Month: December 2006

The Young Conservatives of Texas have made an ACLU friendly nativity scene.
For those who can’t see this small the three wise men are Karl Marx, Vladimer Lenin and Josepth Stalin. There is no Mary but two Josephs. The shepard is a terrorist. The angel appears to be Nancy Pelosi. We are told the manger is empty. Merry Christmas.
Via Dallasblog.com.
Also from Dallasblog:

The Young Conservatives of Texas are planning to erect a “parody” of the Nativity Scene at the University of Texas in Austin to protest the “extremity” of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). According to a spokesman for the YCT “We’ve got Gary and Joseph instead of Mary and Joseph in order to symbolize ACLU support for homosexual marriage, and of course there isn’t a Jesus in the manger,” said Chairman Tony McDonald. “The three Wise Men are Lenin, Marx, and Stalin because the founders of the ACLU were strident supporters of Soviet style Communism. The whole scene is a tongue-in-cheek way of showing the many ways that the ACLU and the far left are out of touch with the values of mainstream America.” The scene will also display a terrorist shepherd and an angel in the form of Nancy Pelosi. So how many conservative Christian Texans will find this humorous or even get the point?

From Frontburner:

An alert FBvian passes along a snippet from last night’s 6 o’clock sportscast on Channel 8. Dale Hansen said:
“Stars defenseman Darryl Sydor is an American citizen. Became official this morning. And you know what this means — Sydor can live in Farmers Branch now.”
[standing, clapping, sticking index fingers in mouth to make high-pitched whistle]

Amen and Amen.

From Frontburner:

It was a good show last night. The Chicks entered to “Hail to the Chief,” and since this was the last tour stop, I thought Natalie Maines might get fiesty. She kinda did. She made a joke about Britney Spears’ crotch, but left politics alone, referring to the band’s past troubles only as “the incident.” They are amazing musicians, as the Morning News attests. But the crowd was sparse. I saw a block of empty seats as close as the fourth row. I wondered how many people like me went for free, the band’s desperate attempt to fill the arena.

Anyone want to explain all the backlash and hoopla over the Dixie Chicks to me? Aren’t our soldiers fighting overseas to give other countries the same rights of free speech that the Dixie Chicks and the rest of American’s have?

A writer over at CyberNet web site installed 200 extensions to his Firefox browser, resulting in the monstrosity of toolbars (and then some) as you see above.
Anyone want to attempt this with IE?
Via: Lifehacker
BTW – I’m really enjoying Firefox and Thunderbird. After a week of use I can’t think of any problems I’ve had with either. No sudden shutdowns, no crazy error messages. Just easy fast browsing.

I had a recent post suggesting churches use YouTube for advertising. I think I got more hits on that one entry than the rest of my blog normally gets in a month (thanks to CMS readers). In the post I mentioned the advertising contest by Chevrolet. Here’s an update on the contest via treehugger:

In March we had great fun with the online Chevy Tahoe advertising campaign where one could go online and build your own commercial; TreeHuggers did so many wonderful parodies. Eight months later, Wired magazine analyses its effectiveness. “The contest ran for four weeks and drew more than 30,000 entries, the vast majority of which faithfully touted the vehicle’s many selling points… But then there were the rogue entries, the ones that subverted the Tahoe message with references to global warming, social irresponsibility, war in Iraq, and the psychosexual connotations of extremely large cars. One contestant…a posted an offering called “Enjoy the Longer Summers!” which blamed the Tahoe for heat-trapping gasses and melting polar ice caps. An entry called “How Big Is Yours” declared, “Ours is really big! Watch us f**k America with it.” The same contestant …created an ad that asked the timeless question, “What Would Jesus Drive?” On its own Web site, the Tahoe now stood accused of everything but running down the Pillsbury Doughboy. ::Wired
…BY ANY OBJECTIVE MEASURE, the Tahoe Apprentice campaign has to be judged a success. The microsite attracted 629,000 visitors by the time the contest winner, Michael Thrams from nearby Ann Arbor, was announced at the end of April. On average, those visitors spent more than nine minutes on the site, and nearly two-thirds of them went on to visit Chevy.com; for three weeks running, Chevyapprentice.com funneled more people to the Chevy site than either Google or Yahoo did.

I haven’t seen any but I wonder if any churches took the challenge to see what kind of television ads their members might make. Could “the church” build a website like Chevyapprentice.com and open themselves up to public scruitiny?
What do you think would happen? How would an ad built by your next door neighbor differ from an ad you might build.

According to experts, phantom power is a huge drain on your electric bill. What is phantom power? It’s the power your television, computer, VCRs, cell phone chargers and more drain when they’re not really in use.
Your television drains power so that it can stay in standby and a picture will appear the moment you turn on the set. Your VCR drains power so that your timer will stay set and your computer may be draining power to charge it or just simply because you left it on.
All those items around your house can add up.
Treehugger.com has some suggestions on how you can kill all that phantom power around the house.

1) Devices like the Kill-a-Watt and Wattson can point you to devices that attract the largest load, leading you to get…
2) A “smart” power strip like the Wattstopper Plug Load Control and Smart Strip Power Strip, that cut the power when your devices are off.
3) The Mini Power Minder has the smarts to shut off your computer’s peripherals and doodads when the computer itself is shut down.
4) Simply unplugging things like your cell phone charger, which is only in use a few minutes per day, will make a bigger difference than you’d think.
5) See How to Green Your Electricity to learn more about keeping phantoms, vampires and warts out of your electrical life.

And one for me – getting up and turning off your bedroom lights before you fall asleep will also make a big difference in your electric bill as well – especially if you leave your lights on one or two nights a week.