Seth Lamble

No serious this is way more important

Babies and dogs playing

Maybe thats what Flike needs, a baby in the house.

Happy fathers day to Dad, I am assuming you guys are at the land.

So I made it to California for my friend Eric’s wedding. I stopped in Albuquerque on Wednesday night and hung out with my other friend Eric. THen I drove on Thursday to Needles California, where I stayed at a KOA campsite, which was pretty empty when I arrived. The most interesting things I saw on the way to Needles was Bucket of Blood Road in Holbrook and the Wigmwam Motel also in Holbrook. I also passed through the Petrified Forest. I got to experience some of the mythical LA traffic on Friday. But I made it to both LAX and the hotel, without much difficulty. Today is the rehearsel dinner. Later

Into the West – Wednesday
So the hardest part of sleeping at the KOA Kampsite was not the rain or the aircraft taking off and landing, but the wind that made last night difficult. My tent was staked down but the sides of my tent was still being whipped around, and flapped all night long.
After I finally got a few hours of sleep I continued on my journey. I had breakfast at the Calico County Café which consisted of Garden Vegetable Eggs, Bacon, Sausage, Hash Browns and small Cinnamon Rolls, along with Fresh Squeezed Lemonade.
After breakfast I continued on the road. Going to Palo Duro Canyon, the second largest canyon in the United States. I could have spent all day driving through that canyon or hiking. But alas I did not have much time, I was only able to spend an hour and a half driving along the canyon floor. It was so amazing seeing the walls of the canyon and how the ages have passed along the walls.
I headed West around noon. It was absolutely beautiful scenery driving out through the panhandle and New Mexico. Though I did wonder who all that empty land belonged too. Was it some ranchers property or was it being held by the government until somebody had a use for the land.
Interesting site: The Taste of India Restaurant and Gas station, or in the middle of nowhere between Amarillo and Albuquerque.
I made it to Albuquerque and met up with Eric, from Peace Corps fame, spent some time on the Kirtland AFB watching Ospreys take off and land. We then headed out to the Casino for dinner. Had some interesting buffet food, I had both potatoe salad and jello salad. Going to have a long day tomorrow so later.

It is amazing how much driving all day takes out of you.

Most Interesting City Name: Lahoma
Most Interesting County Name: Hemphill County, TX

I did forget to mention that yesterday mother and I went to Culver’s for dinner using dad’s gift card. We both ordered their Butterburgers, and I had fries and mom had their potatoe soup. After we had our dinner we each had a small dessert. I won’t complain, but I will only go to Culver’s again if someone else wants to, I was unimpressed.

Today I left the homestead around 9:30 after mom and I took Flike and Queequaeg out for a walk. Flike didn’t seem to mind his new hobble leash, at least compared to the way mom describe it before hand, must have been my expert dog handling skills. I drove the familiar route from KC to Wichita, though I didn’t stop in Wichita, and continued on the less familiar, but traveled route too Oklahoma. I didn’t make it to Oklahoma City, by new Garmin Nuvi took me along country roads to amarillo. I did stop at Gloss (or Glass) mountain in Oklahoma. Took some photos enjoyed the view. Didn’t enjoy the sweat fly that bit me as I was trying to photograph at turkey vulture. It was kind of fun driving through the Cimarron and the Arroyos of the Panhandle. Having read about them in all the westerns I have read.

Sadly the free wifi I have does not appear to be robust enough to upload the photos and videos I have taken. Maybe when I hit LA.

I arrived in Amarillo safe and sound and I am camping, luckily it is not raining, unluckily it is already Mosquito season. I had dinner at the Acapulco Restaurant in downtown Amarillo, and I spent a 1/2 walking around downtown. At the restaurant I had Edith’s Homemade Floutas (Chicken) and Fried Icecream (it is never fantastic, I think the only reason why I get it is its something different.) Apparently Amarillo is not a hopping town, at least downtown, at 9 PM on a Tuesday night.

Tomorrow I will continue my journey into the West.

So I am currently enroute to Las Angeles, California for an old OP friend’s wedding. Since I have never had a chance to see the American Southwest I figured this would be an excellent chance to drive through it. And it also turns out I will be passing along old Route 66. Today marks the end of my first, and shortest leg of my trip. Rolla to Overland Park. Along the way I stopped at the Frozen Grill, a custard place in Tipton, MO. I had seen it many times on my trips between school and home, but it never seemed to be the opportune time to stop there. Today I decided to go for it. I had the Chicken Strips and Clam Strips for lunch along with a small Cheesecake shake. The Chicken Strips were good and hot, while the Clam Strips tasted like fried shrimp, probably because they were fried with the shrimp the small place also offers. The shake proved to be a challenge because the Cheesecake bites kept clogging the straw. Don’t worry I got through them. I also stopped at the Dutch Bakery in Tipton as I often do and picked up some dried fruit and pretzels to snack on as I travel West. I arrived safely home at the old Lamble Homestead in the early afternoon, and immediately got the 2 guard dogs overly excited. Tonight I am taking it easy at home with the parents, but I intend to go out and at least do some touristy stuff along the way. I have the Lonely Planet Guide to the American Southwest and the 1000 places to see before you die books, so hopefully I will find some interesting places to check out along my drive. I also intend to try to eat at non-national chain restaurants, no point in traveling halfway across a continent just to eat at McDonalds or Chilis. Stay tuned tomorrow for my next step, the campsite supposedly has free wireless.

