Victoria's Secret “it” model, Adriana Lima (we affectionately call her Wild Eye Child) was recently interviewed by GQ magazine. In this interview she reveals that she’s not only a Christian, more specifically Catholic, but she’s a virgin who is waiting for marriage to have sex. Think about that for a second. Here’s a woman who had amassed a fortune modeling lingerie (“the ninety-seventh highest-paid famous person in the world according to Forbes”), essentially selling sex, saying she’s going to wait until marriage to have sex. Of course that’s a huge dichotomy. I’m not quite sure how I’d rationalize the two if I was her. The money probably has something to do with that. How would you deal with this apparent conflict of interest? Anyways, here is an excerpt from the GQ interview.
I take it you’re religious?
Yes! I am Catholic. [she pulls out the cardboard scapular hanging around her neck, under her big gray sweater]
Wow. A scapular. Do you go to church?
Of course! Every Sunday.
Is there anything in the teachings of the Catholic Church that you don’t agree with?
No.
Are you pro-life?
What do you mean, pro-life?
How do you feel about abortion?
I think it’s a crime.
Okay, so let’s get started. You know the theme of this issue, right? Love, Sex, and Madness—
Uh-huh. Yes. God.
Which category do you want to talk about first?
Love.
I figured. Okay. Have you been in love a lot?
I’m in love now.
Were you ever before?
No! I believe love just happens once. You can be mistaken, you can think you are in love, but after a while you discover that you’re really not. Real love is different.
Are you a one-guy woman?
Of course! I’m a Catholic.
Look, I’m Catholic, too, but there’s a lot of things about the church that make it hard to date within its rules, don’t you think?
Like what?
Birth control, premarital sex…
Well, you know, sex is just for after marriage.
Say what?
Sex is for after marriage.
Are you saying you’re not going to have sex before marriage?
Exactly.
You mean you’ve never had sex?
That’s why I have to say.
You sure about this?
Yes.
How do men respond to the fact that you plan to, you know, wait?
I don’t care. They have to respect that this is my choice. If there’s no respect, that means they don’t want me.
Now Playing: Cinecast - Cinecast #89: Inside Man/Top 5 Twist Endings
Monday started with breakfast again at Mimi’s. Like I said, it’s the best AM restaurant in Mesa. We headed over to the park with football in hand ready to kill an hour or two before the game started. Of course this was the game we changed our plans for. We usually are in Mesa for Thursday – Sunday stay but since the Cubs were playing the world champion White Sox (damn, that’s really hard to write) we decided to stay Saturday – Tuesday. As we parked the car we noticed something was different. There was a ton of Sox fans. There were even people with Cubs shirts and Sox hats. What’s wrong with these people? You can’t be a Cubs fan and a Sox fan. Or even vice-versa. It’s like saying I’m a Yankees and Red Sox fan. Or better yet, I love FSU and Miami. Or even, I’m proud to be an American and a Bin Laden supporter. You can’t be both. My guess is that these people have a serious psychological disorder let’s call it Can’tMakeADecisionIfMyLifeDependedOnIt-itis. Maybe Lisa can help these people out. Being the last week of spring baseball the starters are going to go a bit longer. So I was expecting a really good game. I did notice a strange anomaly. The Sox had a DH while the Cubs didn’t. So the Black Sox cheating starts already. Future hall of famer Greg Maddux was got the start but it didn’t bode well for him. The Sox were hitting him…hard. In all he gave up three runs on nine hits not his best especially with the season seven days away. The Cubs were down 3-1 when Maddux left after five complete innings. Later, Thome hit his second home run of the game putting the Sox up 4-1. In the bottom of the eight the Cubs was able to close the gap to 4-2. After holding the Sox scoreless in the top half of the ninth the Cubs were able to score again on back-to-back doubles. Then they tied it up on a Nefi Perez single. Unable to score any more runs the crowd was excited to be heading into extra innings or so we thought. Moments after the last out the PA announcer boomed over the loudspeaker declaring the game over. It was a tie 4-4. Boos from the crowd ensued. As we shuffled out the gates murmurs over how the Sox sucked and were “scared to lose.” Of course I declared how the White Sox couldn’t beat the Cubs even though they had the DH and we didn’t. The tie further proves my thesis that the Sox suck.
