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Well, thanks to this nifty website, I now have an official seal for the next presentations of The Golden Bitch-Slap (formerly known as The Golden Two-By-Four), which is presented to those people who really, really need a smack upside the head for something stupid they said and/or did.
The wheat sheaves are a l'il prairie touch :-)
For the first time a star has been observed in real-time (well, O.K. real time plus the 440 million light-years it took for the light to reach us) as it goes supernova – a mind-bogglingly powerful explosion as the star ends its life, the resulting cosmic eruption briefly outshining an entire galaxy. UK scientists, in collaboration with international colleagues, used NASA's Swift satellite and a combination of orbiting and ground-based observatories to catch a supernova in the act of exploding.
read more | digg story
The $250 Lego Mindstorms NXT is somewhere between a really cool toy and a robotics lab in a box. The combination of a computerized controller, sensors, servo motors, and hundreds of Lego Technic pieces lets kids of all ages design and build sophisticated robotics.
My brother and my nephews are gonna love this :-) the whole family is LEGO builders.
read more | digg story
This must be Totally-Fucked-Up Church Decisions week or something. First the Sunday School teacher who gets fired because she's female, and now this gem from Brandon, Manitoba.
Deborah Boschman wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, criticizing the mayor and city councillors. Several days later, she gets a letter from her pastor, Mike Davis of the Pentecostal church Bethel Christian Assembly, chastising her! (Her letter to the editor did not mention her affiliation with Bethel.).
In his letter of Christian love and forgiveness, Pastor Davis tells her, “Your actions are not consistent with the values of Bethel Christian Assembly and if you are not going to do anything about them I am asking you to consider attending another church...”
Ms. Boschman says “I suppose I'm to clear everything through church leaders first -- to get permission to speak my personal opinion.”. And she's gone looking for another church.
Smart woman. If it had been me, I'd have driven over to Pastor Mike's and Bette-Davis-bitchslapped some of the pompousness out of that asshole. Hey, but that's just me.
UPDATE Aug. 24th: See comment below. Perhaps there's another side to the story here.
I've been spending some time tagging musical tracks to add to the new radio station I've created on Last.fm (bar none, the best streaming radio service on the Internet, and one of the successful examples of the power of social networking in cyberspace). Here's how you listen in, step by step:
Step 1. Go to the Last.fm website and click on the "Join Last.fm button with the big green arrow. You'll be at the Sign Up screen (see right). All you need to give is a username and password, and if you prefer, an email address to send your password to if you should forget it. That's it; you don't need to give out your email address or your real name or your phone number or your credit card name; you can sign up and listen for free).
Step 2. Once you've registered, you go to the Account Created screen (see left). Click on the button with the big green arrow that says "Download Last.fm". Follow the instructions link underneath the button if you need more help with installing the software.
Step 3.
Once the Last.fm software is installed on your PC or Mac or whatever it is you're using, just go to this page where you'll see a button that says 'Personal Tag Radio" and a list of the 500 songs playing on my radio station (see right). Click on the "Personal Tag Radio", et voila! Commercial-free music selected for your listening pleasure by yours truly :-)
(Or, to make it ridiculously easy, after your software is installed, just click here. The Last.fm software will automatically load the station and begin playing.)
Enjoy!
Honestly, I don't even know why I bother.
Every so often I think I'm missing something and I sign back on to gay.com. And every time I do, I get hit in the face with all the reasons why I left in the first place.
Tonight I decided to check it out again, updated my profile with a new pic (below) and launched into chat. To be immediately assailed by chatbots who want you to sign up for porno websites. And then ignored by the people you used to chat with. And then realizing, once again, what a hollow, shallow place the chat room is, and that you haven't missed a God-damn thing in all the time you were offline.
One of my best friends, who is online a lot, chatted with me for a bit and agreed that it's bad in the chatroom. I'm afraid I just can't understand why he hangs out on gay.com every evening for hours and hours. It seems to me all it does is get him more tired and depressed and cynical about "the gay scene".
Meh, maybe I'll peek in again in 2007 sometime. Or 2008. The time I would be wasting online I'd rather put towards research for my book, or losing a few pounds at the gym, or adding tracks to my personal Last.fm station, or evening out my suntan at the beach, or folding and putting away my laundry, or going for coffee or supper or a funny movie with a some friends.
Sometimes I wonder if it's the same over on the straight boards like lavalive or eharmony.
You simply CANNOT make this stuff up.
Mary Lambert, age 81, who has taught Sunday School at Watertown's First Baptist Church for 54 years, received a letter from her church leaders telling her she can no longer teach at the church, because she's a woman.
The letter quotes 1 Timothy 2:11 -14 of the New Testament: "A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner."
Been a quiet weekend, spent most of it alone. Actually made a dent on the dishes and laundry piling up around me. Somehow in the middle of folding, I got this urge to start taking pictures of myself.
Then I pulled out one of my folded sheets and draped it over my bedroom door, for that el-cheapo photo studio look ;-)
I usually don't like the way I look in photographs, but this one turned out well, I thought.
Hmmm... on second thought, maybe I should do some suntanning WITHOUT my glasses... (*goes to check this week's weather forecast*)
*sigh* Back to Mount Laundry...
Well, I'm late with the news, but the 11-year-old girl with the BIG voice has been declared the winner of the reality TV show America's Got Talent! Good for Bianca, she definitely deserves it.
And, since things move at Internet speed in today's society, she's already got her own website, and a fan site (warning: video loads and runs immediately on entering website; keep your speakers down).
I hope and wish that she still has a chance to be a little girl in the midst of all this hoopla. She's eleven years old, and has lots of time. I don't want her to land up like Judy Garland did, or (God forbid) Whitney Houston. And Jessica Simpson just makes me nauseous.
For a long time I had wanted to watch Long Day's Journey Into Night. I finally had my chance when it was on Turner Classic Movies several nights ago, when I "taped" it using the PVR feature in my new desktop PC.
Wow. I can see why Katharine Hepburn wanted to do this role so badly that she took a pay cut.
What a haunting portrait of addiction and family dysfunction this play was. I might actually go do a bit of reading of comment and criticism of Eugene O'Neill's work, now that I've finally seen it. And I won't erase it from my hard drive, just yet. I think I want to see it again.
