Ug

I shouldn't blog late at night-that last post makes me look incredibly arrogant. I'm not cool for the choices I've made-I just try to make the right ones like anyone else. I probably fail more than I succeed. But the whole point of morality and spirituality is that you have an ideal against which to measure yourself. You can't be a 'hypocrite' if you have no standards to betray.

This is getting too deep. My main point: I should stick to unicorn pictures.

The basis of testimony

Cousin Cory echoed a thought I had fairly often back in my 20s (which seems like a very long time ago):

I often wonder what I would do if those around me who claim to know who I am suddenly disappeared and I was free to act without judgement.

Basically what this is asking is do you act the way you do because of expectations of friends/family or do you act that way because that's how you want to act? And if you suddenly found yourself completely separated from said contacts and were 'free to act' however you wanted, how would you act?

I've found myself in that situation a few times in my life. The first time was when I moved to SLC in 1997 and got my own apartment. I still had loved ones and friends but not physically living with me or seeing me on a regular basis. This was a very important time in my life where I really confronted that question-now that 'no one' is looking, how will you live?

Fortunately I feel I made the right choice and stuck with church and actually really dug into it and strengthened my testimony far greater than it ever had been before. This made it much easier to weather the next two times I was in this position which was when I moved to Phoenix for a few months and when I moved to Wisconsin for a few years.

It's a pretty interesting question and it's one that I think everyone needs to answer. Are you going along with the church because you think your family would freak out if you lived otherwise? Or are you living the gospel because you actually believe it's the best course for your life? Finding this out is really the time in your life when you take the training wheels off and see if you can remain standing. That's why I feel confronting this question is potentially of much greater impact on a person's spiritual foundation than a mission. Because on a mission you're constantly surrounded by extremely strict restrictions. It's pretty difficult to not choose the right on a mission, even if you want to. Weird, huh?

Poor Nevada

You voted for him-he's all yours. Enjoy the next 4 years.

That didn't take long

Any of you who were afraid of the BHO administration somehow succeeding can rest easy. This should expedite things nicely.

OK

...and now we stop messing with the banner for a while. Even though I can't seem to get my high-res version to display. But I've had enough banner redesigns for a while so there!

If you had to write that book, what would you do?

What a weird teacher I had at a new summer course tonight. He actually said this:

Apparently I'm the happiest person in the world

According to this.

Cetera

Our girl's boyfriend, in Teletubbie form.

New banner

The new banner is just temporary pending some tweaks, i.e. replace the Buccaneer font, make the new robot look at least 10% less satanic, etc.

Twit

I'm not sure how I ever survived without Twitter. It's like blogging except you don't have to think of something interesting to say! Feel free to follow me at: @theevilrobot. On iPhones download Twitterphon and then add such celebrities as:

Neil Diamond!
Fran Healy!
Michael J. Nelson!
Me!

Go see Star Trek

It is endorsed by Maddie. Vicariously.

Happy Birthday to Jan

And an early Happy Mother's Day as well! I love you!

Recommended columnist

I discovered a great new political columnist I'd never heard of before: David Harsanyi. His articles can be found here. This is a guy who makes arguments and supports those arguments with strong examples. His articles, unlike those by many other pundits, are substantive and thought-provoking. So many writers slide by on name calling and on fluff, but Mr. Harsanyi takes the issues head-on. He's conservative-leaning but he doesn't let the GOP off the hook when it messes up, which is what any true conservative should do as well. We can't help it if the other side doesn't play by the same rules-the are completely incapable of ever admitting that the people who lead their party are fallible. Anyway, he's worth a bookmark if you're into this kind of stuff.

You'll want to get it up to 600 PSI

My favorite commercial ever:



This one is very good too-you've probably seen it:

More Mads

She's into interesting faces these days.

For All Things Mads...

I highly recommend my wife's new blog.

The Plan

Breaking News

Dom Deluise was apparently still alive.

I have absolutely no desire to see this

Quote O' The Day

"We rich people can't stop the world's 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach...If $40 trillion worth of gold were located where most of the oil is, one could only scoff at any suggestion that we might somehow persuade the nasty people to leave the wealth buried...So the suggestion that we can lift ourselves out of the economic doldrums by spending lavishly on exceptionally expensive new sources of energy is absurd. 'Green jobs' means Americans paying other Americans to chase carbon while the rest of the world builds new power plants and factories. And the environmental consequences of outsourcing jobs, industries, and carbon to developing countries are beyond dispute. They use energy far less efficiently than we do, and they remain almost completely oblivious to environmental impacts, just as we were in our own first century of industrialization. A massive transfer of carbon, industry, and jobs from us to them will raise carbon emissions, not lower them" -- energy and technology expert Peter Huber, writing in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal

Mads Diamond

I love this kid.

101.9 The End's Complete Playlist

Just in case any of you need a reference, I've decided to post 101.9 FM's complete music playlist for you. This should be good for about the next 10 years or so.

Midnight-11 AM: U2
11:00 AM-1:00 PM: Colplay
1:00 PM-5:30 PM: U2
5:30-5:34 PM: "Hollywood" by Collective Soul
5:34 PM-Midnight: U2

You're welcome

What bias?

This makes me mad...



UPDATE:

A relevant follow up from Nationl Review -

If reporters treated President Obama the way they treated President Bush, some reporter would ask the current president whether he would allow CIA interrogators to deprive suspected terrorists of food, water, and medical care, and whether forcing a suspected terrorist to live the remainder of his life in a trash dumpster constitutes torture.

The reporter's follow-up would be a request that President Obama explain his vote against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.

. . . and the questions would be posed as the president was leaving the stage at Notre Dame's commencement ceremony.

-Peter Kirsanow