Sorry about the gap. This pilgrim has been busy with other things lately.
In the past month and a half, several news items have come to mind which in my opinion need recognition. As I was preparing for my day, I decided that awards were needed, but the awards I had in mind were not necessarily awards which a body would be eager to recieve. Therefore, I present D'Uh Wards:
MOST USELESS TECHNICAL ADVANCE (The envelope, please...) Goes to the bone-headed software developer who came up with an I-Pad application which reportedly "Cures" homosexuality. I honest to gosh wish that I was making this up. I had an e-mail cross my desk the other day urging me to sign a petition to send to Apple protesting an "App" which touts itself as a cure for gayness. Oh, come on, now. I have several openly and not so openly gay people who I work with and whom I consider as friends. For the most part, they're very happy with themselves and don't need to be "cured" of what ails them. If homosexuality is genetic, well, there's nothing that a phone application can do for it. If it is a choice, well, we have freedom to choose what we are, and if one chooses to be gay, he or she made that choice, now, haven't they?
CORRECT INTERPRETATION OF THE CONSTITUTION BY THE SUPREME COURT (The envelope, please...) Goes to the decision favoring Westboro Baptist Church, enabling them to spread their gospel of hatred wherever they damn well please. This award is based on the old saw of "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". No one I know has anything good to say about Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church. As much as that group is a bunch of patented a**holes, they do have the right to spew whatever venom they want. Perhaps the best way to deal with this little rabble is to do what Playboy Magazine did to American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell. Back in 1965 they sent a (then) little-known writer named Alex Haley to interview him for the magazine, then printed the results. I read the interview less than 10 years later (when I was "of age", and yes, I did look at the pictures of the naked women, too) and it was an absolute hoot. I have never read so much back-pedaling and faulty rationalization to that point in my life and it was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. Now if Playboy could do the same for Fred and his little group...
DO AS I SAY AND NOT AS I DO (The envelope, please...) Goes to the American consumer, especially to those who voted for less government last November who are now screaming for the government to do something about skyrocketing gasoline prices. Whatever happened to the ideals of a free-market economy or unrestricted capitalism? I don't like gas prices any more than the next person, but we need to be looking at ways to quit depending on oil by making other resources easier to access and more affordable... that way we can quit having to kowtow to dictators in hopes that they don't cut us off from our addiction.
JUST GET ON WITH IT AND ELOPE ALREADY! (The envelope... wait, we don't need an envelope...) The award goes to Prince William (or is that Harry, or Charles or Walter or something) and Kate Middleton. The only bright spot in the past week and a half about the goings on in Japan and Libya is that attention is diverted away from this royal wedding. I figured out how bad all the hooplah is about a few weeks ago when I happened on an enthusiast magazine for log cabins - and on the cover of the magazine was a headline promising a look at the log cabin where William proposed, as well as a look at the log cabin where William and Kate had some private "dates" during the run-up to the engagement. He's attractive, she's attractive, so go ahead and see a Justice of the Peace and send the money somewhere where it's needed... like Haiti, New Zealand or Japan.
FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, IT'S A MOVIE, NOT A POLITICAL PLATFORM (The envelope, please...) Goes to an un-named bonehead belonging to a decidedly non-political user group here in North Texas. The lovely Miss Carol and I went to see "The King's Speech" and were delighted about the whole thing. A charming movie, richly deserving the Oscars it earned. A few weeks later, I read comments by this un-named bonehead who also liked the movie, but at the same time used it as a platform from which to criticize President Obama. Personally, I'm mostly neutral about Obama. He's not the saint which some believe him to be, nor is he the devil incarnate as others would have you believe. Can someone be critical of the man? Sure. See above. But it strikes me as just more than a bit tacky to insert one's political opinion into what started out as a review of a pretty darn good movie. Take a memo: Get a life!
And Finally, the award for READ AND FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE ATTEMPTING TO... (The envelope, please...) Oh! Me! No surprise, here. I thought that it would be awfully clever of me to start a garden by planting seeds in the middle of February, despite instructions to do so no earlier than mid-March. I've waited for weeks for the plants to germinate and shoot little green stuff out of the earth. No such luck. Back to the drawing board, I guess. Perhaps I should have listened more carefully to the Walden Ponderer before making my first attempt at being an urban gardener!
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