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Another odd anniversary today: The first date listed in my PalmPilot based journal is March 22, 1997. I started the web version December 30, 2000. (Once I realized how redundant they were, I gave up the Palm version.) That means, give or take a few weeks, I've been doing the web journal thing as long as I was doing the Palm journal thing before that. Which is odd, because I felt like I had been doing the Palm journal thing forever, but the web thing seems a lot more recent. (As always, my javascript date toy makes figuring out this kind of anniversary thing pretty easy.)

Sometimes I wish I had avoided the urge to start December 30 and 31st, which I did just so i could say "yup...been doing this journal since Y2K!". Like, on the archive by month, December 2000 is just this lonely little entry....

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News Commentary of the Moment
So, Gay marriage is the big news in this state. Funny how its taken over talk radio, even the sports stations, at least sometimes.

The arguments against gay marriage usually are some variety of "slippery slope". "Why, if we break the 'traditional' man/woman thing because of this idea that everyone deserves equal rights, how can we stop people who want to, I dunno, marry their dog? Or a corpse? Or a child? Or their sister? Or many people at once?" First off, I find that many of these miss one basic criteria: the ability of all parties to give meaningful consent. (This is besides the fact that it's a shameless attempts to get people who might be more or less ok with gay unions to associate them with things they do find distasteful.) A dog, corpse, or child cannot give consent in a meaningful, legal way. The polygamy argument is a little more subtle. Frankly, I don't have a real problem with it; I know in practice, it often shows unequal power relationships and has other structural issues, but in theory, if everyone's an adult, why not? If you need a stronger, legal differentiation between granting gay marriage and polygamy or polyamoury rights, then the issues is that marriage involves the rights of exactly 2 people, so does gay marriage, but polygamy and the like implies creating new structures.

Other arguments are "for the children" variety; "because every child deserves a mother and a father" (as if having loser parents of both genders would be better than two caring and concerned gay individuals bringing you up) or otherwise invoke children, as if straight couples who decide to remain childless are hacking the system somehow. In general, when people start talking about "the children" and not "future generations", watch out.

Oy. It'll be an interesting 180 days.

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For Your Eyes Only

--from an oddly compelling slideshow video of characters in Bond films Click it and see.

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Exchange of the Moment

"Since the minute you were born I knew I would never take another easy breath without knowing that you were alright."
"So I'm like asthma?"

Never watched an episode, though for a giggle I did some testscreening of a promospot for it, got asked to when walking through that semi-stripmall accross from the Arsenal mall.