Todd Jamison doesn’t have to imagine it. His 2004 Hyundai Elantra was one of the two cars crushed by a 62-year-old woman by the name of Tripta Kaushal who was

later arrested after being identified by one of the fitness center workers where the accident happened (said fitness center worker’s car was the other one crushed).

That had to be a pretty shitty day. The folks at Hyundai thought so too so they did something to cheer him up:

You have to admit that giving Todd a brand-spanking new car free of charge was a pretty nice thing for Hyundai to do and will probably make Todd a customer for life. If nothing else it probably went a long way to relieving him of the stress such an event can cause. Kudos to Hyundai for stepping up and helping out even when they had no obligation to do so.

Part of the article:

Four Tanzanians have been sentenced to death by hanging for killing an albino man last year - one of a spate of such murders in the country.

[...] Witchdoctors sell good-luck potions made from the body parts of albino people for thousands of dollars.

More than 50 albino people are thought to have been murdered in the past two years in Tanzania.

Analysts say thousands of albino people are now living in fear, especially in villages in the north-west where the majority of the murders have occurred.

It seems that witchdoctors are making a fortune by selling potions made from albino body parts. Hey, if people are going to believe in that fable about Zombie Jesus, why not believe that albino parts in a potion will cure you or make you powerful? Same amount of proof - have to have faith. Probably use the potions to ward off witches - Look, no witches, must be working! Go figure. I wonder how they prove that said potions are, in fact, made from albino body parts? Do they keep digital photos of the body and show which part the potion was made from? Inquiring minds want to know!

Once again, anytime you make something more sacred than human beings, you devalue the life of a human. When a witchdoctor, or priest, or politician, has more power than a common man, you know the society is in deep doo-doo.

Click to embiggen!

That’s what greeted the half dozen or so groups of kids that stopped by my backdoor this evening. All told I think we saw maybe 13 or 16 kids so they all got to grab big handfuls of candy before scampering off into the darkness once more. It took awhile to get underway as we didn’t see anyone for the first hour and a half, but once it got dark it picked up steam.

We’ve still got a crap load of candy left though.

We’ve got lots of candy to hand out tonight, probably more than we need, and I’ve got a emo plastic pumpkin that lights up and a fog machine that I’ll be setting up on the back porch. No costume for me again this year and I’ll be handing out candy solo as Anne is working tonight and Courtney is up in Grand Rapids. Which really makes it kinda spooky for me in an odd I’m-all-by-myself sort of way. Well, I’ll have the Official SEB Black Cat, Melvin, with me to add yet another layer of appropriate atmosphere, but he isn’t much of a conversationalist.

Or at least he shouldn’t be.

One of these years I’ll own a home where I’ll be able to go all out on the spooky decorations and really do things the way I’ve always dreamed of doing them, but for now I’ll have to settle for what I have. Still, it’ll be fun to see the kids as we actually get a few of them through here unlike just about every other apartment complex I’ve ever lived in. How about you guys? Doing anything for Halloween? Got any cool decorations out in the yard?

It seems the Obama administration has been pointedly not talking to FOX News due to the fact that they’re basically the unofficial PR wing of the Republican party. Needless to say this has everyone at FOX News stamping their feet and crying censorship and whining about how the Obama administration is too dumb to tell the difference between the News side of FOX News and the Opinion side.

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart helps to explain that difference for us:

Once again the hypocrisy displayed by Conservatives, in this case the Cons at FOX News, simply takes one’s breath away. It really is hard to imagine that it isn’t a cynical ploy on their part because they assume their audience is too stupid to remember how they praised the Bush administration for doing to MSNBC what the Obama administration is doing to FOX. Then again given the average intelligence level of a FOX News fan, that’s probably a safe assumption to make.

Nope, this isn’t another article in the yearly tradition of warning you about checking your Halloween candy before eating it or wearing costumes that restrict your vision. This one comes from the founder of Kimberly Daniels Ministries International and was published on CBN.com Charisma Magazine and it starts off with a question:

Halloween—October 31—is considered a holiday in the United States. In fact, it rivals Christmas with regard to how widely celebrated it is. Stores that sell only Halloween-related paraphernalia open up a few months before the day and close shortly after it ends. But is Halloween a holiday that Christians should be observing?

Almost any time an article starts off like that you can pretty much bet the bank the answer is going to be a resounding “No.” Chances are the person writing it is a religious nutcase who is out to rain on someone’s parade and Mrs. Daniels doesn’t disappoint:

The word “holiday” means “holy day.” But there is nothing holy about Halloween. The root word of Halloween is “hallow,” which means “holy, consecrated and set apart for service.” If this holiday is hallowed, whose service is it set apart for? The answer to that question is very easy—Lucifer’s!

