One more. :-)

Ok, this will be the last one of these for awhile. *grin*

A census taker approaches a house and asks the woman who answers the door,"How many children do you have, and what are their ages?" Woman: "I have three children, the product of their ages are 36, the sum of their ages are equal to the address of the house next door." The census taker walks next door, comes back and says, "I need more information." The woman replies, "I have to go, my oldest child is sleeping upstairs." Census taker: "Thank you, I have everything I need." Question: What are the ages of each of the three children?

Another one (just for fun)

Ok...this one's a little tougher, but that makes it more fun right!

There are 3 black hats and 2 white hats in a box. Three men (we will call them A, B, & C) each reach into the box and place one of the hats on his own head. They cannot see what color hat they have chosen. The men are situated in a way that A can see the hats on B & C's heads, B can only see the hat on C's head and C cannot see any hats. When A is asked if he knows the color of the hat he is wearing, he says no. When B is asked if he knows the color of the hat he is wearing he says no. When C is asked if he knows the color of the hat he is wearing he says yes and he is correct. What color hat and how can this be? There is no play on words and there are no tricks. If I used had instead of has it is purely accidental.

*note: There's not "trick". It's a logic puzzle.

Fun Riddle

Punctuate the following so it makes sense:
"That that is is that that is not is not is not that it it is."

Convicting?

Think about it.



UPDATE: If you can't see the video this morning, you're not alone. Apparently the "Embed" option on YouTube has gone screwy. Check back later in the day or just go here

The HORROR of Blimps (hilarious)

Last week while traveling I stopped at a Zany Brainy store and saw that they had a blimp for sale. It's called Airship Earth, and it's a great big balloon with a map of the Earth on it, and two propellers hanging from the bottom. You blow up the balloon with helium put batteries in it, and you have a radio control indoor blimp.

I'd seen these things for sale in Sharper Image catalogs for $60-$75. At Zany Brainy it was on clearance for $15. What a deal!

Last night my wife was playing tennis and it was just my daughter and I at home. I bought a small helium tank from a party store, and last night we put the blimp together.

Let me tell you, it's quite a blimp. It's huge. The balloon has like a 3 ft diameter.

We blew it up with the tank attached the gondola with the propellers, and put in batteries.

Then we balanced the blimp for neutral buoyancy with this putty that came with it, so it hangs in the air by itself neither rising nor falling.

It was easy and fun, and then I blew up another balloon and made Mickey Mouse helium voices for my daughter.

My three year old girl loved it. We flew the blimp all over the house, terrorized the dog, attacked the fish tank, and the controls were so easy my daughter could fly.

Let's face it, blimps are fun.

Alas, the fun had to end and my daughter had to go to sleep. I left the blimp floating in my office downstairs, my wife came home, and we went to bed, and slept the sleep of the righteous.

At this point it is important to know that my house has central heating. I have it configured to blow hot air out on the ground floor and take it in at the second floor to take advantage of the fact that heat rises.

The blimp which was up until this moment a fun toy here embarked on a career of evil. Using the artificial convection of my central heating, the blimp stealthily departed my office. It moved silently through the living and drifted to the staircase. Gliding wraithlike over the staircase it then entered the bedroom where my wife and I lay sleeping peacefully.

Running silently, and gliding six feet or so above the ground on invisible and tiny air currents it approached the bed.

In spite of it's noiseless passage, or perhaps because of it, I awoke. That doesn't really say it properly. Let me try again.

I awoke, the way you awake at 2:00 AM when your sleeping senses suddenly tell you without reason that the forces of evil on converging on you.

That still doesn't do it. Let me try one more time.

I awoke the way you awake when you suddenly know that there is a large levitating sinister presence hovering towards you with menacing intent through the maligant darkness.

Now sometimes I do wake up in the middle of the night thinking that there are large sinister and menacing things floating out of the darkness to do me and mine evil. Usually I open my eyes, look and listen carefully, decide it was a false alarm, and go back to sleep.

So, the fact that I awoke in such a manner was not all that unusual.

On this occasion I awoke to the sense that there was a large menacing presence approaching me silently out of the gloom, so I opened my eyes, and there it was! A LARGE SILENT MENACING PRESENCE WAS APPROACHING ME OUT OF THE GLOOM, AND IT COULD FLY!!!

Somewhere in the control room of my mind a fat little dwarf in a security outfit was paging through a Penthouse while smoking a cigar with his feet up on the table, watching the security monitors of my brain with his peripheral vision. Suddenly he saw the LARGE SILENT SINISTER MENACING FLOATING PRESENCE coming at me, and he pulled every panic switch and hit every alarm that my body has. A full decade's allotment of adrenaline was dumped into my bloodstream all at once. My metabolism went from "restful sleep mode" to HOLY SHIT! FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE OR DIE!!!! mode" in a nanosecond. My heart went from twenty something beats per minute to about 240 even faster.

