Timewaster's Guide Archive

I got a mystery package today:

http://slwhitman.livejournal.com/30887.html

At first I thought someone was softening you up before sending their manuscript . . . 'cause that's what I'm planning on doing. 

Isn't the choice either 6 more weeks of winter or a month and a  half of winter?

And I'll bet they define it as 6 weeks - 42 days   and month and a half, month (February) 28 days + a half 14 = 42 days.   Surprise!   He's right 100% of the time.

Wait!  Maybe he can get it wrong on leap year?

Quote from: Spriggan on November 05, 2006, 04:46:35 AM

Mathematical Requirements listed for the job I recently applied for (Intern Server Admin).

Quote

Ability to add and subtract two digit numbers and to multiply and divide with 10's and 100's. Ability to perform these operations using units of American money and weight measurement, volume, and distance. REQUIRED

Can you do all that?

It doesn't say "Ability to correctly add and subtract" so I could probably do it.

Saw this on Saturday (we go to the movie theater about once every three months and usually the dollar show. 

It was a serious movie, not as humorous as the trailer indicated.

SPOILER ALERT * * *

I was prepared to feel betrayed if the author didn't go ahead and kill Harold.  But I really liked how it ended.  I thought her reasons for changing the ending were good.  That probably sounds harsh.  I didn't want him to die.  But when I saw the boy get on his bicycle it was obvious that he had to save the boy.  I thought, "what better way to die?  The writer has to follow through with it or it will feel like a phony happy ending.  You can't take opposition or death out of life."  And I agreed with the "evil" professor.  But I really liked how the "writer" resolved why Harold should live.  It felt justified and "real."  Rewriting just because she'd found out that he was a real person for some reason didn't feel right by itself.  But because he knew his destiny and accepted it made him a different character than was in the book.

I'm not sure my comments make any sense.  It was a tangled resolution and a weird, and fun, mixing of reality and fiction so it's hard to navigate through it.  Which is why I wanted to see it in the first place.

And yet this was the Catholic Church's official doctrine for centuries (that is, any human who was not baptized during their life would go irredeemably to hell.  This included infants who died in childbirth).

I wonder if this is why Dante's Inferno makes the upper levels of hell rather nice, well, nice compared to the lower levels.  It was a way to make Hell less hellish for the people that couldn't help being there since they never had the chance to get baptized.

Note: I know of at least one LDS author who has done a very respectful book series with a gay man as a main protagonist.  Tracy Hickman (with Margaret)'s Rose of the Prophet books.  Might not work for a person who is actually gay, but I found the depiction to be very well done.

Armadius,

Tracy Hickman also wrote The Immortals.   http://www.amazon.com/Immortals-Tracy-Hickman/dp/0451454049/sr=8-1/qid=1169659425/ref=sr_1_1/103-0145897-0301471?ie=UTF8&s=books

"It's 2010, and an attempted cure for AIDS has mutated into a deadlier disease, V-CIDS. The U.S., under martial law, has set up "quarantine centers" in the Southwest. Searching for his gay son, Jon, media mogul Michael Barris smuggles himself into one of centers only to discover that it and the other centers are actually extermination camps."

I don't think it addresses the morality of the homosexual lifestyle but it definitely addresses how we mistreat people that we disagree with.  It's quite dark and gritty, for my tastes, but I thought it was a good book.

2)  What about all the people who aren't of your religion?  They go to hell because they happened to live at the wrong time, when there were no missionaries to teach them?

<snip>

So, no.  I don't believe that good people who never accepted LDS teachings will go to hell.  Will mother Teresa go to Hell?  Of course not.  I well nigh think that things will be better for her in the eternities than they might be for me, unless I shape up. 

I think she'll be better off than most of us mormons. 

I thought I'd go back to one of EUOL's earlier points.  I thought that President Boyd K. Packer's recent comments while introducing a respected Muslim and Indonesian government leader, Alwi Shihab, relates to this conversation.

http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=11324&x=56&y=3

Among other things he says:

We believe that "the great religious leaders of the world such as Mohammed, Confucius, and the Reformers, as well as philosophers including Socrates, Plato, and others, received a portion of God's light. Moral truths were given to them by God to enlighten whole nations and to bring a higher level of understanding to individuals." ("Statement of the First Presidency regarding God's Love for All Mankind," February 15, 1978)

It may sound a bit condescending to say "all those other folks have part of the truth" but we would be following one of them if we didn't think we had at least a bit more.   But even saying that we claim to have "at least a bit more" is, I think, not quite accurate.  It's more a matter of what is most important and relevant to our current situation.   Seems to me that any system suffers the inevitable effects of entropy and thus the LDS emphasis on continuing revelation to wind us up again and give us the frequently needed course corrections.

Also this address is interesting:  President Faust talks about  "What Makes Our Religion Different?"  http://www.lds.org/library/display/0,4945,2043-1-1110-1,00.html

And this one:   World Religions (Non-Christian) and Mormonism   -  http://ldsfaq.byu.edu/emmain.asp?number=202

From the Book of Mormon:  "the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil."  (Moroni 7:16)

We claim no monopoly on its guidance.  Everyone has it.  We claim more direct guidance as well, but basically everyone on earth is entitled to God's guidance.

Perhaps it will add to her feeling that other people think her BF is a jerk and someday enough such things will add up to an impulse to do something about her situation.

I've heard it's not how she views her boyfriend, of course she knows he's a jerk, but how she feels about herself.  Does she feel like worthless trash that deserves that treatment?  Or does she feel like she's worth something and therefore won't put up abuse?

If she could just lose him in the move.  "Gee, which box did I put my boyfriend in?  I'm not ready to unpack him yet.  Just leave that box taped up."