Paul's blog

Archive for the ‘Emotions’ Category

I must admit defeat. It’s painful. But shit happens.

So, yes, we did go to that Arabian Night dinner show (link). Hey .. unlimited beer!

I had it all figured out, I would get my own beer glass, and my wife, who doesn’t drink beer, would get ‘hers’, but pass it on to me.

I was SURE I would have the place bankrupt (and out of beer) by the time the show started.

But I hadn’t taken Jay into account: “I’m Jay, your server, and I will take care of you tonight”. BOY did he ever!

Here I was sitting with TWO large glasses of beer in front of me. I REALLY started to like dinner shows.

The problem was, that everytime I took a sip (read: gulped down half a glass), Jay would RUN up to us and fill my glass again. COOL! My wife’s remark to him that I would be in love with him by the end of the show didn’t deter him in the least.

Since he kept my glass full all the time, I realized that my wife’s (read: MY OTHER) glass was getting warm, so I started to drink that too. And, consequently, Jay started to keep THAT one full too.

 I LOVE dinner shows!

On the way back I learned from my wife that there were horses in the  show.

I also realized that these people could have been BILLIONAIRES!

If only they’d charged a ‘one buck’ entrance fee to the restroom!

So, okay, they’re not bankrupt.

YET!

(disclaimer: I own Home Depot stock, so I am slightly biased) 

Bob Nardelli, CEO of Home Depot, resigned yesterday.

He was an inflexible dictator with a huge disregard for Home Depot’s shareholders.

A huge disdain even: during last year’s shareholders meeting, where a lot of shareholders had some tough questions for the board of directors -about the CEO’s insanely high compensation package and the horrible business results: stock had sunk 9% in the same period that competitor Lowe’s saw a 185% increase!-, only ONE board member showed up: Nardelli himself. He was an absolute arrogant prick, didn’t acknowledge any of the severely time limited questions and ran out after only 30 minutes. The shareholders were steaming!

Home Depot stock hasn’t gone anywhere the past few years: he basically screwed up.

And now, yesterday, he resigned.

And I’m mad as hell.

Not because he left .. good riddance .. but because this screwup got rewarded with a severance package of $210 million!

That’s almost a quarter billion dollar!

NOONE should get such an amount, not even for having done outstanding work, and thus certainly not for having accomplished close to nothing (and most definitely not when it’s essencially my money!).

This is criminal. Corporate greed in its extreme. I’m so mad, I can barely type. I simply feel robbed. In a very brutal way. Violated almost. Grrrrrrrrr….

Someone… quick, get me my bloodpressure pills!

Recently I have accompanied guests on quite a few visits to the various theme parks in and around Orlando.
Yesterday we visited Disney’s Animal Kingdom. While I love the park, I always seem to forget, and find out too late, that other people, especially kids, are allowed entrance into the park as well. This is very unfortunate, since most of these people don’t have a clue as to how to behave around me.
I will deal with that in another post.

Anyway, that night I had a remarkable dream about a visit to a theme park.
It didn’t appear to be a Disney Park though. It had more of a ‘Holy Land’ theme.

It was laid out according to various Biblical books. It was huge, but I don’t recall all the details, just a few.
In the Genesis section there was a big tent where brothers could play Cain-and-Abel: they were given a blunt foreign object, and he who killed his brother was crowned “Cain” and got to go in unto his mother in order to prevent the human race from dying out right there and then, or so they were told.
Next to the tent was an Egyptian village, where the Nile ran through. Here parents could buy wicker baskets for their babies and place the baskets with their baby in the fast streaming Nile. A popular attraction.
Some houses in the village had bloody stains over the doors. This is where parents could have their first-borns killed by a deceptively real looking Archangel. Parents were complaining about the long lines.
Next to the village was a dry and hot desert-like maze, parents were encouraged to send their kids into the maze to learn about the ten commandments. They could pick up their kids at the other side of the park … 40 years from now.
The center of the Park was the Deuteronomy Plaza, where its most popular attraction was a terrace where parents, so instructed by Biblical law, could stone their children to death for disobedience.
Beyond this point the park would become considerably less crowded: for instance, only a few parents took advantage of experiencing first hand the pedagogical effects of shoving their kids into a lion den, with a fake Daniel and real lions.
The quarter called ‘Numbers’ though was closed. According to a big sign it was being subjected to a ‘re-count’.
But the real highlight was the New Testament part of the park, where, twice daily, one could witness a real, Florida-style botched capital punishment, involving real blood, actual guts and a hydraulic cross, that was so gruesome, real and authentic that even Mel Gibson would have lost his lunch over it. At the end of each crossing, the few remaining bystanders were given little wooden crosses dipped in real blood, to wear around their necks to show the rest of the world their remarkable lack of taste and decency. Proud like kids they showed eachother their bloody miniature torture devices, while they were talking about this deep sense of Love they were experiencing.
I must assume that the brain can only go sofar with weirdness in dreams, that if things get too insane, it has to give up, because here I woke up abruptly. And BOY, was I glad it was only a dream …

Just a link
Commentary link 

This is so cool.

I have waited for it for so long, knowing it would come some day.

But then, I started to lose hope, and after years I simply gave up on it.

And then, all in a sudden: surprise! Out of nowhere … Who’d have thought …

Finally, Time Magazine has elected me ‘Person of the Year 2006’.

Link to Time’s “Person of the Year 2006” site

Okay.

Here it is. Time for me to come out and confess.

I admit it.

I’m an ailurophile.

So. There you have it.

I hope we can still be friends.

Last night I have seen God.

He spoke to me. And I have closed God into my heart.

No, not Jesus. God!

I may have uttered the name ‘Jesus’ a few times, but I’m referring here to God.

