Marriage

To those who oppose marriage for any two persons who wish to be married, I ask simply:

Is marriage important, yes or no?

Do you think marriage helps children who are being raised, yes or no?

Do you think it hurts people (legally, socially, emotionally or financially) not to be married if they want to be married, yes or no?

How specifically could gay and lesbian marriage damage your marriage?

Isn’t America about equality?

Comments

Comments should be moderate in tone and avoid ad hominem attacks. You may ridicule ignorance all you want by pointing it out, but please avoid ridiculing the ignorant. Their burden is heavy enough.

You will be limited to an arbitrary number of comments a day. Twenty-eight, for example, over a three day period is abusive. If you have a point, get to it.

We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. No firearms permitted on the premises.

The Management

John Cleese: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
Michael Palin: Yes, but that’s not just saying ‘No it isn’t.’
J: Yes it is!
M: No it isn’t!
J: Yes it is!
M: Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
J: No it isn’t.

Best line of the day

The wonderful Roger Angell on the wonderful Bob Sheppard. Angell concludes his tribute with this:

Down they go and out at street level, still at a careful run. Herb’s car, a beige 1995 Maxima, is in its regular slot in the team parking lot, just across the alley—the second car on the right. They’re in, they’re out, a left turn up the street, where they grab a right, jumping onto the Deegan, heading home. The cops there have the eastbound traffic stopped dead, waiting for Bob Sheppard: no one else in New York is allowed to make this turn. Two minutes, maybe two-twenty, after the game has ended and they’re gone, home free, the first of fifty thousand out of the building, every night.

July 12th

Today is the birthday

… of Bill Cosby. He’s 73.

… of Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac. She’s 67.

… of Gaius Julius Caesar, born on July 12th around 100 BCE (some say July 13th). Caesar was named for his father, Gaius Julius Caesar III, and he had two sisters, both named Julia. If Caesar was named for a caesarean section, it was an ancestor’s birth, not his. The explanation for the name that Julius Caesar himself seemed to favor was that it came from the Moorish word caesai for elephant.

Caesar, of course, died on March 15, 44 BCE. Caesar never said “Et tu, Brute?” That’s Shakespeare (though not original with him). Some contemporaries said Caesar did say “καὶ σύ, τέκνον,” Greek for “You too, child.” If he said it, it may have been intended as a curse (this will happen to you) as much as a feeling of abandonment by Brutus.

It was Julius Caesar who fixed the calendar at 365 days with a leap day every fourth year. His formula had to be tweaked in 1582 with three less leap years every 400 years, but it stands pretty much as Caesar established it, the Julian Calendar, in 46 BCE.

Henry David Thoreau was born on this date in 1817; George Eastman in 1854; George Washington Carver in 1864; and Buckminster Fuller in 1895.

Oscar Hammerstein II was born on July 12th, 1895. Hammerstein won eight Tonys and two Oscars, for “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” and “It Might as Well Be Spring.”

Best line of the day, so far

By far, the iPad’s most wonderful feature, compared to laptops, is the fact that it turns on instantly. There’s no boot-up sequence. That one advantage makes the iPad an entirely different product from a laptop. Once powered on, the iPad doesn’t start begging me to update things nor force me to make decisions. It doesn’t remind me of all the ways it is protecting me. It doesn’t tell me to order printer ink or ask me to fill out a survey. A regular laptop is like your boss: always making you wait before giving you busy-work assignments. The iPad is more like a punctual lover. It’s always ready for fun.

Scott Adams

[My laptop starts in less than five seconds, so I don’t quite understand Adams’s point despite enjoying his analogies. Does he turn his laptop off? Why? I never turn my computers off unless I’m traveling.]

Redux personal story post of the day

First posted here five years ago today. If you read this story we will have to kill you.

A CIA manager once told me about life under cover. He went by his regular name, lived in a regular neighborhood, etc., but as far as anyone knew he worked for the Navy. In fact, he told me, one time his car broke down and his neighbor insisted on giving him a ride to work at the Washington Navy Yard (in southeast Washington, D.C.). The neighbor kept insisting and he finally had to accept.

After being left off at the Navy Yard the CIA employee had to figure how to get back across the Potomac to Virginia to his “real” office. He was further away than when he started.

In other instances we were often amused when we held a meeting that included CIA or other “under cover” agency personnel. The sign-in sheet consisted of names like Cindy D., Bob L., Frank C., etc.

Lastly, my particular favorite under cover story. After visiting a “secret” location for business and being well treated, I composed a short thank you note to the man in charge. I addressed it to him by name. I ran the draft past my staff member who was liaison with that agency. The staff member came back, saying the note was great except that the man’s name was classified because he worked undercover. So we sent the thank you without the name.

His actual name was John Smith.

Redux post of the day

First posted here two years ago today.

The following begins a story at Scientific American:

Two penguins native to Antarctica met one spring day in 1998 in a tank at the Central Park Zoo in midtown Manhattan. They perched atop stones and took turns diving in and out of the clear water below. They entwined necks, called to each other and mated. They then built a nest together to prepare for an egg. But no egg was forthcoming: Roy and Silo were both male.

