Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Toddlers love key rings, right? Give a baby some keys and she’ll shake them or put them in their mouth or run around the house waving them at the dog. So Dr. Mrs. Dr. F., Jr. gets a hold of mom’s key ring and she does this. The kid is just over one year old.
We are so screwed.
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The camera had a dead battery so I took it with my phone.
Or, if you prefer, you could celebrate another chip in the blockade:
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A federal judge on Sunday struck down Alaska’s first-in-the-nation ban on gay marriages, the latest court decision in a busy week for the issue.
The state of Alaska will begin accepting those applications first thing Monday morning, Phillip Mitchell, with the state Department of Vital Statistics, told The Associated Press in an email. Alaska has a three-day waiting period between between applications and marriage ceremonies.
The late Sunday afternoon decision caught many people off guard. No rallies were immediately planned, but some plaintiffs celebrated over drinks at an Anchorage bar…
Earlier in the week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear appeals from several states that were seeking to retain their bans on same-sex marriage.
The move on Oct. 6 means that gay marriage is now effectively legal in about 30 states. But much of last week was marked by confusion as lower courts and states worked through when weddings can begin.
On Tuesday, a federal appeals court in the West overturned marriage bans in Nevada and Idaho. On Thursday, West Virginia officials began issuing gay marriage licenses, and Kansas’ most populous county issued a marriage license Friday to a gay couple, believed to be the first such license in the state…
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Apart from enjoying the teeth-gnashing word salad from Sarah Palin and/or the Westboro Baptist thugs, what’s on the agenda for a day when Friday the 13th falls on a (holiday for some) Monday?
Monday Morning Open Thread: Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!Post + Comments (84)
Back to the grind tomorrow.
Generation gap in action: http://t.co/gesF2B8lp5
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) October 11, 2014
I went to the 1973 NY Comic Art Convention, in my homemade Shanna the She-Devil costume (which drew very little attention, since it was the year of the Heidi Saha/Destiny costume-call “scandal”). The high point, for me, was asking Sergio Aragones to sign my program book. (Several of his Mad co-workers immediately grabbed it and added their own mini-sketches, including one editor, because nobody ever asked for his signature.) I remember everybody was very excited, because an almost unimaginable number of memberships had been sold — “almost a thousand”, IIRC, which I probably don’t. Even our fertile imaginations could hardly have imagined the NYTimes business section’s discussion of this year’s NYCC, forty years later:
… The event, which celebrates the crossroads of comic books and pop culture, draws such huge crowds that the 151,000 tickets sold out in hours this year, leaving many fans clamoring for a way to immerse themselves in their favorite tales of science-fiction and fantasy. But even as the convention expands, it faces criticism that it has lost its focus.
Ticket sales for conventions like New York Comic Con totaled about $600 million in the United States last year, according to a study by Eventbrite, an online ticketing and events service. Revenue from ticket sales for the New York convention increased 40 percent this year over 2013, and ReedPop, the convention’s organizer, says it wants it to grow even more.
The problem is that attendance, which was 133,000 last year, has reached the capacity of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, where the convention opened on Thursday and will run through Sunday.
So this year, ReedPop broadened the scope of New York Comic Con, adding a weeklong series of events, called Super Week. “The investment is well north of a million dollars to get this going,” Lance Fensterman, the global vice president of ReedPop, said of Super Week. “We were not shy about launching this thing. It’s 110 events in 25 venues all over the city.”…
Little did I know that I was an early indicator of the sapping of America’s precious bodily economic fluids, according to James Pethokoukis…
Why the rise of cosplay is a bad sign for the U.S. economy
Imagine you’re a college graduate stuck in a perpetually lousy economy. That’s a problem Japanese twenty-somethings have faced for more than 20 years. Two decades of stagnation after the collapse of the 1980s real-estate and stock bubbles — combined with labor laws making it tough to fire older workers — have relegated vast numbers of Japanese young adults to low-paying, temporary contract jobs. Many find themselves living with their parents well into their twenties and beyond, unmarried and childless. Then again, they do have plenty of time to dress up like wand-wielding sailor girls and cybernetic alchemist soldiers from the colorful world of anime cartoons and manga comics…It’s hard to blame them. After all, it’s not that these young adults in Japan are resisting becoming productive members of the economy — it’s that there just aren’t enough opportunities for them. So an increasingly large number of them spend an increasingly large amount of time living in make-believe fantasy worlds, pretending they are someone else, somewhere else. This is a very bad thing for the Japanese economy.
