Harold Bloom in The American Religion (1992):

Fundamentalism, the great curse of all American religion, and of all religion in this American century. Fundamentalism [...] is an attempt to overcome the terror of death by a crude, literalization of the Christian intimation of immortality.

As Bloom puts it all religion comes from our apprehension of death. I guess this is why science is so lousy at explaining death. I wonder what comes from our celebration of life?

CIC*TRIPLE ADVANTAGE 877-4816825 may you rot in hell.

Recently I went to Experian's free credit report site to get my score. Despite my best efforts to the contrary I'm now subscribed to their $12.95/month credit monitoring service. Unsubscribing can only be done by calling an 877 number and sitting on hold apparently.

I would like to add that their credit monitoring service only exists because they do such a poor job of gathering accurate credit information. They want me to subsidize their poor credit reporting. Unbelievable.

Credit scoring is only useful for lenders. Let them pay to clean it up.

On the daily puppy they post pictures of cute puppies. They also have ratings and comments for each puppy. The ratings I've seen end up between 10 and 11 (the highest). The comments all use varying degrees of hyperbole to describe how cute the puppy is.

The ratings and comments seem redundant to me, yet I bet people wouldn't enjoy the site as much without them. (I always browse them) Why is that? I see the same kind of redundant chatter on many websites (digg comes to mind). I wonder if this fills the same role as small talk in the real world? I guess any web site looking for an audience needs to provide opportunities for this kind of chatter.