The first couple of sentences start off OK, but then she dives off the deep end with the last sentence in the paragraph. Halloween grew out of old pagan rituals and has nothing to do with Lucifer outside of the minds of crazy Christian fundamentalists. But I’m sure that little fact won’t stop this lady from going on to weave a story full of bullshit.

Lucifer is a part of the demonic godhead. Remember, everything God has, the devil has a counterfeit. Halloween is a counterfeit holy day that is dedicated to celebrating the demonic trinity of : the Luciferian Spirit (the false father); the Antichrist Spirit (the false holy spirit); and the Spirit of Belial (the false son).

Did you know Lucifer has his own Trinity? That’s news to me and I’ve read the Bible several times over. But maybe I missed that part so let’s skip ahead a little and see if we can’t get to what the real dangers of celebrating Halloween are:

The key word in discussing Halloween is “dedicated.” It is dedicated to darkness and is an accursed season. During Halloween, time-released curses are always loosed. A time-released curse is a period that has been set aside to release demonic activity and to ensnare souls in great measure.

[...] During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

Hoo boy, we’re into some Grade A Crazy now!

Really? Witches? You’re going to seriously suggest that the candy being sold at this time has been prayed over by witches transforming it into some sort of Tylenol delayed-release of evil?

I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.

Yep, she’s seriously going to suggest just that. So there’s one of the great dangers of celebrating Halloween. If you eat any candy that’s been prayed over by witches you’ll be possessed by demons too dumb to tell the difference between candy you begged for and candy you bought for yourself at the store.

But she’s not done with the crazy just yet. She’s got lots of it and she’s handing it out in lieu of treats this year:

Even the colors of Halloween (orange, brown and dark red) are dedicated. These colors are connected to the fall equinox, which is around the 20th or 21st of September each year and is sometimes called “Mabon.” During this season witches are celebrating the changing of the seasons from summer to fall. They give praise to the gods for the demonic harvest. They pray to the gods of the elements (air, fire, water and earth).

Well at least she got the name right, though Mabon is celebrated by neo-pagans and has nothing to do with the Christian concepts of Lucifer or demons or a “demonic harvest.” The name for the Autumnal Equinox was coined by Aidan Kelly around 1970 and is a reference to Mabon ap Modron who is the Welsh personification of youth. Ironically if you do your research you’ll learn that in Celtic lore Mabon ap Modron has more to do with rebirth, the start of Summer, than the Autumn harvest, but when you’re making up your own religion based off old pagan ideas no one ever said you couldn’t move things around a bit. After all it’s not like the Christians didn’t move Jesus’ birth to the other end of the year so they could usurp a major pagan holiday.

Continuing…

Mother earth is highly celebrated during the fall demonic harvest. Witches praise mother earth by bringing her fruits, nuts and herbs. Demons are loosed during these acts of worship. When nice church folk lay out their pumpkins on the church lawn, fill their baskets with nuts and herbs, and fire up their bonfires, the demons get busy. They have no respect for the church grounds. They respect only the sacrifice and do not care if it comes from believers or non-believers.

Gathering around bonfires is a common practice in pagan worship. As I remember, the bonfires that I attended during homecoming week when I was in high school were always in the fall. I am amazed at how we ignorantly participate in pagan, occult rituals.

Apparently if you worship Mother Earth with fruits, nuts, and herbs you unleash demons. This is yet another amazing bit of nonsense she pulled out of her ass. The second paragraph makes me wonder if she participates in any of the common Christmas traditions of decorating a Christmas tree or kissing under mistletoe or exchanging gifts as those are all pagan rituals from Yuletide on which Christmas is based. Considering how much bullshit she spreads around to paint Wiccans and Neo-pagans as devil worshipers I can only imagine she has just as much bullshit to justify the pagan-based rituals she does partake in.

The gods of harvest that the witches worship during their fall festivals are the Corn King and the Harvest Lord. The devil is too stupid to understand that Jesus is the Lord of the Harvest 365 days a year. But we cannot be ignorant of the devices of the enemy. When we pray, we bind the powers of the strong men that people involved in the occult worship.

It’s clear now, with her citation of the Corn King and the Harvest Lord, that Mrs. Daniels is engaging in the age old Christian tradition of painting the Pagans as being Satanists, which just isn’t true in the slightest. I’m sure Mrs. Daniels would be more than offended if a pagan were to portray her religion as a sick zombie worshiping death-cult (which, depending on how you look at it, is a fair description) yet she has no problems portraying the pagans as evil people intent on unleashing demonic forces on unwitting Christians. Hypocrisy is not a value I remember Jesus endorsing.

