I recently spent the weekend in a cabin out in the Oklahoma countryside.  Sounds quite redneckish, huh?

I would generally agree, but this was no country bumpkin excursion to the wild west.  Rick and I went with some friends, Walt and Casey, and had an absolutely fantastic weekend.

Naturally, a chance to spend the weekend with Rick was as good a reason as I needed, but getting away from everything and spending three days doing nothing except what we wanted to do was an excellent reason as well.

Walt and Casey found the cabin through happenstance and fell in love with it, so they invited us up for a nice respite.

To say it was an outstanding weekend would be understating it by a significant amount.

Although it rained most of the time we were there, that didn’t deter us from enjoying ourselves.  The point was to relax and get away from the hustle and bustle of our lives, so the rain was a perfect reason not to worry about anything.

Casey was our chef apparent with a planned course of meals, all of which were fantastic.  Walt was entertainment coordinator and provided a plethora of music, games, magazines and movies to enjoy at our leisure.

With nothing to worry about and no way to stay in touch with the rest of the world (how does one survive without internet and cell phone access?), we found ourselves forced into relaxation — and I don’t think any of us minded too very much.

Lying in bed on the screened-in porch, listening to the rain fall and the river rush by, I found myself more relaxed than I have been in a very long time.  Like icing on a cake, Rick and I nestled together as often as we could — both day and night.

This was indeed the ne plus ultra of weekend escapes, made as much so by the environment as the company.  We were completely unfettered by our normal cares and concerns.  Each of us found renewal in each other, in the serenity of our surroundings, in the escapism of it all.

But all good things must come to an end, so we recreantly packed and returned to the normal world, to our jobs, to the hustle and bustle of society.

There is no dissembling the experience.  I believe it helped strengthen my friendship with Rick in addition to demonstrating to both of us that our relationship is far more than just a friendship with benefits.  I’m not coloring things misleadingly however, as we two continually define our relationship in real-time.  It is certainly a work in progress — but this is the kind of work that I don’t mind doing.

As Rick once said to Nathalie though, we’re as close to married as you can get.  This weekend helped cement that in reality.

With the promise to return to the cabin on a regular basis and to assist the owner with making it an even more inviting place than it already is (through planned improvements to the property), we returned to the world at large, each of us better for the experience.

When I think of happiness, this weekend helps to set the bar.

Walt, a dear friend, shared this with Rick and I during a recent visit.  I found it to be rather entertaining despite how bizarre it is.  Truly one of the weirdest Flash series I’ve ever seen.

Then again, my sense of humor can oft times be less than politically correct or predictable.  Dark, off beat, weird, bizarre, different…  Those are all words which can regularly describe my sense of humor.

Created by David Firth of Fat-Pie.com, Salad Fingers, as filteredshots (Tim) of The New Beat said, does cause one “to ponder the difference between being brilliant and being deranged.”

Take a look and be certain to watch all five episodes of Salad Fingers – presented by Newgrounds.com.

I read in a BBC article that scientists have found that climate change was most likely responsible for the demise of Diprotodon and other large Australian beasties more than 45,000 years ago.  Long believed to have been caused by humans encroaching on their land and hunting them to extinction, these new findings certainly raise some serious questions that need answers.

According to modern scientists, climate change is surely caused by man.  Their continual reports of global warming clearly indicate we humans are to blame for any real or perceived changes in Earth’s weather.

That being the case, regardless of what the article states, man must be responsible for these extinctions.  Somehow, long predating any level of human technological or industrial advancement, we must have caused the planet’s weather to change on a massive scale.  Our planet doesn’t do such things on its own, right?

Modern scientists blame any possible changes in our global weather environment on combustion and other man-made technologies which somehow, in only a few hundred years or so, have so drastically impacted the planet that life as we know it must certainly be in danger.

This begs the question: if current changes in Earth’s global weather are absolutely caused by man, what caused the very same things to happen many, many times in the past?

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a tree hugger.  I’m very much in favor of protecting our environment.  I’m also a scientist, though, and very much believe in the facts, even when they stand in the way of good political drama.  Scientists who continually declare that man has indeed damaged the environment on a global scale and that no other explanation is possible are doing an injustice to those who have long held that scientists are objective and that their findings can stand up to scrutiny since they are founded in the scientific method.

