TLC

Marvel does it right again

Unlike the fiasco made with movie titles like Spider-Man 1, 2 and 3, Marvel has done it right again with the new Wolverine movie.

The film, do out in May 2009, is called X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

How cool a title is that?!?! I mean, Marvel did a good job by naming the two FF movies Fantastic Four and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. I really hate it when companies go with the very lame 1 and 2s in a movie title. I mean, c'mon, give us the movie viewer some credit for figuring out the title orders of a series of movies.

But until Wolverine comes out, we have Iron Man.

What a week...

I don't know about you, but it has been a crazy, busy week here. Since my triumphant return from Blueberry Mountain, it has been nose to the grindstone.

School has been ridiculously busy, barely having time to breath during the day. And then the real fun starts...

Monday afternoon/evening (not too late at least), Pop-in-law and I made a run to the "New and Improved" hunting camp with some furniture and cupboards.

Tuesday I skipped Man-Group so to have a night at home with the Mrs. (Sorry guys)

Wednesday brings music practice. While time consuming, it is a lot of fun.

Thursday night I volunteered to help with our Alpha group at church. Then, it was Halo night! Then Red Sox! Oh yeah!!!

So here it is Friday night, and the Missus and I are catching up on some shows that we missed this week. Smallville was fantastic, and Supernatural is great as always, one of my faves.

Saturday brings a little drywall action at my buddy Scott's. Jess is off to Rockland to visit with the rest of the fam.

Hopefully, Sunday will bring a little rest. But I wouldn't trade it all for the world.

Tastes Like Chicken

A Weekend Away-A Man Advance

I just spent the weekend at Blueberry Mountain Bible Camp for what we are calling our first of many "Growing Men of Integrity" men's conferences. Instead of calling it a "retreat", usually a time to kind of get away from everything and collect our thoughts and regroup, we decided to call it an "advance", because that is what a good soldier does in this battle we are fighting with Satan, the world, and our sinful natures.

We left church at around 3:3o on Friday afternoon to head to Weld, where the facility is that we stayed at. We arrived around 6:30 to a great meal. Then we kicked off our festivities for the weekend.

Bruce Johnson, our Outreach pastor was the keynote speaker, and the theme was becoming "revolutionaries" for Christ, which is what we are really called to be, that is not to conform to the cultural norms of our world and sometimes even the norms of the church world that keep us from fulfilling the purpose for which we were created for by God. It was a great kickoff and we had a great time of sharing and bonding as a group of guys.

Saturday morning we had breakfast at 7:30, started our morning at around 8:00 with some music and more "revolutionary" thinking. We went until about 10:30 and then we all were shocked by what came next: free time! Most conferences you go to are booked every second so you have no downtime and you're exhausted, but not ours. From 10:30 to 5:oo was all ours.

While some relaxed by reading, hanging out and checking out the facilities, a group of us I'm calling the "Blueberry Mountain Six" decided to tackle the local mountain (elevation 2950') whose trailhead is located right by the camp.

Now, the trail was rated at a "2" on the difficulty scale, and once you are on it, you realize that whoever decided that this trail deserved a "2" never climbed it or was smoking something a little funny. Leaves, running water and at times almost near verticle climbs made this one of the most challenging trails I have personally done. But we were all in the same boat physically, took our time, and were greatly rewarded by the beautiful colors of the Fall foliage and the 360º views from the top. We'll definitely do this climb again at next year's conference and a planned trip to Katahdin is on the docket for next Spring. Time to start working out for that one...

After our grueling trek, we returned to an amazing meal prepared by the camp staff and then a great night of discussion and learning about our God and King.

Sunday morning after breakfast we met for our last session which started out with an amazing time of praise. Then we had our best time of discussion and bonding yet. The cool thing is that when you spend a weekend together hanging out and sharing your thoughts and feelings with others guys you get a real sense of transparency and honesty you just don't get in church on Sunday morning. What an amazing time!!!

Tastes Like Chicken: Water

Thor, The God of Thunder

Marvel Comics isn't sparing any change when it comes to making movies, and the newest one has piqued my interest. Enter: Thor! And here are the potentials, and most of them would be perfect.

Kevin McKidd as Thor With a hefty dose of Scottish swagger, the gravelly voiced star of NBC’s “Journeyman” exudes the perfect attitude to bring the Thunder God to theaters. Add that to McKidd’s sword-swinging action résumé in HBO’s “Rome” and the recent “The Last Legion,” and you’ve got Mjolnir’s new master.

