In the story of Humpty Dumpty, “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” Am I the only one that has ever asked why they even let the horses try to put Humpty together again? They’re horses, for crying out loud… it’s not like they’re out in hayfields across the midwestern United States weaving hay into blankets or creating mud sculptures. They do not have a particularly delicate touch when it comes to arts and crafts… for that matter, they don’t even have thumbs.

Come to think of it, the story doesn’t even mention that Humpty is an egg… I wouldn’t be surprised if that weird little rhyme actually has some kind of deeper meeting or political statement or something. If “Ring Around the Rosy” is about the Black Plague, who knows evil lurks in Humpty Dumpty.

In 1995 there was a short-lived Warner Bros. cartoon called Freakazoid!, in which the title character got his superhero powers by entering cyberspace and gaining all of the knowledge of the Internet. The cartoon itself became a zany piece of animation history that has to be seen to be believed, but the concept of gaining superhero powers through the Internet was very interesting.

You have to understand that this was 1995. There was no Facebook, no YouTube, no Google, and no Flash animations. Yahoo was only a year old, Netscape Navigator was the most popular web browser, and most people entered the Internet at speeds that would make the above comic take about 10 seconds to download.

And yet, none of this mattered to the early pioneers of the Internet, because they had accomplished their goal of allowing people from any part of the world to share information. Doctors could find cures for diseases from medical papers written in a different continent the day before, families could contact their relatives in a foreign land without paying expensive long distance charges, and artists could show millions of people lovable animations of hamsters dancing to a Disney song played at twice its speed.

Wait… what?

Yep, it’s true, and if you’re somehow unfamiliar with this tidbit of Internet history, you owe it to yourself to go there and check it out. As soon as the Internet hit the mass population, stupid little things like this started popping up. The Internet’s promise of a free flow of information turned into a startling realization that any piece of information added to it could potentially be seen by millions of people.

Never had so many people on earth had this opportunity before. The middlemen of newspapers and radio and television were removed. Anyone who had Internet access could potentially communicate with anyone else who had Internet access. The Information Age had begun.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the Internet. On one hand, I owe it a great debt, as it has provided me with a job, many wonderful friendships, and this site, which I’ve used as a platform to showcase myself for eight years. On the other hand, I have also seen its dark side; I have read things that I would love to unread, and I have seen images that I wish I could forget.

The Internet is a land without accountability. A person can create a new identity for themselves at the blink of an eye, and it doesn’t matter if that person is the biggest jerk that ever lived, because, with very few exceptions, they can just drop their jerk identity, create a new one, and they start fresh all over again.

The Internet has created new social dynamics. Besides sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace that have created a generation of over-multitaskers, there is also the endless arguments. Choose literally any topic, and you will find someone who will argue it to the death with you. They aren’t debates, since debates are set up to solve things… no, they are merely arguments, and are usually just excuses for people to yell, without caring who’s listening. After all, this is the Internet… if I yell something, thousands of people will listen!

There are things I love about the Internet, too. I really have learned a lot from it, and find it a useful tool in many things, including finding reference pictures for Freakazoid, which would have been very difficult to locate any other way. But let me ask you this… have you ever been on the computer, accessing the Internet for some mundane purpose, and then a power failure hits? And for a few moments, you feel your mind clear, and you look around you and say “I’m free”. If you were in a room full of people, they all start talking with one another, as though it was suddenly a revelation that communication is possible without an electronic device in the way.

This happens, of course, until a few minutes later when the power goes back on, everyone goes back to their devices, and you sit down and say “Oh, yeah, I haven’t been to YouTube in awhile…”

Christmas is certainly easier to wrap your head around… “a baby is born that will save the world”. That’s nice. Isn’t that nice? Almost superheroic, really. Let’s add to that stuff like “people gave him expensive gifts to celebrate his birth”. Oh, that’s even better! That gives me a way to celebrate! I’ll give gifts! I’ll get gifts! Christmas is the best time of the year!

Easter. That’s a lot tougher to celebrate. The baby that was born grows into a man named Jesus, is convicted of crimes, killed, but then rises from the dead within a few days informing people that he’s actually the Son of God. The details of his death are gruesome, and the details of his resurrection are, to most people, unbelievable.

