Tea Champs

The North American Tea Championships were recently held, apparently. Neither adagio nor teavana won. I can't tell if either even entered. Though I would think they would. Some of the teas, as you might expect, are pricey, though some are reasonable. http://www.teachampionship.com/index.php/champions/2011-hot-tea-fall-tea-champions

King No More

I wish I could cloak the post in black; or more appropriately, chocolate brown.

King-sized Snicker's bars, a one-time favorite of mine, have become a victim of King-sized guilt about obesity.  Mars LLC will now only sell candy bars coming in at sub-250 calories, making the 510-calorie King-sized version a big no no.

Which is all fine and good - except for the intrusion into my life and purchasing habits and proclivities - minus the fact that now to treat my triplets, I will have to buy 3 candy bars at 250 calories a piece, rather than a single 510 calorie.

Lets see: a 250 calorie treat (1 candy bar per child at 250 calories) or a 170 calorie treat (1 at 510 calories split 3 ways (510 / 3 = 170) with an added side of sharing and negotiating.  I guess I'll be spending more to buy additonal, smaller treats and giving my kids more calories.  Thanks.

Well, one thing is for sure, no trollers will break in...

One of the website I visit for work - the L.A. Law Library - has a "type the following words" system of ensuring you are a human.  It is similiar to this website's method of ensuring that comment posters are real, live, living people.  You have to type a somewhat obscured word to prove you can read and interpret. 

Now, most times the word in these types of challenges is simply overlayed on a grid, or slightly twisted, or has alternating black and white backgrounds.  But not the site in question.  Noooooo.  Its scrambling procedures are absolutely over the top.  Twisted words with alternating backgrounds and random slashes; all at once.  And you have to type two words, not just one.

I often have to visit this site probably 2 or 3 times per week, passing its challenge 2 or 3 times per visit.  I sometimes have to make 2 or 3 attempts just to get both words right.  So either I'm an idiot, or this challenge is seriously hard.  It's like a very unfun and unfair puzzle in Zelda.  Or the entire game Dark Souls, apparently.

So today I visit the site, and I'm on login attempt, oh, I don't know, 7, when this is the challenge:

Well, nobody who isn't human will access the site, that is for sure.  Of course, I'm not sure how any human will gain access either, but if you are 100% deadset on making sure no unwanted guests visit, I guess this ensures that.

All this to protect court briefs that are located on a one-way system (download only, no upload) and are offered free to the public.

Reading, writing, and arithmaflab

More updating -edited 5 more graphs -read more of both Cat and, Abundance: Why the future will be better than you think (kindle version nonetheless) - starting some Codecademy - working out, um, no...

220!

220.  That's how many push-ups I'm doing per day, three days per week, with another 24 per day, three days per week in my "Death Crawl."

Progress on other goals:
- editing book: I got one paragraph edited!  It doesn't seem like much, but rewrote the opening about 5 different ways and finally landed upon something I don't absolutely hate.  Just another 45 years of this type of progress and I can submit it for editing!
- reading: done none of this
- Codecadamy: done none of this

Anti-Gay Marriage As Sex Discrimination

It started with this fascinating and challenging post about how denying same-sex couples the right to marry could be sex discrimination, since you are barring a woman from having the same rights as a man (namely, to marry a woman).

This makes much more sense to me than the due process argument, since to me the due process argument focuses more on whether all males or all females are treated the same (which, in my mind they are, since all men can marry woman, and vice versa. Furthermore, all gay men can marry woman, and none are given special consideration. So while you may have a constitutional problem nationwide if some states allow it while others do not, it could swing either for or against, and I'm not sure that is the argument you want to take to the court.).

I think, however, that this response is a pretty good take down of the sex discrimination argument. I especially liked the bar mitzvah/bat mitzvah comparison. Woman and men in Isreal - and Judiasm, I assume - get different ceremonies with different levels of respect, even. But both get ceremonies. I realize a "civil union" is distasteful for some, and probably rightfully so for a number of reasons, but I'm not sure it has to be, or even should be. People aren't ashamed of honory doctoretes.

This is especially insightful, or at least especially close to my viewpoint:

It strikes me that both sides have a point, and most likely the best thing for
courts to do under such circumstances, where they’d basically just have to take
sides in a culture war pitting feminists against religious and cultural
traditionalists, is to stay out of it–so long as analogous rights and
obligations are available to the plaintiff through an analogous ceremony, in
this hypo the bat mitzvah.

That said, there are two easy answers: remove government from what is essentially religious ceremony/determination (in fact, proponents of Prop 8 frequently point to the original, religious meaning as their lynchpin) and make all such unions contractual, or pass gay marriage laws state-by-state.

New Blog Design

In all the free time I have while not editing my book, I updated the look of my blog. Granted, it took like 5 clicks. And you should know that despite the ease (or because of it?) its probably not a settled and finished product. Which won't matter much if you read this through an RSS feed. You do read this through an RSS feed, right? I mean, you aren't so old fashioned that you visit the websites you read, are you?

More updates likely to come, as they say.

Or as websites used to say in the days before everyone had one... Under Construction.