Sigh...

The Supreme Court upheld Prop 8 today. I honestly can't say that I'm surprised. It was an uphill battle from the beginning. However, it is the responsibility of the Court to protect the rights of minorities and they failed today. Big time. It was going to be tough for them to justify overturning something voted on by the people, though. Even if it was an incredibly slim majority.

The good news is that all 18,000 couples married before the discrimination began had their marriages validated unanimously by the Court. That result made for some interesting hypocrisy from supporters of Prop 8 as noted by Dan Savage:

The anti-gay bigots said before the decision that they wanted Prop 8 upheld and they weren't concerned about the 18K gay couples who wed while same-sex marriage was briefly legal in CA. That exposes their fundamental dishonesty. If they believe, as they claimed during the campaign, that married same-sex couples are a threat to the family, a threat to children, an invitation to hurricanes and earthquakes and wildfires, and that the existence of married gay couples somehow requires homosexuality to be taught in schools, how can they be indifferent to 18K married gay couples rattling around the state? Won't all those bad things still happen?

It's been a pretty good year for album covers.

When I first heard that Wilco were calling their next album, "Wilco (The Album)" with a song on it entitled "Wilco (The Song)". I kinda figured they were having fun and hopefully not taking themselves too seriously. This album cover pretty much confirms that suspicion. :)

It's like tinyurl, but with Dickens quotes. Certainly one of the strangest things I've seen on the Internet, but still impressive...

For example, take this quote from Barnaby Rudge:

http://dickensurl.com/4e95/Mrs_Varden_was_a_lady_of_what_is_commonly_called_an_uncertain_temper__a_phrase_which_being_interpreted_signifies_a_temper_tolerably_certain_to_make_everybody_more_or_less_uncomfortable

OK, maybe it's not the most useful thing in the world. But it's certainly entertaining.

Ross Douthat wrote his first column for the NY Times today and he's already written one more compelling and intelligent article than his predecessor Bill Kristol. It's nice to see an intelligent conservatism return to the Times. One that trumpets critical thinking over ideology. I'm not sure he's the next Will Safire or William F. Buckley, but he's certainly not Bill Kristol, and that's a good thing.

I'm sure this is a pretty soft introduction from Douthat, so I'll be interested to see what he has to say in the future. I never really read much of his work when he was working for the Atlantic, but I've heard good things.

There's been a lot of press lately about the so-called torture memos coming out of Washington. It's certainly news, but it's not like we didn't know it was going on. We just got our official confirmation. There's been some interesting discussion on it lately, like this interview by Chris Matthews.

It's got his usual caustic confrontational tone, which I'm not a fan of. But there's some substance there. Also something he doesn't mention that I found rather disturbing. The congressman talks about these interrogations happening in controlled conditions with doctors. Maybe I'm off base here, but if you need doctors supervising an interrogation, something is off and that sounds a lot like torture to me, albeit in a controlled environment.

The best article I've seen, though, is from the NY Times. An op-ed piece by an FBI supervisory agent during the time these techniques were authorized. He makes some excellent points, including this one that hadn't even occurred to me:

One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him.

It also looks like we didn't really gain much in the way of actionable information that we couldn't have ascertained with conventional techniques. There's a lot of spin in the memos and the timelines are all off.

Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.

It's all pretty disturbing and I'm pretty convinced that going after these agents is completely wrong. These people were given orders. I don't know if they go all the way up to the top and I don't want to make those assumptions (unlike Mr. Matthews), but we should at the very least investigate this. It's pretty clear we violated the Geneva conventions.

For all the love the Republicans give Reagan, even he took the right stand on torture. This shouldn't be a partisan issue. For some people, like John McCain, it isn't. I'm just hoping we're able to make some sense of all of this. I'm not holding my breath, though.

After seeing this video, I'm once again in awe of the Flaming Lips. They've taken a song, kept the spirit of the song and made it entirely their own. This is how you cover a song.

She kinda takes some liberties with the lyrics and I prefer Colin's vocals, but this cover of the Crane Wife 3 by the Decemberists is notable for one very big reason. Marc Ribot plays guitar on it and it's absolutely gorgeous. He's probably most well known for being the guitarist of choice of Tom Waits. He does a great job with the Decemberists here:



Apparently her new album (which is all covers) has a version of this song with Nick Cave. Pretty nuts.

