brb j/k lol!

If you are asking yourself how to make money off of people who believe that they will be lifted up to heaven during the rapture, someone beat you to it:

Your Unbelieving Social Network Members Have Been Left Behind!!

This service will allow those who are raptured to send notes and documents to the people who are left on earth:

We all have family and friends who have failed to receive the Good News of the Gospel.
The unsaved will be 'left behind' on earth to go through the "tribulation period" after the "Rapture". You remember how, for a short time, after (9/11/01) people were open to spiritual things and answers. (We are still singing "God Bless America" at baseballs' seventh inning stretch.) Imagine how taken back they will be by the millions of missing Christians and devastation at the rapture. They will know it was true and that they have blown it. There will be a small window of time where they might be reached for the Kingdom of God. We have made it possible for you to send them a letter of love and a plea to receive Christ one last time. You can also send information based on scripture as to what will happen next. Each fulfilled prophecy will cause your letter and plea to be remembered and a decision to be made.

"WHY" is one last chance to bring them to Christ and snatch them from the flames!

...

Services Overview

We have set up a system to send documents by the email, to the addresses you provide, 6 days after the "Rapture" of the Church. This occurs when 3 of our 5 team members scattered around the U.S fail to log in over a 3 day period. Another 3 days are given to fail safe any false triggering of the system.

We give you 150mb of encrypted storage that can be sent to 12 possible email addresses, in Box #1. You up load any documents and choose which documents go to who. You can edit these documents at any time and change the addresses they will be sent to as needed. Box #1 is for your personal private letters to your closest lost friends and relatives.

We give you another 100mb. of unencrypted storage that can be sent to up to 50 email addresses, in Box #2. You can edit the documents and the addresses any time. Box #2 is for more generic documents to lost family & friends.

The cost is $40 for the first year. Re-subscription will be reduced as the number of subscribers increases. Tell your friends about You've Been left behind.

This is the email that I would send if I was raptured:

"so long sucker! I'm in heaven with teh jesus. lmao! say hi to the Antichrist for me! lol"

Being Wrong and Social Networks

I was reading about the latest Phillies win on philly.com today. I also read about Chris Benson and the status of his recovery and if he can help the Phillies rotation sometime this season.

Then something interesting happened. Philly.com started using social networking technology to recommend other articles. At the bottom of the page, they have a section titled "People who read this also read...and bought:". People reading about Benson's shoulder recovery are purchasing tickets on TicketsNow.com, buying Advil and LCD screens. I'm not sure why that is relevant to anyone reading about Benson's recovery, so my first impression of this feature is that it is somewhat pointless but I don't really know or care much about product marketing on the internet.

However, as a sports fan, I find that the article links they provide are worse than pointless, they are often disturbing. For example, the other day I was reading about the previous night's game and then saw a link to an article about Brad Lidge needing surgery. I didn't realize until I looked at the article that it was 2 months old. There is no indication of how old the article is from the link title, so I was very annoyed that I had to open up the article to find out that it was old news. I'm used to browsing sports articles on the internet to see the latest news and do not enjoy having the new mixed in with the old, so I find this feature distracting.

That being said, I did have an amusing experience with the links provided with the Benson article. There was a link titled, "Phillies' Gordon is game, but no longer able."

The article starts out with this definitive conclusion about Tom Gordon based on his performance during opening day, in which he came into a tie game in the 9th and gave up 5 runs while getting only one out leaving him with a 135.01 ERA:

...isn't it time for somebody to step forward and admit that Tom Gordon's right shoulder is cooked?

The 19-year veteran, whose lack of stuff and command was tragically exposed in a ninth-inning, Opening Day meltdown, has pitched the past two seasons with a torn labrum. I got this e-mail yesterday from an orthopedic doctor friend who used to pitch and understands the slippery slope Gordon is trying to climb: "Why would the Phillies continue to believe that an aging reliever with a known labral injury could stay healthy for any length of time without surgery? Bad shoulders do not get healthier with age and work without getting fixed . . . What do the Phillies have to gain by keeping him on the team?"

Good question, Doc. Here's a sport obsessed with pitch counts and which coddles pitchers from cradle to outright release, yet unblinkingly permits injured pitchers to throw. What kind of hypocrisy is that? Does anybody believe that Freddy Garcia was healthy a single inning last year? Gordon is a warrior who wants the baseball. Pride in who he is and where he has been in the sport impels him to take the ball, suck it up and try to earn the $5.5 million he will be paid this season whether he wins Fireman of the Year or winds up having the labrum surgery that will effectively end his career. Flash is 40. He can't come back a year from now and make a living serving up Nerf balls . . .

Tom Gordon has since pitched 17 innings and has given up 2 earned runs for a 1.06 ERA. His season's ERA is down to 3.63 and has been a big part of the Phillies' bullpen, which has been one of the best in the league all season. I looked through Conlin's subsequent articles and did not see him mention anything about Tom Gordon.

damn, this is cute

Happy Mission Accomplished Day!

Celebrate by purchasing one of these.

You can also celebrate by going down memory lane and reading what people in the media were saying when Bush landed with his flight suit.

Here is one of my favorites from Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like [former President Bill] Clinton or even like [former Democratic presidential candidates Michael] Dukakis or [Walter] Mondale, all those guys, [George] McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits. We don't want an indoor prime minister type, or the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians, or a [Russian Federation President Vladimir] Putin. Can you imagine Putin getting elected here? We want a guy as president.

EDIT: Here's a fun memory from that day:



HA HA! Then why did the banner say Mission Accomplished? Good question Senator!

It reminds me of that part of Catch-22 where everyone celebrated because the front line on the map moved, meaning that they would not have to go on a dangerous bombing run. Yossarian moved the line himself when no one was around, but the map had become reality to everyone, so they celebrated. The Bush administration tried to create their own reality, and failed. John McCain was a willing accomplice in creating this fantasy world.

From Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, by Ron Suskind, published October 17, 2004 in the New York Times Magazine:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

coachella, or how to fry your brain

the lineup at coachella looks super fantastic, but you could not pay me to go. the predicted high temp for tomorrow and sunday is 102. COACHELLA IS THE DESERT, PEOPLE.

natural peanut butter

anybody know any good ways to mix the oil back into the peanut butter without slopping the oil all over everything? it's always a challenge to mix it in when i get a new jar. i wish i had a paint mixer like at home depot so i could just tuck the jar in and turn it on...

Make it Stop

EDIT: It was made to stop because of copyright. It was another one of those McCain/Rain songs.

Never mind.

Smell You Later!

Late April Fools?

NTT Communications Corp. will move ahead with a pilot trial of its Mobile Fragrance Communications service that enables users of its mobile technology to experience scents emitted through an aroma generator built into handheld devices, according to a Japanese media report.

NTT, a unit of NTT DoCoMo , will begin trials of the new service Thursday using 20 volunteers and hopes to commercialize the service later this year, according to a report in the business daily Nikkei.

The handheld device is designed to work together with music and video downloads, whereby scents are combined according to a fragrance playlist linked to audiovisual content

Is Busta Rhymes ignorant?