FlaSoxxJim

Survey says Kasparov with a knockdown in 10 rounds. But, the smart money is on Deep Blue if there is ever a rematch.

Way-2-Wired Metrosexual Geek...

Baggio, Yusuf's (aka, the Muslim-Formerly-Known-as-Cat) comments during the Rushdie thing were reported way out of context by a now-defunct paper, and it is a shame that the myth still gets perpetuated 15 years later. Cat/Yusuf was at a speaking engagement in London and a journalist essentially asked a hypothetical question about teh Islamic stance (Not Cat's personal view) on blasphemy. This excerpt is from the press release he was forced to put out right after the eventm and which was sadly ignored for the most part: And in the adding-insult-to-injury department, what rarely gets mentioned is that He immediately spoke out very visibly and vocally condemning the violence of radical Islamics immediately after 9/11, and donated 100% of his royalties from his 2001 US box set release to charity, with most of it going to the September 11th Fund. He also performed the song you mentioned, "Peace Train", live on VH1 in October 2001 in a show of support for the victim's families. It was tthe first time in more than 20 years he performed a cat Stevens song for the public, and he did it in response to 9-11.

Filkin' A right it was.

Or..... Get a Mac.

Well now tthat I have your secret weapon, the playing field is levelled! Thanks for another time-eating link.

Dang, Soxy! I try to put together a response and you're already on the case!

I was also born and raised Catholic but, I got over it. (Hi. my name is Flaxx, I am a recovering Catholic and I have been clean for 19 years.) Go back and dig into the now-infamous Palistinian-Israeli thread (if you dare), to see cw's and Soxy's educated responses to these claims. John Dominic Crossan is a former priest who has written 3 books on the historical, rather than the mythical, Jesus. His most recent book is Who Killed Jesus ?: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus. It is controversial in that it flatly calls the Gospels' insistence on Jewish responsibility for Jesus' death "Christianity's longest lie." But the fact that Crossan is focusing extensively on the historical facts and not the Gospel's claims makes it a hard book to refute on any grounds other than faith-based grounds. He drives home the point that the Gospels are "prophesy historicized" and not accurate history, they look at the prophesies of the Old Testament and then make the current events of the day fit in with those prophesies. He points out that the early Christians were persecuted by the more numerous Jews, so a healthy dose of anti-Semitism tossed into the Gospels is not hard to understand. Crossan's chief contention is that it was the Romans that did the deed out of fear of civil unrest Jesus and his followers would bring to Judea. I started into the book sitting at Barnes and Noble one day last month and need to go buy it and read it through.

This Southtown article brings a balanced perspective to the issue.

Yeah, Lanford. Thanks. Mmmmm, loose meat sammich...

Dang Wayne, you beat me to a couple while I was writing....

X-Files - ostensably DC and elsewhere, mostly shot in British Columbia. Roseanne - Joliet IL, right? Northern Exposure - Alaska Frasier - Seattle Washington Cheers - Boston MA Streets of SF - Duh Rocky and Bullwinkle - Frostbite Falls, MN Newhart - Vermont

Cool, another way for me to be unproductive!! Thanks for the link.

Steff is correct, you are not.

Just so long as you don't stop using cool words like 'salvific' in your posts! Man, SAT scores are gonna go through the roof with the high school posters here.

I do know those episodes, and I also really liek the one with the blind guy's weed getting pinched by the cops. There's a good Chief Wigham one I haven't seen in a long time, where Wigham is taking the kids through a wax museum of crime kind of thing, and it has all the good urban myths in it. 'The babysitter gets stoned and decides to have a littel snack, but is that really a turkey sandwich she's eating..." dun-dun-dun. And there's the baby she's taking care of between two slices of bread and she's about to eat him.

A good friend of mine just started working at EA's Tiburon operation in Orlando about two months ago, and they're killing him. He's working 15-hour days trying to get this title and others out the door (Tiburon operation basically does all the EA sports titles). He lives 90 minutes from the office and has to basically strand 4 young kids including 7-month old twins with his wife for all that time. He's making an obscene amount of money though (he's heading up the group that is universalizing the front-ends core content on all the titles, and pretty much starting from the ground up), so I guess it evens out.

You must have been "the sadest kid in gra-a-a-de two-oo-oo!" Some of my favorit classic Simpsons episodes are the ones that have those kinds of moments dripping with sentiment. When, at it's heart, America's First Family of Dysfunction has it right and their compassion for each other comes out. Bart cheering Lisa on in ROTC training, or Lisa doing something similar out of love for Bart even though he's a creep. Sure, these are caricatures of humans, but sometimes they are written with amazing depth. especially for being two-dimensional beings!

Wow you even Homer-spelled "saxomophone" right. Bleeding Gums Murphy Lives!

Yeah, but like Leno said last night, he's just holding up his campaign promise to go after the wealthy...

Yeah, it's pretty cool that a warped Flash Internet animator landed a sweet Quiznos deal. Mmmm, toasty.

I love me some fish and I love me some sushi even more. Well at least 99% of sushi. I have never developed a fondness for the sushi piece called 'uni', which is raw sea urchin gonads. The texture has never done it for me and the taste is usually fairly muddy, although I've been told I may have always just tried it out of season. Other than that, I agree with Gollum: "GIVES THEM TO ME RAW AND W-W--WRIGGLING!" On the landlubber side of things, brusselspouts are about the only thing I categorically dislike. Eating them always gave me the feeling I was eating shrinken heads as a kid and I guess I never outgrew that. Oh, yeah, now that I've been dragged along on the silly diet ride by the wife, I casn tell you that most of the low-carb Atkins kind of stuff blows too.

Every identical twins is, technically speaking, a clone of their twin sibling, right down to the last gene.

But Kerry was not the only vet to vocally protest the war after returning from Viet Nam. Not by a longshot. It was very much the voice of these vets that rejuvenated a languishing anti-war campaign. Some of these vets, like author Tim O'Brien, reveal that it was their cowardice (of what others would think of them) that allowed them to be drafted into service instead of dodging the draft as their conscience told them they should do. They did their bit, put in their time, and when it was all over their initial feelings that the war was not a just war and the means were not a just means were validated. These are the anti-war voices that truly deserve to be heard, wouldn't you think? Mai Lai and other such events did happen, are well documented, and substantially corroborated. Are all of the corroborators also traitors? At the outset, Viet Nam was intended to be a secret war, because American citizens would find the manner in which the war was executed to be highly objectionable.

Correct. In the assessment of Kerry and his actions it means nothing. Here's some of the graphic and likely disagreeable 1971 testimony from Kerry. Such reports have come from other vets. If it is true, then it's not even slanderous, let alone treasonous. If it's true, should it not be made public? [A particular sore point is Kerry's 1971 testimony before the U.S. Senate. He said American soldiers "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blew up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."]