Miscellaneous: December 2007 Archives

I finally got my Schrammie! For the complete story, see the original song, listen to the studio version, and watch Ken Schram give me my award. Then finally, watch my acceptance speech.

I wrote the song New Year many years ago, and break it around this time every year. You can listen to the studio version. Here's the lyrics:

It's a new year And it's been a long time It's been a long time since last year It's been a whole year

Well, it gets a guy to thinking
About the time that passes by
Lots of time in one year
365 and 1/4 days

And I can't go back
I can't go back to last year
'Coz there's one whole year between us

365 days
Or maybe 366
I can't remember
It's been a long year

12 months
365 days
8,760 hours
525,600 minutes
31,536,000 seconds
It's been a long year

And it's been a long time
It's been a long time
It's been a long time
It's been a long time
It's been a long time since last year
It's been a whole year

This is the Longest Concert Evar, starring Pudge. Send requests to concertrequest@pudge.net, or post them here.

I've gone and done it and set up my a new site, called <pudge/*> (pronounced "PudgeGlob").

I won't be fully retiring my other journal sites -- I'll still post Perl stuff on use Perl, for example -- but in general, I'll be using the new site for everything. When I do post something to my other journals -- or to Flickr, or YouTube -- it'll be mirrored there. I've already prepopulated it with thousands of posts from my other sites over the past 10 years.

At some point I will be more closely integrating PudgeTunes with <pudge/*> -- each song will have its own entry, and I'll generate podcast feeds directly from the new site -- but other than that, it's pretty much set.

This also means my "meta-feed" is going away. If you subscribed to pudge.net/feed.rss, it now just symlinks to pudge.net/glob/rss.xml.

So now you have one place to go for All Things Pudge. ;-)

Enjoy.

This is a great little Christmas song by Rich Mullins.

Sorry my voice is a bit thrashed. I have a cold and it hurts to sing. But the show must go on!

This is the Longest Concert Evar, starring Pudge. Send requests to concertrequest@pudge.net, or post them here.

Christmas Must Be Tonight was originally recorded by The Band, though this version is heavily influenced by The Compassion International All-Star Band's version (sung by Randy Stonehill).

Sorry my voice is a bit thrashed. I have a cold and it hurts to sing. But the show must go on!

This is the Longest Concert Evar, starring Pudge. Send requests to concertrequest@pudge.net, or post them here.

I figured this was a good opportunity to try out my new Yamaha drum machine thingy.

Sorry my voice is a bit thrashed. I have a cold and it hurts to sing. But the show must go on!

This is the Longest Concert Evar, starring Pudge. Send requests to concertrequest@pudge.net, or post them here.

The YouTube "community" has let me down.

Granted, there are some "leave jamie lynn alone" videos, but that is not as funny. She should never, ever, in the context of comedy, be called "Jamie Lynn." Her comedy name is "Britney's sister."

I knew little about The Golden Compass, but then something someone said about it triggered a fading memory, and I grepped my email for "Pullman," the story's author. Here is what I wrote about him two years ago here:

http://www.crlamppost.org/darkside.htm

The same guy, Philip Pullman, also noted (in the Washington Post, Feb 19, 2001, "The Last Word"; an article about how his trilogy for young adults ends in God's death) that in his stories "I'm trying to undermine Christian belief."

So cross Philip Pullman of the list of authors my children might read ...

So let's be clear. The author of The Golden Compass is, in his own exact words, "trying to undermine Christian belief." And he slams C.S. Lews and Narnia in this way:

One of the most vile moments in the whole of children's literature, to my mind, occurs at the end of The Last Battle, when Aslan reveals to the children that "The term is over: the holidays have begun" because "There was a real railway accident. Your father and mother and all of you are - as you used to call it in the Shadowlands - dead." To solve a narrative problem by killing one of your characters is something many authors have done at one time or another. To slaughter the lot of them, and then claim they're better off, is not honest storytelling: it's propaganda in the service of a life-hating ideology.

He believes that believing in heaven as I, and millions of others, do is "hating life."

I will not see The Golden Compass. YMMV.