Can't wait to play "Don't Stop Believing" in Rock Band. Some reference... :)

Yes, the one song that's been a glaring omission (at least for me :p) in Rock Band is showing up next week along with Heartbreaker by Pat Benatar! Rawk!

Some guy got a hold of the master tracks for Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" and broke down the famous clavinet part. Turns out there are 8 separate tracks all with different textures. Some pretty sick playing in there. Overall it's pretty insane. I'd love to hear each individual track...

Well, after years of talk, looks like the film is finally coming out this year. There was talk about this project three years ago when I left the visual effects industry. So it's being directed by Spike Jonze and is written by Spike and Dave Eggers. As if that wasn't enough hipster cred, the trailer has a special remix of "Wake Up" by the Arcade Fire. Sounds like hipster overload to me. :)

Looks good, though.

So turns out there's a perfectly normal scientific explanation for why most Asians get red in the face when drinking. It's a lack of a certain enzyme called ALDH2. Of course, they also found that if you drink too much and get a tolerance for the response, bad things happen. Namely, squamous cell esophageal cancer. That doesn't sound good.

The solution. Don't drink as much...

Japanese men reduced their consumption to under 16 drinks a week, 53 percent of esophageal squamous cell cancers in that group could be prevented.

Well, I think I'm good. :)

So looks like Stephen Colbert won the voting to name NASA's new space module on the International Space Station. NASA still reserves the right to pick their own name according to the rules of the poll, but I wouldn't be surprised if they ran with it.

Serenity would have been a nice pick (and it may still get picked), but I'm ok with Colbert. :)

They should be naming a shuttle or other vessel Serenity, anyway.

So the Sci-Fi Channel is changing their name to "Syfy". I wish that were a joke. I understand the logic in expanding their programming to other genres, but already do that and people aren't complaining that much. Here's the marketing speak:

"We’ll get the heritage and the track record of success, and we’ll build off of that to build a broader, more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand."

Human-friendly? Really? What the hell does that even mean?

Took some pictures of the Star Trek panel at Wondercon in SF a couple of weeks ago.

Overall, it was a great panel. Really entertaining and the new trailer looks incredible. Saw it again in front of Watchmen and *now* I'm excited about this movie. Looks really fun.

This quote from RNC Chairman Michael Steele is impressive. You have to give him points for creativity.

"We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right?"

Oh, and for the record:

The name Greenland comes from Scandinavian settlers. In the Icelandic sagas, it is said that Norwegian-born Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland for murder. He, along with his extended family and thralls, set out in ships to find the land that was rumoured to be to the northwest. After settling there, he named the land Grænland ("Greenland"). Greenland was also called Gruntland ("Ground-land") and Engronelant (or Engroneland) on early maps. Whether green is an erroneous transcription of grunt ("ground"), which refers to shallow bays, or vice versa, is not known. It should also be noted, however, that the southern portion of Greenland (not covered by glacier) is indeed very green in the summer and was likely to have been even greener in Erik's time because of the Medieval Warm Period.

This keychain/USB drive is pretty awesome. I only wish I didn't already a thumbdrive! Not the most practical size, granted. Still pretty freakin' sweet.

This machine to open and pour a bottle of wine is so insanely elaborate and unnecessary, I only regret not having space for it. :)

I kinda long for the days when I just thought Glenn Beck was an idiot that I didn't agree with. He's looking more and more like a complete nutcase with each passing day:

BECK: So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing – remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us Eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it science. Let’s put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don’t we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed with it!

And it was from America. Progressive movement in America. Eugenics. In case you don’t know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. …. The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails. But I just want his policies to fail; I want America to wake up.

Love this stuff from Colbert last week about Beck:

Neat little meme here. You basically use Wikipedia to name your band, the Quotations Page to name your first album and flickr to get the album cover. I'm pretty happy with the results...

Band Name: Newquay and Cornwall Junction Railway
First Album: Break My Pen and Throw It Away
Album Cover: