Casual Harangues

Today marks the day of the 77th Oscars, or something.  Awards will be given to movies that nobody has seen, and actors that nobody cares about.

To check this problem I present to you the (Dum-De-Dum!) Darksaber Awards, named in honor of our username.  Here we give out "awards" to the movie, game, book, and CD of the year, the only things you are probably going to care about.  Basically, the way it works is, whatever is our favorite movie of 2004, that is the movie of the year.  No extra points are awarded for "acting" or crap like "most original screenplay." And you'll never see a movie like Million Dollar Baby win.  For one thing, neither of us saw it; for another, it is officially disqualified because I hate that title.  It just pisses me off. (Note-because games are relatively expensive , a game needn't come out the year of the awards.)

Now for the awards (score given next to title):
Best Movie
Revan-Van Helsing (9)
Axiom-Spiderman II ( 8 )

Best Game
Revan-Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (9)
Axiom-Super Mario 64 DS (9)

Best Book
Revan-Star Wars: Yoda- Dark Rendevous, Sean Stewart (9)
Axiom- Axiom regrets to inform you that he doesn't read

Best CD
Revan- A Valid Path, Alan Parsons ( 8 )
Axiom- Modest Mouse: "Good News for People Who Love Bad News" (9)

Personally for me this was a slow year for movies. For the past five or six months there has been nothing I wanted to see.  I think Van Helsing won it for me (over I, Robot) partly because everyone else hated it.  That sort of thing can make me like something more.  A good year for games though, with KOTOR, Halo 2, and Pikmin 2 among the best I have ever played.

For any of you that saw Van Helsing, and then other movies in 2004, you know that Revan is terribly missguided in his choice for Vanhelsing as the best movie of 2004.. but thats another topic for another day.  This year was a great year for music, with modest Mouse, Yellowcard, Lost prophets, and  The Killers putting out some great CDs (just to name a few).  Video games dissappointed me somewhat.  I saw more of the same in sequals, and someoriginal ideas, but not enough to make me happy.  Pikmin 2 was a good game, and so was Metroid Prime 2, but I've gotta give it to Super Mario 64 DS, just cause i say so.

Comments anyone?

-Revan and Axiom

Axiom here.  I had soo much to say about this that I decided to make my own post about it.  Please feel free to leave comments.

YES!  I was wondering when we'd get around to a nice post about PETA.  On with the thrashing.

For those of you interested, here is a direct link to the letter Revan reffered to that PETA sent to Arafat.
[link]
The letter talks about a donkey that was packed with explosives and blown up.  At no point does this version of the letter reffer to the loss of human life or human property.. just the donkey.. and some strey cats that a bulldozer is apparently targeting(..? read the letter..)

Now, before I continue I'd like to express that Revan and I do not condone in any way the senseless torture of animals.  However, PETA stretches the word senseless to the point that we should leave the whole planet to the animals.

Their goal is simple:  completely eliminate human-animal interaction and implication.  They are against (the links are PETA's "factsheets" about each topic):

-Keeping animals as pets  (bye bye, Lassy)
-Using animals as clothing  (...sheep grow it allll back...)
-Experimenting on animals  (ok, lets just use people instead?)
-Being a vegetarian (confused yet? I am.. no animals.. and I can't be a vegetarian..)
-Fishing, hunting, trapping, eradicating, exterminating, ect. (yes, this includes non-lethal methods of removing pests from YOUR human home)
-Everything else they represent (yeah, there's more..)

They're advertising/information campaignes are based on scare-tactics and/or intimidation.  They claim eating meat can cause impotence.. Yep. Our forefathers ate meat, your father probably ate meat, yet.. somehow we are still here... They have:

-Billboards
-TV ads
-Radio ads
-Textual ads
-Web banners

My favorites are the web banners.  They advertise websites such as savethesheep.com.  They also boycot stores like Petsco, claiming they are cruel to animals.

Oh, and don't forget about the frogs.  Kids should do their homework, and choose not to disect, according to one banner.

