Rolling EyesEmojis

Facebook really needs a rolling eyes emoji / emoticon, especially in these ... trying times. Since they don't have one, I -- well, I kind of swiped an eyes emoji and turned it into rolling eyes. I don't know how to get it submitted as a "sticker" or emoji on facebook ... yet, so I'm putting it here.
gif 1 was done without a background. You can see the one eye trailing. I don't actually like it, but there it is. :

 gif 2 where each part of the animation has a white background, and you don't get the trailing :

----
Edited to add reasonable sized giff for Facebook comments:

Call It an Issue I Have With Women's Gymnastics

Okay, here goes: I got into a discussion with two women last night about women's gymnastics and … it's just better that I move my thought processes to my page, because it really was off-topic of that post. Or rather, move it to my blog. Because it's gonna be a long ride.

My women friends understandably support women's gymnastics and are … I really don't want to put words in their mouths, but they're audibly happy that the ladies performed so well, and are miffed at the poor coverage. They believe the women deserve respect. As I said, this is understandable. Because they're right. Those gymnasts do deserve respect and aren't getting their due, and I should have left my comments to my own devices page and my own topic.

Because, meanwhile, I am perpetually miffed at the sexism in the sport, and rather pervy sexism at that, both from the standpoint that the men get insufficient coverage, and the standpoint that men's gymnastics emphasizes “power and strength” whereas women's emphasizes “agility and flexibility”. Or as I like to phrase it, men's gymnastics emphasizes athleticism where women's emphasizes pretty girls dancing.

Please bear in mind, I do not *want* it to be that way. I *see* it as that way. And don't make the mistake of thinking that women getting more coverage is “reverse sexism”. It's actually *not* (in my considered opinion) a victory for women that women's gymnastics gets more attention, but another example of the sexism in sports overall, where men still make all the rules, and men like to look at pretty pixies; where the men on Sports Illustrated are football, baseball, basketball and hockey players, and the women are swimsuit models. (Not all inclusive, and I'm getting off-track. Sorry.)

But enough of the hyperbole. Let's look at the differences between the men's and women's programs, starting with the superficial:
Men wear a sleeveless, satiny (but sometimes just stretch cotton) leotard, with separate pants, on rings, high bar, parallel bars and pommel horse, and they wear the leotard with baggy shorts (covering the pelvis) on the floor and vault. Women wear shiny, sequined leotards with sleeves, with as much of the pelvis and legs exposed as is legally possible.
Women are heavily made up. Men? No.

Men are on average aged 20 to 24. Women are on average aged 16 to 20. This is only because they've prohibited anyone who hasn't turned 15 by the start of the Olympic year from competing*. In 1996, Kerry Strugg was the old woman of that group at 20. This is why I referred to them as “girls” above. And I'm not alone. Although he seems entirely fine with it, American coach John Geddert said “Without sounding condescending to young women, this is a little girl’s sport,” to the Washington Post on November 9, 2012 (and we'll each decide for ourselves whether you're being condescending or not, thanks.) Of course, it wasn't always that way. In the 1950s and 1960s (I can't find records for an Individual All-Around before 1952), the female all-around champions were aged 30, 21, 25, 22, 26, and 20, in order.

* I keep seeing that the age limit was raised to 16 in 1997, but I also saw an article that claimed that all of this year's Chinese girls meet the age requirements, but that same article listed one of those girls as 15.
Oh, and this year's US men are aged 23 through 29.

Men compete on 6 apparatuses: floor, vault, high bar, parallel bars, still rings and pommel horse. Women compete in 4 apparatuses: floor, vault, uneven bars and balance beam. The vault is pretty much equivalent for both today, though they may do different vaults and only have to compete within their genders. Once upon a time, however, the men had to vault the length of the apparatus, the women vaulted the width (that's at least one improvement). On the floor, the men move from tumbling run to tumbling run, taking small, controlled step sequences between, except when they stop to either balance on one foot, do a handstand or do leg flairs on the floor;
 the women make a tumbling move, then dance across the floor, then another tumbling move, then they preen and stick out their butts, et cetera.
Do women's gymnastics take athletic skill? Yes, absolutely and for sure. But it is hidden behind unnecessarily decorated with makeup and sequins and dance moves, which take away from that athletic skill. And the unfortunate fact that even though it takes an incredible amount of skill to jump from having one foot in front of the other on a four-inch wide beam and land in the exact same spot, it looks … kind of silly,

