Jeshua Cottontail

Tis the season…

Adam on Adams

Putting together a single “best of Ryan Adams” CD is hard – lots of great songs to choose from. Nonetheless, I decided to try. I realize that this list could change from day to day or from mood to mood, but it’s still pretty solid.

What would you add/delete? Does anyone who stops by this site listen to Ryan Adams?

No wires necessary

In the picture below, those glowing rods are flourescent bulbs, they are lit, and they arent plugged in to anything. Cool! Click here for more pictures and a better explanation as to how this works.

Standing up for gay marriage

It’s a hot topic that stirs so much controversy and I will never understand why. Here’s my two cents:

People are generally against gay marriage for religious reasons. I could rant here, mostly about how an ancient book sprinkled with acts of pure evil shouldn’t ever be used to justify moral beliefs, and go further and state that our morals aren’t rooted in religion, but I won’t get into it. When people use religion to define marriage, they use religion to justify their homophobia. This very day, there are people protesting Iowa’s decision on the steps of the courthouse. I will take the anti-gay protests seriously as soon as people start protests about businesses being open on the sabbath, a sin just as sure to send you toward eternal hellfire (if you are in to that sort of imaginary stuff).

Opponents also use the fact that two people of the same sex can’t naturally conceive a child to bash gay marriage. As if the sole reason for marriage was procreation. It’s not. Besides, Mother Earth could use a reduction in the birth rate of the human species, but I digress.

I take no issue with same-sex couples marrying and having children. They could artificially conceive or adopt. The process of doing either of those things requires lots of proof that the couple is caring and emotionally able to care for children – heterosexual couples, on the other hand, can reproduce at will (or accidentally!), sometimes at the expense of the child’s well-being.

I’ve probably never felt the love that two people who are ready to marry feel. But I cant imagine feeling that way but not being able to act on it.

I am for any act of legislation (or removal of legislation) that allows for more people to be happier, provided that it does no harm. In other words, extending rights to others (so long as our own rights aren’t revoked) is okay. It’s noble.

Life is too short for these silly arguments. I am happy with the decision that Iowa’s courts made, and hope other states follow suit.

[For more on why this isn’t a big deal and not worth fighting about, see this post, and really take the time to let it sink in.]

Also, feel free to comment. I’ve enabled anonymous posting.

Human beings: beautifully insignificant

You are looking at one of the most eye-opening, paradigm-shifting photographs ever taken. It changed my life.

Without context, this image is a shoddy piece of photography. The photo is notoriously called the “pale blue dot” and was made famous by scientist, science advocate, and supercool Carl Sagan.

So why so wonderful?

That little pixel is Earth! The picture was taken by Voyager 1. Launched in 1977, it turned around in 1990 (after traveling 3.7 BILLION miles -  as far away as Pluto) and snapped a photo of our home.

Carl says it best:

…you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known."

I honestly get a little bit choked up.

Baracknophobia

This is worth a watch: Baracknophobia on the Daily Show.

P.S. The only thing worse than Sean Hannity is Glenn Beck.

No meat on Fridays! WHY?

Every person who knows a Catholic person (so… everyone?) is probably aware that during Lent there is to be no meat eaten on Fridays. No one knows why, they just follow blindly. So I looked into it.

Canon 1251
Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

No justification at all. Religion without reason! So I dug a little deeper. Nothing.

C’mon there has to be a reason! Many speculate that it is just another instance of sacrifice – meat was a luxury back in the day. But today, meat just seems arbitrary.

Side note: It makes me sick that there are at least 1250 other Canonical laws… all man-made. No god involved. If you are Catholic, you are far more likely to be under the influence of the Vatican than you are of Jesus. The holidays Catholics celebrate, the songs they sing, most prayers they pray, the mass itself, even which gospels made it into the bible… all decisions made by regular human beings like you and me. I don’t mean to single Catholics out, either. Other religions are the same, but the “no meat on Fridays” think irks me. I hate that there is no reason for it! Rules need justification!

A gem of a letter (to the editor)

Every day I read the letters to the editor of my hometown newspaper, the Fort Dodge Messenger. They always consist of a constant bickering between conservatives and liberals, each blaming the other for every problem you can think of, from taxes to bailouts to Iraq to the relocation of the post office… no topic is spared. (And the topic of god somehow always comes up.)

Today there was a real gem from Glenn Smith of Algona. A snippet:

I have learned over the years that politicians make many statements that they should print of Charmin, so we can get some good from them.

Chuckle. However, the following doesn’t sit right with me:

Somewhere most politicians have lost track of what the job they are supposed to be doing is. Maybe the French knew something we do not know – the guillotine!

Heeeere coooomesss god!

How does one get that liberal viewpoint firmly embedded in your mind, it is just satanic.

Satanic?

I hear about how smart these politicians are, but as a boy I picked up rocks that were smarter.

OH SNAP!

Keep ‘em coming, Glenn. Nothing perks me up in the morning like a little crazy-talk. (Except for the ethanol – I agree with him there.)

