Blog of Talmage 2003/12

The Eggnog Recipe

Marriage Poll

A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me the URL of a poll about Homosexual Marriage sponsored by American Family Association. I took their poll, indicating that I support same-sex marriage.

Bless their hearts! They sent me a recent tally of the results. It seems that more respondents favor either homosexual marriage or the economic and political equivalent thereof. Here's the message in the original HTML of the e-mail:

Dear David,

• I oppose legalization of homosexual marriage and [93]civil unions[94] total votes: 201914



• I favor legalization of homosexual marriage total votes: 378691



• I favor a [93]civil union[94] with the full benefits of marriage except for the name: 52238

Only votes that have a valid email address associated with them will be counted. We will be purging those with invalid email addresses, which may cause poll results to change somewhat.

Sincerely,

Don

Donald E. Wildmon, Founder and Chairman
American Family Association

P.S. Please forward this email to at least one friend.

Best job advertisement

Subject: HTML O' The Day
From: nev@bostic.com
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 21:24:49 -0500 (EST)
To: nev@bostic.com (/dev/null)

Religious Fervor and Politics

Will people go to the polls in 2004?

I should hope so! A margin of 537 votes is too small!.

According to Lance deHaven-Smith in an op-ed article published in the September 02, 2002 edition of the Tallahassee Democrat the 2000 Presidential Election was won in Florida by 537 votes . deHaven-Smith points to evidence published by the New York Times and the Washington Post that indicate that Florida's governor, secretary of state, and speaker of the House ... used their offices to manipulate the election controversy and secure Bush's victory. During the controversy, they collaborated either directly or through intermediaries with the legal and political advisers of George W. Bush to: (1) put pressure on the state's top law firms not to work for Gore; (2) bend the rules on absentee ballots to allow improperly marked absentee ballots to be counted; (3) block, stall or discredit manual recounts; and (4) create fears of a constitutional crisis so that the U.S. Supreme Court would intervene.

If more people had voted, maybe the election wouldn't have been won in corrupt Florida. Maybe there would have been a clear, obvious, and uncontestable winner. Then there it wouldn't be reasonable for people like Michael Moore to refer to fictitious presidents on national television.

In 2000, Gore won the majority of the popular vote but did not obtain the majority of electoral votes. That winning national popular vote does not imply winning the electoral vote and therefore winning the election is not new and may or may not be controversial. In an election that was so close, we owe it to ourselves to count the votes both thoroughly and impartially. After an election, it ought to feel like the will of the people has been carried out. The 2000 doesn't have that feel.

Alternative linkage:

• Some people might want a Michael Moore antidote. Try MOOREWATCH.com

The PDP-11 is off line

The PDP-11 emulator I wrote about in Retrocomputing is off line. It's been running for months. I haven't logged into it in ages and there are no other users, so I halted it last week.

Contact me if you're really really interested in using it.

Fair and Balanced?

In belated honor of Towel Day , there will be a moratorium on mentioning both Miserable Failure and la falta desgraciada .

The Retrocomputing Museum

I've written about retrocomputing before in Retrocomputing and More on retrocomputing.

Today, while sidetracked by Eric Raymonds Galaxis game, I discovered ESR's and John Cowan's delightful Retrocomputing Museum. It's mostly a collection of implementations of dead languages like Algol and BCPL. It has a nice collection of links to other retrocomputing sites.

Hand Painted

My friend Ali applies decorative paint to all manner of objects and she does a beautiful job. I've bought some of her martini glasses and I've commissioned her to paint the PowerPuff Girls on some highball glasses.

Ali also makes chalice art for the Unitarian Universalist in your life.

What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

The truth is out there. For the European Swallow, it's about 11 meters per second.

Mr. Wellington's Home Page

My Uncle Fred teaches at an elementary school in suburban Philadelphia. He is on a special assignment as the K-8 Technology Staff Developer. His home page contains links to a lot of educationals stuff for kids and teachers.

Uncle Fred has been an elementary school teacher since the 1970s. He never does anything half-way. His collection of links ought to document "best practices" in education (if you'll pardon my using a buzz word).

Side note: I found a link to an interesting best practices web site that "contains solutions over 1600 proven solutions from more than 140 countries to the common social, economic and environmental problems of an urbanizing world."

Joshua:"Would you like to play a game?" David:"Global Thermonuclear War"

Modern scholarship has not yet established the game for which these dice were used.

Duh! It's just a D20.

They played RPGs like Micronauts, D&D. Chances are they didn't have OpenRPG.

They didn't need polyhedral dice to play Wooden Ships & Iron Men or Panzer Blitz.

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