This took much less time than I expected: Utah Polygamist Invokes Ruling on Gay Sex. The defendant claims that the state has no compelling interest in what six people do in the privacy of their home. If he had been a Massachusetts polygamist, he could have invoked the ruling on gay marriage; then he and whichever of his wives are of age could go to Cambridge and get married.
Word count: 1380
NaNo link of the day: HTTP Error 447
The Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving is not the time to be trying to get from Boston to Fall River. It took me and Veronica an hour just to get to South Station. (The Green Line is not just light-rail - it’s a way of life.) Then we spent the next hour on the highway between South Station and Quincy. Veronica got to meet the mac in explicit, geeky detail. I also made her listen to Weird Al’s “The Saga Begins” (my all-time favorite filk), “Amish Paradise,” and, appropriately, “Another One Rides the Bus.” The Bonanza bus was half an hour late getting into Fall River, and worst of all, I missed a monster chat.
Word count: 275
Some people are getting on Mitt’s (that’s our governor, for those of you playing the home game) case for saying in various contexts that gay marriage goes against “3,000 years of recorded history.” Or as the World Socialist Web Site put it,
“I agree with 3,000 years of recorded history,” Romney ignorantly declared.
The context does not make it clear what Governor Romney is ignorant of; some have cast doubt on the idea that recorded history began 3,000 years ago. The Greek alphabet was invented around the 9th century BC. The Phoenician alphabet is slightly older, but not much remains of their history. Cuneiform and hieroglyphs are much older, dating to around 3,500 BCE, but most of that is not history as we think of it; it’s an illustrated archaeological record - we’re not really sure what went on. The historical mindset in the West goes back only as far as the Greeks and the Exodus, which is to say, about 3,000 years. Chinese recorded history goes back about 3,500 years. In other words, Mitt’s statement was close enough for government work.
I just thought I’d count that all up for you.
Word count: 2550 (and too much blogging)
It’s official now - I’m old. I wasn’t planning to be old until tomorrow, but it hit me early because of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s decision to extend marriage to homosexuals. That’s only an indirect cause of the premature aging; the end of marriage is one of those things that’s been coming on for a long time. You never think it will be your state and your black-robed masters who will put the final nail in the coffin, but hey, somebody has to do it. You don’t get to the fall of Rome without plenty of declining along the way.
American politics never really gets to me. It’s not like we’re all going to be pushed into the sea because of a single bad decision - it’s not a high-stakes game, it’s just a gentle decline and fall. When we make mistakes, other people’s governments collapse and other people get slaughtered by the millions. But I’m now officially out of patience with the willful ignorance of individuals and, to quote Thomas Sowell, with self-congratulation as a basis for social policy. Stupidity in groups is perhaps inevitable; it only bothers me in individuals.
So, to be specific, it’s the 10% number again. The media spent years spreading the myth that 10% of the population is homosexual, even though the number conflicts with scientific data and, much more importantly, is clearly and obviously inaccurate. Ten percent is a lot of people. It’s 635,000 people in Massachusetts alone, 30,000,000 in the US overall. It is, to be trite, one out of every ten people you know.
Now I don’t think that homosexuality is as biologically based as other people seem to, so I believe it is logically possible for 10% of the population to be gay. It’s simply a question of fact - if 10% of the population were of an incompatible sexual persuasion, you would notice. Those are not “don’t ask, don’t tell” numbers - those are numbers rivalling the black population. To put it in Bostonian terms, Cambridge is not a Roxbury full of gay folks, even though they’ve announced that they’ll be issuing same-sex marriage licenses before our Mormon governor can get his constitutional amendment going. (By the way, the black population of Massachusetts is only 5%, and it’s still higher than the homosexual population.) I found a nice overview of sexuality surveys, many of which show that the number is closer to 2% (as was believed in the medical community before the Kinsey report). There’s a nicer summary from the family research institute, but I’m not expecting you to take their word for it.
Since I believe it’s too late for our culture, what do I care about the cooling corpse of the civil institution of marriage? I don’t particularly; I just object to the characterization of those who do care as hateful, homophobic, or just plain irrational. Of the three, I don’t find hateful or prejudiced people all that scary, because there are so few of them. (Hateful here means actually feeling an emotion of hatred, not just disagreeing with someone else’s political agenda.) It’s the irrational people, the ones who are hallucinating about a full tenth of the population, who disturb me.
I’m too old to live in a country full of people who can’t count. This isn’t the first incident of non-counting to prematurely age me - the most notable recent one was when someone I know claimed that the Inquisition had killed five million witches. My attempts to impress upon said person that that was nearly the entire population of Spain at the time - and, again, someone would have noticed - fell upon deaf ears. (To his credit I should mention that he gave a good guess of the homosexual population at not more than 5% - his political sensitivity is restricted to religion.) I’m not talking about hicks here, but people with advanced technical degrees who ought to be able to count - but somehow the skill abandons them when politics is involved.
Word count: 1217
I did my civic duty and voted. It never ceases to amaze me how difficult it is to get basic election information when it comes to local offices - yet people complain about voter ignorance. Honestly, I’d know what was going on if this were a real election - the kind that gets actual news coverage.
If you try, you can find out where to vote and even discover your cryptic ward and precinct numbers. It’s not hard to determine who your current elected officials are. But if you want to know what’s on the ballot, information is far more scarce.
Oh, if it’s an election that matters, then the state will at least let you know what the ballot questions are. But if it’s a random off-year election, how do you tell who’s running, never mind figure out the difference between the candidates? My only hope of finding out seemed to be to go to the polling place and have a look at the ballot. Rocky, surprised that we don’t get sample ballots in the mail here in Boston, suggested checking the paper. The Metro is above local politics, and the Globe can’t distinguish between the umpteen Democrat clones running for any office, be it President or Councillor-at-Large.
