I saw The Passion tonight.  It was the first time I ever went to a movie by myself.  I’ll probably never do it again, but for this movie, it wasn’t bad being alone, and I couldn’t wait any longer to see it.  (And plus I couldn’t wait any longer to read other people’s blogs about it.)  There were only about 15 people in the theatre, too; it was a Monday night show at 9:30 in a college town during spring break.  I still have my whole ticket because there wasn’t anyone ripping them in half.

(Warning: spoilers follow.  Not that you don’t know the story already.  But if you haven’t seen it yet, you might not want to read this yet.)

Despite all the whining I’ve heard up till now, the movie wasn’t any more violent than lots of other R-rated movies.  And that whole issue is irrelevant anyway because this is a true story; Jesus was violently beaten and violently killed, so a movie that faithfully depicts those events will be violent.

At times I got very angry.  First of all, the people were so barbaric.  And the soldiers constantly whipping Jesus as he carried the cross... how much of a moron do you have to be to not realize that if you want him to go forward, you can’t knock him down?  I was also really mad while the soldiers almost scourged him to death, after they had been ordered not to kill him.

The only time I got really choked up was when Claudia brought the white towel/sheet to Mary.  I’m not sure why then; maybe because they just got done showing so much of Jesus’ beating, and you could still hear it in the background, and just all the emotion between the women.  Ironically, Claudia thought the situation was unjust while Mary understood that it needed to happen.

Some things made me really happy, too.  It was awesome when after they nailed Jesus to the cross, they flipped it over, and the whole thing was levitating about a foot off the ground.  I presume this is because of the prophecy which says that no bone in his body shall be broken; certainly flipping the cross over and dropping it face-down with Jesus on it would have broken ribs and probably legs.  And I almost jumped up and cheered when the crow pecked out the eyes of the murderer who was laughing at Jesus on the cross.  At the end, I thought it was really neat how the stone rolled itself away, and the camera panned past the vacant shroud, and you saw Jesus just crouched on the ground, waiting to walk out.

I thought that satan’s constant presence was interesting and well-done.  I’m glad (s)he was portrayed as just plain evil and subtle, instead of being red with horns and a pitchfork.  (Though it was kind of interesting how everyone in the movie was dressed in clothes from that time period, while satan wore what looked to be a modern black hoodie.)  Apparently the role was played by a female, but I don’t think the face looked any more female than male, or vice-versa.  And I’m glad I didn’t end up seeing the movie with Dimitry like I was supposed to, because satan’s face and eyes were very similar to his.  I’m additionally glad it’s spring break and Dimitry won’t be back for a week.

My favorite character was Pilate.  He was really tough and cool, and really skeptical.  I didn’t like how they portrayed him as needing his wife’s permission/guidance before making any decisions, but whatever, in gay upside-down feminist American entertainment, that’s what you get.

The soldiers who were scourging Jesus were beating him so hard that they were out of breath.  That is telling.  Truly the only way Jesus was able to stay conscious through that was through God’s sustenance.  The body signals the mind into unconsciousness in the face of that kind of pain, but Jesus had to feel the pain.  And the way they yanked on his arms to dislocate his shoulders to crucify him... terrible.

One of the languages (probably Greek) was pretty similar to Spanish in a lot of words; I picked out cuando for "when" and verita- for "truth" a few times.  Um... there were others but I forget now.  Of course I understood Cephas for "Peter" and Yeshua for "Jesus."

One thing I was waiting for that didn’t happen was for one of the soldiers to say, "Truly this man was the son of God" after crucifying him.

All in all I think the movie was superb.  It reminds me very much of this song by The Cross Movement.  One of my friends had said it was overly Catholic, and that the story mostly just followed Mary around the whole time.  I don’t see it that way at all.  It followed Jesus, and showed a decent amount of Mary, which I’d say is appropriate.

