Saw a commercial last night for some variety of Purina dog treat proclaiming that it reduced tartar by 80%, cleaned between the teeth, and tasted like beef.

…

Why am I using a toothbrush?! Reduces tartar by 80% AND tastes like beef?!! Sign me up!

Two days in a row on the skytrain on the way home there’s been someone with a Toscana frozen pizza under their arm. One was a teen and today a well dressed couple. They’ll have regular knapsacks or work bags and then this pizza…Whats going on?!! I must know!

I wished I had a Toscana pizza in my mouth. I’ve never had one but my stomach was grumbling all the way home.

Watched Bill Maher’s ‘Religulous’ last night on the recommendation of Greg. I’m a player hater when it comes to Bill Maher but suprisingly I found him easier to stomach in this. Maybe I’m crazy but he seemed a little nicer in this than he often does in his shows. I did find myself chuckling on a number of occasions at the reactions he engendered from the interviewees and his self-deprecating humour.
That said obviously the premise of the show I have to take issue with. The main premise I guess being, like that of Hitchens and others, that religion is destroying the world with it’s irrationality and violence and if it continues …well the picture he paints at the end is pretty bleak. He book ends the documentary with these quotes;
“Before man figured out how to be rational and peaceful he figured out nuclear weapons and how to pollute on a catastrophic scale.”
“If the world does come to an end here…or limps into the future decimated by the effects of religion inspired nuclear terrorism, lets remember what the real problem was…grow up or die.”
What I don’t understand, even after watching all of his presentation, is why he gets to pin this imaginary violent end on religion and not on the human nature itself. I mean the atomic bomb didn’t invent itself. We have enough evidence that apart from religion people will still kill each other. Seems to me we could look at politics or philosophies in exactly the same light what with large polarized, often widely divergent populations that at times resort to violence to ‘communicate’ their ideas?
He sets up the rational, liberal, enlightened, scientist against ignorant, conservative, blind-faith filled, christians. Not that I didn’t expect that, but it’s still irksome. He did interview Dr Francis Collins, Christian and head of the Human Genome Project for a bit which was nice but fellows like that aren’t nearly as interesting as truckers and people who think they’re Jesus Christ, quite honestly- so thats mostly what you get. I’ve been around enough non-religious people to get the impression that the religious don’t have the corner on the ignorant market. I suspect unfortunately it afflicts people of all persuasions.
So basically on those points of Mahers I think his gripe is more with the human condition than religion.

He says ‘he doesn’t know’ pertaining to religion…He’s “preaching the gospel of ‘I don’t know’”, but this strikes me as disingenuous. I think he thinks he does know. His presentation makes that pretty clear. He speak’s pretty emphatically quite often which is odd if ‘he doesn’t know’.

Anyway, it made me laugh, cringe, chuckle and brood, all of which I enjoy…Especially the brooding. I’m a good brooder.

Somehow in my rush this morning I got out of the house without putting a belt on. I must have lost a little weight. I had to keep my hands in my pockets all the way to work… They were a little chilly but mostly so I could inconspicuously hold my pants up.

My computer, more specifically XP, has been rotting and festering for a good while – but this last month it’s begun to get really bunged up. I used to format a HD once every three months or so in the 95-98, 2000 days but since XP I rarely format or even defag for that matter, and things are generally reliable. These last few weeks are unbearable though, with getting a trojan and who knows what else, cleaning that up and random things not working, programs randomly crashing-makes it hard to get work done…and I’m insanely busy and need reliability more than ever.
Fortunately I’d installed the Windows 7 beta on another partition so I figured I’d bite the bullet and make it my home base till August when it expires and give it a good working over while I clean up the old XP partition and eventually format it. Windows 7 is working wonderfully but on my slightly older system it’s a bit sluggish compared to XP and it’s definitely a beta. I’ve managed to crash explorer a good number of times with a sprinkling of the blue screen here and there…but so far nothing that hampered my productivity believe it or not. Explorer seemed to crash when you do things like install 3000 fonts and the BSOD has only reared its blueness on shutdown thankfully…quite different from having Photoshop crash every 5 minutes as you’re trying to get a mockup out which was happening in XP at the end there. Looking forward to my next super-fast desktop system loaded with Windows 7 hopefully not too far in my future.

actually…looking forward to 2019.