Read the whole letter and view comments here.

Honoring Amy at Relay For Life 2009

Last night was Iowa State University’s Relay For Life. Amy’s story was read and a slide show of her was displayed. For those who couldn’t be there, here is what was said:

Amy Kapler came to ISU in the fall of 2006. Though she grew up in Fort Dodge, she attended high school in Minnesota. She opted to return to the state of Iowa to be a Cyclone, as were her father and brother. Amy led the life of the typical freshman: staying busy with schoolwork, enjoying the dorm life, and trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life – she chose English education. She would later call her freshman year at Iowa State the best year of her life.

Throughout that year, she began to have increasingly frequent bouts of nausea. She was misdiagnosed several times until the summer of 2007, when a doctor who had run out of ideas did an ultrasound of her abdomen and found a six-inch diameter mass on her liver. A biopsy showed it to be malignant – Fibrolamellar Hepatocellular Carcinoma. It is a rare strain of cancer that only affects young adults at a rate of approximately 200 cases per year, worldwide. There is no genetic predisposition to Fibrolamellar – Amy was an unfortunate random victim. It was unfortunate that doctors hadn’t caught it sooner, but no one suspects a nineteen year old girl to have liver cancer.

Doctors were optimistic that they could remove the tumor, which they did in July 2007, along with one-third of her liver. Unfortunately, they found that the cancer had already spread throughout her abdomen.

Chemotherapy was the plan of action, and this presented its own problems. Amy’s type of cancer is so rare that little research exists on it and no clinical trials are performed on its behalf. The doctors who worked with Amy pioneered a treatment. Since rare cancers are underrepresented in the medical community, treatment of them is hit-and-miss, at best. The chemotherapy drugs given to Amy had no proven track record. Of the different drugs she tried, only one seemed to slow tumor growth, and only for a short time.

Amy’s life turned into rest at home, pain management, trips to hospitals, and struggling to maintain her weight. There was the occasional escape – through the generous support of friends and family she was able to do some traveling. She went to Florida with her mom to spend some time on the beach, and also got to spend time on an island off the coast of Georgia with her family. Aside from that, life consisted mainly of home and hospital.

Last year, Amy ventured away from the Twin Cities and came down to Ames to take part in Relay For Life. Events like this are needed to honor survivors, to remember those who cancer has taken, and to lift the spirits of all who have been either directly or indirectly affected by this disease. After Relay For Life last year, Amy said that “it was great to feel like a normal person again for a night.” She was able to hang out with her friends. Though at home she had to sleep frequently, here she stayed awake and active until after midnight. At home she rarely had the energy to walk even short distances; here, she walked around the track more than ten times. And while at home she took a regimen of pain pills, here she got by with almost none – and was all smiles. For one night Amy got to put aside her illness and the Kapler family is forever grateful for it.

Amy was excited to be a part of last year’s Relay. She was an advocate for fellow cancer sufferers. When she wasn’t wearing cyclone gear or her shirt that in big purple letters stated “CANCER SUCKS,” she proudly wore her Relay For Life shirts, practically wearing them out.

She had a lot of reasons to be cynical… but never was. She was cheery when everyone else was sad. Her positive outlook lifted everyone else’s spirits. She was polite when she needn’t be. And typical of Amy, she made everyone smile when it seemed as if there was nothing to smile about.

After a bleak couple of weeks, Amy died in her home on September 13^th, 2008, after a year-and-a-half battle with the disease. She was wearing a “BEAT IOWA” shirt. The Iowa – Iowa State football game was later that day. The Cyclones lost that game, and the world lost Amy Kapler.

Amy suffered greatly during the last year of her life, but Amy’s family thinks that she wouldn’t have wanted us to dwell on that fact. Amy is remembered by her friends, family, doctors, and nurses as an upbeat girl with a positive attitude, contagious smile, and an unforgettable sense of humor. She was described posthumously on Facebook as “always smiling,” “one of the funniest people I know,” “everybody’s friend,” and “bright and lovely.” She inspired everyone – from her doctors to people whom she had never met.

Amy was a fighter. She outlived every prognosis given to her. Everyone who knows her feels lucky to have had as much time with her as they did.

If there is one thing made blatantly obvious by Amy’s struggle with cancer, it is that cancer is an ugly disease from which no one is safe. Events like this one are needed to bring light to cancer and the issues surrounding it. In a time where our Nation’s financial situation has put a considerable amount of pressure on Washington to cut federal science funding, the money raised in events like this is crucial. On behalf of Amy, the Kapler family would like to thank all of you for your participation.

Amy would have been about to finish her junior year.

She was so beautiful, so funny, so happy, so brave, so loved, and is so missed.

To read more about Amy’s fight, Google “Amy Kapler.”

The New Camaro

When they discontinued the Camaro a few years ago, I knew they would bring them back. I told myself I would buy one when they did (my first car: 1987 Camaro). I just didn’t expect it to come back so soon. 430 horsepower has never been so affordable. Click the pic for more!