In case you don’t think she’s really portraying pagans as evil all we have to do to see this is true is to continue reading:

Halloween is much more than a holiday filled with fun and tricks or treats. It is a time for the gathering of evil that masquerades behind the fictitious characters of Dracula, werewolves, mummies and witches on brooms. The truth is that these demons that have been presented as scary cartoons actually exist. I have prayed for witches who are addicted to drinking blood and howling at the moon.

Got that? She’s prayed with real, live witches that were addicted to drinking blood and howling at the moon. How can you not take her seriously?

Incidentally, it’s interesting to read what the neo-pagans have to say about the Corn King and the Harvest Lord:

Yet another kingly God from Wiccan traditions is the Corn King, who grows during the hot summer months only to give himself up for the good of others when harvest comes. The death of the Corn King is a powerful image of sacrifice—of one who lays down his life for the welfare of those he loves. Many vegetation Gods play this sacrificial role, one well-known example being Dumuzi, the Sumerian consort of the Goddess Inanna. In most mythic stories, the sacrificial God dies and is reborn at the beginning of the next season. Of course, the theme of the dying-and-reviving God found it’s most enduring form in the mythic story of the death and resurrection of the Christian God, Jesus of Nazareth.

[...] HARVEST LORD is an ancient symbol of the Slain God, the willing sacrifice, the sacred king, and sacred seed. He is the Green Man seen as the cycle of Nature in the plant kingdom. The Harvest Lord is cut down and his seeds planted into the earth so that life may continue and be ever more abundant. This mythos is symbolic of the planted seed nourished beneath the soil and the ascending sprout that becomes the harvested plant by the time of the next Autumnal Equinox.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that both of these pagan myths sound remarkably like the Christian story of Jesus. If you’ve studied ancient religions to any degree you will be more than aware that the idea of a God sacrificing himself for the sake of his creation—sometimes in human form and sometimes not—is a recurring idea that predates Christianity. There’s a lot of such myths out there and the Christian version is hardly novel.

The point being that there’s clearly nothing evil or demonic about the pagan myths. That, in fact, they express some of the same ideas that the Christian myth does. Mrs. Daniel’s attempts to twist them into something evil and demonic not only does a disservice to a harmless holiday, but is an act she would never tolerate against her own beliefs.

But she won’t let that fact get in the way with cranking the crazy knob all the way up to 11:

The word “occult” means “secret.” The danger of Halloween is not in the scary things we see but in the secret, wicked, cruel activities that go on behind the scenes. These activities include:

• Sex with demons
• Orgies between animals and humans
• Animal and human sacrifices
• Sacrificing babies to shed innocent blood
• Rape and molestation of adults, children and babies
• Revel nights
• Conjuring of demons and casting of spells
• Release of “time-released” curses against the innocent and the ignorant.

Another abomination that goes on behind the scenes of Halloween is necromancy, or communication with the dead. Séances and contacting spirit guides are very popular on Halloween, so there is a lot of darkness lurking in the air.

Sex with demons? Orgies with humans and animals? More Tylenol-like time-release curses? Man, apparently I’ve been getting invited to all the boring Halloween parties!

It should come as no surprise that Mrs. Daniels offers absolutely nothing in the way of evidence to back up any of those claims. It’s just more bullshit she made up to paint the holiday and pagans in a bad light. I’d love for her or one of her followers to show me anything that remotely supports the claims she’s making here. They can’t because it doesn’t happen.

The rest of her column is the standard Bible quotes and calls for people to repent that usually closes out such idiocy. There’s a certain irony, from an atheist standpoint, of watching one delusional person attack the delusions of a different group and try to paint them as evil.

The real evil here is being committed by Mrs. Daniels who sees nothing wrong with spreading lies and demonizing another religion’s beliefs to score points with her fellow believers. If she really believes the nonsense she’s spewing then she’s arguably crazy. If she doesn’t then she’s classically wicked. Sadly, she’s hardly alone in her approach.

We’ve been running on the ExpressionEngine platform for the last five years. Before that SEB, and the other blogs I host for friends and family, ran under MovableType up until the release of version 3.0. I originally made the switch to EE due to the licensing fiasco that accompanied the release of MT 3.0. By the time Six Apart came to their senses and made MT licenses reasonable again we were already running on ExpressionEngine and digging all the cool new goodies it had. It turned out to be a great move as EE had a lot of stuff in it that MT didn’t and continued to add lots of cool stuff as the years rolled by and the platform built up a market for itself.

As it turns out, however, the market that the folks at EllisLab found themselves supporting was slowly becoming less and less blogger-types and more and more web application developer types. It seems that ExpressionEngine not only made for a fantastic blogging platform, but for a pretty damned impressive website building tool at a cost far less than many other CMS platforms. Being smart people the folks at EllisLab took that ball and ran with it. This is most evident in the upcoming release of ExpressionEngine 2.0, which is currently in beta testing and which I got to play around with for a bit. One of the changes that drives the point home is the fact that you no longer define “weblogs” in the system, but “channels.” Which is, if you know how EE works, actually a much better way to describe things. ExpressionEngine now drives some of the bigger sites out there and people are using it to build all manner of cool web applications and, honestly, the fact of the matter is that EE has outgrown me.

