BBC: Ball-less Broadcasting Corporation?

The BBC has dropped plans to show a fictional terror attack in an episode of Casualty to avoid offending Muslims.

The first show of the hospital drama’s new series was to have featured a storyline about an explosion caused by Islamic extremists.

Now the bomb will be set off by animal rights campaigners instead.

A BBC spokesman said: “With any storyline there are lots of ideas that get put forward but don’t make the series.”

No word on how they expect animal rights campaigners to react to the change. Most likely, they’ll just go liberate some chimps rather than behead a hostage or blow something up. It’s odd to look at animal rights kooks and see them as the level-headed bunch, isn’t it?

Other storylines that did not make the cut:

• Cancer was to kill a little girl but they decided not to offend little girls, cancer patients, or very superstitious astrology followers.

• I’m all tapped out on those. You’re welcome to suggest your own.
  

My wife’s a Brit, and I would wager she’s glad that she’s not paying taxes to support the anti-American, pooping-our-pants-if-we-offend-the-Prophet BBC.

For years, I visited the brick-and-mortar Blockbuster stores, renting movies first on videocassette (ask your parents, young ones) and then on DVD.

I completed the membership form everytime I changed cities, each instance just slightly less painful that the government security clearance application I had to fill out a few years back.

I dealt with deadlines and late fees and a computer system that insisted month after month that the wife had lost a movie despite everyone in the store saying “No, you returned it, ignore that $100 charge we keep sending you. Honest. No big deal. Your credit report is cool and all.”

Then came Netflix. And the (mythical) angels sang from on high!

We’ve been members for over five years and have nary a complaint. Movies arrive quickly, selection is great, and when a disc happens to be unplayable, it’s usually the fault of our even older DVD player; much like a senile old man, it quickly swings from friendly to refusing to cooperate. I was sure that the end of Blockbuster was nigh.

But, it seems like some of you didn’t get the memo, and they’re still hanging on.

From what I can see, there are two main differences right now:

1. Blockbuster allows you to return and pick up movies from the store rather than waiting for them to arrive in your mailbox.

2. Netflix now offers a number of movies on demand for streaming to your computer, included in the price of your membership (and, it seems, without affecting the number of movies you can have out at one time). You can stream one hour of movie goodness for every dollar in your monthly plan charge.

I’m still sticking with Netflix. I dropped Blockbuster because the convenience of mail was better than having to make yet another stop on my way home from work, or a second trip out in the evening. As the turnaround time for us is negligible, adding that inconvenience back and calling it a feature isn’t a really big selling point for me.

However, Netflix’s streaming movies are a nice touch in my opinion. I can watch a movie on my lunch hour if I choose, or at the airport, or… well… just about anywhere given that I’ve got wi-fi and broadband wireless service on the laptop.

For people like my friend Rhett, who have an XP Media Edition PC hooked up to a beautiful television and middle-of-the-road speakers, it’s like having a home theater on demand, with a better selection than Comcast gives you.

And for dorks in their mom’s basement, those with eyeballs glued to the computer 24-7, one would think it would be heaven (note to Netflix: add a looping feature so they can watch nudie scenes over and over… ok, maybe I’d like that too).

So, for this family, Netflix it is, at least until Blockbuster pays to advertise on my site. Unless Netflix offers more.

Not that either has come knocking.

Update: Looks like it has been a good choice to stick with Netflix, as Blockbuster has seen fit to “improve” one of their current plans by stripping away features. Awesome job, Blockbuster!

Given the complete failure of creationism and intelligent design to hold up to any sort of honest inquiry, it seems some of the faithful are taking a new stab at explaining it all:

A new brand of creationism, which creationists and secular science are not familiar with is “Biblical Reality”, which is better known as the “Observations of Moses”.

This “Old Earth” brand of creationism puts forth the view that combines a seven 24-hr day week of original creation (Exodus 20:11), with a separate “six 12-hr days of revelation” given to Moses (Genesis 1:2 – 2:3). The pseudo discrepancy between the “sixth day” in Genesis chapter one and in chapter two is explained as chapter two being the beginning of modern mankind (Adam & Eve), and chapter one as being an earlier species of prehistoric mankind in an earlier restoration period, more than 60 million years ago…

The “six days of Moses” in Genesis chapter one are actually six consecutive (12 hour) days in 1598 BC that God revealed to Moses (on Mt. Sinai) from the ancient past. Each day was from the first week of each of seven different geological eras in “biblical order”. The only day of Creation Week which Moses saw was the “Fourth Day”. Creation Week was 168 hours, in 4.6 Billion BC, according to the geologist.

So, since the current Biblical explanations don’t fit with scientific observation (the admission of which is refreshing) - but they KNOW with ALL CERTAINTY that “God did it” - they’ll just stick some meaningless dates on everything and call it problem solved.

