I always wanted to be a sommelier

You know which wines go best with which foods, and you can make New York City's finest sommelier feel like a kid at a keg party. You wanna take that Emeril guy and beat him with a stick, but really - you've got more class than that. What people love: You know the best restaurants and what their specialties are. What people hate: Every waiter in town wants to mangle your pretentious ass.
What Kind of Elitist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I will say that I'm a bit surprised that I didn't end up with the "Book and Language Snob" result. Guess I just put more emphasis on food then I do on my books.

(Via Reverend Mike's)

Christ, Jews, the Resurrection and the Church

I came across this post via a link to their website at Spare Change(see God & Bush blogroll).
Jared puts forth the thesis that prove of the resurrection lies in the very existance of the church itself.

But something unique happened after Jesus’ death, something completely unexpected and inconceivable. His followers kept following. It makes absolutely no sense. Nobody follows a dead messiah, because, as was mentioned above, a dead messiah was not a messiah after all. If Jesus’ life ended for good on the cross, he was not who he said he was. Or, at the least, he was not who his followers believed he was. What should have happened after Jesus’ death is the scattering of his followers, or perhaps their attaching themselves to one of Jesus’ brothers or something. You don’t keep saying a dead man was the messiah. The thought is inconceivable. Again: the idea of a messiah who dies wasn’t really a viable option in first century Jewish messianic ideology. Nothing can really explain the extraordinary turn of events in the years following Jesus’ death.

Nothing, that is, but the resurrection.

- Thinklings: The Resurrection

While I agree with the premise of the argument I don't think it would be as effective as he seems to believe. First and foremost, most people don't have extensive knowledge of first century jewish messianic ideology. This is something to help solidify the faith of someone that's already crossed over, not to bring new people into the Church.

BTW, read the comments to get some of the possible arguments against this along with some nonsensical comments.

Version 3.0

I've been updating the site design over the past few months. Making little adjustments here and there. It started with the site icon and moved on from there. And today it comes to the biggest changes. The new site design took a lot longer to do than I had hoped due to work and various other events in life.

To see the old designs, you can look here:

• First design, back when I was on blogger. (Version 1.0)
• When I switched to MT in October of 2002. Yeah, it's been that long since I changed the design in any major way. (Version 2.0)

I've taken the time to test this new site with IE, Netscape, Opera, Mozilla and Firefox on Mac, Windows and Linux. I would like to ask anyone that has a problem with the site design to leave a comment describing the problem and the system they're using. However, I'd like to remind everyone of the increasingly public issues with IE and would like to say that there's only one way you should go at this point.

Damned?

Well, it's been awhile since I took a quiz. This quiz has some good news in it, if I actually took any of these quizes serious to begin with. . .

Are You Damned?
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

(Via I am Jack's Restless Thoughts)

News for junkies?

Noticed this little plug over in "Into the Ether." A new source for all us news junkies has arisen.

Well, that means there's another place for us all to waste time reading every day. About time, I've been getting tired of Drudge.

And I really need to post to the Ether. It's strange, before I signed up to write in it I always had something that I thought would fit perfectly in a sideblog. Now, I'm blanking on it about as much as what I want to write for the site would take me way to much time.

Early Wake Up Call

Someone decided to ring the doorbell and bound on my door this morning at 5 'til 7am this morning. Normally, I'd be a bit ticked but today I'd like to thank whoever that did it. Whoever they are saved me from a ticket for parking on the street that's getting "cleaned" today.

Whoopi gets dropped

Well, it looks like Slim-Fast is realizing, along with most of the rest of the country, that Whoopi Goldberg should no longer have celeb status in this country by dropping her from their ads Now let's just hope that she continues on her current path to oblivion.

Dead Routers

Well, we had quite a storm come through Louisville last night. Heavy rain, 60-70 MPH wind gusts and more. . . This storm ended up knocking power out to nearly 90,000 people and that includes me. Power only came back on this morning around 7:15am after going out around 8:30 last night. This happened to be just as I was finishing cooking a late dinner. The whole deal made me miss the days I had natural gas appliances to cook with in the kitchen.

However, the real fun part is somehow my Linksys WAP got fried. It was working fine last night as the UPS kept my network up for nearly two hours after the power went out. But this morning, when I came in to power everything back up, the cable modem, my VoIP phone adapters, and everything else lit up. But the WAP just stayed dark and remains so.

Now, before anyone thinks I'm really complaining too much over this, I know I'm lucky. I'm not one of the individuals that had a tree come through their house. I'm not the guy that got stuck in his car when a phone poll crashed down on him. And I wasn't in a wreck or anything due to the street and stop lights being out all over the city. In a way, the storm actually saved me a little money by allowing me to notice the street cleaning signs for today after the storm had passed when I went and talked to one of my neighbors. But it just stinks when my livelihood right now, as limited as it is, is based on me having a network connection and I don't have the cash to replace the device at this point.

The only bright spot in regards to the device is I bought it at Best Buy and I'm in the habit of getting the replacement warranty on things I purchase there. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the receipts for the purchase. Hopefully I'll figure something out. . .

Rash of comment spamming

Has anyone else noticed an increase in comment spamming as of late? In the past three days I've deleted literally over 1000 comments that were directed to a grand total of three sites. All three sites don't even resolve either.

The real joy is that they are either spoofing IPs or have invested a bunch of machines to do this as I haven't seen a single IP as a primary source for any of the current spam trend yet. At least I've taken the time to make sure MT-Blacklist is up-to-date. I just can't imagine deleting that many comments manually.

God & Bush II

Ok, I've fixed and updated the previous entry on God & Bush based on the comments given to that post. There's a few more to add to the list at this point.

Everyday Thoughts Collected
Fidler On The Roof
My Domestic Church
Stark Raving Mad
This Liberal

If you have any sites to add, just leave a comment or let me know via e-mail.