Well, I went home, got my birth certificate, and rushed back to the tag agency. They told me my 100% original birth certificate wouldn’t work. I had to get a new State Certified Birth Certificate. “So,” I said, “this real birth certificate I’ve had for 52 years isn’t good? I mean, it’s the REAL deal!” NO. I have to have a State Certified Birth Certificate.

So, I went home instead of back to work. I have to get this done. I don’t have a license. And, now, I’m worried about how in the world will I verify who I am to the state where I was born over the phone?? I mean to say, if the original document that I’ve hung on to for over 50 years won’t say I’m who I am, then, what in the world can I supply over the phone to verify who I am? And why wouldn’t I be able to supply that in person to get my license? It just doesn’t make any sense that anyone would think this process is anything that would better verify who I am.

Well, something I couldn’t understand turned into something totally ridiculous.

Below is the form I had to fill out. You’ll notice there is absolutely nothing on it that couldn’t be easily discovered with very little research. “Wow.” That’s all I can say–just, “WOW!!” Don’t you feel more secure knowing I can’t get my ID without a really grueling identity verification?

Internet form 01/09/09
If the form doesn’t print properly, try using smaller screen font on your internet browser.
Application for Copy of Birth Certificate

Name of person on the certificate: ______________________________________________
First Middle Last
Date of Birth ________________
Month/Day/Year
Mother’s Maiden Name ______________________________________________
First Middle Last

Father’s Name ______________________________________________
First Middle Last

Place of Birth
City _____________________County ____________________ State ________________

Hospital _____________________ Sex ____ Male; ___ Female;

Requestor’s Relationship:____Parent/Grandparent;____ Guardian or Agent;
_____Brother/Sister ____ Child/Grandchild; ____ Certificate of my own birth; _____Spouse;
Making false statements and misuse of vital records will result in criminal and civil penalties pursuant to WV Code §16-5-38.
__________________________ ____________________________
Signature Printed Name

Requesting ________ copies at $12.00 per copy and enclosing $___________.
Please send check or money order. Please do not send cash. Make checks payable
to Vital Registration

Send copies to: Print your address below.

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

City State Zip
Daytime telephone number ( ) ______ ___________
Area Code

Separate on the above line and return the form to:
Address and phone were here.
Make checks payable to: Government agency was here.

Trash, trash . . . look at, trash . . . look at, and so on. You know the drill.

One of the typical throw away credit card offers was just about to make its way to the trash, when the texture of the all too common fake-me-out credit card made me laugh. I just know we’re all faked out by the credit card inserts—right. Well, this one felt like a freezer magnet.

“No way,” I thought.
“There’s no way in this world they would make the credit card insert a freezer magnet!”

Sure enough, there it was–in all its stick-me-to-the-freezer glory–the make me want you all the more, flexible, magnetic credit card!

Say it isn’t so!

I chuckled to myself considering the board room discussion, where a bunch of marketers could have their heads so far up their hind ends that they need to listen for the ‘pop’ when they pull their heads out to a fresh breath of reality. You know, like the sound of a cork pulling from a bottle. Could someone possibly consider any reality in which the happy offer recipient makes the mad dash to the refrigerator to stick this wonderful reminder of the junk mail they just received to the front of the refrigerator door–there in its place of glory next to the last image colored by the kids?

Naturally, being the over-analytical type that I am, I presumed that the extra attention the lunacy of the thought had given this junk mail was the intent of the genius marketers. But then, I settled on the fact that the ridiculous light this would cast upon the presentation of their offer excluded that possibility. Nope, these folks actual had their heads so far up they expected excited prospects all over the country to slap their credit card look-a-likes onto the faces of refrigerators all over the country, just waiting for their best opportunity to call the number on the front, and grab the offer wholesale. “Why, they’ll sign up in droves!” must have been the thought.

So, now I’m sitting here thinking about what I may possibly have in my life that requires me to listen for the ‘pop’.

Why? Because these folks can’t be dumb. Yet, they’re so into where they are, day in and day out, that they missed the world and reality as far as they did. So, where, and in what way, am I doing the same?

I’ll bet we all do it. And, pathetically, the all too inherent quality of being out-there with something is the inability to realize it by one’s self.

