Yay!

Gay people can get married in California! Yay! Our state supremes said it's unconstitutional to deny gay couples the civil rights of marriage. WOO HOO!

But don't get too relieved -- there's an amendment to the state constitution on the ballot which would limit marriage to het couples. WEAK.

Though, as Mark Morford points out, the court that made the ruling is hardly a hippy-dippy bastion of liberalism:

it was one thing for an uppity and slick San Francisco mayor to try and make a name for himself and enter the gay history books by allowing all those happy gay people to stand in the rain back in 2004 and get married in City Hall, only to have it all annuled by the courts.

But it is quite another when a powerhouse seven-member Supreme Court -- six of whom are moderate Repubicans -- of the largest and most potent state in the union says, hey, you know what? It appears we've had it wrong all along. It appears there is actually nothing the slightest bit wrong or unlawful or even dangerous about allowing people of the same gender to buy overpriced formalwear and drink way too much champagne and dance to crappy '80s power ballads in the Chardonnay Room of a low-rent winery up in Napa, and call it a wedding.

Who can argue with that? Hell, to this very day, cultural conservatives still have no idea exactly why they hate gay marriage. There is still zero articulation. There is a complete lack of fact or understanding and I have yet to meet a single person of any political stripe who can adequately explain exactly why gay marriage is so dangerous, or who's threatened, or how. Same as it ever was? Yes. Only now, their misunderstanding feels quite a bit less dangerous, and far more pathetic.

But regardless, we need to trounce that amendment at the polls this fall. If you aren't already registered to vote, go register and mark your calendar to vote!!

If you are registered, be sure to vote in November! Sure, California pretty much always goes Dem in the presidential race, but when it comes to the state measures, every single vote matters. There are enough right-wingers out in the central valley and down in Orange County to give us liberals a run for our money.

Vote early, vote often!

I'm somewhat blithely assuming all my readers are in favor of gay marriage. If you're not and you're a reader here, um, you are really weird. Please comment so I can marvel at your weirdness more directly. Thanks!

File under: Political Schtuff
Posted at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

GHIII

This guy is spot on about how freaking impossible GHIII is at the higher levels. Also, very very funny. Kudos to Rich for the link!

File under: Geekiness
Posted at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

I am not a Doctor, but... Plastic is Evil

Last year, I came down with a headache that just would not go away. It wasn't agonizing, but it was around a 4 or 5 on the 0-10 pain scale (with 10 being the worst possible pain ever). But it was unrelenting. Nothing took the edge off except Vicodin. I had it for a month and a half before a friend suggested I try getting my hormone levels tested. It turned out my estrogen levels were unusually high and my progesterone levels unusually low, producing a nasty condition called estrogen dominance. I started treatment, which included a variety of supplements and a regimen of progesterone replacement pills.

It's better (the headache is gone, for one thing) but my hormones are still out of whack. My nutritionist ordered me to cut out all sources of estrogen or estrogen-mimicking chemicals (which I like to call pseudoestrogens, though I don't think they have such a catchy name in the medical community). This meant filtering my water and, much more difficult, removing plastic from as much of my food service as possible. No more plastic or polycarbonate water bottles, no putting hot food (or heating food) in plastic containers, etc. I was a bit surprised -- plastic contained pseudoestrogens?

Continued...

File under: I am not a ____, but...
Posted at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

To Tweet, Or Not To Tweet, That Is The Question

Via Earthdog, I read this piece on GapingVoid.com about why the author has quit Twitter. It gave me some food for thought. The conclusions of said thought are:

The folks who are talking about how useless Twitter is seem to be missing the point. A lot of them are the kind of Twitterer I try not to be: one who compulsively updates any time they change from their previous status, and one who reads the updates of every single person who has friended them or whom they've friended. Folks in the comments talked like Twitter took up hours out of their days.

I believe those people are Doing It Wrong.

I only receive by text message the updates of the cream-of-the-crop: folks who are very close to me or whose posts I find very interesting (or those who post less than once a day on average). I only read via RSS the updates of folks I like or find interesting. High post frequency usually results in my dropping a person from those whose updates I get on my phone, and a low post interestingness usually results in my dropping a person from my Twitter feed altogether (I may keep them on my Following list so I can check in occasionally, but I won't read their updates regularly).

I try only to post when I am (a) doing something interesting or (b) have an interesting observation to make. I do not always succeed (as you can see by my recent Tweet, "Running errands," heh), but I do try to post fewer than three times a day.

Twitter takes up maybe, MAYBE, 15 minutes of my day, if you include the time it takes to feel my phone vibrate, retrieve my phone, open my phone, read the message, and delete the message. I like Twitter, because it's interesting to me what my interesting friends/family/acquaintances are doing. I like when Earthdog tweets a question and I have an answer. It's a fun, quick way to communicate.

I genuinely believe the folks who think Twitter is evil and a waste of time are doing it wrong. Like a lot of things on the web, it can be a really useful and fun tool ... or it can be turned into a time sink. The trick is not to turn it into a time sink.

File under: Geekiness
Posted at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Review of The Forbidden Kingdom posted

Go read! You know you want to. :)

File under: Pure Ego!
Posted at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Dethklok is touring again! BRUTAL!

Details here.