On occasion, they employ pictures of a very attractive, entirely naked/partially naked (depeneding how you look at it) woman.  Now there's nothing wrong with that, but what does that have to do with saving the elephants? Some sort of insentive? I dunno..

Some of the banners encourage you to ask yourself, Did your food have a face?  What kind of a sick image is that?  To associate having a face with having rights is rediculous.

If PETA had their way, we'd all be vegans and we'd be living in the trees...until they decided it was cruel to live in trees...

So cook up a few juicy hamburgers America, wash it down with a cold glass of milk, lean back in your leather recliners, cover up with a thick wool blanket, and enjoy the animals, the way they were intended to be enjoyed.

They're here to serve us; to feed us; to clothe us; to entertain us.  Not the other way around.

-Axiom

It looks innocent enough- "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals"- but what lies beneath all the cute slogans and fuzzy puppies? Pure evil, that's what. Indeed they should start calling themselves "PeoplE That are Evil."

First off, what are their core beliefs?  To treat animals ethically. But which animals? And how do you define ethically? The answer may shock you.  For while they may consider all animals equal to man, they advocate "ethical treatment" for everything but humans.  Case in point,PETA once wrote a letter to Yasser Arafat asking that be careful to detonate the next suicide bomb away from animals and to only target people.  If that isn't disturbing, I don't know what is.  Next up, what do they mean by ethical?  This means, basically, to never cause harm to any animal ever (except humans), including eating one.  A number of facts go against this doctrine. They are:
1. The vast majority of the teeth in your mouth are meant for devouring the flesh of animals.
2. Animals are delicious and nutritious.
3. Animals do not matter, they don't have souls.
4. Most religions-such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam- favor the death and consumption of animals.  If you are part of a religion that believes animals, such as cows, are sacred, I highly reccomend you get a new religion.
5. Humans are vastly more important than other animals. Did Jesus ever tell a giraffe that its only way to salvation was through him? No, he did not. As I said in #3, animals don't have souls, they have no purpose in life other than food and pets.  Are dolphins or chimpanzees ever going to become sentient? No, never. The world revolves around humans, and it always will.

Now, I'm not saying that you should torture animals for the sake of torturing animals, or that you shouldn't be nice to your dog (you should). I'm saying that organizations like PETA take it way too far, raising animals to a level above humans that they do not deserve to be, and elevating them to the status or everyday normal human beings, which they aren't.

Some of the stuff they use to attract more flunkies is utterly ridiculous"
1. "Meat may cause impotence"- This is a big one. The main word here is "may." As you may or may not have noticed, there is no epidemic of impotence spreading across the face of the Earth, as PETA would have you believe. Chances are there is a zero percent chance of becoming impotent from eating meat.
2. "You wouldn't eat/wear your dog"- No I wouldn't. But the animals you eat are not naturally domesticated, like dogs.

Boy, this is a doozy. I'll let Axiom add to the post.

-Revan

In honor of today's being Friday, I dedicate this post to the Alan Parsons Project, my favorite band.  In case you didn't know, and you didn't, Alan Parsons was nominated for 10 grammys, although he won approximately none of them.  His first work was engineer for a couple of the Beatles' albums, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.  You may have heard of that last cd. Just about every goth in my school has a "Dark Side of the Moon" shirt.  Anyway, the Project started in 1977 with Tales of Mystery and Imagination.  The band lineup was Ian Bairnson on guitars, Stuart Elliot on drums, Eric Woolfson as writer/producer/vocals, and Alan Parsons as writer/producer/engineer/ keyboards, along with many different vocal talents.  There are a total of fourteen albums. The latest, A Valid Path, was released last August.  Without further adieu, here's how I rank their CDs.

1.The Time Machine (1999)
2.Eye in the Sky
3.Try Anything Once
4.Ammonia Avenue
5.I, Robot
6.Vulture Culture
7.Gaudi
8.Eve
9.Stereotomy
10.Turn of a Friendly Card 
11.Tales of Mystery and Imagination
12.A Valid Path
13.Pyramid
14.On Air (1996)

W00t!

