Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I was just answering a comment on my last post, to the effect that polygamy is the next item down the slippery slope of gay marriage. My answer was that I don’t believe it is. The natural extention of a right for any two unrelated people to get married, regardless of gender, is not the right of any three, four, five people to marry, nor even the right to marry one’s livestock, but the right of any two related people to get married.

So having nothing more controversial to talk about, and not wanting such an entertaining observation to be lost forever in comments, I figured I’d go on in this vein. Despite its status as one of the world’s oldest taboos, incest doesn’t really arouse any passions in the average person. And that’s odd. If I had to guess, I’d say that there are more incestuous desires out there in the world than homosexual ones.

For example, Veronica once had her eye on a male first cousin of ours - a relationship considered incestuous in over 30 of the 50 states. Not ours, fortunately, but he was about 20 years older than her so twue luv was unlikely to conquer all in their case. Many entirely non-consanguinous relationships have traditionally been considered incestuous, and not just in the law but in the court of common opinion - for example, Woody Allen’s relationship with Soon Yi, which was doubly non-consanguinous. (That is, Soon Yi wasn’t related by blood to either Woody Allen or Mia Farrow.)

Woody Allen notwithstanding, people do go to jail over incest, even without consanguinity. Consider the case of a woman and her teenage foster child, with issue, the Alabama love story of a father who claims his wife isn’t his daughter, and the case a while back of two siblings separated at a young age by the foster care system who claimed not to have known they were related at the time of their marriage, and continued to have children with medical problems after being found out and ordered to separate. I think the brother ended up in jail. (If you have a link for that one, I’d love to see it - I don’t remember if they were full or half-siblings.)

Someday the woman’s foster son will reach majority, and the woman will get out of jail. He wants to live with her and raise their two children. As in other incidents of non-consanguinous incest, it’s hard to see how the state can split these people up in light of the sweet-mystery clause. How can any non-consanguinous incest statute stand up to that?

Now, consider the six states where first cousins may marry if they’re infertile. That’s an open admission that incest laws are about not just consanguinity, but the likelihood of producing defective offspring. What then should be the policy in cases where reproduction is not just personally unfeasible, but biologically impossible? That is to say, what of gay incestuous marriage? What if a homosexual man wants to marry his brother, his son, a nephew, or a first cousin? Presumably, he can marry his male first cousin in those six states that permit infertile cousins to wed (AZ, ME, IL, IN, UT, WI).

That is, however, an artifact of the English language, in which cousin is a neutral term. For all other homosexual incestuous couples, the legality of their incest will depend entirely on how the incest law of the particular state is phrased. In Maryland, for example, the law specifies that a man cannot marry his daughter nor a woman her son, but no mention is made of a man marrying his son. A minority of states phrase their incest laws not as a catalogue of forbidden relationships but as a formula, such as Louisiana’s: Incest is the marriage to, or sexual intercourse with, any ascendant or descendant, brother or sister, uncle or niece, aunt or nephew, with knowledge of their relationship.

So the legality of gay incestuous marriage would depend on the exact phrasing of the law in any particular state. I find this sort of thing fascinating in and of itself, but thinking about it has shown me how homosexual marriage makes nonsense of the current marriage laws - in the sense that it brings new laws into being (regarding gay incestuous marriage) which no one intended by their original phrasing of their incest statutes.

My desktop is a mess, so I’m cleaning it up with another link dump.

