Link-a-Rama Sunday
Let Your Panties do the Talkin'
Where Will You Spend Eternity? On your knees begging God for forgiveness? Well if he's close enough to read your 100% cotton Evange - lingerie (tm), he's already on his knees - so start spreading, the Gospel, that is!...WWJD? When faced with hard situations, sometimes you don't have the strength of will to just say "no." When the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, let these 100% cotton panties do the talking for you, "What Would Jesus Do?" These words will put a damper on a young man's ardor faster than a bedroom full of stuffed animals....see for yourself...
THE UNREAL THING by ADAM GOPNIK
What�s wrong with the Matrix?
....The first �Matrix��for anyone who has been living in Antarctica for the past four years�depended on a neatly knotted marriage between a spectacle and a speculation. The spectacle has by now become part of the common language of action movies: the amazing �balletic� fight scenes and the slow-motion aerial display of destruction. The speculation, more peculiar, and even, in its way, esoteric, is that reality is a fiction, programmed into the heads of sleeping millions by evil computers...What made the spectacle work was the ingenuity and the attention to detail with which it was rendered. The faintly greenish cast and the curious sterility of life within the Matrix; the reddish grungy reality of Morpheus�s ship; the bizarre and convincing interlude with the elderly Oracle; and, of course, those action sequences, the weightless midair battles�few movies have had so much faith in their own mythology...Even Keanu Reeves, bless him, played his part with a stolidity that made him the only possible hero of the film, so slow in his reactions that he seemed perfect for virtual reality, his expressions changing with the finger-drumming time lag of a digital image loading online. .... If it was the spectacle that made the movie work, though, it was the speculations that made it last in people�s heads. It spoke to an old nightmare. The basic conceit of �The Matrix��the notion that the material world is a malevolent delusion, designed by the forces of evil with the purpose of keeping people in a state of slavery, has a history. It is most famous as the belief for which the medieval Christian sect known as the Cathars fought and died, and in great numbers, too. The Cathars were sure that the material world was a phantasm created by Satan, and that Jesus of Nazareth�their Neo�had shown mankind a way beyond that matrix by standing outside it and seeing through it. The Cathars were fighting a losing battle, but the interesting thing was that they were fighting at all. It is not unusual to take up a sword and die for a belief. It is unusual to take up a sword to die for the belief that swords do not exist....read all of it...