Category Archives: Aside

_Bridge to Terebithia_ is often the target of book censors in American because of frequent use of the word “lord” and concerns that the book promotes secular humanism and New Age religions, occultism, and Satanism. It is number nine on the ALA’s list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000. Which sucks. (Reference to source article redacted because of Wikipedia idiocy.)

Kelli Connell’s Double Life photo series chronicles the private relationships we have with ourselves. “Polarities of identity such as the masculine and feminine psyche, the irrational and rational self, the exterior and interior self, the motivated and resigned self are portrayed. By combining multiple photographic negatives of the same model in each image, the dualities of the self are defined by body language and clothing worn.”

From my ongoing “statutory rape watch” series (uh oh, a double entendre!): Georgia DA potentially in trouble with the Feds for releasing a tape used in prosecuting a 17 year old who had consensual oral sex with a 15 year old. The 17 year old got a ten year prison sentence. The tape of their “encounter” has been distributed three dozen times in response to freedom of information requests. Except if the conduct was really child rape, that makes the tape really child porn. Oops.

A certain friend in Scotland who does not want his name given for fear of revealing his secret online identity (and life of crime and mayhem) has started, *FINALLY*, to blog. His posts are amusing and informative, and so since he seems to be taking this all with the seriousness that blogging demands I shall offer the greatest honor I can bestow: a link! So check out A Bat Blog.

Rolling Stone is chronicling the fall of the record industry. At the same time as you think “I told you so” and “serves them right” you have to feel at least a bit sad that it took the industry dinosaurs so long to figure out that things were changing that tons of people had lost their jobs in the process. Is there any saving the industry? Many people in the business apparently think the answer is no. To what extent is losing the big labels a loss to music lovers?

An internal Microsoft email about “life at Google” is highly informative about the Google culture. Some of it I suspected, some of it is fairly well known, and some of the perspective is new and quite interesting. Like every job there are good and bad things, and it sounds like some of their structure and biases lean towards “bad”, while a lot of the perks and technical competencies tend strongly towards “good.”

The _Times_ reports that younger Americans are more likely to support universal health care, gay marriage, and the Democratic party. “But when it came to the war, young Americans were more optimistic about the outcome than was the population as whole. Fifty-one percent said the United States was very or somewhat likely to succeed in Iraq, compared with 45 percent among all adults. Contrary to conventional wisdom, younger Americans have historically been more likely than the population as a whole to be supportive of what a president is doing in a time of war, as they were in Korea and Vietnam, polls have shown.”

An anonymous fan has digitized for YouTube three segments from Charles Kuralt’s On the Road series that aired on the _CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite_ beginning in 1967. “A Stop Along the [Oregon] Trail,” “Tom Sawyer Days in Hannibal,” and “Thanksgiving in Prairie Mississippi” are beautiful examples of Americana, and a great introduction, for those of us too young to have seen it, to Kuralt’s brand of journalism.

Somewhere around one in every 5000 people is born “intersex,” with biological or chromosomal characteristics that are both male and female. Says Wikipedia, “[i]ronically since the advancements in surgery have made it possible for intersex conditions to be concealed, many people are not aware of how frequently intersex conditions arise in human beings or that they occur at all.” However some cultures recognize a “third sex” that is neither male nor female.