Never fear, Street fans. It’s not Ernie and Bert going to “Pray out the gay!” counseling or Oscar the Grouch finding Jesus and becoming the older crusty green version of the dropkickable Elmo. It’s really about David Hames of Colorado who decided the world was in dire need of preschool level indoctrination:

His creation is “Cranium’s Ark,” a 30-minute video that Hames wrote, produced and filmed with one camera in his basement. He also got help from a couple of overseas animators and a local music director.

In the video Hames, 40, portrays Capt. Cranium, who commands a Noah’s Ark-like ship filled with animated animals learning a pre-school curriculum sprinkled with Bible teachings.

Sounds ghastly, but the show actually won the Best Children’s Film award at the 2009 Christian Film Festival despite selling only 600 copies of the thing so far. Is that the equivalent of Titanic to the Christian film crowd?

He’s already started on the video’s sequel, which he hopes to release in January.

Though Hames said a distributor has shown interest in picking up “Cranium’s Ark,” so far Hames has marketed the video and paid for its production — about $50,000 — himself.

“There have been days when I thought this was insane,” said Hames, founder and president of Red Balloon, a local video production company with clients such as General Motors, Compassion International and Junior Achievement. “I’ve turned away work to dress in an outfit and parade around in front of a green screen.”

Hames persists because he believes God has called him to combine his knowledge of video production, interest in pre-school education and desire to spread Christ’s message.

“This is a free fall of faith,” he told me.

And as far as I know, we’re still living in a free society so nobody should feel obligated to purchase this show, even if churches and faith-based organizations peddle the hell out of it.

Child pornography is illegal and perverted and obscene and worth fighting against. People who film it, sell it, and buy it to watch need a good long stay in PMITA prison and perhaps some of their most favourite body parts should be fed to hungry badgers without cutting those parts off their bodies first.

Pornography with consenting adults is legal entertainment (and a serious money making industry, I might add), and not to be confused with any illegal perversions people may want to do and film for money.

Should kids have access to pornography? Technically they should be 18A or Restricted, yes? But really, sex is such a natural part of life that it would make more sense to let a kid sit through a porn film with a parent to explain why it has very little to do with the very real and natural art of lovemaking. The kid in this scenario would be horribly embarrassed to watch it with a parent and would probably get ill at the thought of trying to watch another one alone some other time. A past experience will always flavour future experiences, after all. A little education can go a long way.

Porn Awareness Week was suggested by f-ckingc-nts.com to counteract WRAP’s attempts to stamp down on pornography in general. It’s part of a Morality in Media movement, apparently. From a recent news release on that site, two thirds of U.S. adults claim internet porn is immoral and not harmless entertainment.

Morality in Media president Robert Peters had the following comments:

“There is a perception held by many that hardcore adult pornography has become acceptable in American society. But the perception is false. This is not to say that there isn’t a market for hardcore adult pornography. There is. But what primarily fuels the market is sexual addiction, not casual viewing. Furthermore, just because a person experiments with this material or on occasion succumbs to the temptation to view it does not mean he approves of what is viewed or of all pornography, especially when online hardcore adult pornographers often promote their products aggressively and deceptively.

No definition is provided for what constitutes “hard core” pornography, just that “most of” what’s commercially sold would be considered hard-core. If the telephone survey takers didn’t provide a definition, or description for that matter, then it would have been up to the person who answered the phone to independently decide what “hard core” meant. I don’t know what would classify as hard core. I’ve never watched a whole porn film and I suspect many of the people who were called could claim the same.

“Those harmed by the proliferation of hardcore adult pornography include women (many of whom are still in their teens) who ‘perform’ in this material, individuals of all ages who become addicted to this material, women whose husbands are addicted to this material, women who are raped, sexually assaulted or sexually harassed by males addicted to this material, children sexually abused by men who use this material to arouse themselves and to groom their victims, children sexually assaulted by other children who act out what they have viewed in this material, and females trafficked into prostitution to gratify the sexual desires of men who act out what they have viewed in this material.”

And the following is also true:

1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread eaters.
4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
7. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after only two days.
12. Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.

Is bread why people commit crime? Probably not. Is pornography? Probably not. Does pornography alter how people view women? Probably. But a guy who’d abuse a woman would still treat a woman like shit whether he watches any porn or not. Abuse is all about having power over people. The people who only feel powerful when they bully or assault someone else are going to be drawn to entertainment that glorifies that distorted world view and helps them justify that behaviour.