Now, to the point, I–you may need to listen for the ‘POP’. But we can’t do it by ourselves. We need each other to point the way. It’s why our differences make us work together. Only the foolish allow the differences to set us apart. Regular people could have instantly told these genius marketers the error of their way.

So, listen for the ‘pop’. Do it every day. Live in such a way that its popping resonates for all of us as well as yourself.

It can get paradoxical really fast.

I was thinking about the whole God thing, how he is said to be ‘outside’ of time.

Now, our whole reality is fixed in a linear path encapsulated by time. Our perception is limited to express itself to us within the limits of our experience. Consequently, we can’t even conceive beyond an inadequate premise even to discuss such things.

So, as the blind talking to the blind, I was considering the length of time a day might be when there is no time. Such a consideration obviously borders on the ridiculous. One might as well ask how nothing compares to something.

Yet, in the first passages in the Bible, after God creates something from nothing, it says that God looks at what he has done, says that it is good, and then there is a division that occurs that is said to be the first day–it words it as “the evening and the morning were the first day.”

I’ve heard people get into rather acute arguments over the seven days of creation thing. But, even in the Biblical account, there can’t be a twenty four hour day until after the fourth day. A twenty four hour day occurs in the first place because of the earth’s rotation on it’s axis and orbit around the sun. Well, if you read the Bible, the sun and moon weren’t created until the fourth day. So, there couldn’t have been days in the sense of twenty four hours. Also, even after their creation, nothing says a rotation of the earth was twenty four hours. It could have just as well been twenty four hundred hours, for all we know. It simply doesn’t say. But, within its reading, it is obvious that it for sure had no rotation and orbit around the sun to define a day until after the fourth day. Also, for those who may be caught up in the fact that the original Hebrew text uses their word for twenty four hour day, note that their word was applied to the first day, the second day, and the third day—-all before there was a sun to be displayed by rotation in a twenty four hour day. There simply was no such thing as day or night as we think of it without a solar system.

To take the whole biblical side of this another step, when does the passage of time begin in the first place? It speaks of days, to be sure, but time, as we know it, has as one of its elements the laws of thermodynamics. From all I gather in the creation account, the destructive, decay spiral of time didn’t occur until after man sinned. At that point, death, destruction, and the elements of time are first mentioned. So, just how many billion years of non-time were spent before time began? Before there was a sun or moon, how many billions of whatever could have passed before then? It’s foolish to get into arguments over such things. Even science can’t say with any fairness to empiricism that a year was a year as we know it in the distant past. To speak of anything as we know it in an effort to describe billions of years is as frail as catching a comet with a spiderweb. Such science relies on the weakness of extrapolation based on everything having the same linear properties throughout the entire time of the extrapolation. It is as limited and formed upon the same inadequate premise as is describing anything outside experience with only the elements of experience that I mentioned in the onset of this discussion.

So, back to time. What I mean to show with the above few words is that neither religion, nor science, nor any mix of the two, can adequately describe that which lies outside what we can see and know, or even believe. Thus, the freedom of license for what I am about to say. For the religious, weigh it against the words you believe. For the scientists, weigh it against what you can see and test. These words are not intended to prove or disprove anything. They are spoken for the speaking. If they expand your thinking about anything, they exceed their pledge.

______________

To begin, one must remove all the elements of experience to consider the heart of this discussion.
Even the act of thinking requires a point ‘A’ point ‘B’ line. A reality without time won’t even allow for thought as we know it. A place without time can’t even exist, as we describe time. The elements of time and space are pieces of a whole. We can’t remove time from our reality and have a reality at all.

For a moment, consider with me the snapping of a photo. We look at a photo as a point in time. Yet we all know it is really a small blur across time for the length of the exposure. In fact, I issue a challenge for anyone to give an example of true stasis with regard to motion. It is nothing known in this universe. It is impossible for anything we know to be outside time. In fact, we don’t know anything that is stationary. Everything of which we are aware is moving through space—which movement is actually one of the components of time.