That night, our last night in Mesa, we headed over to Mi Tia’s, er, Tia Rosa’s again for some fine Mexican vittles. Unfortunately, they were closed. We ended up at Chevy’s for some truly detestable food. Afterwards, we headed out to Golfland for some miniature golf action. My Dad suggested it. I guess he wanted to lose at something and I was more that happy to oblige. I beat him by seven strokes. The tide turned on holes nine and ten where his one stroke lead turned into a four stroke deficit. Thanks to a hole in one by myself and a six stroke brew-ha-ha on hole ten for him. After that flogging the losing wasn’t done for him. I beat him in six straight games of Pop-A-Shot. Can’t beat the master.
Overall, it was a good trip. I have loads of trepidations about this year’s Cubs. Can Prior and Wood get off of the DL and contribute. Will the up-the-middle defense be good enough? Will the bottom of the order or even the number two batter be effective? Can the bullpen do something other than blow the game? All interesting questions that I have no answer for. I guess that’s why they play the games. Go Cubs.
Our second day in Mesa started early, well at least for me. I’m still on Alexa Marie time so I woke up at 5:30 AM and decided to go for a run. It was about fifty degrees outside and Mesa isn’t exactly the most interesting place to run. Everything here is dusty and brown; welcome to the desert. Luckily for me the hotel has an exercise room with a treadmill, a nice one at that. Sixty-five minutes and six miles later I returned to the room ready for a nice big breakfast. Our breakfast was supplied by Mimi’s Café the best place for breakfast in this little suburb. Four pancakes, two cups of coffee and one english muffin later we headed towards the ballpark. The Cubs were facing the home town Diamondbacks so I was expecting more local fans than usual but that wasn’t the case. The Cub fans drowned out the smattering of cheers for the D-backs. Unfortunately, for us Cub fans there wasn’t much to cheer. Arizona’s pitching dominated the Cub bats and our beloved Cubs were defeated 6-0. Over the past nineteen innings the Cubs have only been able to muster one run. With the start of the season only a little over a week away I hope this isn’t an omen of things to come.
After the game we headed out to dinner at Carrabba’s an Italian restaurant. On the way we passed a Pizzeria Uno’s that we dined at last year. As we entered Carrabba’s I asked my Dad how long he was willing to wait. “Twenty minutes” he replied. The server at the door took our name and party size. “How long is the wait” my father inquired. “Twenty minutes” said the lanky server. My father quickly replied “I don’t want to wait that long. Let’s go.” As we waked to the car I asked “What was that about? I thought you said you were willing to wait twenty minutes.” “I can’t stop thinking about that Uno’s pizza.” “You should of just said so.” So we ended up eating a delicious pizza at Uno’s. That’s the way these trips go, you go in one direction and end up in another.
We landed in Phoenix on Saturday at 12:30 PM. This was perfect since we had tickets to see the Cubs split squad at Ho Ho Kam Park at 1:00 PM. But for some reason Hertz (linked with nofollow, no Google juice for you) didn't want to get us there on time. Over two months ago my Dad placed reservations for a yellow Mustang convertible to be ready for us. Of course it wasn't. We settled for a red Mustang and they assured us it would be ready in ten minutes. Forty minutes later we were in a half-washed red Mustang convertible with Sirius satellite radio.
We arrived at Ho Ho Kam in the fifth inning and saw the Cubs throw a combined no hitter against the A's through nine innings. With the bases loaded and one out in the bottom of the ninth the Cubs failed to score so we headed into the extra frame tied 0-0. The A's broke-up the no hitter in the tenth but didn't score. Then in the Cubs half of the inning with a runner on first Brandon Sing hits a broken bat double off the wall that scored the runner. Cubs win 1-0.
Later that night we ate at our favorite Mexican restaurant here in Mesa, Mi Tia's, er, Tia Rosa's. One huge burrito and a full stomach later we called it a night. It's good to be back in Cubs spring training.
