more sex ed fun… :(

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http://www.sltrib.com/ci_9424130

“I’m really angry right now. I want someone to apologize to those kids and lie to them, saying, “Oral sex and masturbation and homosexual sex aren’t real. The only acceptable kind of sex is that between a married man and a married woman for the purpose of making babies.“

I wonder if the self-righteous parents who are concerned about keeping sex out of the sex education classrooms coordinate with the self-righteous parents who are concerned about keeping evolution out of the science classrooms. Do you think they have weekly meetings or something to make sure that they keep their bigotry focused on the most significant intolerances of the time???

Oh wait, they do … and they meet on Sundays. :<

last one of the night – what ELSE could we have done with $6,000,000,000,000

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http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/05/alternative_boondoggles.html

An interesting article on other ways that we could’ve spent the money that has been dumped into the war in Iraq. Send 510 astronauts to begin colonization on Mars; eliminate the world’s carbon footprint in one stroke by a global switch to nuclear energy; housing in China for 600 million people – I haven’t even gone through all of the comments yet, but any of these sound more worthwhile to me…

allergic … to the future???

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Group Wants Wi-Fi Banned from Public Buildings
http://kob.com/article/stories/S451152.shtml?cat=517

This is “interesting,” and by that I mean ridiculous – a group of folks out in Santa Fe want wi-fi banned from the library, court house, etc… because they claim sensitivity to some electric fields and believe that it’s against the Americans with Disabilities Act to offer these services because it effectively keeps them out of such areas. Funny how they weren’t able to provide supporting evidence from actual doctors that this is even a legitimate medicial issue – I was only able to find a few brief sites via Google that even spoke of such a thing and most of those were European-based articles claiming this to be a great conspiracy “that the medical community doesn’t want to acknowledge,” so I’m picturing tin-foil hats and long nights spent out in the desert all around…

Either way, something like this might keep a small town here or there from setting up government-funded wi-fi spots (which is still a shame), but good luck getting any of the paid guys to shut down their cash cows … exponentially so for cell phone traffic, as apparently these folks are touchy to that, too. Good luck prying that Blackberry from the ear of the on-the-go, SUV-driving Mama who’s juggling soccer practice, ballet recitals, and Pedro the Pool Boy!

At least the quote from the City Councilor gives a good indication of where they stand – “It’s not 1692, it’s 2008 – Santa Fe needs to embrace this technology, it’s not going away.”

three-day weekend recap

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The Good News: I think I might be just about over the horrendous cold that showed up last Wednesday morning.
The Bad News: That’s pretty much all that I managed to accomplish this weekend.

I guess it just frustrates me because my June 1st deadline is now less than a week away and I had really hoped to make some significant strides over the three-day weekend, but at the same time, I certainly didn’t ask to get sick and sometimes you just have to roll with the punches. I did make a ridiculous amount of progress last week during our flights to and back from New York, so that helps me feel a little better, but I am starting to think that mid-June might now be a more reasonable timeframe … at least for everything that I was trying to pull off. I’ve got a bunch of non-secret-project things that need to get done in the near future, too, namely wedding-related stuff like sending out invitations and getting the website ready to take RSVPs, so I suppose a few smaller successes here and there over the next three weeks might work ok, too…

Official Wedding-Planning Update
Wedding bands have been purchased as of Saturday afternoon, although I had to work for it a bit when they tried to jerk us around on the costs for getting Sara’s in the right size. I think I’m going to be pretty happy with my own selection – it was down to two, but one just seemed really bulky and heavy, despite “looking very masculine on my hand,” according to the salesgirl. Riiiight. Anyways, we also met a videographer that day, who I’m guessing we’ll probably end up going with even though we haven’t gone over the budget for the umpteenth time to check just yet. And last night we both spent some time working on various parts of getting the invitations ready to send out – no spoilers, but creatively speaking they look pretty cool!

Take a Look – It’s in a Book!
Finally cracked open the copy of Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture late Sunday night to get a taste of how it turned out, which was sort of a mistake because I ended up reading the entire thing in one sitting! Such an inspirational and motivating story – if a guy on his death bed can have such a happy outlook on life, you kind of wonder how the rest of us get off being so glum and pissy all of the time! The latest updates on his blog show that he’s still fighting strong — it’s really just an amazing story.

Twitter? Why???
I’m not entirely sure yet, myself … still trying to decide if it’s something that I want to take the plunge into or not, but in the meantime – http://twitter.com/ssevener. I currently have the updates to my phone turned off and I’m not really following anybody yet, but let me know if anybody out there in LJ land actively uses this thing! It seems like a neat idea, although I can see it very quickly eating through my meager 500 off-network text messages per month by following just a couple of friends! Still, I like the idea of being able to post to something from my phone (I know that you can post to LJ via e-mail, too, but the character limits on my phone make it kinda pointless for a wordy guy like myself!) and it might be a neat text-only replacement for my MIA MoBlog. We’ll see…

(…just promise that you’ll stop me if it ever gets this bad…)

