wow thats pretty profound stuff right there :-D I dig it!

In reply to this comment by laura:
why thank you, ninjafish!
are you familiar with the Hunab Ku? (or Hu'Nab'Ku or Hun Nab Ku)
Galactic butterfly. Mayan symbol.
Represents the collective consciousness of everyone/everything throughout all space and time.
Or something like that.

In reply to this comment by NinjaFish:
I love your icon :-)

why thank you, ninjafish!
are you familiar with the Hunab Ku? (or Hu'Nab'Ku or Hun Nab Ku)
Galactic butterfly. Mayan symbol.
Represents the collective consciousness of everyone/everything throughout all space and time.
Or something like that.

In reply to this comment by NinjaFish:
I love your icon :-)

People have been predicting the end of the world for centuries now...and they've all been wrong (real surprise huh?). Although if a nuclear attack were to happen, make it between 3:30pm-6:00pm PT. That way I don't have to take my Marketing final =)

Or even better, Friday at 10:00am-12:00pm for my shitty Astronomy final.

Though people speculate that the end of the Mayan Calender on 2012 Dec. 24 is the actual "end of the world as we know it" blah blah blah blah.

Someone needs to put up some great "Y2K bug" videos when people were stockpiling for the end of the world because of the year 2000 were to crash all the world computers! (or was it blow them up?)

And since when are aluminum trailers and rations to protect people from a slow, painful, horrible death from exposure to nuclear fallout? Faith? We all know what happened to that little girl who died from diabetes because her parents relied on faith to heal her rather than a doctor visit. I respect other religions, but I have to draw the line at this kind of ignorance. If it does happen, at least we won't have to pay for expensive gas anymore. Woohoo!

At 0:30 -- "The more humanity strays from its origin... the farther from perfection we become"
Yeah, how about we go back to stone-age tribalism where rape was the chief means of reproduction and people believed diseases were the wrath of god. The maker of this video obviously knows NOTHING about human history.

At 1:00 -- "Fatal flaw" in the symbols
If you want to express something different from the official meaning of a word, USE A DIFFERENT WORD, OR A METAPHOR. To communicate AT ALL, it is necessary that we both know some of the same meanings for symbols. If your word for dog is my word for cat, that DOESN'T DO US MUCH GOOD.

At 2:00 -- "every 26,000 years our solar system passes through the 12 zodiac signs"
Obviously this guy knows NOTHING about the solar system, and neither did the Mayans. The zodiac signs are human-invented patterns in the distant stars, that coincidentally vaguely resemble human mythological figures, whose apparent position relative to the sun cycles yearly as the the earth revolves around the sun. The only resemblence of the truth in that statement is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession_of_the_equinoxes

Whoever made this video is ignorant and batshit insane, so it's only worth watching as *comedy

My cross-the-pond hero. This fella has always made clear, poignant commentary. His culture is being strip-mined before his eyes, and he actually cares enough to speak meaning. In the "name of love", (the U2 song's title comes to mind).....this addiction to niceties the western world is inebriated with, allows a retrograde segment of humanity, who were not part of a similar political and religious reformation as the west, to gain power and influence.......It's like allowing N.Korean's, recently free form the bonds of their current dictatorship, a seat in Parliament, without proper debriefing,... or a kid who just got his driver's license, to commandeer a tractor-trailer full of nukes, over a frozen, mountain pass.......It's fucking insane, to let Islam out of its box, in the modern world.....as insane as 100 million or more, Spanish and Mexican folks, being duped into giving any money whatsoever, to the Roman Catholic Church.

Time for taking children away from the most insanely devout, before they mutate....why do you think the Mayans high-tailed it????

It’s a good thing I checked the paper besides looking at MovieTickets.com. Instead of Sunday, the last movie on the list was shown Saturday night. I called the theater confirm the schedule just to be sure.

Before I review the Horrorfest, I wanted to mention the theater where I viewed the films – Hollywood 9. It used to be part of a chain called General Cinema. Some older folks will remember the music that used brushes on a snare drum with an electric guitar to announce “Coming Soon” and “Feature Presentation.” Then stadium-seating theaters were introduced ten years ago. They managed to kill a majority of movie theaters in this area. A local family bought this theater from the chain. It continues to run first-run films. We used to have a network of second-run film-theaters. They were good for when a film left the first-run-theaters. Plus they were cheaper.

