Work in Progress

joy

 

Not sure why this is so appealing because I hate dancing and am not particularly fond of crowds but the simply unabashed gleeful happiness-to-be-alive from this clip chips away at my morning grumpiness.

Besides, I suspect I know why they're all so happy and I can't blame them.

who's to say not gay enough?

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Three members of an amateur San Francisco team who said they were branded "not gay enough" and stripped of their second-place finish at the Gay Softball World Series have settled their lawsuit against a national gay sports organization.

Steven Apilado, LaRon Charles and Jon Russ, who were members of D2, a team that was part of the San Francisco Gay Softball League, will receive an undisclosed sum from the North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance and will get their second-place 2008 championship trophy back, said their attorney, Suzanne Thomas.

"This is an amazing result," Thomas said Monday. "It's also an opportunity to put a spotlight on significant discrimination in sports against the LBGT community, and going forward we will look at this as an opportunity to provide additional education about this discrimination."

Roger Leishman, an attorney for the alliance, said the settlement Friday came a week after U.S. District Judge John Coughenour in Seattle ruled that the group had the right under the First Amendment to limit the number of heterosexuals who could play on a team to two.

"It is reasonable that an organization seeking to limit participation to gay athletes would require members to express whether or not they are gay athletes," Coughenour wrote

D2 ultimately lost the championship to a team from Los Angeles.

Afterward, officials with the gay athletic alliance called Apilado, Charles and Russ separately into a conference room for a hearing to determine whether they were heterosexual or gay, the suit said.

They were asked "very intrusive questions," including what their sexual interests and preferences were, Thomas said.

Charles, who was D2's manager, asked whether he could say he was bisexual and was told, "This is the Gay World Series, not the Bisexual World Series," the suit said.

Charles' Facebook profile said last year that he was married to a woman.

The alliance ultimately determined that the three men were "non-gay" and that D2 had broken the rules.

Thomas said the men had been essentially branded as "not gay enough."

Read the rest here.

At first glance, this story seems silly but I actually see a larger point here: the gay softball league has rules about who can play and who am I to say they should allow 2 or 3 or 5 non-gays, or consider bisexuals as gays or not. Clubs set their own rules and, as long as these aren't set up to discriminate against a particular group, I think they should be allowed to set themselves however they want.

This is why I think the state has no business in the "marriage" business.

Let me be clear. Of course, the state should recognize unions but imagine how the debate changes if civil marriage is simply renamed as civil unions. Leave marriage to churches so if someone wants to get married, they can always do so but at that point, celebrating same-sex marriage or not becomes a decision made by each individual institution.

Churches are clubs, clubs have rules.

If a church says their definition of marriage is a man and woman, fine. That's their club and no one is obligated to join it in order to get married but the state cannot be in the business of allocating different status to different tax-payers so if there's no gay marriage at city hall, there should be no marriages at city hall.

What happens in every individual club is up to its members.

"services are not being affected... Guaranteed"

 

From today's Globe & Mail:

TTC riders in every corner of the city will feel the effects of service cuts set to begin in January as streetcars and buses are taken off 62 of the system’s busiest routes. More crowding and longer waits will be the outcome.

The service cuts were approved earlier this year by TTC commissioners as part of their efforts to find the 10 per cent budget cuts demanded from every city department and agency. At the time, riders were warned that decision would mean reductions to service, but the commission so far has remained silent on just how far the pain would be spread.

An internal list, obtained by a group that advocates for transit riders, shows passengers on six streetcar lines and 56 bus routes can expect less frequent service starting Jan. 8. These include already crowded services such as the Queen and Spadina streetcars and buses on Finch Ave West, Don Mills and Dufferin. However, streetcar service will not be affected during peak hours.

The group released details of the service cuts Thursday morning, the same day as the commission’s first town hall meeting. The evening meeting at city hall is part of the TTC’s new customer service campaign.