I will be at the San Francisco show. WOO HOO!

File under: Geekiness
Posted at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Whoa.

A pro-forced-birth candidate for Senate has legally changed his name to Pro-Life and says he will run for Senate in every race until he's elected. His platform is basically that he wants to get into Congress so he can introduce bills calling for murder charges against abortion providers and their patients.

At least he's consistent. The PFB's who advocate murder charges for the doc and not the patient get my hackles up over sexism as well as reproductive rights.

File under: Political Schtuff
Posted at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor Discusses her Stroke

This video is a must-see. It's nearly 20 minutes long, but worth every minute.

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor woke up one morning to discover she was having a stroke. She discusses what the experience was like from the inside, knowing what she did about how the brain works, and explains what she has learned from her experience. Absolutely fascinating. The video and a transcript are available here, and I am cut-and-pasting the transcript below the fold for posterity.

Continued...

File under: Geekiness
Posted at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Youhaas Global Brings the Rock

As Antwon has already noted, he and I did the Endless Setlist in Rock Band over the weekend. Again. He sang on Expert, I played lead guitar on Expert. It was epic win.

Like last time, my shoulder is sore, but unlike last time it does not appear to be utterly destroyed (I was very careful with my Overdrive/Star Power activation moves). I'm taking the evening off from Aikido to be on the safe side and am really babying it. Here's hoping it recovers a lot faster than last time.

File under: Geekiness
Posted at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Spring is here! Ssspring is here!t

Life is skittles and life is beer. I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring. I do. Don't you? 'course you do!

No, I won't be off poisoning pidgeons in the park or anything, I just think of those lines every time I think of spring, because I love spring. I love it. Not even the fact that I'm allergic to a significant portion of common landscaping plants that spring forth into bloom this time of year. I love it. Why?

• The sun is finally out enough I don't need my light box every day to keep from slipping into an emo-a-thon.
• Flowers are gorgeous.
• The blackbirds get their red shoulders and look awesome! And sing their horribly weird songs!
• Flowers smell nice (the ones I'm not allergic to, anyway)
• It's warm enough to not have to bundle up to prevent aching from the cold.
• It's cool enough to prevent aching from the heat (stupid fibro).
• Everything's green, including the hills (at least, for a little while).
• The sun is actually up when I get up to go walking in the morning.
• Baseball season starts, and I love going to the ballpark. Especially when we spring for field club level seats. Mmm, margaritas.

My absolute favorite part of spring is the really early part, when the ornamental plum trees are blooming but nothing else is. I'm not allergic to ornamental plum trees. There's still a bit of bite in the air, which I rather like, but not so much so that I have to wear an extra two layers of clothes to go outside.

Sadly, our camera bit the dust right as early spring was starting, and it took a couple of weeks to get a new one, so I missed a bunch of neat photo ops. Got the above, though. Yay. And we have a new camera now, so I can try to get some good full-on-spring shots.

Hooray for spring!

File under:
Posted at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Sigh.

Someday I will learn that this is not a fruitful use of my time. As annoying as it is to abandon the field to idiots, it may well be better for my sanity. After a year or so of being fairly restrained, I gave in to temptation today. Wasted my time and that of readers of the forum I was posting on.

So annoying.

My one consolation is that it wasted the guy's time too ... though I think he might've enjoyed it, being one of those not-quite-but-nearly trolls. Feh.

Just another Goddamn Learning Experience, as they say.

File under: Geekiness
Posted at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Music Meme

Ganked from Becca.

Put your music player on shuffle/random. Post lyrics from the first 20 songs that play (ignore instrumentals!). Have your friends guess the songs - or just marvel at your strange music collection!

This should be entertaining. I'm going to skip past all podcasts as well as instrumentals. And some of these will be really obvious, but others even I wouldn't get -- I don't listen to all the music on my player with any regularity.

Continued...

File under: Memes
Posted at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Miscellaneous links

OMG, I wish we had more space so we could adopt this cat. She's so... so... herself. My SIL sent me the link. The cat is half Sphynx (hairless) and half long-haired-Siamese-or-something. Look:

So ugly that she's beautiful.

In other news, I love this comic. I must start reading the strip.

And this Sinfest pretty much sums up the dialog in my head sometimes. There are bits of me that are Lil'Evil and bits of me that are Buddha. I love Sinfest.

File under: I'm a What?
Posted at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

An Exercise in Vanity

Self-Googling is fun. :) Places I found my name today:

• David-Strathairn.com
  
• A review of The Libertine, which calls my thesis "fascinating, and surprisingly easy to read"
  
• Holesinmyshoes.com, where my review of the film is quoted.
  
• A beautiful writeup about Antwon's and my wedding by my sensei, who officiated.
  
• The wikipedia entry on the Earl of Rochester

File under: Pure Ego!
Posted at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Obama = Muad'Dib

Via Hedtke, The Dune Theory of Democratic Politics, Revised posits: Barack Obama is the the Democratic Party’s Kwisatz Haderach. He is the shortening of the way, the one who shall give meaning to our lives and make our planet anew.. I'm not convinced Hilary Clinton is equivalent to a Bene Gesserit witch, but otherwise I like the analogy. :D

File under: Political Schtuff
Posted at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)