Category: Uncategorized

Opponents of same-sex marriage failed in their attempt to pass a proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. A joint session of the Legislature swiftly defeated the propsal — without debate — by a vote of 45 to 151, eliminating any chance of getting it on the ballot in November 2008.

It’s a done deal, folks. They couldn’t even muster 25% of the Legislature behind them. The more folks who live with same-sex marriages around them as a regular thing, the more the opposition wilts.

As to the pernicious effect that “gay marriage” is having on “traditional marriage” — well, lessee:

The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, according to data supplied by the US Census Bureau.

Oddly enough, the states with the highest divorce rates are in the Bible Belt — the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people.

Makes ya think. (Of course, if conservative Christians were big on thinking, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place, now would we….)

I’m taking today off for my birthday, but wanted to put this out there, for those who might be interested–

I’m planning on spending Sunday afternoon (Father’s Day) in a lazy haze of video-watching. Items on the schedule include various bits of FAR WEST brain-fodder…namely Westerns and Wuxia.

If anyone else would like to join in, your company would be more than welcome.

Drop a comment and let me know.

Hit a nifty discovery today.

The Phillips upsampling DVD player that I picked up a while back also plays multimedia files.

Which means that if I don’t feel like converting bittorrented AVI files into DVD-video to burn discs (a process which takes a little while), I can just burn the AVI files direct to DVD-ROM as a standard data disc — and the player will still play them.

I’ll still convert the my “grade A” stuff to DVD-video (new Who, Spooks, etc.), but it does mean that stuff that’s old enough that the quality doesn’t get any better (Tomorrow People, for example, or various Spaghetti Westerns and Kung-Fu movies), or stuff that I’m just grabbing to watch and not necessarily keep, can just be bulk-burned to data discs, and I can still watch ’em.

Cool.