When he appeared to me I was not alone: many devout followers witnessed the event with me, mostly people in their 50’s and 60’s. There was waving of arms, chanting, calling His Name and I even have seen tears. It was glorious, awesome and just plain perfect.

He did not speak many words, but he needn’t speak much, his mere appearance was close to what mere mortals like us, in this big arena in Jacksonville, could take.

Of course, God has been God for a long time.

But it was still breathtaking to witness the evidence of his divinity: even after some 40 years, Clapton is still God.

Link to the history behind this

Yesterday was Friday the 13th. An unfortunate day indeed.

President Bush signed into law bill H.R. 4954: Security and Accountability For Every Port Act or the SAFE Port Act.

Official title: To improve maritime and cargo security through enhanced layered defenses, and for other purposes.

Sounds good eh? Cost: $26 per American over a four year period. Good AND cheap!

Votes: 421 Ayes, 2 Nays (9 no votes). Good, cheap and popular.

Congress hammered this through on their last day ‘at work’. Probably noone cared to actually read the damned thing. Who cares about the details .. we all want to be safe, right?

Here’s how the American people gets screwed by an increasingly sleazy and sneaky government: the catch: look at the last four words of the official title given above!

Yes. Other  purposes.

What are those other purposes?

Well … whatever some really sneaky politician decides to sneak in there. So, if, for instance, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and the Speaker of the house Dennis Hastert (yes, that guy from the Foley scandal), based on their righteous ideas of what is ‘moral’, decide that all those millions of Americans who play that wildly popular Texas Holdem Poker game online are engaging in immoral activities and therefore should be banned from doing so, then, yes, they can in fact sneak in some rules that practically bans this form of innocent entertainment. Even in a bill about protecting our sea ports!

Not only can they do that. They did do just that.

As of yesterday, I can no longer legally fund my accounts at online poker sites in order to engage in my beloved 5 cents poker games. All in the name of making our sea ports more secure.

We live in a free country. And we have many freedoms that other countries don’t have.

But make no mistake, those freedoms, even the ones that concern only what we do in our own houses, in our own time and affect noone else, are being eroded at an alarmingly increasing rate.

This war on terrorism is quickly becoming a war on our privacy.

Americans, once again (remember the Patriot Act?) … you’re being screwed!

You’re being conned out of your freedoms by self-righteous, deceptive, manipulative, insincere, dishonest, machiavellian, cheating, lying, powerhungry and zealously selfserving politicians. Considering the oaths they took, their actions border on treason.

It’s always sad when someone dies, especially when it’s at a relatively young age and by a freak accident. But it’s extra sad when it’s someone you liked.

We used to make fun of Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter quite a bit, and would also mimick him (“isn’t she a beauty?” and “danger, danger”). When we would run into one of his programs while channel surfing, we would yell, OH NO, and pretend to run away, because, let’s face it, he was a little over the top. But we would watch his programs anyway, and we secretly loved the guy and his programs. His ‘drive’, enthusiasm and pure passion were inspiring.

We will miss him.

If you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin

*wipes foam off mouth*

I will probably respond to this later. It’s too soon after I read this. I need to sit down a bit for a while. Get my heart rate and blood pressure under control. 

I mean:

“Separation of church and state is ‘a lie we have been told’“?

This candidate for the US senate *gasp* calls her own nation’s constitution a lie?

“separating religion and politics is ‘wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers‘”?

Lady, go look up the meaning of the word ‘democracy’. This is neither Iran nor the Vatican. US citizens choose our leaders (check that constitution again!). In any case, if God chooses our rulers, why are you campaigning?

“God and the nation’s founding fathers did not intend the country be “a nation of secular laws.”“?

To claim to know God’s intention is pure blashpemy, or stupidity, depending on your religiosity, but in both cases extremely arrogant. The intention of the founding fathers, however, can be known, since they wrote it down. Mrs. Harris clearly doesn’t have a clue about her own country’s history.

She means to tell me that the founding fathers didn’t mean to establish the strict separation of church and state after one of them, Thomas Jefferson, wrote this (part of a longer) letter:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.“

 

JUST after I wrote the post about ‘remnant prayer’, I came across an hilarious website that offered Armor of God Pyjama’s.

Hilarious, untill I realized these people are most likely serious about it. Just read it. I’m just speechless. Don’t know where to begin. Too crazy for words.

Okay, just one remark: see their about page and notice these two statements:

a. “although we are a new company, our desire is to grow” (followed by a lot of blah-blah, but what they want is to simply sell a lot of that crap .. I’m tempted to say “Holy Crap”).

b. “we believe in One God – God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit”

ad. b: Armor-of-God-folks, if you keep up this kind of arithmetic, or rather, basic counting, you’re probably not going to achieve your goal mentioned ad. a. 

Well, okay, maybe a second remark:

This whole idea was inspired by a mother reading Ephesians 6:10-18 to her children every night.

First of all, read it yourself here: imagine that this is read to you every night .. is that really going to give you a warm fuzzy feeling and helps you falling asleep feeling safe and well guarded? Flaming arrows from the evil ones? Would scare any kid shitless .. If they had a clue what it was all about.

But they don’t. They’re kids for crying out loud.

Heck, even mama doesn’t really understand what it is all about:

“Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

See that Mam? That helmet and that sword? It’s a (difficult word: look it up mam!) ‘metaphor’. It doesn’t mean a real helmet or a real sword, it means (read it again!) “the word of God“, whatever that means, but most definitely it does not mean a pyjama!

It’s not about man to man combat (could ‘our struggle is not against flesh and blood‘ be anymore clear?)!

It’s about fighting rulers corrupting power. It’s simply telling you to join the ACLU.

Just join the ACLU and don’t turn your kids into the joke of the day by forcing them to wear moronic PJ’s.

Please? Mam?