So I was outside Saturday. Several times, even.
And I had my trusty-but-old little camera with me — a Kodak EasyShare CX7330 with well over 20,000 shots on it.
What follow are a few photos I took in our front yard.
Pepsi’s Score
I don’t know what it is.
But I say they’ve hit a new low with their latest effort to amp up the debasement of the culture:
Amp, an energy drink made by Pepsi, has an application (app, for short) for the iPhone called “Before You Score.” It’s billed as a “roadmap to success with your favorite kinds of women—24, in all.” Choose your type and get suggestions on how to “score.”
Here’s a boast from the online commercial for it: “If you’re anticipating a successful night, the Before You Score app gives you up-to-the minute information, feeds, lines, and much more to help you amp up and talk to 24 different types of ladies.” By “lines” they mean pick-up lines. As for “types,” you can choose from “businesswoman,” “foreign exchange student,” “sorority girl,” “rebound girl,” “nerd,” “treehugger,” “cougar,” “twins,” even “married.”
Have they no shame?
Have they no decency?
Apparently not:
Pepsi issued an apology via Twitter that said, in part: “We apologize if it’s in bad taste.”
You’ve got to be kidding me! 🙄
Well, read the rest of Marcia Segelstein’s post over at WorldMagBlog.
“Just as Real and Admirable”
Frankly, I was astounded to read this earlier this morning.
Furthermore, it happened Saturday night. I didn’t learn about it till this morning. Lemme see — Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday — six days later. And I don’t exactly stay isolated from the news.
Has this story been buried?
President Obama delivered an unprecedented message to the Human Rights Campaign Saturday night. Sounding more like a homosexual activist than a sitting president, Obama went well beyond his expected message of “I’m here with you” on the homosexual agenda.
“My expectation is that when you look back on these years, you will see a time in which we put a stop to discrimination against gays and lesbians — whether in the office or on the battlefield,” Obama told an estimated audience of 3,000. “You will see a time in which we as a nation finally recognize relationships between two men or two women as just as real and admirable as relationships between a man and a woman.”
Even Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese was stunned at the breadth of Obama’s statement, calling it “something quite remarkable.”
“This was a historic night when we felt the full embrace and commitment of the President of the United States,” Solmonese said in a post-speech statement. “It’s simply unprecedented.”
Sounds like the folks at Human Rights Campaign got far more hope and change than they dared expect.
Oh, America!
“Hear the word of the LORD, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah.
“Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;
“If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land:
“But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it” (Isaiah 1:10,16,19,20).
Here’s my source: Obama: Homosexual Relationships ‘Just as Real and Admirable’ as Heterosexual Marriage
Handy Pornography!
Way back in 1994, I wrote for our school and church a piece I called Handy Pornography! Here’s an excerpt from early in the article:
Why this increasing freedom of exposure? Well, facts are facts, you know. The news must be reported; stuff must be advertised and sold; anthropological discoveries must be made known; technological advances must be demonstrated. Do any or all or these explain or justify the increasing indecency? Hardly!
Is there news value in having a woman in ice skating attire flinging her leg way up toward the reader? No, the issue is not news. Did Scientific American need to use a picture of Marilyn Monroe with her dress flying up overlaid on a picture of President Abraham Lincoln? No, the issue is not advanced computer technology. Do bikinied women actually make a car or radio controlled airplane more attractive, or a soap more effective? No, the issue is not advertising and commerce. Do pictures of third-world, partially-nude women help us understand their cultures better than simply telling the reader they don’t cover themselves from the waist on up? No, the issue is not anthropology.
Folks, we have been snookered and taken in by a “conspiracy” of the enemy of our souls! Can you see how he is successfully wearing down our resistance to immorality? We still stand against Playboy, but will our children? If we allow in our homes what our grandparents called pornography, will our grandchildren allow in their homes what we call pornography? If we don’t bat an eye about these things which would have jolted our grandparents, will the things that still jolt us have any effect on our children’s children? Remember, what parents excuse in moderation, children justify in excess.
