People are really getting upset about this James Cameron special. Over at The Huffington Post, religious scholar Bruce Feller says:

If true, this would indicate that Jesus was never resurrected from the grave, thereby debunking a central claim of Christianity.

Doesn’t the fact that NO ONE ELSE HAS EVER BEEN RESURRECTED EVER sort of debunk this claim? I mean, really. No amount of logical evidence is going to persuade or dissuade anyone from believing that a dude can come back to life after death. I don’t know if Cameron’s film is total horse shit or not, but I will say this: if the guy who directed Piranha Two: The Spawning can convince you in one hour that your entire system of faith is wrong, then maybe you should spend a little more time thinking about your beliefs.

These are really freaking cool. How does someone even think to do something like this?

From an (hard-hitting) interview with Larry King:

First Lady Laura Bush acknowledged that she has found the Iraq war and its aftermath “wearing,” but told CNN she fully agrees with the president that a troop withdrawal would be a “serious mistake.”

“Of course it’s wearing, worrying. There’s no doubt about it, and I understand how the American people feel and that they feel like things aren’t going like we want them to there,” she said when asked by CNN’s Larry King if the war had worn her down.

The First Lady went on to say: “Many parts of Iraq are stable now. But, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everybody.”

A. According to the Brookings Institute, there are, on average, 185 insurgent attacks every day in Iraq.

B. 1 bombing per day is a lot of bombings.

From the dude who will forever be known as Britney’s 55 hour husband:

Jason Alexander told the Sunday Mirror of London that Spears almost died due to a fatal “MDMA” overdose while they partied in Las Vegas. After seeing the pop star was having trouble breathing and wasn’t coherent, he says he took her to their hotel room and threw her in the shower.

“I remember looking down at her all crumpled in the tub with the water coming down. She looked so white and lifeless. I thought she was dead. I thought, ‘This b- - - - is going to f- - - - - - die right here in front of me,’” Alexander said.

Three things:

1. I wonder how many people look at the word b followed by 4 dashes and somehow feel safer from the evils of the world? God doesn’t care if you fill in the letters in your mind, but if they’re actually typed out, there’ll be hell to pay.

2. Wasn’t this dude supposed to be one of her oldest friends? So the first thing her oldest friend thinks when Britney is lying on the floor, apparently dead, is “this bitch is going to fucking die on me”? What class! No wonder she’s so f- - - - - up.

3. I didn’t know she married Jason Alexander!

From the AP today:

Archaeologists and clergymen in the Holy Land derided claims in a new documentary produced by James Cameron that contradict major Christian tenets, but the Oscar-winning director said the evidence was based on sound statistics.

“The Lost Tomb of Christ,” which the Discovery Channel will run on March 4, argues that 10 ancient ossuaries — small caskets used to store bones — discovered in a suburb of Jerusalem in 1980 may have contained the bones of Jesus and his family, according to a press release issued by the Discovery Channel.

One of the caskets even bears the title, “Judah, son of Jesus,” hinting that Jesus may have had a son. And the very fact that Jesus had an ossuary would contradict the Christian belief that he was resurrected and ascended to heaven.

Cameron told NBC’S “Today” show that statisticians found “in the range of a couple of million to one in favor of it being them.” Simcha Jacobovici, the Toronto filmmaker who directed the documentary, said the implications “are huge.”

“But they’re not necessarily the implications people think they are. For example, some believers are going to say, well this challenges the resurrection. I don’t know why, if Jesus rose from one tomb, he couldn’t have risen from the other tomb,” Jacobovici told “Today.”

Well, I’m glad that debate is finally over!

Matt Tabbi is the sole reason I subscribe to Rolling Stone. He did a piece last year in which he hung out with soldiers in Iraq that was the single best thing I’ve ever read on the war. Here, he takes on the ridiculous and eternal imbalance of real news vs. entertainment in mainstream media.

Oh my Lord is this funny:

Second Life is free to play, and I keep seeing people referring to it in the news, so I had to take one for the team and just dive on in. I knew it probably wasn’t going to be intriguing when I got to the signup part and couldn’t even make a one-word name. I had to use some fantasy-ass last name and I couldn’t even use cusses. The best I could do was call myself Wenis.

Wenis Swindlehurst: How do I hit people
Foxbrand Leprechaun: You can’t
Wenis Swindlehurst: I need that shit you drive.

I downloaded Second Life once. It freaked me out. Not only was it painfully slow and dull, as this dude says, it was filled with cartoon avatars of actual people. It made me very sad to think that there were real, lonely people creating cartoons of themselves and pretending the cartoons were their friends. And they all type in that crappy un-English webspeak that drives me up a freaking wall. A rule of thumb: if you can’t be bothered to type out the word “are,” I can’t be bothered with you.

(Thanks, Boingboing!)

Who could have anticipated that K-Fed would turn out to be the classier of the Britney/K-Fed pairing? This whole Britney Spears tragedy thing reminds me of the time that I was watching TV with my old roommate Don, and a preview for Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo came on. “Dude,” I said, because I called him dude, “are you aware that we could be entering an era in which the ‘making copies’ guy is a movie star?” Lo and behold …

Can anyone explain to me what a non-binding resolution is supposed to do, and why it matters if it was “shut down” in the Senate?

Happy Day After Valentine’s Day! Last night Sarah and I attended a Valentine’s Day workshop called “Feel the Love” at this gallery called Machine Project in Echo Park. It was put together by Sarah and a couple of her friends from the Sundown Schoolhouse. Sarah gave a brief intro, and then we spent the rest of the night eating and crawling around on the floor and drinking wine and learning about massage and CPR. These are the kinds of things we do in Los Angeles on Valentine’s Day.

Anyway, whenever I spend some time without writing, I like to do a little thing called “linking to videos.” It makes me feel like I’m devoting time to you without actually having to do anything.

1. Here’s Larry the Cable Guy before he was Larry the Cable Guy. Refreshingly milquetoast!

2. Terrorists planning the Mooninite fiasco. I have been cracking up about this pretty much nonstop since I first saw it.

3. Fox News has a new right-wing Daily Show. Here’s why this will never work: CONSERVATIVES AREN’T FUNNY. Painful. Incredibly, excruciatingly painful.