But here’s the thing sites like Morality in Media keep missing – it’s all about choice and letting people choose for themselves what they will and will not see or do. There’s more than porn on hotel televisions. Don’t go looking for the porn just so you can complain that there’s porn to be had and write complaint letters to the Marriott about how much porn they have on tv (which Morality in Media did). Cosmo is not the only magazine for sale at supermarkets either (which they also complained about).

Magazines and TV are optional entertainments. You don’t like what’s in it, don’t watch it, or make your own stations and publications for people instead. And if they don’t want to watch or buy it, they won’t. The choice will always be the consumer’s.

I don’t particularly care for how overtly sexual advertising has gotten, either, but I think it’s just as damaging (or worse) for kids when adults hide sex away and treat it as sinful to enjoy it, to experiment with it, and to crave it with their partner, married first or not.

Consumers don’t have to put up with it with all the advertising. We can picket if we want, write letters. Complain about content, write articles about obscenity laws and immoral hellishness all we like. It’s also up to the maker of that product to choose whether or not to care about what the people think. If enough people stood up and said they didn’t want to see or buy it anymore, and if sales tanked enough to prove people were truly fed up and serious, then maybe they’d change some things. But while sex sells, they’re gonna sell it.

1. They believe it wholeheartedly and seek to demonstrate through the best possible verses why.
2. They don’t believe it and seek to demonstrate through the worst possible verses why.
3. They’re well read anyway and recognize a quote as being from the bible, whether they believe the book is truth in print or not.
4. They’re familiar with the phrase from other sources and may not know or care if it’s from the bible because the phrase passed from elitist knowledge to common knowledge years ago and the origin doesn’t matter as much as the meaning does.

Are there more reasons? Could I break those down better? Maybe, but you see what I was intending, at least.

I’ll give you an example from some other cultural reference point.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

You don’t have to Kobayashi Maru your way out of that one (necessarily), but you do have to have a big enough knowledge of Star Trek to clue in, and specifically have a recollection of the episode in TNG where the phrase was uttered and why.

If you watch the video, it won’t help you a bit, but it’s just a little slice of Sims 2 awesome I had to share, which I was reminded of because of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Oh, you just gotta go where the brain wants to go, you know?

Anyway, in this particular episode, Picard and company wind up dealing with a planet where the culture speaks in metaphor. Sure, the universal translator can tell them what the folks are saying, but not what they’re talking about, so there’s a lot of confusion for the first while. It’s meme to the extreme, where everyone speaks of new events by acknowledging an event known to the whole group from sometime in past. So how do you establish communication when you can’t speak the same experiences?

I haven’t seen the episode since it first aired but according to the Wikipedia article, Picard winds up telling his captor the story of Gilgamesh as best he can with limited vocabulary and sign language, particularly the part where Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh mourns him. The Tamarian is at risk of death at the time, so the story resonates with him and he understands Picard’s intention completely. We discover later that “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” refers to two enemies reaching common ground. Picard is able to use what he learned, and what he shared with the Tamarian, to sooth ruffled diplomatic feathers at the end.

Why use Gilgamesh instead of finding some relevant bible story to throw in as a reference point? My guess is that since Star Trek was not a show that pushed religion on people, writers were not going to add any, no matter how easy it would have been to use a religious story there. Too many people still believe the bible is touched by god and has his fingerprints all over it. The Epic of Gilgamesh is even older than the bible (and available in Klingon). It’s considered mythical but Gilgamesh was a king of his land at one time and the poems that were scratched into clay and preserved and later translated probably have some truth in them. Plus, the similarities between that epic and what got put into the first few books of the bible is also interesting but off topic.

The Washington Times has an article about an author promoting bible literacy. I get why this keeps coming up. People want the text to be relevant, want people to still think it’s relevant, want people to quote it and know precisely what it is they’re quoting so they don’t twist the meaning around to suit some nefarious purpose (unlike when religious folk do it for their own purposes…). The author is Timothy Beal,

who has written a book connecting popular references to biblical stories. “Biblical Literacy: the Essential Bible Stories Everyone Needs to Know” was published in October.

“I think you can’t be culturally literate without being biblically literate,” Mr. Beal said in an interview in his snug, book-lined office at Case Western Reserve University.

“These biblical stories and even images are pervasive in our language; they are all over our culture, from high culture to low culture, from Michelangelo to the Simpsons.”