I always knew this was going to happen. I always knew that skepticism and science were mere psychological decorations and vanities. Deep in our alligator brains we all know that the world is just chock full of evil and monsters and sinister forces aligned against us, and it is only a matter of time until they show up. Evolution know this, too. It knows what to do when the silent terror comes at you from out of the dark.

When 50 million years worth of evolutionary survival instinct hits you all at once flat in the gut at 200 mph it is not a pleasant sensation.

Without volition I screamed my battle cry (which is indistinguishable to the sound a little girl makes when you drop a spider down her dress (not that I'd know what that sounds like,) and lept out of bed in my underwear.

I struck the approaching menace with all my strength and almost fell over at the total lack of resistance that a helium balloon offers when you punch the living shit out of it with all the strength that sudden middle of the night terror produces.

It's trajectory took it straight into the ceiling fan which whipped it about the room at terrifying velocity.

Seeking a weapon, I ripped the alarm clock out of its plug and hurled it at the now High Velocity Menacing presence (breaking the clock and putting a nice hole in the wall.)

Somehow at this moment I suddenly realized that I was fighting the blimp, and not a monster. It might have been funny if I didn't truly and actually feel like I was having a legitimate heart-attack.

On quivering legs I went to the bathroom and literally gagged into the toilet while shaking uncontrollably with the shock of the reaction I'd had.

Unbelievably, both my wife and daughter had completely slept through the incident. When I decided that I wasn't having a heart attack after all I went back into the bedroom and found the blimp which had somehow survived the incident.

I took it to the walk in closet and released it inside where it floated around with the air currents released from the vents in there. I closed the door, this sealing it in, and went back to bed. About 500 years later I fell asleep.


***

At about 7 am my wife awoke. She had been playing tennis and wasn't aware that we have assembled the blimp the previous evening, and that is was now floating around the the walk-in closet that she approached.

The dynamic between the existing air currents of the closet and the suction caused by opening the door was just enough to give the blimp the appearance of an Evil Sinister Menace flying straight towards her.

This time the blimp did not survive the encounter, nor almost, did I, as I had to explain to my very angry spouse what motivated me to hide an evil lurking presence in the closet for her to find at 7 am.

I can order replacement balloons on the internet but I don't think I will.

Some blimps are better off dead.

Ron Paul

This is a really good web page that brings together what Ron Paul stands for. The more I hear about him, the more I believe he's the kind of leader this country needs.










Brief Overview of Congressman Paul’s Record:

• He has never voted to raise taxes.


• He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.


• He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.


• He has never voted to raise congressional pay.


• He has never taken a government-paid junket.


• He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
  


• He voted against the Patriot Act.


• He voted against regulating the Internet.


• He voted against the Iraq war.
  


• He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.


• He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.

Bleh

Run down, sinus drainage down the back of my throat, sore throat, headache, stiff neck.

paging Dr. Plattner, paging Dr. Plattner.

*sigh*

Elusive trait

1 Timothy 6:6 But godliness with contentment is great gain.

Contentment has got to be one of the most elusive traits in our society today. Heck, capitalism relies on DIScontentment in order to thrive. We are incessantly bombarded with the messages of more, better, improved until we are compelled to go buy the latest and greatest.

Think through your current possessions. Mentally put them in either the categories of needs or wants. It seems like 90% of what we're burdened with would fall into the wants category.

What does this say about us as God's people? I'm not sure really, but I don't think it's all that good.

Nevertheless, not I...

Have you ever wondered what the balance is, in a Christians life, between self-discipline and Christ-reliance. You have that "I should do more" feeling, but you know that of yourself you can do nothing.

Part of us wants to say, "I just need to 'buckle down'...try harder...be more disciplined", and yet we know that fruit doesn't come from discipline. The Word doesn't call them "Fruits of the disciplined life", it calls them "Fruits of the Spirit".

At the same time there is this sense that you can't just sit back, relax, and let the Spirit produce fruit either. There should be a striving for the mark of the prize...

Sometimes I struggle with the balance between those concepts.

Here are the two ditches I find myself slipping into.1. The Self-Discipline ditch: I decide that I can do this, so I buckle down, and lo-and-behold, I do it. I do it. I think that ditch is pretty obvious. I fail to give God the glory.