Remember the old example used in physics of shooting a B-B at an on-coming locomotive. Remember all the discussion around when did the B-B stop to reverse direction, and how it was against the train when it reversed direction, and the argument about how a B-B could stop a train, bah, blah, blah. The point is that there isn’t even anything we know of in this reality that is ever ’stopped’ or stationary at any point in time. Even a complete reversal in direction translates forces to the molecular level (and levels we can only dream about) within the shape such that the ’stop’ never truly occurs. Further, even apparent stasis is on a planet spinning in a galaxy moving through a universe at a speed we ‘think’ we have measured [relative to what?]. Even the center of our universe could be the center of a small system in a much larger system—prove it isn’t! Wait, now prove it with string theory too.
______________

Here is the logical conclusion based on what we can know, but read below.

With what we know about time, if God is outside time, then he is at a place with no beginning, no ending, and no linear movement related to space and time as we know it. In such a ’stopped’ state, a ‘view’ of time would be all at once—before it, during it, and after it. When God said, “let us make man in our image”, he was talking to us—later. Well, later, after we escaped time and were outside it, which would place us ’stopped’, looking at time for all time, with no beginning and no ending. You see, eternity is always misconceived as linear–but outside time is ’stopped’ in a way we can’t conceive.

OK, has this stretched around your head and gotten ridiculous enough yet?

The ridiculousness of everything this implies can lead us only to one conclusion. The spirit world is so different to the physical world that we can’t think of it with any of the terms we think about anything. When Jesus walked this planet, He said that God is spirit. So, if you believe in God, this blasts you into a confrontation with reality. If God is real, then He is the realest real–He is real if all else isn’t. Since God is spirit, this means that the spirit realm is the realest real. What we perceive as reality is a pocket of decay within the pure stasis of the spirit realm.

“And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. . .to be remembered no more.” How can this happen in a place where nothing happens? You can quickly see how twisted things get when we apply what we know to things we can’t know. Spirit math has to be different from reality math. It totally removes the laws of thermodynamics. So we can’t even talk about spiritual things with the language of this reality. God made dirt and man from it. In our reality, dirt is a product of thermodynamics, so there wouldn’t have been any dirt for a long time.

Have you seen those explorer style programs and books that look at the miracles in the Bible and validate them with a mix of science, archeology, and history? Doesn’t it strike you as ridiculous that anyone believing in God would, then, have to prove or disprove a miraculous occurrence by proving how it could happen with the normal laws of science—you know, all the laws a miracle is said to be breaking?
______________

In a nutshell, the spirit world is as far from our physical reality as life is from death. A further discussion might circle around how the absence of the Spirit in this present reality is time and death in this physical plane, and the absence of the Spirit in the spirit plane is the ultimate separation from all reality and all that we are, with no hope of anything else–forever.

I’m using a cheap Wacom tablet and an older version of Flash.

Flash instantly converts everything that is drawn into vectors and straightens the lines up. It has a pressure sensitive setting, and allows a large opening to be filled by setting it to consider larger openings as closed.

In my first comic, I spent a couple of hours scribbling and creating a couple of characters from scratch, while I was learning the settings and how to draw with Flash.

My characters, Captain & Corky didn’t start as a plan. They evolved as I was learning to use Flash over those couple of hours.

I thought I would create another installment to this new born comic strip.

It didn’t take two hours this time. It only took ten minutes!

That’s right, just ten minutes from start to finish. Nothing pre-drawn, inserted, or loaded.

I’m positive, that one could develop a library of expressions and poses that would allow you to create a completed comic in two or three minutes. It would take that long because you would have to insert the text.

Anyway, here is my second installment to Captain & Corky, all ten minutes of it.

Here’s my quick description of how to create comics using flash: Click Here

In a nutshell:

Create a new blank document.
Select the paint brush.
Select the second smallest size.
Click the pressure sensitivity.
Loosely draw the character.
Select the fill tool and the color.
Set it for large openings.
Fill the areas.
Select the Oval tool.
Create the balloons for the text.
Drag and size everything to fit the strip

It’s that easy.

Regards.

I couldn’t believe my ears.

They were arguing that it was actually a racial thing!

Opponents wanted to reduce the punishment for crack cocaine because it carries a 100 to 1 longer sentence than powder cocaine. They claimed it was a racial imbalance against blacks and latinos.

First of all, what does that say about blacks and latinos? What a horrible way to argue a case, by pointing out any groups persistent abuses as a reason for it to be racial.

I say they raise the punishment for powder cocaine to be equal to that of crack.

You wouldn’t reduce the laws for speeding because all 18 year-olds speed more, would you?

Certainly not.

