Friday Fun - Minister of Silly Hats

What should one do if one is young, and famous, and royal, and one wants to stand out in a crowd of other young (and not so young) famous royals? Why, wear a silly hat of course!

Princess Beatrice is becoming rather well known because of her repertoire of silly hats, like this one she wore to a previous wedding:

Of course in a world where Lady Gaga exists there is no such thing as a hat that is too silly for public viewing.

And will all the fuss being made over Princess Beatrice and Lady Gaga, and what constitutes bad taste, ridiculousness, and the ultimate in "look at me" bids for attention, no one seems to get overly worked up about these guys:

Perhaps because these blokes have "earned" the right to wear their silly hats, while Princess Bea and Lady G. are stealing the public's attention without having had to kneel before God and a bunch of other blokes wearing silly hats to receive their honor. 
Just goes to show that "ridiculousness" is relative. 

More proof that we tend to make things more difficult than they are...

Random cattiness...

see more crazy cat pics




see more crazy cat pics




see more crazy cat pics




see more crazy cat pics

I'm so going to Hell.....

(click on the cartoon to enlarge)

Zzzzzzzz....

It's good to have Monday off...
Sleep in, go to the grocery store and buy Yodels, sleep some more.
But soon I will have to pry myself out of this chair and go to a Ministry Council meeting at church. Perhaps they won't notice if I nod off half way through.
It's definitely a two kitty-bed day.

Kitten therapy

This is Sophie.
She has won 82% of her battles on KittenWar.com

This morning I have to go grocery shopping, clean up some cat poop in the dining room, fill two vacancies on the Sunday School schedule, and make a dentist appointment.

I'd rather sit here and look at Sophie.

Readers: feel free to forget about whatever is weighing down your mind and stare at Sophie for awhile...works like a charm!

The Book Quiz

This is an interesting quiz...eerily true....but interesting...

You're The Giver!
by Lois Lowry
While you grew up with a sheltered childhood, you're pretty sure everyone around you is even more sheltered. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, you were tapped on the shoulder and transported to the real world. This made you horrified by your prior upbringing and now you're tormented by how to reconcile these two lives. Ultimately, the struggle comes down to that old free will issue. Choose
wisely.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

New from Apple - the iKitty...

Say hello to my friend E’s new addition to the family, a sweet little kitten named Bailey.
It’s obvious from this photo that Bailey is perturbed that her mom has not yet seen the light and is still using an antiquated PC.
Bailey will continue her protest by staging a sit-in (with her kitty butt and paws perpetually pressing down on CTRL-ALT-DELETE) until E. makes her way to the Apple store and comes home with a Mac. Should E. refuse to submit to assimilation….err, I mean “making a well-informed consumer choice made of her own free will” I shall facilitate the process by planting an iPod in her backyard. While E. is asleep the pod will sprout and replace E. with a complete and controllable replica. The replica will then make its way to the Apple store and fulfill its destiny.
Bailey will then have a stunningly beautiful silver Mac keyboard to lounge on that is not only impervious to viruses and spyware, but repels cat hair and dispenses kitty treats with a state of the art wireless remote. Is she going to get THAT from a DELL?? I think not….




"It's amazing, I can fit my entire CD library on this thing, and it's portable!"

It's official, I'm now a pod person...

I am now the proud owner of one of these:



It’s a MacBook Pro 15” 2.4GHz 160GB HD 2GB RAM.
Ain’t it purrrty?

It was bound to happen eventually.
I’ve tagged along with my SO to the Apple store on a regular basis in the past six months as she satiated her need for techno toys… an iMac, an iPod Video, an iPhone and assorted iAccessories. It was only a matter of time before exposure to all the shiny plastic toys sitting on those blonde wood display tables got to me. It’s like shopping at IKEA…all Euro-minimalistic-like….It’s not shopping, it’s an experience. And then there’s the pod people….they saunter up to you in their I’m-so-cool-and-you’re-not Mac logoed black T-shirts, wearing white iPod looking nametags around their necks and sporting wireless microphones that magically summon your desired object from the back storeroom. You tell them that you’re just looking and they step away and assume the “too-cool-to-be-a-salesperson-no-pressure” stance but stay just within earshot just in case they need to slip in comments like “I was a PC user for 20 years and then I bought a Mac and I’ll never go back” or “You know what Vista stands for right? Viruses, Intrusions, Spyware, Trojans, and Adware.”

