I never really thought I cared about the Saints. Apparently I do. This is probably old news to many of you, but I feel the need to vent. John and I were driving around the Illinois countryside yesterday and he told me that San Antonio was going to take them. I got really pissed.

"San Antonio doesn't want the Saints!" I yelled. "The only reason that football team has lasted as long as it has is because New Orleans fans are crazy enough to root for them even though they loose year after year after year! And this is how they are repayed!?!? For years of blind, unfounded loyalty?!? That's BULLSHIT, John! BULLSHIT!"

Then last night, while sitting in the stands at a Blackhawk's game, I learned that the Chicago Bears had beat the New Orleans Saints. I glowered angrily into the distance. I was pissed. I have never been pissed at a Saints loss before. I've been mildly suprised when they win, but never pissed when they loose. Especially when they're beat by Chicago.

I suppose it's that I grew up with the Saints. I grew up hearing my dad yell at the t.v. screen. Generally he was yelling the word "Dummies" over and over because he could no longer curse having young kids in the house. I actually went to a game at the Superbowl when I was twelve. My first live sports event. The Saints won. That was that year they were good. The game was the 8 - 0 game. They started loosing after that one. I actually had a 'Who Dat' pennant on my bulletin board growing up.

In summation I would like to express my agreement with the masses who think that the owner is an asshole. I would also like to express incredulity that he is at all suprised at the death threats he has been recieving and the various projectiles that have been launched in his direction.

Sorry I'm on the front page twice today, but as I was creating my rant about the Saints, Josh IMed me to ask if I would organize Secret Santa again this year. So I figured I should make an official post to see if people are interested.

If you're interested please respond, if not enough people do it... then it's just not fun.

So the following are the rules pasted from what I wrote last year. They seemed to work fairly well. I've only added one.

Official Killoggs Secret Santa Rules and Regulations

1. Everyone wishing to play must have their info e-mailed to Meredith's head by no later than November 30th. You shall receive a confimation e-mail stating that your information has been recieved. If you receive no such e-mail, realize that there is a possiblity that your information has NOT in fact been received.

2. Non-heads that are personally known by a 'headed' person may participate. If you specifically do NOT wish to give/recieve a gift from a non-head, include this with your information, it shall be kept confidential.

3. All gifts are to be kept below or in the neighborhood of $10 US dollars.

4. If you wish, you may include a helpful wishlist or a list of personal interests to help your secret santa choose a gift that you will not hate. You may also include limitations, i.e. - no candy or no wet things that do not belong to me, as some people have done.

5. Once assignments have been made, please make every effort to send your gift off before the beginning of the New Year in order to ensure that Killoggs doesn't have that one kid left standing without a gift at the end of the class Christmas party because their secret santa was lame and lazy.

6. If you participated last year and never gave a gift to your person you are banned from participating again. If you wish to appeal this decision, you may put in a request and it will be reviewed by the KSS court of law and the person you gyped last year.

Any further points or questions, please post them here or e-mail me!

Yaaaay! Christmas!!!

i took the weekend off for my mother's birthday. she thought she was a year older than she really was. this bummed her out because she was excited to cash in some 401k thing. at dinner over steaks she said she wanted to stop by the bookstore on the way home to pick up a copy of gamepro because it had an eight-page feature on the new world of warcraft expansion pack. so we go, but couldn't find the right issue, it might've been last month.

the night previous i had gone to dc with friends, and dc still makes me feel funny and uncomfortable. i tried to explain to josh how dc makes me feel all weird, and how it began a couple years ago. it was fun when i was a teenager, and i'd smoke weed on the mall and think it and i were the coolest. for the past couple years its more like, much of everything about dc feels tailored to my exact dislikes and non-needs. isn't that weird?

