Westboro Baptist invades South Florida

December 14th, 2009 • christianity, intolerance
Tags: hatred

The infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas, known nationwide for its religion of hate and extreme intolerance, has sent some of its acolytes to Palm Beach County to protest. What are they protesting against? Well, besides hating homosexuals which is their usual M.O., they’ve brought out copious signage to incite hate against our huge Jewish population down here. Outside of New York and Israel, south Florida has the highest population of Jews in the world, so what better place to hate them than in their own backyards? Besides being here to spread hate, I have absolutely what other reason they’d be here for but they’ve got a new gag they’ve brought with them: trampling the American flag. As many of us know, defacing the American flag was a pretty big deal back in the Vietnam era, I personally have no experience with it but it was fairly heinous from what I’m told. In Florida, it is a public crime to desecrate the flag. So, one Hezekiah Phelps was interviewed on the CBS12 news while he was walking all over the flag, openly participating in the crime. The irony in this is the fact that he’s protesting against Jews with an obvious Jewish name. I guess shacking up with ol’ Fred Phelps removes the idea of irony from your memory.

I found it interesting that the Sun Sentinel was not able to interview any of these hate peddlers but CBS12 simply sent a camera crew up to West Palm Beach today and not only interviewed two of them but was able to video all of the protesters — all 6 of them. Seems the Sentinel didn’t think hate against two large portions of their readership would be important to cover.

The Westboro crazies are going to be at Spanish River High School tomorrow in Boca. I’m not sure what time they’re going to be there but I am going to attempt to get down there for some pictures of the insanity in action.

Meteors come and sometimes they glow

December 14th, 2009 • chatter, photography
Tags: photography

Last night was the Geminid Meteor Shower and I was lucky enough to see a few — two to be exact. However, my girlfriend, in the span of 10 minutes, saw nearly a dozen. I have no idea how I missed so many since I was standing in the middle of a field looking up, mostly. I admit that I was fairly busy snapping shots of the hanging fog and attempting something artsy. I did get some neat pictures but all of my sky-ward shots turned out terrible, I think it was due to the overall amount of ambient light around coupled with the hazy night. Everything is either too blue or too amber/red, despite having tweaked all of the white balance settings to get as much black as possible. I’ll see if my pictures from the shower tonight are a similar color, although I’m going to a different location entirely where there should be a lot less ambient light around.

Here’s one of the hanging fog pictures from last night since all my actual sky pictures turned out looking like absolute garbage

Resistance was almost futile – Photo of the Day #13

December 14th, 2009 • photography
Tags: jameson, photo of the day, photography

Barrels of Jameson Irish Whiskey. From bottom left to right: 1 year, 3 year, 5 year. From top left: 10 year, 15 year. There are different levels of whiskey due to alcohol evaporation, which causes about 1/5 of a barrel to evaporate every few years.