I can’t believe our congress could be so stupid . . . er, well . . . I guess I should have expected this kind of argument.

Regards.

I’m a republican. But I have to admit, the sudden swing of working together sure smacks of politics.

Can’t we stand for what we stand for, regardless of the current winds?

By the way, the above comic was created in Flash. See my previous article on how this is done.

Regards.

Basically, he does it all by hand and scans it into his computer.

Now, if you have ever tried to draw on your computer with a mouse, you know it can be a bit of a challenge– Even if you can draw well. Getting straight lines that aren’t squiggly can be tough.

I’m privileged enough to have several really nice graphic programs and a Wacom™ drawing pad. It makes it a great deal easier, but jagged lines are still a problem. You end up with as much cleaning to do as you do drawing.

After reading the comic drawing tutorial, I tried several different graphics programs without the kind of easy solution I was hoping to find.

I’ve had an older version of flash on my computer for several years, and never really used it. I just never had the time or inclination to learn it. But I knew it was based on vector drawing.

After playing around with the pressure settings in Photoshop™ for a while, I opened Flash™ and drew a few scribbles. Voilà! It automatically smoothed the jagged lines I was drawing, and created the kind of lines we are used to seeing in comic strips.

I can draw a little, but I’m no artist. Flash™ made everything I was drawing look better.

So, I scribbled down a little character. He just kind of evolved as I was drawing him. I drew him 3 or 4 times, as I was getting used to how drawing works in Flash™.

Here’s the result of just a couple of hours from scratch with no preexisting character, per se:

So, here is the first comic I have ever made:

Here’s how it’s done:

When you select the paint brush–remember everything is vectored–go to the bottom and select the round brush shape. Then, just above that, select the second or third size. You can play with the size you want. Then, the magic for creating a comic happens by selecting the pressure setting icon at the very bottom.

For this to work, you need a drawing tablet. I am using one of the $100.00 cheap Wacom™ tablets. So it’s nothing special. But it is pressure sensitive.

Now, everything you draw has the “serifed” look that we are used to seeing in comics.

Also, it worked wonderfully with the slanted brush for calligraphy.

Anyway, I just drew my character rather loosely. I didn’t really try to connect every line with precision–but the closer they are to closed, the better when you color the image.

Then, to color it, select the fill icon and select the color you want.

Now, to magically fill all the loosely drawn shapes and keep the color where you want it, at the bottom select the icon to ‘close wide gaps’. That keeps the color in the place you want it, even if the shape isn’t quite closed.

There you have it. It is that simple.

Have fun.

Oh, by the way, I’m thinking of starting a comic site now. It isn’t up as of this writing, but it will be called comic.currenttoday.com

Bluehost.com let’s me have 20 subdomains for the same $6.95. If you’re interested in the best host I’ve ever used click one of my Bluehost.com links on the side of the page or above this article.

Regards.

You know, there’s really two major reasons no one should ever vote for a democrat.

First, no moral person could ever support a platform that supports abortion.
There is only ONE legitimate reason to ever abort a baby.

Namely, when the mother is likely to die if you don’t.
Even then, it shouldn’t be approached without regard for an attempt to save the child.
Even rape is a horrible reason. Do you kill the child because one or both of the parents sinned?

Second, no one above an idiot wouldn’t realize that when companies do well, the country does well, and people will do well in the healthy environment this creates.

Any platform that over taxes to support the individual will spiral to decay.
The whole must be well for any part to do well.

The democrats play upon the ignorant to gain access to power. The party wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for ignorance among people. At the heart of any democrat is a person willing to stoop to the level of a user to gain power. If they truly cared about people, they would be republican.

I was born a democrat. It was in West Virginia. What could you expect?

I went to college and studied a few things about economics.
I contemplated a few things about right and wrong.

Now, I’m a republican.

Regards.

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regards.

Bad bots and lazy people will steal anything they can.

They try to get emails, free content, layouts that they like, and all your hard work.

Stopping them is fairly straight forward and simple.

In the top directory of your site or subdomain, create a file called .htacces if it doesn’t exist already.

If you can access your .htaccess file simply add the following lines to it:

Then anytime you see more activity you don’t want, simply add the agent or user-agent performing the activity follow the example above to the list.

Regards

Yes, you get immediate access even at 2:00 A.M.