He also said he was a “Christian,” and he “has to listen to loud-mouthed women every day.” That was Wednesday.

Today, he was shouting back at Auburn University students who were traveling between classes or ones that simply had nothing better to do than listen. He stood on his two-foot high wall just past the concourse (a place for hanging out and club recruitment and other stuff for you non-Auburn students). I would argue that he had more than a hundred students at several points during the day.

They were shouting back at him.

The highlight of the day? The The Gay Song (It’s Not Okay To Be Gay).

He is Micah Armstrong. He is the “Open Air Bible Thumper,” according to his website. He is radical. He is in your face.

He’s been on campus all week long, every day from around 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. He’s been preaching the “Word.” He’s been preaching against homosexuality, masturbation, and sex. Those are apparently our only sins.

Today, just after 2 p.m., he was escorted off the campus by police.

The crowd was riled up. Some were merely taunting the preacher bearing dark news (I like to think of him as the Dark Preacher). Others were preaching back at him. He was telling them about hell. Others were telling him about Jesus’ compassion, freely masturbating, and being openly gay.

“Every girl that has premarital sex with a guy is a W-H-O-R-E,” he shouted at the laughing young adults. “Every masturbator is a potential homosexual” because it is sex with the same sex.

He was there today to make sure we knew we were going to hell for the things we’re doing. He was there to tell us that Martin Luther King Jr. is in hell. That Ghandi and Mother Teresa were burning too. And, about the only person on campus today that wouldn’t burn would be himself.

The students took that message well.

Of course, there were a few opposers to stand on the wall with him.

This student reads an issue of Cosmopolitan. The story was something about how to gratify your partner sexually. “You can’t get your own audience,” Armstrong responds. The student then goes on to lead a group of students to another spot to read the issue, but they were few.

This is not an uncommon event. We usually get one radical preacher every semester who tries to scare the student body into religion, which is entirely the wrong approach. He was preaching against the Christians there that were trying to go with the Jesus’ love angle. No. That’s not allowed, that kind of preaching. It’s all fire and brimstone. That’s the only way to preach it.

My favorite person to take a stand against Armstrong is this guy, sporting a shirt that reads “Plays Well With Self” and an arrow pointed toward the man. This fit so well with Armstrong’s rampage against masturbation that you could not help but laugh. Well, and the t-shirt guy just looked funny.

“Your problem is not your testosterone or gender. You got a wicked, perverted heart. You’ve masturbated one too many times, you’ve watched one too many porno movies, you’ve had premarital sex,” continued Armstrong.

He never let up until the police arrived. I guess he was lucky he didn’t make a scene about “freedom of speech” at that moment. He was clearly harrassing those students who were gay, Muslim, Christian, women, and well…every one else. One seemingly devout Christian was near tears arguing back at him. This was what he was doing to his brothers in Christ.

Aside from the t-shirt guy and The Gay Song, the funniest scene of the day was when a student poked Armstrong in the butt with a stick. “Don’t turn your back on this guy,” Armstrong fired.

I’m not condoning this kind of childishness from grown people, but what Armstrong said incited an uproar of laughter.

It’s been a war all week. Christians vs. Armstrong. Muslims vs. Armstrong. Athiests vs. Armstrong. Students and Faculty vs. Armstrong.

I should make a Facebook group. I wonder what I’ll call it…

This in no way is an anti-Christian or anti-religion post. It is simply a post about a man who made a scene.

Here are some files I’ve uploaded for your viewing and listening pleasure. I would’ve uploaded the hour worth of recorded audio I got today, but it’s hard to hear since there was so much noise. Enjoy.

• The Gay Song Youtube Video – Link provided by Daniel Morgan
• The Gay Song (It’s Not Okay To Be Gay)
• Pictures from today’s events

It’s certainly no secret that Britney shaved her own head last Friday, then continued over to an L. A. tattoo parlor to have little lips inked on her wrist.

I don’t think the bald look is coming into style any time soon in America, at least not if you’re a woman. I’ve read that the look is becoming quite popular among men celebs.

Britney shouldn’t hog all the news though. She’s had too much media attention in the last few months.

Here’s a look at some other celebs who’ve sheared their hair. However, I must note that they were paid money for losing their locks.

Demi Moore donned the shaved look in G.I. Jane, in which she played a senator who enrolled in the Navy SEALS training program. She had the tough look going though. Not a bad looking woman, even with no hair. Moore’s head at least helped with female self-empowerment.

Sigourney Weaver went shaved in Alien³. I haven’t seen the movie, but I added her because she kept popping up when I was looking for pics of other celebs with shaved heads. I’m not sure why her head was shaved. Maybe the aliens done it or that was the look for the time.

My favorite actress who has shaved her head is Natalie Portman. She played Evey in V for Vendetta, and had to lose her hair to go undercover. Quite possibly the most beautiful woman without hair I’ve seen yet. I don’t know if there’s a bad look for her.

Obviously, these other celebs won’t make the headlines, but at least there’s one blog post in the blogosphere with their names in it.

Are there any other female celebs who’ve shaved their heads? For money or because they’ve lost their minds?