Jesse Spencer as Donald Blake Thor’s physician alter ego needs to have the same look as his godly counterpart, but with a much frailer physique. “House” co-star Spencer has the perfect mix of charm and nerdiness.

Linda Cardellini as Jane Foster Blake’s assistant needs a specific kind of gal Friday sexy, and “E.R.” actress Cardellini exudes more than enough “girl next door” hotness to coerce fans into scheduling multiple doctor’s appointments.

Cillian Murphy as Loki Previous roles in “Batman Begins” and “Red Eye” were scary enough, but with a touch of CGI, Murphy’s take on the persuasive and perverse trickster god Loki could be the most frightening comic villain in screen history.

Kate Beckinsale as Lady Sif Female furies who kick ass and carry big swords are hard to find. Luckily, Beckinsale can pull off the action heroine part (a la “Underworld”) without snuffing out her smoldering hotness.

Cilian Murphy and Kate Beckinsale are amazing choices, and Kevin McKidd is a great looking choice, but in my opinion to be a real Thor he has got to beef up a bit. This one will be one to watch for.

More on Gore and the Nobel faux pas...

I'm not the only one it thinks it in bad taste that the Nobel committee gave a Peace Prize to Al Gore while overlooking some people who were actually worthy of the prestigious award. My buddy Peter points this out:

This year, though, the committee outdid itself. Here's who it ignored in favor of Gore:

Irena Sendler, born in 1910, was raised by her Catholic parents to respect and love people regardless of their ethnicity or social status. Her father, a physician, died from typhus that he contracted during an epidemic in 1917. He was the only doctor in his town near Warsaw who would treat the poor, mostly Jewish victims of this tragic disease. As he was dying, he told 7-year-old Irena, "If you see someone drowning you must try to rescue them, even if you cannot swim." In 1939 the Nazis swept through Poland and imprisoned the Jews in ghettos where they were first starved to death and then systematically murdered in killing camps. Irena, by than a social worker in Warsaw, saw the Jewish people drowning and resolved to do what she could to rescue as many as possible, especially the children. Working with a network of other social workers and brave Poles, mostly women, she smuggled 2,500 children out of the Warsaw ghetto and hid them safely until the end of the war.

Sendler was tortured and nearly killed for her principles.

Peter also links to a post about how old Al Gore doesn't even live according to his own proclamations. Gore's "Carbon Footprint" is BIG!

They'll give these things to anyone...

Al Gore and U.N. Climate Panel win a Nobel Prize. Somebody had a little too much to drink while selecting this one. This was a bad decision for a couple of reasons.

First, it's Al Gore, they guy who "invented" the internet. The really funny thing is I found a site that defends Gore's statement and tries to explain it. It think it is pretty clear irregardless of the context:

But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

Looks like a pretty clear cut statement to me. Anyway, here is a great article by Steven Hayward about Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize. Some highlights:

Parson Al winning the Nobel Peace Prize was as predictable as his Oscar for Best Documentary, and represents the final debasement of a once-prestigious award. It used to be that the award went to people of genuine humanitarian or diplomatic accomplishment, like Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer or Doctors Without Borders. Now it goes to frauds and poseurs like Rigoberta Menchu, Yassir Arafat, the U.N. (three times now, counting Gore’s co-winner, the U.N.’s climate change panel), and Jimmy Carter. About the only way to top this would be to give the next Peace Prize to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. More likely the Nobel committee will, one of these days, simply pat itself on the back and give the award to . . . themselves.

The glitter of the Nobel overshadows the inconvenient news reported last week that a British court of law labeled Gore’s movie as partisan political propaganda, pointing out 11 different errors of fact or scientific judgment, and prohibiting its screening in British public schools without a disclaimer of these defects. The Nobel will be one more quiver in Gore’s arsenal of intransigent moral authority by which he refuses to debate any aspect of the subject and declares the entire matter “settled.” It’s never a good sign when politicians declare a scientific matter settled; we all remember how well that worked out for the Vatican when they told Galileo 400 years ago that astronomy was settled. It is even more problematic to suggest that climate change is not a political issue, but a moral issue, but then to demand massive political interventions in the economy to fix the problem.