Mr. Beal thinks people who are unfamiliar with these or other biblical references in everyday life are missing a lot.

“When we don’t know these stories, when we don’t hear these resonances, and we’re not familiar, we’re really missing half the conversation,” said Mr. Beal, who has written 10 books and teaches Bible literature and the method and theory of the study of religion.

And I’m going to reiterate something I’m sure I’ve mentioned in this blog at other times about this same topic – maybe it’s time to put the bible down. Our societies and communities and neighbourhoods aren’t designed with WASPs in mind anymore – at least, they shouldn’t be. Nobody ever suggests having a good handle on the Koran or Rig Veda in order to be well-read public speakers. It’s always the bible getting pointed at as evidence of cultured dialogue. Why? There are lists of books all over the place that we could be quoting to sound sophisticated and spiritual. Why the bible? Why continue to treat that book with so much reverence and cultural significance?

It’s a habit. We could just as easily quote Mark Twain:

“Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.”

Or Charles Dickens:

“I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.”

or the current Dalai Lama:

“If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.”

and sound just as insightful and on topic. It’s just that bible stuff seems so pervasive and recognizable, which is probably another reason why people like to quote it – not because they buy it, but because they know their audience will.

What is it now, you ask? A recent study into parents, toddlers, and attentiveness has led to expected results. Science Daily includes the journal information at the bottom of their report on it for those interested in seeking the whole thing out.

The researchers studied about 50 1-, 2-, and 3-year-olds, each of whom was with one parent, at a university child study center. Half of the one-hour session, parents and children were in a playroom without TV; in the other half-hour, parents chose an adult-directed program to watch (such as Jeopardy!). The researchers observed how often parents and children talked with each other, how actively involved the parents were in their children’s play, and whether parents and children responded to each other’s questions and suggestions.

When the TV was on, the researchers found, both the quantity and the quality of interactions between parents and children dropped. Specifically, parents spent about 20 percent less time talking to their children and the quality of the interactions declined, with parents less active, attentive, and responsive to their youngsters.

Were they studying TV as a background attention catcher, or parents’ attentiveness while physically watching TV? It’s not completely a TV’s fault parents don’t pay attention, if that’s the direction they were going here. Similar results probably would have happened had the activity been housework, food prep, or any other random every day thing a parent does. Parents can’t possibly devote 100% attention to their child every moment of the day. Maybe TV is an added distraction, but it would never be the sole cause of parent-child interpersonal dysfunction. There are always more factors in play, more forces at work.

Not every parent would automatically pop the TV on to fill silence in a room. Some parents are naturally more intuitive and play well with their children and give them plenty of fun and functional activities and a lot of opportunities for talking back and forth. Other parents might rely more on siblings to fill attention gaps, much to the thrill of siblings, I’m sure. Maybe they’re relying on daycare or babysitters or nannies to provide the necessary socialization because they don’t have the time or inclination. We don’t know.

I’d be curious to see how the selection process worked. Did they get samples from enough kinds of families? Rich, poor, working class, etc? Would ethnicity skew these results at all? What about size of town they live in? Would the channel matter? Were they picking families that already admitted to high television use, or did they mix it up to include some that rarely watch, too? What if a parent picked Much Music Retro instead of a Q&A quiz show? Could they see the TV or just hear it? How was “level of interaction” determined in order to figure out how much less there was when the TV was on? Did volume play a role? Too many questions for the amount of information we have, sadly.

If this study is going to be worth a nod, it’ll have to be tried again with a bigger pool than 50 kids, surely? It’s evidence of a trend, but what else can really be said about it?

I’m picking on Andrée Seu again today. She was the one whose commentary I tsk’d over in regards to how women dress. Today her gripe is with Larry David’s character urinating on Jesus in a recent Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. I admit that I can agree with her assumptions of quality television.

One good thing about not being a TV watcher is that I am impervious to the “frog in the pot syndrome.” Everything shocks me because the last I tuned in was to the 1960’s Bonanza.

Supposedly if you throw a frog into a boiling pot of water, it’ll leap out in a panic. If you start with the frog in cool water and slowly warm it, the frog gets used to the changes in heat and doesn’t realize it’s getting boiled alive until it’s much too late to do anything about it. Turns out that’s all a lie. Once the frog gets uncomfortable, it’ll make every attempt to get the hell out.

