Does anyone know when the government first started being able to preside over marriages? It seems like a lot of this is an old fight, about whether marriage belongs to the churches or the state, bubbling up. That is where the bile is creeping in; to many, it looks like the christians are trying to encode christian morality. To (some of) the Christians, they feel the rite of marriage is being taken away from them. Really, it was taken off them a long time ago, but as long as the governments requirements for marriage looked more or less like the religious requirements, the fight could be avoided. If someone supports full civil unions, and opposes gay marriage, which is how I hear Kerry, it isn't necessary to assume they are trying to prevent homosexuality from gaining respectability, if they were, they'd support the strong version of the amendment, where civil unions are not permitted the legal benefits of marriage, as Bush does. I want marriage to be a civil institution, but we need to understand why people might not, and that it isn't the same as wanting to lock away the homosexuals.
The most important thing I learned at St. Johns was that the conservative and religious are not evil, and a few of them are smarter and more thoughtful than I am, and spend a lot of effort trying to be good and just. I read something on the local list-serve this morning that suggested that all opponents of full gay marriage were morally responsible for the child abuse in the catholic church. Presumably this made sense to the person who said it. I find it utterly dispiriting how quickly public discourse, particularly among like-minded people, descends into the demonization of the others.
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(8)
10:16:13 AM,
Wednesday 11 February 2004
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US Election Atlas shows you how your county voted back through the 1960 election. Middlesex County has never voted Republican in that time. Bush only got 32% in Massachussets last time. I hate the winner-take-all for state electors. Of course nearly all states do it, because the majority in each state wants as many votes as it can get. We need a mutual disarmament: We'll liberate the Massachusetts Republicans in exchange for the Kansas Democrats, and Florida can creep back into whatever ocean it crept out of. They need a "this is daft" lever you can pull. Some people thought that was what Nader and Perot were, but they were too many other things as well.
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02:17:24 PM,
Tuesday 10 February 2004
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I seem to have given up on accordions. I'd want to learn to play a Bayan, a chromatic button accordion, but I absolutely can't afford one on a whim. A touch sensitive keyboard is much, much cheaper and considerably more useful, though terribly dull. Piano keyboards don't make much sense to begin with, and make considerably less sense on an accordion. Diatonic accordions are essentially several bellow-powered harmonicas lashed together; I may as well just play my harmonica.
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(2)
08:34:46 PM,
Monday 9 February 2004
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This shall be my new blog title, replacing all blog titles that have come before, Moss Willing.
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(2)
08:12:09 PM,
Monday 9 February 2004
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For the past few months, I've been walking into bookstores with a mandate to find something I can read in the bath. I then find something big and unwieldy that I want to read, and give up in despair. The worst case was when the paperback shop I went into, determined to find something light and unexplicably came out, hours later, with Shogun and The Mill and the Floss. I haven't so much as picked either of them up since. I found the solution the other day: Spend lots of money. I went in, found a lovely, unmarked 1960 hardcover edition of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and then, and this is the exciting bit, picked it up and kept shopping. After a near miss with Updike's collected Rabbit novels, I managed to get A Walk in the Woods and From Beirut to Jerusulem, books that I ordinarily would have passed over, because I was pining for the book I didn't buy, and they cost more than it did.
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(2)
07:22:05 PM,
Monday 9 February 2004
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I think I've found the problem. Spin just doesn't matter in air hockey. What is top spin on one side is backspin on the other, so unless you hit a single bank shot, it doesn't do much, and even then it's sort of useless. Spin works in ping-pong because the ball being in slightly the wrong place messes up your aim, and aim matters. Aim is a luxury in air hockey. I'll just save it for the Flatland Tennis variation I've been thinking about, where you have to jump and swing at the ball, but that has to wait until I solve my rotating polygon problems and have articulated paddles, so they could control themselves a bit in mid-air.
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04:48:20 PM,
Monday 9 February 2004
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This is taken from the same spot as the picture below, looking the other direction into the fells. The tower on Pine Hill seems to have caught fire at some point, the roof was charred.
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05:37:26 PM,
Sunday 8 February 2004
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Boston skyline, looking over Medford from the north, from Pine Hill in the Middlesex Fells
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05:35:41 PM,
Sunday 8 February 2004
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Acorns in frozen slush.
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(1)
05:34:03 PM,
Sunday 8 February 2004
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Today was one of those clear, cold days, and all the slush from friday was frozen solid.
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05:18:20 PM,
Sunday 8 February 2004
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04:45:54 PM,
Sunday 8 February 2004
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In some sense I knew that lemons must grow on trees, but it was a surprise to see. Found in the the Orangerie at the Tower Hill Botanical Garden.
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(3)
04:44:38 PM,
Sunday 8 February 2004
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site & script courtesy of Moss