My trusty HP laptop just had its 4th birthday. It’s on its second hard drive and power cord, the finish is worn off of the mouse pad and it arbitrarily refuses to turn on when I want it to. I can sit there for up to 5 minutes clicking the little power button before it decides to bend to my will….how many (c)licks does it take to get to the center of an HP laptop? 126 on a good day.

I haaaaaaaaate disposing of things before I get my full use out of them, so it killed me to even consider plunking down big bucks on a new laptop when the old one isn’t officially dead yet. But I know the day is coming….the day when it won’t turn on at all, or the hard drive gives up it’s 2nd ghost, and it will probably be the night before I’m scheduled to preach and my unprinted sermon is trapped inside a dead laptop never to be seen again.

My SO was in the market for a new laptop as well (when is she not?) so we got matching MacBooks. I know, it's pathetic.
The deal Apple has going right now is what pushed me to make the move.
$200 off the price of the computer for teachers and students, $120 off the extended warranty, a free HP printer/copier, a free iPod Nano (or get $200 off an iPod video like I did), and the satisfaction of knowing that you are a Mac owner and thus superior to all the PC slogging masses out there.

Now I just need to earn some iMoney to pay off my iCredit Card which is now iMaxed out. Anyone wanna buy a used and slightly temperamental HP laptop?



Resistance is futile....

Where can I get me some man meat?

According to the following Blogthings Quiz, I don't have a boyfriend because I don't give men enough of my time....
Too bad none of the questions had "Because I'm a lesbian" as an answer choice.

The things I waste my time on when I get bored.

Oh...and I like the picture they have of the chick playing pool.
If that's not code for "forget about the boyfriend - you're better off spending your time in a bar called Sappho's Sisters" I don't know what is.

You Don't Have a Boyfriend Because You are Too Busy

While a relationship sounds nice, you're strapped for time Whether you're legitimately busy or just making excuses... ... You don't give men enough of your time. As nice as "instant love" would be, there's just no such thing.

Why Don't You Have a Boyfriend?

Springtime in CT

Just wanted to note that it's going to be 85 degrees here today.
You know it's warm because my Weather Pixie down in the sidebar is wearing a dress.
She's such a femme.

TAG! You're it!

My fellow blogger Dennis was kind enough to tag me to participate in the "Six Weird Things" meme that's going around, so here goes:

Ground Rules for tagees:
1. Reveal six weird things about yourself on your blog, and
2. Tag six people to do the same.

Six Weird Things About Me

1. I have no idea what beer tastes like. Other than a sip of champagne at a wedding or two I've managed to get through my entire life without ever partaking in an alcoholic beverage.

2. While on the subject of drink, I love the smell of coffee but hate the taste of it.

3. I've seen Elton John in concert 22 times and was obsessed with him as a teenager. I had every record and every poster, magazine, book, T-shirt etc. that was in existence. I was 15 years-old and in love with a gay man. That should've been my clue that I was destined for weirdness.

4. When I was a kid I loved the Encyclopedia Brown books. My friends and I started our own detective agency in my back yard and we advertised our service on the telephone pole in front of my house. Someone kept stealing our sign so we never had any customers. We didn't think to try and find out who was stealing the sign (we were lousy detectives).

5. Back in my bike racing days I used to get up at 4:00 in the morning every Saturday and drive to Prospect Park in Brooklyn to race. I'd pay my $20 entrance fee, bitch about how cold and dark it was until the sun came up, line up on the start line with 50 men and 3 other women, bust my lungs wide open trying to keep up with them and not crash, get dropped on the hill on the 3rd lap, and spend the rest of the race trying in vain to catch back up and/or not get lapped and pulled from the race. I did this every weekend. Voluntarily.

6. If I could hang out with any fictional character I would choose Captain Janeway of Star Trek Voyager. She had brains, brawn, and beauty. She could take Kirk AND Picard in a fight any day.

I'm going to go out on a limb and tag some wonderful bloggers whom I read often but aren't part of the Mad Priest brigade: Kitty Litter , Sassy Femme , Mary Sue , Skdo , Zane , and Mrs. M

Dante's Infernal need to label people

Yay! I'm a heretic!
If you need me I'll just be hanging out on level six with Joan of Arc, Galileo, Martin Luther, Copernicus, and that infamous leader of the rabble rousers...what's his name again?....oh yeah, Jesus.