• I wanted to set up an Atom feed, but the Four Easy Steps involved downloading MT 2.65, which happens to include its own Atom template, so gee, you’d think that would be one hard step, not four easy ones.
• If you thought installing a new version of MT was bad, try Step 3, getting your webserver to serve Atom files with a new mime-type. Any step that suggests getting a better web hosting service is not an “easy” step.
• So I thought I’d try Mark Pilgrim’s Atom 0.3 template, but that requires two plugins. I don’t even know if they’re installed here, and I don’t care enough about Atom to harass my host over it.
• Atom: it’s not just a feed, it’s a way of life. If you have an Atom 0.3 template that works with MT 2.63 out of the box, please share it with me. Otherwise, I’m going to start saying nice things about Dave Winer.
• Skia is a lovely font owned by Apple - it’s a shame more people can’t use it. Abstract fonts lists it as free, but that may not be the genuine Skia. To be safe, you should get a Mac.
• Visibone has a nice browsershare survey, in case you’re curious about who can see what fonts.
• Sean Wilson has some more nice bookmarklets, which Windows people tend to call favelets.
• Although Stargate SG-1 is headed into a record-breaking eighth season, other shows are busy doing the Firefly. As everyone knows by now, the WB kicked Joss out on his Buffy-neglecting behind. If you ask me, a show can get only so far when the lead actor can’t act his way out of a paper bag.
• Speaking of which, UPN is still threatening to give Enterprise the old heave-ho.
• And while we’re on the topic of dogs (I mean Porthos, of course), the Canine Genome Project has distinguished ten families of man’s best friend.
• Scientists have been sphere-packing with M&M’s - mmm-mmm, math!
• A white dwarf star gives a whole new meaning to like a diamond in the sky.
• Did you know the Hubble recently spotted the most distant known object in the entire universe? It used gravitational lensing to see the ancient cluster of stars. But that’s not the point.
• The point is that the Hubble is going to be left to rot up there and will stop working in just a few years. Why? Because NASA has new safety regulations forbidding the astronauts from doing a space walk to the Hubble. How many times, I ask you, has a shuttle blown up because someone went on a spacewalk? Tooling around in space is the least deadly of all shuttle endeavors. If they ever launch another one of those aging behemoths again, the only thing they should be doing with it is fixing the Hubble. (If crazy people want to travel to and from the International Space Station, let them use rockets.)
• But then again, I remember the debacle at the beginning of the Hubble’s tour of duty; maybe this death-by-too-scared-to-fix-it is a fitting end to its star-crossed career.
• Speaking of star-crossed spaceships, someone found the wrong Beagle.
• Apparently, Mars really is red. Who knew?
• Which scifi writer are you? I was Heinlein, which is odd since the only thing I ever got out of him was grok.
• There’s a Speculative Literature Foundation, with nice links to resources for writers.
• Greg Egan has a home page, but only the bibliography is up-to-date.
• Barbie and Ken play Arwen and Aragorn - and I thought the movies were wonky…
• A List Apart lists cool custom css underlines.
• Speaking of lists, learn about the little-known but versatile tags for HTML definition lists
• Robert Wade lists the rules according to guys.
• Silence is for sale again at the iTunes Store.
• A nifty little app called Wiretap will let you record your own silence (OSX 10.2+).
• Dinner time: TastyBite InstantIndia, available at a Trader Joe’s near me. (Shaw’s has them way overpriced.)
• TastyBite’s store locator for Massachusetts is an entertaining example of the perils of off-shore database entry. Who knew that Massachusetts had cities like Malibu, Mamaroneck, Mayland (Wayland, Maynard, or a combination of the two?), Mlt, Mit (perhaps an indication that MIT has seceded from Cambridge), Morrissey Boulevard, Hyannis Mall, Lexington Street, Newport (RI), Narragansett (RI), Pawtucket (RI), Providence (the capital of RI), Norwalk (CT), Old Saybrook (CT), Stamford (CT), Meriden (CT), Middletown (CT), Vernon (CT), Allston Plus (is that anywhere near Lower Allston?), Franklin Plus, Mt. Auburn Plus (seceded from Cambridge and supersized), Brighton Mills (a step up for Brighton?), Porter Square (presumably named after the world-famous T stop), Newburgh, Hedley (with a Mountain Farm Mell), and “Salem, Mass” (scare quotes in original)? All out-of-state towns are listed with a genuine MA after them.

Rather than spend another entry talking about Sam/Jack fics that everyone else in the fandom has already read, I think I’ll clean out my random links folder. So, in true weblogging tradition, here are the links:

• Old images of Venus reprocessed - did you know the Soviets managed to land on Venus, a planet that’s literally hotter than hell, 10 out of 10 times?
• New images of Red Mars in QuickTimeVR - doesn’t it look nice and hospitable? It’s heaven compared to Venus - so where have all our landers gone?
• Maybe we need spies to find them.
• Are you a huge government space agency with a reputation to maintain, but you can’t hit Mars to save your life? Try this map of the universe (not to scale) - try not to hit the Great Wall
• Are you a Martian in search of a quieter neighborhood? Check out the galactic habitable zone.
• Here’s a map of Minnesota - where do you think O’Neill’s cabin is?
• If you’re crazy enough to come to Boston when the windchill is headed for -40 degrees Fahrenheit (I believe that’s about 11 degrees Kelvin for those of you playing the home game), here’s a handy map and pictures of the Chinatown bus stop. I cannot be held responsible for ensuing frostbite.
• Italian Mutant Cholesterol
• Talk to your baby using baby sign language
• The 100 Most Often Misspelled Words in English - bellwether? Who uses bellwether?
• Saddam the novelist
• The fifth annual Tomato Awards for the worst movies of 2003 - I didn’t see any of them.
• UK Millennium Seed Bank - Save Our Seeds!
• An old question from a pessimist: Why pretend to care?
• A little humor: The International Jewish Conspiracy
• A lot of humor: If Microsoft were a soda company, from slashdot.
• Attend Battery University to learn how the old laptop lost its spark.
• I ought to download LyX for MacOS X and mod_bandwidth and the newest DivX, but I don’t.
• I could always make my own Big Mac…
• A lovely macosxhint comment that begins Into zee Terminal, typa wiz your fingers - what you should type is sudo periodic daily weekly monthly.
• Pagesucking made easy (if you have a real OS)
• No mac? See how the other half lives with iCapture.
• The unused diveintomark site redesign which inspired me to make Jade’s new splash page

