Twelve Days of Christmas

I just received an email from my church office, letting me know a fascinating fact: that the classic Christmas song "Twelve Days of Christmas" actually encoded some of the basics of the Christian faith.

My BS meter immediately started ticking.

So I went to that bastion of truth and otherwise, Snopes.com. Thirty seconds of research -- more accurately, typing into a search bar and pressing send -- proved my meter was well-calibrated.

This shows either that we Christians blindly accept anything that comes our way without analysis, or we knowingly sacrifice truth for the sake of a good and uplifting story. Either is utterly unacceptable.

Four thirty-five

About a year ago, I discovered a site called thirty-thousand.org. It was basically a site focusing on how those who considered and wrote the Constitution of the United States intended there to be a Representative for every thirty thousand citizens. One does wonder if they ever pictured the United States having three hundred million citizens, thus requiring ten thousand members in the House. But even that aside, it also pointed out the gross discrepancies between House districts, where some actually have twice the residents of others.

Flash forward to 2010. The Supreme Court just denied an appeal aiming to double or even quadruple the number of Representatives. One of the stated reasons for this original appeal was to more fairly divide the existing districts.

Unfortunately, everywhere I look I find only the same three or four brief paragraphs on this. It seems to be treated as a non-issue, when I personally feel it's anything but. The choice to have 435 Representatives -- no more, no less -- seems nothing but arbitrary to me, and though I don't deem 10,000 Representatives necessary, an expansion to make the picture of the American people the House is supposed to be less grainy seems anything but a bad idea to me. Maybe I'm missing something. I hope it's not just a dedication to a needless status quo that caused the Court to deny it.

Consequences

Truth be told, I absolutely believe in an individual's God-given right to be stupid. Do whatever you like; as long as it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, I'm okay with it.

But in that statement comes the flip-side: you are not entitled to my help to get you out of the trouble your poor choices cause. You can ask; I just might say yes. But my time and money used to fix your self-caused problems is not your right. What is mine is yours only if freely offered. If it is not freely offered, you're on your own.

Life and Choice

On the one side, you have those who call themselves pro-life. On the other, pro-choice. And to hear these two camps talk, you'd think "life" and "choice" are antonyms. But that's a bit like responding to someone who says "I like football" by saying "I like basketball"... and then, of course, burning down the football stadium.

Is there room to be both? Certainly. You can be strongly pro-life, saying that to destroy that little life growing inside a woman's womb would be a terrible mistake, one with the potential to haunt her for a very long time... but still defend her right to an abortion. It gets down to the status and rights -- if any -- that the fetus/baby has, and that can tend to be an extremely sticky question.

Incidentally, the concept of being anti-life and anti-choice tickles at my mind. I wonder how that would work.

Happy Holidays

Some people are infuriated by the phrase, "Happy Holidays". As you may have guessed, I am not one of them.

People have actually stopped doing business with a company simply because the use the more generic well-wishing, instead of specifying a certain holiday -- yes, usually Christmas. (For that matter, heaven forbid you should use the abbreviation "Xmas". No; we must keep Christ in Christmas!) Seriously, though. Why in the world would you stop associating with a business because they choose to acknowledge that Christmas isn't the only holiday in December? I can think of three right of the top of my head! Do we stop doing business with a Canadian company because they dare celebrate the birth of their country three days too early?

So, though I will be celebrating Christmas, though I have celebrated Christmas and no other holiday my entire life, and barring some really surprising development in my future, will celebrate Christmas only for the remainder of my life... Happy Holidays! Or if you prefer, Happy Holiday of Choice.

A Not-So-Personal Appeal

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is asking me (yes, me) for money. Why I've been singled out for this honor eludes me.

Apparently my good and personal friend Jimmy feels that it would in some way taint his vision for his website to include ads, so naturally he puts a "personal appeal" up on his site. I admire him for having a vision and wanting to stick to it, but honestly, it wouldn't bother me if the website did have ads, as long as the content remains the same.

Similarly, I could have ads on this blog to make a little something off it. I'm considering it, but given that I've had maybe three dozen hits so far, I just don't see much point in it.

So, enh. If Wikipedia had a banner saying please donate to keep this site ad-free, I probably wouldn't donate anyway, but that's mostly because I'm poor and only give to those causes I'm extremely passionate about. But for Jimmy Wales to frame his asking for money as a message just for me makes me even less enthused, and makes my opinion of him drop. Given I had no idea who Jimmy Wales was before he started asking for my personal money, that's rather sad.

Who Cares?

Yesterday, it made the AP Political News wire that President Obama bought some pastry at a bakery. I'm sorry to say, I don't care.

I don't care if the president buys pastry, or drinks Bud Light, or smokes. I don't care if his wife thinks children should eat more greens and exercise more. I don't care where his kids go to school.

I don't care if the president is black, or brown or red or yellow or green. I don't care if he's a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, an atheist, or paints himself blue and bays at the moon. I don't care if he's older than God or barely legal. I don't even care if the president is female, homosexual, or even both.

Can the president govern? Will the president show wisdom, an even temper, a faithfulness to the Constitution? That's all I care about.

So can we please shut up about the president's pastry choices?