In the end I had to root through my garbage for the fliers I’ve been throwing out all week, just to see who was running and for what. I discovered that my current councillor has a baby and was up for reelection. That was enough reason to hike all 100 yards to the polling place, where it turned out that there were no dog-catchers on the ballot, just the local councillor and a crowd of Clones-at-Large of whom I was supposed to choose up to 4 names.
If you’re looking for the kind of advice I was, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I still can’t tell the difference between them. But you have until 8pm to figure it out for yourself.
[Update] Here it is: proof that they were all clones.
Cool link of the day: Directions to Mordor (by way of RJ)
Mac perversion of the day: Country Song Generation 1.0
People are staggering home. You can tell the game is over by the sudden ambulance activity at an hour when Bostonians are usually in bed. Will we never learn? It’s been 85 years since the Sox won a World Series - I bet there’s no one alive today who’s seen them win.
We started watching in the bottom of the seventh, after CSI was over, so we got to see the Sox do what they do so well: snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Dr. Deb wanted to turn it off at 5-4, but I’m a real Boston fan - I watch to see them lose, because it’s not whether you win or lose - it’s how spectacularly you lose. Turning a three-point lead into bupkes, then dragging the game out to the bottom of the 11th, is a new low for the Sox. I enjoyed every minute of it.
Mac sighting: C.K.S. International Airport, Taiwan - it’s leaving on a jet plane, but where is it going?
Who would have known Chestnut Hill had a post office? Certainly not someone who’d just put “Chestnut Hill” into to the USPS post office locator, which claims the closest P.O. is in Jamaica Plain.
If you know anything about Chestnut Hill, you know the locals won’t be going to JP for their stamps, 0.4 miles or no 0.4 miles. I hiked out there to meet Dr. Deb’s favorite oral surgeon, who, of course, wanted to remove all my wisdom teeth even though only half of them are ailing at the moment. I was on my way back to the Chestnut Hill T stop, inbound for the stunning variety of Brookline postal options, when I spotted it. It was lovely and well-manicured and looked exactly like a sterotypical post office. Inside the clerks were amazingly friendly and helpful - it was like being in a whole new postal world.
Don’t get me wrong - the Brookline people are nice, too, but the Chestnut Hill post office had that special Stepford Wives touch about it. Having accomplished my postal mission (a last-minute submission to Writers of the Future [the link is especially amusing if you have popups turned off]), I decided to take the scenic route east and walked towards the Chestnut Hill reservoir. I took a turn up Chestnut Hill Road, a private way, and it was like I’d stepped into another century.
Picture those gorgeous old houses you see in Newton when you’re driving out of the city on Route 9, but instead of being all crowded together imagine them with lots of immaculately landscaped space around each one. Throw in a few topiary trees and lots of slate roofs, and you have the Hill. I felt that I was polluting the shades of Chestnut Hill just by walking up the road with my CVS bag.
I emerged at the wrong end of the reservoir, with the homey asphalt landscaping of Boston proper equally far away on both sides. I went left. There’s a fence around the reservoir, but if you really wanted to get in there and spit in my drinking water, it wouldn’t be hard. (I’m trying to express a disturbing thought without attracting the eff bee eye or nasty people looking for water to spit in.) Many joggers passed me by, but eventually I reached Boston and lived to blog the tale.
Rumor of the day: New PowerBooks tomorrow!
I was looking for Boston blogs to add to my RSS reader and I found an incredibly useful page at Boston Online: the Wicked Good Guide to
Boston’s public restooms. I tried to send in an update for the Copley Library facilities, which deserve at least 2 rolls, but the form script was broken so I emailed my recommendation instead.
On the Arraiolos front, I’ve put off my Persian yarn mission to the local needlework and knitting shops (eg., Woolcott in Harvard Square) because I’m in negotiations with a kit supplier over foundations. If you ever need to ask a Portuguese speaker whether the kit comes with jute or linen, the words are juta and linho.
Today Veronica, her nearly-ex-roommate, and I went to CAOS, the Cambridgeport Artist’s Open Studio. (Cambridgeport seems to be the snooty name for the neighborhood between between Central Square and the river.) The art wasn’t particularly interesting except for some glass. Glass blowing is technically a craft, rather than an art form - like writing fanfic or cross-stitching. I was inspired to cross-stitch so I stocked up on Monaco evenweaves and DMC #4 tapestry cotton at Pearl.
Well, not actually cross-stitch - I prefer Hardanger and Arraiolos. I spotted the book in English about Arraiolos rugs, Portuguese Needlework Rugs, at Rodney’s Bookstore for $25. It’s out of print, so snag it while you can. I love the Arraiolos stitch, which is actually several variants of long-armed cross-stitch, because it’s all done freehand on the top of the fabric. I’ve been experimenting with other threads on other foundations than the traditional Persian wool on ten-count jute. At the moment I’m doing three or four strands of embroidery floss (over two) on 25-count evenweave.
By the way, I was geeking so much yesterday that I forgot to blog, but I did get the preference picker working with MJB’s fic. Jade is next.
Word count: 0
I came back from NYC on the Chinatown bus. Fung Wah wasn’t a bad ride for $10, though the minibus could have used better shocks and the tailgating was a bit disturbing. Fung Wah is one of a slew of little bus companies running daily service between Chinatown in New York City and Chinatown in Boston (not to mention Chinatown in other places). The Boston stops are near the Chinatown gate, not far from South Station. I ended up walking across Chinatown to Boylston to catch the Green Line, but then my backpack was light. It wouldn’t be all that convenient for someone with luggage.
But it’s cheap, and that’s what counts.