tekHedd – the blog

Don’t forget to wear your gray ribbon to help promote zombie awareness. Remember, May is zombie awareness month. A great resource is the Zombie Research Society web page.

This is a good time to ask yourself: do I know where my machete is?

As we all know, May 6 is the National Day of Prayer, on which we are encouraged to pray to strengthen our faith and our communities. Prayer helps strengthen our great country at a national level, but what can you do to strengthen your community locally?

I reflected on this question for a while, and asked friends for advice. My nonchristian friends tell me that hands that help are better than lips that pray.

Reflecting on this wisdom, I found my answer: stoning!

A National Day of Stoning

I hereby put forth May 7 as the “National Day of Stoning.” You’ve just spent a day praying, now it’s time to do some good for your community. I propose one short, official day when we are encouraged to stone heretics and heathen unbelievers.

Honour killings have been practiced for centuries to strengthen and purify communities. While stoning unbelievers to death is not necessary, it does prove your piety and discourage retribution. I can not recommend this practice because killing is illegal–But who can blame you if you get carried away! It’s such a great feeling to be on the delivering side, confident in the knowledge that you’re not the one being stoned, and therefore you must be projecting sufficient levels of piety.

Some might say that a Day of Stoning is unfair to atheists, or to people whose religion does not support stoning. Well, I’m glad to say that it’s not! Most major religions support stoning (read your bible!), and anyway, it’s only just the one day. Counting the National Day of Prayer, you still have 363 days of godless constitutional law and equality. And anyway, even if it was every day, it’s not a violation of anybody’s rights, because you don’t have to participate if you’re not religious.

Come on, it’s fun–I’ll cast the first stone!

Updated. See the latest entry for details.

The latest versions of the Quotes Collection plugin have changed the get-quote function. Here is an updated version of the quotescollection_get_quote function that does not waste randomness.

function quotescollection_get_quote($condition = 0)
{
        global $wpdb;
        $offset = rand( 0, quotescollection_count($condition) );

        $sql = "SELECT quote_id, quote, author, source
                FROM " . $wpdb->prefix . "quotescollection
                WHERE visible = 'yes'";

        if ($condition)
                $sql .= " AND " . $condition;

        $sql .= " LIMIT " . $offset . ", 1";

        $random_quote = $wpdb->get_row($sql, ARRAY_A);
        if ( !empty($random_quote) ) {
                return $random_quote;
        }
        else
                return 0;
}

The shipping version of Quotes Collection uses “ORDER BY  RAND()”, not a big deal, but hey my randomness is precious.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quotes-collection/