Category: General

The above picture tells you what’s been going on in my life for the past few weeks/months besides getting used to the new job. I’m going to be a dad. It’s kinda a little surreal still. I know it’s coming and I’m excited and thrilled, but it still almost seems really unreal, like it’s just another weird story.

Life is kind of feeling like that lately. Like I’m still a kid pretending to be a grown up, having a grown up job, becoming a father (whoa… still sounds amazing), looking for our first house. Since when did I pass from kidhood into adulthood? Not that it’s a bad thing, but sometimes I’m not sure how I got here, but I’m glad that I got there.

So yea, the idea of being a father and getting that into my head has been fun. Starting to see the doctor and getting the ultrasound just drives it more home. To see that image above live and moving around, inside my wife’s belly was one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in my life. Life is amazing.

While looking around on Screenhead, the guy tells the story of a man trapped in a phonebooth, surrounded by concrete, with only the contents of his pocket to keep him alive and help him escape. Interesting and compelling, and it would have made a great Twilight Zone episode. Read it. It’s worth it.

With the comic book industry chugging along at it’s usually plodding pace, it’s been interesting over the last few years to see independant artists and writers take their comics to the web, and actually making some money from them. Scott McCloud was one of the first I read a few years ago. His My Obsession With Chess was an incredible read, and really took advantage of the web medium.

I just found a link to the top webcomics from 2004. There seems to be a great representation of styles and genres. I’m interested in looking at them all and seeing what they have to offer. I’ve read a few, like Copper and found them great so I look forward to reading the rest. Enjoy.

I recently finished this tome of a book. Translated from Italian, and found in a local thrift shop, I’m not really sure why I picked it up. Maybe it was because the name, maybe it was the subconcious recognition of the name from somewhere in the past, or it just had an interesting sounding story on the bookjacket. My $1.29 was well spent.

I also read recently The Da Vinci Code and was sutably impressed with it. I can understand why it has been a bestseller for a while. It’s accessable, and very compelling, making you read just one more chapter before you go to bed. The fact that I read it completely within 24 hours of buying it says I couldn’t put it down. I think the movie adaptation will do it well.

Foucault’s Pendulum covers some of the same ground. We have a mysterious man who comes to this publishing agency with his book on the Templars and the secret that they hid from the world. The three editors laugh him out of the office, but the man ends up missing and that kicks off the whole story of secret societies and their ultimate secret that they are hiding. It’s not an easy story to sum up, and it’s filled with so much more history, and secrets, that reading Da Vinci Code after it, made Code seem light and fluffy.

It’s the kind of book that let’s you in on it’s intelligence, but at the same time you feel that if you only knew a little more about different subjects you’d get even more out of it. The three editors who are the focus of the story create a fictional secret “plan” that covers the history of all the secret socities from the Masons to the Templars and more. Umberto Eco draws you through their worlds and the connections they make and compels you to find out more about things. From reading the book I want to know more about the Templars.

Read it. Foucault’s Pendulum is rewarding, dry though it may be at parts. I’m looking forward to other books by Umberto Eco, once I make my pile of unread books drop down to below 10 books that I’m meaning to read.

I had a good conversation with my dad the other day about politics and where things are these days. He’s more on the conservative side of things, but we both are good at level discussions, so it was fun. One of the things he said, and that I’ve heard others say, in response to the lack of worlds support in attacking Iraq and building a true international coalition, was that France and Germany had oil interests in Iraq and so that’s why they were stalling the processes.

I’m fine with that. They can have their own interests to protect. The US and the British claimed to go to war in the name of WMD’s and the “clear and present danger” they were to our national security. Bush and Blair both said they had proof. The data supported their war. If this proof was so compelling as to send our country into a pre-emptive war for the first time in it’s history, why didn’t we share it with the international community. At best we would have had everyone on board. Even France and Germany, who wouldn’t be able to deny this “proof” unless they really wanted to look bad. At worst we would at least have had more than Poland and Japan, and we would have at least shown that there was a danger.

Instead we asked the world to trust us, in that there were WMD’s and they rightfully didn’t. And look what happened, there was a complete lack of them, even facilities to build them. Way to build trust in the world you seek to lead to great “freedom and morality,” lie to them.

The ends do not always justify the means. Now that there are no WMD’s, the administration points to the new freedom of the Iraqi people. Does the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people, be they American or Iraqi, justify us going and freeing another country when ours still needs work? What gives the American nation the right, or the will, to force our political views and ideologies on other nations? These very things are what Al-Quida is fighting their “holy war” against. Shouldn’t a people rise up and free themselves? Does freedom mean something to someone who hasn’t fought for it? Sometimes the fight for freedom needs a helping hand, and I don’t mind helping then. We got it in our Revolutionary War from France, but would we be the same country today if France had just decided for us that we should be free from British rule? I highly doubt it.

But now that we are in Iraq, we must to all that is possible to help get them set up and get our influence out of there. If the new Iraqi government is ever going to succeed and be taken seriously in the Middle East, it has to seem free of American influence and guidence. Get our men and women home from the battle lines and back to their families. I may dislike the war, but I want the warriors home as quick as possible.