Cool link of the day: Arabic numerals

I found Paul Graham’s article about What You Can’t Say by way of Slashdot, but it’s been making the blog rounds ever since. Since I referred to my more unmentionable opinions in a comment a few days ago, I found the article timely. My favorite thing you can’t say that Graham actually came out and said was:

It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics.

But seriously, here’s the Conformist Test; it will tell you whether you need to read the whole article:

Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you’re supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn’t.

One popular reaction to the article is going forth and giving your personal list of Things You Can’t Say. Aaron Swartz gives a representative list including endorsements of eugenics, bestiality, and racial superiority. The trouble with these lists is that they’re all the same political hot-buttons. You’d think unspeakables would come up in other areas of life.

So I tried to think of things you can’t say in fandom. I’m blogging late because I was busy chatting about whether Trek fandom is dead - but plenty of people think it is, so that doesn’t quite qualify as unspeakable.

I think it’s relatively taboo to say that good writing is an inborn talent - some people don’t have it and no amount of hard work will ever make them good writers. There are cases when you see someone working so hard at something at which they so clearly will never succeed, and you want to tell them to get a new hobby. I’m thinking of an aspiring pro writer, not anyone who might be reading this blog - but the same taboo exists in fandom. It’s related to the general myth of equal potential, but since Americans aren’t allowed to say that’s a myth, I’ll just be going now.

Feed frenzy of the day: anti-RSS feed discrimination

I had the opportunity to screen most of my mother’s chick flick collection recently, plus a couple of others here and there. They were all DVD’s someone actually thought were worth buying; in no case was that someone me. (I have no other directors beside M. Night Shyamalan.) The short story is: the oldest movie was the best one.

Notting Hill and What a Girl Wants were notable for their music-video sections. If I wanted a music video I’d watch MTV, thanks. Although there is one nice bit of camera work in Notting Hill where the seasons pass as Our Anti-hero is walking the streets of, presumably, Notting Hill, music-video interludes are mainly a directorial cop-out. If I’d sprung for the DVD I’d feel cheated at this sort of cheap filler. You can’t get away with playing a pop song instead of plotting the story in a novel, so feel free to dismiss my concerns as jealousy.

What a Girl Wants is Colin Firth; otherwise the movie was entirely undistinguished and the romance was just a subplot. Notting Hill was slightly better, though it did suffer from a touch of Idiot Plot. You recall the Idiot Plot. That’s the plot that would be solved in an instant if anyone on the screen said what was obvious to the audience. (Roger Ebert) The concept of an Idiot Plot goes back to scifi author James Blish: Any plot containing problems which would be solved instantly if all of the characters were not idiots. (See similar terms in the Turkey City Lexicon.)

Romantic comedies tend to feature a special brand of these Idiot Characters - people who would live happily ever after if they’d just stop acting like flaming idiots for five minutes straight. It’s hard to sympathize with Julia Roberts when she’s stomping all over the guy of her dreams, and the boy with the “kick me” sign on his back (Hugh Grant) only gets as much sympathy as he does because he’s pretty. At least it’s not hard to believe that a famous actress would be self-centered or a stereotypical Brit would be terminally self-effacing. The same can’t be said for Four Weddings and a Funeral, in which hapless Hugh gets himself caught up in Andie MacDowall’s drive to ruin her own life and those of everyone around her. The four weddings and one funeral don’t provide nearly enough character background to justify this level of idiocy.

Julia Roberts does better as a pining third wheel in America’s Sweethearts, mainly because she’s the sane one waiting for the Romantic Lead to get a clue. The major protagonists of idiocy are Catherine Zeta-Jones and John Cusack. Once again, Our Male Lead gets sympathy only for being cute, and the movie is funny only because of supporting cast members like Billy Crystal, Seth Green, and of course, her Julianess.

Speaking of Catherine Zeta-Jones, I didn’t detect even a smidgen of chemistry between her and Sean Connery in Entrapment. Maybe it’s that he’s old enough to be her great-grandfather, or maybe it’s that I never thought he was particularly cute. So he gets no sympathy from me, not even when he’s about to plunge off the Big Bank Building to a terminal-velocity death. (This was a Thomas Crown Affair rip-off with the same romantic subplot.) The end did surprise me, though.