In Which Circle of Hell Would You Reside? Your Result: Circle Six The Heretics: You taught heresy, falsehoods against the truths of God. Your flaming tongue that lead people to their deaths have gotten you a burning tomb in the city of Dis.
Circle Three
Circle Eight
Circle Seven
Circle Nine
Circle Five
Circle Four
Circle Two
In Which Circle of Hell Would You Reside? Create a Quiz

Get yer Irish up

Your Irish Name Is...

Jade O'Mahony

What's your Irish Name?

He's MAD I tell you...MAD!

From New England to Jolly-Old England, I'd like to send a "Holla!" out to MadPriest who gave yours-truly a plug on his blog yesterday.
Mr. Mad is an Anglican priest who has a bird's eye view of the tug-of-war going on between the American Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church. He's witty, intelligent, and spot on with his observations of both the religious and non-religious world. His interests include "Christianity, madness, and satire" (which I'm pretty sure are all the same thing) and his favorite movies are Some Like It Hot, La Cage aux folles, and Diva, which I suspect makes him a friend of Dorothy's (which is a euphemism for "Gay" for those not up on the slang….the lesbian equivalent would be "a friend of Home Depot's").

Mr. Mad noted that I am one of the 534 people who have seen the cycling movie Breaking Away"….in reality, I've seen it 534 times, which makes me the sole viewer on the planet earth. Ergo, I am probably the only person who understands the context of the following photo-shopped pic and to thus think it's hysterical:





G.W. quickly resorted to subterfuge. He reached over, slammed Lance's STI lever so it shifted into the little ring, and he let rip with his recently honed high end speed. Infuriated, Lance popped it into the 53x11 and quickly closed the gap. Out sprinting G.W. wasn't enough for Lance, he wanted to grind that beady eyed, dry drunk's face into the dirt. So out came the pump….

Stop Sign Hermeneutics

This is a humorous bit that I stole from my pastor (and she stole from the internet). It's called "Exegegis of a Stop Sign" and it's pretty funny...
(at least it is to theology nerds like me).

Stop Sign Hermeneutics
Suppose you're traveling to work and you see a stop sign. What do you do? That depends on how you exegete the stop sign.

• A post modernist deconstructs the sign (knocks it over with his car), ending forever the tyranny of the north-south traffic over the east-west traffic.



• Similarly, a Marxist refuses to stop because he sees the stop sign as an instrument of class conflict. He concludes that the bourgeois use the north-south road and obstruct the progress of the workers in the east-west road.
  
  
• A fundamentalist, taking the text very literally, stops at the stop sign and waits for it to tell him to go.



• A progressive Catholic rolls through the intersection because he believes he cannot understand the stop sign apart from its interpretive community. Observing that the interpretive community doesn't take it too seriously, he doesn't feel obligated to take it too seriously either.
  
  
• An average Catholic doesn't bother to read the sign but he'll stop the car if the car in front of him does.
  
  
• An educated evangelical preacher might look up 'STOP' in his lexicon of English and discover that it can mean:
  (a) something which prevents motion, such as a plug for a drain;
  (b) a location where a train or bus lets off passengers.
  The main point of his sermon the following Sunday on this text is: when you see a stop sign, it is a place where the traffic is naturally clogged, so it is a good place to let off passengers from your car.
  
  
• An Orthodox Jew does one of two things: (a) take another route to work that doesn't have a stop sign so that he doesn't run the risk of disobeying the Law; or (b) stop at the sign, say 'Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who hast given us thy commandment to stop,' wait three seconds according to his watch, and then proceed.
  
  
• A scholar from the Jesus Seminar concludes that the passage 'STOP' undoubtedly was never uttered by Jesus himself because being the progressive Jew that he was, he would never have wanted to stifle people's progress. Therefore 'STOP' must be a textual insertion belonging entirely to stage III of the gospel tradition, when the church was first confronted by traffic in its parking lot.
  
  
• An Old Testament scholar points out that there are a number of stylistic differences between the first and second half of the expression 'STOP'. For example, 'ST' contains no enclosed areas and five line endings, whereas 'OP' contains two enclosed areas and only one line termination. He concludes that the author for the second part is different from the author of the first part and probably lived hundreds of years later. Later scholars determine that the second half is itself actually written by two separate authors because of similar stylistic differences between the 'O' and the 'P'.
  
