Intelligent Falling?

As I write this entry, I'm fairly certain that the activity in the Alpha office has approached the kinetic grace that people used to associate with John Woo and Hongkong cinema. While we gather ourselves for the upcoming Worship Central Manila Conference in The Tent, Ortigas and the subsequent Alpha Conference in Singapore, allow me to share a slightly subversive article that made me laugh out loud. I pray that my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ will enjoy the humor which the Christian author G.K. Chesterton says informs the joy that we all share in Christ, and which I believe lied beneath the surface of this gentle reminder:

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

TOPEKA, KS-Evangelical physicists are now asserting that objects fall because a higher power is pushing them down.

Here are some choice excerpts:

Critics of Intelligent Falling point out that gravity is a provable law based on empirical observations of natural phenomena. Evangelical physicists, however, insist that there is no conflict between Newton's mathematics and Holy Scripture.

"Closed-minded gravitists cannot find a way to make Einstein's general relativity match up with the subatomic quantum world," said Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry. "They've been trying to do it for the better part of a century now, and despite all their empirical observation and carefully compiled data, they still don't know how."

"Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work," Carson said. "What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that 'gravity waves' and 'gravitons' are just secular words for 'God can do whatever He wants.'"

Some evangelical physicists propose that Intelligent Falling provides an elegant solution to the central problem of modern physics.

"Anti-falling physicists have been theorizing for decades about the 'electromagnetic force,' the 'weak nuclear force,' the 'strong nuclear force,' and so-called 'force of gravity,'" Burdett said. "And they tilt their findings toward trying to unite them into one force. But readers of the Bible have already known for millennia what this one, unified force is: His name is Jesus."

Interested readers may check out the theory of Intelligent Falling for a more complete understanding of the parody above. Enjoy!

Cultural Decay in The Onion

I've always held the opinion that the some things are funny because to recognize them for the painful truths that they represent would be too depressing. It's a distinctly Filipino trait, I believe, and one that helps us deal with the otherwise bleak realities that we have to stew in until we mature as a people. As such, allow me to share the following which, ironically, might be lost on a culture that is increasingly less inclined to read:

Novelists Strike Fails To Affect Nation Whatsoever

The opening paragraphs are truly a distillation of how the genuinely funny can be genuinely tragic, so I'll reprint them here:

LOS ANGELES—The Novelists Guild of America strike, now entering its fourth month, has had no impact on the nation at all, sources reported Tuesday.

The strike, which scholars say could be the longest since 1951, when American novelists may or may not have voluntarily committed to a six-month work stoppage, has brought an immediate halt to all new novels, novellas, and novelettes from coast to coast, affecting no one.

Bookstores across the country saw no measurable change in anything.

Nor has America's economy seen any adverse effects whatsoever, as consumers easily adjust to the sudden cessation of any bold new sprawling works of fiction or taut psychological character studies.

"There's a novelists strike?" Ames, IA consumer Carl Hailes said. "That's terrible. When is it scheduled to begin?"

I haven't read a funnier, sadder account of cultural decay from The Onion since Klingon Speakers Now Outnumber Navajo Speakers in 1999:

NEW YORK—According to a report released Monday by the Modern Language Association, speakers of the Star Trek-based Klingon language outnumber individuals fluent in Navajo by a margin of more than seven-to-one.


"Navajo, a 3,000-year-old Native American tonal language belonging to the Athabaskan/Na-Dené group of tongues, is clearly dying and will likely be extinct by 2010," MLA president Frederick Toback said. "Fortunately, though, the sad, steady decline of this once-proud Native American tongue has been more than offset by a rising interest in Klingon culture."

Enjoy!

Easter Reflection

As the Lenten season draws to a close, I find myself reflecting not only on my life but on how "Easter" has taken a life of its own, at least in comparison with Christmas. In James Martin's Slate article Happy Crossmas! he raises some rather interesting points regarding the Western perception of Easter.