 especially in the middle of a routine. And especially compared to the flairs on the pommel horse. Although, yeah, scissor kicks look pretty silly, too.
And when you compare gymnastics to other sports, the differences are glaring. Even though the costuming in women's volleyball is ridiculous, the sport is the same as for men. They may not compete against each other, except in equestrian (where let's give the horses the credit they're due) but Archery is Archery, Cycling is Cycling and Water Polo is Water Polo. (Although, I'm not quite sure why the women's cycling road course is so much shorter than the men's or the women swim 800 m when the men swim 1500.) You can also contrast this to winter's figure skating, another heavily artistic sport, where, even though there certainly seem to be problems of sexism there (especially in the fondness for pixies), both the women and the men are required to show footwork as well as jumps. Mind you, I don't want to see the men dancing to the music and exaggeratedly sticking out their butts between tumbling runs. No, I'd like to see, and I think the sport would get more respect if, women's gymnastics rid itself of the prancing and preening. I'd also like to see collegiate women's gymnastics be the training ground for our Olympians that men's collegiate gymnastics now is, instead of the place Olympic girls go to retire.

I'd also like to see men's gymnastics get more air time, but that's a different topic.

Black Lives Matter vs All Lives Matter and Gay Pride vs Hetero Pride

We've all seen it: a movement comes up trying to right a wrong, and then, once it's popular enough, the counter-movement pops up. Once we saw enough blacklivesmatter hashtags, we started seeing alllivesmatter. That one didn't take long at all. We are seeing people asking, “When's heterosexual pride month?” “When's white history month?” and the oh-so-popular Men's Rights Movement, as if white, heterosexual males were somehow a persecuted class in need of protection. (News flash: you're not.)

Now, my liberal friends are saying that all of these counter-movements are an attempt to derail the progress of civil rights and equality. And the originators of these counter-movements may even be trying to do that, but the rank and file are probably thinking, “No...” (more later on what the rank-and-file are thinking.)

What brought me to this conclusion was a nearly random thought about the abysmal failure that is Title IX. Title IX (“title nine”) is a law that was designed to offer athletic opportunities to women in colleges and universities, but it hasn't exactly turned out that way. What Title IX states is that, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Laws being laws, there's probably more to the law than that, but... How this reads to me is that Federal funding of educational programs should be evenly distributed between programs for men and programs for women, without regard to co-ed activities. How it's actually been put into practice is that colleges and universities that receive federal funding have to have equal opportunities for men and for women. Which sounds great. Football alone has 105 players allowed on NCAA rosters, and the major teams do everything they can to fill all 105. After all, football is a big money maker. That should be lots of opportunities for women. But it's not. It seems to me that while Title IX demanded that colleges provide equal opportunities, it didn't really do a lot to fund those additional women's opportunities. So colleges still have limited funding, even with a “big money maker”. So to fund those 105 women's opportunities, plus the numbers provided by basketball, baseball and hockey, it seems they had to take the money from somewhere. So they made cuts: men's gymnastics, men's wrestling, men's rugby... Temple University recently cut the men's gymnastics program because it couldn't fund itself, despite all the money that comes from having a major NCAA Division I football team and basketball team. And cutting these men's sports also served to reduce the number of opportunities they had to provide to women. Look at all the money they saved!

That leaves conservatives thinking there are only so many opportunities to go around. So what are the Rank and File thinking when they spread “alllivesmatter”? They're probably thinking, “I need to protect what's mine, otherwise my job / rights / life will go the way of Temple Men's Gymnastics.” And truth be told, they're not entirely wrong. In some cases they are – entirely wrong, that is. We can fight for black lives without putting white lives at risk. We can teach police departments how to resist racism, and require background checks and psychological tests, and have them actually follow proper take-down procedures, and get rid of that archaic “fraternity” system where good cops cover for bad cops' bad behavior, without letting real criminals get away, and without putting police lives at risk. In fact, as the sniper in Dallas shows, digging heels in and refusing to change the way police departments do business puts police lives at risk. It puts the lives of good police at risk. In the same way, recognizing a gay person's right to marry, right to be considered next-of-kin to his or her significant other, right to hold and keep a job, will not reduce a heterosexual's right to marry, right to be considered next-of-kin to his or her SO, or right to hold and keep a job.

So the question remains: who's starting all of these counter-movements? Well, if we create opportunities for non-privileged people (gays, women, blacks, latinx, transsexuals, …) without reducing the opportunities for white heterosexual males, what is the cost? Well, obviously initially, the cost is to business owners. You know, the dreaded One Percent. Yep, them again. See, creating a full-time, cost-of-living providing job costs money to a company … until such time as that wage-earner starts spending that money, and it all gets funneled back into the economy. But what costs money to a company costs profit to the CEO and stock holders, and despite the requirements of their jobs, they are apparently not forward thinking. And they're certainly not in it for the good of the economy at large.

