Photos from San Francisco

No, I'm not simply trying to curry favor with my mother-in-law. Her name is Cynthia Jay, from Huntington, New York, and she is an exquisite painter and art curator--and a polymath. She is also learning to use her new camera, the same model that I so often carry around, the Canon SD1100SI (costs less than $200). Cynthia is in St. Louis this weekend, and she shared some recent photos she took in San Francisco. I found two of them especially beautiful. The first was taken in the San Francisco Academy of Sciences Aquarium. Image by Cynthia Jay - Click for larger image The subject of the second photo is a tree opposite the DeYoung Museum:

Image by Cynthia Jay - Click for larger image

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In honor of Maine, and Gay Marriage

This week marks another turning point in gay rights (go Maine, and we're hoping New Hampshire's Governor signs, too). A little reminder that there is still a lot of opposition from certain quarters, but with friends like John Stewart I'm certain things will continue to work out!

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Pornography parity

I had no idea that pornography was this popular in America. People in the U.S. are voting with their feet, according to an article on pornography published by cracked.com:

A new pornographic video is being created every 39 minutes in the U.S. [I]n hotel chains that offer in-room X-rated content alongside major Hollywood releases, porn movie rentals represent 55 percent of the overall pay-per-view usage. . .

In 2005, there were approximately 425 films released in Hollywood, including a Star Wars prequel and a Harry Potter movie, with domestic grosses of $8.597 billion. That's very impressive. In 2006, the cumulative grosses for porn videos in the U.S., leveraging video sales, rentals, mobile phone content and Internet revenues--came out to... $8.65 billion.

You'll also find that adult sex terms are wildly popular on search engines. The search term "Obama" overtook the adult sex search terms for only 23 minute during the entire year, and that was on election day. Fascinating stuff.

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