Hail to thee, Camp Jesus, by the shores of Devil's Lake

You know how people are always complaining that trailers and advertisements always give away too much of a movie? I don't know that it's a complaint often used when it comes to documentaries, but it's kind of how I felt when I saw Jesus Camp. I'd already seen a lot of the craziest stuff, like the kids praying for a cardboard cutout of President Bush and the guy with the little toy fetuses, in news segments and such. Still, it was definitely interesting, as documentaries on such subjects are prone to be. I thought working in the clips from the liberal Christian radio host was more effective than simply having a narrator provide rebuttals (although it's certainly possible to make an effective documentary film of the sort without any on-screen rebuttals, as Hell House demonstrated). Before we even get to the camp parts of the movie, we see one of the kids being home-schooled and taught that there's no global warming, while we see a picture of Bush on the wall nearby. (I wonder what the mom thought of Bush's half-assed admission in the most recent State of the Union that global warming might be real?) There's also some pre-fall footage of Ted Haggard preaching. Man, that guy just seems so untrustworthy. Was anyone REALLY surprised that he turned out to be a total hypocrite? And why was someone who was supposedly totally secure in his faith tempted to solicit prostitutes and do drugs, while I've never had any particular desire to do either one of those things? Did the Devil find him a more promising target because he was respected by so many other Christians? Or is it another case of a self-styled Christian totally ignoring "let he who is without sin cast the first stone"?

And that provides a transition into something else I was thinking of that kind of relates to the subject, but wasn't actually addressed in Jesus Camp. It seems like a fair number of fundamentalists are frequently accusing "secular humanists" of "trying to make humans into God," or some such. Then they start insisting that they know who's going to Hell. Um, okay, if God is supposed to be all-knowing, all-good, and all-just, and you're obviously not, how can you be so sure what He's going to do or think? Isn't that kind of arrogant?

How not to make a web page

l8erngr8er made a reply to this post about how web pages that are too busy can be irritating. I have to agree, and when I thought about it, I started coming up with a whole bunch of annoying things that people do with their web pages (which includes blogs, MySpace pages, and the like). I was going to mention some of them in a comment, but then I decided that the topic merited its own post. So here are just a few annoying things about some people's web pages:

• Embedded music. I'll admit that I thought this was kind of cool when I first came across it over ten years ago, but it didn't take me long to realize that I didn't WANT to hear some midi every time I looked at a page. It's particularly annoying when you're already listening to music, or you're using a computer in a public place. I don't want to have to waste my time searching the page for a pause button. Music is cool, but let people CHOOSE whether or not they want to hear it at a specific time.
  
  
• Text that doesn't show up against the background. Granted, this can sometimes vary from one display to another, but I've seen some text that's almost impossible to make out unless you highlight it.
  
  
• Along much the same lines, pages that don't display properly on certain browsers/computers bother me. I understand that this is going to happen sometimes, because when somebody designs a personal web page, they're usually not going to have the time or ability to try it out on every possible browser and display setting. The problem comes in when somebody says something like, "Hey, this doesn't display properly on Netscape," and the creator says, "So what? Netscape sucks." Well, hey, maybe Netscape DOES suck, but some people prefer it, or don't have the choice as to which browser to use (especially if they're using a public computer). When people make pages that are "optimized for Internet Explorer 7.0" or whatever, that seems to me to be a form of snobbery. And snobbery isn't cool, is it?
  
  
• Images that are too wide, and stretch out the page. This is especially annoying on LJ, when people insist on posting huge images without using cuts. I suppose it's not quite as bad as when people post quiz results that end up putting the bottom of your friends page at the top of the page. I'm not sure how that happens, but what's even more puzzling is how people who post things like that apparently don't know about it and fix it as soon as possible.
  
  On the other hand, I hate the browser setting that automatically resizes images, so that some of them become way too small to see properly. There are sometimes good reasons for an image to be too big for a browser window. It's just that these images shouldn't share a page with text, unless it's absolutely necessary.
  
  
• Putting the wrong stuff in automatically generated fields. I seem to see this quite a bit in MySpace pages, where people will use the "Name," "Location," "Favorite Movies," and other fields to write some long, irrelevant paragraph. What, you really couldn't find anywhere else to put that paragraph, and either actually fill in those fields, or else just leave them blank?
  
  
• Comic Sans. Enough said. Also any font that's too small to see, so big as to look incredibly tacky, or just generally difficult to read.
  
  
• Some people have LJ info pages, MySpace pages, or whatever where they have a whole bunch of those "Which [x] are you?" quiz results posted. I can see putting on one or two that you find particularly amusing or reflective of your personality, but making people scroll through zillions of them in order to see the rest of the actual content is pretty cruel.
  

I'm sure there are plenty of things I could add to this list, but I can't think of any offhand. Any ideas?