Combat Queer Online

Two Roads Converge

Well Dear Reader, I remain quite busy.  I think you often, but have had deeply limited internet access as of late. That said, I will try to do better.

 

Apology aside, I'm currently reading "The Language Of God" by Francis Collins and it is absolutely wonderful.  Admittedly, I am pretty awful at science.  The worst grades I got in any courses in college with in biology and chemistry classes. All the memorization, the lab works, etc, there was nothing about those classes I was skilled in.  In fact, science nearly endangered my college enrollment before things got turned around.

 

Despite all of that, the implications of science are fascinating to me. That we poor humans can learn the truth about the workings of the universe, a truth that doesn't depend on a certain way of thinking, a certain set of ideas or ideals just amazes and delights me.

 

Collins is a person who finds the hope of God in the great complexity and reality science describes.  He shows a faith that is big and strong enough to survive contact with reality.  He's able to maintain a faith without denying the basic truths about the world we live in.

It's awesome.

I'm also reading a book, Luke Timothy Johnson's "Living Jesus," that, true to its title, discusses the reality of the living Jesus.  Not just the dude who lived 2,000 years ago, but the person who is alive today and still working in the world.  The book's point is that when Christians move from celebrating the Holy Mysteries of the Resurrection to treating these miracles as problems to be solved, we miss the point. Somehow I think the views of these two books work together.

 

Now hear me out.  I think that figuring out the mechanics of God's Magic is crap game that misses the point.  Christ's message is how to treat each other like human beings.  To read it looking for esoteric clues seems to me a rejection of His message.  It's saying to Christ, "What you were telling us, that whole 'do unto others' and 'don't judge,' and 'love each other,' that's not good enough. We need strange teachings to make us better than other people."

 

But I seem to be rambling.

 

More later.  Affectionately yours,

 

CombatQueer

Awesome News

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/09/27/prime.number.ap/index.html

I can't tell you how excited I am about this. Maybe it's the 90+ hours weeks talking, but man, a 13 million-digit prime number. If it were published as a book, I would totally buy it.

To you trivia interested reader, how many pages would a book need to be to contain a 13 million digit number?

An Awesome, Awesome CNN Story

This is exactly the kind of news story I like to see. It is 100% forshadowing. If I were to right a book about nuclear mutatants rising up and taking over the world, I would want this exact news story in the introduction. It's got everything. Cool sounding jargon no one understands,(strangeletts? named, as of yet undiscovered particles?) hubrisistically confident European scientists, crazed outsider psuedoscientists trying to warn the world, and an author who obviously knows what he's doing. I mean, just look:

"The leafy campus of CERN, a short drive from the shores of Lake Geneva, hardly seems like ground zero for doomsday. And locals don't seem overly concerned. Thousands attended an open house here this spring."

If that's not a set up for some dramatic irony later, I really don't know what is.

Anyway, before the blackhole swallows the entire Earth, I really hope I get some nifty superpowers.

What Transition Isn't

Before I started Hormone Replacement Therapy, the bit where you take the girl chemicals and it turns you into a girl, I just couldn't wait to start. I assumed it would be something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/v/QdHe35qUl6w&hl=en

First, as of yet, I have not gotten a space ship. I assume it's on its way, but who knows when it'll arrive.

Next, the time thing. I've been on hormones for about three and a half months. Starting hormones was not like a laser scanning me, cutting me down to my essential being, and building a new form around it. No, it was more like taking antibiotics when you have the flu. It's just a little white pill you take in the morning. You don't feel much different. After three and a half months, my boobs are slightly fuller. It looks like I've bunch an ass load of push-ups.

Also, space gods aren't really involved. I have yet to deal with a single space god voiced by Orson Wells(Yeah, 1986's Transformers: The Movie was his last film before he died. Fuck you, Orson Wells' legacy. Now who's so great).

Past that, it's all the usual. No new voice, not much a new look, no new troops to command. Bitch bitch bitch, moan moan moan.