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Facebook users click here. We didn't have air conditioning at work today, so I had to step outside to get some fresh air and this happened.

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Disclaimer: I talked to Eugenio about this post. No offense is intended... My Review of the movie Surrogates (Sort of). First off, allow me to apologize for the lack of updates. Blogger has changed the formatting of their image posts and it requires a bunch of annoying HTML code to fix the glitch. So posting more than one image per post is a pain in the ass (for me anyway). So much so that I am considering moving this blog to a wordpress account because of the ease of their formatting. But don't worry. I'll let you know if I get around to doing that.

You may notice the picture of the stout man napping. That is Eugenio. He is an artist at my work. His drawing is impeccable. One could make the argument that Eugenio traded all senses of decency, tact, logic, and humanity for superior drawing skills. What do I mean by this? I'm basically saying that anytime Eugenio says anything about anything, it is absolutely flabbergasting to those in his presence.

A few things to know about Eugenio. Eugenio is from Cuba. Eugenio hates communism so much that he hates anything that is colored red. Although Eugenio will deny this when directly asked, he hates all races and creeds except for (to the best of my understanding) Catholic Spaniards and pretty girls with big butts. If I were to compare Eugenio's persona and appearance to a movie character, it would be Señor Esteban Vihaio from Kill Bill II.
The major difference would be that Eugenio talks twice as fast and is twice as loud.

Eugenio, having lived in Cuba, experienced Communism run amok. Because of this, Eugenio is suspicious of everything. Eugenio is always trying to read the subtext of any situation, any movie, any song, anything. One might say that Eugenio (as a result of his experiences) is a critical thinker. Critical thinking is the ability to make a conscious effort to delve beneath the surface of things. However, Eugenio's critical thinking is flawed.

According to the New Century Handbook (a reference guide for writing) "Critical thinking does not imply a negative attitude; rather, critical thinking involves the ability to contemplate, question, and explore ideas in depth without accepting easy answers." Eugenio has two major flaws in his approach to critical thinking. Eugenio's first flaw is that he almost always implies a negative or suspicious attitude to his thought. However, far more detrimental to his thinking is that he aggressively conjures up subtext that doesn't exist, he infers ideas that aren't there, or he erroneously synthesizes an implicit meaning that was not intended. And he stridently does all this at the expense of disregarding the literal meaning of whatever he is disseminating.

For instance, I recently saw the movie Surrogates. Being a modern man who uses technology, it is fairly easy to infer that the subtext of the movie is that technology is dehumanizing people and that the situations that occur in the movie are a metaphor for the modern audience's growing dependence on the anonymity of the internet to live vicariously through artificial means. However, Eugenio read into all kinds of ideas about race and gender that were hardly the thrust of the film. I'm not saying that the ideas that he inferred were not present (even though I believe that Eugenio's racial inferences were not present in Surrogates). But Eugenio was so busy conjuring up a deeper meaning that satisfied his personal agenda, that he forgot to watch the movie.

When I discussed Surrogates with Eugenio, it was apparent that he missed out on certain key information that was on the surface of the story. So much so that he did not remember certain scenes from the movie taking place. So what is critical thinking? It is thinking on three levels: 1. Understanding the literal or surface meaning. 2. Interpreting a deeper meaning based on the information of the surface meaning. 3. Evaluating the critical worth of the work.

Being a flawed human being, who's ideas are regularly challenged, dismissed, and/or scoffed at. Allow me to be the first to say that perhaps my grasp of critical thinking is flawed, perhaps I misinterpreted Surrogates. Perhaps Eugenio is right, and perhaps he is always right. Basically, it is possible that I am wrong, that I am stupid, and that I don't know what I'm talking about. Few people seem to be willing to admit fault or error in their thoughts or actions. The fact that I am pointing this out could be seen as a loophole for avoiding criticism. All that I am saying is that yes, I could be wrong. But how regularly am I? When I saw Surrogates, I felt that the ideas presented in the film were better suited for exploration in a long running television series. In my opinion, for someone like Eugenio, the deeper meaning of the story might have become more apparent over time, repeatedly reinforced over the course of multiple television episodes. I was somewhat unimpressed by Surrogates. However, it gave me the opportunity to write about critical thinking. Something that I am very thankful for being imparted to by my High School teachers and Star Trek the Next Generation. Something that I believe is severely lacking in Florida and the rest of the world.

On an unrelated topic. I liked, "Michael Jackson's This is it."

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I stopped using dating websites a long time ago because of the high percentage of date failures and the poor character of available individuals (perhaps that statement reflects on me as well, but I'm not going to be introspective enough to analyze my imperfections beyond this statement here).

Nevertheless, I am occasionally e-mailed potential matches from dating websites that I have frequented in the past. I found this one fairly entertaining.

1. Her profile picture is a pair of huge boobs. Assuming that it is indeed a picture of her, she's established that this is her primary selling point. This is reinforced by the fact that it is her only profile picture.

2. Her spelling is far too terrible to just be text speak. Nearly every other word is misspelled. Some of her 1337 speak is as long as the word that was misspelled. Did she sacrifice letters to save time? Or to seem cute?

3. "im smart so i catch on 2 things." I really want this to be a legitimate profile because it seems almost too funny to be real.

There is one thing that intrigues me though. She states, "rite now im workin at burger king. dnt pay all that grate but at least i get the food cheep." I suppose that "sentence" would be a red flag for most people. Especially because she managed to misspell "great" and "cheap." However, she brings up a great asset. Burger King.