It was hot today!

Am I in Arizona? Someone needs to remind the weather that summer is over now.

Cooking

I very recently (in the past month or so) have been really interested in cooking. In the 3 years that Michelle and I have been married, I can count the number of times that I cooked dinner on 1 hand. And each time I cooked, dinner consisted of overdone scrambled eggs and underdone toast. I hated to cook. Cooking was the most stressful thing to me. Everything happened so quickly and I was never prepared. But I recently tried to make a couple things and it turned out ok which gave me a lot of cooking confidence. I made a decent batch of divinity and a decent batch of peanut butter fudge. Then Michelle and I saw Julie and Julia and I started making dinners. So far I've only got me feet wet with casseroles, but they have all turned out pretty well. Cooking is no longer stressful and I really enjoy it now. I'm going to crack open The Joy Of Cooking and try my hand at some of the fancier kinds of cooking. Occasionally I'll share some recipes that worked. Today, I'll share the easiest peanut butter fudge recipe in the world (from Alton Brown):

1 cup peanut butter (I recommend chunky to add texture)
1 cup butter
1 lb powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Microwave peanut butter and butter on high for 2 mins. Stir and microwave for another 2 mins on high and stir again. Add vanilla extract and (sifted) powdered sugar and mix into peanut butter/butter mixture. Pour mixture into lightly greased 8 X 8 inch pan and cover with wax paper and refrigerate until chilled. Slice into pieces and store in air tight container for up to 1 week.
***Warning: this recipe creates an insanely sweet fudge. I used about 3/4 lb of powdered sugar and it was still so sweet that you bypass the sugar high and go straight to sugar coma.

Easy peasy. I added melted chocolate to the top for a Reese's effect and it was pretty good.

Religulous

Bill Maher has made a less than flattering documentary about religion which he has cleverly titled Religulous. Maher admits in his documentary that his mother was Jewish, his father was Catholic. His family chose his father’s religion and he was raised Catholic, but he was only really Catholic when he wanted something from God. He asked his mother why they went to church while he was growing up and his mother responded with “that’s just what you did back then.” So according to his own confession, Maher is not religious. However, he understands the basic doctrines of Christianity and often quotes the Bible in his documentary, but he is to be taken less seriously than one who has truly investigated the claims of Christianity and chosen not to believe (like Bart Ehrman). While he harpoons all three monotheisms, he focuses most of his documentary on Christianity.
Maher believes that all religion is bad and needs to be eliminated before mankind can progress to our next intellectual stage. He gives some thought provoking reasons for this belief: religious fundamentalism results in war, religion leads to racism and a new type of class warfare in which classes are divided by belief instead of wealth, and religious creeds are crazy. He asks how anyone can believe that a second millennium b.c. religious mystic talked to God through a burning bush that wasn’t really burning, or that God impregnated a first century AD virgin teenager to give birth to His son who is also God, or that the Trinity is monotheistic. Maher, like most other modern critics of Christianity, falls victim to the logical fallacy of reductio ad absurdum in which he reduces the doctrines of Christianity to their simplest form and criticizes them as absurd. The same method can be used to make evolutionists look crazy. “Do you actually believe that the tree in your backyard, or your dog, or your body and your mind all came out of a bunch of rocks?” Of course evolutionary theory is more complex than that! An evolutionist has a right to get offended if I say that they are naïve, crazy, or just plain stupid to believe in something so preposterous. Christianity is the same way. If you reduce Christianity’s beliefs into their simplest form and then criticize Christians as stupid for believing them, then you commit the same offense as I just mentioned. And this is what Bill Maher does in Religulous. Most of Maher’s claims about Christianity can be refuted with a little common sense and independent thought.
Bill Maher is no better than Michael Moore. Both make pseudo-documentaries that support a conclusion which they’ve determined before they started. Both edit their documentaries to portray people on the fringe who make themselves and their organizations (in the case of Religulous, Christianity) look crazy and make the narrator/interviewer look intelligent. Both use hot-button issues in a spectacle of disingenuousness that becomes mere entertainment with no intellectual value. But don’t get me wrong; it is entertaining. Its entertaining like Favre’s retirement announcements and Kanye’s apologies: they’re fun to watch, but you just don’t take them very seriously. I enjoyed Religulous not as a documentarian look at religion, but as a representation of how some non-Christians view Christianity.

Americans and American History

It seems like every year a study comes out showing how abysmal Americans' knowledge of American history is. Jay Leno frequently show us how little we know in a humurous way with Jay Walking. We even make light of it with shows like Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader. Surveys of college students have been conducted that show how most college graduates know very little of our country's history. (Click here for an example) Here are some results from this study:
"Approximately 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 schools nationwide were given a 60-question, multiple-choice exam on basic knowledge of America’s heritage. Both years, the students failed. The average freshman scored 51.7% the first year and 51.4% the next. The average senior scored 53.2%, then 54.2%."

In response to this survey, I would like to take my own survey. Please indulge me and take my short 15 question quiz on American history and politics.


U.S. History Quiz
1.) Which came first, the Revolutionary War or the Civil War?
2.) What decade did the Civil War take place in?
3.) How many presidents have there been?
4.) Name the original thirteen colonies.
5.) Which came first, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution? (extra credit for naming the years that either were drafted)
6.) Name the branches of government.
7.) What was the Monroe Doctrine?
8.) How many amendments are there to the Constitution? (extra credit if you can describe them all)
9.) How many presidents have been shot? Assassinated?
10.) How long can a president serve? What are the prerequisites to become president?
11.) Who said “Give me liberty or give me death?”
12.) Who/what is America named after?
13.) On what ship did the Pilgrims sail to America?
14.) What significance is there to the date June 6, 1944?
15.) Who is the current commander-in-chief of the armed forces?

Music vs. Lyrics

Do you listen to the lyrics of a song, or do you listen to the beat/instruments/other aspects? Do you have a song that you love, but the lyrics are bad? One of my favorite songs of all time is Say Goodbye by Dave Matthews Band, but it is about how this guy is cheating with another guy's girlfriend. Its all about making love to a girl for one night and then she has to go back to her man the next day and they have to be just friends. The live versions are even better than the studio, but the lyrics are even worse. But I still love the song and it remains on my top 5 greatest songs of all time.
Can you disassociate the lyrics from a really good song? What songs do you love that have bad lyrics?

Meca-leca-hi-meca-hiney-ho.

Good news for all you Pee-Wee Herman fans
Here and here.

Happy Anniversary, Honey!!!

Today is Michelle's and my three year anniversary. Three years ago today we were standing in the gazebo at the Huntington Beach Hilton proclaiming our love for each other through marriage. A lot has happened in the last three years, the best thing is this little guy.




Michelle, if its possible I love you now more than I did then. I look forward to every day with you. I thank God every day for blessing me with you. I love you!