It's "The Gospel of Barnabas", supposedly written some 300-400 years after Barnabas was alive, so it's not exactly...well...gospel. Look: the Gospels were written decades after the events they describe but the ones that form the New Testament were written by the disciples. This book of Barnabas--dated no earlier than 400 AD--could not have been written by Barnabas himself.
And in fact scholars have dated the manuscript to a time after Mohammed formed the death cult.
This ain't gonna do jack shit to Christianity. I'm not going to believe anything the death cult has to say about my religion, the same way I'm not going to believe anything Democrats say about the motivations of Republicans.
* * *
The lede for this article is too wordy. It reads, "Many Muslims don't want there to be Christians living in Egypt".
Let me fix it for y'alls:
"Many Muslims don't want there to be Christians living."
I hope that helps.
* * *
Arse Technica whines about game balance in D3. I'm more worried about the server problems than game balance.
Speaking of which--this article claims that the barbarian is the weakest character class in the game--barbarian and monk--because they're melee-only and have no ranged attacks. I don't see it; but considering the situation I don't have a problem with characters being "overpowered".
Look: your character goes up against a slew of bad guys. For most of the game he has a mercenary along with him but the mercenary does perhaps 20% of the damage that the player character (PC) does. (20% is being generous.) In the course of the game the PC goes toe-to-toe with everything from the weakest underling to--I am told--Diablo himself...by himself.
Why shouldn't the character be a little overpowered? I'd rather have the PC be overpowered than die 50,000 times.
* * *
Someone who believes in nothing but her own power sees nothing wrong with forcing people who believe in something to violate their beliefs. That's what this boils down to.
The real test will be if Pelosi's policy forces imams to marry gays. I bet it won't, and I further bet the media will not say a word about the hypocrisy.
* * *
The media's not saying a word about Catholic organizations suing the government. They're keeping this real quiet because they don't want the average Democrat voter to know that Obama's "compromise" is anything but.
* * *
Kid does Tebow's pose during graduation, and is punished for it.
Question: would he have been similarly punished if he'd yelled "allahu ackbar"?
* * *
As promised in 2008, Obama's policies are leading to energy prices going up.
I mean, he said "energy prices would necessarily skyrocket" under his policies, and we're there, baby!
* * *
Associated Press has discovered that George Zimmerman is not a racist. Well, that's great. It's only taken them seven weeks to get on the same page as the rest of us.
* * *
I don't know what to do with this edit project.
The problem I've got is, the original draft was written with a font called "Galant", and at 10 pitch it's very readable. But it's not a universal font--not like Times New Roman is--so I changed the font throughout to TNR. There are also some licensing issues; when I've made PDFs in the past a copyright notice has croppeed up--over the font--so I hesitate to use it. This is a shame, because it's a really good font for a novel.
So I switched the font to TNR 10; now the text is too dense. It's hard to read in that size, especially for my "really need bifocals now" 45-year-old eyes. My more recent projects have all been composed in TNR 12 to good effect, so last night I started to change the body text to TNR 12.
I hate it.
It's not just that the text looks too big; it's screwing up my pagination. I have certain bits in the book where I represent information shown on flight displays or computer screens--where I use different fonts etc--and some of those ended up crossing page breaks, so I have the choice of leaving them that way, or inserting chunks of blank space into the manuscript.
I've been, therefore, led to a couple of realizations.
First, I'm going back to Galant. I like it, it's readable, it lets me put plenty of text on a single page, and it can be set to 10 pitch so it doesn't fuck up my pagination. If the editor doesn't like it, let him fix it.
Second, I'm going to see if I can define text styles so I can make this kind of change without having to manually go through all three hundred pages. (At least, for future changes like this.)
...actually, I'll be doing that in reverse order.
* * *
So I'm sitting here answering an e-mail from my choir director--practice has been cancelled again--and my cell phone starts ringing.
Me: "Why is my cell phone on?"
Not "who's calling?" or even "why would anyone be calling my cell?" but "Why is it even on?"
I didn't recognize the phone number, so I hit "ignore". It wasn't even from an area code I recognize. And everyone who has my cell number knows (or is supposed to know, at any rate) that I habitually leave the f-ing thing off and that calling me on the thing is fruitless unless I specifically say in advance that I'll have it turned on.
I don't even have voice mail set up on this thing, because generally it's for calling out, not receiving calls. I don't give out my cell phone number except to people who need it. (It's not even on my resume.) When I am asked for a cell phone number--such as, when I fill out an order on-line--I skip that. I give them my home phone number; they don't need my cell number.
Knowing all this as I do, then, it's pretty simple to figure that whoever was calling my cell phone was probably either A) dialing a wrong number, or B) trying to sell me something. Either way, I'm not interested.
And yes, I shut the thing off, and put it on the charger.
* * *
But before I can do any work on the novel, or anything else, I need to go to the bank. Why? Well, property taxes are due, that's why, and I've got to write a check for my quarter of the GOVERNMENT RENT. *sigh*
...my portion of the government rent is enough to cover the government rent Og pays on his house. Then again, Og doesn't live in a state that's been ruled by Democrats since the dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
And before I go to the bank I really should get a shower. I think I last bathed on Tuesday, which is really not all that long ago...but in a society where people generally bathe every day, that's bad enough. I don't know; it's not like I've been out digging ditches or anything. The most strenuous task I undertook on Wednesday was cooking a batch of chicken stuff. Otherwise I did nothing but work on editing the novel, and none of this required breaking a sweat.
Yet I'm habituated into bathing every day, and feel unendurably crummy if I have to go much longer than about 48 hours between showers.
I suppose I should get moving, then.