athens alert! danger, danger will robinson!

as a blogger that occasionally touches on athens happenings, i thought i should warn my fellow citizens of the danger that we are now in during the full moon.



stock up on silver, mountain ash, and of course wolfsbane!

"twitbook" is ruining my blog

i never feel like writing posts anymore now that i'm on twitter and facebook. of course, now that my parents are on facebook too i don't feel comfortable posting there either, so it might be the case that all my really negative shit will just get focused here like an anti-religion vitriol funnel. eh, not really. like my friend brian says, i'm getting soft in my old age.

facebook.com/bagoflazers
@bagoflazers

if you're not on one or either of those, i have widgets down and to the right on this page that should show my status updates and tweets. i am like, so meta.

so give me something to write about. email me some "ask an atheist" type questions. keep 'em brief and you'll get an answer. lobstamt at yahoo dot com

ima go to work and eat leftover biscuits.

givoogle!

one of the guys behind my favorite harry potter site, mugglenet.com, has started a new (non-pottercentric) site called givoogle. this thing is awesome. it looks similar to and works exactly like google (can even use your browser's search box) but raises money for cancer research.

from givoogle:

Advertisers pay us for every 1000 people who see their banner ad below.

We donate that money to the American Cancer Society.

Just setting Givoogle as your home page can raise $74 a year or more. Idea: do this for all the computers at your school/company!

Prefer the search box in Firefox/IE? Use the Givoogle Search Box.

Tell two people - start a chain reaction! Instead of $74, you could raise $74,000. Who knows?

i'm using givoogle until it's gone. i hope you'll at least give it a shot. it costs nothing, and you lose no websearching power.

harry potter and the half-blood prince review

*SPOILER ALERT! sort of...

i am very conflicted about half-blood prince. it was a strange moviegoing experience. i was sitting there in the theater fucking loving it; just eating it up. it was funny, it was dark, well paced, and had largely stellar performances from the cast. i had an ok seat and was about 80% sober, so y'know, i felt jjuuuuust right. lavender brown was hysterical! harry was intense! hermione glowed! dumbledore was magnificent! snape smoldered! the fx were slick!

but the back of my mind took a brick to the front of my head just before the ending. something was wrong....

oh right. that was it.

as my fellow fans know, there are certain scenes that you simply have to see. you had to see voldemort's face in the back of quirrell's head in sorcerer's stone. you had to see the basilisk fight in chamber of secrets. you had to see the shrieking shack scene in prisoner of azkaban. you had to see voldemort come back in goblet. you had to see sirius bite it in order of the phoenix, and you had to had to had to had to had to had to watch the dumbledore/voldemort fight right after that. these things aren't just highlights, they must be on screen. they are non-negotiable.

and that scene wasn't in half-blood prince. and i'm not just talking about... y'know...that scene. i mean a handful of huge, monumental, story-crucial scenes and chunks of information.



now i know what you're thinking, "c'mon man, take your own advice!". but the thing is that none of the cuts were necessary. know how i know that? because there's a big extra scene dropped, for no reason whatsoever, smack in the middle of the movie. it adds nothing, nothing at all. nothing is advanced by it. if one were watching the film in the editing room, it would be the first to go because it's pointless and will actually (now that i'm thinking about it) fuck up an awesome scene in deathly hallows. to be clear, it looks awesome, and is really well shot, but i would have preferred that time to have been taken up by that scene.... or one of those scenes.





what was missing, in light of what was added, makes this an egregious error. a decision almost jar-jar binksish in its ability to detract from what would otherwise have certainly been the best potter film yet. if you'll forgive another analogy, i'll turn to football: we won the game, despite the string of interceptions thrown in the last quarter.



half-blood prince is an ugly win.

6

*SPOILER ALERT IF FOR SOME BIZARRE REASON YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK!*




ok, so tonight at midnight/tomorrow morning harry potter and the half blood prince is coming out. holy flaming rhinoshit, this is going to be awesome! however, i want to take this opportunity to make something clear. remember this my fellow harry potter fans:

they're gonna cut stuff outta the movie from the book, k?

keep this in mind while whining tomorrow. unless of course it's a maurauder's map-no-explanation-wtf-it-would-have-taken-ten-seconds-made-harry's-i-saw-my-dad-bit-make-sense-and-enriched-the-emotional-content sized violation of the story. in that case, i'll be loudly on your side.

stuff that's going to be killer in HP6:

quidditch is back!

ginny and harry!

ron gets some!

more michael gambon!

wizard zombies attack! (inferi)

sectumsempra! (pleasepleaseplease get gory)

emma watson's legal now, so the guys in the audience will feel slightly less creepy!

headline: the pope doesn't fuck up!

well bless his crackers, the pope didn't fuck up! not only that, he said something that i can pretty much agree with! hooray! his comments were regarding the G-8 summit, which is coming up right in the pope's backyard, italy.

here's excerpts via cnn:

Pope Benedict XVI, on the eve of a global economic summit, lashed out at modern capitalism for being shortsighted and short on ethics.

"Today's international economic scene, marked by grave deviations and failures, requires a profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise," the pontiff said in his third encyclical letter, "Charity in Truth," which was released Tuesday.
The papal letter was released as the heads of leading industrialized nations started gathering in central Italy for the Group of Eight economic summit, which begins Wednesday.

In his letter, Benedict challenged bankers to turn away from the practices blamed for bringing about the global economic crisis and instead use their power to help the world create wealth and economic development.

"Above all, the intention to do good must not be considered incompatible with the effective capacity to produce goods," Benedict said. "Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity, so as not to abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers."

the whole (but brief) article is here , and i was pleased to see it. not that i thought the pope was a neocon before this or anything, but it's so nice to agree with someone who i'd normally vilify. after all, this is the guy who spreads deadly lies about aids and says harry potter is evil.


but at least now the lord of liturgical lunacy is being all social justicy. i'm happy to point out that this isn't the first time that an incarnation of general pointyhats has spoken out on this. the previous pope, john paul 2, made similar comments. keep it coming guys, and who knows, maybe one day you'll stop covering for child molesters!

here's hoping.

craigslist may be free, but sometimes it's priceless

i think i'm going to start making that title a regular feature. sometimes there's just such great shit on craig's drab gray background.

Reply to: comm-bc2bw-1248488996@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
Date: 2009-07-01, 10:32AM EDT


New hit on the block.

Lil Rid is the new hit rapper/country singer. Covertly underground, Lil Rid knows how to pull off the rhymes in a seriously funny way.

You gotta listen to Lil Rid. His voice might sound a lil proper, but he is coaching himself to talk less proper.

To listen, go to: www.youtube.com/TheLilRid

Tell your friends also!!!!!!!

And by way, Lil Rid lives where the Big Dawgs do!!!!!!!

clap. clap. clap.

aaww, isn't this cute?

in this video (courtesy of a.a.s.h.o.m.) you'll see a muslim apologist go on a christian t.v. show. he debates not just a christian apologist, but has to bat away the show's insufferable host lee strobel as well. i was actually impressed with shabir ally's handling of these two jesusbots, even if ultimately his point is still that there's a magic man in the sky.

yeah i know, religionists arguing about god is like two comic book geeks debating the composition of captain america's shield, but i just love a dose of this stuff once in awhile, don't you? it's adorable!