As if poker as a sport wasn’t strange enough, now there’s Extreme Ironing. People go to the ends of the earth and take pictures of themselves ironing. You know, this may be the best example I’ve seen in a while of what the Internets can bring to all of our lives.

Best. Comic. Book. Movie. Ever.

Go see it in the theater if you can. It’s really, really fantastic. And stick around to the end of the credits if you can — there’s a nice little Easter egg at the end. Pack a lunch, though — a movie like this has a LOT of stuntpeople and a LOT of animators.

My friend Jeff and I went to see it tonight. Despite my leaving the running lights on so we came back to a dead car, it was a blast. Easily the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen (and I really enjoyed Batman Begins), and such a rebound after being so disappointed in Indiana Jones and the Difficult Jumble (or whatever it’s called). Walk, don’t run, to that. But do go see Iron Man — it’s a rippin’ good time.

Hey, does this new theme work for everyone? It needs some tweaking (it doesn’t display the date of the original post, for example), but I like how simple it is. But if it’s borking the display for anyone, let me know. Blix was nice, but it was hard to find a good link color that matched the color scheme AND was readable AND was immediately visible.

Roland Martin has a good commentary on AmericanFlagLapelPinGate. It’s a fun, insightful, and unfortunately necessary read.

My friend Doug will do anything for a shot. Case in point — while the rest of us go inside when it begins to hail, this is what you’ll find Doug doing.

But with all due respect, Doug’s got nothing on photographer Ryan McGeeney. At the Utah state high school track and field championships, he wandered into a restricted area reserved for the javelin throw. He was, predictably, hit by a spear at a high rate of speed. Luckily it kind of rug-hooked him under the kneecap and didn’t do a lot of damage. But while he was being tended to he just started clicking away, getting a point-of-view shot of what it’s like to be tended to after being speared at a distance by a high school student.

Doug, don’t take this as a challenge. It’s merely a cautionary tale — keep that other eye open, too.

So for years I’ve been saying that if I were ever chased by the police, I’d want a fit cop to be chasing me — I don’t want one who pulls up lame after ten feet and just shoots me in the back instead. Apparently Jody Weis, Chicago’s relatively new Superintendent of Police (yes, his name really is Jody), feels the same way. He’s been implementing a new fitness regimen for officers to get everyone back in shape, and now apparently tubby officers won’t be issued the bigger weapons Chicago just ordered to fight the homicide rate. I think it’s great — police officer is a unique job in that you can go years without having to REALLY exert yourself, but suddenly it can be a matter of life and death whether you can run 100 yards. And if they get to play with the big guns if they eat carrots and jog, so be it.

The Vatican’s astronomer is saying that God may have created alien life out there. I’m still confused about whether God created everything 10,000 years ago or if He just created us 10,000 years ago.

In preparing my sarcastic blathering for this post, I did a bit of Wikireading about Creationism (having been rightly dressed down earlier today on Slashdot about some of the gaps in my knowledge about the Church of Latter Day Saints). Turns out there are several levels of Creationism, and only one has this goofy 10,000-year idea (did I say “goofy”? I meant “quaint”). Most of the others all espouse the scientifically accepted age of the universe with varying degrees of Divine intervention to get various balls rolling. It’s fascinating reading — if I had to believe in Divine anything, my vote is for Theistic Evolution. It seems to basically say that science is right about everything, assuming that God got the party started.

The Intelligent Design movement is interesting, though. Its basis is partially political, but it’s also surprisingly hocus-pocus. The idea seems to be that some things are too complex to be explained, and therefore must be explained by a concept called Irreducible Complexity. There seems to be no clear indication of when the universe began, but they seem to believe that certain complex things (including, one must assume, bogus evidence of natural evolution like fossils and rock strata) happened at the wave of a hand (or fin, or claw, or whatever) of a very complicated God.

I’ll admit, I never did a lot of reading about the Intelligent Design argument except for some giggling at the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory. And really, I still haven’t. But even this bit of reading now has me convinced that whether right or wrong (and I have my opinion about that), this is quite possibly the most faith-based movement I’ve heard of in a long time. The faith portion is admirable — I don’t think I could do it. But it seems to say that God created everything, and anything that defies our understanding must be the indescribable complexity of God. Set, spike.

It’s pretty tidy. If I don’t understand something, clearly God does. And therefore EVERYTHING IS UNDERSTOOD by someone. Me and God, we have it covered. Crockett and Tubbs, Poirot and Hastings, Wallace and Grommit, God and I have this shit under control.

I guess I don’t understand the willingness to surrender the mystery. I don’t understand the need to explain everything. I love the idea that some creepy abhorrent occurrence that I don’t understand will be figured out by Nora or her contemporaries. That’s what makes all of this fun, right?

