Wild Tangents
Marc talks about life in Nashville, life as a Catholic and life as a geek.

Well, it seems a winter storm has rolled through this part of the country. We decided to come back to Memphis early and it looks like that was the right thing to do. Here’s some pictures of what was dumped here.

Outside shot form my office window.

Another shot form the office window. I wasn’t sure how they would turn out, so I took two.

This is our back patio. You can see the bottom of the bike wheel is under the snow.

Another one from the back patio. You can see the fold-up chair and flip flop covered in snow.

Another one of the flip flop and the door step. It seems the snow has piled up against the wall and door.

This is the weird one. This is the staircase in the covered breezeway. You can see the snow piled up pretty heavily on the top step.

Another shot of the whole staircase.

Well, something ugly like this…

On 6/13/2007 that’s exactly what happened on HWY 386 just east of the Indian Lake Blvd exit.

While I have seen a few pics of the damage from the highway, I haven’t seen where anyone took some pics from the bridge. I decided to do that. Even two days later the scene was pretty horrific. One scene that caught my eye was this…

This post holding up the guard rail is a good 30 - 40 feet away from where the bridge actually starts. But it was still half burnt through.

You can see all the pics I took at Flickr.

Technorati Tags: accident, dumptruck, fire, Nashville, news, explosion

This is strange. Not only does my package from Amazon have to go through Memphis to get from Kentucky to here in the Nashville area. It seems it also had to go through 1969 in order to get from two days ago to now.

You can go to this Flickr page to see the whole thing. No photoshop type stuff is gong on here either. It is pure MAC OS X screen capture.

It also makes me wonder why since it is coming from Kentucky and is already in Memphis (not to mention the fact that it can time travel), why should I not expect it for five more days. HUMPH!

Technorati Tags: humor, amazon

Does anyone out there know what kind of flower this is? It showed up in my mom’s garden and no one seems to know what it is.

Technorati Tags: botany, flower, gardening

Go to a thrift store and find some really old and rare document worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and buy it for $2.48.

A rare, 184-year-old copy of the Declaration of Independence found by a bargain hunter at a Nashville thrift shop is being valued by experts at about 100,000 times the $2.48 purchase price.

Then there’s always Power Ball.

Technorati Tags: nashville

I really have it in for people who make anonymous threats. Brittney of Nashville is Talking fame talks about the sleazy folks that leave nasty messages for her on her blog.

Anyway, there are a healthy number of people who dislike my stylings, but then there are the others. The readers who not only dislike me, but go to great lengths to let me know it. Worrisome lengths. Like, “I know what you drive and where you live, you little commie whore, and I know when your pets go outside,” sorta lengths.

She says it scares her. To be honest it scares me too. I feel for her and her family too. I say that because my wife had a scary situation the other day. My wife sometimes has trouble finding a parking place at Vol State because her first class is rather late in the morning. When she found someone pulling out of a space, she patiently waited for them to clear the space so she could pull in. While she was waiting, someone else drove up and decided that even though she had been there before them, that was their space. Not only did they pull up behind her car and sit their for close to five minutes while she collected her things from the car before getting out, the followed her in their car until she turned down a side walk that does not follow the road. She told me this story and it worries me. I’m the type to worry about sometimes silly things. Hopefully, that’s what this is, a silly thing. Hopefully this pimped out muscle car driven by a stupid coward will never darken the lives me and my wife again. I hope and pray the same thing for Brittney. That these threats she gets are all just silly things that are made by people who are just cowards that are too afraid of their own opinions to even make their names and faces known.

Technorati Tags: Nashville, rant

I just found this band. Their MySpace page says they’re from Nashville and they have a great sound. You can find clips of their music on both their MS page and their website. Both sites are linked below. The unusual thing about this band is that they have a hard core conservative theme to their music. While that’s not necessarily outside the norm for the Nashville music scene, it is for the hard rock scene. While I don’t necessarily agree with all their stances, I do find it refreshing to listen to some good rock and roll that’s not overrun by hard left politics.

Go check them out!

The Right Brothers - MySpace Page

The Right Brothers - Home Page

Technorati Tags: music, politics, Nashville

I can hear my children who have not been born yet asking me the question already. It’s just one of many questions that they ask me constantly. I’d like to think it’s just my psyche getting me ready for when it happens for real. It really comes to light now though as I read this post on Nashville is Talking. It actually quotes another post from another blog as follows:

What if Christians are wrong about Homosexuality? What if it is not a choice?
…
What if tremendous scientific research proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Homosexuality is a normal occurrence? What if its nature and not nurture?

To be honest, I didn’t know that as a Christian I believed that homosexuality is a choice. That leads me to believe he’s wrong about Christians generally. He’s just stereotyping..

This Christian (Marc points at Marc) for instance has no friggin’ idea why homosexuals have same sex tendencies. I’m not a scientist, a sociologist or a psychologist. But here’s what I do think. I think people like Bill O’Reilly have it wrong that there must be one end all, be all explanation for why it happens. Isn’t it just possible that just maybe different people that have same sex tendencies have them for different reasons? Isn’t it possible that in a virtual plethora of reasons, all of them might hold true for at least one person or another? If that’s true then people are fighting over nothing. Get over it. Quit trying to find who or what’s to blame and let’s get one with our lives. So what I am saying that the inclination toward homosexuality is not necessarily a choice. I don’t know what causes it. To be honest, I don’t really care. On the other hand, giving in to the temptation of these inclinations, just like any other temptation is a choice. I know that to be true, because as a sinner I give in to one temptation or another so often.

Now, what I am going to tell my kids? Well, I have a few more years to figure that out. If I come up with something good, I’ll let you know. Whatever it is, I know it needs to be an answer that’s charitable. Young impressionable minds need to hear words of love, not hate.

I would like to thank Cole for bringing this up. I hope it makes someone out there not think of Christians as haters.

Technorati Tags: catholic, nashville, web

I keep getting this when trying to leave a comment at WKRN channel 2’s Nashville is Talking blog.

I’m not really sure if I specifically targeted for stating my views, or if this is just random. Either way, this is the firs time I have tried to post a comment on NIT since last night (about 14 hours since). So I just don’t get it. For a site that is trying hard to build community, I don’t understand why they have initiated such unfriendly tactics. I don’t really see where I did or said anything abusive in my comments on the post in question. So really I don’t know if someone feels I did something wrong or if I am just some unlucky SOB that got stuck in a software malfunction.

UPDATE: My comment did finally go through, but I had to re-write it, which was still a big inconvenience.

UPDATE #2:Brittney has posted a response to this post here. My faith in NIT has been renewed.

Technorati Tags: nashville, web

Pope John Paul II High School in Hendersonville carries the name of the late pope, and now it also houses the black ski jacket he wore during visits to the mountains.

It seems Bishop Kmiec, the most recent bishop of Nashville before Bishop Choby pulled some strings and was able to obtain the ski jacket owned by Pope John Paul the Great. Ever the comic, Bishop Kmiec had this to say.

“Yeah, if you’re wondering, I tried it on. It fit.”

How blessed we are up here to have this so close. JPII high school is right down the road from me.

Click here for the whole story.