saturday night peter, josh, abi and i went to goth night at the edge. its smaller than the dc goth flagship alchemy, but it was still pretty funny and the first dj played fucking madness. and new order. it was like being at the grocery store. i saw a guy from high school, and he was pretty much the same but noted that i had "grown up." my old friend charlie was there too, he is real successful and travels around a lot. he's always so cised and funny. we talked about some shit, i don't remember what, but i am sure it ruled.

sunday night i gave my mother's dogs a bath. it was so fun. keiko was greasy and deserved it. keiko is a tiny piece of crap, a chihuahua-shitzu that is more like a patchy, long-haired example of the former. its so small and delicate and mewed pitifully as i laughed and lathered her up with high-end dog shampoo. keiko is basically like a trembling, hairy, eight-inch tall antelope. charlie got it next, he is the same breed from a different litter, and he's more of a sturdy shitzu and is also amazingly fat. his rolls of backfat were gloriously apparent when wet. he took the bath better but wouldn't put all four paws in the water.

i hung out with my cats a lot. winslow slept on my arm and we watched tv together: boa vs. python, i love the 80s 3d, laguna beach, the secret life of wedding cakes, comedy central presents demetri soandso, a little bit of the sci-fi original d&d movie. cosmo pawed at his gallon jug of cat treats until i hooked him up. he looked cised so i kept hooking him up. i saw kender once and she looked beautiful, her orange dreads turned into scoops of ice cream. my cats are my most blessed angels.

my brother's best friend got out of prison on the last day of my visit. he'd been out for a month actually but was living in a halfway house. i hadn't seen him in two years! he looked all muscley like prisoners do i guess, but his clothes were hanging off him. i've known him since i was eight or nine. his older sister was my best friend in third grade until she stole me in the face one time i think. he and my stoned looking brother were going to hooters, they have awesome taste. later that day i got to see alex winter's idiot box, which i bet alex winter thinks has fallen out of all knowledge.

somewhere in there we went to the shooting range, too. sonny got mooned so he mooned them back. i was real rude to everyone i think, and i didn't shoot at all. the guns scared me, but something's going on at a cellular level in me and its making me less fearful of not seeming nice to people. but i think being nice is cool. maybe i don't. maybe i think nice people are chumps. but i don't want girls to be all "are you twelve" either. i guess wisdom on this type of shit comes with age. my friends are all amazing marksmen as well. i'm not really shocked because they are all pretty good at everything they do anyway. next time i am totally shooting some stuff.

so i'm posting this because a while back yet another news article was posted that drones on about the religiosity of america's national character. i realize that the article says this is a bad thing, but it floors me whenever "the religiosity of our national character" is said with zero ironic intent.

i got news for you, america's religious fervor is flying out the window. the above article talks about the religiousity of america as opposed to the secularism of europe. it then talks about how intellectuals in europe have noticed the decline of religion in europe over the past 200 years or so. this makes sense, religion is a powerful psychological force, it would take many generations to secularize a country. which is why i am floored at the rapid rate of the secularization of america. america has become noticeably less religious in my lifetime. anyone who can't see this must be freaking blind.

let me direct you here.

now scroll down to the table that is labeled "religious affiliation". the percentage of total christians in america is given as 79.8% as of 2001. that's a freakin' lot, and a clear majority. but look over to the left, the percentage of americans who were christian in 1990 was 88.3%. an 8.5% drop in eleven years? that doesn't seem like a good sign to me. sure doesn't look like our "national religiosity" is holding up there. but i digress, america is an immigrant nation, perhaps america is just being flooded with muslims, hindus and buddhists. hey the soviet union collapsed back around '90 and we saw an influx of jews who were persecuted under communism, remember?

well that idea is bunk. scroll down that page. while the total number of non christian adherents is up to 5.2% from 3.5%. that's a big increase, but pretty negligible in the over all scheme of things. a 1.7% increase isn't an answer to the 8.5% drop in christian adherents.

i wonder where all those believers are going? haven't they heard about the religiosity of our national character and all? maybe we can find these people if we scroll down the page a little lower. oh, here they are. a whopping 15% of america is listed as "no religion/atheist/agnostic". from here on out, i'll just refer to this segment as "none".

