I haven’t done a questionnaire or similar post in a while…
Name: Gene
Where are you from? The U.S. Narrowing it down further: ten elementary schools, four states. My father worked in the petroleum industry, so while I was born in northwest Colorado, and we returned to that same small town by the time I entered middle school, we lived in a bunch of small towns in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah…
Favorite colours? Purple! Violet! Plum! Aubergine! Lavender! Lilac! Also various shades of pink, orange, and teal. And did I mention purple?
Write something in capitals: NASA
Favorite band / musician: As in many things, I have lots of favorites. I love, love, love Scissor Sisters, and wish that their “hiatus” would end sometime soon. Rufus Wainwright, Mika, Pet Shop Boys, Taylor Swift, Will Young, John Grant… and don’t get me started on the divas!
Favorite number: My favorite integer is 5. Which is also my favorite rational number. Though 3/5 is also good. Favorite algebraic irrational is the square root of 2. My favorite transcendental irrational is e. My favorite indeterminate form is ∞0…. I could go on (I majored in Math at university, can you tell?)
Favorite drink: In the morning, coffee. Afternoon, tea (especially Earl Grey with lavender). Current favorite cocktail is a Manhattan, straight up. But my old stand by is an extra dry martini (a real martini with gin; people who call vodka drinks martinis should be shot). Favorite wine is Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. Coconut water and Dry’s Lavender soda are also big faves.
Tag 8 people you want to know better: Everyone! Seriously, if you see this and you wanna post your answers, go for it. If you don’t, no worries!
It’s Friday! The first Friday in August. It is also, alas, the first Friday without Jon Stewart hosting the Daily Show. I don’t know how we’re going to get through the insanity of the 2016 Presidential Campaign without him to help us laugh at the worst of it…
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
(There were many, many more outrageous headlines regarding the clowns scrambling to out-bigot each over for the Republican nomination; but sometimes enough is enough.)
It’s Friday! The last Friday in July, and what a strange summer it has been thus far! But good news, a long running copyright dispute may finally be resolved!
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
What Walter Palmer Did Wasn’t Hunting. ” Killing a single lion in 2015 is mathematically equivalent to murdering 400,000 of the planet’s roughly eight billion people.”
(There were many, many more outrageous headlines regarding the clowns scrambling to out-bigot each over for the Republican nomination; but sometimes enough is enough.)
It’s Friday! A Friday in which every source of news is almost certainly going to be giving wall-to-wall coverage of yet another horrific shooting in a public place. Which I’m not going to say anything more about just now.
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Americans’ Air Conditioning Habit Is Eco-Friendly. The European myth that we use more a/c is based on comparing American cities with average summer temps on 88F (31C) to European cities with average summer temps of 73F (23C).
(There were many, many more outrageous headlines regarding the clowns scrambling to out-bigot each over for the Republican nomination; but sometimes enough is enough.)
As usual, there were a few big news stories of the week I didn’t include in Friday links, and a few that have had more developments that I didn’t see until after I set up the posts to publish. Because I put the Friday Links post together Thursday night, but also because I post a full version of the post to my old LiveJounal and Dreamwidth blogs and my Blogger site, none of which I’ve ever been able to fully automate, so I spend way longer putting them together than I probably ought to.
Anyway, my social media streams were flooded with a lot of Caitlyn Jenner stuff. Mostly people reacting to other people’s snark and derision, especially about her winning the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, Caitlyn Jenner at ESPY Awards: Accept People ‘for Who They Are’. The speech itself was awesome, with a lot of heart, and focused on the problems of trans kids: Caitlyn Jenner honors transgender boy with Macomb County ties during her ESPYs speech. But haters gotta hate. And I think all we can do when they do is shut them down, like Joey Vicente, a U.S. Army behavioral health specialist did in the post I’ve pictured here. Click it to embiggen and read it.