Edit (February 20, 2006, 8:15 p.m.): I just found this link to A History of Bald Women. It shows some of the women stars in films who’ve taken on bald roles.

James Pacenza, a 58-year-old man from Montgomery, Ala., says he is an Internet addict, and this is a disability resulting from watching his best friend die in the Vietnam War.

After returning from a Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, he logged onto a adult chatroom. Another employee reported finding the site after Pacenza left the computer unattended. Michael Diederich, his lawyer, said that Pacenza had never visited pornographic sites while at work; therefore, he broke no company rules.

When I first came upon the CNN article, I immediately thought, Oh no, here’s another Alabamian making our state look like a bunch of idiots. However, Net Addiction states, “Estimates suggest that five to ten percent of the population,” suffer from Internet Addiction. I might even suffer myself.

This case will bring more questions than answers. Should employers monitor the Internet use of its employees? Should “Net Addiction” be considered a disability? If it is a disability, should companies offer treatment?

There’s no definitive answer to those questions or other questions generated by this case.

One could argue that Pacenza got caught breaking the rules, and now he’s trying to find a way out of it. However, we might want to look into this whole Internet addiction thing. There might be something to it. I’m up past 2 a.m. blogging this story. Maybe I should be getting a good night’s rest instead.

Jen Hunter, the model, responded, “You don’t have to be a size eight to be beautiful. I am trying to change an industry that is so set in its ways and its definition of what is beautiful. It is so hard and harsh at times.”

I’ve seen quite a bit of discussion on the paper-thin size of models lately. I have never been that interested in modeling or fashion (I am a guy), but this bit of news sparked my interest.

Also, the very healthy-looking Scarlett Johansson topped FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women this year.

Could we be embarking on an age where the ideal woman is once again curvy?

The homework I did—believe me, this isn’t a boring topic—was a proposal on our ethics project for Technology, Literacy, & Culture, which centers on Cell Phone Tracking Parents. This has become a reality.

Katherine Albrecht, mentioned in the article by Barry Levine, discusses the factor that I see as the major problem with GPS Cell Phone Tracking Technology.

“I have a problem with any kind of tracking device, especially for kids,” she says, “because they will grow up with the expectation that tracking your every move is a normal part of life. It raises the hair on my neck because we’re training kids to be tracked at all times and they will think that some authority tracking them is fine.”

This is a real issue. People my age (22) may be some of the last people in the U.S. who believe it is wrong to have our every move tracked. Sure, our every move isn’t being tracked at the moment—I hope not, at least—but this is a future that could be real. Kids today, might not know that they have certain privacy rights when they become adults. Even adults now don’t know about their rights of privacy.

Cell Phone Tracking isn’t all a bad thing either. There’s E911, which is a great thing by all means. It provides emergency teams to get to an emergency quicker and more efficiently than before, in some cases. This is definitely a good thing if you’re living in a back-of-the-woods Alabama town. Parents can actually know where their kids are if the kids’ cell phones are on and not ditched at a friend’s house. Of course, what kid would turn off or leave their cell phone somewhere? Not many. This can also be a bad thing, which I went over before.

The real truth is, is that Cell Phone Tracking has positive and negative consequences. It depends on which viewpoint you’re looking at it from. This is a reality that is upon us all.

What surprised me the most was John Cloud’s assesment that “the essay readers reward formulaic writing over original voices.” Well, I wasn’t that surprised. Original voices are not always heard. But, the people with original voices usually stand out in the crowd when they get out of the mechanical confines of high school. I’m not too worried about them; but I hope that one day high schools and test makers will look beyond the people conforming to standards and put more focus on those “original voices.” Not to say that conforming to standards is a bad thing, it’s just not the only way. They try to get you to do the same thing in college. Only then, though, will some professors notice what has gone unnoticed for many years—originality.

Cloud argues that formulaic writing earns better test scores.

Finally, I was right about one other thing: that the graders would reward formulaic, colorless writing over sharp young voices. The average essay score for kids who wrote in the first person was 6.9, compared with 7.2 for those who didn’t. (A 1-to-12 scale is used to grade essays. That score is then combined with the score on the grammar questions and translated into the familiar 200 to 800 points.) As my editors know well, first-person writing can flop. But the College Board is now distributing a guide called “20 Outstanding SAT Essays”–all of them perfect scores–and many are unbearably mechanical and clichéd (“smooth sailing always comes after the storm”; “they say that history repeats itself”).

“20 Outstanding SAT Essays.” How bout’ that? Anyone who actually wrote “smooth sailing always comes after the storm” or “they say that history repeats itself” in an essay I graded better have something a lot better to back that up. Those are two of the most unoriginal ideas I’ve seen in an essay since, well, high school. And I like the idea of first-person writing from high school students. I like to read it on any education level. It gives essays a more personal feel (this largely depends on the type of essay also).

I know what these essay-graders are looking for. They’re looking for the standard five-paragraph essay. You know, the one where the thesis statement must be the last line of the first paragraph, which is called the introduction; three body paragraphs supporting the thesis; and a closing paragraph, basically restating what you wrote in the introduction. Boring, “colorless,” writing.

