China doesn’t want to go back to the future or the past: The Chinese government has banned any depiction of time travel in TV shows and films because the plot element “disrespects history.”
China’s State Administration for Radio, Film & Television said that fictional time-traveling in programs “casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation.”
Another reason why the Chinese government sucks. Government controlled news and the fictionalizing of real events and frequent human rights violations and yet we continue to by crap made from there while borrowing more and more money from them while they become more and more powerful.
I am as guilty as anyone…
One day we will be fighting not only for our human rights but for our right to watch Star Trek.
I love this safety video for Air New Zealand…I could see Southwest doing something like this…but no way US Airways or any other stick in the ass airline.
This chart surprises me, not the fact that support for same sex marriage is growing but the fact that it’s still so low in some places… ex. North Carolina. I guess there are still a lot of rural folks (and city folks by the way) that just don’t get it. I forget that Bill James exist. I guess i’ve been in New York too long.
This is a special news report from Mike Wallace called CBS Reports: The Homosexuals from 1967. If you have 45 minutes, watch it. It has interviews with Gore Vidal, various members of The Mattachine Society, politicians, prosecutors, law enforcement, and both closed and out in the open gay people.
It’s been a while since I’ve put anything here. Just keeping up with other people’s stuff and spending TOO much time on facebook when I AM in front of the computer, and then also just doing real life things to amuse myself, I guess this blog thing takes a back seat much like I’ve seen it has with countless others.
We were supposed to get some snow today but like the rest of the winter, looks like we’re out of luck. They’ve downgraded expectations to 3-6 inches….and that’s really alright with me. We’re usually due 60-70 inches of snow a season but so far, we had that snow of 6 or 8 inches in early December and a few small snows since then, but really nothing. It’s been COLD though, OMG! I hate it. This year has had only 5 days over 40and only 9 over freezing. Can you tell I just watched the weather guy? This is Casey wanting to jump onto The Mohawk River after a bird
This is Lake Champlain from a road trip a couple of weeks ago. We had never been all the way to the very northern part on Vermont so we made our way Plattsburgh, NY and took the ferry over to Vermont and then to St. Albans where we ate here (and they freaking had everything) and then to northern Vermont and then to Canada. We made our way into the Canadian countryside where where we explored for a while and then set the GPS to come home. THIS is where we entered the United States again. I would have taken pictures but I think they may frown on that especially considering we had a remote starter hidden under the seat because it looks like a bomb and the fact that Duncan had a hard time finding his license on the way back through so I was sure we were were about to get detained and stripped searched in this cabin they called a security checkpoint.
And finally, if you haven’t seen this great Google commercial, take a look.
Forgot to include pictures from our road trip through the Adirondacks last weekend. It was gorgeous. Glad we did it because it looks like this weekend isn’t gonna be so nice…and I gotta work…yuck.
A couple of interesting stories out of the south today. First, a lesbian senior in a Mississippi high school will not have her picture in the yearbook because she took her picture in a tuxedo instead of the piece of material they throw over the girls and pretend it’s a dress.
Veronica Rodriguez describes her daughter, 17-year-old Ceara Sturgis, as a perfect child: a straight-A student, goalie on the soccer team, a trumpet player in the band and active in Students Against Drunk Driving.
She also is gay and feels more comfortable in boy’s clothes. So, Rodriguez said she supported her daughter’s decision to wear a tuxedo, rather than the drape customary for girls, when she had her senior portrait made in July. But Rodriguez said school officials at Wesson Attendance Center, a K-12 school in the Copiah County School District, were not as supportive and have refused to include the picture in the school yearbook.
Never understood those schools that had all the students wear the same thing in their senior pictures anyway. Fake dress or tuxedo? Who cares?
A little further to the west, a Louisiana justice of the peace refused to marry an interracial couple on the grounds that he’s worried about the children’s future. And it’s not the first time the judge with 34 years on the bench has done this, it’s pretty routine.
Keith Bardwell, a white justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish in the southeastern part of the state, refused to issue a marriage license earlier this month to Beth Humphrey, who is white, and Terence McKay, who is black. His refusal has prompted calls for an investigation or resignation from civil and constitutional rights groups and the state’s Legislative Black Caucus.
