Married with mementos

We were official before but now we really feel like an old married couple because we sat and watched our wedding photos swim by last night, courtesy of the magic of iPhoto and the Ken Burns effects, all on the splendor of our big-screen TV.

And now, eccoli!

I hope this isn’t the last update!

Tomorrow marks the start of operations for CERN’s new large hadron collider. Scientists are pretty certain the resulting collisions of hefty particles at 99.9% of the speed of light will not result in Earth’s destruction.  At least the start date is 9/10 rather than 9/11.  I am not superstitious!  Just saying.

I’ve been working on a new technical article which has kept me quite busy the last few days.  I am almost done, and taking a break from a final edit.  I eaked out a major new chapter and some revisions to a novel-in-progress the end of last week, which has also been a major effort.  I have to keep pluggin along with that, I’ve been doing daily writing exercises a la Natalie Goldberg as well.

On a different note, I have news that our wedding photos are in the mail! I am stoked because we don’t have many gatherings of families.  At the wedding we had most of R’s family and as much of mine as I could convince to travel from Delaware.  Everyone looked fabulous in their dressy outfits, and we had family portraits as well as different minglings of family group shots.  At one point the photographer, who works as a press photographer here in San Francisco, stood up on a railing with a steep drop behind her to get a full-on photograph of all of us together, with a potentially lovely backdrop of the garden.

I hope all the pictures turn out!  Regardless, you’re going to see some of them here shortly

You think we’ve got crazies!

I think all of us residents of San Francisco inevitably hear from friends or relatives in other (typically more conservative) locales that we “…have crazy people there.” Often in the context of something the speaker heard about on Foxnews. Well, payback is a bitch, and below are two nut-cases who hail from waaaay far away from Queeristan. And I’m not even going for Fred Phelps!

Believes in God. Just not God's love. And what's with the phony smile for his own PR photo?

Bill Donahue, currently leader of the right-wing intolerance group Catholic League, is lately in the news for asking the Democratic National Committee to revoke the Convention coverage credentials for two blogs that diverge from his tastes: Towleroad (gay politics and pop culture) and BitchPhD (feminist). Below is some background and some previous comments from this learned gentleman, who is a regular on the ultra-right talk circuit:

(from Media Matters) “William A. Donohue, president of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, has made 23 guest appearances on TV news programs in 2004. Donohue uses his appearances primarily to attack gays and progressives. He has referred to the “gay death style,” remarked, “God forbid we’d run out of little gay kids,” claimed that Senator John Kerry “never found an abortion he couldn’t justify,” and claimed that “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular … Hollywood likes anal sex.”

Believes in magic golden plates. Same-sex lovin' not so much.

And then we have exhibit B, SF (as in SciFi!) writer Orson Scott Card, a believing Latter Day Saint (a.k.a. Mormon). Recently caught declaring that he advocates over-throwing the government rather than accepting same-sex marriage.

(from Queerty) “I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.”

So we may have some ‘crazies’ packed into our 49 square miles. But hell, we’re only 49 square miles! They’ve got a whole “wide world of weirdness” going on.