A gay couple holding hands as they left a Scottsdale restaurant were attacked by as many as seven men leaving the pair badly beaten.
Andrew Frost and Jean Rolland say the attack took place just feet from the restaurant’s front doors.
Frost, 19, needed numerous stitches to close wounds on his head and face. Rolland, 28, suffered many bumps and bruises.
"I had blood pouring out of me and I actually blacked out at one point," Frost told the Arizona Republic.
He said that as he and Rolland exited the restaurant he heard someone yell "fag". He said he turned and saw two men. Frost said that he replied to the slur and one of the men punched him. He said that at least five others rushed from the restaurant and joined the attack.
Frost and Rolland have filed a police report, but no one at the restaurant seems to have seen anything. The couple said they had never seen their attackers before.
Tempers boiled over at an anti-gay marriage rally yesterday when the executive director of the Boston-based Catholic Citizenship emerged from behind a lectern outside City Hall, rushed toward a female counter-demonstrator, and pushed her to the ground.
Sarah Loy, 27, of Worcester was holding a sign in defense of same-sex marriage amid a sea of green “Let the People Vote” signs when Larry Cirignano of Canton, who heads the Catholic Citizenship group, ran into the crowd, grabbed her by both shoulders and told her, “You need to get out. You need to get out of here right now.” Mr. Cirignano then pushed her to the ground, her head slamming against the concrete sidewalk.
"It was definitely assault and battery,” said Ronal C. Madnick, director of the Worcester County Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. Police interviewed Mr. Madnick and several others moments after the incident.
As Ms. Loy lay motionless on the ground, crying, Mr. Cirignano ran back behind the lectern, where moments before he had opened the afternoon rally by leading a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Emphasising the words "under God" and Leaving out "indivisible", no doubt…
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been asked to help with the investigation into two attacks on women Ada Oklahoma where homophobic epithets were marked on their bodies.
But apart from helping develop a profile of suspects in the case there is little the FBI can do. Gays and lesbians are not protected under federal hate crime legislation.
Sara Kaspereit, 20, said she was grabbed by two men as she got out of her car in front of her home on Monday. One of the men carved the word lesbian into her forearm.
Earlier this month a second woman said she was blindfolded, bound to a tree and the word "Hellbound” was written in marker pen across her chest.
…
In previous homophobic attacks where the FBI has been asked for assistance there is little the bureau could do.
Last July the FBI was called for help in investigating an incident involving a burning cross in front of the home of a gay man in Athens, Tennessee. After determining the incident was homophobic rather than race related the bureau declined to help. (story)
Federal investigators examined evidence but said that even if the people responsible are caught they cannot be prosecuted under federal law. (story)
Legislation that would have included crimes against gays and lesbians in federal hate crime laws was dropped in the Senate in May. (story)
That last one was probably taken with the 50mm f4 Distagon. On a 6×6 format camera (that’s 120 roll film) a 50 is actually a very wide angle lens. For a sense of scale, see the small group of people walking the trail in the lower right hand corner. I used no filters, nor any Photoshop tweaking, other then kicking down the resolution for posting to the web. The sky really is that blue out there.
A little beauty to start your week…courtesy my new film scanner (a Christmas present to myself…I’m allowed)
Colorado River, Near Big Bend Utah
This was taken during my swing through the southwest in 2004, with the Hasselblad I was able, finally, to afford. Thanks to the general migration to digital, film cameras and lenses I once thought I’d never be able to own are now showing up on the used market, and in excellent condition. This was taken with a 501c, and the 80mm f2.8 Planar lens it came with, on Fuji Velvia, which rivals the old Kodachrome in detail and color saturation. The combination of the Hasselblad with its magnificent lenses and Velvia is simply stunning. When I got my first rolls back it simply took my breath away. I had to bump down the image resolution here quite a bit or the page would never finish loading, the scanned image size on a 6×6 color slide at the scanner’s full resolution is running about half a gig. But even so you can see the richness and delicacy of the image.
Gosh all those Microsoft products all work so damn well together don’t they? And as a software developer I can say for a fact that Microsoft development tools are not only among the very best there are, but are amazingly well integrated with their business suite of applications, including Office and SQL Server and IIS. It’s all just one big happy smooth seamless whole.