More Car Crap Next Week
Errr, this week, as it were. I don’t know how it’s going to happen, but I need to get my car back to the dealership so that they can continue The Great Leaky Floor Investigations of 2007/2008. It’s not this particular dealer’s fault, but this really pisses me off because we took the car in last summer when we first bought it and it was under factory warranty, but they couldn’t find any problems despite a huge puddle of water on the passenger-side floor. Now we’re still dealing with it and we want to get it fixed before summer kicks into full swing because it tends to get worse when it’s hotter outside … problem is, now we’re under the crappy extended warranty that we bought which comes with a $200 deductible and the fact that they want to reimburse us for everything rather than pay the bills directly themselves. My big problem, though, is going to start with simply getting the car there because they won’t just give me a rental right off the bat – the warranty company has to authorize one after a work order has been opened by the dealer, meaning they want me to drop the car off and then give me a ride home, then have me wait around at home until the warranty company is ready to contact Enterprise or whoever to issue me the rental … at my expense, until this is all over, of course. Problem is, my ass has to be at work tomorrow morning, and especially between Memorial Day, missing a day last week, and not being completely with it the rest of the week because I was sick, I’ve just got way too much work to catch up on to sit around playing car tag all morning…

I’m still not sure if I’m even going to do it tomorrow now, even though we really need to at least get the ball rolling on it. Now I’m mad and I kinda wish I hadn’t even brought it up!

And Last But Not Least … Guitar Hero: Aerosmith?!?!?!?!
This changes everything! Lori, it’s your job as my official Guitar Hero Advocate to keep me in the loop on these sorts of things! Who knew I still had a chance to rock out with Steven and the boys?!

Scott Ill

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I should be in bed right now, but after four hours of sleep immediately upon returning home from work, I felt the need to be at least somewhat “productive” for a little while tonight. So I spent some time adding a couple hundred more photos to the old gallery, mostly more Disney photos for my albums dedicated to each area. Thankfully, it looks like I’m finally almost done now – all four theme parks are populated, I added a couple of albums for personal favorites, and there are just a few other random things left that with any luck I might get thrown up later on this weekend…

…but speaking of throwing up, man, have the last couple of days really kicked my ass. Late Tuesday night, my throat started getting a little hoarse, but I thought nothing of it, only to wake up Wednesday morning coughing and sniffling with the cold from hell. Just before leaving for work, I had some issues with the medicine that I tried to take and ended up crawling back into bed and calling it a day at roughly 9:00am. I managed to drag myself in yesterday and be somewhat productive, but today was really rough. I don’t know quite how many millions of tissues I went through, but if I had to recommend a stock to invest in, Kleenex would certainly be right up there at the top! And it didn’t help that the new medicine that I had picked up didn’t even cover runny noses, only sore throats, so mid-day I went out exploring for either a better medicinal solution or at least somebody willing to just knock me unconscious for the rest of the afternoon. Fortunately, being the Friday before Memorial Day weekend and all, a lot of people didn’t even come in at all and most who did cleared out after lunch, so at least it was quiet and I could sneeze and cough in my cubicle in peace.

So at least now my throat is feeling mostly better, in that it doesn’t hurt to breathe anymore, but my nose still drips like a sieve pretty much constantly. Tomorrow we have some running around to do to meet with another prospective videographer for the wedding, then look at wedding bands, so it should be an “interesting” day.

Reasons Why I Love Our New Camera…

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I took these out the window of the plane somewhere between Tampa and Atlanta on our way up to New York last week and was kinda blown away by the results! The sunset was absolutely beautiful from 30,000 feet up in the air – it was such a different experience, almost like watching the sunset on another planet or something. I love the textures that the clouds give, creating a landscape across the sky. Aside from our trip back flying first class, this was probably my best plane ride to date…

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“David Named ‘Idol’ Winner”

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I don’t know if this headline from AOL’s front page is supposed to be clever or if the writer just didn’t care enough about the show to realize that they were both named David. Kind of reminds me of Football Team Wins Superbowl or something… 🙁

Anyways, I was happy to see David Cook win last night, even though I half expected Archuleta to win simply because there are probably more teenage girls that watch Idol than older women. It was good to see a “rocker” finally win one, though, because it seems like up until now I normally wouldn’t actually listen to any of the previous winners’ music outside of the show. Of course, now at this point it will be interesting to see what he actually does with it because it’s seemed to me that lately all of the past winners haven’t gotten very far past American Idol: Season X winner … although again, I don’t listen to pop and dance music enough to be sure. Cook definitely deserved this one, though – that’s for sure.

Now will I watch season 8 next January? I don’t know about that just yet – if Sara really wants to, then probably, but Idol has gotten about as boring as Survivor did to me a few years ago, to the point where the last few weeks I didn’t mind reading the results in the paper instead of watching any of the episodes that I’d missed. Problem is, there’s not really much that they can do to change it up, so to speak – we can’t do American Idol: China or American Idol: Caribbean Islands like they did with Survivor to buy a few more years. We’ll see. I was really disappointed by The Office’s season finale, so when Top Chef is over in a couple of weeks, I don’t know what we’re going to watch on TV!