Unlike this woman, I’m not at all shocked by what passes for entertainment in the world. She must wander the world with her ears blocked and blinders on if she hasn’t already noticed all the terrible humour out there. She’d be wrong to assume that’s all there is, though, just based on one bad experience.

So when my friend told me about the Sunday, October 25 episode of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, I suffered a genuine Alvin Toffler “future shock.”

Future Shock was written by Toffler in 1970. In it he suggests that technology has been changing so fast that it becomes stressful and traumatic for people who can’t adapt as fast. As someone who is witnessing the dawn of a New Library Age (more on that Monday and the coming weeks) I can concur in theory. I doubt a new library catalogue for the province is going to change divorce rates or increase drug use but I’ll bet library crime will see a big boost once people realize fines have increased to a dollar per DVD per day. I suspect a lot more will walk out the door and never return rather than get properly borrowed.

But I digress. Back to the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode.

The plotline involves Larry David, who plays a caricature himself on the show, going to the bathroom in the home of a Catholic woman where there is a painting of Jesus on the wall next to the toilet. The David character somehow manages to spray a drop of urine onto the icon, and it lands on Jesus’ cheek, below his eye.

Later the woman emerges from the loo and announces that a miracle has happened: The Jesus picture is crying. The audience has a good laugh at the stupid Christian’s expense.

I’m going to agree with how tacky it is. It’s sad that people like Larry David use their shows to malign stupid Catholics. It’s not really their fault they see miracles where none exist. It’s built into the lifestyle. Unlike the frog who isn’t dumb enough to stay in a stupid situation, so few Catholics are willing to do the same. They can’t see how stupid it is for some reason.

Why would the first assumption be a miracle rather than thinking Larry’s an ass who can’t aim his stream? Why would any Christian put Christ’s picture so close to the toilet anyway? I’m forever worried I’ll drop a comb down the bog, they’d risk knocking Jesus in every time they reach for a new roll of toilet paper? Bizarre is all I can say about that.

The German population of the 1930s didn’t wake up one morning and decide to kill Jews. The relentless poisoning of the atmosphere through media softened them up. For instance, Julius Streicher’s Der Sturner magazine ran cartoons featuring characters with large noses, engaged in immoral acts. Ridicule is the passport into the violence to come.

Catholics had nothing to do with all that, of course. Pius was the very vision of piety. God must have wanted all those Jewish folk to die horribly. Hate Hitler, but don’t question God. But he did save some Jews, apparently. By insisting they abandon their faith and become Catholics. Isn’t that helpful? Sure is, betcha by golly.

No, the Germans left it up to their leaders to make some bad decisions and let themselves be encouraged to act on their dislike and distrust of the Jewish population. Why were they disliked and not trusted prior to the 1930s? I’m not a historian so I can’t illustrate just how the rest of Europe felt about them, let alone the Germans. I do know that Hitler’s holocaust wasn’t the first ever attempt to rid the world of Jews. It’s a two thousand year old prejudice. Maybe older. Is there any valid logical reason behind antisemitism beyond religious differences? Not that I can see.

You know how fear breeds? By pairing ignorance with superstition. Rather than make attempts to understand something different, it’s mocked, ridiculed and demonized instead. Is that fair? Hardly. The only way to fight prejudice is to be willing to look beyond it for some truth.

The difference between the presumed offenses Christians experience and the real offenses Jewish people have experienced is very great. I don’t think ridicule has to lead to violence, though. Propaganda can be a step toward violence, but Larry David demonstrating a complete lack of care is just bad television. Did people laugh at the crazy Catholic? Probably. Were Catholics offended? Probably. But they can’t say he didn’t illustrate a common fault of the Catholic faith. Belief without proof. Ignorance with superstition.

That’s something everyone should work on fixing, regardless of religious leanings.

Clothes were the least favourite part of the show for me, but I couldn’t get over how well Buffy could kick ass in those pointy toed heels she’d wear. Some of the outfit choices were a little odd, but I loved that yellow coat she had that got all those grass stains when her and Spike were… But whatever.

I’ve tried commenting at lemondrop about a recent article there on Buffy and fashion and what’s available to buy now if you want to play a Slayer for any reason (kinks or vanilla?) but I can’t tell if they’re going into moderation limbo or getting lost, so I’ll repost here.