Anyway, for those of you who aren't fans already, like Axiom, I would reccomend Eye in the Sky for your first CD.  It contains their most popular hit, Eye in the Sky, which reached #3 on the charts, and Sirius, which is played before many sporting events, like Chicago Bulls games.

I'd also like to introduce are grading system, which operates on a one to ten scale, ten being the best, five being average, and zero being crap.

And so I'd like to give this band a score of ten. We'll see what Axiom thinks soon.

-Revan

Axiom here.

Topic: Should Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons/reactors?

No way!  Simply no way.  The country/region is way to volatile to even risk the production of nuclear weapons.  I'm not neccessarily saying that they would/wouldn't be dangerous in the Iranians hands, but if they were to fall into the wrong hands.. well you know.

Comments? Oppinions?

-Axiom

School buses. Boy do they ever suck.

(Axiom: I'd just like to say that this is freaking hilarious.  What's even funnier is that it's all true.)

I live 2.51 miles from the school. Today it took one hour and one minute to get from the final bell to the time when I finally entered my house. Along the way I saw vast stretches of beach as we, as has happened the past few months, had to take another bus of kids home first, due to the shortage of drivers.  This took maybe fourty minutes.  Then we were pulled over by the police.  They came on board and announced that *gasp* someone had actually spit out the window.  A very hurt-looking couple came aboard to identify the scourge of society that had commited this act.  He was charged with battery and some other misdemeanor.  Apparently the offending spit globule came into contact with the couple's vehicle, causing unusually large amounts of emotional distress and prolonged trauma. What has become of the community? Where have all the family values gone? I arrived safe and sound at my house at 2:51 PM.

In other news: That darn newspaper.  Will it ever stop its shenanigans? Probably not.

Three stories- a local girl advances in American Idol, a devastating earthquake in Iran, and an appeal to Roe vs. Wade by the formerly named "Jane Roe" is rejected by the court system. Which of these stories, do you think, made it to the front page, and which got a tiny blurb hidden deep within the recesses of the paper?

If you thought the American Idol story got front page treatment, give yourself a hand, (Axiom: I guessed it right!!!) and then watch in horror as it spurts blood all over you(that was humor by the way).  The abortion story got the blurb, and the 'quake got a half page on page 6.  But the point is that it is stupid, one might say sickening, that the paper places American Idol in so much more importance than the Iran earthquake, which killed hundreds, or the Roe v. Wade appeal.

That's all for today.

-Revan

Axiom here again.

Topic: Should steroids be legal in professional sports?

I'm going to focus on baseball, 'cause I love baseball, but what I say is applicable to all other sports. I have only one response to the topic question:
Absolutely not. Performance-enhancing drugs should be banned from all athletics and athletes should be tested frequently. Steroids have no place in the pro sports world.

Sports are meant to show the peak of human physical achievement, not the achievement available through chemical aid.

Steroids do nothing but degrade the purity of a sport. And for sports that are begining to suffer in popularity/coming out of a recent slump in popularity such as baseball, a steroid debate isn't going to help things.

Lets face it baseball fans, our sport just isn't as popular as football and soccer have been towards the start of the 21st century (since when has soccer been popular? - Revan; Axiom: Soccer has been popular for a while.. haven't you read about the masses of people in the stadiums? so many that they are collapsing and killing people; but not in America, which is where we live if you haven't noticed-Revan). It had its glory days, and hopefully we'll have more.

I miss the old days of baseball. The days when the sport was good and the athletes were clean (well clean-er). The days when you could memorize a team's starting lineup and not have to worry about them changing hour by hour. The days when they played for the love of the game. I miss those days and I was never even around to experience them...but I know they were better than today. Anyways I've gotten a little off topic.. back to steroids

What abour football? Hockey? (don't even get me started about the NHL this year...) Basketball? You name a sport and you will more than likely find steroid issues(like dwarf-tossing -Revan; Axiom: Yes, like dwarf tossing...).

