"Bright Star" Early Learning Center?!

Boy oh boy, if I were running a Christian "Early Learning Center", I would NOT name it Bright Star. The connotations are all wrong.

How To Rebuild Civilization

I think this might be my new favorite TV show. Starting with just a survival knife, we learn how to make fire, how to use that to make lye, and how to use that (with animal fat) to make soap. Other episodes show how to make a clay kiln, how to use that to get copper and tin from ore, and how to use that to make bronze. It never assumes the existence of too much technology -- just the one survival knife and whatever we've learned from previous episodes.

And, hey, the more people who watch HTRC, the better chance we've got of bootstrapping civilization following humanity's next great "whoops". It's a *practical* show.

Now will someone PLEASE do me a favor and start producing this show? I, for one, am waiting eagerly to watch it. All I've got at the moment is this idea, but I know there's got to be someone at the Discovery Channel who wants to buy a full season.

My credo

I tinkered with the look of my LJ tonight, and decided to use a style that allows custom text. Here's what I put there:

I believe in humanity: our indwelling capacity for good, our insatiable desire to make ourselves known to one another, our coruscating passion for knowledge, our ability to handle the truth, and our capacity for learning from really dumb mistakes.

I believe in humor as the universal solvent of ignorance, grief, and fear.

I believe in public libraries.

I believe in using intellectual property rights to establish a sustaining wellspring for the creative endeavors of others; I believe in the Creative Commons license.

I believe in putting final punctuation outside the quotes unless it was present in the original.

I believe in the Oxford comma.

I don't believe in rigid gender lines, violence as national economic policy, or any particular religion (though I'm congenial to many).

A friend of mine took a religious education class at a Unitarian Universalist church. No, seriously. One of the products was her own personal credo. This is mine.