Of course those tools only work on Microsoft platforms, and you can only take full advantage of them if you confine your applications to Microsoft platforms, but if you agree to wear Redmond’s golden chains, it is almost embarrassingly simple and straightforward for a software developer to build some very impressive custom business applications. You can be fantastically productive while wearing Redmond’s golden chains.
But the thing to remember about Redmond’s golden chains, isn’t that they’re golden…
With the recent release of Microsoft’s newest potential cash cows, Windows Vista and Office 2007, the company is expecting a wave of upgrades from users seeking the latest functionality. But what if you’re not looking for new bells and whistles? What if you want to keep your old operating systems, such as Windows 2000, running as long as possible?
Microsoft isn’t making it easy for you. Office 2007 and the software for the company’s much-hyped Zune music player won’t install on Windows 2000. As other new products emerge from Microsoft in 2007 and beyond, more and more of them are likely to leave Windows 2000 out of the party.
Which of these installation restrictions are caused by a real lack of capabilities in Windows 2000, however? Are any of them merely a "squeeze play" by Microsoft to convince buyers that it’s necessary to immediately upgrade all PCs to Vista and all servers to Server 2003 or the forthcoming Longhorn Server?
One example of this conundrum is Microsoft’s Windows Defender program. This antispyware program can be downloaded for free, but it will only install on Windows XP, Server 2003, and higher. The application won’t install on Windows 2000, according to Microsoft’s own product documentation.
Users have reported, however, that this is simply an artificial rule built into the Installshield package that copies Defender files to disk.
Surprise, surprise. The article goes on to discuss the upcoming legislative changes in how daylight savings time is calculated. Operating systems will need to be patched accordingly, and Microsoft already has a patch out there for XP and Vista. But not…surprise, surprise, Windows 2000. And their position is, they aren’t going to either. Computer not keeping time correctly? Oh…you need our 300 dollar software upgrade, and a two-thousand dollar hardware upgrade, to run the software upgrade…
As many as eight conservative Episcopal churches in Virginia are expected to announce today that their parishioners have voted to cut their ties with the Episcopal Church. Two are large, historic congregations that minister to the Washington elite and occupy real estate worth a combined $27 million, which could result in a legal battle over who keeps the property.
In a twist, these wealthy American congregations are essentially putting themselves up for adoption by Anglican archbishops in poorer dioceses in Africa, Asia and Latin America who share conservative theological views about homosexuality and the interpretation of Scripture with the breakaway Americans.
“The Episcopalian ship is in trouble,” said the Rev. John Yates, rector of The Falls Church, one of the two large Virginia congregations, where George Washington served on the vestry. “So we’re climbing over the rails down to various little lifeboats. There’s a lifeboat from Bolivia, one from Rwanda, another from Nigeria. Their desire is to help us build a new ship in North America, and design it and get it sailing.”
Together, these Americans and their overseas allies say they intend to form a new American branch that would rival or even supplant the Episcopal Church in the worldwide Anglican Communion, a confederation of national churches that trace their roots to the Church of England and the archbishop of Canterbury.
…
In Virginia, the two large churches are voting on whether they want to report to the powerful archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, an outspoken opponent of homosexuality who supports legislation in his country that would make it illegal for gay men and lesbians to form organizations, read gay literature or eat together in a restaurant.
"I think what upsets people is that Rushdoony [the founder of the Christian Reconstructionist movement] seemed to think – and I’m not sure about this – that a godly society would stone people for the same thing that people in ancient Israel were stoned," he said. "I no longer consider that essential.
"It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things," Ahmanson said. "But I don’t think it’s at all a necessity."
Well…there’s stumbling on such a country, and then there’s bankrolling one yourself. The conservatives can make all the excuses they want for their decision to schism, but the staringly obvious fact is that they are ripping their church apart for nothing more righteous and noble then a bottomless hatred of homosexual people. Nobody is forcing them into the arms of the man who wants to cleanse Nigeria of homosexuals, anymore then anyone was forcing them to take money from a man who still finds it "a little hard to say" that stoning them to death is immoral. They’re going willingly. Joyfully. A ‘lifeboat’ Yates called it, who preaches to his faithful in a state that used to enforce a law forbidding bars and restaurants from serving known homosexuals, and which only last month passed a constitutional amendment that strips same sex couples of all legal rights. But it isn’t enough that the state hates gay people as much as they do. God has to hate them that much too.