The Wedding Planner started off so well, with very nice camera work and some snappy dialogue when Our Wedding Planner discovers that her new flame is also a customer. Unfortunately, like so many romantic comedies before it, this one gets bogged down in the middle when Our Characters must act like idiots to keep the movie going long enough to fill the required DVD space. The plot quickly degenerates into cliches, including the poorly done Italian family of the non-bride and her imported fiance. Matthew McConaughey gets by on his looks.

The thing all these romantic rejects have in common is the idiot characters. Maybe the target chick audience is supposed to believe that you can be an idiot and live happily ever after, too. Not being an idiot myself, I just can’t identify with Idiot Love. I prefer a real, live plot involving interesting, non-idiot characters, like Moonstruck. On the surface, it seems to have the same plot as several of the others - someone is engaged to the wrong person when the right person comes along - but Cher doesn’t get bogged down in slapstick and stupidity. There’s no pining away after anybody or sacrificing anybody’s happiness for the sake of the idiot who happened to propose first.

And, of course, everyone lives happily ever after.

Here are some gratuitous Temari shots. I made the kiri (chysanthemum) pattern on eight divisions, done two different ways on the two sides of the obi (belt around the middle). The green thread under the embroidery is DMC variegated tatting thread.

Rug state: on hold with most of the medallion done

I should have been born Japanese. Not only am I hopelessly addicted to sushi, but I’m also crazy enough to make temari in my spare time. I found my old temari supply hoard and started wrapping styrofoam balls and poking pins into them again.

At first I wanted to try something seasonal and sophisticated, a snowflake ball, but the flakes required too much embroidery - I hate crewel with a passion. So I switched my already-prepared complex 10 base over to the swirl pattern. That wasn’t going well, either; the instructions were somewhat unclear and, like the flake embroidery, annoyingly imprecise. I think the result looks messy, so the purple ball is back in the temari box.

Despite my temari experience, I think I ought to back off from the fancy balls, go back to Temari 101 and make a simple kiku.

Word count: 2000 and counting

I’m a few days late on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of JFK; now we’ve moved on to the virtual Johnson administration:

President Bush urged Senate passage of the Medicare prescription drug bill Saturday. It would saddle him with a huge entitlement program on top of an unpopular war. We knew September 11th changed everything, and we just found out that it changed President Bush into Lyndon Johnson. –Argus Hamilton

Word count: 500

For those of you not following the story of Terri Schiavo, the woman being starved to death in Florida, here’s the latest news: a Catholic priest was forbidden to administer last rites to her. She collapsed under mysterious circumstances thirteen years ago - her father suspects the husband. Her parents want her kept alive and her husband wants her feeding tube removed.

[Midnight update:] The Florida legislature has passed a bill tailored to the case, allowing the governor to have Terri Schiavo’s tube reinserted.

It’s been Anti-Marriage Week in the LJ world, so I just wanted to be contrary and say something in defense of the oldest institution.

Seema blogged some nice Marriage Protection Week links and somehow inspired the Anti-Marriage Protection Week Contest. Any sort of argument in defense of traditional marriage has been shrugged off.

Marriage Protection Week itself is dedicated to “Preserving the Sacred Institution of Marriage.” This approach is doomed to fail (and be laughed out of LJ) - you can’t defend a sacred institution to a secular society. There’s also a huge loophole there - if a church makes gay marriage a sacrament, it becomes its own sacred institution.

The secular argument for marriage is, basically, that it’s a cornerstone of our (and probably any) society. The institution is in a bad way right now and diluting it with gay marriages will only make things worse. If we don’t want our nation to fall to pieces in a starry-eyed social experiment with the same chances of success Communism had, the line must be drawn here.

Is that unfair? Sure it is. Marriage didn’t get in the state it’s in because of gays. Divorce laws and the welfare state are the biggest culprits. Economic prosperity, which broke down the extended family, has now made even the nuclear family obsolete. I’m a perfect example - here I am, living the single life in Boston, with very little incentive to get married. I’m not important, but multiply me by several million and I begin to have an effect.

Maybe you like that effect. As a writer, I think it’s interesting. Socially, I think it’s ominous. The point, however, is that wanting to preserve marriage as-is is not equivalent to prejudice against gays. I don’t expect you to agree, since most of my readers put individual rights above sociological concerns.

I also think the defense of marriage is too little, too late, because the bigger problems like divorce and economics will never be addressed. But I admire the little Dons Quixote defending their Dulcineas to the bitter end, even when they get it mixed up with sacraments.

I have to keep rooting for the underdog - it’s in my blood.