Thanks to the recent California Supreme Court ruling (in re Marriage Cases), one of my heroes is finally able to get married. George Takei will be marrying his partner of over two decades, Brad Altman, as soon as they work out the details of the ceremony.



Congratulations, and wishes that they will have many more happy years together!

Any of you readers who are registered to vote inside the City of Albany, go vote for the Library Budget today!!! Polls close at 9pm, find your polling center, it's not necessarily where you voted in the primary.

Albany needs more Library!

I just got to see the Tim Burton production of Sweeney Todd (my Secret Santa at work gave me a movie pass for my local theater).

Bottom line, I thought it was excellent :-)

( Longer Review )

( August 6, 62 Years Ago )

[Haiku and photography grabbed from various locations via the Internet, none are by me]

Here's a great video that Eric Faden and the Media Education Foundation put together on copyright law!
They even hacked the FBI Warning :-)


(note, the audio track is crucial for this to be understandable, so make sure you play it somewhere you can listen as well as watch)

(snagged from aloyen)

Pretty vroom vroom:
FlyTheRoad.com
( Pics! )
(snagged from a comment on bradhicks)

"To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon."

One of the men who helped me look at the world has passed on.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr is dead. I'm not sure of all the details, but apparently a nasty fall was involved.

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.”

He will be missed.

This might be old to some of you, but it's new to me :-)

Thought some of you more puzzley types might be interested in playing with Rubik's Tesseract (aka Magic Cube 4D) by Subliminal Software. [Note: requires Java]

Enjoy :-)

Encountered a poet today that I wanted to make sure to both remember and share, so here are a couple of poems from Mary Oliver:

( Some Things, Say the Wise Ones )

( Fall Song )

I'm very happy with this year's elections. But, enough people are talking about them I don't need to belabor the point here. So, I'll share some political humor links :-)

Politicians Sweep Midterm Elections: Resounding Victories In All States, Counties, Cities, Towns (The Onion)
Midterm Elections (The Daily Show, via YouTube)
This Modern World

And, for no good reason, Weird Al's new video White & Nerdy.

Lyrics time: Lion with a Sharks Head, by Dan Deacon

( made entirely of bees... )

As election day approaches, I think there are some candidates running that you all should be aware about:

http://payattention.org/

Seldom have I heard an ad for a senate candidate so inspiring.

( Read more... )

[Link snagged from chipuni]

I think this is a brandy new meme! I think this since I'm copying it from dancinglights and she seemed to be doing it just because she was bored in the kitchen. So, I'm officially declaring this a pointless meme.

WARNING: I want people to comment before they read other people's comments, so just hit the "leave a comment"/"reply to this post" link/button/icon now, you can read other people's answers later.

Below are three ingredients lists from stuff in my house. See if you can guess what they are just from the list. I tried to give an easy one, a moderate one, and a "how could we possibly have figured that out" one. For extra credit, see if you can guess the brand (all three are well known brands in most American grocery stores)!

1. water, prepared beans, tomato paste, brown sugar, sugar, salt, distilled vinegar, modified corn starch, spice, mustard seed, mustard bran, onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, turmeric

2. sugar, enriched flour bleached (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), cocoa processed with alkali, partially hydrogenated soybean and/or cottonsead oil, wheat starch, salt, corn starch, dicalcium phosphate, dextrose, artificial flavor, gellan gum, nonfat milk.

3. potatoes, whole wheat flour, water, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (contains one or more of the following: palm oil, soybean oil, cotton seed oil, rice bran oil, sunflour oil, sesame oil), salt, spice, ginger, green chillies and glycerol

Go ahead, guess. And, if you feel like it, grab three things from your home, and do the same from your own kitchen in your own journal.

Update: I'll be posting the answers sometime on Saturday.

Update 2: Extra extra credit (since it's not even a "major" brand here): barracuda fish 30%, dried chilli 20%, tamarind juice 20%, shallot 19%, sugar 6%, salt 4%, monosodium glutamate 1%. Yes, I'm putting this up entirely because I was amazed that something in my cabinet had barracuda in it. A hint: neither "fish" nor "barracuda" appear in this product's name.

Protest the illegal war, the torture, the erosion of our civil liberties, the destruction of the checks and balances our government was founded on.

Stop work, stop school, grab a sign and take to the streets.


October 5: Day of Mass Resistance

Please pass this on.

Late this August, the combination of high temperatures and a low pressure region centered around the north pole resulted in massive fisures and thin ice in the northern polar region.

Huge holes, one larger than the British Isles, were visible in what was normally thick icecap. Ice was so thin up towards the pole that some researchers have speculated that a ship could actually have made a voyage to the pole. This level of ice loss has never been observed before.

( Pictures and more... )

Here's a great website devoted to unusual animal friendships :-)

http://letsbefriends.blogspot.com
( Cute Bird and Mouse Under Cut )

I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Terry Bisson short story (well, dialogue anyway) called "They're Made Out of Meat", but I recently found a wonderful short film that someone (Tom Noonan) made from it:

They're Made Out of Meat

Hot

Ug

*melt*