now i know what you're saying, " kiche, while 15% is a sizeable minority, it's dwarfed by the 79.8% of americans who are christians." to which i say, take another look at the chart, my friend. none has jumped from 8.4% in 1990 to 15% in 2001. that's quite a leap. in fact, none is presently the third largest religion in america AND the fastest growing religion in america.

in fact, the second fastest growing religion in america is "christian - no denomination supplied", up to 7.2% from 4.7%. in fact "christian - no denomination supplied" is tied for fourth place with the methodists. this is also bad news for our "national religious character" (can you feel the sarcasm?). religion is an organized structure, belief is a spiritual concept. this is a growing demographic of people who have rejected organized religion despite sharing their spiritual beliefs.

but this should be hardly surprising news, if it weren't for the delusion faithfully reported in the media that we are a church going nation. jeez, i've seen report after report in the media dutifully report high church attendance numbers. it's a standard media delusion that 40 to 50% of americans attend church weekly. even though, study after study reports that half that amount attend church weekly. christ, what fucking planet do the media live on anyway? 40% church attendance? i grew up in a freaking swamp in mississippi. 400 people lived, there. high, high church attendance compared to the rest of america. i can guarantee you that the population didn't even hit 40% religious attendance. media pollsters, morons that they are, would probably return with a 100% weekly church attendance rate. fuck. they probably only got 40% attendance for easter and christmas. in fact, my mom worked for a catholic school where the priest gave the same homily for ten years. and that homily was "if ya don't go to church every sunday, you're gonna burn in hell!" way to go media. maybe we should chunk the figures the state collects on how often people vote and use the polling data of how often people say they vote. apparently you think that's the more reliable figure.

one thing, i just completely cannot get over is how the hierarchy of the catholic church is looking at the political rise of the religious right in america and licking it's chops greedily. as the popular delusion goes, the rise of the right wing in american christianity has filled up churches to the point of bursting. i mean, just look at the baptists. they've been swinging right for 20 years. in the past ten they've gotten rid of women pastors, endorsed creationism over evolution and declared that all of the jews are going to hell. it's done wonders for them. they've gone from 19.8% of the population in 1990 to 17.2% in 2001. yeah, that's a great model. it's possible to go decrease as a percentage of the populace while still increasing your numbers as a religion because of population growth; but the baptists have managed to bleed enough members to actually decrease in raw numbers. this is a religion that actively recruits and has regular converts. this means that they lose enough people on a regular basis to have a steady influx of people coming in and still wind up with less people than they started with. man, that's a fucking model for success. i am absolutely certain that "none" will be america's second largest religion come the 2020 census.

it's mind blowing that the catholic hierarchy would want to follow these guys straight down the toilet. they only lost 1% of the populace from 1990 to 2001. but something tells me that's gonna change in the next 25 years or so (note to anyone from the catholic hierarchy that ever happens across this post, let me give you a short math lesson: [massive pedophilia scandal and cover up] + [appointing a former nazi as your leader] = DEATH). although, the catholic church's contingency plan of launching an an inquisition to eradicate homosexuals and liberals from it's already dwindling priesthood may stop the looming exodus of the faithful.

and another thing about this whole "religious right strategy". from the crap flying around the news media you'd think that 100% of church going christians were down with the republican party and that their biggest concern was cutting the capital gains tax. i can't link to any stats on this, but it's been my experience that there are a lot of christians out there who aren't exactly card carrying republicans. maybe i'm just completely out of touch with the mainstream; but don't you think that if the overwhelming majority of christians in america were down with the republican agenda bush would have gotten a whole heck of a lot more votes back in november than 50.8%? hey, i've got an idea, if you want to reconnect with people why don't you read the bible and see what jesus actually had to say? he's the guy that made you popular, not p.r. firms and right wing jackasses.