I urge you to read the entire article. Despite the title (Handy Pornography!) and the URL (www.anabaptists.org/writings/softporn.html), it is not pornography. Not even so-called soft porn.
October 14
1656 — Massachusetts enacts the first punitive legislation against the Quakers.
1773 — The East India Company tea ships’ cargo is burned at Annapolis.
1789 — President George Washington proclaims the first Thanksgiving Day.
1884 — George Eastman patents paper-strip photographic film.
1916 — Paul Robeson is excluded from the Rutgers football team when Washington and Lee University refused to play against a black person.
1926 — A. A. Milne’s book Winnie-the-Pooh is first published.
1933 — Nazi Germany withdraws from The League of Nations.
1943 -– US Air Force loses 60 B-17 Flying Fortresses during an assault on Schweinfurt. (Today’s America likely would have called it quits after such losses.)
1960 — The idea of a Peace Corps is first suggested by Presidential candidate John F Kennedy at the University of Michigan.
1962 — A U-2 flight over Cuba takes photos of Soviet nuclear weapons being installed, thus getting the Cuban Missile Crisis under way.
1964 — Martin Luther King Jr wins the Nobel Peace Prize. And Leonid Brezhnev ousts Nikita Khrushchev as leader of the Soviet Union.
1986 — Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wins the Nobel Peace Prize.
1991 — Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi wins the Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle to achieve democracy in her homeland.
1994 — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
2009 — The price of gold spikes to a record high of $1,072 per ounce. The dollar slumps to a 14-month low against the euro (1.49:1). Crude oil futures go above $75 per barrel for the first time in a year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average passes 10,000 for the first time in a year before closing at 9988.
“Are You Virginia?”
The few times we’ve air-traveled post-911 with minors, I’ve been grateful for this loophole:
Loophole allows minors to bypass airport security
When an Oregon teen talked his way onto an airplane bound for Chicago last weekend, he unknowingly revealed a little-known hole in airport security.
Kids don’t have to show photo ID.
That may come as a surprise to many air travelers. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, travelers are accustomed to removing their shoes, not carrying liquids and otherwise coping with strict protocols of airport security.
But when it comes to conducting minors through airports, security and efforts to preserve air passenger convenience intersect in a highly unusual way.
The Transportation Security Administration requires all air travelers 18 and older to show a boarding pass and government-issued photo ID to enter security screening.
But minors generally don’t have government-issued IDs. So security officers don’t expect them to have one, says Dwayne Baird, the TSA’s public information officer for the Northwest.
That makes sense enough. But….
Congress Tries to Cover Gays Better
Congress acts to extend hate crimes to cover gays
The House voted Thursday to make it a federal crime to assault people because of their sexual orientation, significantly expanding the hate crimes law enacted in the days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968.
With expected passage by the Senate, federal prosecutors will for the first time be able to intervene in cases of violence perpetrated against gays.
Civil rights groups and their Democratic allies have been trying for more than a decade to broaden the reach of hate crimes law. This time it appears they will succeed. The measure is attached to a must-pass $680 billion defense policy bill and President Barack Obama – unlike President George W. Bush – is a strong supporter. The House passed the defense bill 281-146, with 15 Democrats and 131 Republicans in opposition.
[…]
Many Republicans, normally stalwart supporters of defense bills, voted against it because of the addition of what they referred to as “thought crimes” legislation.
“This is radical social policy that is being put on the defense authorization bill, on the backs of our soldiers, because they probably can’t pass it on its own,” House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said.
GOP opponents were not assuaged by late changes in the bill to strengthen protections for religious speech and association – critics argued that pastors expressing beliefs about homosexuality could be prosecuted if their sermons were connected to later acts of violence against gays.
[…]
Some 45 states have hate crimes statutes, and the bill would not change the current situation where investigations and prosecutions are carried out by state and local officials.
[…]
Tom McClusky, vice president of the conservative Family Research Council’s legislative arm said the next step likely would be contesting the legislation in court. “The religious protections are pretty flimsy,” he said. He contended that Democrats were trying to move their “homosexual agenda” this year because it would prove unpopular with voters next year.