Tangentially: GoodAsYou.Org’s Jeremy Hooper reads all the news blogs and such of the professional anti-gay haters so we don’t have to, and reports that Maggie Gallagher of NOM is trying to claim that support for gay marriage is suddenly plummeting. Jeremy explains how Maggie has constructed this lie (or is it self-delusion), but there’s also this: U.S. Support for Same-Sex Marriage Stable After High Court Ruling. Which isn’t stopping the wingnuts (especially my relatives on Facebook) from continuing to post foaming-at-the-mouth rants about the coming apocalypse because of the gays, how the rainbow flag is a “dark symbol of tyranny,” and the need to assert their religious liberty by discriminating agains the gay. Patheos has a nice counter to this: Your “Deeply Held Religious Belief” Isn’t Biblical. If only there was some way to get people to stop screaming and listen, eh?
It’s Friday! A glorious Friday that did not arrive a moment too soon. I should have more witty things to say, but I’m just soooo tired.
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Santorum Calls For A Constitutional Amendment To Ban Same-Sex Marriage. Note that the other wingnut pesidential hopefuls decided it was slightly more reasonable to call for a constitutional amendment giving states the right to define marriage. Which is slightly less bigoted-sounding.
Another in my series of posts recommending web comics:
Caterwall by Spain Fischer Caterwall is the story of Pax, who is the orphaned son of a knight who was the hero of the kingdom, and his best friend Gavin, who is the descendant of a line of seers. Pax is a young man who has a reputation for pulling pranks and telling lies, who gets exiled from the kingdom. Gavin joins him in exile. I like the story and really like the artwork. It’s just so cheerful and cute, even when grim things are happening. Caterwall is a graphic novel, the first 25 pages are available on the web site. The first book has recently been published and is available for purchase here.
I have recommended “Mr. Cow,” by Chuck Melville many times before. A clueless cow with Walter Cronkite dreams presides over a barnyard of a newsroom. But I need to update the recommendation because the comic has moved to a new site. The old Web Comics Nation site died without notice (literally), stranding several artists and leaving no way for them to post pointers from their old URLs to their new homes. Chuck has found Mr. Cow a new home on Comic Fury: mrcow.webcomic.ws. His other comics have also been moved to the new host: Champions of Katara and Felicia, Sorceress of Katara. If you like Mr. Cow, Felicia, or Flagstaff (the hero of Champions of Katara) you can support the artist by going to his Patreon Page. Also, can I interest you in a Mr. Cow Mug?
I’m a big fan of (and have previously recommended) “Deer Me,” by Sheryl Schopfer. This artist is also a friend. I have previously described this strip as: “Three roommates who couldn’t be more dissimilar while being surprisingly compatible.” Except in a recent story line Thomas has moved out! Eeek! After a storyline that took us back to the high school days of some of the characters, the storyline has returned to “the present day” where various consequences of the Thomas’s moving out are coming to pass. While checking the links, I realized that my older recommendations for this comic linked to a specific strip on the artist’s art blog, rather than the main comic URL (DeerMe.Net), and she’d moved her blog to a new host, so those links don’t work anymore. So, I’m updating and re-recommending. In any case, if you enjoy Deer Me, you can support the artist by going to her Patreon Page!
Some of the comics I’ve previously recommended:
And I love this impish girl thief with a tail and her reluctant undead sorcerer/bodyguard: “Unsounded,” by Ashley Cope.
The Young Protectors by Alex Wolfson begins when a young, closeted teen-age superhero who has just snuck into a gay bar for the first time is seen exiting said bar by a not-so-young, very experienced, very powerful, super-villain. Trouble, of course, ensues.
If you want to read a nice, long graphic-novel style story which recently published its conclusion, check-out the not quite accurately named, The Less Than Epic Adventures of T.J. and Amal by E.K. Weaver. I say inaccurate because I found their story quite epic (not to mention engaging, moving, surprising, fulfilling… I could go on). Some sections of the tale are Not Safe For Work, as they say, though she marks them clearly. The complete graphic novels are available for sale in both ebook and paper versions, by the way.