Audiences have been small for the Horrorfest – maybe four to twelve people at most. Horror films are more fun with a full theater of raucous younger folks.

And now for my rankings . . . . I organized them from most favorite to least favorite. The films included for 2007 cover certain standard genres:

The Deaths of Ian Stone (R)
Ian Stone keeps dying and jumping to another life. Each time he interacts with the same girl. Before each death a clock suddenly stops. I like this one best because the film takes time to reveal the context of events and characters.

Mulberry Street (R)
This could have easily been called “Rat People.” The film is set in New York City in a rundown apartment building. Rats across Manhattan bite people spreading a contagious “rat virus.” Once bitten, people morph into rat-faced-like-humans. This flick has a style similar to “28 Days Later.” These carnivorous rat-people move fast and gnaw at their human prey. The newscast vaguely covers events as the infection becomes widespread. Other than the rats spreading the virus, there’s not much of an explanation for the virus’s existence.

Crazy Eights (NR)
Six young adults gather together after the death of someone they all knew. Twenty years earlier their parents left them at mental institution as guinea pigs for human experiments. The name given to their group was “Crazy Eights.” Prior to the group reuniting, they started having nightmares. A last request by the deceased takes them on an odyssey to locate a time capsule they made years ago. OK, that’s seven people; so what about the eighth one?

Borderland (NR)
Of the eight films this is the only one based on a true story. It is more consistent than some of the others. Three American guys in their early twenties cross the border into Mexico. In the course of seeking young women, they cross paths with drug dealers who perform Santeria human sacrifices. In this area near the border, the drug dealers have police intimidated. There is one cop, however, who helps two of the guys when the third one goes missing. He’s been investigating the drug dealers for a while. Also, They killed his partner.

The murders in this film are brutal. Sean Astin plays a bad guy – I was expecting him to yell for Frodo. He has a beard that helps a little with his baby face.

Tooth and Nail (R)
Set in the year 2012 (how Mayan ), civilization has collapsed because there is no more gas. People are forced to survive without technology. Two guys and a girl are exploring when they rescue a girl from an armed man. They bring her back to their group. Right away the group does not trust her. Then one night the group’s leader is murdered. Soon group learns that cannibals are intent on feeding on them. Considering the beginning of the film I expected more cleverness in the lines and the battles to survive. I would have thought the hospital, where they are living, would have some neat props and/or rooms to do battle in – I felt like more could have been done. The cannibals dress like medieval warriors. Axes, knives, swords, spears all make for a bloodbath. There are some later twists in the plot that redeem this movie a little. Otherwise, the film just has a body count.

Mike Madsen and Vinnie Jones ham it up a bit.

Unearthed (R)
Unless I missed it, I’m not sure what group of Native Americans the characters are descended from in this movie. Anyway a young male Native American is digging in a cave where a sacred burial ground is located. Unfortunately his efforts release a monster that his ancestors managed to knock out for many centuries.

A female Native American is sheriff. She’s still trying to live down a circumstance in which she was not able to prevent a young girl from being shot. She investigates a vehicle crash site involving a truck. She locates a piece of something that was caught in a truck’s grill. When a biologist analyzes this something, she determines that it is not of this earth and it has been collecting samples of living things.

As the body count adds up, the sheriff does her best to protect those left. In the course of things she becomes covered in some black liquid in the cave. This stuff ends up protecting her in a close encounter with the creature. She and the guy, who unleashed the creature in the first place, figure out that uranium is what they need to make the protective liquid. Someone else will have to comment on the science or lack of science involved here.

The creature behaves a bit like the ones from “Alien.” It is scarier when you don’t see it. However, it does move fast.

Nightmare Man (R)
A woman orders her husband a primitive mask with horns. She gets more than she bargained for in this tale. Although this one starts off hokey, filmed with video, it does improve with some plot twists. This couple runs out of gas on the way to a mental hospital. He leaves her alone while he goes for gas.

She becomes scared by a demon in the darkness. After a bit of cat ‘n’ mouse, she manages to run to a house in the woods. Two couples are enjoying each other’s company until this woman arrives frantic about what is chasing her and the pills she dropped in the forest in the dark. Listen when someone tells you that pills help control a demon inside. : )

Lake Dead (NR)
A grandfather to an incestuous family is killed. Three granddaughters want travel to see the property they inherited. Their father warns them not to go. The kids are mad at him because saying their grandfather was dead long before he actually was dead.