My internet connection died today around 2pm and was out for about 6 hours.  That’s annoying and it happens fairly often (for much shorter durations), but it’s no big deal.  At that point, however, what I don’t want to see is a commercial on TV for Adelphia’s "always on, lightning fast" internet connection.  Anyway... now it’s out again.  (I’m posting this 2 hours after writing it.)  I called them and got a recording saying that I don’t need to stay on the line, because they are aware of a problem affecting service in PA, NY, VT, NH, Mass (yeah I’m not sure of the abbreviation for that one (MA?  MS?), and I can’t exactly look it up right now...), RI, CT, and Maine (MA?  ME?).  So whatever the problem is, it would appear to be formidable, having ensnared 8 states so far in its death-grip... I mean, having taken 8 states offline.

And you know, there’s something very wrong with the world when Tropicana makes a "light and healthy" version of orange juice.  Normal Tropicana orange juice contains... orange juice.  Nothing else.  Not from concentrate.  Nothing added.  You know what’s "light and healthy" about this new version?  Less sugar and carbohydrates.  Give.  Me.  A.  Break.  Maybe if you are having problems with your health/weight, you need to FREAKING EXERCISE, and maybe orange juice isn’t your biggest problem.

Moving right along, I’m sick of commercials that portray white men as imbeciles.  When was the last time you saw a commercial that made fun of a woman?  Or a black person?  Right, never, because in the make-believe world of politically correct American media, the only person whom you can make fun of without getting sued is the white man.  (Because, of course, the white man is the cause of everything bad that has ever happened in the universe, and must be in a perpetual state of apology for that, and all women are perfect, as are all people with dark skin.)  Anyway here are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  Note that I only watch an hour of TV per weekday (The O’Reilly Factor), plus American Dreams on Sundays, and Newlyweds on Wednesdays.  So all these are from that little bit.

Mastercard commercial about gym memberships, where the guy can’t open the pickle jar, and the girlfriend does it for him, convincing the boyfriend to start going to the gym.

Progresso soup commercial where the kid(s) just moved out, the husband is about to make condensed soup, and the wife says in her best you’re-so-dumb voice, "What are you making?  Condensed soup?  The kids are gone, we’re moving on."  She then pulls out a can of Progresso soup instead.

Tampon commercial where a guy and a girl are in a small rowboat on a lake, the boat springs a leak and magically the guy doesn’t notice it.  The girl says "...the lake," the guy says, "the lake," then the girl pretends that she actually said "the leak" and points down at it.  The guy says he’ll handle it, turns around and fumbles around for something; meanwhile the girl grabs a tampon and puts it into the hole, stopping the leak.  The guy turns back around with a small plastic cup that looks like the lid to a can of spray-paint, presumably as his solution to the problem, only to find that the girl has already stopped the leak.

Lending Tree commercial where a kid gets accepted into an ivy-league college, and the dad starts selling things to raise money for it.  He comes home with some strange man who is going to be renting the kid’s bedroom while he’s away, and the wife says, "Honey, I’m getting a home equity loan to pay for college."

Earthlink commercial where the wife switched to Earthlink because she "needs answers fast" and "needs to stay on top of things around here" as her clumsy husband keeps botching various things out in the yard.

And just to be clear, I don’t mind being made fun of, not one bit.  What I mind is the whiney babies who would scream and cry if a non-white-male were to be made fun of in a commercial.

I thought it was cool that I am visitor # 53808 today ;~]

Yes, I have it.

This new theme is called Spring.  It’ll probably be tweaked a bit more yet; I may remove/change the photo behind the body of the page, and I may put a random short quote on top of the header image.  Please let me know if there are any readability issues.

Also, Andy suggested it’d be a good idea to add a preference for disabling the slidey pop-out menus.  I agreed.  It’s there.

JoAnna (my wife) and I saw "Passion of the Christ" yesterday.  I guess it was so much better than I expected because I didn’t want to trust what people were saying because I figured people wanted to be supportive.

Powerful and emotional.  I don’t cry easily at the movies, but this will more than choke you up.  I wouldn’t be too concerned about the violence/gore.  I was expecting another "Saving Private Ryan" and it was nothing like that at all.  Probably different because everything was focused on Jesus.  The violence is not an issue.  It was that the movie put you right there.  I got very emotional.

