Mind matters

What many of my friends know is that I’m not that fond of making food. I’ve started doing it more regularly now that I’m unemployed and don’t have a big budget. Otherwise I prefer eating out.

What many of my friends don’t know is that I don’t really fancy spaghetti. I don’t know why. It’s one of those weird things you know about yourself. All other kinds of pasta I eat happily, it’s just spaghetti… Something to do with the problem of getting it off the plate. I do eat spaghetti now and then, it’s not that I hate it. I just prefer other stuff, other kinds of pasta.

The reason I’m writing this post is that I decided to make spaghetti today! This is like the 3:rd time in my life I make spaghetti.

Well, the thing is that I have a jar where I keep the spaghetti. I haven’t touched it for ages, but I figured the spaghetti would be okay. To the left is a picture of the jar.

The strange thing about this is not that I decided to make spaghetti. The strange thing is what I found inside the jar. Can you guess, or have you already looked at the picture?

Yep, you guessed right! It’s a lightbulb! How the heck did a lightbulb end up there?

My only guess is that a couple of years ago some of my beloved friends thought it might be fun to put a lightbulb in the jar, and wait for my reaction. They must have waited more than 5 years for this!

I laughed out loud at the bizarrness of it and immediately started to think about how to blog about it. I would write a post that explained my aversion against spaghetti, giving an explanation to why I didn’t see the lightbulb until now. And here it is, the blogpost that gives you the full story!

And yes, the lightbulb works. I checked it.

Totally unnecessary link: Flying Spaghetti Monster

I just finished watching Jesus Camp, a documentary about some of the activities of the evangelic church in america. I now only got 10 movies to go before sunday’s Oscar gala!

The documentary shows us how some children in america are schooled in the evangelic faith by their parents and their church. The movie makers film children talking about their faith, the church meetings, some of the home education and the camp many of the children attend. They also film Mike Papantonio when he’s doing his radio show and talking about the evangelic church and his take on all of it.

It’s scary! Scarier than An inconvenient truth! They actually teach their children that the global warming is not a problem. When a mother homeschools her kid, they have the following conversation:

Mother: “One popular thing to do in american politics is to note that the summers in the united states over the past few years have been very warm. As a result, global warming must be real. What’s wrong with this reasoning?”
Child: “It’s only gone up by 0,6 degrees.”
Mother: “Yeah, it’s not really a big problem, is it?”

75% of homeschooled kids in the United States are Evangelic Christians.

The scariest part is right in the beginning of the movie where Becky Fisher, a Pentecostal children’s minister, says:

“I want to see young people who are as dedicated to the cause of jesus christ as the young people are to the cause of islam. I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are over in pakistan and israel and palestina and all those different places. You know, because, we have… excuse me [exited]! But we have the truth!”

It’s a scary movie. Well worth watching! The thing is that the life these children seem to live doesn’t seem so bad. They get a lot of attention, they get a huge amount of moving experiences. They have a lot of people who care for them and what becomes of them. They have a community that thinks like they do. A lot of their basic needs are met by this lifestyle in the church. That’s why it’s so dangerous. There’s no reason for them to question what they are doing, and what is happening, since it all seems so good.

So, what can we do about it? Not much unfortunately, as far as I can see. They’re not legally doing anything wrong. Maybe they could change the rules about homeschooling, but I bet the right wing lobby would see to that never happening. There are estimates that 25% of the population in america is of the evangelic faith…

In my quest to try to watch all the oscar nominated movies before oscar night 25:th of february, I today reached An inconvenient truth. This is a movie of Al Gore travelling around the globe making presentations about the global warming. In this movie he presents some of the facts about global warming that are known today.

I wanted to see this movie to expand on my own knowledge about the global warming, which I must confess is rather limited. I thought the scientific community was split up in two camps about this issue, but as Gore shows there is no dispute today. The theory that we are the cause of the current warming of our planet is no longer a theory, it is in fact a fact.

One of the main sceptic arguments is that the rise in CO2 we are seeing today in the atmosphere is just part of natural variations. I also thought this could be the case. But the data, sampled from the ice in anarctica, that shows measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere for the last 650,000 years, indicate that we are way above the natural variations that have occured in these 650,000 years. In fact, it’s quite clear that it is mankind that is the reason for the increase of CO2. We in europe produce 27% of the CO2 worldwide, only America is a bigger producer than us.

This movie is an eye opener. Atleast for me. It could be argued that it is a campaign movie for Al Gore, since it portrays not only the climate, but also personal details from Al Gores life. But I think it’s just a way to make him seem more sympathetic, and thus make people take his words even more seriously. And considering the danger we are facing, I would say that it’s worth it.

I would strongly recommend everyone to see the movie.

The movies website: http://www.climatecrisis.net/

The big day is coming up! The day for the Oscar gala! 25th of february it will be broadcasted live from Hollywood. I’m not yet sure if any of the major swedish TV-networks will be broadcasting the show, but I sure hope so! Me and a couple of friends try to stay up at the oscars and watch it live Best way to watch it!

This year I decided to try and watch most of the nominated movies, so I started to hunt them down on the internet. Easier said than done. Some of them I still can’t find. Luckily I stumbled to this site today: www.oscartorrents.com, a sister site to The Pirate Bay. Unfortunately, some of the movies are still missing there too…

Anyway, they don’t list a little masterpiece that has been nominated for best animated short film, one that I happened to find on youtube today. Maestro. It’s brilliant! And here it is, for your entertainment

Yes, yes, I know. I have not been writing any posts for a while. The main reason is that I’ve been designing a website for a friend and have become very unsatisfied with how my own website looks. So I will be taking care of that in the near future, thus increasing my motivation to write posts

Oh, I found this on boing boing:

That’s one handy sofa to have!