When they tell you it’s not about hate, laugh in their faces and point to their new Moses and his promise land, where homosexuals cannot even sit down together in public without facing arrest. Then point to their blood money.
…and likely won’t ever find at a flea market either…
Okay…never mind they stopped making them a year before I was even born. Dang! What boy wouldn’t love to have his own nugget of U-238 to play around with?
In 1951, A.C. Gilbert introduced his U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, a radioactive learning set we can only assume was fun for the whole math club. Gilbert, who Americanmemorabilia claims was "often compared to Walt Disney for his creative genius," had a dream that nuclear power could capture the imaginations of children everywhere. For a mere $49.50, the kit came complete with three "very low-level" radioactive sources, a Geiger-Mueller radiation counter, a Wilson Cloud Chamber (to see paths of alpha particles), a Spinthariscope (to see "live" radioactive disintegration), four samples of Uranium-bearing ores, and an Electroscope to measure radioactivity.
And what nuclear lab for kids would be complete without an Atomic Energy Manual and Learn How Dagwood Splits the Atom comic book? (The latter was written with the help of General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project.)
How Dagwood Splits the Atom would have fit in just swell with my copy of Classics Illustrated Adventures In Science…
Sigh. I guess the world I grew up in was a different place. Mr. Atom was our friend…do-it-yourself bomb shelters in the backyard notwithstanding. I guess I’ll never have the atomic energy lab I always wanted for Christmas. But…at least I have my radioactive Fiestaware…
More from Radar Online’s The Ten Most Dangerous Toys of All Time…Here. I did manage to talk mom into getting me that nifty Bat Masterson Derringer Belt Gun though. Wish I still had it. Seriously…you would not believe some of the things kids were allowed, even encouraged to play with once upon a time. Get me started on cap gun rolls sometime…
Tsunamis this large don’t happen on Earth. One week ago, a large solar flare from an Earth-sized sunspot produced a tsunami-type shock wave that was spectacular even for the Sun. Pictured above, the tsunami wave was captured moving out from active region AR 10930 by the Optical Solar Patrol Network (OSPAN) telescope in New Mexico, USA. The resulting shock wave, known technically as a Moreton wave, compressed and heated up gasses including hydrogen in the photosphere of the Sun, causing a momentarily brighter glow. The above image was taken in a very specific red color emitted exclusively by hydrogen gas. The rampaging tsunami took out some active filaments on the Sun, although many re-established themselves later. The solar tsunami spread at nearly one million kilometers per hour, and circled the entire Sun in a matter of minutes.
There is an absolutely amazing set of sequential images of this shock wave travelling across the surface of the sun on the NASA website: Here.
Took out some active filaments on the sun… (!!!) Some of those filaments are massively larger in diameter then the planet whose air you’re breathing right now.
I’m Endeavouring, Ma’am, To Construct A Mnemonic Memory Circuit Using Stone-Knives And Bear-Skins…
Originally (1947) EDSAC boasted [sic] 512 words of main memory stored in 16 ultrasonic mercury-delay-line tanks, cleverly known as "long" tanks because they were longer then the short tanks used for registers. On the bright side, as we used to quip, each of the 512 words was 18 bits! Forget the word count, feel the width! Alas, for technical reasons, only 17 of the 18 bits were accessible. By 1952, the number of long tanks had doubled, providing a dizzy total of 1-KB words. Input/output was via five-track paper tape, which therefore also served as mass [sic] storage. Subject only to global timber production, one might see this as virtually unlimited mass storage…
-Stan Kelly-Bootle, writing in the current issue of the ACM Queue, Will The Real Bots Please Stand Up?
Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old
and they shut them, with tears, in a magnificent mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet —
this is what desires resemble that have passed
without fulfillment; with none of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a bright morning.
