For Nerd Nite 1.2 I am going to settle once and for all who the best Doctor is, at least until Matt Smith becomes the Doctor starting April 4. In the spirit of March Madness I have constructed a bracket and have seeded the Doctors based on how many stories aired in their reign.

I had several false starts on this one, including a funny but ultimately unsustainable scene of 19th century authors downhill skiing, but finally focused on the parenthetical note about Olympus as my jump off point. It was, of course, my son, Simon, who threw that prompt in there. It is another of my more philosophical pieces returning to a common theme in my writing - the true believer meets the skeptic. Enjoy.

Don't read further if you don't want any spoilers.

I broke two cardinal rules in this script. Don't make your actors sing. Don't make your actors do impersonations. Yet, after the read through, I feel fairly confident this should be good.

My prompts were:

WHO: A Bitter Academic
WHAT: Harmonica
WHERE: Sesame Street
TIME: 11:00
WALK ON: Super Dave Anderson (area television meteorologist)

If you are coming tonight, don't read on unless you want spoilers.

This is my first attempt at posting video from my iPhone. I took this around 12:20 today. The winds were gusting up to 50 mph according NOAA.

Black Eyed Snakes - Rise Up! from Brian Barber on Vimeo.

I'm heading to the Free Range Film Fest tonight to get my share of this year's crop of organic films without that nasty big corporation aftertaste.

I saw this on my way down Superior Street yesterday and had to stop and take a photo. I have no idea if the balloon was placed there or just happened to be caught on the statue, though I'd guess the former. It just made me happy.

This has been cracking me up for a couple years. Our local grocery tags Land O' Lakes products as LOL. I wonder if they know what amusement they are affording us.

But, honestly, I'm not sure any of them are much better or worse than the good old D&D alignment matrix. In old school D&D you choose an alignment to describe the ethos of your character. You can, on one axis, be Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic in relationship to your adherence to authority, and on the other axis be Good, Neutral, or Evil in what, in game terms, boils down to your own sense of altruism. In D&D terms, Evil characters are always out for self enrichment and use other people to achieve their own ends.

When applied to real life the alignment grid becomes very interesting. As a pastor in a major, mainline denomination (perhaps two of them) you might predict that I'd be Lawful Good, seeking to maintain social order and promote the common good. It's the classic Paladin alignment after all. But, actually, in testing and in practice, I'm Chaotic Good, and not accidentally so.

I'm fairly suspicious of institutions, whether governmental or ecclesiastical, and not that I doubt the good intentions of the leadership, though sometimes I do. Moreso I question the overall efficacy of such institutions and their ability to really do anything of worth. The bigger the institution, the more out of touch it is. And that's not just my experience, it's my theological reasoning as well. A key biblical text for me in this regard is 1 Samuel 8 which describes what a king does to his people.

Also, I'm just suspicious of moral frameworks in general. After all the fall was caused not by eating an apple, but eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Morality is a curse in the context of Genesis 3 and one could argue that the rest of the Bible is dealing with that curse.

So, I'm a Chaotic Good Preacher. I believe that Good is best expressed in individual actions of compassion and justice and not in institutional expressions of the same. Sometimes the system works, sure, but even a blind pig finds an acorn once in awhile.

Practically this means I preach about grace and joy found in concrete expressions of individual's life and charity found in the life of the community. As a leader I try to be sure that my institution for which I'm paradoxically responsible is a permission giving body that tries to chart a course for the body, and then pretty much stays out of the way, giving resources and support, rather than micromanaging. In other words, I try never to let the rules stand in the way of a good idea.

My daughter, Emma, is featured in this promo video. What she says is true. When she was six and first auditioning she was extremely shy, but also extremely charming. I'm very proud of her, in case you didn't know.

I remember I had a rather lengthy discussion of whether we should admit the verb "to be" into our calculations as was argued that the word is often just a linking verb and has no real existential meaning in most cases.

I also remember a dean or a vice president or some such authority being very upset with me because he thought I was trivializing the whole thing and wasting time.

The interesting thing is, now that I have had the dream, I think this might be a fun project to do in reality.

Noah, perplexed by this plan, wondered aloud to God about what would happen after he and his partner died off and there were no more humans left. God led them down into the lower levels of the ark where there were these humanoid robots in various states of construction.

"These will replace humans as caretakers of my creatures," said God. "They can't do any worse than humans have."

And that's where the dream ended.

Please give me the following information for your entry.

Word (eg - phaser, Kashyyyk, frak)

Origin (what franchise) (eg - Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica)

Usage (eg - "Set your phaser to stun!" "Chewbacca went back to Kashyyyk." "What the frak are you talking about?")

If possible also give me some Documentation (a web link would be good) supporting your entry.

Also, these words don't have to be hard. They can be fairly simple or intermediate words. They just have to be sci fi words.

So that we don't spill the beans on all the words for the contestants, please don't put them in the comments, but send them to me at scifibee@ironic1.com.

Thanks for your help! This should be fun!

"A cookie recipe calls for 2 cups flour for every 1/2 cup chocolate chips. If you wanted to make a triple batch, how many cups of chocolate chips would you use?"

His immediate answer was, "insufficient data."

I started to argue with him, but then I saw why he was absolutely right.

Can you?

I love my rules lawyering son.

I wish I could be there when he confronts his math teacher over this problem tomorrow.