  
• Because of the difficulties in interpretation, another OT scholar amends the text, changing the 'T' to 'H'. 'SHOP' is much easier to understand in context than 'STOP' because of the multiplicity of stores in the area. The textual corruption probably occurred because 'SHOP' is so similar to 'STOP' on the sign several streets back, that it is a natural mistake for a scribe to make. Thus the sign should be interpreted to announce the existence of a shopping area. If this is true, it could indicate that both meanings are valid, thus making the thrust of the message 'STOP (AND) SHOP'.
  
  
• A 'prophetic' preacher notices that the square root of the sum of the numeric representations of the letters S-T-O-P (sigma-tau-omicron-pi, in the Greek alphabet), multiplied by 40 (the number of testing), and divided by four (the number of the world: north, south, east, and west) equals 666. Therefore, he concludes that stop signs are the dreaded 'mark of the beast', a harbinger of divine judgment upon the world, and must be avoided at all costs.

...and now here it is, your moment of Zen:

A little Friday Fun...

I love Monty Python.
I love Star Trek.
Put the two together and a good time is had by all!

Star Trek Meets Monty Python | Send To Friends | Video Jokes at JibJab

How well do you know the Bible Quiz

This is why I need to go to seminary...to learn the 5% of the Bible that I don't know...(apparently the book of Numbers doesn't have algebra problems at the end of each chapter, who knew?)

You know the Bible 95%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

Hunk-a Hunk-a Burning Love

Ok, so I'm sitting in my chair the other night pulling out my hair over my seminary entrance essay just as I've done every night for the past two weeks (yes, I'm still working on it) when the power cord on my laptop does a shizzle madizzle, literally.
Sparks flew out and it gave up the ghost.
Time of death: 8:25 pm.

After much fretting and searching online for a replacement cord - and using up my precious battery juice in the process - I determined that my immediate options were to order a new power supply from HP for $125, drive to Best Buy the next day and pay $80 for an aftermarket power supply that may or may not work with my computer, or order a $30 "authorized replacement HP power cord" from one of the many computer parts outfits that have set up shop on the internet. I trust the latter about as much as I trust those electronics stores on 42nd St. that have permanent signs in the windows reading "Going Out Of Business - Everything Must Go!"

But funds are tight so I bit the bullet and ordered the $30 cord from the most reputable site of the lot. In the mean time I was without a laptop. But not for long. My SO is the Queen of laptops. She has a huge mega-gaming laptop on which she plays endless hours of World of Warcraft, she has a smaller back-up gaming computer to take on road trips, and a teeny tiny Dell that she uses only for work. I snatched the power cord from her middle computer (also an HP) and happily went about my business.

And then the laptop Gods struck again - My SO's huge mega-gaming computer overheated and decided to shut itself off, again and again and again, right in the middle of one of her mega-gaming World of Warcraft raids. She spent two hours on the phone with tech support (a very polite Indian gentleman) who determined that she needs some kind of magic gel to keep her CPU cool.

While we await the arrival of the magic gel she quite rightly fired up her back-up WOW machine and I was once again without a power cord.
But because my sweetie loves me she let me use her "work only" computer to thrash over my seminary essay in between mindless bouts of web surfing.

So, there we sat, just as we do every night, with one eye on our respective computers and the other on repeats of CSI:Miami.
Hey - we love each other, and it works for us.

So God did His best to take away our computers and give us each a break from our nightly obsessions - What he didn't plan on was our ingenuity - You can take away our toys but we will prevail……We have back-ups.


….and now here it is, your moment of Zen:

Love is in the air....now give me the chocolate

In honor of Valentines Day (and the cuddly little Valentines Build-a-Bear that my sweetie gave me) here's an appropriate Blogthings quiz:

Your Candy Heart Says "Hug Me"

A total sweetheart, you always have a lot of love to give out. Your heart is open to where ever love takes you! Your ideal Valentine's Day date: a surprise romantic evening that you've planned out Your flirting style: lots of listening and talking What turns you off: fighting and conflict Why you're hot: you're fearless about falling in love

What Does Your Candy Heart Say?