Likewise, climate change is a real phenomenon, but the catastrophic scenario of Gore and his fellow climate campaigners is steadily fraying around the edges if you follow the scientific literature closely. Has anyone noticed, for example, that global temperature has been flat for the last decade, after two decades of slow and steady increase from 1980 to 1998? Most of the climate models suggest global temperature should be consistently warming with the rise of greenhouse gases, but it has stopped. This increasingly inconvenient truth will eventually become too obvious for even the media to ignore. Meanwhile, the real world economic consequences of Gore’s policy agenda (which Obama and Edwards—but not Hillary—have signed up for) are so extreme that no self-governing people will ever submit to it, which is why a few environmentalists have gone so far as to say openly, “down with democracy.” Go ahead; make my day; try that out on the American people. The Democratic Congress can’t even pass a modest emissions trading scheme that would barely begin to enact Gore’s agenda, because they are afraid of its cost.

Next, there is the problem with the science of Global Warming. Richard Lindzen, an MIT scientist, is refuting the findings of the U.N. and Gore:

The reports maintain that there's more than a 90 percent chance that human activity—primarily the burning of fossil fuels, resulting in increased levels of atmospheric CO2—is responsible for the earth's recent warming, which amounts to a 1.2-degree-Fahrenheit rise in global mean temperature over the past 100 years. Noting that the current atmospheric concentration of CO2 is higher than it's been in the past 650,000 years, the IPCC predicts that human-induced climate change could spell extinction for 20 to 30 percent of the world's species by the end of this century, cause increasingly destructive weather patterns, and flood coastal cities.

Lindzen doesn't dispute that the planet has warmed up in the past three decades, but he argues that human-generated CO2 accounts for no more than 30 percent of this temperature rise. Much of the warming, he says, stems from fluctuations in temperature that have occurred for millions of years—explained by complicated natural changes in equilibrium between the oceans and the atmosphere—and the latest period of warming will not result in catastrophe.

Okay, that's enough. I'm going to go continue my ground-breaking research into re-creating the internet and put my name in for one of them there fancy and relatively easy to get Peace Prizes...

Hopefully they don't get stuck in the ice as well...

Some of descendants Ernest Shackleton and his crew are attempting to replicate the failed "Nimrod" Antarctic trek of 1908 and reach the South Pole.

Of course, Shackleton is best known for his 1914 Endurance expedition that is known as one of if not the greatest survival stories of all time.

28 crew members trapped on the ice flows of the Weddell Sea for almost 2 years, and they were all rescued. Remarkable.

Pushing Daisies -

We'll start with the fluff today, and that fluff is Pushing Daisies. I would dare say that this is my favorite new show this season. Great fun, especially with Kristin Chenoweth singing "Hopelessly Devoted to You" to Digby the dog while pining away for the Pie Maker.

I hope this one sticks around.

Tastes Like Chicken: Bacon

Peculiar Posts

The world of the weird and peculiar brings us this story from MSNBC: Poisoned tourist saved with vodka drip.

BRISBANE, Australia - Australian doctors said they plugged a poisoned Italian tourist into a vodka drip after running out of the medicinal alcohol they would normally have used to save his life.

The 24-year-old Italian, who was not further identified, was diagnosed as having ingested a large quantity of ethylene glycol, a common ingredient in antifreeze that can cause renal failure.

Pure alcohol is often given in treating such cases because it can inhibit the toxic effects of ethylene glycol.

Dr. Pascal Gelperowicz at Mackay Base Hospital where the man was taken for treatment said he was given pharmaceutical-grade alcohol on arrival, but that the hospital's supplies soon ran out.

"We quickly used all the available vials of 100 percent alcohol and decided the next best way to get alcohol into the man's system was by feeding him spirits through a nasogastric tube," Gelperowicz said in a statement.

"The patient was drip-fed about three standard drinks an hour for three days in the intensive care unit," he said. "The hospital's administrators were also very understanding when we explained our reasons for buying a case of vodka."

The patient made a successful recovery. The incident occurred about two months ago, though the hospital just released information on the case.

Used a vodka drip. Who knew that was going to work?

What I really want to know is how the poisoned tourist got so much Ethylene Glycol in his system in the first place...

Columbus Day

Which essentially means in the educational world a day off.

Here is the obligatory link with info about the explorer the said day is named in honor of.

As for me, here is what the day entails. A few chores around the house. Right now, Pitch Black is in the DVD player, with the Chronicles of Riddick and Hot Fuzz in the queue.

A little reading is on the menu as well. My light reading is Tyrannosaur Canyon by Douglas Preston and my heavy reading is Six Battles Every Man Must Win by Bill Perkins.

Of course, tonight brings tons of good TV with "Chuck", "Heroes", "Journeyman" and "CSI: Miami".

Have a great day!

