I got to go into London one day on this trip. Ade Brown graciously stuck out a wildly windy and rain-soaked day, as we wandered all over the city, from locations featured in From Hell to the Lord Mayor’s annual parade to watching football in a pub to several other pubs. Douglas Townsend joined us later on, for more wandering, until we finally met up with Lindsey Duff at a charity benefit for the London Rollergirls, a roller derby team. Photos here in the slide show, or click here for full size on flickr:
Thanks, guys. That was an absolutely wonderful time.
Amazing, that it’s been already one year since hatred and improper out-of-state financial carpetbagging by Mormon extremists conned California into rejecting equal civil rights via Proposition 8. The fact that civil rights, or any human rights, are something that can be voted on is a whole other filthy mess that needs to be legally challenged up to our Supreme Court level. At least in Washington state, when the hatred of Referendum 71 was presented–similar to California’s Proposition of hate–our state voters smartly and overwhelming rejected it despite more out-of-state financial carpetbagging by Christian extremists from Oregon and other areas.
The people of Maine were not so fortunate, where it was reported that some Catholic churches conducted secondary collections to help fund anti-gay voting.
Like women’s rights and interracial marriage, delegating the question of equality to the whims of the state level are fundamentally flawed and unethical. Like what happened with abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the rights of blacks to marry whites in Loving V. Virginia in 1966, I’m thinking this won’t end until someone can challenge it to the Supreme Court. You simply don’t vote on “rights”. The biases of any religion cannot be allowed to affect the lives of all your other citizens who don’t follow that religion, full stop.
It’s gotten so bad now one year later with dangerous religious extremism trying to sway American legal destiny that the Catholic Church announced it would terminate all charity work in our nation’s capital if Washington D.C. legalized gay marriage locally, in revenge.
We’re now getting closer daily to the desires of the far Right for concepts like dominionism and Christian doctrine to be our version of an American Sharia law. Both ideals are patently dangerous, wrong for a secular multi-cultural nation like ours, and frankly evil if imposed on everyone who doesn’t subscribe to those limited precepts. If it happens, our nation is pretty much doomed to become the next Iran.
There were nationwide protests a year ago this weekend, where millions of people opposed the religious hatred and civil rights violations last year in California. These were my photos from the Seattle protests:
I’ve got 1,870 photos on my Flickr account. I don’t think I’m a great photographer by any stretch. I point, I shoot. Sometimes I muck around with trying to get good lighting, angles, and all that. I can’t quite figure out why Flickr thinks that this photo is my best and most interesting, a long-distance photo I took of a woman’s profile at the Market in August 2008:
I actually think this one, from the same day, is much better. It doesn’t even make Flickr’s Top 20 for my photos, though:
I can never figure out their Interestingness formula.
I posted the other day about that Seattle Viaduct (it’s actually the Alaskan Way Viaduct, or I-99). These are a couple of views of it. This is what the Viaduct looks like, eyes toward the south and the SoDo neighborhood of Seattle, with the stadiums in the distance. Taken from Victor Steinbreuk Park, click for bigger views:
Driving north on the viaduct, into downtown, this is what you see:
Bonus points: Want to watch the viaduct come down in a simulated earthquake put together by the Washington Department of Transportation? Click here.
Thanks again, to the President that took our good name and utterly ruined it globally. Thanks again to the complete fools that elected this fool, who was completely and utterly unqualified to run a baseball team (which he failed at) let alone a world superpower. January 20th can’t get here any sooner.
Only took 32 years and a civil rights movement happening to coincide with it, but some of my work is finally in print, sorta. The Stranger used three of my photos November 20, 2008 edition, on the “Anatomy of a Protest” (click for the online version) article on page 16. It’s in the free news boxes now all over the Seattle metro area, and the photos are from my Prop 8 Seattle protest photos. Silly little thing, but it made me happy.
I joined in today at the rally at Volunteer Park in Seattle, Washington, which then became a march across Capitol Hill, down Pine Street, and finally into a huge celebration and second rally at Westlake Center. I guestimated about 10,000 people, and am seeing estimates online now of 6,000-9,000. It was amazing, and a strong nationwide civil rights action. There were protests and actions in nearly all major American cities, it looks like. These are my photos:
If you’re distracted by lolcats at work all day, new evidence from evolutionary biology suggests it’s not your fault. A study from Yale explains that human visual attention evolved to track images of animals — and lolcat images awaken our buried evolutionary impulses.
I noticed today that I was getting a ton of hits (by my standards, a ton) for an image of Hayden Panettiere, who plays Claire Bennett on Heroes. I couldn’t figure out where on Earth they were all coming from, until I just ran a Google Images search for her, which you can see here. As of now it still shows my site as the last entry on the first page. The funny thing is, until this post, I never had a picture of Hayden or Claire on this site. I do have my Livejournal Image Randomizer, which links off of each page, and on the top right of each page loads the most recent image on each reload. It’s not really technically random–Livejournal publishes an RSS feed of all the images linked inline on every recent LJ post, and the PHP scripts I borrowed and tweaked from other sites just trawls the last 1 or 10 entries, depending on where I use it.
Anyway, this is the page on my site that they were ending up on from Google Images. It’s specifically this page, the June 29, 2006 archive, in case that long Google URL goes dead. The actual picture of Hayden was probably linked from the Livejournal feed at the exact moment that Google crawled that page, and voila! People are coming looking for hottie pictures of Claire and find me grumbling about holes in socks, and my review of Superman Returns. This is the picture they were after…