In the comments on this post on the Unfunny Duck, Tukla In Iowa notes:
We’re having some fun with this over at Comics Curmudgeon because it happened to hit the news the same day one of his cartoons complained about alcohol-free eggnog:
It’s a hoot…go read it. It’s over at the Comics Curmudgeon, who says…
Now, I don’t usually — or ever, really — comment on Mallard Fillmore on this blog. Partly it’s because it inspires the sort of pointless vitriol amongst commentors that will get folks banished to the Cockpit. Partly it’s because I already have an outlet for my political commentary. But mostly it’s because my comments would just be as foaming, angry, and unfunny as Mallard Fillmore itself. Not only do I disagree with pretty much every political opinion expressed therein, but the strip itself is a sham of a comic strip. There are plenty of conservative-themed strips (Prickly City and the online Day By Day come to mind) that actually have sequential action in panels and recurring characters; Mallard Fillmore is just a standard-issue editorial cartoon that happens to be drawn in a box that’s the same dimensions as a comic strip so that it can be printed on the comics pages.
See, I’m doing it already.
I know the feeling pal. And…he’s right about the Unfunny Duck. It isn’t the political point of view, it’s that the strip simply reeks of being cranked out without any feeling whatever for the medium itself. And for that matter, any passion whatever for the political statements he’s trying to make. It isn’t funny, it has no feeling or passion, it’s just…there. It’s not good as a political cartoon, and it’s not good as a comic strip. I figure it’s being bought by newspaper editors who feel like they need to have something…anything…to "balance" Doonesbury.
But…Mallard Fillmore keeps me working hard in my own cartooning efforts. If a political cartoon I am working on starts getting as vapid and the expression in it as deathlessly rote as a Mallord Fillmore strip, I trash it.
Like I said the other day when certain readers groused about the attention this blog gives to homosexuality, it is one of the central issues of our time, and the response to it is cleaving the Christian churches. People who complain about the time conservatives spend on the issue wouldn’t complain if we were taking the Andrew Sullivan gay liberationist line. It’s that we don’t do so that they dislike. If we can’t say something nice and cheerful, we shouldn’t say anything at all.
But the issue — the issues — won’t go away.
No shit Sherlock. That’s because knuckle dragging jackasses like you can’t let go if it. It matters to you, that somewhere, someway, somehow, there are gay people in this world who don’t fear and loath their sexual nature, the way louts like you think they should.
Rod Dreher, he who knows that homosexuals can pray the gay away because he himself was cleansed by God (or was it just getting old) of his lustful feelings toward…no, not men, but Betty Blue (no…I’m not kidding…just read his article), wants us to know he feels Compassion for all those poor suffering gay Evangelicals The New York Times profiled the other day. Not that he feels any particular need to treat them as if they were as human as he is mind you, with the same basic human needs for love and intimate companionship that gutter crawling louts like him need to stop demonizing. He has Compassion…Compassion I tell you.
Whatever your stance on homosexuality and religion, you have to have a heart of stone not to feel for men and women caught in this dilemma. For me, it brought to mind something my friend David Morrison told me over a decade ago, about the world he found as he left gay activism and committed himself to living as a chaste Christian faithful to Scripture and tradition.
As it happens, David Morrison was once a friend of mine too. But that was back in his gay activist days, when we were both volunteers on Jon Larimore’s Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS system (David was mostly a theoretical volunteer, since I ended up doing 90 percent of the work he’d also volunteered for). In those days he wore his pride like, as he once said, "an anthem". But over the years we all watched him fall, first into a profoundly reactionary brand of conservatism, and then (surprise, surprise) into an even more reactionary brand of religion. I remember vividly the day he posted to the general forum, that as far as God was concerned none of us were any better then Hitler. He had a boyfriend back then, or so he always claimed. I’ve often wondered how the boyfriend took David’s bellyflop into the gutter. When he later wrote a column for the New York Post, titled "What Crime Of Hate And Anger?" (issue of November 5, 1998) in which he averred that Matthew Shepard had it coming, because he had a history of risky sexual flirting with strangers, I couldn’t have been less surprised:
Newsweek called what happened in Cody last summer a miscalculation on Shepard’s part and it may turn out that he similarly miscalculated in Laramie. But whether he did or did not miscalculate, Americans should think long and hard about the making the feeling of repugnance at an unwanted sexual advance subject to additional penalties under the law.
