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04/19/2007


News: 'We Do,' Zayn Malik, Italy, Outkast

1NewsIcon Anti-gay activist Brian Brown is in France trying to stir up more homophobia in the nation's debate about marriage equality.

GLF1NewsIcon Former Smithsonian researcher Tim Gold and his husband Mitchell Gold, of Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams Furniture, hope to open an LGBT history museum.

1NewsIcon The Campaign for Southern Equality will take its "I Do" campaign to Virginia next week, where same-sex couples will try to get marriage licenses to protest nuptial discrimination.

1NewsIcon Italy's High Court ruled yesterday that same-sex couples can adopt.

1NewsIcon The Vatican, predictably, is pissed. "Monogamous families constitute the ideal place to learn the significance of human relations and represent the social and anthropological environment in which the best type of growth is possible," bioethicist Adriano Pessina wrote in the Vatican's newspaper, clearly basing his argument on the homophobic assumption that same-sex couples are incapable of monogamy.

1NewsIcon The world's 100 oldest living Oscar nomineees.

1NewsIcon Dallas city officials recorded a 13-minute "It Gets Better" video.

1NewsIcon "Why Is NBC Sports Sponsoring America’s Largest Gun Show?"

1NewsIcon James Yeager, the man who promised to start killing people if President Obama tries restrict access to deadly firearms, has had his gun permit suspended.

Deathstar1NewsIcon Sorry, Star Wars fans, but the Obama administration says we can't afford the $850 quadrillion it would take to make a Death Star. Also, do we really need a device capable of blowing up planets?

1NewsIcon Hot: Outkast (Andre 3000 and Big Boi) got back together to help Frank Ocean on his track "Pink Matter."

1NewsIcon Paying it woofward: Dog teaches puppy how to walk down the stairs.

1NewsIcon Sorry, but Johnny Cash did not write a song called "I'll Have The Wine," though I'm sure he wanted to...

1NewsIcon Jeremy Renner shines fabulously at Hansel and Gretel premiere in Mexico.

1NewsIcon Happy 20th birthday to One Direction singer Zayn Malik.

1NewsIcon And congratulations to all the winners at the International Web TV Awards.

1NewsIcon Canadian Blood Services wants gay men to be able to donate if they haven't had sex with a man in the past five years. The AIDS Calgary Awareness Association says that's not enough: the entire ban must be lifted.

1NewsIcon A wonderful profile of openly gay boxer Orlando Cruz.

Stormycongress1NewsIcon Only one-in-seven Americans approve of Congress. Shocking, I know.

1NewsIcon Legacy: "George Prescott Bush is gearing up to run for a little-known but powerful office in a state where his family already is a political dynasty and where his Hispanic roots could help extend a stranglehold on power Republicans have enjoyed for two decades." That office? The Texas Land Commission.


Your Ears May One Day Be A Battery, Says Science

MilliondollarmanLet's take a break from this week's election to look at some technology of the not-too-distant future: an implant that turns your ears into batteries.

From New Scientist:

For the first time, an electrical device has been powered by the ear alone.

The team behind the technology used a natural electrochemical gradient in cells within the inner ear of a guinea pig to power a wireless transmitter for up to five hours.

The technique could one day provide an autonomous power source for brain and cochlear implants, says Tina Stankovic, an auditory neuroscientist at Harvard University Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.

Lee Majors may soon have some competition, and the cost of these new bionic parts will no doubt be far less than six million dollars.


Movies: 'Looper' Thrills

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"Bang Bang" Joseph Gordon Levitt kills people dead in LOOPER.

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS

YOUR FEATURE PRESENTATION

"Time travel hasn't been invented yet," Joseph Gordon-Levitt warns us from 2042 in LOOPER's voiceover. "But in the future it will be." In 2072 crime lords send their victims back in time to be killed by "loopers"  like Joe since it's the only way to get away with murder. (Apparently infallible forensic science has also been invented in the future!). 

Loopers dispatch their prey unceremoniously with a crude descendant of the shotgun called a  "Blunderbuss" which is useless at long distances but impossible to miss with up close. When each Looper's contract expires, his older self is sent back to his younger self for execution which is called "Closing the Loop". In this case that's Bruce Willis sent back in time to meet his death at the hands of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Bruce Willis drag. (Joe's makeup effects, though extraordinarily non fake-looking are initially distracting -- JGL doesn't look like that!) 

MORE AFTER THE JUMP....

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Continue reading "Movies: 'Looper' Thrills" »


Extraordinary Student Film About Augmented Reality: VIDEO

AugReal

You've heard that "augmented reality" is the coming thing? (In April, Andy posted a slick demo video on the potential uses of Google's extremely cool augmented reality glasses prototype.) Well -- two film students at Jerusalem's Belazeal Academy of Arts, Eran May-Raz and Daniel Lazo, have taken it as the subject of their graduation project, and come up with the following, very impressive student film.

Their vision of humanity's technofuture is pretty grim, but their filmic abilities are delightful. That amateurs can put something this advanced, this slickly CGI'd on film convinces me: We're living in the future. Watch, AFTER THE JUMP ...  

Continue reading "Extraordinary Student Film About Augmented Reality: VIDEO" »


NEWS: Legacies, Stars, Canada, God

PettitPhotography

Towleroad-roadicon Don Pettit's photography -- pictures "taken 240 miles up in space by combining multiple 30-second exposure photos, and then stacking them together with imaging software." Star trails, city trails, gorgeous.

Towleroad-roadicon CNN has a feature on the Maryland divorce case Andy briefly discussed here.

Towleroad-roadicon Rick Santorum has a new PAC, presumably so he can run semi-anonymous attack ads.

Towleroad-roadicon Yea gods! This woman castrated a guy with her hand!

