Shopped Magazines Get Scary

Stunning, perfect, flawless faces grinning at you from covers of magazines that profess to tell you all the secrets to losing weight and looking beautiful and trim. You want to look just like the woman gracing the page don’t you? Or you want to meet a woman who looks just like her? Unfortunately, she doesn’t really look like that.

Photoshop is a powerful program and someone who is skilled with it can deceptively manipulate photos in such a way that you might not even know what is and isn’t real. As someone whose done photo retouching on a freelance basis I know all the tricks, but what’s going too far is up to the retoucher, or the client in some cases. Well many magazines definitely go too far in my opinion. They take already thin, fit, beautiful models and people and shave 15 to 20 pounds off them, airbrushing out any freckles or other "imperfections" in their skin, upping the contast until their face is ghostly and washed out and of course removing any wrinkles in the face at all, even the ones everyone is supposed to have. Like, you know, eyelids. And charming ones like laugh lines.

Recently there was an article about Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook and about how heavily manipulated her photo was. So how did they take an already attractive 39 year old women and make her look like an anorexic 16 year old girl? Click "read more" to find out (or… uh… go to the article I just linked to)

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Another “Moral Leader” Caught With a Hooker

What is it about hateful old Conservative Evangelical Christians who dedicate their lives to trying to tell everyone else what to do and hookers? This time it was the President of the Christian Action League another, you guessed it, Christian group who likes to try and effect laws and legislation with the doctrine of their religion. Luckily these screwballs keep their efforts focused on North Carolina rather than the entire United States.

I wasn’t planning on doing another blog post about religion so damn soon, but holy crap! These guys just won’t stop giving me material. As if the whole D.C. Madam scandal wasn’t enough!

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Thoughts on “Jesus Camp”

This girl looks like she needs to be saved,
but not the way these people are thinking

Tell me something. Would you pay to willingly send your ten year old child to a summer camp where some fat crazy bitch talks into a microphone for an hour telling them they’re a hypocrite, they’re a phony, they’re dirty and bad and need to feel guilty and be made clean? Well apparently alot of Evangelical Born Again Christians would. Just another example of everything that’s wrong with religion in the United States.

The documentary Jesus Camp covers the most confounding people, from the aforementioned fat bitch, founder of the camp in question, talking like a giant creepy child predator about how she goes to playgrounds to "convert" kids and can have them hallucinating and convulsing on the ground within minutes. To some poor kid named Levi with a rat-tail hairstyle I haven’t seen since 1992, saying what people have been saying for the last 2,000 years: this generation is gonna be the one to see Jesus come back for sure.

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Demanding Religious Tolerance But Not Giving It

So for the first time, the Senate had a Hindu guest Chapalin, Rajan Zed, delivering the morning invocation in the chamber. Before the poor guy can even begin speaking, hecklers in the crowd start shouting out things like: "Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight" and "No Lord but Jesus Christ! There’s only one true God!". Yeah. They seemed to mistake the Senate chamber for their church. Maybe they walked into the wrong building?

These people were from a group called "Operation Save America", yet another gathering of people under the mistaken impression that America is anything but a secular nation, and that the Deist and Freemason Founding Fathers would want us to drive all religions except Christianity out of the country. It’s these kinds of groups that want Christian prayer in schools, want Christianity invovled in laws, whine and cry about imaginary oppression and spread mistruths about how their religion is kept out of the public eye by twisting stories of their own misbehavior to make themselves out to be the victims (which, true to form, they’ve done with this situation.)

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Bleach Sucks

Oh here I go on another anime rant, I seem to be stuck in a vicious cycle. A while ago on deviantART someone was complaining about Adult Swim’s lineup, complained about Bleach, but then implied reruns of Cowboy Bebop would be worse. After calling the poster retarded I was quickly reminded of how much I hate the anime Bleach: the story of a boy who can see ghosts and gets the power to turn into an invisable samurai from an emo dead girl.

And before you ask: Yes I did actually watch it. I saw up to the story arc where the characters all ended up in the poorly named "Soul Society", at which point the show went from simply almost unbearable to completely unwatchable, despite numerous people telling me this is where the show is supposed to improve. Why was I watching it? Well it happened air on Adult Swim between Trinity Blood and Eureka 7, two anime I sorta wanted to watch (Eureka 7 wasn’t bad, but wasn’t that good either, and I missed the first few episodes so I still have no idea what the hell was going on in Trinity Blood) and I was too lazy to change the channel.

And no, I didn’t go into watching Bleach with any preconceived notions. I had heard of it, but I had no idea what it was about, so the show had only its own merits on which to impress me. And my first impression was: "Yeah, I liked this show the first time, when it was called Yu Yu Hakusho." Well okay, I’m exaggerating: I never liked Yu Yu Hakusho.

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