How exactly are we supposed to turn something like Easter into foil-covered chocolates or wrapping paper? I’ve seen Biblical wrapping paper at Christmastime, with nativity scenes and angels and shepherds, but never Easter. An empty tomb, a crucified man, God having a victory over demonic forces… all of it is very difficult to commercialize, and so we celebrate it with bunnies and chicks and eggs and a host of odd symbols based on ancient Babylonian customs that don’t make sense to us. But, in doing so, we are forced to ignore this:

“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”

If Jesus was just a nice guy who said a few nice things and died in a horrible way, then everything changes. All Christians become lunatics, and all people of this earth lose the one true source of hope, freedom, and a relationship with God.

But, if it did happen, and Jesus did die to cover everything that you did wrong before rising from the dead and conquering death… well, then you have a choice, don’t you? Do you accept the gift? Do you want to be saved?

Many of the people I know don’t want to answer yes or no to that question… they’d rather just avoid the question entirely, and get on with their lives. I imagine that this is probably why we still have the Easter Bunny… it’s a lot easier to believe that we get a few days off work to celebrate a rabbit than having to answer that question that the annoying Christians keep asking: Do you want to know Jesus?

I won’t ask you that question. All I can say is that it’s been well worth it for me.

Happy Easter!

“For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life.”

Upon reading this, I was hit with the strangest thought – Christians are human brussels sprouts.

You know about brussels sprouts, right? They have this certain chemical inside of them that certain people can taste and other people can’t, and this is one of the reasons why some people find that they taste horribly bitter, while others don’t find that true at all (and, in fact, will even say they taste sweet sometimes).

Now, I don’t have a sense of smell – that’s a topic for another day – so whenever I hear about “aroma”, that’s pretty much the closest thing I can relate it to, and when the verses I was reading talked about the same aroma being fragrant or deathly to different people, it clicked with me. As a Christian, I have a message that I’m supposed to tell the whole world. It’s a message of extreme importance, and it has saved my life. And yet, to many people, that same message reeks.

I don’t really know how to deal with that yet. I’m sure I talk about Christianity proportionally more on this site than I do in real life. I want to show people my faith properly, and this is the best way I know how to do it… giving any reader the freedom to walk away from what I’m saying at any time. But, if the message of the Gospel really is the most important message in the world, shouldn’t I be telling everyone about it, no matter how much it reeks for them?

I don’t know. All I know is that sometimes, people learn to like brussels sprouts.

This was a real conversation that came up at work about a month ago.

At first, it sounded plausible that Superman wouldn’t be able to see through lead crystal, and if a bad guy gave Superman a lead crystal box with kryptonite inside, he’d have no idea, even though the humans around him would be able to see it plain as day. It even sounded possible that if the bad guy had all of the windows in his base made out of lead crystal, Superman would not be able to see inside (even though everyone else would).

However, it was determined in the end that it was only Superman X-ray vision that was affected by lead. His regular vision would be able to see right through it, and any bad guy that tried this lead crystal technique would end up feeling pretty stupid.

Incidentally, a bad guy wouldn’t be much better off making his base out of pencils. Pencil “lead” is not actually lead. It’s graphite, which is a dense form of a carbon.

Moral: Don’t make Superman angry. Vague loopholes in his superpowers never quite work the way you hope they will.

I also frequent many video game sites, and have gotten the impression that, at best, the Wii has a few pretty good games, and at worst, it’s a mockery of video game consoles and an insult to serious gamers.

I don’t know if I’m a “serious gamer”. What I do know is that it’s as though Nintendo probed my brain to find out what I’d want in a video game system, made most of it happen, and threw in some extras that I would never have dreamed of.

Here’s the thing. I do not like first-person shooters. I don’t like sports games. I don’t like horror games. I do not own a high-resolution televison. I do not have a home theater surround sound setup. At this point, Xbox and PS3 have pretty much already lost me.

What do I like? I like platformers. I like humorous games. I like adventures and solving puzzles. I like being able to hold my hands more than a foot apart and still play a game. I even like to work up a sweat while playing a video game in my own home sometimes.

You know what else? I have no problem whatsoever with not playing a video game for months on end. When it’s the summertime, I want to be outdoors more often! I want to do other things sometimes! Video gaming is not my life!

I like Mario. I like Zelda. I wish I could buy about 50 of the games on Virtual Console. So what if I have to store them on SD cards, I don’t care. There is more than enough video game entertainment to last me a long time on the puny little white console. And when the time comes, I’d love to design a game for it. I already have design documents for it.

Yes, there are really people out there who play and enjoy the Wii. And I am one of them.