Towleroad-roadicon 50 years hence there will be statues of Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs will be forgotten.

Towleroad-roadicon Egyptian women are sexually assaulted during a protest against sexual assault.

Towleroad-roadicon "Catholics, Gays, and a Parallel Universe":

I sometimes think of Canada as one of those science-fiction parallel universes -- a world strikingly similar to but slightly different from our own.  The differences can be illuminating.

In Ontario a controversy has been raging, as they say, involving legislation that would require schools to sponsor Gay-Straight Alliances, the anti-bullying clubs that some social conservatives see as Trojan horses for the “gay agenda.” (They’re right, if by gay agenda they mean recognition that gay and lesbian students exist and should feel good about themselves and their sexuality.)

The twist is that Roman Catholic schools in Ontario receive government funding. 

The archbishop of Toronto, Cardinal Thomas Collins, had complained that GSAs include an agenda that does not comport with Catholic teaching ...

Nevertheless, after the bill was approved, Collins issued a statement recognizing that it “is now the law” and that Catholic schools “will seek, as we have always done, in a way that is in accord with our faith, to foster safe and welcoming school communities.” The  Ontario Catholic School Trustees Assn. said it had no intention of challenging the provision in court.

At a time when U.S. Catholic bishops are crying foul -- or crying wolf? -- about intolerable intrusion on their religious liberty in the form of "Obamacare" regulations, it’s interesting to speculate how they would react to a law like Ontario's GSA requirement ...

Towleroad-roadicon Gay Pride in Tel Aviv.

Towleroad-roadicon God's getting nicer.

Towleroad-roadicon On the prescience and darkness of Ray Bradbury:

BradburyThere’s already been a lot of rhapsodizing about Ray Bradbury’s “sense of wonder,” the dark magic and October chill he infused into his work. But let’s not turn him into something harmless, a kindly, childlike uncle spinning marvelous tales of rocket ships and dinosaurs. Don’t forget that he was also the crazy uncle, the dangerous one, a malcontent and a crank, alarming everyone at the dinner table with impassioned rants and dire warnings. (For a bracing antidote to his sentimentality, reread the demented revenge fantasy “Usher II,” in which an entire board of censors is meticulously killed off after the manner of Edgar Allan Poe stories.)

The obverse of his reverence for the natural world was a keen-edged contempt for the greedy men and crass, destructive culture that would gladly bulldoze it for a buck. “We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things,” says the archæologist Jeff Spender in “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright” from “The Martian Chronicles.” “The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose.” There isn’t a hot-dog stand at Karnak yet, but I’m advised there are tourist shops selling pricey bottled water and Pharaonic souvenirs made in China.


NEWS: Monarchs, Mormonism, Sci-Fi, And 'Jan Pehchan Ho'

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Towleroad-roadicon Vids and pics from the Diamond Jubilee.

Towleroad-roadicon The New Yorker's 60 years of sassy queen coverage.

Towleroad-roadicon Grey's Anatomy, Days of Our Lives among winners at last nights GLAAD Media Awards, in Frisco.

Obamanote Towleroad-roadicon Remember the fellow who's challenging Jonah Goldberg to a boxing match? He's Jamie Kilstein, a comedian, and here's his gay marriage rant. Be aware that the language is a little coarse. (Thanks to FilmTurtle for the link.)

Towleroad-roadicon An ideal European getaway for the supervillain in your life.

Towleroad-roadicon A fifth grader cuts class; gets pretty awesome exculpatory note.

Towleroad-roadicon For these married Mormons, love conquered faith:

“I don’t believe in God,” my husband whispered in the darkness of our bedroom.

... his confession hung over our nuptial bed. And though I’d known this was coming — he’d been struggling with his faith for at least two years — I’d never considered what I’d say. Sean had always been the rational one, a brilliant computer scientist who spoke sense when I was in the throes of clinical depression. Now, my thoughts went still as I groped for his hand. Before I could process what I was saying, forbidden words slipped off my tongue. “You are more important to me than the Church,” I said.

Towleroad-roadicon Sci-fi as mental oxygen, from William Gibson:

... When I was five, I was chastised for disagreeing with an Air Force man, a visitor to our home, who made mock of my Willy Ley book. I knew he was wrong when he said that space travel would never happen. And I was right, at least in the relatively short term, just a few years off from Sputnik. I was a native, I felt unquestioningly, of Tomorrow.

But somewhere along the way, during the decade after my argument with the Air Force man, Tomorrow went lowercase. By 1964, when I was negotiating puberty in the chill deeps of the Cold War, history itself had become the Atomic Disintegrator. In those years, I was drawn to science fiction (and mainly to its prose forms) for the evidence it offered of manifold possibilities of otherness. To a curious, anxious, white male child coming of age in an incurious and paranoid white monoculture, there was literally nothing like it—though a great deal of science fiction, possibly the majority of it, I was starting to notice, depicted futuristic monocultures that were dominated by white males. The rest, however, had as much to do with making me the person I am today as anything else did. Things might be different, science fiction told me, and different in literally any way you could imagine, however radical. Simply to know that people who thought that way existed was a game changer for me. Being able to directly access their minds, as a reader, was like discovering an abundant, perpetually replenished, and freely available source of mental oxygen. You bought it from a wire rack in the bus terminal, less than a dollar a shot, and took home Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, and many others—and then you saw things differently ...

Towleroad-roadicon It's Jefferson Davis Day in Florida -- because that actually is a holiday there -- and to celebrate, the governor's purging the voter rolls. Or would be, if the Department of Justice hadn't stopped him.

Towleroad-roadicon You know that hideously catchy song from that Heineken commercial? See it in its proper context -- in the 1965 Indian hit Gumnaan, given voice by the legendary Mohammed Rafi -- AFTER THE JUMP. Seriously, hideously catchy.

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