Two different articles from Slayage. First Real Vampires Don’t Wear Shorts:The Aesthetics of Fashion in Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

The aesthetics of fashion consists of three facets, or “looks.” First, and most obvious is the “look” of the trends and branding as a status symbol. The first season establishes fashion as a major aesthetic on BtVS. Buffy is portrayed as fashion-conscious (in fact, in the Revised Core Rulebook for the BtVS Role-playing Game, fashion is Buffy’s consistent “wild card”). She is fashionable enough, at the beginning of the pilot, to merit Cordelia’s attention and possible admission to the Cordettes. Much of “Welcome to the Hellmouth” (1001) centers around fashion concepts. Buffy agonizes over what to wear to the Bronze (“Hi, I’m an enormous slut! Hello, would you like a copy of the Watchtower?”), identifies potential vampires by their lack of fashion sense, and informs Giles that one of her greatest worries upon arriving at Sunnydale High was that she “would have last month’s hair.”

Second, Dressed to kill: Fashion and leadership in Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

As Barnard (2002) notes, there have always been complex and shifting discourses connecting women, feminism, leadership and fashion. Many early second wave feminists took an interest in the way fashion contributed to the challenges women faced. They noted that women’s clothing was often restrictive and designed to exaggerate secondary sexual characteristics (De Beauvoir, 1972).The argument ran that the fashion industry contributed to the establishment of women as functionally inadequate creatures who were designed as objects of desire for men, whereas men wore functional clothing that coded them active rather than passive. Fashion, it was argued, contributed to our inability to take women seriously as leaders and workers (see Hollows, 2000 for a discussion of shifting feminist approaches to fashion).

Interesting…

Vampires sure are the thing these days, aren’t they? Esquire has an interesting take on their popularity in terms of mainstreaming gay love, specifically in the show True Blood. Neil Gaiman’s article also makes some good points in relation to pop culture, his own writing, and why the mythic vampire persists in so many guises.

Several feminist writers have pounced on Stephanie Meyer’s writing to illustrate everything that’s wrong with her series and its portrayal of obsessive love and twisted desires.

At least Buffy wanted to kill the damn things. Angel was a special case (cursed with a soul) and Spike, well, who hasn’t felt like having a fling with a bad boy once in a while to escape a monotonous drudge? She never had to wonder how he felt about her either. He was very clear when it came to expressing desire. Plus, she had just come back from the dead and who else was around who could understand what that was like? Spike may have manipulated her into it, but Buffy is the one who made all the rules and forced him to follow them. It was the only way she’d play the dark secret sex game Spike was craving. He needed that connection to someone else as much as she did so he complied with every one of her secretive demands.

I read and saved around two hundred Buffy studies articles from Slayage and other sources as and when I could find them. They run the gamut of topics, too, from language to philosophy, religion, culture, sexuality, fashion, whatever. For any discourse a scholar can suggest, I think a Buffy scholar could pull a reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Besides tracking the number of times vampire teeth touched human beings, Paul Shapiro’s piece also examines work by several other writers so you may as well start with his. A tidbit to whet the appetite:

Since vampires exist along a border of life and death, vacillating between human and monster, Stater (1997:1) argues that there is no real reason for a vampire to obey traditional gender roles. She says, “Social constructs such as sexuality cease to be of such importance when the possessor of that sexuality, more importantly than defying ideas of what sexuality ought to be, defies the very laws of life and death.” This is interesting because even with the freedom of being “dead,” “soulless,” or “evil,” the vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer appear to mostly follow traditional gender lines and heterosexual norms–at least when it comes to their biting patterns. It is beyond the scope of this paper to debate the larger overall questions about whether or not Buffy the Vampire Slayer violates heterosexual gender norms. [Arwen (2002) and Alessio (2001) say it does challenge gender categorization and shatters female stereotypes; while Levine and Schneider (2003) and Owens (2003) say the show reinforces hetero-normal sexual and gender stereotypes.]

Fascinating.

So smart was I to decide to follow CBC Saskatchewan on Twitter. Otherwise I might have missed this story completely:

Saskatchewan police charged with investigating unsolved cases are reluctant to appeal for psychic intervention when leads run dry, according to a Saskatoon psychic.

Barb Powell, a psychic medium, said she rarely is approached by local police to help in ongoing cold case investigations, but does get criminal case work from some southern U.S. states.

Because our people don’t want to rely on hocus pocus mumbo jumbo to solve cold cases? Proving DNA evidence is a big enough gamble without relying on some psychic to point southish and then see someone wearing green. On Rider Day, that might be everyone.

Powell told CBC News she feels her work is only one investigative tool available to help cases along, not to solve them.

