Today we biked over to see the 2½ hour long gay pride parade. "You're here, you're queer, we're used to it." About 40,000 other people came to see the parade along the edge of my neighborhood today. You can see the crowds looking down Grand Boulevard. Many people were festively…
Why grow grass when you can eat your front yard? Grass is no longer cool, according to this article in Time: The problem, as [architect and founder Fritz] Haeg sees it, is that the "hyper-manicured lawn" is looking increasingly out of date. In the 1950s, when suburbia first began to…
Does money buy elections? After reading this 2008 paper by "Just $6," you'll have no doubt. What is Just $6 about? Congress would only have to spend $6 per citizen per year to publicly fund each and every election for the House, the Senate and the White House. When you…
I was surprised yesterday to find a post by Jerry Pournelle (well known SF author and technology columnist) on MensNewsDaily (a starkly conservative news magazine site with pretensions of middle-of-the-roadism). His column, Intelligent Design: Answers and Questions, is openly favorable to the premise that Intelligent Design and Global Warming denial…
I'm currently reading a new book by Susan Linn, The Case for Make-Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World (2008). The main point of the book is that modern parents tend to over-schedule their children and otherwise deprive them of time for creative play. For instance, many parents are letting…