Angry, yes. But not surprised. You can read the article in full here on Eutopia. (There is also a response in that issue of Eutopia to my letter to the Post. Note the theocrat’s reliable retort that "certitude of experience" must answer to "certitude of truth".)
That was the David we’d all come to know and loath on GLIB. If he’d said the Pink Triangles were a sensible reaction to the repugnance of unwanted sexual advances I couldn’t have been less surprised.
But Dreher thinks David is a fine young man, because David is the only kind of homosexual a moral runt like Dreher can tolerate: a self castrating one.
Looking back, after eight years of seeking to live chastely as a Christian, I believe my time at Trinity represented a turning point in my early Christian life. While I had accepted intellectually the claims of the historic Christian creeds and experienced a deep emotional conviction of Christ’s reality and love, Christianity’s doctrines and disciplines remained merely concepts. It was the witness of the Christians at Trinity Church that put flesh onto the bones of biblical phrases like "love thy neighbor" and "seventy times seven times."
You can love your neighbor, so long as you don’t love yourself…right David?
Sadly, most men and women living with same-sex attraction have had experiences more akin to Gail’s than mine….
Actually David, what a lot of us have had is experience being in love, and being loved, and sharing with the one you love all the wonderful, awesome, life affirming joy of sexual intimacy. And we resent it, when a gutter crawling slimeball like you, who just had to put another cigarette out on a dead gay kid’s body for the sake of your own cheapshit self hatreds, decides to lecture us on how sinful that perfectly human joy is.
Of course, Mr Thank You Jesus For Saving Me From The Clutches Of Betty Blue sees it differently…
In my view, that Episcopal church’s response to David, and to homosexuality, was authentically and beautifully Christian.
An authentic and beautifully Christian approach to homosexuality. Sorta like the one the Catholic Bishops took last month here in Baltimore:
Ever since my branch manager signed me up for one of those time management courses, I’ve been getting tons of flyers for all sorts of self help classes…
Sitting cross-legged in jeans and an open-collar shirt, Barnes spoke in his video about evolving feelings growing up in a firm moral family: from confused little boy to adolescent racked with self-loathing and guilt.
In their only talk about sex, Barnes said his father took him on a drive and talked about what he would do if a "fag" approached him.
Barnes thought, "’Is that how you’d feel about me?’ It was like a knife in my heart, and it made me feel even more closed."
I have a strong hunch that dad was having some thoughts about how manly his boy was, and decided to lay it on the line for him. It did it’s work. When Abraham took his son to the sacrificial altar, so the story goes, an angel stayed his hand just at the moment he was about to put the knife into his son. But I don’t think even an angel could stop some parents.
NEW YORK – Edward Bruce Tinsley, 48, creator of the comic strip Mallard Fillmore — known for its conservative edge — was arrested in Columbus, Indiana, on Dec. 4 and charged with operating a vehicle under the influence, the Indianapolis Star reports today. He posted a $755 bond.
It was his second alcohol-related arrest in less that four months, according to the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department. His previous arrest was Aug. 26.
The comic appear in almost 400 papers in the U.S., including the Star.
Tinsley lives in Columbus. He a blood-alcohol level of 0.14 — almost twice the level at which an Indiana driver is considered intoxicated.
You know…I used to get myself royally blitzed nearly every fucking weekend back when I was a younger guy, and I still do every now and then to the degree my middle aged body will occasionally allow, and I have never once, never once, gotten behind the wheel of a car while doing it. My body, to my secret pleasure, reacts strongly to all kinds of things that never faze most other people. Where my friends can down one drink after another, I can only take one and I am unfit to drive. Two, and my head is on the ceiling. I can smoke a good cigar and I am unfit to drive. Yes, enough nicotine will do that to some of us. A nice back massage can release enough endorphins into my body that I am massively unfit to drive, even sometimes, just to stand up. So I don’t drive. I am always careful to put myself in a situation where I do not need to drive Before I decide to get my head all zoned out. It isn’t that hard. All it takes is to use your goddamned head and think about others, before you start making yourself all high and wobbly.
But then…I am one of those goddamned bleeding heart liberals, which means I give a good goddamn about my neighbors and peace and love and not hurting people and all the bleeding heart liberal stuff that conservatives like Tinsely think is a dirty joke. Hey pal…you ever hear of something called taxicabs?
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