He begins with an observation:

Unlike Christmas, whose deeper spiritual meaning has been all but buried under an annual avalanche of commercialism, Easter has retained a stubborn hold on its identity as a religious holiday.

And he posits some interesting insights into modern man's tenuous hold on, for lack of a better word, "un-spirituality":

...agnostics and atheists who don't accept Christ's divinity can accept the general outlines of the Christmas story with little danger to their worldview. But Easter demands a response. It's hard for a non-Christian believer to say, "Yes, I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead." That's not something you can believe without some serious ramifications: If you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, this has profound implications for your spiritual and religious life—really, for your whole life. If you believe the story, then you believe that Jesus is God, or at least God's son. What he says about the world and the way we live in that world then has a real claim on you.

Easter is an event that demands a "yes" or a "no." There is no "whatever."

I've come to realize that it's very difficult to be Christian. From a purely rational perspective, the passion, death and resurrection of Christ seems unbelievable, and the way in which it unfolds is certainly poor storytelling. If I were to invent a story about a deity, it certainly wouldn't take the form that The Passion of Christ took. But the sense of incompleteness that echoes in the human heart about Christ's story that urges us to complete it by responding to it. It's funny. We've only recently discovered how artfully executed cliffhangers like those that make up tv series like Lost can rope in a rabid audience week after week, but it seems that Christ began cornering the market on a faithful audiences at least two thousand years earlier.

Happy Easter!

Acquired Tastes: I Watched This On Purpose

Every once in a while, I have to fight the urge to be contrary, just because. This willful turn towards contrariness oftentimes rears its head in the face of critical commentary, or commentary that carries with it the snap, crackle and pop of especially active synapses struggling for synthesis. Mostly, I fight the urge to be contrary whenever critical opinion reaches some sort of consensus.

I think:

"What if all these experts and intellectuals were somehow wrong?"

Then, I gloat:

"Who's the smart one now?"

Josh Modell posits the same subversive slant in what is hopefully a series of short articles on movies that critics might have panned unfairly. Here are some excerpts:

We at The A.V. Club—writers and readers—are imperfect culture warriors, knowledgeable of what we should like and its relation to what we actually like, but even so, we aren't always impervious to the sexy allure of ostensible garbage. Sometimes—frequently, even—a movie or TV show will actually have cartoon stink lines emanating from it, yet we can't stop ourselves from seeing it. It's all about that kernel of hope, that faint possibility that this will be the one in a hundred that all the critics—and our own instincts—were wrong about. Thus is born I Watched This On Purpose, a new feature that will explore the impulse to spend time with entertainments that are unlikely to reward us in any meaningful way, or sometimes any way at all. It isn't a matter of getting to know your enemy, or even of discovering guilty pleasures, but of playing the long odds in hopes of a real reward. And a good time.

The first movie? The Timothy Olyphant starrer, Hitman. Good times!

And yes, Ate Cecile. The picture has nothing to do with the post. You love it anyway!

Manly Musicals?

Since time immemorial, men have always been concerned, funny enough, with their masculinity. Masculinity, strictly speaking, isn't entirely about having the proper equipment under the hood, though the propensity to reduce everything to automotive metaphors certainly helps one case for being masculine. If one were to believe the editors of Cracked, male concerns regarding their manhood extend even to their justifications regarding that bastion of gender ambiguity, the musical.

While the writing is, as befits this curiously unrepentant humor site, petulantly juvenile, there is the occasional glimmer of what might evolve into wit, as in the case of their argument for the musical "Hair":

The Story:
A troupe of political-activist hippies attempt to change the world through song.

Why Guys Fear It:
It can be argued that the play consists primarily of a troupe of political-activist hippies attempting to change the world through song.