Which is exactly how I worded it in the email I sent the EllisLab folks letting them know I was dropping out of the beta test and moving off the platform. From everything I’ve seen ExpressionEngine 2.0 is going to be pretty damned amazing for the people that have the skills to take advantage of it fully, which would be the professional web developers. That’s not to say that EE 2.0 wouldn’t be an excellent blogging platform, but that’s no longer the primary focus because it’s attracted a market for which that is only a small part of what they’re going to use it for. That means some of the features I’ve been hoping to see implemented probably won’t be anytime soon. Again, not because they’re bad features, but because they’re not what the overall EE marketplace is looking for. And that’s as it should be.

WordPress has made a lot of progress since I first considered it five years ago and it now has a lot of the things I switched to EE to get, plus some of the things I’ve been waiting for EE to add. It is, more than ever, squarely aimed at bloggers and it’s enjoying a huge popularity as a result. If I had the PHP and mySQL programming skills I could easily develop modules and extensions for EE that would do all the stuff I’ve been hoping for, but I don’t have those skills. WordPress already has a lot of that stuff anyway so the sensible thing is to switch the tool I’m using to the one that best fits my needs and desires.

The point I’m trying to make is that I’m not switching because I suddenly consider ExpressionEngine inadequate. I think it’s great. It still has one of the easiest templating systems I’ve ever used considering how powerful it is. I will still recommend EE to people who are looking for an excellent low-cost CMS package that is easily modifiable and extensible with an active and helpful community behind it, because that’s just what you’d get with EE. I’m switching because the direction I want to head in and the one EE is headed in are diverging enough that it’s the right move to make. I will still be keeping an eye on EE as time goes by just as I do with MovableType. I won’t rule out the possibility of switching yet again because you never know what another five years will bring.

All that said, the change won’t be happening over night. I have already developed templates that’ll make exporting everything from EE over to WP a relatively painless process, but we will lose a few things along the way. First off is the SEBpedia, which is powered by the built-in Wiki module of EE. It doesn’t seem like it gets used all that much anyway so it’s probably not a huge loss, but I may try to find a way to preserve the data it has.

Second thing we’ll lose is the vast majority of user accounts. WordPress will auto-create accounts for people who have had at least one entry that they’ve submitted, but it won’t auto-create accounts for commenters. Those of you who do get an auto-created account will have to use the password recovery option to reset the password so you can login so be sure you have a current email address in your user account before we make the switch.

The third thing that we’ll lose is cross-links within past entries until I can be bothered to go through and fix them all. The basic URL structure will be changing so there will be a lot of broken links in old entries that refer to other entries. It’ll also take awhile for Google to re-index the site and update its database to reflect the new links as well. It’s a bummer, but it can’t be avoided easily.

The last thing that we’ll lose is cross-site user accounts. With EE if you registered on SEB then your account would work on my mother’s blog, my sister’s blog, and so on because they were all part of the same system. With WP I’ll have to have a separate install for each site so if you want an account on all of them you’ll have to register at each one separately.

Beyond that I think most stuff should make the transition. I’ll probably start with one of the freely available themes out there and then once everything is up and running I’ll work on learning how the WP templating system works. As always your thoughts, comments, and suggestions are encouraged.

The listing was allegedly posted after Tannenbaum’s fourth grade daughter claimed to have an argument with a 9-year-old classmate from her Smithtown elementary school.

Prosecutors say Tannenbaum, 40, then plotted revenge by listing the provocative e-mail address “lacethong23@yahoo.com,” and then giving out the girl’s first name and phone number when she received several responses.

According to court documents, the mother of the 9-year-old girl received a call from a man who, upon her answering, asked, “Hey baby, is this [girl’s first name]?”

When the woman told the man she was her mother, the caller responded: “Oh, hot lady lives with foxy momma!”

Said the girl’s mother: “I told him the hot lady you are referring to is 9-years-old.”

The caller then hung up, she said.

Here’s the kicker: Tannenbaum is a social worker.

So far, the Suffolk County district attorney is asking the state to review Tannenbaum’s social work license. She could be asked to undergo counseling and will be back in court next month, maintaining her innocence.

Tannenbaum was the classroom mother last year for the fourth grade, which included her daughter and the alleged victim. This year she was replaced.

You may have lost your spot as Classroom Mother, but you’ve earned a shot at the SEB Dumb Ass Mother of the Year Award! Congratulations!