Facebook is eating my brain, and I don't seem to care

This past week, I joined FarmVille on Facebook. May God have mercy on my soul.

For those who don't know, FarmVille is a Facebook app that lets you grow pretend crops, sell them for pretend money, and do favors and send gifts to your real friends, who are also busy in the growing of fake food, milking fake cows, etc.

I had no choice in the matter whatsoever. Last Sunday, my wife told me "I don't care if you play it or not, but you have to join FarmVille so that I can get a bigger farm."

Now, I love my wife, and live to help her anytime I can without movement or labor being involved. So I signed onto my Facebook profile, and accepted her Farmville friend requests I'd been ignoring for the past 4 months. I planted my first crop (soybeans and strawberries, I think), and walked away.

Now, here I am, one week later, waiting to harvest a rice crop that takes up most of my arable land, and plotting my days around when I have be available to harvest crops. It is the nature of this insidious little game that you can always get a bigger harvest, or more stuff. Seemingly, the game only takes 5 or 10 minutes of your time. Seven or eight times a day. Or more. And because the game is so addictive, you don't really care.

I've already got my exit strategy in place for when I inevitably get tired of feeding make-believe people. One day, I will sell all my animals, leave my land fallow, and put up a sign telling any visitors that I have gone away to read and play in the sunshine — another abandoned virtual farm on the vast digital landscape.

And I think I should do it soon.

Unless, of course, I make level ten. I've always wanted my own cranberry bog.

Mini movie review — "The Da Vinci Code"

With my daughter staying the night at a friend's house last night, my wife and I decided to watch The Da Vinci Code for the first time. Thanks to donations from family members, I have had a hardback edition of the book, as well as an audio cassette version, for several years. However, I had become resigned to the fact I was never going to read either one, and that the movie version in this case would do just fine.

As a movie, Da Vinci works pretty well; it's suspenseful, and has an interesting narrative and subject matter. Plus, I like the idea of a symbologist as an action hero. The scenes illustrating his thought processes as he tries to crack a puzzle are pretty neat to watch.

An impressive stable of actors has been recruited here, and the performances are pretty solid throughout. Particularly enjoyable for me were the always-impeccable Sir Ian McKellan and the likewise first-rate Paul Bettany. Jurgen Prochnow was also enjoyable in his role, as was Alfred Molina.

That said, a lot of the plot twists were seen coming a mile off, both by my wife and myself, so there were few real surprises. Most alarming, it plays extremely fast-and-loose, and somewhat cynically, with church history. Some of the conclusions it takes are decidedly from a certain point of view, and, just based on my limited knowledge of the subject, it takes a cafeteria approach to both gnosticism and some of the so-called "missing" gospels. I'm no one's expert on that subject, but from where I see things now, it seemed as if they were taking a lot of things out of context to try to justify their conclusions.

So, overall, as a movie, I give it a solid B, but a theological and historical D-.

Long time, no see

If blogs were houses, this one would be the house on the corner that the family moved out of a couple months ago; freezing inside, somewhat dusty and moldy, completely barren, and starting to give way to the elements. Life, the holidays and Facebook have effectively diverted my attentions elsewhere.

No longer; it is a new year, and I haven't given up on this little diversion just yet. I have just been refreshed by prolonged contact with 'purt near everyone in my extended and scattered family, and am eyeing the coming year with a sense of optimism and purpose.

To that end, I plan to go back to the 'notes on the refrigerator' school of blogging. I may post the occasional essay. but like as not, it will just be 'thoughts for the day.' After all, what's the point of being brilliant if I don't share (he said, tongue firmly in cheek).

We'll begin our journey into my mental processes with a quick thought about the Twilight series. As many know, author Stephanie Meyer is a Mormon, and I've just pieced together what I believe is a bit of Christian symbolism included in her books, unintentional or no.

The "good" vampires, the Cullens, are "vegetarians" — living on animal blood, and not human. This isn't a new idea; Anne Rice did the same thing in Interview With A Vampire. But in so doing, the vampires in both books are rebelling against their created nature, and choosing a moral path rather than a natural one.

In the same way, Christians rebel against their created nature, and live according to a moral path rather than a natural one. There are a hundred temptations we resist each week that our natural impulses tells us to give in to. They can appear small; white lies, excessive venting about why we're angry with someone, and other little moral shortcuts. Or, for some, they can loom large: fighting the urge to drink or smoke; resisting the urge to cheat on one's spouse, or any of the multitude of demons and compulsions being fought at this very minute around the globe. Either way, it is a seemingly natural drive that we, like the Cullens, resist because we are heeding "the better angels of our nature."

Now whether or not Meyer intended to be that deep is a question for further debate.