I’m honestly just mad that young original voices are being graded poorer than the standard. This is because I am an English major, and I’ve read all types of writing. At least in my world, part of it anyway, colorful writing is appreciated. Forget some of those literature classes. The professors in those have a mechanical system too. I say keep writing from your heart with your voice to those kids whose voices are being smothered now. Someone will value it later.

This morning in my Newswriting class we discussed what we felt like and what we were doing at the moment we first heard the news of the attacks. The first thing I realized in class was that I was old, much older than the other students in there. I am a 5th year senior in a sophomore level class. Many of my classmates were 14 at the time of the attacks. I was 17. I think the way we viewed the event was much different. And I had never thought about what 9/11 was like for people younger than me. There is a more-than-marginal age difference between 14 and 17. What was going through these kids minds? I know I can never fully grasp the answer to this question.

Our professor’s main question was, “Did you think that life was going to be different at that moment?” I told him I remember thinking that it would be. I had never imagined anything like an attack within the U.S. borders. Change was a big thing on my mind at the time. I was a senior in high school. I was preparing myself for change, for college, for a different life ahead. What might be different about the world after that day, I didn’t know; but I did feel like change was coming.

Luckily, there wasn’t much change. One of Bush’s goals was to maintain a sense of normalcy, and that seemed to work out for the most part. What did change, for a while, was America’s sense of patriotism. I watched people stand proudly, stiff, at the sound of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” people who had trouble taking their hats off at sporting events pre-9/11. We did get that, a sense of patriotism.

So, what were these other students thinking about? I’m still not sure, really. Most of us were in some kind shock. It didn’t matter whether we were 14 or 17 or 50, for that matter. The things that they recalled about 9/11 were the same things I recalled. We were at school. We watched TV all day. And if you got to watch TV all day instead of work, then something life-altering was happening. For once, our lives departed from the usual teenage chatter of girls about boys and boys about girls to what was actually going on outside the locker-lined hallways. We were forced to grow up, if only for a day.

Scarlett Johansson escapes Cruise’s clutches
‘MI:3’ star reportedly wanted the starlet to embrace Scientology

Did Tom Cruise try to recruit Scarlett Johansson to Scientology?

The “Lost in Translation” star was expected to co-star with Cruise in “Mission: Impossible III” but was dropped because of “scheduling conflicts.” But it seems that there may have been other conflicts as well. Cruise invited Johansson to a Scientology center where he showed her literature about joining his controversial church, according to a report. “After two hours of proselytizing,” according to RadarMagazine.com, “Cruise opened a door to reveal a second room full of upper-level Scientologists who had been waiting to dine with the pair, at which point the cool-headed ingénue politely excused herself.”

The Scoop called Johansson’s mother/manager for comment and she declined, referring us to Johansson’s publicist, who didn’t return calls or emails. Cruise’s rep didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Rick Ross of CultNews.com told the Scoop: “Is this Tom Cruise’s version of a first date? It’s becoming increasingly difficult to make distinctions between his personal, professional and religious life. Tom Cruise and Scientology seem intent on recruiting a hot young star. Apparently, Scarlett Johansson flunked her test, but Katie Holmes passed.”
By Jeannette Walls
Link To Article

Giving the benefit of the doubt to Scientology and all Scientologists, (if that’s what they’re called) I checked out the website Scientology.com. I swear this thing is a book fair for L. Ron Hubbard. I clicked on the link What is Scientology? to see what this thing is all about. Here’s what I got:

What is Scientology?
The aims of Scientology are a world without insanity, without criminals, without war, where the able can prosper and where Man is free to rise to greater heights.

And if you were to ask any Scientologist they would tell you it is a practical religion, with practical answers — tools that can be applied to achieve greater awareness and purpose in the here and now.

Or, as we say it, when you have the answers to life’s questions — there is virtually no part of existence it cannot be applied to for the betterment of life itself.

What people need are real solutions, real tools to deal with and effectively overcome human problems.

Every one of us has experienced it.

Think back yourself and you’ll remember when you tried to help a grieving loved one, a struggling child, a friend overcome by addiction.

And where you have failed, it’s only because you lacked effective answers to accomplish what you desired.

Now, I know this isn’t supposed to explain their whole religion. I know that. But come on, that’s no real answer. If anything that’s skirting around a serious question that needs to be answered up front. So far, it’s my belief that Scientology is crap. Plain and simple. Crap. I’ve always thought that most other religions couldn’t give you real answers, but this just tops them off.
Just a few years after I really come to appreciate Tom Cruise as an actor, I’ve now come to think he is just a few french fries short of a happy meal (for lack of a better phrase). Hope War of the Worlds is good. I don’t want him to go off the deep end completely.

I’m sure I’ll read up a little more on Scientology before I write it off altogether, but it doesn’t look too promising at the moment.

In other news, I made my second new website theme this week. It’s just a random idea I came up with based off of the Yahoo website. So check it out if it’s not already loaded into your browser.

I guess that’s it for now. I think this is the longest post I’ve made since I downloaded Wordpress. Of course, if I took out all of the quotes, then it’d be shorter than some of the other posts.