Friday Links (Super-habitable Edition)!
It’s yet another Friday, here’s a yet another collection of news and other things that struck me as worthy of being shared:
We’re All Still Secretly Using Our 1990s AOL Screen Names. Why? (Thanks to Seashellseller for the link!)
Let Love Define Family: Becoming Dads Again.
And Journalists Wonder Why Anarchists Don’t Trust Us to Be Fair.
New York Gives Sean Hannity the Finger With Daily Show Musical Number.
How We Know Gravity is Not (Just) a Force.
Early Europeans had dark skin and blue eyes.
Alpha Centauri B may have “superhabitable” worlds.
Yet Another Study Validates Same-Sex Parenting.
Rise of the Cetacea: Part II – The Ambulocetids.
FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR TODD STARNES HAS TWITTER MELTDOWN OVER GRAMMY WEDDINGS.
How the Colors Got Their Names.
NOM determined to divide GOP, define it by discrimination.
It’s Raining Men becomes anti-Ukip protest song. Three decades after its original release, the single re-enters the charts thanks to a social media campaign launched in response to David Silvester’s remarks that the bad weather is a punishment for its gay marriage laws
Stop Beating a Dead Fox. I disagree with Rich’s conclusion for reasons I may go into elsewhere, but: “With a median viewer age now at 68 according to Nielsen data through mid-January… Fox is in essence a retirement community.” and “Hard as it may be to fathom, Fox Nation is even more monochromatically white than the GOP is, let alone the American nation. Two percent of Mitt Romney’s voters were black. According to new Nielsen data, only 1.1 percent of Fox News’s prime-time viewership is (as opposed to 25 percent for MSNBC, 14 percent for CNN, and an average of roughly 12 percent for the three broadcast networks’ evening news programs).”
The Problem with “Don’t Feed the Trolls”: Steph Guthrie at TEDxTor (Thanks to Sheryl for the link!):
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Google Street View does seem to go just about everywhere…. (Click on the double arrows!)
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A nice cover of “Say Something – A Great Big World” (Thanks to Zacky for the link!)
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Ms Ana Matronic and Bright Light, Bright Light created a cool cover of “West End Girls” for a charity gig:
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“Just ignore them!”
However, the most passionate part of his argument is the claim that when those of us who don’t share Fox’s ideology react to the latest outrageous commentary or false story, we’re simply giving them the attention they want. And we should stop doing that. That sounds eerily like the advice I used to get from some adults regarding some of my most frequent childhood bullies. And it is just one of the deep flaws I see in Mr. Rich’s arguments… Read More…
Mirror, mirror…
And then another nerdy/geek/fannish friend happened to mention, midway through the second season, that he was strangely addicted to the show. I mentioned the reasons I had assumed I wouldn’t like it, and he said, “Oh, me too!” Then he explained how his wife (a person who has been even more immersed in fannish culture than either her hubby or me) had watched the first season on Netflix. “I tried to ignore, and work on stuff on my computer. But it kept making me laugh… and it usually made me laugh because the characters acted exactly like some of our friends.”
Fake geek guys
After yesterday’s post, this was too funny not to share…
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Don’t forget to check out:
The Fake Nerd Guys Tumblr
The Fake Geek Guys Tumblr
Four-color boy’s club…
On the other hand, since Captain America’s costume included armor (in the the silver age comics the costume included chain mail on his torso!) why didn’t Batgirl take advantage of similar protection?
And then, when the Valkyrie was introduced in the pages of the Defenders, she had armor… Except originally it was only her breasts that were armored, everything else was either covered with spandex or it was bare. And that made absolutely no sense at all! Yeah, she has those shiny metallic wristbands and the upper arm bands, but those look more like jewelry than body armor, right? (Saddest of all, within the story, Valkyrie was created by an evil Asgardian goddess for the express purpose of proving that women were the equal of men! Her superstrength originally only worked when fighting males. Take a guess as to how long after the character joined the superhero group before a story line saw her falsely accused of a crime and sent to a women’s prison, where the artist got to draw a lot of ridiculous women’s prison scenes…) Read More…Eyes on the road
Friday Links!
It’s yet another Friday, here’s a yet another collection of news and other things that struck me as worthy of being shared:
Christians aren’t being driven out of public life – they’re just losing their unfair advantages. Money quote: “The venues’ uncertainty was not about hosting Christians; it was about hosting a political event covered in religious fairy dust.”
Labor Board Rules Against Bakery Taken Down By LGBT Protest.
How the Geocentric Model of the Universe Worked [Video]. Great video! You really need to see it.
Michigan GOP official: ‘Herd all the Indians’ to Detroit, build a fence and throw in corn. This is NOT a reprint from the 1800s…
A meditation on a random stranger’s slur.
The five best punctuation marks in literature. More specifically, the author explains five instances where famous writers used punctuation in a particularly interesting/important way.