I'm amazed that I caught this story over at Yahoo! News.
KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Growing international pressure on Afghanistan to respect the religious freedom of a Christian convert was met in Afghanistan on Friday by calls for the man to be executed for denying Islam.
The controversy over Abdur Rahman, 40, whose trial is due to begin next week, threatens to drive a wedge between Afghanistan and Western countries that are ensuring its security and bankrolling its development.
But President Hamid Karzai cannot ignore conservative proponents of Islamic law or appear to bow too readily to outside pressure.But President Hamid Karzai cannot ignore conservative proponents of Islamic law or appear to bow too readily to outside pressure.
Religious and political figures meeting at a Kabul hotel, including former prime minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai and Shi'ite cleric Asif Mohsenia who commanded anti-Soviet forces in the 1980s, said the government should ensure that Islamic law is enforced.
It said if its demands were ignored, "the Muslim people of Afghanistan would consider struggle their legal and religious duty."
Rahman was detained last week for converting to Christianity, judicial officials say. Death is the punishment stipulated by sharia, or Islamic law, for apostasy. The Afghan legal system is based on a mix of civil and sharia law.
This is really sad and sobering. It's great that we live in a country where one can worship a made up guy named Xenu and be taken seriously. I can't even imagine what Abdur is going through right now. My heart cries out for this man.
Rahman told a preliminary hearing last week he had become a Christian while working for an aid group helping Afghan refugees in Pakistan 15 years ago.
He was detained after his family informed authorities he had converted, apparently following a family dispute involving two daughters, a judicial official said.
A prosecutor has raised questions about Rahman's mental state, and a judge said that could be taken into account. Rahman has denied he is mentally unstable.
This is truly heartbreaking. His own family turned him in? Then on top of everything else they think he's crazy. They thought Christ was crazy to. Maybe we as Christians need to act a little crazy. We believe in a man who rose from the dead. To some that is crazy. But we know that even though the truth sounds crazy it's still the truth. So be praying for Abdur my friends and get a little crazy you Jesus Freaks.
Update 3/26/06 1:01 PM - It looks like Abdur has been released. This is great news. Of course how many of you believe he's safe in Afghanistan? Me neither.
Tomorrow, my Dad and I are off to Phoenix once again to catch our beloved Cubs in three spring training exhibitions. Of course I’m looking forward to seeing the team in Ho-Ho-Kam Park but I’m really looking forward to wind down and get some sleep. It seems that sleep has been in a short supply recently with the baby and all. She’s doing much better, she’s asleep by 6:30PM and only waking up once during the night. And I’m still training. Today, I got up at 4:15 AM to get in an eight mile run. And yes I’m crazy. Nonetheless, I will be gone till Tuesday but the blog and Flickr site will be updated so stay tuned. If you’re lucky I post the exciting events of my church basketball squad.
It looks like internet video is finally taking off. Sites like YouTube and Libsyn are now allowing users to upload video and share it for free or a small cost. This is allowing the individual to create and publish video content without bandwidth and storage costs. Of course bitTorrent has been around a while now but it can be cumbersome for the average user to use and of course it can be changeling to find content. Some of my favorite video sites are AskANinja, DiggNation and Rocketboom.
This video revolution has made some traditional shows relevant again. SNL has seen a popularity rise since their Lazy Sunday and Natalie Portman Gangsta Rap shorts were put on YouTube. Of course that didn’t stop them dropping a cease and desist on YouTube.
How is this revolution going to turn out? Dunno. But I know it won’t move much past the entertainment realm unless someone can figure out how to search inside the video content. Without the ability to Google the contents of a video users will be manually searching content again looking for singular piece of information. Microsoft, are you hearing me? You have the resources and tons of video content to index. You can make this happen. Who would make the switch from Google to MSN if you knew you could search the content of lecture, instructional and how-to videos? So all hail the internet video revolution at least it will be fun…for now.