So Pete Olson recently decried Obama’s cutting of the Constellation Project (Man Spaced Flight to the Moon) as a national embarassment. I decided to take a look at Representative Olson’s website and I didn’t find any indication if he is a Free Market Capitalist, which being the bigot that I am was my knee jerk reaction thought when I saw what party he came from. His site is pretty opaque about his stances, with only anecdotes that don’t really mean anything about his ’stances’ but if he is a Free Market Capitalist, doesn’t wanting the GOVERNMENT to do manned space flight be running contrary to the free market. Of course Richard Branson and his Virgin elitists are kind of hippesque and who wants hippies to be exploring the outer space, gotta show those space aliens what the real Earth is like.

new movies coming out in the next decade.

At time 0:32 Toby Keith is singing about the hole in the Ozone layer and how the world keeps turning. I have taken this 2 different ways,

either A: Despite the fact that there is a hole in the Ozone layer (shrinking?) the world still keeps going on, in my interpretation despite the problems the world has the world will always keep moving on.

Or B: The hole in the Ozone layer has no real effect on the Earth, which is like saying I took a bucket of soil from the lakeshore and the lake is still there, one does not necessarily effect the other. Due to the way the song goes and previous works by Toby Keith, I suspect it is B, but the optimist in me says its A.

And since I am talking about Toby Keith, there was this news article a couple o’ months ago. And his actions are not what made me think about it so much as why was Toby Keith one of the Musical Performers for the Nobel Peace Prize honoring Barack Obama?

I am no evolutionary biology expert, and I am really not much of a biologist in general, so I have no critique of the debate between Darwinism and Intelligent Design as presented by Ben Stein in his movie Expelled, I do have three issue with his movie though:

One
Ben Stein at one point while discssing the origins of life mocks both the idea that life could have originated when molecules piggy backed on the formation of crystals which created the order that allowed life, and more ironic to me mocked the idea of Panspermia, the concept that extraterrestials seeded life on earth, (which this does not solve the problem of where life came from, because the aliens had to have come from somewhere) Ben Stein fails to aknowledge the face that panspermia is actually just another way of saying Intelligent Design, an alien intelligence for its own reasons chose to intelligently design life to survive on Earth. That and of course the old argument of the idea of lightning strikes causing the 250 base sets of proteins to line up perfectly. Life originated on Earth what 4.5 Billion years ago, give or take a few million years, how many lightning strikes are there per year? The department of energy reports over 8 million lightning strikers PER DAY, which adds up to over 3 billion lightning strikes per year, so from the point of the earth being friendly enough for primordial ooze to form to when life actually evolved, I am going to low ball and say a million years (there is a 1.2 billion year time period in between the formation of the earth and the first cells as estimated, but I want to go with a million, cuz I can) and assuming every lightning strike has only enough energy to cause one chance of protein alignment (it apparently has significantly more, as in every lightning strike could spin the wheel of chance a couple hundred times to evolve life, but lets go with one) that means there are 3 x 10^15 chances for life to spontaneously evolve, and going with a evolution skeptics (from Ben Stein’s movie) random statistical likelihood of life spontaneously evolving of 1 in a trillion, that means there was at least 3000 points at which the 250 proteins lined up perfectly, and only one of those 3000 points had to survive long enough to make a replicate of itself. And I am no mathematician, and all of my numbers were found doing quick google searches online in the 10 minutes I took to write this, wonder how higher (or lower) the number goes with someone who knows what they are doing.

Two:
Ben Stein goes to Germany, and goes to see the hospitals and concentration camps where the Nazis went about committing genocide. Regular Darwinism and Evolution are dropped as way Nazis justified their programs. Except the way Ben Stein defines Darwinism, Nazis were never Darwinists. They believed they could use forced evolution to return to their ideal of a perfect race, but they did not believe that humans evolved from primordial ooze billions of years ago. They believed that they were annointed by a higher power to rule all the lesser races, that they were descended from Angels (angels do not exist in Darwin’s Origin of Species), they hated Catholics but believed Protestantism was the true religion (or one of the true religions) so when Ben Stein equated Nazisim with Darwinism he was spreading false information. Not only that but it was kind of sad to see him take that path, he moved his movie away from being a critique on the conflict ongoing between Intelligent Design and Darwinism, and towards a simple attack on Darwinism by associating it with evil. Not only that but just because Evil used an idea doesn’t make that idea evil, cuz that is saying every doctor killing pro-lifer has just made the concept of a higher power being pro-life evil, in my opinion.

Three:
A scientist was waxing about his ideal Utopia, one where religion has been regulated to a quaint hobby, and where science rules the world, and how perfect it would be. Ben Stein then does a video over of the only path a relgion free world can go and goes to Soviet Russia. Which is kind of stupid, Soviet Russia removed religion and replaced it with loyalty to the state and communist party, not scientific research and education, as the scientist invisioned. And of course he gave no aknowledgement to the path that allow religion to dominate can take, oh wait, that has turned out so well, or it has never been truly attempted I guess.

In the end I believe any origin of existence runs into the same roadblock. For the Big Bang theory, the energy that created the Universe has always been there and will always be there, while for religion the higher power has always been there and will always be there. Both had to have come from something, which in turn must have come from something.

I am not against Intelligent Design, but I think it could be taken as a cop out, i.e. this molecule is too complex instead of continuing to study it, lets say it was Intelligently Designed.

And a very adult SUCK IT BEN STEIN