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Extreme Christmas Lights In Orlando
tripmine writes "The Orlando Sentinel has a story about a geek who can't get enough Christmas light. 'This Christmas, tech-savvy people such as Hansen are increasingly building the biggest, most elaborate holiday lights in neighborhoods across Central Florida and throughout the country. They typically work in fields such as computer programming, Web development, engineering or audio and visual services and are armed with a technical knowledge that the average person lacks. They trade tips and stories on message boards and set up Web sites with step-by-step descriptions of how they installed their lights as well as pictures and videos of the finished product.'" Many cities have neighborhoods where the spectacle takes up blocks at a time, not just individual houses, too, as anyone who's strolled down Austin's 37th Street can attest. Links invited (in comments) to the best / worst light-spectacles you know of.
Insightful and funny are really the same thing, except one has a punch line.
Of course, it's all fun and games until the bus of epileptic kids drives by.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
What's the point to banning some incandescent light bulbs if this bullshit is allowed?
Shut up. This has been a year to end all years. We've been bullied into accepting bullshit laws left, right and center, we've seen our countrymen lose their lives in a neverending bullshit war, and the holiday season is the one time of year when we get to let our hair down and have fun without petty moaning getting in the way.
Yes, it's garish, and yes it's a "waste of energy", but you know what? I feel like getting up and going to work every day just to fall into bed and do it all over again tomorrow is a waste of energy, too, and I look forward to the fun and silliness of the holiday season, and things like this add to the fun. Pretty much everything else fun has been legislated to death, if we start legislating Christmas then we might as well give up the fight altogether and become mindless automatons retiring to our alcoves for 8 hours 'recharge' in between 365 days of work.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Uh, the New Testament wasn't authored in Hebrew - it was originally written in Greek, which was the common language of the day (owing to Alexandar the Great's March across most of Western Europe/Asia).
/.): The US Supreme Court issues a ruling in English based upon some treaty written in French. It turns out that the supreme court choose to use a less-common translation of a French phrase in the treaty as part of its ruling, and quotes it in English. In the USA the only binding law would be the Supreme Court's ruling, based on the alternate translation from French. The Supreme Court's ruling isn't really a translation-error per se since it is also an original creative work, and the Supreme Court's intention wasn't to just translate the treaty, but it chose to quote a part of it in English to further some larger purpose. You couldn't look at the ruling 100 years later and say that the Supreme Court didn't mean what they said because the translation of a line of French was debatable - the Supreme Court clearly meant what they said in the bulk of their ruling, and the translation was in support of the larger work. Now, you could choose to disagree with the Supreme Court, and that is neither here nor there.
What you are probably getting confused over is the fact that Matthew quotes from Isaiah - which was written in Hebrew originally. Matthew translated it when he quoted it (since he was writing in Greek - not that he was the first to translate the Hebrew bible to Greek).
The word used in Isaiah is probably best translated as young maiden. In using it to refer to the virgin birth Matthew translates it to Greek as virgin to go along with the rest of his account. It is obviously a more recent phenomenon than Isaiah, but it dates back to the first century - it isn't like this was a mistranslation from the middle ages. Matthew's intention of communicating that Mary was a virgin is very clear from the lengthy account of the whole story.
Now, if you think Matthew was full of it I suppose that is something else, but this isn't some invention of modern translators or anything like that.
How about an analogy (since this is
So, while Isaiah is likely to have meant "young maiden" it doesn't really change the fact that Matthew was trying to communicate "virgin". And if you really are just interested in historicity then you'd probably tend to put more stock in a document written after Jesus's birth than 600 years before it when trying to figure out what happened.