Dirac Angestun Gesept

The National Book Festival is October 9th, in Washington, DC.

Very tempting…even if the PDF map has a location marked “Word’s Are Your Wheels” [sic]. Three cheer’s for literacy!

We went to see Tying the Knot today. It does a very good job of showing the price real couples pay for the lack of civil marriage rights, counters the usual arguments against (including a point-by-point comparison between anti-miscegenation arguments and the current anti-same-sex-marriage arguments), and includes discussion of the history of marriage and how it’s not the “immutable institution” that the anti folks like to pretend it is.

I encourage anyone in areas where it’s showing this week to see this movie, especially if you (or someone you can convince to come along) is on the fence on this issue. I hope that it can get the visibility it deserves and show people why this is an important civil rights issue.

Info on showings.

To John Thomas Stuart XI the troubles of himself and Lummox seemed unique and unbearable, yet he was not alone, even around Westville. Little Mr. Ito was suffering from an always fatal disease—old age. It would kill him soon. Behind uncounted closed doors in Westville other persons suffered silently the countless forms of quiet desperation which can close in on a man, or woman, for reasons of money, family, health, or face. —Robert A. Heinlein, The Star Beast, 1954

The “compassionate conservatives” in the Republican-controlled Congress want to be able to deport people, on suspicion alone (in other words, at Ashcroft’s whim) to countries that will torture them, unless of course the prospective deportee can manage to prove that they’ll be tortured.

Obsidian Wings has the details on this work toward legalizing torture here.

Anyone else think this might be a little more important than one news organization and their issues with memos?

So Bush is in the White House, Duran Duran has a new album out, and I’ve just been to a Worldcon in Boston.

What year is this again?