Digital Imagination

Yesterday I had a doctor’s appointment to have my stomach staples removed. As we were leaving, a nurse came up and started cooing at Ace. Always the woman’s man, Ace started winking and smiling at her.

She said, “Awww, are you flirting with me?”

Just then, right on cue, he reached out and grabbed her boob.

I have never been more proud of my child.

Also in the Ace News: He’s started standing by himself today, I just happened to have my camera ready and caught his first attempt.

I read a great blog post yesterday about “Society’s Cognitive Surplus.” In the article, Clay Shirkey posits that Americans wastes about the equivalent of 1,000,000 wikipedia projects (not pages mind you, the entire volume of the site) per year watching television.  It also points out that media producers need to beware, as future generations are becoming more attracted to the internet as a means of entertainment.

This is not news. The new media, the internet, provides a way for people to not only be entertained, but to provide feedback and be part of a community or project. The great thing about the internet is that most sites offer in some way, shape or form the ability for you to provide input.

Now, it’s no secret that I’m a geek. I love my computer(s), not because I love tinkering around with them (which I d0), but because of the very fact that they’re interactive. I can communicate with other people, build something to show the world, spout off my demented opinions in my blog or watch other fascinating people on youtube. It provides me with a constant data feed that keeps my mind active. To me, computers are a heck of a lot more entertaining than the television.

So I guess I’m not a geek after all… I’m a revolutionary.

10. Wow, I guess our bodies don’t really process seeds/corn skin/peanuts!

9. Never having to sit down at a public bathroom stall

8. I forget what 8 was for

7. You can pretty much get whatever you want just by threatening to swing the bag around “splattering shit like a drunk on a tilt-a-whirl”.

6. Getting to use the sentence, “I apologize, I recently had an operation that left me unable to control my flatulence, however, I assure you, while it does appear that I dealt it, you won’t have to smelt it.”

5. Seriously, and I can’t stress this enough, you NEVER have to sit down at a public bathroom stall!

4. If you think this bag is full of shit, you should meet my brother-in-law!

3. Whenever anyone anywhere in your vicinity passes gas, you get to make a mad dash to the restroom to make sure you’re not leaking.

2. When your wife/boss is yelling at you for something you did/didn’t do that you didn’t know you wer/weren’t supposed to do, being able to secretly think “I’m pooping right now”.
1. Watching yourself poop is just like seeing George Bush’s domestic policy get prepared.

“Thank you your Holiness, Awesome Speech.” AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m a freaking Athiest and I would give the Pope more respect than that!

I bet he has a nickname for the Pope as well, something like or “Touchy McPopey” or “Padre Bendover”.

Ben Stein, the duldrum, yet charming personality famous for his monotonous voice and dry humor has a new movie coming out; Expelled : No Intelligence Allowed.

Apparently, Mr. Stein has taken it upon himself to challenge the current “liberal” education establishment that keeps insisting that Evolution explains our existence on this planet. His conjecture is that the current “Big Education” institutions “don’t like the very idea of an intelligent cause because they don’t like the idea of allowing even the possibility of the existence of an intelligent ‘designer.’ That might lead to scientific evidence in support of the unthinkable, i.e. G-O-D.”

The idea here, is that somehow, the education establishment has conspired to keep religion from interfering within a scientific context.

“Fucking Right”, I say.

Not only should proponents of “Intelligent Design” be driven out of our public universities, but they should be rounded up with the dingbats in the Flat Earth Society, pointed at, laughed at and forgotten.

The entire problem with the Creationist movement has not been with their hypothesis; that an intelligent creator envisioned and fabricated the building blocks of existence. I have absolutely no problem with that. What I have a problem with is that the “ID” movement plainly isn’t science. It’s faith. And faith, unfortunately can’t be tested.

See, in order for something to be considered “science”, it must be testable, it must be observable. Science is nothing more than the process of testing a hypothesis. We know evolution has occurred because we have absolute, undeniable, proof. We have tested, and tested, and tested. We have observed it in action, we have seen the missing link.

But Creationism doesn’t rely on proof. It relies on scripture. It doesn’t test, it sues. Creationism is not, and has never been about presenting an alternative view of how the world was created. It has been about smothering the very real, very true scientific principal that “things come from other things”. It is a pseudo-science created because religion felt threatened by the “proof” that humans were not, in fact, created by and perfectly in the likeness of God, but that we evolved from creatures, that evolved from creatures, that evolved from creatures that at one point were in no way similar to us whatsoever.

Creationism has at no point displayed any actual evidence that proves their hypothesis. Instead, they have chosen to present their theory as a series of criticism’s designed to disprove current evolution theory. They have chosen to litigate in order to force the inclusion of their material into school textbook, and as that has failed, they have now decided to play martyr and cry, “The entire establishment is conspiring against us.” And the reason they have chosen this path, very simply, is because what they present is an article of faith, not science, and can therefore never be proven.

All of this is moot though, I have absolute, unequivocal proof that Mr. Stein is in fact, a descendant of Ape.

I went to the Emergency Room last on Friday April 4th, with acute pain that began in the lower left abdomen and quickly expanded. I’d originally attributed it to a vicious stomach bug, but alas, it appeared after a CT-Scan to be a nasty case of Diverticulitis. I was admitted and given heavy antibiotics. I reeled in pain for about 3 days when my Surgeon informed me that he was going to need to do immediate surgery. He explained the operation, the chance of success and the probability of a temporary colostomy.

So on Monday, at 2PM, I had a funny man in a mask telling me to count backwards from 100…99…98…97… (has anyone actually made it past 97, please let me know).

When I awoke, I went back to sleep. I did that for a few days. Really, nothing before Wednesday is very clear to me, other than the fact that a lot of annoying people in gloves kept waking me up at unseemly hours like 3 in the afternoon. Oh, and that I had this little magic button that I could click which would make the pain go away, if I clicked it twice, I felt really fuzzy, and if I clicked it three times, the entire original cast of Pirates of Penzance would perform “Modern Major General” right before my eyes while flying around on real dragons, really, they’re quite amazing, should see them next time they’re in town.

I have to say, by Wednesday, I felt miserable. But I was still 1000 times better than when I was having the Diverticulitis attack. My chief form of frustration was not the abdominal pain (mostly from the incision), and wierdness, but from the damn Nasogastric Tube I had coming out of me. Actually at this point, with the NG, IV, Catheter and Colostomy bag, I officially had so many tubes running out of me that Ted Stevens had me declared “Part of the Internet”.

Since then, I’ve gone through a range of emotions from; “This is absolutely the filthiest, most disgusting, smelly thing on the planet.” to “This is absolutely the smelliest, most disgusting, filthy thing on the planet.” What can I say, I’m a diverse guy. Everybody keeps telling me that, “Hey, you can do anything with it, go diving, climb mountains, become ‘that dude at the office with the bag of poo hanging at his side’” Yeah, I can just imagine how great my life is gonna be for the next few months; Ol’ Scatty (as I like to call him) and me, hanging out at the bar, making pals.

I know that the trick to dealing with this is to have a good attitude, but dammnit, that’s really hard to do with this thing. I walk down the hall and it goes “poot-poot-poot”. Only a week into it and I’ve already had it publicly leak in front of a horrified audience in a waiting room as I was walking around.

I know, this stuff happens, and I can deal with that. But on a very deep and personal level, I have never felt like such a freak in my life. I know I’ll get used to it and I’ll learn to manage it, but right now, it just doesn’t feel that way.