Allowing same-sex marriages will not make more people gay.
There’s only one governmental action that can make more people gay: reinstating the draft.
Imagine how many people will discover their new sexual orientation when that happens!
We started by declaring the Diplomacy game carried over from last week a three-way draw (the smaller powers didn’t see any real hope, the Big Three were showing no signs of cracking, and England was over playing War of the Ring anyway).
While waiting for more folks to show up, we played the usual 3+ player time fill, Can’t Stop. After that, we wound up with seven folks not playing WotR, so we vacillated a bit and eventually wound up with two games, a 5-player Evo and 2-player Hannibal.
I hadn’t played Evo in a while; I should play it more often. Loads of fun. I should have bid more on those leg genes, though; I got sort of stuck off in a corner where I couldn’t do much, and lost way too many dinos to the vagaries of the climate.
After Evo, on to Puerto Rico! This time, we discovered the origin of the saying “when only one player has any of the bonus buildings, and he has two, the game is over.” (Wasn’t me, either; I managed to build a factory that paid me a whopping one doubloon.) I don’t think I’ve ever seen the construction hut used as effectively as in this game; four of the eight quarries were on one island in a five-player game!
I normally would have headed home at that point, but Carl had brought back one of his designs that I’d played in the past and enjoyed, with some rule tweaks based on that session. Loads of fun even if I did wind up crushed between the two leaders. With that, I headed home even though another round of it was about to start; since unlike the others, I wasn’t T dependent, I didn’t have to stay up until the system started running again.
In an op-ed for the New York Times, Scott Dadich compares compares the Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards logos with a graphic designer’s eye, including comments on the typography.
A typical Kerry logo displays the same inconsistency that his opponents accuse him of. A steady visual message requires the consistent use of the same font over and over again. On a typical drive to work, I encounter no fewer than five typefaces used in as many different Kerry-Edwards logos.
Fun for type geeks.
They start at Emma’s Pizza, visit various spots in Inman and Central Squares, and even give Riverbend Park a shout-out.
Good stuff for visitors, though locals should probably just be nodding their heads and saying “yeah, those are all good, but you’d need a much longer article to do us justice”. (They could have left Harvard Stadium out, though at least they do point out that it’s not in Cambridge.)
Justice Ian Binnie, of the Canadian Supreme Court, in response to arguments by opponents of same-sex marriage, had a lovely rejoinder.
One lawyer said marriage pre-dates the constitution. “This is not a creature of statute.” Justice Ian Binnie pointed out that the divine right of kings had been around for a long time. “Why is it that the divine right of kings has to give way to constitutional change but marriage doesn’t?”
Not long after the death of Francis Crick, we’ve lost another of the discoverers of the double helix, Maurice Wilkins.
Wilkins, along with Rosalind Franklin, did the X-ray diffraction work that made the discovery possible, and he shared the Nobel with Watson and Crick. (Franklin died before the award, and Nobel Prizes are not given posthumously.)
Lord May, president of the Royal Society:
We are all greatly saddened to learn of the death yesterday of Maurice Wilkins. While Watson and Crick have rightly been recognised across the world for their contribution, the roles of Wilkins and Franklin, which were crucial, have not always been fully acknowledged outside the scientific community.
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.
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?
