So according to this study, you can tell a lot about a person based on their sleeping position.

As for myself, I am, THE YEARNER:

People who sleep on their side with both arms out in front are said to have an open nature, but can be suspicious, cynical. They are slow to make up their minds, but once they have taken a decision, they are unlikely ever to change it.

Cynical?  Me??  Please.  What a ridiculous study too, probably done by a group of virgin weenie scientists who wouldn’t know what real psychology was if it up and collectively back-slapped all their wart infested faces.

And just because I’ve had the same beliefs about life, politics, religion and evil women in general since I was 7 years old doesn’t mean I’m unlikely to change my mind about things.

… … … what? 

Tags: life, politics, psychology, religion, sleep, sleeping position, study, women
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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Slate isn’t yet on my block list, which is why I was able to come across yet another one of their lame articles, this one espousing on the issue of sex and religion in the lives of American teenagers.

The central emphasis of the article of course was on the usual liberal notion of how promoting abstinence encourages even more booty calls. But then I found this particular gem:
 

What really matters is not which religion teenagers identify with but how strongly they identify. After controlling for all factors (family satisfaction, popularity, income), religion matters much less than religiosity. Among the mass of typically promiscuous teenagers in the book, one group stands out: the 16 percent of American teens who describe religion as “extremely important” in their lives. When these guys pledge, they mean it.

So let me see if I have this right: those who actually take their religion seriously are far less likely to be plowing the field. And this is newsworthy… why again?

If anything, it only reinforces the rather obvious point that a large number (if not the vast majority) of young people claiming to be Christians today are pretty much full of it. They may pay lip service to God, attend church regularly, and speak the language of “Evangelese,” but they are about as much Christian as this bottle of Pepsi I’m drinking here. Look, you guys want to roll around in the hay, or get hammered at college frat parties and wake up in strange places the next day, or flash truckers driving the opposite way, or unabashedly drop f-bombs because it makes you feel like a Soprano, then go right ahead. Just don’t call yourself a Christian. It really frosts my cookies when you do.

I think part of the reason why I get all bent out of shape over this is because it doesn’t exactly make my search for THE ONE any easier. I want to meet a nice CHRISTIAN girl, but now that even bra burning, baby killing streetwalkers are touting themselves as children of the kingdom, this sort of makes my efforts to find a virtuous snuggly pie a little daunting, to say the least. Honestly, if the profiles from dating sites like Match.com were to be believed, then just about 99 percent of the women on there are Christians. But if I’m to be the 31st guy in the supermarket express line that is the sex life of many of these “Christian” Match girls, then I think they might want to do a little more soul searching to discover just what exactly their true religion really is.

Tags: abstinence, american teens, christian girl, christianity, Christians, dating, girls, hypocrites, lip service, lukewarm, match.com, matchmaking, online dating, pepsi, poll, promiscuous, religion, religiosity, slate, soprano, streetwalkers, survey, teenagers, truckers, virtue, virtuous, women
Categories: Christians Gone Wild, Romance and Relationships
 
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It’s hard to decide what direction I’d like to take this blog in, which might have something to do with the fact that my life currently has no direction either.

The best I can do now is simply blog my thoughts, and see where it goes from there. I enjoy blogging, but my writing can suck hairy monkey’s smelly butt if I don’t keep at it on a regular basis. In the meantime, I’ve been continuing to explore how I can use social networking sites to publicize my blog, so as an experiment, I submitted a few law school related posts of mine to a variety of sites. After watching my traffic for the past 24 hours, I noticed StumbleUpon and Reddit appeared to draw the biggest crowds. In fact I was floored by the amount of traffic I was getting from them. Getting my posts Digged though only resulted in a handful of visits, but then again, Digg only appears to be news, politics and technology oriented, and I simply don’t have much to contribute in those areas right now. My blog is more personally oriented, and my interests usually lie in topics relating to Society, Crime and Punishment, Offbeat News, Dating and Religion/Spirituality. It’s not likely then that I’ll be using Digg often, if at all.

Reddit was awesome though, with a continuous stream of links that I actually found myself interested in reading. One of the things I didn’t like about voting oriented sites like Digg was that the content you found was almost always something everybody on the planet already knew about. Big deal. Personally, I got my fix from reading newsworthy items that for some reason or other never seems to make the news (or even a mention on some of the more popular blogs out there). Maybe it’s just a vanity thing, but I feel better informed this way (not to mention that it provides a more unique depth to my site by blogging about news items not covered elsewhere).

It’s nice to know now that if I blog a particularly good post, there exists a few outlets from which I could legitimately promote the articles I write. Not that I’m going to submit every inane piece of writing I ever put up here mind you (up to and including my latest bathroom experience), but certainly on those occasions where I experience a random moment of clarity and blog something that might actually prove useful (or entertaining) to outside visitors. I can’t get people who game the system though. I heard of one guy using a script for automatically submitting his pages to StumbleUpon and I can only wonder, why? These shameless asshats completely ruin it for the rest of us.