Why You'll Survive It:
If this play were a dude, it would be the troubled loner who can't seem to stay out of harms way. Purveyors of the show' early runs dealt with bomb threats, legal hassling and suspicious fatal arson, all of which earn Hair a fair share of street cred. Also:

Live, on-stage nudity.

The rest of the article is just as silly, but oddly entertaining. Enjoy!

Craptions!

While the rest of our proud nation was watching Pacquiao-Marquez II, I was scouring the web for something cheerfully inane. It just so happens that my delightfully subversive friends at Cracked have a cheerfully inane section called Craptions.

Behold!

Between his alchoholism, his poor temper, and his half-assed attempts to disguise his true nature, Seamus was always the least popular Transformer...

Photo Credits:
Picture comes courtesy of Cracked.

"Grandfather!"

Recently, my father, Juan Vargas Borra, celebrated his 61st birthday in Xiamen, China. Now much may be made of the fact that he is a devoted family man, that his intelligence is exceeded only by his compassion for the less fortunate, that all who encounter him are left with the distinct impression that they had been in the comforting presence of a jovial "man for others".

For me, the true measure of my dad's character can be gleaned whenever you ask my dad what his profession is. His automatic reply?

"Grandfather!"

Belated Happy Birthday!

Acquired Tastes: Miracle Man

My last post on uber-nerd Gary Gygax opened up a whole can of lumbricus. Soon after ruminating on the legacy of the man after which natural 20s are going to be named (if the preceding clause made absolutely no sense to you, then you might as well skip this post as I will be sprinkling nerd-speak liberally throughout this entire entry), I came across A.V. Club primer on dystopian science fiction writer and comic book legend Alan Moore.

Miracle Man is one of those unfortunate masterworks which, due to the frustratingly endless legal battles over the ownership of the opus, might never be available for reading ever again. Yet it should be available to the general public. Without going into too much detail, because it is precisely the inspired selection of minutiae which makes reading Miracle Man a distinct joy, and without producing any samples to validate what follows (due to the aforementioned legal complications), I would like to recommend all mature readers to check it out.

How, pray tell? Well, there are torrents, and these files shared with among the many BitTorrent peer-to-peer networks might contain some miraculous finds. Enjoy!


Photo Credits:
Picture of Miracle Man comes courtesy of Wikipedia.

Gary Gygax (July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008)

I read today that Gary Gygax, co-creator of one of the most influential tabletop fantasy role-playing games of all time, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), passed away at the age of 69. While I haven't played D&D in a while, and it would take me a while to reacquaint myself with the different polyhedral dice that are used to calculate for event outcomes, I remember playing D&D with much fondness. I tried to come up with a fitting tribute to one of the most influential nerds ever by composing an encomium of sorts for Mr. Gygax, but one of our friends at Cracked beat me to it.

Therefore, in an effort to ensure no one will make any more terrible puns, I have compressed as many as possible into the following obituary. Hopefully running the premise into the ground will convince others to give it a rest.

Gary “The Beholder” Gygax reached epic level this week after rolling a natural 1 during a battle with Time. Apothecaries have stated that despite his Alertness feat, he was caught flat-footed and failed a subsequent Fortitude save to negate the effects of a Level 8 Finger of Death spell (touch attack), due largely to a -3 Constitution modifier brought about by a Curse of Natural Ageing. Though clerics at the Temple of Pelor have attempted a resurrection, it appears Mr. Gygax has been the victim of a Soul Bind enchantment, and has already passed through the material, astral, and shadow planes into worlds beyond.

Mr. Gygax is best known for his Critical Hit Sneak Attack against an Ancient Red Dragon during a treasure-hunting excursion in Ched Nasad, and for turning a Bag of Holding inside out in order to destroy an evil pocket dimension. Later in life, he retired from adventuring to work with animals, training Mordenkainen’s Faithful Watchdogs for the blind and chairing a committee for the conservation of Gelatinous Cubes.

He is survived by his wife, two half-elf children, and a +5 Mace of Shock.

