Sunday, January 27, 2013

Winter Storm Luna?

So the National Weather Service (NWS) has begun naming winter storms the way they name hurricanes.  And at present, winter storm Luna has us iced in.  (temporarily.  until the temps hit the 40s, which they will shortly).

Having grown up with winter storms (and walked through more than one to get home from school), driven foolishly through far too many on bald tires with crummy wiper blades, and shoveled out of untold numbers more, I questioned the judgment of the NWS when they began this naming business.  This stuff is normal life in the Great Lakes states.  The only winter storms we really remember are the ones that hit hard at Christmas, disrupting everyone's travel plans, or the ones that knock out power for long enough to have you lose the contents of your refrigerator/freezer.

I think it was a plot by those soft Easterners in Washington who can't cope with a little snow and ice.  You ask a native of the Upper Midwest if naming winter storms is a good idea, and they'll just look at you and ask: "are you from here?  If you were, you wouldn't ask."

What we ought to name is tornados.  (or is it tornadoes?  You say potato, I say potatoe...)  And we do sort of name them, right?  In 2011, we had two that people would remember: Joplin, MO, and Tuscaloosa/Birmingham.  We name them after the towns that they flatten, where the homes are gone and people die.

Flattening towns, and making people homeless (or dead):  now that's a storm you name.

As for winter storm Luna, I think I'll just go sprinkle some salt.


Thursday, January 24, 2013

On being Bible-minded

First time I saw this graphic, I said to myself: "There has got to be a purpose for this, but I'm not sure I can articulate what it is."  Produced by the Barna Group (founded by George Barna of church growth strategies fame), it purports to tell the reader which sizable US cities (96 of them) are more "Bible-minded" than others.

Bible-minded?   What?

You mean as opposed to Koran-minded, or Veda-minded?  Or do you mean as opposed to secular-minded (i.e. readers of Asimov and Hitchens and the NY Times)?  Or as opposed to business-minded (devoted to stock tickers & the WSJ)?  Or culture-minded?  Or porn-minded?  Or crime-minded?  Or ... what?

Well, with Barna, you always have to consider the target audience, which is usually Evangelicals who are involved in church-related ministry (or companies like the one I work for who market to that same audience).  If you want to find a really ripe mission field for the Gospel, you could target New England.  From this chart it looks like a Bible-less wasteland.  If you want to find where the "Bible-believing churches" or their attendees live (in order to sell them Bible-related stuff), why... just work your way down the west side of the Blue Ridge and make straight for the Gulf.  You'll find the picking's nice & ripe.  Folks down there read the Bible most every day, and think it gives a mighty accurate description of the way things are.

At least that's how Barna Group defined being Bible-minded: weekly Bible reading and a commitment to its accuracy.

Hm.  Typical of those east-coast elites & intellectuals to disagree.


Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Play Money

Remember Monopoly money? When I played, I always surreptitiously slid a $500 under the board, so I would "forget" about it, and other players would, too. It was sort of my off-shore account, not real visible to the authorities. :)

Sometimes Monopoly money got used for other purposes (like pretend grocery shopping, or to teach budgeting), or it got colored upon, cut with scissors, chewed up by pets or toddlers, and it often disappeared altogether. But, the great thing about Monopoly money was... if you lost it or it was otherwise no good, you could always make more!

President Obama must have played Monopoly as a kid. Because his administration is talking about making some new stuff to take the place of what they've searched around and discovered... they don't actually have! So they will just play Monopoly and make some more. Out of platinum this time instead of paper.

$1,000,000,000,000.   One coin.   One time.

(yeah, sure..)

One of my favorite sportswriters, Gregg Easterbrook, whose column (TMQ) I read religiously on ESPN.com, included a piece in this week's edition which contained this snippet about the trillion-dollar-coin gambit, which could get around a recalcitrant Congress when it comes to debt ceiling time. He suggests: why stop at a trillion? It's fake anyway, so how about a ga-zill-ion dollars, like when we were kids? He says:

The Trillion-Dollar Coin Won't Work in a Coinstar Machine: The platinum trillion-dollar coin has been getting a lot of attention. Comedian John Oliver suggested one should be used in the Super Bowl coin toss, to heighten excitement. Slate asked readers to design a trillion-dollar coin. One has Big Bird on the obverse, another the legend MADE IN CHINA on the reverse. The winner depicts Barack Obama doing the Doctor Evil finger pose.

An obscure statute authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to mint platinum coins "in the Secretary's discretion," in any denomination. Why stop at a trillion dollars? The United States could mint, say, a $100 trillion coin and use it to purchase Europe. We could mint a $1 quadrillion coin and use it to purchase the Milky Way.

I like it.  Let's buy Europe!  Kind of like Monopoly and Risk combined.  You don't fight wars for countries anymore, you BUY them.  With fake money!  How great is that?!?

American ingenuity at work, baby.
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