“This is a big service cut to surface transit in Toronto,” said Jamie Kirkpatrick, a spokesperson for TTCriders, who obtained the list. “It’s a war on transit users across the city because we’re doing our part, there are more of us than ever before, we are paying 70 per cent of the cost to run the system and for a relatively small amount of the TTC’s budget, we are all going to be made to suffer next year.“

Keeping riders in the dark about the affected routes, he speculated, is designed to head off opposition as the city faces tough budget talks in the coming weeks. “They are trying to hide the impact of this until it is too late,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said, pointing to the uproar created by other proposed cuts such as reductions to library hours.

Don't blame me, I didn't vote for him.

have a seat, Karl

I miss Calvin.

Not that I'm one to turn my nose up at a good opiate.

 

42

 

I love this TED talk.

This should come as no surprise: the presenter, Robin Ince, is described on the site as "grumpy but charming" and his talk is essentially on Life, The Universe & Everything which, if you think about it, would make an excellent title to for a book.

I'm not sure why this new-found fascination with the universe has taken such a hold on me but there it is. Maybe this will star-gazing will subside if when Markov comes back but only time will tell.

wait, did you just feel something?

Click for ginormous image.

don't look back in anger

Though there remain another 5 weeks in 2011, we are beginning to see retrospective looks back at the year it's been.

In this collection by Reuters, we see some shots of momentous events and others, like this one, speak to the era in which we live: a time of startling technological advances that remains hobbled, still, by ancient problems like drought & famine, faced by humans for a million years. 

In this photo, an aid worker using an iPad films the rotting carcass of a cow in Wajir near the Kenya-Somalia border, July 23, 2011.

Amid our squabbles over debts & budgets & other nonsense, 2011 has seen another remarkable string of events like earthquakes & revolutions that show us the more things change, the more we stay the same.

The whole collection can be seen here.

Be forewarned, some of these images are very graphic.

Not the Great Pumpkin

This shot appeared on the web about a year ago and it may be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. In case you don't recognize it, this is a photo of the Sun "in the wavelength of hydrogen alpha light", whatever that means.

To give you a sense just how majestic our Sun actually is, did you know it represents over 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System? In other words, every single other thing in our solar system: every planet, asteroid, comet, moon, whatever, everything, added together, represents 0.14% the mass of the Sun. Now you know why I've capitalized the first letter of its name.

So, if you insist on praying to anyone or anything, you might as well pray to the one who really makes life possible on this planet. Come to think of it, we tend to think of ancient Sun-worshippers as being primitive but they actually knew where the real power in the universe resides!

In any case, to photographer Alan Friedman, wow.

I just bought the print and it will be on display in our offices soon!

Markov speaks

 

Purely selfish post. I know this will prove of little interest to anyone but me.

If you're a fan, you may already have seen his and if you're not, you won't care but Markov's my favourite and he's been gone way too long. I'll be happy when he's back. Soon, I hope.

Carry on.

the cognitive dissidents

I've taken to checking a new blog recently, The Big Picture, and this morning's offering was a home run, referring to those who refuse to acknowledge any facts that do not coincide with their beliefs:

I have a new name for these folks: They are Cognitive Dissidents. They will continue to dissent from reality for as long as it takes to get everyone else to believe as they do, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary.

If you engage with a Cognitive Dissident, it is futile to try to use facts or data, for theirs is a belief based upon Faith. You cannot convince a person of a fact if it conflicts with their deeply held, nearly religious convictions.

Thus, when confronted with someone who has a fervent belief based not on evidence or reason or data or logic, do not waste your time convincing them the earth is not flat; their cognitive facilities simply will not allow them to recognize the world is round. 

A farmer — or was it Robert Heinlein? — once passed along this slice of wisdom; I repeat it now for your benefit: Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

Read the rest here.

I love this.

And I'm getting better at doing this. I've stopped arguing with people who ignore facts and make bad decisions whether these are bad investment choices, lifestyle choices or political choices.

Life's too short. I don't even let the fact that most of my friends are theists bother me anymore...

Live and let live, brah.

And Go Habs.