random quotes ... to amuse, inspire, enrage:
Science fiction is not, and never has been, about technology. It is occasionally about the effects of technology on Man, or on Man's reaction to technology, which are not the same as being about technology. It's nice when all the science can be accurate, but science fiction is a subset of FICTION, not of SCIENCE, and if a writer of same has a choice between a fact and a story, he jettisons the fact and tells the story.
The NYT had the germ of an interesting idea today: What I’d Be Talking About if I Were Still Running, op-eds from presidential candidates who have dropped out. It was only a germ because it turned out that the op-eds were only very short, virtually substance-less talking point-level comments. Now if the NYT followed this [...]
Last weekend I was listening to a program on “Testosterone” on “This American Life” (archive) and, predictably, my interest in the topic was equaled or surpassed by my exasperation and annoyance at its handling. “This American Life” is a one-hour show, that aims to do something rather cool: Shed some light on a topic [...]
In last night’s Democratic candidate debate about The Gays, Clinton explained that she’s not anti-gay marriage: “I prefer to think of it as being very positive about civil unions.”
As Michele (my Massachusetts spouse) said: “If she’s so positive, why doesn’t *she* get one.”
Years ago, my partner read some of Nicholas Wade’s NYT articles and shook her head at the shallowness of his analysis. It hasn’t gotten any better since. The NYT is running a lot of articles right now about sex, gender, and sexuality, and Nicholas Wade’s latest article is crap. He writes like the answers have [...]
I really can’t stand it when politicians engage in cheap & sleazy grandstanding, knowing that what they’re doing is actually irrelevant. I’m speaking of Mitt Romney’s “lawsuit” to get the Mass. courts to step in to force the Mass. legislature to vote on an anti-same-sex-marriage amendment. [nyt 11/25]
Cheap & sleazy political grandstanding may [...]
The NJ Supreme Court is releasing its SSM decision today @ 3pm. [available at NJSC website]
Will they help us out but energize the Republicans and lead to queers being blamed if the Dems don’t take the House or Senate? or will they fuck us over leaving everyone, but us, happy?
(And if I’m [...]
NY’s Court of Appeals just handed down its no-same-sex-marriage decision, holding that denying marriage licenses on the basis of gender to same-sex partners does not violate New York’s Constitution. In my opinion, this is a big setback for equal protection and individual autonomy. We had a certain momentum going forward in terms of courts [...]
* Alas (a blog) has deemed Father’s Day “queer sex day” for very good reasons.
* Jon Stewart points out the obvious to Bill Bennett’s proffered state rationale for recognizing only male-female marriages:
Divorce doesn’t occur because 50% of marriages end in gayness.
* New York’s highest court (the confusingly named “Court of Appeals”) heard arguments in [...]
The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts finally issued its ruling on out-of-state residents marrying in Massachusetts, upholding a previously moribund statute that had been dusted off especially for same-sex marriages. [nyt 3/30; Cote-Whiteacre v. Mass. Dept. of Public Health, SJC-09436 (Mass. SJC 2006/3/30)]
Right-wing homophobes have been freaking out over the Åke Green’s conviction under a Swedish hate speech code. They were particularly incensed because Green made his anti-gay comments from a church pulpit, and hailed the conviction as a sign of the treacherous path of hate speech codes. His conviction was reversed on appeal and then the [...]
Coming home on JetBlue on Thursday 12/29, we had an interesting experience with the TV programming. One entire “Daily Show” segment was wiped out. The program did one segment, then skipped straight to the interview with Howard Stern, and then ‘programming was temporarily unavailable due to normal motion of the aircraft’. Pretty [...]
Yahoo!’s historically less-than-stellar track record of protecting user privacy is made much, much worse by this news: Yahoo! turned over a user’s identity information to the Chinese government, and now journalist Shi Tao has been sentenced to ten years for “e-mailing a government’s plan to restrict media coverage around the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen [...]
The Rude Pundit tears it up on comparisons between the Clinton Whitewater-MonicaGate scandal, and the Bush-Cheney Fraudulently-Induced-Then-Bungled-Iraq-War-PlameGate scandal. [link from sideshow]
debate over intelligent design: the abstract factory points out that intelligent design advocates, like pretty much every other human being, work within a science-based framework when it really matters to them personally. [...]
hollywood.com 9/12
HOLLYWOOD, September 12, 2005
Wood Stunned by Gay Photo ‘Revelations’
By WENN
……………………………………..
Elijah Wood is continually stunned by clever cyber pranksters who try to prove he is gay.
The Lord of the Rings star is often caught out by Web sites with far from subtle names, like www.veryverygay.com, when he’s surfing the Internet, but he’s rarely offended.
And, [...]
some links, some quotes, some comments, all in one … I pulled various of these articles up several hours ago from various blogs, which I would like to link back to, but windows got closed, systems got rebooted, and to make a long story short I no longer know which link came from where. [...]
Remember the kerfuffle about the stupidly titled NYT article on bisexuality? (Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited) The study, to be published in Psychological Science in Aug. 2005, was described by NYT science writer Benedict Carey as suggesting that there are no truly bisexual men, and indeed it seemed as if the study’s [...]
oh, this makes me sad: two teenagers in Iran were executed this week for same-sex sexual activity. M.A. and A.M., hanged in Edalat Square, in the City of Mashhad. [direland; seen on Pandagon] The direland site includes pictures of the young men, who are — were — just kids.
i want every [...]
In the fourth & final entry in Salon.com’s series on ‘ex-gay’ therapy ministries ['True confessions'], the writer describes how one ex-ex-gay’s attempt to control photographs of him is thwarted by copyright:
On the front page of the Exodus International Web site is a photograph of several dozen men and women. The allegedly changed homosexuals, [...]
Apparently the PTO is protecting us all from the offensive term “Dykes”. See Jason Schultz; SFGate. Very annoying and what poor judgment. ‘Offensive’ really ought to refer to terms used offensively, as in, attacks on someone or something. The way the PTO interprets offensive — a term that can be used [...]
The NYT ran this article from New York’s reigning air guitar champ. [NYT 7/"10"] I wonder if these rock’n’rollers acknowledge the debt they owe to drag queens and lip-syncing celebrity impersonators, who have been competitively dragging since at least the 30s? [see Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First [...]