This has become a plague. A festering issue that needs to be delt with. A decision needs to be made: steroids should be banned and that ban should be strickly enforced. If they can keep Pete Rose out of baseball and the Hall of Fame for gambling, steroid use should could easily carry as weighty a punishment.

Feel free to comment on this topic, or even make up your own.

-Axiom

Axiom here.

Topic: Nuclear Weaponry

Is the use of nuclear weaponry on a large scale (not the new mini bunker buster nukes, but the big ones) ever justified under any circumstance?

I say yes; but only under the most extreme situations such as that at the end of World War II. Some people think that President Truman's decision to drop the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unjustified. However many, including me, believe it was justified.

American lives were saved through dropping the bombs, because we did not have to invade the Japanese mainland. Also, Japanese lives may have been saved. At this point in the war, Japanese soldiers and civilians were commiting suicide if American forces threatened to overrun their area. If we had invaded, countless civilians may have taken their own lives needlessly.

What if a similar situation arose today? A war in which the enemy refused to surrender and the only way to win was to win completely. I think in such a situation, dropping nuclear bombs could be justified. But only in that extreme situation.

Feel free to post comments.
-Axiom

Hello! Revan here. Yes, that's Revan with an "a" you idiot.

Sorry... Introducing the great Revan with an "a"..... - Axiom

A self-evident or universally recognized truth; a maxim.

An established rule, principle, or law.

A self-evident principle or one that is accepted as true without proof as the basis for argument; a postulate.

I just thought it was a cool word and I liked the definition; hence Axiom is my name :)

---

Topic of the day: Is life worth living?

Revan:  I submit that yes, indeed, life is well worth living.  Reasons include the continual quest for knowledge, religion, and love.

Axiom:  I'd say yes and no, but I'm gonna go with yes for now.

   It depends on your situation.  Lets say you're 85 years years old, your wife/husband is already past and you have no close family or friends.  And, to add a little more to it, you're slowly dying from a rare form of cance.  They've fulfilled what they came here to do, and the end is near. But, I think life even under these conditions is still worth living.  Why? because it's not something you could come back to, so you should take in every moment of it no matter how painful or how low-quality it may be.

However, lets say your 16 or 17.  you've got your whole life in front of you.  A future for youself to mold.  People to meet, places to go, things to do, stuff to do.  Physically, your near the peak of your life so anything you wanna do you can do.  At this point likfe is very much worth living.

   I'm gonna sum this all up with one of my favorite sayings:  Life's a game; play to win.  In other words, enjoy life while you have it, and live to the fullest, 'cause you only get one shot.

---

News item: An Alaska resident's *ahem* was cut off recently, and later reattached. The man's girlfriend (or she was just beforehand anyway) reportedly cut it off with a knife and proceeded to flush it down the toilet.  How it was found is anyone's guess. What is remarkable about this incident is that this is the first time something like this has happened since 1993.  What is perplexing is that it somehow made its way to section A of my local newspaper.
(Axiom:  For all of you that think this news post is sick, you are right and I agree.. I'll have to more closely monitor Revan's postings...)

Two guys with lots of time on their hands, plus to very oppinionated personalities has resulted in this blog. A source for facts, opinions, ranting and raving about everything from global warming, to time travel, and everything in between. Sometimes serious somtimes funny.

   In entering and reading this blog you subject yourself to our opinions, but remember you've got the ability to post comments. If they raise a valid point we might post them.

   Character profiles (titles):

   - Revan: Male; 16 years old; well-informed and typically correct; science, mathematics, and humor are his strong suits. Expect anything you hear from him to be true; Color: Red.

   - Axiom: Male; 17 years old; informed and generally knowledeable; full of useless/usefull facts on many subjects; science and history (war history epecially) are his strong suit, with the occasional dose of comedy. More general postings should come from this one; Color: Blue

   Of course, we're much deeper than those brief profiles could reveal. Follow along with the posts and you should learn our personalities quickly. So read on, learn a little, and form an opinion. Knowledge is power.

--Axiom & Revan--