A Newly Deciphered Babylonian Tablet Details Blueprints for “Noah’s Ark”. More accurately: “…blueprint for the Noah’s Ark myth.”
Why is mathematics the language of the universe? Though the real answer is given in my soon-to-be-published fantasy novel…
An Evolutionary Theory For Why You Love Glossy Things.
Robert De Niro Debuts Documentary About His Late Gay Father At Sundance.
UK Lawmaker’s Gay Marriage Claim Prompts ‘It’s Raining Men’ Facebook Campaign.
Ten literary quotes we all get wrong.
No, buddy, you have NOT been friendzoned. She has been girlfriendzoned by you…. (Thanks to Sky for the link!)
Best family Christmas vid ever:
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The jerk on the tube

A screen grab from one of the many videos posted last year by groups who kidnapped, tortured, and occasionally killed teens who were alleged to be gay.
First of all, what kind of heartless jerk think that’s an appropriate response right after someone has talked about teen-age kids being tortured and murdered?
Never mind that it’s a complete non sequitur, do you really expect us to believe, Mrs. Wealthy Republican Campaign Consultant, that you actually have gay friends…? Read More…
Actions speak louder than words
Bayard Rustin is probably most famous as the man who handled all the organizational details of Dr. King’s 1963 March On Washington. Rustin took care of everything from the transportation, to making sure there were enough porta potties for the crowd, to insuring that no one brought weapons and the march stayed nonviolent, to convincing Dr. King that King’s speech should the be at the very end of the program. Rustin was convinced that the “I Have a Dream” message that King had been writing and rehearsing would work best as the dramatic crescendo at the end of the day, rather than as an opening whose sentiment might be overshadowed and diluted by other speakers and performances afterward.
And Bayard Rustin was gay. He was not closeted and secretly gay—Bayard Rustin was openly gay in an era far more homophobic than today. Despite having been arrested, beaten, and several times fired for being homosexual, Rustin remained open and candid about his sexuality. Throughout the years of their association, Dr. King was frequently urged (and begged and ordered) to push Rustin out of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to distance himself from Rustin and denounce him as a “pervert” and “immoral influence.” Again and again, Dr. King refused to do that, and continued to rely on both Rustin’s organizational and debate skills.
Dr. King was assassinated before the Stonewall Riots, therefore before the modern gay rights movement began to be noticed by the press and the public at large. We don’t know what he might have said or done at that time. We do know that he fought as much against factionalism within his own movement as the enemies without, trying to keep everyone focused on the cause of racial equality and economic equality. As more than one historian or political scientists have pointed out, if he had been anti-gay, there would surely have been a sermon delivered on the topic, or some negative comments about Rustin or other homosexuals he met among the hours and hours of FBI wiretap tapes.
And there isn’t.
Nor is there any indication he ever asked Rustin to try to hide his sexuality.
Rustin had deep religious convictions about the importance of nonviolently fighting against racial and economic equality. While he was open about his sexuality, he didn’t start publicly fighting for gay rights until the 1970s, when he referred to the treatment of gays and lesbians as the new barometer for measuring social justice.
And he wasn’t the only one.
“If you are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, you do not have the same rights as other Americans, you cannot marry, …you still face discrimination in the workplace, and in our armed forces. For a nation that prides itself on liberty, justice and equality for all, this is totally unacceptable.” — Yolanda Denise King, Dr. King’s eldest daughter.
Today, several white leaders of anti-gay organizations have tried to wrap their hatred in King’s legacy. They do this by quoting King’s niece, Dr. Alveda King, a rabid anti-abortion and anti-gay rights activist. I suppose it is petty of me to point out that the supposedly pro-traditional marriage, pro-life Alveda King has been divorced three times, had two abortions, and the only reason she didn’t have a third abortion is that she could not convince her father or grandfather to pay for it, and that she didn’t appear to become anti-abortion until she started being a paid speaker for various archconservative groups.
But I think Dr. King’s widow might have more accurate insight into Dr. King’s beliefs:
To me, the real answer comes back to Bayard Rustin. Dr. King was pressured to distance himself from Rustin, to disavow him, to remove him from leadership positions within King’s organizations. When, before the March On Washington, a U.S. Senator read the full police report about Rustin’s arrest in 1953 into the Congressional Record, including Rustin’s guilty plea to the sodomy charge, along with statements from Rustin’s FBI file in admitting several times to being a homosexual, virtually no one would have faulted Dr. King if he had removed Rustin from his position. In fact, the then-president of the NAACP begged Dr. King to, at the very least, not publicly acknowledge Rustin’s role in organizing the march.“I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people. … But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.” — Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s widow.
Dr. King did none of those things. When Life magazine interviewed King about the March, Dr. King credited Rustin and A. Philip Randolph as the organizers, which led to Ruston and Randolph appearing on the cover photograph of the magazine.
I could include many more quotes from members of Dr. King’s family and other leaders of the movement, but I think Dr. King’s actions toward Rustin tell the story.