Under a Gibbous Moon

It is said the he who shouts the loudest has the most to hide. Since his disastrous anti-gay advertisement, it seems that Republican Presidential hopeful Rick Perry has succeeded in getting people to wonder what, or rather who, may be hiding in his closet.

Rick Perry is far the people’s choice when searching Google for information that he might be gay. Interestingly enough, the focus of this attention is coming from the place where the people should know him the best, his home state of Texas.

So Rick, take this piece of advice. Tone it down and if you’re hiding in the closet, come out, God still loves you (it’s just Christians that don’t).

It has been nearly a year since I first wrote about using your arm as a strop. I can happily report that I am still using the same razor cartridge.

I just wet the blade and then give it a couple of strokes before I begin and then a few more after I have finished and the blade has remained in like new condition.

I admit that I was initially skeptical that this would be able to keep a blade fresh for years but as I near the one year mark I can say that I am willing to believe that the blade will last me another year.

The only thing I regret is that I had bought a new pack of blades before I found out about this.

I’ve been meaning to do this one for a while but I haven’t gotten around to it because it involved a trip to the Outland and I hate the Outland.

The Burning Crusade is the first expansion for World of Warcraft and was released back in 2007, several years before the train wreck of a movie, Avatar, was released (yes, it had special effects but they were just lipstick on a bloated three hour pig of a movie).

After having seen the movie and playing through the Outland, I have noticed some interesting similarities.

Remember the otherwordly blue jungle of Pandora?

In World of Warcraft, it’s called Zangarmarsh.

And the climatic battle among the floating rocks?

It’s a lot like Nagrand.

And finally, the blue cat people with tentacle hair? (By the way, a google image search comes up with way too much cat people porn, shame on you.)

Meet the Draenei, blue goat people with tentacle hair.

Neat, huh?

Football season has started again. It’s a horrible time when grown men yell at their television sets like they had some kind of prion disease and they tell anyone who’ll listen how they’re team won last night despite the fact that the most physical activity they’ve ever had was a sprint to the toilet after eating that entire jar of nacho chēz.

One thing that I’ve always found interesting is that when you listen to a sports fanatic, they know every detail about the teams, the players, and and who made the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl thirty-six years ago.

Despite this encyclopedic knowledge, they frequently show no aptitude for other learning and will often look at you funny if you mention reading that doesn’t involve fantasy football or the sports page.

On the other hand, you have nerds who also show extreme knowledge of the obscure when related to Star Wars, Star Trek, Joss Whedon, and/or comic books. Despite this similarity, outside of their obsession, these people show aptitude for learning and tend to obtain degrees in engineering, computer programming, and other hard sciences.

Why do such similar behaviors result in such similar outcomes? While sports fanatics do display the capacity to be quite intelligent, I would say that they suffer under the stigma that if they used their brains for anything other than learning sports statistics that they would be not be macho.

The overly sexualized behavior of sports players (the but smacking, dick grabbing, etc.) has often been interpreted as fear of being seen as homosexual or feminine. Unfortunately, in these circles, being intelligent is also seen as a symptom of not being a man. This leads to perfectly intelligent people hiding their intelligence behind a haze of beer and stupidity.

Further evidence that sports (particularly professional sports) do not do anyone any good.

It’s that time of year again, Beloit College in Wisconsin has put out their annual list of milestones, touchstones, minutea that make up the generation of the years incoming freshman.

Key items on the list is the lack of watches (who needs one when you have a clock on your cellphone?), computers have always had CD-ROMs (but who the hell needs CDs anyway?), and Hollywood has always been making terrible movies out of old sitcoms.

SEVERE WARNGING – reading this list may make you feel extremely old.

I’m going to go somewhere and cry now.