It’s Friday! Because I took a vacation day Monday (therefore making the holiday weekend a four-day weekend) you would have expected this short week to be a bit of a romp. No, work was… well, one very disturbing thing and then a few more-than-usual chainsaws, plus the super hot weather and ongoing weirdness from a few homophobic relatives, leaving me exhausted and wrung out by the end. I am soooo glad the weekend is here. Even if I have activities scheduled both days.
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Republicans Are Too Angry About Gay Marriage: If the GOP wants to stay relevant, it has to become less hateful. There’s a big disagreement I have with the writer. He says that “fewer people are going to listen to those ideas if millions continue to believe that Republicans are intolerant of large swathes of Americans” which implies that Republicans aren’t actually intolerant, it’s merely a misperception. While I know some Republicans who aren’t, they are by far the minority–and that’s backed up by statistics, it isn’t just anecdotal.
The plague of angry white men: How racism, gun culture & toxic masculinity are poisoning America. I grew up in a very redneck family in very redneck communities, and I was taught: Guns are for hunting. Guns are for target shooting (so you can be good at hunting). Guns are not for shooting people! The only time I ever saw my paternal grandmater raise his hand to anyone was to deliver a slap up-side-the-head to one of my cousins when he pointed an unloaded rifle at his little brother. “You never point a gun at a person! Not as a joke! Not because you think it’s unloaded! Never!”
It’s Friday! Although for some of us, yesterday was “virtual friday” since my office is closed today so I have a holiday. My husband doesn’t get the holiday until Monday. So I’m taking a vacation day Monday. Because the Founding Fathers would have wanted me to have a four-day weekend, right?
For those of you who are reading this in the U.S., happy Independence Day! If you’re in the UK you’d probably not like to talk about it any further. Everyone else: Happy Friday!
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Bristol Palin and the failure of abstinence. This is also not snark – it’s about the very serious issue of teaching kids in a way that give them the real tools they need to protect their health, not ruin their lives, and maybe have a happy sex life with the person they love.
Pride Flag carried near the front of Seattle’s Pride Parade, 2014 (photo by me).Friday Links (rainbow connections edition!)
It’s Friday! It’s not just Queer Pride Month, this is Queer Pride Weekend (at least in many places, including my home, Seattle)! Tomorrow, June 27th, is the anniversary of the Stonewall Riot, which most credit as the beginning of the modern gay right’s movement, which is why most folks in the U.S. celebrate June of Pride Month and why so many Pride Parades happen on the last weekend of the month. It’s time for every les-bi-gay, transgender, genderqueer, femme, butch, stud, stem, glittering fairy, cycle mama, leather daddy, drag king, queer nerd, gym bunny, baby dyke, cuddle pup, drag queen, bear, wolf, otter, twink, single, swinger, couple, trouple, PolyFamily, anyone I left out, and everyone who loves any of the above to step out and get down in the Pride Bash Extravaganza!
(Remember, you don’t have to be queer to celebrate it. Know someone who’s queer and want them to have a happy life? Then you can join the party!)
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Conservatives Demanding ‘Fascist, Anti-Christian’ Gay Pride Flag Be Taken Down. Right… and exactly when, in history, did Gay people enslave non-gays, buying a selling them, ripping them from their families, and then declaring a war the resulted in the deaths of 300,000 americans to try to keep their right to enslave?
Leonard Nimoy reads Isaac Asimov’s ‘The Last Question’:
(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)
Asimov said of all the stories he wrote, this was his favorite. And he said the story had “the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they ‘think’ I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don’t remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably ‘The Last Question.’”
He said people wrote and asked him so often, and the story they were trying to remember was always this one. So one time when he got a phone call that was clearly an international call on a bad connection (which we had to put up with back in those days), he could barely understand the person, but he thought he caught the phrase, “don’t remember the title.” So Isaac said, “I yelled into the phone, ‘the name of the story you can’t remember is The Last Question!'” Then he repeated it, in case the person couldn’t understand. The line was just static for a moment, he heard, “thank you” and the person hung up. “So now he probably thinks I’m psychic.”
Font Folly 