Pride Bracelet

In the beginning of June, a store (that shall remain nameless) started selling stretch bracelets out of a little box decorated in pride colors (the box was decorated), with the text "#loveislove" on the side of the box. And I thought, "Ooo. I should get one of those," partly for myself and partly to stand with Orlando. So I looked through and looked through, and not one of the bracelets had the beads in the right order. And some of them may have even missed a color or two entirely. (Once I saw that they weren't in the right order, I stopped paying that close attention.) I tried looking at local crafting stores, but while they sold some premade bracelets, none were in pride colors. I tried the nearest city's gay bookstore, but it's no longer the store it once was.
So I tried going to a local beading store. The woman there sat with me fishing through the morass of beads in three different bowls until we found enough beads in the six pride colors to make the bracelet pictured above.
It turned out so easy (though it was time consuming fishing for the right beads), and so affordable that I thought I'd check etsy to see whether anyone was already doing this. (I hadn't checked ahead of time because I didn't want to wait for delivery.) Unfortunately, a lot of people are already selling pride bracelets, some of which are very much like the one above. Hey, I never claimed it was all that original an idea.

Why Do My Camera's Pictures Look Like An Oil Painting?

I bought a new camera this past weekend. I had thought I was going to need over a thousand dollars to get a camera which could take really large-sized pictures at an eight-times optical zoom, but this thing has the 8x zoom, and the large picture size is 5152 x 3864, which is huge. So I bought it on Sunday morning, and to my delight, the thing came with a fully charged battery. Or maybe a mostly charged batter, because unfortunately, it only lasted 2 hours of a 6-hour event.
Anyway, here's the real problem: When I zoom to 100% magnification on the pictures I've taken, they look like an oil painting. Of course, I don't have a monitor with 5152 x 3864 pixels, but part of the point of that size is that I can leave space around the subject and then crop to my subject. And the old camera had some really good 100% magnification.
Here's an example of a picture taken with the new camera, cropped to 1024 x 800.

That doesn't look so bad, but when you click on the picture, you'll see what I'm talking about. Or you should.

I've chosen a comparable picture for comparison.
Here's that picture scaled down to 1208 x 800:

And the new camera's whole picture scaled down to 1067 x 800

(Why they have different ratios, I do not know. That stuff should be standard, so sez I.)
Now, here's the old camera, without scaling, cropped to 1208 x 800:

Mind you, the old camera doesn't have 5152 x 3864, so here's a picture from the new camera, scaled to
 3008 x 2000, which is the highest pixel dimensions the old camera can do, and then cropped to 1067 x 800:

Note on the subject matter: I usually dislike posting photos of people without their permission(s). But when you're a college, or professional athlete, competing in an event in a large stadium, which is broadcast on national television, you don't have that same expectation of privacy as the guy who happens to be shopping at the local supermarket.
Note on the post format: I was originally going to put in a table of the photographs, with a row of new camera pictures and a row of old camera pictures and the columns being the full picture, a scaled picture and a cropped picture, or some such, but it doesn't seem like that would really elucidate anything.

A New Take On Baptism?

It's that time of year again. In early June, our church holds a baptism service, which means our pastor has lost his ever-lovin' mind. Take this week's sermon title as an example: he titled it “Baptism and Communion”, and in the 40 minute sermon, he spent 40 minutes talking about why everyone needs to be baptized. See a problem there? Oh, sure, it was communion Sunday. We have a communion Sunday every month (I think; my schedule doesn't let me attend every month). But last month, they didn't title the sermon “Share … and Communion” or the month before that “Contagious Inviters … and Communion”, because they recognized that Communion, while part of the service, was not part of the sermon. But for some reason, this week they felt the needed to include Communion in the sermon title, even though they wouldn't actually be talking about it. Reminds me of last year, when he actually raised the question, “Does a person need to be baptized to be right with God?” and he would not answer the question. Hint: The answer is no. But something about Baptism turns our pastor, who I otherwise genuinely like, into an advertising guru, or possibly a grifter, shilling his shell game.

My pastor is not alone in this phenomenon. A few years back, I was … not happy … with some aspects of my church, including this attitude about baptism, so I decided to look for another church. I went to church after church after church in my area, and they all said the same thing: “You need to be baptized. Oh, baptism isn't a requirement for salvation, but you need to be baptized.” Really? Why? No one can actually give a satisfactory answer for that. They just say, “It's a sign of obedience.” But is it, really?