One of the girls skips the funeral and goes to Lake Dead by herself – bad news. Lake is the family’s last name. Anyway the two girls arrive with a couple and another guy. There is a shallow manmade pond on the property. Characters in the story refer to it as a lake.

So then the body count starts. The gene pool in this town is a bit shallow too.


OK, there are the “8 Films to Die for.” When I’ve seen the eight from 2006, I’ll do a synopsis and ranking of them as well.

You are wrong.. The Egyptians had it right. No wait. The Greek pantheon was right. No wait.. the Romans had it right. No.. wait.. the Sumerian gods were right. No wait.. the Babylonians had it right. No wait.. the Norse gods were right. No wait.. the Mayans were right. No.. wait .. the Inca were right. No.. wait.. the Neanderthal concept of ancestor worship was right. No.. wait.. the native American concept of nature spirits were right. No.. wait .. the Druidic concept of natural spirits had it right. No... wait.. the Muslim concept is right. No.. wait... the Christian concept God and the invisible magic-man had it right.

So... who is right? Did the Christians finally 'get it right' after millenia of cultures/societies ALL getting it absolutely wrong? Now.. that truly must be an "Evolution" of religion. For so many people to be so absolutely wrong, and to FINALLY, find the Truth(tm). Whatever that means.

To be sure, Diamond's book functions better as a macro explanation of civilizations over the past 10,000 years, rather than a theory of why one specific culture loses to another. This is more or less his stated goal in the introduction--not to ignore culture, which obviously plays a huge role, but to recognize environment, especially as having an important long-term effect. Diamond's point is that Eurasia shares certain geographical/environmental conditions and resources not present in other parts of the globe and that this gave Eurasia a big head start. You can argue against this on specifics (probably endlessly), but, generally, the theory seems to hold water. In this context, I don't think a comparison of Mycenaean VS Classical Greek cultures is relevant. A more appropriate comparison that Diamond might make would be Mayan VS Greek or some such.

I do agree, however, his comment "in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners" (p21) does detract from the overall scientific quality of the book. But then again, he makes it clear he is basing this one his subjective observations, and as Raven says, he was probably just trying to drive home the point that 'primitive' is relative.

That was great.....New Iberia is a town built on capsicum...the blood of the Mayans!!! Never been on that tour, want to, before the coastline changes....

24 and counting down that Mayan calendar.

Some coordinates of cool stuff on Google Earth (not in order and some extras):

Indian Head - 50° 0'38.20"N 110° 6'48.32"W
Mayan guy: 19°56'58.08"S 69°38'2.25"W
Lady's Head - 50° 0'36.09"N, 110° 6'35.17"W
Swastika Building - 32°40'37.25"N, 117° 9'22.02"W
White Building - 25°57'0.39"N, 97° 8'48.34"W
Giant bug: 48°51'28.95"N 10°12'17.88"E
Korean Ship: 35° 9'18.21"N 129° 8'51.37"E
Bomber= 52°20'10.98"N 0°11'43.17"W
Hovering car= 32° 0'42.88"S 115°47'10.97"E
Firefox crop circle: 45° 7'25.87"N 123° 6'48.97"W

BUFFALOES: 4°17'21.49" S 31°23'46.46" E
CAMELS: 15°17'40.32" N 20°28'47.42" E
ELEPHANTS: 10°54'13.66" N 19°56'06.15" E
FLAMINGOS: 21°50'36.15" S 35°27'00.60" E
HIPPOS: 6°53'53.00" S 31°11'15.40" E
6°54'00.10" S 31°11'11.67" E
ORYX: 24°57'18.60" S 15°51'30.61" E
SEALS: 18°26'45.45" S 12°00'44.20" E

Bonus:

Kitty in a bottle:

28°27'13.48"N, 96°20'54.23"W

How to find odd places on Google Earth:

http://virtualglobetrotting.com/

http://www.googleearthcoolplaces.com/

http://www.gearthhacks.com/

Those are not democratic systems so I fail to see how that applies in the context of discussing the difference between atheism or theism in society. Furthermore, we have lead the lives of god fearing people in one way or another since Egyptians, Mayans, Romans before and have been embroiled in various acts that directly went against logic and reason under the banner of religion. I was brought up in a religious society I understand it's need for existence, but I also understand that it has no place when it comes to certain things. Specifically goverment, liberties of other people and science.