Anyhow, now that I’ve gotten hooked on StumbleUpon and Reddit, I’ve been exploring other social networking sites as well (excluding of course MySpace and its copycat clones). Some seem to revolve around a specific theme that I found little use for (like researching networks tailored for members of academia), while others were merely less popular clones of some of the more prominent networks out there. There were a significant number of bookmarking sites as well, but for now I decided to limit my membership to Yahoo’s My Web and Del.icio.us. I’ve also known about blogging communities like Xanga before, but I’ve only recently discovered that the makers of MovableType had also created a similar community called Vox, which seems at first glance more tightly designed and aesthetically pleasing than Xanga. Xanga had been the place I would have gone to in the event that I could no longer stomach the anguish of maintaining the backend of my own blog, but who knows, Vox might actually prove to be a better choice if it comes to that.

Other sites were unfortunately so cryptic as to their purpose that I’ll have to give them a harder look before deciding whether they’re worth joining or not. And finally, I think it’s become obvious that I don’t much care for the more generally oriented sites like Facebook, Bebo (and that Space that shall not be named). They’re like online ghettos offering little more than juicy tidbits that prospective stalkers would just love to know. No thanks.

I’m kinda hoping that by jumping around all these social networking spots (and settling into the ones I like), it will all in some way help me find my niche, streamline my blogging style and give it some actual direction, so I can at least refrain from merely cluttering it up with the meandering thoughts of my completely useless and boring life.

But until then, I’ll just have to stumble along.

Tags: blog, blogging, blogs, bookmarking, bookmarks, boring, butt, clones, crime and punishment, crowds, dating, digg, direction, experiment, exploring, handful, law school, life, movabletype, myspace, niche, offbeat news, people oriented, personal, politics, post, publicize, reddit, religion, sites, social networking sites, social networks, spirituality, stalkers, stalking, stumble, stumbler, stumbleupon, stumbling, technology, traffic, travels, vanity, visitors, Vox, writing, xanga
Categories: Blog Fog, Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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Yes, I know, it’s been a month since I last blogged. I’m aware of that. No need to keep reminding me. Shut up already.

After such a long hiatus, I’ve come to the realization that I’ve lost my blogging mojo. I have some suspicions about why this is so, but I’m pretty much stumped as to how I can get myself going again, if ever. I used to blog up a storm in times past, but now I just don’t have the passion for it that I used to.

I think part of it is that I’m pretty much all talked out (after having vented for so long on just about everything and everyone). I’ve blogged about my personal life and the traumatic experiences I’ve had in the past, about religion, politics, romance, the legal profession, and whatever else tickled my fancy. Then I just grew tired of it. No matter what I did, any blog entry I made felt flat and boring… like the one I’m writing now.

But rather than give up (because I truly enjoy writing), I’m going to turn over another leaf and try again, this time with a more candid emphasis on my personal life, and perhaps a little dabbling in fiction here and there.

I’ve also cleaned up the blogging backend, dropped a bloated plugin that seemed to slow the load times here, and brightened the text a little bit for easier reading.

So, a new year, a new slate. Let us see what 2007 has in store for us.

Tags: backend, blog, blogging, hiatus, legal profession, little bit, mojo, new year, passion, personal life, realization, religion, romance, slate, suspicions, writing
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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Since I now have a broadband connection, it no longer takes me 12 hours to download all of my news feeds using my favorite RSS aggregator, Newzcrawler. Obviously, by the time my downloads finished it was no longer news and worth blogging about. But now that I’ve finally hit the fast lane, I’m face with yet another problem: Too MUCH content. WAAAAYY too much content. I mean, where the @#$% do I begin???!? I checked out some blog directorys to get started, but the listings just go on, and on… and on… and on….

And on.

I guess I could narrow it down by blogging only about those things that interest me the most, such as politics, religion, justice and the law, entertainment, and what’s been happening in the world lately. Unfortunately that covers just about 99% of what everyone else blogs about. Uh, maybe I need to try a different approach here.

What I’d like to do is be able to extract all the relevant signals from the mass of white noise out there, so that my beloved reader is spared the task of doing it himself.. It not only adds value to my site, but it enables me to keep my researching skills sharp and fresh, which is an absolute must if I’m to thrive in the legal profession (assuming that’s where I’m headed).

Which brings me back to my original question: Where the @#$% do I begin???!?

It’s a good thing at least that I still have a smattering of old but active news feeds that I can start out with. Google News also has some monstrous feeds I can peruse of, and so does Yahoo. But I can see this is going to be a personal project that could go on for months before I finally build up a sizeable database of truly invaluable feeds. Ick. I’d much rather be doing other things, like oh say, fighting terrorism, saving the world, and dating smokin’ hot girls. I guess that’ll have to wait till next year.

Tags: aggregator, blogging, blogs, downloads, fast lane, feeds, google, legal profession, newsfeeds, Newzcrawler, religion, rss, signals, smattering, syndication, white noise, yahoo
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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