Watching My Endless Movie

Matt and I have returned from our big family gay-cation, minus some earrings I bought for Mother's Day and a library book that mysteriously disappeared.

On
Thursday, May 1, we flew to Vegas on Southwest. Upo0n arrival, we checked in at The Plams, an off-Strip property that we had seen on a segment of Great Hotels on The Travel Channel. The Palms definitely lived up to its billing as a hip hotel for the ytoung and hot. I declare I have not seen that many hot, shirtless studs in all my life. It was a guidofest for sure.

We applied the $20 dollar trick, which got us an upgrade from a standard room to a 1, 000 sq. ft luxury suite.

Palms Living Room

Palms Bedroom

We had dinner at N9ne Steakhouse, which served us incredibly tender steaks that melted in our mouths despite having been overdone.

The next day, Matt's parents arrvied and all four of drove off in a rented SUV to the Grand Canyon, a 5-hour drive away.

Joe and Matt at Grand Canyon

Plateau Point

Matt and Pat

In the Canyon

Thunderbird

Breakfast at El tovar

Bow and Arrow Dance

Hubble_image2-hmed

To celebrate the 18th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, today NASA released a set of 59 images of colliding galaxies. Galactic collisions are thought by astronomers to create new episodes of star formation, because the interactions of the galaxies initiate strong gravitational effecrts that draw together and collapse galactic dust clouds, which are the nurseries of new stars.

If only we had faster-than-light propulsion so we could visit the stars and see these events up close, instead of being anchored to this rock. 

I have really let myself get out of shape, so it's time to head back to regular workouts and proper nutrition, instead of eating out every night.

Now we have recently discovered footage that completely supports Hillary's harrowing tales of landing in Bosnia under gunfire.

C'mon, Hil-dog, we know you think Americans are stupid, and perhaps you're right, but you ought to know that in the age of the Internet it's pretty easy for your baldfaced, self-aggrandizing lies to be found out.

A truly tragic story from Wisconsin, where a couple of religious whackos allowed their 11-year-old daughter to die needlessly:

WESTON -- An 11-year-old girl died after her parents prayed for healing rather than seek medical help for a treatable form of diabetes, police said Tuesday.

Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin said Madeline Neumann died Sunday.

"She got sicker and sicker until she was dead," he said.

Vergin said an autopsy determined the girl died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body, and she had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness.

The girl's parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to "apparently they didn't have enough faith," the police chief said.

They believed the key to healing "was it was better to keep praying. Call more people to help pray," he said.

The mother believes the girl could still be resurrected, the police chief said.

Some religious adherents ask why freethinkers speak out against the folly of superstitious belief, and here is  prima facie evidence to demonstrate  the harm that occurs when people substitute religious fantasy for reason.

This couple should have taken their daughter to the hospital where she could receive proper treatment for her illness, instead of leaving her in agony while they chanted their useless nonsense.

These cretins allowed their daughter to die painfully from a treatable illness, yet the cops think that is not abuse.

That's insane.

Because Matt's sister Jen and her kids had come up from Pennsylvania to visit her and Matt's parents, he and I went to see them. Jen and I helped her girls color Easter eggs, using the Paas tablets dissolved in vinegar. My, but that stuff reeks!

On Saturday morning, the adults hid plastic Easter eggs stuffed with candy and a clue to the next egg all over Matt's parents' house. There was a different color assigned to each girl so there would be no confusion, and at the end of the trail was an egg with a $20 bill inside for each of the girls.

In the afternoon, Matt and I headed home, but when we arrived, Matt out of the blue decided that Easter weekend was a perfect time to gamble in Atlantic City. We booked a room at Caesars AC (the Borgata was sold out), and off we went. The drive from Virginia to Atlantic City is about 3.5 hours, and we had a chance to use my cell phone;'s GPS system to help us navigate.

Clerk at Caesars

The front desk clerk was extremely courteous and efficient, and in no time (a lot faster than our Vegas check-ins), we were happily sliding the card key into the door of our room

Room at Caesars AC.jpg

The room was on the small side, but we've been spoiled by our stays at the Venetian and New York New York in Vegas. On the other hand, the view from our room was phenomenal.

View from our room in AC.jpg

Matt spent his time playing on the only full-pay 9/6 video poker machine in the entire casino. We looked for quite a while for decent video poker, but every jacks or Better machine we looked at was a lousy 6/5. We finally found one machine hidden in a slot pit that had 9/6, so I left Matt to play there while I went to the poker room to play the real game. 

Matt at Caesars

I played a tight and aggressive game, and when Matt and I took a break to eat, I was up by $80. However, I had an unfortunate hand when my 10s over 8s full house was crushed by a villain catching a jack on the river, giving him jacks full. I had raised heavily in that hand, so I lost about $100 bucks on that hand alone. I caught some hands successfully after that, so I finsihed the session only down $30 or so.

It's only a small  loss, and I'll find plenty of poker room donors to recoup my  cash when we head to Vegas in May.

Joe at Caesars AC.jpg

In honor of Good Friday, a video presentation of the Passion of Our Lord.

Despite Obama's mastefully delivered speech on Tuesday, the racist white media, especially Fox, continues to mischaracterize and flat-out lie about Rev. Jeremiah Wright's connection to Barack Obama, sking why he has not shunned Wright completely.

Here's the relevant excerpt from Obama's speech
Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.

But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

The talking heads at Fox have focused narrowly on only a few intemperate comments excerpted from Rev. Wright's sermons, yet they have ignored the fact that relationships are complicated, and that you can't reduce Rev. Wright's career and his pastoral care of Obama and his family to a few sentences out of a lifetime of service.

Moreover, it is unreasonable to expect that Obama should completely abandon his relationship with a man who is as close as family to him merely because  Wright made some unfortunate remarks.

As for the paranoid conspiracy theories about AIDS and 9/11, [b]yes they are irrational[/b].

However, we know that the U.S. Public Health Service conducted the 40-year Tuskegee Experiment on 399 poor, black sharecroppers by denying them medical treatment in order to track the long-term effects of untreated syphilis.  We also know that medical researchers have performed other unethical experiments on indigent blacks without informed consent. From The Washington Post's review of Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington (I read this a few months ago--horrifying!):
The infringement of black Americans' rights to their own bodies in the name of medical science continued throughout the 20th century. In 1945, Ebb Cade, an African American trucker being treated for injuries received in an accident in Tennessee, was surreptitiously placed without his consent into a radiation experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Black Floridians were deliberately exposed to swarms of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and other diseases in experiments conducted by the Army and the CIA in the early 1950s. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, black inmates at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison were used as research subjects by a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist testing pharmaceuticals and personal hygiene products; some of these subjects report pain and disfiguration even now. During the 1960s and '70s, black boys were subjected to sometimes paralyzing neurosurgery by a University of Mississippi researcher who believed brain pathology to be the root of the children's supposed hyperactive behavior. In the 1990s, African American youths in New York were injected with Fenfluramine -- half of the deadly, discontinued weight loss drug Fen-Phen -- by Columbia researchers investigating a hypothesis about the genetic origins of violence.

African-American mistrust of medical research that leads to wildly implausible conspiracy theories is irrational, but the history that has fueled that atmosphere of suspicion is very real.
 
I found that this cartoon gives some much needed context:

Britt-cartoon-3-19

 I offer this happy little tune, courtesy of  PZ Myers of Pharyngula (Audio NSFW).