Churches, well, Protestant churches, are fond of quoting The Great Commission: “Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:19) Okay. I actually believe the Bible. I believe that it's the Inspired Word of God, and good for teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness. (2 Timothy 3:16) What I don't believe is that God requires us to climb into a pool of water and have someone shove our heads under while that person recites the magic words (“I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit”).

One of the things the pastor talked about during his sermon was what he called, “a brief history lesson.” During Old Testament times, or The Days of the Prophets for those who don't recognize two Testaments, in order for a gentile to become a Jew, he would submit to circumcision, to obedience to the law, to a sacrifice (probably of a bull, ram, lamb, goat, doves, what have you), and to a ceremonial washing. Today, to become a member of the Church, a lot of churches gloss over obedience -- yes, they say you should be obedient, but they don't really talk much about The Law, they no longer demand that a person not have committed adultery, or that the person not be divorced -- and they certainly don't demand an animal sacrifice or circumcision. If those aren't necessary, why do they still insist on a ceremonial washing?

I don't like literalism. I do, however, like understanding. The Greek word “βαπτίζοντες” (past-participle of βαπτίζω) means “to dip under, to immerse, to soak, to sink, to wash”. To a literalist, that means to cover the person in water. Okay, you want to be a literalist, then why would you say “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” instead of their actual names, “I AM” (אֶהְיֶה or EHYEH or Yahweh), “Jesus” (ישוע or Y'shua) and … well, I don't know the Holy Spirit's name, but is that really why they don't use the others? When we talk about how Jesus said, “Ask anything in my name...” he didn't mean that saying “In Jesus' Name, amen” at the end of a prayer will magically make it come true. He meant that if the prayer is in accord with his name, with his identity, then God will do it for you*. (This does not mean that only prayers God was going to do anyway will come true, which would make prayer ... redundant.) Moreso, if you're going to be a literalist, the Bible doesn't say, “Be baptized,” it says TO baptize. So the impetus would then not be on the members of the congregation, or new believers to submit to baptism, it would be on the pastors, teachers and missionaries to baptize people. Maybe that's why they push it so hard. Mind you, there are many, many reasons I don't like literalism.

Because, no, I do not believe God has commanded missionaries to shove people under water while spouting The Magic Words.

Jesus said a lot of things while He was alive (one of which was not, “Always capitalize when referring to me in the third person,” but I digress). He said, “You must be born again.” He called himself a vine, a gate and a shepherd. He called his followers sheep several times. None of these were actually meant literally (and when He said, “sheep,” He did it in love). No, you do not need to crawl back into your mother's womb and come back out again to be a Christian. Many Christian faiths even believe that when he said, “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” he was not speaking literally, that he did not transform crackers and grape alcohol into human DNA, while still standing in front of his disciples.

So, maybe, just maybe, when Jesus said, after his death, to “go and make disciples of all the nations, βαπτίζοντες them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” what he meant was not, “go and make disciples of all the nations, immersing them in water and saying, 'in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit',” but, “go and make disciples of all the nations, immersing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” immersing them, not in water, but in the very identities of who the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are (figuratively, the name). After all, it seems to me that in Jesus' teaching, the state of a person's heart is far more important than outward signs of religiosity.

So that's why I've made the decision to not be baptized as an adult, not because I'm unwilling to be obedient, but because my reading of the Bible tells me that it's not an issue of obedience. I haven't done a search to find whether this is a new idea or not, but I did go looking for a church not that long ago, and couldn't find one that believed in the Bible but didn't believe that baptism was necessary. So call me a trendsetter, call me a trailblazer, hey, you can call me irresponsible, since it doesn't matter what you call me. But seriously, don't judge me. And don't judge others while you're at it. If you want to hold a baptism service, you go ahead. If you want to be baptized, you go ahead. And if I don't, then you might want to consider that I'm not the one being disobedient or hard-hearted.

* This is not a guarantee. It's a truism. There are several reasons why God's answer to a prayer is or seems to be "no". Of course, most of those can probably be summed up by, "It's not in accordance with His identity, at least not right now."

What do you call 5 politicians at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.

 Okay, so it's not exactly William Shakespeare

We asked 2016's Presidential Hopefuls to answer this question.
Why did the chicken cross the road?

Hillary Clinton

Bernie Sanders


Martin O'Malley


Lincoln Chaffee


Ben Carson

Ted Cruz


Marco Rubio


Rand Paul


John Kasich


Carly Fiorina


Jeb Bush


Mike Huckabee


Rick Santorum


Chris Christie


Rick Perry


Scott Walker


Jim Gilmore


Donald Trump


Jim Webb