There, now I hope we can all let Mr. Gygax rest in peace. And if you’d like to contact me about giving a eulogy, I speak Common, Abyssal and Underdark.

Rest in peace, dear friend. And thank you for creating a gaming experience that everyone, especially those who cannot roll natural 20s in real-life, can enjoy.

Photo Credits:
Picture comes courtesy of The NYC Dungeons and Dragons Meetup Group.

Keeping in Touch

It must be noted, however painful it might be: I'm really bad at keeping in touch. Despite my numerous social networking accounts, my relative availability through my blog, and the fact that my cellular phone number is so readily available to so many people, I don't keep in touch as often, and as meaningfully as I would want to.

Thus, I'm dusting off my address book, which has taken less the dimensions of a leather bound repository of friendship, but has morphed into this frightening Necronomicon-like tome of half-remembered names, and hastily scribbled pre-Facebook contact information. Prayers would be most welcome.

And yes, Ate Cecile, it is a picture of my boys. This time, it has something to do with the entry. Enjoy!

A Curious Case for Elevation to Prime-time

While I didn't have the opportunity to watch the recently concluded Oscars, I'm glad that much like this year's artistic output in film, the commentary on the awards, both real and "imagined" was of a similarly high quality. How else does one explain Chris Carlisle's impassioned plea for the recognition of '80s cartoon icon Optimus Prime?

Choice excerpts include:

The reason I’m not watching this year is because I am boycotting the broadcast due to the omission of a deserving nominee in the best actor category. This actor’s performance encompassed physically demanding stunts, displaying ranges of emotions from sorrow to happiness, and working under extreme conditions with minimal direction. His display of thespian mastery was truly one of the greatest on-screen performances this past year, if not the decade. In spite of all this and for reasons I cannot comprehend, Optimus Prime was shut out of the best actor category.

Oh I know what many of you are thinking right now. “But Chris, Optimus Prime isn’t real.” You know what I say to that? Shut up. Shut right the hell up with that talk. Optimus Prime is more real than any of the other actors up for award this year. I’ll tell you who’s not real. Johnny Depp. He’s a complete CGI creation. How else do you explain that he hasn’t aged since appearing in the original Nightmare on Elm Street almost 24 years ago?

As far as acting chops go, Optimus Prime has Depp beat hands down. The same goes for George Clooney, Daniel Day Lewis, and the rest of the best actor nominees. While I can’t say that I’ve seen the films of any of the nominees up for best actor this year, I’m willing to wager that none of them were required to battle 30 foot robots or even turn into a truck. Speaking of which, can Clooney turn into a truck? Can Lewis or Depp? Pshaw! Talk about limited range.

Have a nice day! And visit Chris Carlisle's site. You won't be sorry you did.

Photo Credits:
Picture of Optimus Prime comes courtesy of Wikipedia.

Safeguarding Hope

I started this entry determined to produce incisive commentary on the political situation in the Philippines, but decided to eschew the timely for the timeless: namely, that despite all, hope springs eternal.

I first met Gen. Samson Tucay in Valle Verde Country Club for exploratory talks regarding the use of the Alpha Course in the Philippine National Police (PNP). Not only is he a dedicated officer, but it is due largely to his efforts, which he tries his best to downplay whenever he can, that increasingly, an honest and dedicated police officer is no longer a rarity in the PNP. Rather, in his capacity as Police Chief Superintendent of the Police National Training Institute (PNTI), he has been putting into practice long-term institutional measures to ensure that policeman who want to start off on the right path have a fighting chance of staying the moral course that they have chosen. He labors in anonymity, and yet his contributions to Philippine society can, potentially, outstrip the more ephemeral contributions of our political leaders and emotionally charged citizenry.

It is largely due to Filipinos like Samson Tucay that despite all the political upheaval, the uncertainty of the times, and the brutal violence of the corruption which threatens to overwhelm our social structures, hope springs eternal.