Friday, February 10, 2006

Why didn’t I think of that?

Did you notice ”Joe’s BlogAd Giveaway” there in my new center adbar? Use the Offer Code “FREE” and run an ad here on aTypical Joe. For free.

Meanwhile, the Rocketboom eBay auction has ended. $40,000 to be first to advertise on Rocketboom! Forty thousand dollars. Amanda says maybe a new backdrop. And we should embrace vblog mainstreaming.

She’s right.

CONGRATULATIONS ROCKETBOOM!

Vigilant injustice

Her daughter told her a sex offender had moved to the neighborhood:

A woman in Benton County hung a sign on a neighbor’s door warning people that the man who lived there was a sex offender.

But there were two problems: she had the wrong house, and even if she had the right house, police say sex offender notifications can’t be used to harass released convicts.

“Don’t play here. Child molester lives here,” the sign said, according to a police report.

Carolyn Hansen of Bella Vista also posted warnings in a nearby park. Those signs said, “There is a child molester here. Keep children out of the park.”

The guy didn’t want her prosecuted; she should have been charged anyway.

OH NO! There I go sounding like one who believes in Retributive Justice. Calmer reason would suggest having her name splashed all over the papers is punishment enough.

biG mail on campus

A new chat application rolled out on campus. Huh? Why on earth! Seems to me AIM and Windows Messenger have done that. Adopt one.

Then there’s email. Don’t get me started…

Google blog:

San José City College (SJCC) has embarked on a technology improvement program, and for the first time will be offering student email accounts. That’s where we come in. We’re testing a new service with the school by hosting Gmail accounts with SJCC domain addresses (like ), plus admin tools for efficient account management. Massive storage and features that tame the most unruly inboxes, like powerful mail search, conversation view for messages, and a fast interface, make Gmail very handy for students. Together, we’re pleased to provide this channel for better communications and a stronger community for all 10,000 SJCC students.

One BIG caveat. Privacy.

LATER: Doug on IM, “Google has IM too.” Scobleizer on Google domains going after Outlook, “MSN has been doing pretty much the exact same thing for months now… A little Google love going on in the blogosphere?”

I care not whether it’s Hotmail or GMail, and I haven’t made one red cent from those Adsense ads.

Would you want your daughter to marry one?

Dan Savage on conservative Christian outrage that gay actor Chad Allen appears in “End of Spear:”

The pastors claim they’re worried about what will happen when their children rush home from the movies, Google Chad Allen’s name, and discover that he’s a “gay activist.” ("Gay activist” is a term evangelicals apply to any homosexual who isn’t a gay doormat.) They needn’t be too concerned. Straight boys who have unsupervised access to the Internet aren’t Googling the names of middle-aged male actors gay or straight - not when Paris Hilton’s sex tapes are still out there.

Frankly, I can’t help but be perplexed by the criticisms of Mr. Allen from the Christian right. After all, isn’t playing straight what evangelicals have been urging gay men to do?

That’s precisely what Jack and Ennis attempt to do in “Brokeback Mountain” - at least, according to people I know who have actually seen the film. These gay cowboys try, as best they can, to quit one another. They marry women, start families. But their wives are crushed when they realize their husbands don’t, and can’t, ever really love them. “Brokeback Mountain” makes clear that it would have been better for all concerned if Jack and Ennis had lived in a world where they could simply be together.

That world didn’t exist when Jack and Ennis were pitching tents together, but it does now - even in the American West. Today, the tiny and stable percentage of men who are gay are free to live openly, and those who want to settle down and start families can do so without having to deceive some poor, unsuspecting woman. [...]

Sometimes I wonder if evangelicals really believe that gay men can go straight. If they don’t think Chad Allen can play straight convincingly for 108 minutes, do they honestly imagine that gay men who aren’t actors can play straight for a lifetime? And if anyone reading this believes that gay men can actually become ex-gay men, I have just one question for you: Would you want your daughter to marry one?

Metaphysical nonsense

A court this week overturned a law that exempted Bibles from Georgia’s sales tax:

The exemption dated back to the 1950s when Gov. Ernest Vandiver issued an executive order suspending the sales tax. Gov. Lester Maddox issued a similar order in 1970 and the Legislature approved it in 1971.

In November, the law was challenged by retired librarian Thomas Budlong and Candace Apple, the owner of Phoenix and Dragon — a Sandy Springs bookstore that specializes in the sale of metaphysical, religious and spiritual books.

Apple said yesterday that she did not file the lawsuit because she thought Bibles should be taxed.

“It just shouldn’t get preferential treatment,” she said. “Books concerning life and death, good and evil, even if they are not of a specific religious orientation, should qualify as books in the same category of the Scriptures. They are being used for the same purpose - to try and lead a better life.”

But Sadie Fields, state chairman of the Christian Coalition of Georgia, denounced the decision.

“It does not reflect the will of the people in Georgia. I think it’s an outrage,” she said. “I don’t see any comparison between Scripture and some metaphysical nonsense.”

Via The Carpetbagger Report, “Leave it to the Christian Coalition to summarize the far-right legal perspective so perfectly - the state should favor religion, just so long as it’s my religion. “

Hillary & Coretta

Diane McWhorter writing in Salon:

Both of these women entered the public arena as wives, only to endure the sexual brinkmanship of their charismatic husbands, so brazenly compulsive that the men would not curb it even when it jeopardized their professional effectiveness and their historic missions along with their marriages. And for the two wives—ambitious, talented women who took flak for wearing their birth names as badges of independence—there was extra humiliation in such spectacular “failure” at a marital role that they had assumed ambivalently, subordinating their own dreams to their husbands’.

Now that Coretta Scott King has received her due props, historical honesty demands that we address the ways in which her private drama as Martin Luther King Jr.’s wife intersected with his epic trials as a world statesman—and shaded both their legacies. When I think of the Passion of Coretta (and Coretta, like “Hillary,” entered the culture on a first-name basis, having ceded the acquired last name to the bigger star), I flash not on the April night in 1968 that the call came from Memphis; I think of a day in January 1965, soon after the couple returned from collecting King’s Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, when she opened a package sent to his office and decided to play the enclosed audio reel. My guess is that she was devastated but not surprised by its contents: profane banter leading to sounds of erotic ecstasy, which an accompanying letter confirmed emanated from her husband. Because the letter further urged King to kill his “filthy, abnormal fraudulent self” to spare his race from the shame of his exposure, the mailing would go down in history as “the suicide package,” and from then on King’s human appetite clashed dangerously with his moral mandate. The tape, a soundtrack spliced together from King’s bugged hotel stays, was the anonymous work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose director, J. Edgar Hoover, hounded King with the same prurient fury that independent counsel Kenneth Starr would later turn on Hillary Clinton’s husband.