from porn (which is their parents' job, btw) and not censor and ultimately control the internet.  and even those of us stupid enough to believe that, can't possibly also really think that it could actually work.

in other words, that's right, leave my internet free and the fuck alone, you vile, hypocritical, amoral privacy and freedom-of-speech-loathing assholes.  you haven't won just yet.

okay, so the next person to post about that judas iscariot bullshit is gonna get bitchslapped. 

i'll sell all my possessions, duct tape myself to a cargo plane, come to your house, and slap you, your children, kick your dog, and take a dump on your keyboard, you flaming retard.

we now return you to your reguarly scheduled friendslist.

windswept posted this meme:  

five things i feel strongly about with which you might disagree.

1.  i believe in hell.  specifically i belive you cannot believe in heaven and not believe in hell.  i try hard to respect other people's beliefs, no matter how different (or assinine in my opinion / from my viewpoint), but this is one of those i really, really can't work my brain around.  believe in both or believe in nothing at all (and admittedly i do think it takes serious balls to be an athiest) but please don't fall for this feel-good, have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too, it-sounds-nice-to-me-so-i'll-decide-it's-the-truth bullsh*t.  i love you guys, but please don't start a flaming arguement with me over this, i promise you'll be off my friends list sooner than you can say "but how can a loving God..."

2.  apple macintosh = awesome awesome awesome, end of story, there is no arguement.  w00t!

3.  hindi movies (i.e. indian bollywood movies) suck and are a monumental, gargantuan embarrasment to anything even remotely indian and must die, die, die.  there is no excuse.  it's not cultural, it's not escapism, it's not indian, it just sucks, okay?  to name just one example, americans make fun of themselves and admit when they suck at something, why can't we take a few pointers from that?  just because it's an indian production doesn't mean you have to kiss it's ass.  if it sucks, it sucks, it doesn't make you anti-indian or any less of a patriot to just admit that it does suck.  it makes you less of a flaming idiot whose intelligence and denial of blatant reality defies the theory of evolution.

4.  speaking of which, i don't believe in evolution.  at least i don't believe in it in the ridiculous "prehistoric swamp muck gets struck by lightning and by some enormous fluke (to add to the many supposedly leading up to that point) we get a planet completely bursting with life" idea.  you can't really, seriously tell me that that bullsh*t is somehow more plausible than genesis chapter one?  what, just because some dude in a labcoat said he kind of thinks so?  and it's not really important, in the sense that sorting out what's going on between me and God right now is more important than how the universe came to be however many trillions of years ago.

5.   life is way more pointless than anyone, especially my fellow Christians, are willing to admit or even begin to consider.  and that's not necessarily a bad thing.  so much of what we do and worry about now won't matter when we're dead.  so much of what we're consumed by and with will be so unimportant when we're about to die and we realize we've been idiots all this while.  and that's not a bad thing, unless you want it to be.  we really do make ourselves miserable, as cliched as that is.  and you'll regret the things you didn't do way more than you'lll regret the things you did.

or something.  this post is done.  don't hate me.  and don't flame me or argue with me or you're off my friendslist instantly.  the meme did say "five things i feel strongly about with which you might disagree," so, duh.

kthxbye