Scientific method be damned, those scientists say.  Never let the facts stand in the way of good politics, and never let real science stop you from being an alarmist even when you can’t prove it.

Sadly, poppets, we simply don’t have enough hard data to indicate whether man is truly the cause of any weather changes, real or perceived.  We are only now becoming familiar with the true workings of our planet’s ecosystem.  Only now are we beginning to understand in even the most simple of terms how the vast earthly ecology works, how weather patterns that span decades — or even centuries — play pivotal roles in atmospheric physics, how naturally occurring phenomena impact global weather patterns through a series of interconnected events which can even be catalyzed by something innocuous and seemingly unrelated (gas expulsion from the sea floor, natural weather patterns like El Niño and La Niña, large influxes of fresh water into the salt water system, changes in sea currents due to water temperature changes, volcanic eruptions, natural oceanic oscillations, solar flairs and sunspots, meteor impacts, and so on).

We can’t even predict with any level of certainty what the weather will be like tomorrow, yet some scientists have quickly jumped on the global warming bandwagon and are convinced that man must be responsible.

We may be.  We may not be.  I think it’s the height of human arrogance to assume we could have such an impact on the planet, especially in light of how little time we’ve actually been around and how many times in the past significant climate changes have taken place on their own.  I’m unwilling to discount the premise, however, since we simply don’t know enough either way.

I’d rather err on the side of caution than assume nothing is wrong, only to find later that we’re screwed.  That doesn’t mean I have to claim global warming is true and is happening today.  This is especially true when the facts and historical references contradict those findings and indicate the planet is fully capable of such changes — very rapid changes — all on its own.

I simply detest the alarmist attitude of scientists, in direct contradiction of the scientific method and objectivity which must always be practiced.  Study, investigate, research — but don’t scream that the sky is falling when you still can’t tell me if it’ll rain tomorrow.  All that proves is that you still don’t fully comprehend the planet’s weather systems but are willing to claim understanding just to get your name in the headlines.

What the hell is going on with 2005?  It seems just yesterday I was celebrating the new year with with several man-whores, $1,500 in cocaine spread all over the coffee table, enormous amounts of cheap American beer and a penchant for exaggeration.

Now it’s June.  JUNE!  What’s that about?

I feel as though I have whiplash thanks to how quickly this year is flying by.  I realize, with how hectic and busy our lives have become, that each passing year seems to move by more quickly than the last, that we, in our never-ending pursuit of stuff, continually push ourselves harder and harder, thereby causing this insufferable discontinuity between how quickly time passes from one year to the next.

But it’s simply beyond my comprehension how the first half of 2005 has already slipped by practically unseen.

If time flies when you’re having fun, how is it then that it seems to accelerate to relativistic speeds when you’re not having fun?

Fine.  Stop the world.  I want off this crazy ride.

I rented Alone in the Dark because I’ve always been a sci-fi and horror movie buff since I was a very young child.  This is one case when I should have kept my curiosity in check.

Alone in the Dark is a mess.  It’s another entry in the video-game-to-movie genre that is crippled by its own use of mundane locations and characters.  There is no character development outside of providing them with names.  In fact, the characters seemed less interested in the movie than I was, and I wasn’t interested at all after the first 15 minutes.

This is truly a movie which should never have been made.  It’s worse than garbage.  I’d rather watch Dreamcatcher over and over again, and you know how much I hated that movie.

With wooden acting and what can only be described as absentee direction, leaden and uneven in every way, this film deserves nothing more than instant oblivion.  The editing is equally bad as we are often left asking how we got to where we are because scenes would simply come out of nowhere.

This is truly one of the worst movies ever made — and I use the term “movie” quite loosely in this regard.  This is more like a freshman high school drama class doing its first reading of a script (even then I feel as though I’m insulting those very same students).

Leave this one on the video store shelf and find something less appalling.  This isn’t worth seeing once even if, like me, you feel compelled to see every new horror movie just in case.