Truly, my wife will miss David Tennant.  I never imagined her becoming a Doctor Who fan, but Tennant pulled her in and kept her there long enough for her to get hooked.

But he is bowing out, soon to be replaced by Matt Smith.  If you’ve not heard of Matt Smith, no worries, looks like he hasn’t done much TV work just yet, though he does have a bit of a stage career.  Coincidentally, he appeared on Secret Diary of a Call Girl.  Perhaps an encounter with Billie Piper led him to helm the TARDIS.

Knowing nothing of his work, I can’t speculate on how he’ll be as the Doctor.  Guess we’ll find out in 2010.

We are getting closer to seeing how they’re going to get around the 12 regenerations limit, though circumventing it seems a mere plot point.

Catholics are cool.  They get to wear ornate outfits, exclude women, and operate tax free.  Well, okay, that’s most recognized religions.  But leave it to the Catholics to make decrees stating that homosexual practices will lead to the destruction of humanity.

I suppose that could be true if heterosexuality died out over time, but the heteros would have to be giving birth to huge numbers of homos in order for there to ever be enough of an imbalance to threaten the survival of mankind.

And even then, the homos would have to swear off any form of parenthood via adoption, insemination, futuristic self-fertilization, and the good ol’ “drunk donor” method.  In order for humanity to die out, everybody would have to decide that breeding is simply not desirable.  

Are there any indications that such is the case?  No.  Not at all.  The world population continues to grow even though “they” are among us.  GLBT couples fight for the right to adopt and are made spectacles when they have children.  In fact, the only people threatening the continuing existence of humanity are priests with their vows of heterocelibacy.  

But at least the Catholics have tempered their opposition somewhat.  It’s now okay to be gay as long as you’re not gay with somebody else.

Joel on Software posted a nice little CSS tip yesterday about how to get IE to do image scaling that doesn’t look like 8-bit interpretive art.

I instantly started hitting the sheets of my various sites to add this in.  So far, so good!

I was stumbling through six degrees of LJ Friends pages and ended up on madamewoselle’s YouTube site where I sat down to watch Palin Rally, Penn State 08.

There’s a guy in there, wears glasses, chokes when challenged to contrast Palin’s supposed down-home nature with Cindy McCain’s uptown girl persona.  Yeah, I work with that guy.

And now I have to live with the knowledge that he had nothing other than campaign soundbites as his defense for supporting the McCain/Palin candidacy.

You are obligated to visit A BeTaMaXMaS in order to watch a virtual TV carrying nothing but the programming of XMaS’s of yore.

I’ve been a big fan of isnoop.net’s Universal Package Tracking interface.  You punch in a tracking number from any shipper and it maps the results to a Google map so you can see exactly where your stuff is sitting.

Apparently, the UPT became popular enough to spin off into its own site, because it is now Boxoh.com.  

Those with a healthy sense of paranoia won’t balk too much at handing out their package tracking numbers.  Those with an unhealthy sense of paranoia should probably just stick to using the courier hosted tracking sites.

I recently received some winter riding gear from Nashbar with the hopes of putting it to use on the 22nd (anyone interested in a November ride through the PA grand canyon?).  Bib pants, a base layer shirt, and a warm cycling jacket were the order of the day.

But also in the package were three sample packets of Excedrin Back & Body.  The included insert shows two women riding a tandem bike with the words “Keep pain off your horizon” floating just over the front tire.

While I’m all for free pharmaceuticals, I have to admit that I laughed over the fact that back pain is so prevalent in Nashbar’s clientele that they (and Excedrin) feel that their customer base has a high likelihood of purchasing back pain medicine.

I can’t think of a time that I’ve had back pain after riding my recumbents.  I must be doing this cycling thing wrong.

I have no animosity toward upright bikes, but I do think it’s funny that they sent a recumbent guy back pain pills.

I was making some mac ‘n cheese tonight, watching the pot of water heat up just before the point of boiling.  All along the bottom of the pot, small bubbles of air formed and held steady spots while even smaller bubbles danced between them.  Then, as often occurs, the larger pockets released and rose to the surface of the water where they then swirled and joined with other similar pockets.

As I observed all of this, I thought about the complexity of everything I had just witnessed and realized that, in some ways, my atheism is just as “faith” based as most people’s belief in a higher power.

Some believe that God must exist because our world is so incredibly complex.  They can’t conceive of any of this happening on its own without guidance from one infinitely powerful.  I, however, can’t believe that any being could be so infinitely powerful as to conceive of the rules required to govern the behavior of heated water.  That is, I can’t conceive of any being capable of building systems of such complexity.

Speaking of religion, I was reading an article today about a local man who recently sold a rather extensive collection of Nazi correspondence relating to the Holocaust.  One of the reasons he started his collection was that he wanted tangible evidence in order to refute those who claim the Holocaust never happened.  This is “speaking of religion” because I thought it bizarre that people would rather believe in the divinity of Christ, who has no direct descendents that we’re aware of and whose existence is no more corporeal than, say, Harry Potter’s, yet they would sooner believe that than believe a Holocaust survivor standing in their presence.

Damn, this better be some good mac ‘n cheese.

When did this become the Star Wars blog?  No clue.  I apologize.  I could talk about Obama and the new dawn and why I think we’re in dire need of a community organizer, but no, I’m going to post this thing I just made up:

“Hey baby, from back there, I thought these were just small moons, but damn girl!  These are space stations!”

I dump crap like that on Brandy all the time, just to make her cringe.  But of course, this being the internet, there are lots of other folks who have mined this territory.  Some of my favs…

• I may look like an Ewok, but I’m all Wookie where it counts, baby.
• Date, or date not — there is no ‘let’s just friends be’.
• Honey, you’ve been looking for love in Alderaan places!

Just Collin
Originally uploaded by ratsinis

Oh look how clever I am! I made a lolcat reference in order to introduce my son to the world!

Okay, truth be told, I fucking LOVE lolcats, but even I am unwilling to put a caption on my child’s photo using a large outlined Impact font.

Anyway, yeah, kid #2. Collin Alexander.