"There were pieces of human bodies all over the bus and all around the bus," said Jerusalem city councilman and opposition leader Nir Barkat, who was driving across the street at the time of the blast and helped treat the wounded.  "Would that the whole world could see the horrors that were in that bus," he said, his hands, trousers, and shoes covered in blood. ... "People were screaming ’mommy’ and ’daddy.’ There were body parts everywhere, including some hands and feet scattered outside the bus," medic Reuven Pohl said. ... Deploring the world’s "double standards" for criticizing Israel for building the security barrier, Barkat said that "Our right not to be blown up is more important than the quality of life of people whose lives will be disrupted as a result of... the fence."

- JPost and Cox & Forkum

I created a prefs page for you.  Right now, there’s just one preference you can set: you can choose to have the list of "who’s online" displayed in the status bar of your browser (the small line of text in the bottom of the window).  For most of the themes on my site, the list of who’s online is displayed in an iFrame right on the webpage, but for the new "simple" theme, it’s not.  There’s still an iFrame, but it’s hidden.  So this preference allows you to get that same functionality back, displayed in the status bar instead of on the webpage.

Add to Uncommon Skills section of résumé:

• Can spell English words

• Can park a car straight in a parking space

I snagged some fancy sliding menus from youngpup.  Just in time, too; I was getting tired of having to click through multiple pages to get to the one I want on my site.  (Update: they’re only on the simple theme.)

While hitting up glish.com to read about css and positioning, I read a couple interesting things on his blog:

I think maybe the most important dividing line (a sort of mendoza line, if you speak baseball) on the spectrum that stretches from "being stupid" to "being smart" is that line to the right of which fall people that are stupid, but smart enough to know it.

I think that is profound.

Then this, from his four-year-old daughter, is hilarious:

The other day she drew some marks on a sheet of paper and said, (really, she said it): "these guys are the good guys, and these guys are the bad guys.  If the good guys win, they still lose, but if the bad guys win, they really win."

Also hilarious is that O’Reilly was supposed to have Snoop Dogg on The Factor sometime this week, but apparently he cancelled, and while talking about it, he referred to him as "Mr. Dogg."

Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger appear together on Jay Leno, and Microsoft saves Apple again.  What will they think of next?

With the exception of the "Preview" button, my blog now renders identically in Mozilla and IE6.  This was way harder than it should have been, thanks to IE’s broken box model, which among other things includes an element’s padding in its width, making cross-browser pixel-perfect sites well-nigh impossible.  (How many hyphenated words can you use coherently in a single clause?)  The main thing here is that the amount of space between posts, and the amount of space above and below the body of each post, should be the same in both browsers.  I don’t expect it to look correct in IE5.x, because its box model is even more broken, but I also don’t have a system with that browser to test on.  (Steve says it renders like crap on IE5.x/Mac, but didn’t send me a screenshot, so I have no idea.)

In slightly more exciting news (if you’re a geek, anyway), the blog script itself can now also function as a calendar script, so that for example bands could use it to post concerts, teams could use it to post games, or more generally, groups could use it to post meetings/events.  From the user’s point of view this probably doesn’t seem much/any different from they way the blog is used on my site, but it’s actually very different internally.  Meetings need to be displayed in chronological order, instead of in posted-order, as my posts are.  For instance, today you might make a post about a meeting next month, but then tomorrow make another post about a meeting in 2 weeks.  The 2-weeks-away meeting needs to be displayed before the next-month meeting, even though it was posted later.  Furthermore, you probably want upcoming events to be displayed separately from past events.

Because of all that, the best implementation is probably to make the filenames be the dates of the events, instead of the number of the post, as on my site.  But I want a single script to function as either an event-blog or a normal blog; I don’t want to maintain two separate scripts, because that’s difficult and time-consuming, especially when 95% of the functionality is identical.  So, I added the event-blog functionality into the main blog script, and added a preference to the prefs file that allows one to choose whether the blog is a normal blog, or an event blog.  If it’s an event blog, then the posting form has extra fields where you enter the date and time of the event.  And at the bottom, instead of having a "list all posts" link, there are "past events" and "upcoming events" links.  This also required a lot of internal work that the user won’t see; for example, on a normal blog, the post after 327 is 328, but on an event blog, the post after 2003-12-31 is not 2003-12-32.  So there are now functions to calculate things like that in event-blog mode.