Robert Gramzay, a keeper at the zoo, watched the chinstrap penguin pair roll a rock into their nest and sit on it, according to newspaper reports. Gramzay found an egg from another pair of penguins that was having difficulty hatching it and slipped it into Roy and Silo’s nest. Roy and Silo took turns warming the egg with their blubbery underbellies until, after 34 days, a female chick pecked her way into the world. Roy and Silo kept the gray, fuzzy chick warm and regurgitated food into her tiny black beak.

Like most animal species, penguins tend to pair with the opposite sex, for the obvious reason. But researchers are finding that same-sex couplings are surprisingly widespread in the animal kingdom. Roy and Silo belong to one of as many as 1,500 species of wild and captive animals that have been observed engaging in homosexual activity. Researchers have seen such same-sex goings-on in both male and female, old and young, and social and solitary creatures and on branches of the evolutionary tree ranging from insects to mammals.

Death and taxes

Well, just taxes.

Hey, New Mexicans did you notice that increase in the sales tax July 1st? (Actually, the gross receipts tax, but the same thing at the cash register.)

The state rate is now 5.125 percent, but the counties and cities add on to that. In Albuquerque the total is now 7%. It’s 7.375% in the Bernalillo County part of Rio Rancho, 7.1875 in the Sandoval County part. It’s 7.625% in Las Cruces (New Mexico’s second largest city) and a whooping 8.1875% in Santa Fe, indeed the city different.

Nipper

The trademark His Master’s Voice was registered 100 years ago today. It was based on a painting done in 1898 by Francis Barraud of his mutt Nipper. Nipper had died in 1895, but Barraud remembered the scene of the dog, which had belonged to his brother, listening to a gramophone.

250px-His_Master's_Voice.jpg

When Barraud visited the Gramophone Company to see if they would lend him a horn so he could repaint the work, Gramophone asked to buy the painting (with their instrument in it).

The work went on display as advertising in January 1900. Emil Berliner bought the copyright for America and his company eventually became Victor Talking Machine Company and ultimately RCA Victor.

VictorTalkingLogo.jpg

Oh, jeez

“Two parents are suing the Greater Toronto Hockey League for $25,000 because their son suffered ‘irreparable psychological damage’ when he was cut from a team.”

Sideline Chatter

I’m pretty certain the kid has “irreparable psychological damage” but I suspect other causes.

Best line of the day, so far

“By any measure it was a landmark moment in the history of human self-involvement, eclipsing previous peaks in the narcissism Himalayas (Nero’s impromptu fiddle concert as Rome burned, the career of the prophet Mohammed, Kim Jong Il publishing “The Popularity of Kim Jong Il”) mainly because it was a collective effort.”

Matt Taibbi discussing the LeBron James ESPN TV show.

You really need to go read the whole marvelous essay, but here’s another excerpt:

“The weird thing about this Lebron story is that seven or eight years ago, he seemed like a nice kid. All he did was step into a media machinery deisgned to create, reward, nurture, and worship self-obsessed assholes. He was raw clay when he went in, and now he’s everything we ever wanted him to be — a lost, attention-craving narcissistic monster who simultaneously despises and needs the slithering insect-mortals who by the millions are bent over licking his toes (represented in The Decision by the ball-less, drooling sycophant Jim Gray).”

Best line of the day

“It’s all about making adjustments out there. You’ve gotta go out there and you’ve got to read the swings and the last few games they’ve been sitting on fastballs away and if they’re going to continue to do that, then they better get ready to back off the plate and they better get ready for some stuff up there to keep them off-balance.” 

Steven Strasburg

You think there’s a batter in the National League that won’t have some doubt the next time he faces that 100 mph Strasburg fastball?

July 10th

Jake LaMotta, the boxer portrayed by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, is 89 today. He was middleweight champion of the world 1949-1951.

Canadian author Alice Munro is 79. Ms. Munro won the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, “awarded once every two years to a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage.”

Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.

Man Booker Internation Prize judging panel

Lolita, the actress Sue Lyon, is 64 today.

Arlo Guthrie is 63.

Bela Fleck is 52.

Adrian Grenier is 34 today.

Jessica Simpson is 30.

Arthur Ashe, the first black man to win a major tennis championship, was born on this date in 1943. Ashe won Wimbledon, the U.S. and Australian Opens. He died from pneumonia, a complication of AIDS, in 1993. He contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion during surgery (not altogether uncommon before the disease was understood).

Marcel Proust was born on July 10th in 1871. His fame is based on the novel The Remembrance of Things Past — À la recherche du temps perdu is actually better translated In Search of Lost Time and that has become in recent years the more common title. Jane Smiley belongs to that tiny group that has read the entire 3,000-page work — she wrote about her experience for Salon in 2005. A brief excerpt from her story:

[I]t is time for you to begin, because reading all of Proust is not hard.

First, you buy all seven volumes in a uniform edition — mine came in a six-book set — and you arrange them in a row next to your bed, the bathtub or your favorite chair, wherever you are most comfortable reading. For a few days, let’s say no longer than a week, you glance at them from time to time and pick them up and look at the covers. You can even flip the pages — but don’t read anything. You are familiarizing yourself with this new acquaintance. You are coming to recognize his appeal. You are letting him impose upon you, because for the next 70 days or so, you are going to organize your free time around him.