Color me impressed.

Surely this is the next great revolution in human thought.

Wow, that was pretty crap, huh?

Combining all the fabulous traits of poor direction, excessive exposition, and clumsy foreshadowing, the tale of a haunted and cursed comic book anti-hero becomes a formulaic piece of Hollywood poop, leaving us with little but Eva Mendes’ delightfully ample bottom and love of push-up bras.

Not that that’s a bad thing.

Future Hollywood starlet and perennial paparazzi favorite, Fiona Evelyn, strikes a pose, while curious and/or jealous onlookers wonder just what it is that makes the camera love her so.

I have a feeling that I, being her father, have one rough road ahead.

What’s with the extraneous use of “she?”

Update: Cheap shot? Hell, yeah. It’s the best I can muster this early.

Today’s poet is What’s-his-name, or Whomever-they-are, the one (or ones) that write the craptasmatic lyrics which that god-awful band Hinder then tries to put to music, without much success (unless you define “success” as cringe-inducing cheese-ballads of emotional diarrhea that make P. Diddy seem like the Percy Bysshe Shelley of the last twenty years).

From the song “Better Than Me, comes this bit of powerfully poetic poignancy:

While looking through your old box of notes
I found those pictures I took
That you were looking for
If there’s one memory I don’t want to lose
That time at the mall
You and me in the dressing room

Ah, and some say that the Romantic movement is dead!

Why, what could possibly better encapsulate the notions of emotional and powerful aesthetics than “That time at the mall / You and me in the dressing room?” His angst… his longing… or, well, the surety that none of this ever happened and he just writes cheesy crap in order to bang as many tasteless groupies as possible before his fifteen minutes are up (which, let’s be honest, is about 15 minutes and one second more than this group of pop-rock-pablum peddlers deserved in the first place).

Seriously, do some of you people actually enjoy listening to this crap? I simply must know.

Ah, yes, the sweet, sweet joys of socialized medicine:

A rare set of identical quadruplets will be reunited Friday at a Calgary hospital after spending their first night apart Thursday — two in Canada and two in the United States.

Karen Jepp, 35, of Calgary delivered four healthy little girls Sunday at a hospital in Montana, after being sent there because of a shortage of neonatal beds in Canada…

Lynda Phelan, a spokeswoman with the Calgary Health Region, said no other Canadian NICU had space for Jepp’s four babies.

“There wasn’t space anywhere in Canada, so we had to turn to our friends in Montana,” she said.

A shortage of neonatal beds in the entire country of Canada?

How do the Canucks stand for such idiocy? An entire country of medical progressives has no room for them, but a state with less than one million residents is equipped to handle them in their time of need. When Piers was born, he didn’t have to go to the NICU, but we were adjacent to it, and there were 4-5 empty beds in one hospital in one county in one state of the United States.

And Canada can’t find a couple in the whole of their territory?

HOORAY FOR SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!

Wow, where do I sign up?

(found via Wizbang)

Came across something yesterday.

When I see a photo like this, it really makes all of my problems, stresses, concerns, and worries seem so insignificant. This captures just one small view of the universe, mostly occupied by our own galaxy on the vertical plane - beyond that lie billions more galaxies.

With such awe-inspiring wonder to behold, why should I let my little problems get me down so much at times? For every bit of negativity in my life, there are a million breathtaking views of the universe to behold.

Perhaps if God(s) spent more time gazing at the vast beauty of his/her/their creation, he/she/they wouldn’t get so distracted with who is sticking their pee-pee where.

Those of you who enjoyed (or even did not enjoy) Richard Dawkins’ last series of British television shows called “The Root of all Evil?” might be keen to know that his latest, “The Enemies of Reason,” is available for the time being on Google video.

A summary:

In his last Channel 4 series, Root of All Evil?, the evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins explored how organised faith and … all » primitive religious values blight our lives.

But the fault line runs deeper even than religion. There are two ways of looking at the world – through faith and superstition or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence – in other words, through reason. Reason and a respect for evidence are precious commodities, the source of human progress and our safeguard against fundamentalists and those who profit from obscuring the truth.

Yet, today, society appears to be retreating from reason.

Apparently harmless but utterly irrational belief systems from astrology to New Age mysticism, clairvoyance to alternative health remedies are booming.

Richard Dawkins confronts what he sees as an epidemic of irrational, superstitious thinking…

He explains the dangers the pick and mix of knowledge and nonsense poses in the internet age, and passionately re-states the case for reason and science.

If your chakras bristle at such a thing, so very sorry indeed. Perhaps you could use the magical mystical hocus-pocus of “The Secret” to wish Dawkins away.

Or, say, prayer even.

(via Pharyngula)