2. The Christ's power ditch: I know I can't do it of myself, but I recognize that Christ has the power to work it in me, so I give it a shot, remembering that it is Christ's work. Then I fail. Then I tell myself, well...I guess Christ wasn't ready for me to________ (you fill in the blank). I can end up putting blame on Christ.Thoughts on a practical balance between those two ditches. Scripture references would be appreciated.

Lions vs Buffalo vs Crocodile then vs Buffalo again.

Absolutely AMAZING.

sigh

A life lived in fear isn't much of a life at all.

When writer Elena Lappin flew to LA, she dreamed of a sunkissed, laid-back city. But that was before airport officials decided to detain her as a threat to security ...

Ron Paul @ the National Right to Life Convention

Ron Paul on Entitlements

Ron Paul on the Second Amendment

Ron Paul '08

I don't necessary agree with EVERYthing he stands for, but I think he's close. Real close.

How to help the poorest

How to help the poorest
Springing the traps

Aug 2nd 2007
From The Economist print edition

THIS slip of a book is set to become a classic of the “how to help the world's poorest” genre. Its author, Paul Collier, an Oxford economics professor, has spent 30-odd years puzzling mainly over sub-Saharan Africa and trying to work out why so many of its 48 countries have become basket cases. Crammed with statistical nuggets and common sense, his book should be compulsory reading for anyone embroiled in the hitherto thankless business of trying to pull people out of the pit of poverty where the “bottom billion” of the world's population of 6.6 billion seem irredeemably stuck.

Mr Collier reckons that most of the bottom billion live in 58 countries, 70% of them in Africa and most of the rest in Central Asia. Since the 1990s, more than 4 billion people in the poor world have begun to move out of the depths of poverty, some of them very fast. But the countries where the poorest live have barely grown at all since the 1970s.

Most of them are caught, as Mr Collier describes it, in one or more of four traps: wars, in which 73% of the poorest have been caught at one time or another; natural resources gone wrong (think of Nigeria and its oil), which accounts for about 30%; landlocked with bad neighbours (look at Chad); and the bad-governance-in-a-small-country trap (too many to name).

What comes most convincingly out of Mr Collier's book is that aid from the guilt-ridden West is not the answer, or at least not the main answer, and certainly not aid as it has so often been disbursed. For sure, aid has not been useless. “A reasonable estimate is that over the past thirty years [aid] has added one percentage point to the annual growth rate of the bottom billion,” he writes. “Aid has been a holding operation preventing things from falling apart.”

But Mr Collier is sceptical about the mantra of doubling aid to Africa, as the rich countries' leaders grandly promised at Gleneagles in Scotland two years ago. “The statistical evidence generally suggests that aid is subject to what is called ‘diminishing returns’,” he writes. Take Nigeria. Over the past 30 years or so, it has received some $280 billion “with depressingly little to show for it”. Plainly, vast dollops of aid have gone down the drain. In one of many statistical cameos, he cites a study showing that only 1% of €20m of aid sent to Chad actually reached the rural health clinics that were its intended target.

The rich world should concentrate, he argues, not on throwing aid at Africa, whether in budget support or projects, but on taking measures to encourage growth, above all through improving trade. The poor billions of East Asia have begun to race out of poverty not because of aid (very few received much) but because the conditions were created for their countries' economies to grow.

Mr Collier has an array of suggestions, all of them sensible, though some are unlikely to be taken up soon. For instance, he makes a bold case for military intervention to restore order in failing states (like Somalia); “the typical cost of a civil war”, he calculates, is “around $64 billion.” He also lists a raft of laws that should be enacted by Western governments, and of charters, mainly for poor countries to sign up to, that would provide a framework for setting things on the right track. Five suggested charters—for natural resources revenues, for democracy, for budget transparency, for post-conflict situations, and for investment—set out the sort of norms which, if adhered to by rich governments and poor ones, would help hoist the poorest out of their traps.

In the past two years, two famously opposing clarion calls, one from the aid-loving left, the other from the aid-is-always-wasted sceptical right, have been trumpeted. The one, Jeffrey Sachs's “The End of Poverty”, exaggerates the value of aid, especially in the massive dollops he proposes. The other, William Easterly's “The White Man's Burden”, rightly mocks the delusions of the aid lobby but exaggerates the negative aspect. Mr Collier, though tending towards the second view, steers a masterly course between the two.

A-MAZ-ING

Law of Supply & Demand

I'd encourage you to read up on what's happening in the Zimbabwe economy right now. It's terribly tragic.

breathless

I love cars. I love driving cars. I love looking at cars. I love reading about cars. I love cars. It's true.

A big high five to the first person who correctly identifies this car. It's just being introduced into the United States by a company that hasn't had a US presence since 1995. I think it's beautiful. Opinions? What's your "most beautiful car ever"?