Day Hike: Cheseboro Canyon

Cheseboro Canyon is part of the Santa Monica Mountains Recreational area, and part of a larger network of clearly marked trails in an open space surrounded by suburban sprawl. You can find a good map of Cheeseboro Canyon here. The area is popular with mountain bikers and equestrians. I hiked to Shepherd’s Flat late Sunday

Coyote Walking

Most nights we can hear the coyotes in the river bottom, howling, yipping, cussing and breaking bottles. Some nights we hear them up close to the house, less than 100 feet away in the lemon orchard, ripping, snorting, murdering small creatures with glee. Last night I decided to drop in on the coyotes in their

Adventure Hippie

Here’s what happens to a counterfeit Adventure Pass when it’s been exposed to rain, sun and torrential water crossings. It turns into a groovy tie-dye adventure pass. I should keep this if I want to go to the Rainbow Family Reunion this year. The reason for having a counterfeit Adventure Pass in the first place

I Feel Dirty

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Stayed up way too late last night watching archaelogical porn. I was intrigued by what Jacobovici choose not to show in his documentary (besides any serious alternative theories about the occupants of the tomb) The Lost Tomb of Jesus. Namely, he didn’t indulge in any Knights Templar theorizing that the website for his book dabbles

Jesus Family Tomb and a Unified Conspiracy Theory

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Amidst all the scholarly chatter about ossuaries, patinas and epigraphy there isn’t much talk about the Freemason connection to the Jesus Family Tomb. This, I think, is where the Cameron/Jacobovici documentary could have its biggest impact. Consider the number of people who believe that the DaVinci Code is fact. By all accounts Cameron and Jacobovici

OMG Google Maps for Mobile

How could I have missed this? I was killing a few idle minutes by poking around the web browser on my Treo 650, and I pointed to Google Maps. Instead of the “this device does not support Java” error that I used to get, there was a redirect for a prc download. Google Maps for

Science and Irony

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Before this James Cameron business hit the filter I was stewing over a line of ad copy for Victor J. Stegner’s book God: Failed Hypothesis: Science has advanced sufficiently to make a definitive statement on the existence-or nonexistence-of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. But as it turns out, science hasn’t even reached the point where it can

Cameron Digs His Own Grave?

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Biblical scholars are falling over themselves to point out reasons that James Cameron’s “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” is a bad piece of investigation. Ben Witherington of Asbury Seminary lists some quick thoughts notably that Jacobovici’s claim that one of the ossuaries belongs to Mary Magdalene is without evidence. All historical references to Mary Magdalene

Jesus Family Plot Filmmaker No Stranger to Controversy

Critics are accusing filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici of leaping to conclusions in the upcoming Discovery Channel documentary The Jesus Tomb. And this isn’t the first time such accusations have been made against him. Critics accused him of playing fast and loose with the facts in his documentary about the Exodus.

James Cameron Finds Jesus

I confess I’ve been a little unnerved by director James Cameron’s Titanic announcement that he’s found Jesus–I wasn’t aware that Jesus was missing. Cameron’s latest project, a TV documentary called The Lost Tomb of Jesus will supposedly unveil evidence that could rock the foundation of Christianity. Namely that the bodies of Jesus Christ and his

To Do: Boycott RIAA in March

I’ve been itching for a good boycott for a while. Here’s one that I can support–Gizmodo’s Boycott the RIAA in March. The RIAA’s trenchant enforcement of outdated copyright laws threaten innovation in computer-mediated communicatons. And there’s some evidence that closed copyrights put a damper on music sales (the classic example is the Grateful Dead, who

The Number 23 Skiddoo

The Number 23 promised to be a sublimely disorienting voyage into paranoia. A little Eternal Sunshine followed by a slice of Pi. But it just doesn’t quite make it. Too bad the studio won’t take this film back into the editing bay for a little knife-work. It’s about 2/3 of the way toward being great