Andy Grove on Drugs
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Waterboard The Man
Far too many political leaders in this country are equivocating on the subject of torture. Like demented ostriches, they stick their heads up their asses so they can pretend not to know that a practice that the US is engaged in has been considered torture since the Spanish inquisition
Any US politician, whether in or out of power, any federal appointee or aspirant, any goddammn one of them who can not agree, unequivocally, that waterboarding is torture, should be subject to a multi-week course of regular waterboarding. If after that time, they still hold their position, then I’ll be willing to consider that they are not, in fact, vile, worthless, evil cowards.
JK Rowling Outs Dumbledore as a Gay Man. Icky Homophobia Follows
At a recent talk at Carnegie Hall JK Rowling revealed that headmaster Dumbledore is gay.
Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?My truthful answer to you… I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation.] … Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was.
The transcript I linked to has already garnered over 2000 comments. I don’t intend to read all of them, but it’s interesting and a bit distressing to skim. As you might expect, there are a range of reactions. A lot are enthusiastic, but I find the “neutral” and negative comments to be the most telling.
One common theme is the people who would basically prefer that Dumbledore remain in the closet so they don’t have to face their latent paranoia and dislike about homosexuals.
Was this really necessary? I have no problem with gay people, but it just seems like something that was not important in the books and not important to mention now. There will be parents now who won’t want their kids reading the books because Dumbledore is gay, even though nothing of the sort is mentioned in the books.
Posted by Sally on October 19, 2007 @ 10:14 PM
The other common theme is the idea that, basically, if the series had gone on, Dumbledore would surely have hit on Harry. This is by no means a surprise, homophobes are constantly equating homosexuality with pedophilia, but it’s jarring to see it exposed, even among people who seem to otherwise accept the revelation.
[…] It should be noted that Dumbledore kept that secret even from Harry, as noted by Dumbledore treating Harry like a regular father-son relationship.
Posted by Raymond on October 19, 2007 @ 10:15 PM
and
Oh my goodness. I don’t believe this. I think she is kidding with us. And if its true. I’m just glad he didn’t come onto to harry.
Posted by luna on October 19, 2007 @ 10:11 PM
How about a clue or two folks. Time to suspend your willing suspension of disbelief and think critically for a second or two. This is a work of fiction, and the product of a single authors imagination. Dumbledore didn’t come on to Harry because JK Rowling didn’t want him to. Probably because she isn’t into reinforcing homophobic paranoia, and also because doing so didn’t serve the story she wanted to tell.
Jeesh!
via Kottke
Bush Plots War with Iran
I Want the Mac Back
I’ve been using an 800MHz G3 iBook with 256mb of memory this weekend and it has been an
epiphany. Don’t get me wrong it’s slow, but it has a sensual dimension that I don’t think I’ve ever felt with a windows PC, and I’ve missed it.
It may be the my aversion to Windows is a conditioned response, but that doesn’y change the fact that I’m dreading the prospect of going back to using a PC, day in, day out. I think I need to buy a mac for my personal machine, and soon. And the truth is, there is very little I need widows for at work.
I only wish Apple hadn’t been dedicating themselves to their odious business partners at the expense of their users so much lately.
Apple’s Automatic iPhone Backups Suck
iTunes is supposed to make a backup of your iPhone settings and data every time you sync, but I’ve already been burned twice by their crappy software.
First time I tried restoring my phone to fix a problem with no sound coming out of the earpiece. It didn’t help (plugging and unplugging the headphones several times did), but I found out that they don’t backup and restore the photos you take on your iPhone. Idiots.
Second time I decided to restore my phone before installing the 1.1.1 update, just to be on the safe side. This time, it started restoring the iPhone while the activation process still seemed to be underway. A few minutes later I get an error message on my computer that there was a problem restoring from backup because their was a timeout. No option to try again. I went ahead and tried syncing my phone. It updated bookmarks and contacts, because those were synced with desktop applications, but my e-mail account settings, my favorite contacts, my calendar, all my notes and pretty much every other setting was gone. I was going to try restoring the phone again, but iTunes only keeps one backup, and from the associated times on the backup, it had gone ahead and created a new backup from my iPhone after all the data went missing.
WTF, Apple? I thought your stuff was supposed to just work.
Maybe you should open the iPhone up to 3rd party developers, because you aren’t doing a very good job on your own.
Update: This post is old. iPhone backups are much better now.