http://contests.about.com/b/2008/10/13/win-cash-for-your-homemade-halloween-costume.htm

Do you have the imagination and craft skills necessary to create a fantastic home-made Halloween costume? If so, take a picture of your finished costume and send it in...

For quite a while now I've been using LJ Toys intermittently as a way of keeping track who reads me, andd who doesn't. It's not something I've spent a lot of time on, but it's been amusing and informative to see who actually reads me on their friends list and what filter group I'm in, as well as who reads me who isn't on my friends list. Oh, the hours of fun I've had tracking IP addresses down to see where hits are actually coming from.

But I realised recently that I was checking it rather too often, and that I was thinking just a little too much about who read me, who didn't, and who I was writing for. So I just cancelled my subscription to it, and I'm going to do my best to just not think about it. People read me, or they don't, and that's fine - I know there are people out there who don't have an LJ, but enjoy dropping in from time to time, and I also know that there are people who have been on my friends list for over half a decade that only drop in a couple of times a year, and I don't actually think it matters that much.

I have real friends in my real life, and I have people who enjoy reading me, and I shouldn't let the two get confused (not that there aren't a fair number of you I wouldn't mind meeting at some point). I write for myself, whatever I feel like, and that's as it should be.

Now, if only my the last bits of this cold would stop fuzzing around my head, I'd be actually able to!

I'm not going to reply to everyone on the last post, so a general "thanks" to everyone that replied. Lots of interesting stuff there.

One of the interesting things in the responses was the number of people who thought they should let me know that it wasn't a peer-reviewed paper in a renowned journal. Clearly, I knew that - it was someone's personal page, with their thoughts on it. If it had been a published paper I wouldn't have bothered asking you lot, I'd have had a look to see if it had been refuted.

Similarly, some people seemed to think that because it wasn't presented as Pure Science, but also had personal opinion, it couldn't have anything to it, an approach I find frankly baffling.

However, there were also plenty of good arguments against it, and while some of the ideas are interesting, I'm certainly not taking it at face value. Cheers to all of you!

I had an amazing weekend with Dave.

( Read more... )

For technical reasons too complicated to explain, I put myself on Google Alert recently, and have found myslef busy around the globe.

In Brockton, MA, reaching out to make an arrest::
masscops.com/forums/showthread.php 

running the Baja 1000:
bajasafari.blogspot.com/2008/09/baja-racing-newscom-baja-1000-2008-live.html

...catching a TD pass for the Lakeside Warriors (we lose anyway):
nwlanews.com/index.php

...beating a contempt charge in New Zealand:
home.nzcity.co.nz/news/article.aspx

...and more.  A new list every day.  My new movie, "Boy A", is hot worldwide.  We are all happy for us.

National Coming Out Week was last week, and this was delicious icing on a great week (details forthcoming). Woo!

Hartford Courant: High Court Grants Marriage Rights for Same-sex Couples

NY TImes: Gay Marriage Is Ruled Legal in Connecticut

Text of the opinion (pdf files)
Majority: Palmer, Norcott, Katz, Harper
Dissent 1: Borden
Dissent 2: Vertefeuille
Dissent 3: Zarella
I'm working on a printable version so I can really read them. Looks like it'll be over 100 pages with all the dissents. When it's prepared, I'll add a link to this post.

ETA: Forgot to promote red_mage_jerry's excellent concurring opinion with an eye to responsibilities of marriage.

http://contests.about.com/b/2008/10/13/win-a-tricked-out-school-bus-and-cash-from-amp-energys-sweepstakes.htm

If you thought you knew what riding in a school bus is like, you'll think again if you're the lucky winner of AMP Energy's Ultimate Talladega RV Sweepstakes.
The grand prize...

There's an article here looking at bodyfat, Vitamin D and Autism/ADHD and I'm wondering if it's junk science, or it's something I should be paying attention to.

It's already passed my basic "It's not written by a raving madman" filter, but there are people on this list who are much better educated than I about biology.

Anyone got any thoughts?

I am sneaking into my hotel room for my lunch break today. We're doing training only right now, so no need to stay exactly where we're put over lunch in case of crisis.