“You know, I’d like to think that some of the information that comes through to me obviously helps or at least gives a detective, or police … just that extra nudge if you will, to put two and two together and hopefully come up with a full picture,” Powell said.

Sgt. Brent Shannon, a cold case investigator for the Regina Police Service, acknowledged that in some historical cases any information is considered important.

Information coming from non-traditional means such as psychics is often not specific enough to be useful to police, Shannon said.

There’s a great Torchwood episode (if you haven’t seen that yet, what’s wrong with you?) called Ghost Machine where this alien device gives anyone who holds it a look at some event in the past, but more than that – an emotional connection to that past person. Gwen sees a little boy lost in the streets during the Blitz and out of curiosity hunts him down to see how accurate the device was. In one word: very. Owen, meanwhile, witnesses a young woman get murdered back in the ’60s somewhere. He’s ripped to shreds over what he’s seen, because the killer wound up getting away. Now he knows who did it, but what can he do with that information, call the cops and explain how it “came to me in a vision” or try and deal with it himself? In typical Torchwood fashion, nothing ever seems to go according to plan, of course.

But back to our psychic. Even people who physically witness events will give varying responses. Memory is incredibly flawed and no matter how vividly people feel they’ll recall some event, every recollection will be clouded by time, by media reports, by nonsensical shreds of detail that likely match no other witness account of the same event. Even two people standing side by side will latch onto and recall different things, and none of it might be actually useful. Given what the police have experienced when it comes to dealing with witness testimony, why would they give any credence to something a psychic comes up with?

One example would be the investigation into the still-unsolved disappearance of five-year-old Tamra Keepness, who went missing from her Regina home in 2004.

Shannon said many aboriginal elders came forward to police with dreams and visions in the hope of helping investigators find her.

Shannon said while the efforts were well-intentioned, the information provided was too vague.

There’s a tendency to over-report. I’m sure they were swamped with calls of suspicious vehicles and people and whateverall. And I’m sure they have to check all of it, no matter how unlikely, and wind up ruling 99% of it out.

Families of cold case subjects seem more willing to take a chance on alternative methods of investigation like those offered by Powell.

I suspect this is because people want hope more than they want truth.

Another Torchwood moment from a different episode, Adrift, where a boy is whisked off a bridge by an unknown mysterious event, just as he’s within waving distance from home. Gwen still has friends in the police department and one of these fellows has the sorry job of telling this poor mother that her son is still missing, so many months later. Gwen can’t let it sit once it becomes obvious this woman’s not the only one missing a loved one and eventually finds out that this rift in Cardiff not only drops aliens off, but sucks locals in. Only a few ever get back to Earth and those that do are permanently traumatized. Gwen still feels it’s vital to inform Mom that her son is one of these poor unfortunates (“closure” and all that) and the mother winds up traumatized and depressed over that. That desperate hope that he was alive and happy somewhere was better than the reality, by far.

Powell said a few families in Saskatchewan have contacted her for help, but she said she’s learned the work is so draining that she’s become cautious about what cases she takes on.

“There are some families that do come to me and I just have to say, ‘I can’t help you because the emotions are so, so strong,’ ” Powell said.

“Which is why I would rather work more so with police or detectives because they too … are not necessarily emotionally attached to the situation,” she said.

Interesting to note she turns people down, though. I wonder if psychic style folks down south would do the same. Shows she has some standards, at least. Won’t take complete advantage over the miserable. I’ll give her credit for that, if nothing else.

I still think psychics are a load of hooey, but if people want to give this woman money to buy a chance in the hope lottery, who am I to stop them?

This is Nerd Heaven! It’s great to be a Nerd!!

I heart Joss! I miss Buffy the Vampire Slayer! I guess now I’ll have to watch all the seasons again…

And so far I like it – but not because of Sookie and Bill. No, it’s the rest of the regulars that are making it enjoyable. Tara’s awesome, Sam is sweet, and Jason’s hilarious.

Why did they pick Anna Paquin to play a Southern waitress? Are there no good actresses from Louisiana and area that could have taken on the role? I just don’t get how they pick casts sometimes. But whatever.

I wonder how close they’re going to follow the books by Charlaine Harris. It’s been a while since I read that series.

K, that’s it for a bit. I think I’m going to dare to bundle up and take pictures of our stupid early snow now. Thank you Old Man Winter. If I could find your ass, I would kick it…