I have a new computer — my Toshiba was on its last legs and I ordered a new Dell Inspiron 1520 (despite my tendency to avoid products with silly made-up names). I am in love. The keyboard rocks, nothing has worked any less perfectly than I expected (a phenomenon atypical to Toshiba laptops), and I spent a little extra on some fun stuff.

First of all, I now have a 1680×1050 screen resolution. Things are a little small over a 15.4″ widescreen monitor, but I can fit full spreads in InDesign on my screen now. Photoshop looks pretty, too, as does Google Maps. Secondly, I have internal bluetooth. This will work nicely for syncing with my Treo, but will also hopefully save me a USB port if I get a bluetooth mouse.

I also got some other stuff — big hard drive (320MB), 4GB of RAM, big juicy processor power, and so on. But none of that holds a candle to the silliest addition to my office environment.

I now have an integrated webcam. I thought I would have no interest in this, but then I tried recording a couple songs tonight. The mic sucks and needs to be worked around, but the video thing is very interesting. I may need to put a few things out on YouTube. In the meantime, here’s a goofy picture of the proud papa in front of his webcam.

Jenna Bush is getting married tonight. She apparently did not invite several of her closest friends because she didn’t trust them to behave at the reception. And in case you were concerned that wasn’t classy enough, they seem to be giving out mouse pads as favors. Man, those Bushes really know how to wow the dignitaries.

Mouse pads. Why didn’t we think of that. F—ing Jordan Almonds.

The shift from Homer Simpson to Ned Flanders has begun. I own both a leaf blower AND a weed whacker. And I have a lawnmower coming Wednesday.

I cannot stress enough how bad I am at this stuff. Our lawn is already suffering from a bad winter, very poor drainage during a very rainy spring, and a f—ing squirrel who’s tearing it to shreds. So it needs all the help it can get, and me and my 36 years of apartment living (combined with a few power tools) are the last thing it needs.

In my defense, this is the first lawn work (short of some raking a few autumns ago) I’ve EVER done. There’s always been a janitor, superintendent, or prison crew in the area to do this stuff where I’ve lived in the past. I’ll get better at it, but for now I’m glad that our neighbors on both sides were out today and therefore not around to watch me try to figure this stuff out. Today, I suspect I looked like THAT chimp who can’t figure out how to use the stick to get the grubs out of the log while the rest sit there chewing.

Both new tools are electric, and the mower that’s coming is a manual push mower. I really hate the sound of lawn equipment, so I went for the cheapest-but-quietest tools I could find. We’ll see how the mower goes, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I may be willing to make some noise a year from now. Still, one must begin with one’s morals and ethics and THEN start to compromise out of laziness, right?

Anyhow, I started with the blower. I got it out of the box, assembled it, and got a-blowin’ right away. We have a magnolia tree in the back yard, and we’re covered with pink (and rapidly browning) petals. So I blew all of those into a “pile” (I basically contained them to a quarter of the yard) and then turned around to answer a question from Nora. Lesson number one: turn off the blower (or point it up) before you turn around.

After I got what part of my “pile” I could back out of the neighbor’s yard, I continued. I blew everything into one area, raked it all up, and bagged it. Then I did the deck. Lesson number two: as with everything, start at the top and work to the bottom.

After I did the deck and redid the yard because now all the deck crap was all over it, I put the blower away and assembled the weed whacker. I suppose if it had spikes or was covered with barnacles it could have been more awkward to handle while assembling. It’s a perfectly good design for whacking weeds, just not one that’s also conducive to screwing a guard onto the business end of it while it skitters around on a glass patio table.

So after the required swearing, I pinned it for a three count and then got to whacking. We had a couple of big thick patches of grass that I wanted to level off so when the mower comes it’ll be able to handle them. I did that with enthusiastic adequacy, and then got to edging the sidewalk. Lesson number three: you really can shave a patch of grass down to the dirt with a weed whacker. I then tried the setting for edging — the head of the whacker flips 180 degrees and a little guard comes out, and you’re supposed to be able to drag that guide along the edge of the pavement for perfect edging every time.

Rather than edging, ours seems to cut a deep rut about two inches in from the pavement. I’m sure there’s some practical application for such a rut — I guess I need to do more reading. Anyhow, for the time being, I think I’ll go back to our creaky manual edger.

Once I was done with that, I looked around. Lesson number four: the blower comes LAST. My whacking had produced a fresh layer of grass and crap that had to be cleaned up. I blew again, and then finally put everything away. There’s nothing more satisfying than a job poorly done.

While I was sitting on the deck reeling up the extension cord and putting away the packing from my new toys, the wind picked up and blew another buttload of magnolia blossoms onto the deck. I’ll get them next weekend.