So far we've had a bit of a communication glitch, wherein we ended up being about 20 minutes late for our training, but it's the supervisor's fault. He told us to meet him in the lobby at 07:45 so we could be at the detachment for 08:00, only he left for the detachment at 06:30 without us. Do we see the problem? Anyway, yeah. Turns out we didn't need to be there that early anyway, so it worked out.

I'm having a pretty good time. It's nice to be in a place where I don't have to worry about cooking and cleaning on top of working 12 hours a day. I miss the cats and BorderCrossing, though.

Okay, gotta run. My lift is going to be here in less than five minutes, and I have a long afternoon ahead of me.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Here's the story I just posted to history_time, a fun community where we tell stories from history:



Molasses. Big deal, right? Just one of the ingredients in gingerbread. But imagine two million gallons of it. That’s a lot of gingerbread (actually, it was mostly used as animal feed.) Now imagine a tank of it exploding and flowing through a city, destroying everything in its path.
( Read more... )

Title: What?!
Author: TheKerrGirl
Summary: (Cameron POV) Okay, I guess it makes sense now that I see it...but what?
Rating: K
Pairing: Sam/Jack
Category: General...hopefully humor.

Okay, this is kind of a continuation from "Who?" but I don't think you need "Who?" to understand it...however, if you want to read "Who?" you can find it HERE

(Head on Over to My Journal)

Hi All,  I hope someone can remember either one of these fic's. 

(1) All the time Sam was on SG1 she was also part of another (covert) team who were trying to bring to justice someone like the NID or Trust.  No-one at the SGC (not sure about Hammond) knew, but Jack eventually found out and confronted Sam about it.

(2) Can't remember much about it, but think it took place sometime after Beneath the Surface.  There was a conversation between Jack and Sam where they talked about the possible repercussions of their time when memory stamped, and if she had become pregnant then the 'SGC' would 'have taken care of the problem'.  Not much to go on, I'm sorry.

Many thanks for any help 

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14004.phtml

Capsule Review by Dan Davenport (3/4): This game of Victorian-era Africa pulls off a trick rarely seen in roleplaying games: neither the characters nor their players will have any idea of what their expeditions will discover.

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14002.phtml

Capsule Review by Patrick Riley (3/2): A small press superhero game that is workable but not inspiring. Somewhat incomplete, lacking detail or depth. Good thing it's cheap.

http://contests.about.com/b/2008/10/13/sweepstakes-ending-this-week-october-13-october-20-2008.htm

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's list of sweepstakes ending this week. Among the sweepstakes coming to a close this week, you can find the chance to win...

(Oh yes I will blog all the HIFF movies.)

Mexican drama/comedy Lake Tahoe was slow, with a distinct atmosphere, and I've been thinking of certain parts of it over and over again. Right after seeing it, I rated it four stars out of five (we were asked to rate it for a competition), but now that it's been a few weeks, I'd give it just three. It was very nice, but all the pieces didn't seem to fall in place. It looked very promising, though.

The plot was that a young man crashed his car on the outskirts of a small town in Mexico. He then walks to town and tries to look for a repairs shop, but some are closed and some are just plain weird. He encounters a lot of people on his odyssey, all different and all somehow strange and funny. The trivial task of getting the car repaired seems unimportant to the viewer from the beginning. We concentrate instead on the procession of people that marches past the unblinking young man who is just trying to get this one small thing taken care of.

Despite having an appearance of a gentle comedy, the film did have a tragic undercurrent. And this, I think, is where it fell short. The point was to give small glimpses to the young man's less-than-happy family life (depressed mother, recently deceased father, younger sibling old enough to know things aren't right but too young to process them) through ordinary, everyday details, but it somehow failed to touch me. But maybe the idea was actually to make the viewer feel as estranged from everything meaningful as the main character did. He had bix things in his life that he couldn't fix, so he spent almost the whole length of the movie trying to fix his car instead.

Anyhow, I liked the Boxer.

http://wordsmith.org/words/epeolatry.html

The worship of words.