Via BoingBoing, Digg
I’m speechless…..No I’m not. How can I get this in my house? How much water do I have to consume to play for five minutes? Will this beat the PSP for the best gaming machine in the bathroom? How do you update the games? Will there be a web browser? If so, what constitutes a click? Does this promote gender bias? Will there be a female version? What about a crap controlled gaming toilet? Will Tetris be available? What about a handheld version? Can we get a RSS reader on this? What about a mechanism that spits the water back at you when you lose the game? I better end now before I run out of ideas.
My darling wife has decided to work on her scrapbooking business full time. She has been a consultant with Creative Memories for over three years now so she knows the ins and outs of the Creative Memories products and services. To help her with her business I suggested that she start a scrapbooking blog where she can describe her products and ideas. So I installed Community Server 2.0 on a server at Server Intellect but ran into a few problems. The server was throwing an error which I couldn’t see so I opened a support ticket to get the error. The support at Server Intellect took a look at my installation and reinstalled Community Sever for me. Impressive, most impressive. So Lucy’s new blog is available at www.lucyspreciousmemories.com. She also has links to her Creative Memories site where you can purchase scrapbooking tools and products.
Now Playing: Michael Arrington - Episode 1: Google Calendar v. the Competition?
Recently, I needed to create a list of items that were to be manually sorted by the user. I decided to use the sorting mechanism that Netflix uses in its queue. The items are listed 1 to n on the page with the sequence number in a text box. If the user wishes to re-sequence an item all they need to do is change the number in the text box to the desired sequence number. After I created the sorting algorithm in the business collection object I started out to write the UI. I first started out using Infragisics WebGrid. It worked fine but it was dog slow and it wasn’t the look that I wanted. I then moved to the ASP:Table control and was quickly reminded that it doesn’t use viewstate. The DataGrid seemed like my next best hope although I’m not a big fan of the control. I added bound columns for the static data and a template column with a textbox in it for the sequence number. While coding the save function I needed to use the FindControl to access the data in the textbox. That’s when I came across this excellent article at OdeToCode.com titled In Search of ASP.Net Controls. To find the proper textbox I needed to access the FindControl function in specific row of the grid. For Example:
Dim SeqText As TextBox = DirectCast(SeqDataGrid.Items(i).FindControl("SeqText"), TextBox)
With this I could iterate through the grid, grab all of the new sequence numbers, plug them into the business objects then call the sorting routine.
I also found this article on the CSS Box Model very helpful (even though it was a refresher).
Now Playing: John Coltrane - Chasin' the Trane
I just ran across this Star Wars fan film today which stars two guys in one of the most incredible lightsaber battles I’ve ever seen. This isn’t your run of the mill minute and a half sequence this runs over five minutes long! If you loved the final lightsaber sequence at the end of the Phantom Menace check this vid out. Via The Movie Blog.
Now Playing: Larry Hryb (Xbox Live Gamertag: Major Nelson) - Show #166 The one about OXM
Over the past year or so we’ve been getting information on X-Men 3 and it’s been less than flattering. News of David Singer going to Superman Returns (instead of Kevin Smith who discusses his Superman experience in this video), a cavalcade of new characters (Gambit, Juggernaut, Kitty Pride, Angel, Moria MacTaggert, Psylocke, Beast, Jamie Madrox, Callisto), and a lack of Nightcrawler all pointed to X-Men 3 sucking hard. Admittedly, there was some good news coming out of the X3 camp. The biggest one was that the Dark Phoenix was to make her appearance. Those of you who haven’t heard of the Dark Phoenix Saga, Google it or better yet pick up a copy. This story line is a good one; one of the best comics has ever produced. Which brings us to today, the X-Men 3: The Last Stand trailer has been unleashed on the web and I’m impressed. If this doesn’t get your inner fanboy (or fangirl) excited I don’t know what will. Images of Phoenix all darky, Storm all stormy and Wolvie all pissed is what the X-Men are all about. And is Legion in this as well? My geek meter just broke. Via Digg.
I just ran across this new digital photography site JustShowMeHowTo.com. The site does exactly what it says; it shows you how to use your digital camera and how to take better pictures. Via Scoble.