Patriots vs. Browns

Wow!!! The Patriots are stomping on the neck of yet another team. The Patties are up 20-0 and have intercepted Cleveland Browns QB Derek Anderson 3 times already.

I almost feel bad for the Browns. Almost.

Bruschi just ran over Anderson like a freight train...

Downeast Maine Pumpkin Bread

The pumpkin theme continues with this yummy number. Now, this one is a first time recipe and the cakes are cooling on the rack as I write this, so an update will be in order later.

Downeast Maine Pumpkin Bread

1 can pumpkin
4 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
2/3 cup water
3 cups white sugar
3 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp ground ginger

1. Preheat oven to 350º F. Grease and flour 7x3 inch loaf pans.
2. In a large bowl, mix together pumpkin, eggs, oil, water and sugar until well blended. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger. Stir the dry ingredients into the pumpkin mixture until just blended. Pour into the prepared pans.
3. Bake for about 50 minutes in the preheated oven. Loaves are done when a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Now we tweaked this recipe just slightly. We used a couple of bundt pans and 1 tbs of pumpkin pie allspice instead of all the separate ingredients.

I'll let you know how it tastes...

Update: This didn't come out so good. Tasted great but didn't cook all the way through. Should of cooked them about 30 minutes longer.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

When we got home from church today, Jess and I looked at each other and said, "Let's make some Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies!" So, we did. And they taste amazing!

Here is the recipe:

1/2 cup butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 egg
1 can pumpkin
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 cups chocolate morsels

Mix together butter, sugar, egg, pumpkin and vanilla extract. Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, nutmeg and cinnamon. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients. Stir until just combined. Add chocolate morsels. Place on greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350º for 12-14 minutes.

This is an amazing recipe, and fall is a great time for all things pumpkin. Enjoy!!!

The Black Frog's "Naked Lunch" in murky water

And I'm not just talked about Moosehead Lake. The Black Frog, a Greenville restaurant that Jess and I ate at about a month ago, has made the front page of MSNBC.com. I'm not sure that is a good thing. Apparently, the "Naked Lunch" is in jeopardy:

A sandwich called the Skinny Dip, featuring sliced prime rib in a baguette roll, has been offered free of charge to anyone willing to plunge naked from the restaurant's dock into Moosehead Lake.

Since the free sandwich offer was introduced three years ago, owner Leigh Turner has found plenty of takers. "We've had two or three a week," he said.

During that time only one patron has suggested the activity was inappropriate, Turner said. However, that patron apparently suggested to selectmen recently that the activity be curtailed.

The naked lunch issue surfaced this week when Town Manager John Simko presented the Black Frog's application to renew its liquor license. Simko said he had been approached about the nudity and suggested that Police Chief Scott MacMaster speak to the owner about it.

Turner did not attend the selectmen's meeting, but said he would remove the free lunch offer if asked to do so.

The skinny dip was typically done at night, no frontal nudity was exposed to customers and a towel was readily available, Turner said.

"Most everybody applauded" when patrons took the plunge, he added.

Yeah, this is sad that the "Skinny Dip" has become a "national" story. Someone got their undies in a bundle, had some pull with the town selectmen, and when of all things the Black Frog's liquor licence came up, then all of a sudden the "Naked Lunch" becomes a big deal.

Lighten up people. If you're stupid enough to jump in the lake that usually hovers around freezing naked to get a free meal, the more power to you.

TLC

Tastes Like Chicken for this week.

Yup, I figured the whole Christopher Columbus thing went down like this!

Keep up the good work, Josh!!!

I'm no tree-hugging, eco-conservationalist but...

...I was really excited to see that the Friends of Acadia were able to step up and buy a 25 acre parcel of land on the north side of Acadia Mountain that was slated for development.

So much of the natural beauty and landscape in our country has been developed, so it is good to see groups out there trying to save it, and especially saving the natural habitat here in our own beloved state.

More than Meets the Eye once again...

Dreamworks and Paramount commit to "Transformers 2". (Hopefully not the name. I hate movie titles with "2" in the title.)

It sounds like Michael Bay, Shia LeBeouf and Steven Spielberg are in for the Deuce!!!

Boy, its a long time until 2009...

Sad, but not surprising

Britney Spears' long spiral down is now just about complete as she has now lost the custody of her children. How selfish and immature can one person be? Hopefully this is a major kick in the ass for Brit and she'll finally come to her senses.

She's at rock bottom now, so hopefully she can pull herself together for the sake of her kids...