Sometimes, it just makes me speechless the things people do for no sound reason…just speechless.
I actually agree with Newt Gingrich. Kids should be able to ride their bikes to school. A lot of school districts, not just Saratoga Springs, have banned kids from riding their bikes to school because they worry about getting sued if they get hit….crazy. They might just want to concentrate on teaching kids the rules of the road because undoubtedly, nobody in these parts knows them.
OMG! Look at this thing that was on our door when I got home today. Does this guy think THIS is gonna get him elected to anything? I’m not saying he’s not perfectly qualified, but he looks like he’s some sort of nut job living in the mountains collecting guns waiting for the government to try to take all his possessions and force him to marry a man.
My friend Debbie’s apartment building burned today taking all her stuff with it, and that makes me sad.
While watching a little Good Morning America this morning, I noticed the first of what I guess is not the last of NOM’s local anti-gay marriage commercials playing in New York and Albany areas. While the bill has passed the Assembly, it hasn’t been put to a vote in the Senate because it’s too close to call. Most people want it put to a vote whether it passes or not but Senate leaders have a plug up their ass about it. Not looking forward to a barrage of these commercials to come. It’s interesting how the use a black voice for the narration.
Gay marriage: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Iowa, Maine (today), and New Hampshire (just waiting on the governor so who knows). The next battleground is here in New York where Gov. David A. Paterson introduced a marriage bill last month and the State Assembly, which strongly supports it, will probably take it up next week. The bill’s fate in the Senate is less certain. Several of the above states still have fights to be fought, and they will be but the big fights remain. The closer this fight gets to the south, the more venomous it will become. However, here’s what David Patterson had to say last month.
I think the stirring debates of Daniel Webster, the thunder speeches of Frederick Douglass and the inspiring writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe certainly were a catalyst for the great abolitionist movement in the mid-19th century, but it could have come to a screeching halt when probably the most painful and agonizing United States Supreme Court decision was rendered in 1857, when Dred Scott was denied the opportunity to escape slavery north of the 36th parallel.
And yet, only five and a half years later, Mr. Paterson noted, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in rebel states. Mr. Paterson compared the rapid progress of the same-sex marriage to the transformation of the status of black Americans — at least on paper — in the 1850s and 1860s.
Proposition 8, which overturned same-sex marriage in California last November, “left a number of advocates in a place of complete confusion and stunned disbelief.”
“This is a civil rights issues,” Mr. Paterson said, citing issues like hospital visitations, health insurance coverage and inheritance that are connected with marriage. He called for an end to “a legal system that has systematically discriminated against all of them.”
He continued:
Anyone that has ever experienced degradation or intolerance would understand the solemn duty and how important it actually is. Anyone that’s ever experienced antisemitism or racism, any New Yorker who is an immigrant, who has experienced discrimination, any woman who has faced harassment at work or suffered violence at home, any disabled person who has been mocked or marginalized, understands what we’re talking about here. We have all known the wrath of discrimination. We have all felt the pain and the insult of hatred. This is why we are all standing here today. We stand to tell the world that we want equality for everyone. We stand to tell the world that we want marriage equality in New York State.
He said, “I understand the trepidation and the anxiety that people feel right now,” but said that “rights should not be stifled by fear” and that “silence should not be a response to injustice.”
“If we take no action, we will surely lose,” Mr. Paterson declared. “Maybe we’ve already lost. There is no gain without struggle.”
Mr. Paterson noted that his predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, had introduced a similar bill in 2007. “I’m wondering if I’m in a time warp or have been sent someplace else in time,” he said, citing critics who said he was “rushing.”
“Didn’t we cry out for democracy, and didn’t we ask for the openness and transparency of government that we thought we deserved?”
The governor continued: “I am not in any way attempting to instruct the majority leader of the Senate or the speaker of the Assembly … I am here to speak against those who are antagonistic and antithetical and always have been, not only to marriage equality, but equality,” for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people. The reality is that for me this is the time to fulfill the dreams of our founding Constitution, which implored us to expand the rights of the union. Our founding Constitution has been expanded to include African-Americans, the right of women to vote, the right of immigrants to get citizenship in this country.”
