“ When courts decide for same-sex marriage, those who oppose it say it should be the choice of legislatures. When legislatures decide it, those who oppose it say it should be the choice of the voters. I have no doubt whatsoever that if the voters decide it, those who oppose it would be in the courts trying to stop it. The folks who oppose same-sex marriage don’t really want any one to say it’s okay. They just want it not to exist.
—
Cory Booker Gets It Right – Whatever
Click through and watch Cory Booker be awesome.
(via tbridge)
Okay, Newark, you elected this guy? From now on, any time I may make a Jersey joke? Assume it doesn’t apply to you. Your mayor is righteous!
(via tbridge)
930club:
After teasing fans at a recent show about a finished (and somehow still unreleased) album, we can now be certain of a 2012 arrival for Fiona’s follow up to 2005’s Extraordinary Machine. Happy Friday indeed!
Cool, new music from Fiona. Also, has it been that long since Extraordinary Machine came out? Also, Fiona at the 9:30 would be awesome.
scribnerbooks:
annadevries:
cmasonwells:
Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing, via The Trad
Know them. Love them.
Amen.
I rarely agree with writers’ advice on writing — I tend to trust them much more for matters of hard liquor and or sexual perversions — but this is pretty good.
(via wilwheaton)
“ Of course, whenever people discover that other folk are going out of their way to give handouts, some will get lazy and simply try to trade off this goodwill. It’s a telling point, actually, that this was already a danger in the very early church – because you only get that problem arising if the church is being generous. The line between ‘deserving poor’ and ‘undeserving poor’ is very, very hard to draw, and one of the things about poverty, whether one has work or not (some jobs pay so little that the people who do them are still well within the poverty trap), is that it is depressing, and actually saps the energy and nerve and vitality in ways that people like me, who have never been out of work and never been truly poor, can only appreciate by being with and ministering to people who are genuinely and chronically poor. There is a real danger that in a go-getting country like the USA those who have initiative, energy, advantages of birth and education, can easily look down on those who have none of those things. It simply isn’t the case that every human starts at the same level point so that the rich are those who’ve worked for it and the poor are those who couldn’t be bothered. Throughout the Bible God seems to take special note of those trapped in poverty, and we should do the same.
bornofanatombomb:
Today’s Style
Okay, I like the style, but that’s not why I’m reblogging this.
The combination of green of that shirt and the orange of that tie have triggered something in my memory, something submerged just under the surface. In my childhood there was something — a toy? a poster? — using precisely those colors, and it was something that meant a lot to me.
I’m verbal, not visual, or least that’s how I see myself. Yet somehow, there are any number of small color cues which touch off visceral responses in me, the kind I feel as pressure in my chest, intense longing for not just that unknown item, but for the ability to recall something which once meant so very, very much to me.
Try as I might, I cannot scrape away enough of time’s accumulation to unearth that wonderful item in lime and tangerine.
“ Many people in the Bush administration were insisting [it] was not torture at all. The Inquisition was actually very clear on the matter. It obviously was torture. That’s why they were using it.
“ …making money from art is not a human right. It so happens that technological and societal blahbity bloos have conspired to create a situation where selling songs about monkeys and robots is a viable business, but for most of human history people have NOT paid for art. I don’t want this to happen again, and I would be very sad if this came to pass, but it’s not up to me to decide. We are constantly demonstrating through our actions what we believe to be the norms for acquiring and consuming content. Right now a lot of us think that it’s OK to download stuff through illegal sites under certain circumstances, and a lot of us think it’s totally fine to use those things to make videos and put them on YouTube even though YouTube profits from it. That’s not ME saying that, that’s US saying that – we’re a nation of pirates and infringers. Based on our behavior, you would not be wrong to deduce that some of us think funny videos on YouTube are more important than honoring intellectual property rights. This kind of thing has happened before. Entire industries rise and fall as the world changes and our priorities shift. Sorry. I believe in copyright. I benefit from it. I don’t want it to go away. I love that we have laws and people to enforce them. But if I had to give up one thing, if I had to choose between copyright and the wild west, semi-lawless, innovation-fest that is the internet? I’ll take the internet every time.
Severed head found below Hollywood sign in Los Angeles
The story itself is odd, but not tremendously odd. Still, I’m trying to imagine the scene when it was discovered. You and your friend see your dogs playing with something in the brush, and when you go to take it away from them, it turns out to be a human head in a plastic bag.
I suspect some doggie kisses are going to be rebuffed for a while.