Back when the OAO site was still in existence, I turned my blog into an event blog for them to post concerts.  But I didn’t do it in the best way, by adding the functionality into the main blog script, because that would have taken a lot of time and effort.  It was quicker and easier to just modify it and forget about it.  But that meant that it was twice as much work to add new features later.  Now, it’s done correctly.

So, any bands or other organizations needing a calendar like this, you know who to call.

Why??  And what the heck is this thing, anyway?

Ok folks, the last time I suggested a sibling dinner... well, lets just say it was the worst night of my life. So, things can only get better, right? Dan and I moved into our apartment and would like to have everyone over for dinner. The kitchen is so small that so far everyone who has come over has asked "where’s your kitchen?", but we can cook out as our grill survived the fire. For obvious reasons. We are free all of next weekend if anyone is available. If not, the next weekend is open so far, too. It’s our slow season :o)  Plus you can kiss our gorgeous new puppy!

What ever happened to Blink?  Has anyone heard the new music?  It seems as tho ever since they got Travis as the drummer they have succeeded to outdo themselves at sucking album after album.  What happened to the good music?  What happened to Apple Shampoo?

The I In Team finally has a website.  Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is an especially tasty number.

Great, now I have to go see this movie really soon.  Don’t get me wrong, I want to see it, but now I’m forced to see it as soon as possible, because I can’t read anyone’s blogs until I do.  Drat and blast you, intarnet!

I just had the best idea.

When I compare showering to shaving, shaving is on the "pain in the butt" end of the scale, and showering is on the other end.  I love showers -- who doesn’t love hot water and cleanness?  But if you shave at any time other than immediately after showering, your skin is way less soft and smooth, making shaving a lot harder and more nick-prone.  It’s cruel irony: showering makes shaving better, but shaving puts a big damper on the overall joy of the showering process.

So... I’m going to buy a suction-cuppy mirror and shave in the shower!  It will extend my time in the shower and make shaving even easier, since it’s also a pain to have to splash water from the sink all over your face and neck trying to get rid of leftover shaving cream, etc.

What a fantastic idea.  I can’t believe I never thought of this before.

Telefon Tel Aviv: instrumental, sort of techno-ish/electronic but not the crappy dance-kind.  Dreamy... sometimes slow and soothing, sometimes lots of crazy alien sounds for no apparent reason.  Somewhat like The Postal Service.  You can listen at telefontelaviv.com (which unfortunately is offline at the moment).  Update: looks like they’re back online.  In their "Listen" section, check out the tracks from the album Fahrenheit Fair Enough; the other stuff is cool too, but so far I’m liking FFE the best, I think.

Rainer Maria - Long Knives Drawn: this is their newest album, and I just got it... it’s so rock and roll.  As time has passed, RM has gone from a dual-vocal format to just the female vocalist, and she is amazing.  I can’t get through many of the songs on this album without bursting out in song, and one of them is "Long Knives."  At first, this song makes no sense.  I mean I think it has verses and a refrain and even a bridge, but they just make no sense... the guitar is crazy on the verses, the drums are crazy on the chorus, and the vocals the whole time are just... like, repeating the same word/phrase a few times in a row almost spokenly... and her inflections are just very unique.  So anyway, after the first listen, I was like, "what?"  And after a few more, I’m in love.  This song rocks, it’s just different.

Emery: this is a pretty new band (I think).  They’re "another one of those" indie rock bands whose sound is highly dynamic, with intense screaming parts followed by pretty mellow parts.  But I like those kinds of bands, so I like these guys.  Similarish to A Static Lullaby, and maybe a little bit to The Juliana Theory.  Listen to almost the whole album at theweaksend.com and a couple songs at purevolume.com.

Freemartin: they just relased a new EP that’s unstoppable.  They are punk rock + emo, I guess... mostly fast but with slow and pretty breakdowns.  Their sound is really tight, with incredible drumming.  (Update: I forgot a sounds-like.  Sounds like... sorta like old Get Up Kids stuff, especially the vocals, but way faster.)  Listen at freemartin.com.

Tasha and Dan have a precious new puppy.  Go see!