And guess what: America has a growing number of make-believe “cosplay” heroes, too. Many of the 130,000 people who attend the San Diego Comic Con every year invest big bucks in elaborate outfits as a way of showing off their favorite Japanese characters, as well as those from American superhero movies, comics, and “genre” televisions shows such as Game of Thrones…
When you’re disillusioned with the reality of your early adult life, dressing up like Doctor Who starts looking better and better. It’s not to say that all or even most cosplay aficionados are struggling to find work. It’s only to say that any rise in people fleeing reality for fantasy suggests problems with our reality…
To which Rob Bricken, at io9, responds: “That is possibly true, although it does kind of stereotype people who enjoy cosplay as poor bastards who have been trapped as immature man-children and women-children unable to cope with our current harsh economic reality, as opposed to, you know, PEOPLE WITH A FUCKING HOBBY… “
And that’s the problem, isn’t it? If you’re James Pethokoukis, DeWitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, gainful employment is the true (libertarian) heart of Our American Spirit, and anything you’re not getting paid for is a dangerous distraction. For most of us, most of the time, having a job that pays enough to support us and hopefully our hobbies is important, but it’s not how we measure our personal worth. Once you start thinking of cosplayers as a dangerous economic indicator, I think you’ve turned economics into a form of religious belief.
Mayday PAC will support indie for KS senate if supporters donate $200K by Monday http://t.co/JrTIAKJPxS pic.twitter.com/gZG7jIENss
— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) October 11, 2014
From the BoingBoing link:
…”We are now considering entering one final race. All eyes are on the Kansas Senate race. Greg Orman is an Independent — not a Republican, not a Democrat — and he could decide who controls the Senate. He is actively campaigning as a reformer against an entrenched incumbent who has taken millions from special interests.
Should we do this? If we raise $200,000 by Monday at 11:59pm, we will be in a place to firmly say: Yes, we’re in.”
Brian continues, “To me (and I have no inside knowledge of the board’s decisions – I’m just a volunteer at this point) – this seems to be a test of whether or not Mayday PAC supporters think it is worth the risk of devoting resources an independent candidate, albeit one that is slightly ahead in the polls and which FiveThirtyEight gives a ’67 percent chance’ of Orman winning.”…
I’ll admit I’m suspicious of Lessig’s “non-partisan” PAC, because I don’t trust the GOP to be honest about a funding disarmament treaty. (And that’s even about from my reservations about “independent” Greg Orman.) But maybe that’s just me?
Didn’t drink a lick this homecoming, but for some reason I feel like I did. Really run down.
*** Update ***
The Steelers are really testing my sobriety.
Just found a draft I’d forgotten to post in the wake of this year’s MacArthur fellowships, from commentor Xboxershorts:
Laurie’s (my wife) ability to research both the legacy history of PA’s 155 years of drilling activity as well as PA’s byzantine legal and policy maze has gotten to the point that she can exceed that of the PA DEPs own staff. She is on a first name basis with the head of the DEPs oil and gas management and she has had DEP’s own field staff refer problem wells that residents have complained about for decades to Laurie and our organization and we have forced the state to take action on them!
I love being a constant thorn in the side of political appointees…heh heh heh heh heh heh heh
As reported in the Guardian:
Laurie Barr spent a recent Saturday like she spends a lot of her weekends: trodding through the thorny and damp woodlands of rural north-western Pennsylvania, juggling a point-and-shoot camera, a GPS navigator, a cell phone, and, most importantly for the mission at hand, a methane detector…
“Here’s the spot they killed the last abandoned well hunter,” Barr joked from somewhere deep in the woods. Then Barr did something she’s done hundreds of times in the last three years – she leaned over a foot-wide hole in the ground and waved around the gas detector until it began beeping. First the beeps were slow, then rapid.
“I haven’t met a well that hasn’t leaked some amount,” she said, taking a picture of the hole, marking the location on her GPS device, and walking back towards the path. “Some are high emitters, some are low emitters, but they all leak.”…
No one knows exactly how many abandoned oil and gas wells litter Pennsylvania or the US. The state’s Department of Environmental Protection estimates the number is close to 200,000. Some estimates are a little lower, some much higher. Across the country, the number could be more than a million. Most of the wells are relic of of a time when states didn’t bother to regulate much of what happened on private land, including oil and gas drilling, and when most Americans didn’t think twice about a seemingly esoteric issue like the environment.
But hindsight has proven that losing track of hundreds of thousands of oil and gas wells can lead to some problems. For decades, many of the wells have leaked methane into the air, soil and water.
Now, as the state makes its way through the seventh year of a new drilling boom, thanks to the technology of hydraulic fracturing, the old wells are posing an increasing threat. The more companies drill in the state’s Marcellus Shale, the more likely it becomes that the old wells will act as a pathways for newly-released gas to make its way into the earth, streams, and even people’s homes, with potentially deadly results…
Long Read: Tracking the Forgotten FrackingPost + Comments (43)