Is this a cause for great joy? Are the three great religions united at last? Is peace about to break out in the Middle East? Well, no. International gay leaders are planning a 10-day WorldPride festival and parade in Jerusalem in August, saying they want to make a statement about tolerance and diversity in the Holy City, home to three great religious traditions. Now major leaders of the three faiths – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – are making a rare show of unity to try to stop the festival. They say the event would desecrate the city and convey the…
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I noticed a lot of visitors are arriving here looking for information on adding drop shadows to images. As I flailed helplessly at this for a long time before finally settling on a simple method, I thought I’d add a little documentation. The previous entry I had on this was a little sketchy in that department. Also, some discussion popped up regarding text wrap at the excellent Learning Moveable Type site, so I thought I would elaborate on my method for handling images. First off, you need to go to A List Apart and read Sergio Villarreal’s excellent tutorial. Copy…
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This was who Terri Schiavo was 15 years ago or more: vibrant, pretty, bright. She was a real knockout, in fact. No wonder her husband fell in love witih her at first sight and fought so hard for her care in the first few years after her collapse, coma, and entry into a persistent vegetative state. He did everything he could to bring her back, but after several years he came to accept what the doctors told him as far back as 1994: her cerebral cortex was “all but gone.” 11 years ago. “All but gone.” Michael and the doctors…
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BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Eccleston quits Doctor Who role HUH? 1 episode aired, but he apparently fears being typecast. So just one series with Eccleston, and then yet another new Doctor. Huh.
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The recaplet for last night’s AWESOME double episode: Wait, am I high, or did that really happen? Okay, this two-hour extravaganza starts out in South Africa, where Ray and Deana gut out a Fast Forward and Rob and Amber chase it in vain, putting the latter in the back of the pack temporarily. A Detour sends a couple of teams through a fairly cushy scavenger hunt and sends the rest into a cave, where Gretchen manages to fall and cut her head. And as head wounds do, it bleeds a lot, which is pretty scary. Ray and Deana win that…
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Okay, I’ve uploaded some more Chicago Botanic Gardens pictures and jiggered things around. The main albums page is here, and the newest album is “Spring 2005.” It was a nice day that day, if a little cold, and windy on the southern exposures (Ooh! my Aunt Fanny!). Today, though, was a really nice, actually quite warm day. The tulips are coming up in the front yard, I can hardly believe it but it’s true. And only last week the whiskey barrel was full of ice. I’ll be doing more gardening this year than I did last year, that’s for sure.…
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That pretty much says it all for tonight’s double-barreled TAR7 episode – it turned out to be a non-elimination episode first, with an elimination second. Gretchen took a terrible spill and cut up her face something awful, plus they had wandered around looking for the clue before that, so they came in last. In yet another “new twist,” this time in addition to losing all their cash, they had to hand over their backpacks and all their possessions except for the clothes they were wearing. You can tell who the nice people were from the not-nice people at the beginning…
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The latest bizarre, yet strangely compelling must-have item chronicled at Boingboing: Pet pillows made from the fur of your very own very dead pet! Well, this option is no longer open to us. Which is an extremely good thing. Besides which, the cleaning ladies would be mystified by the extremely quiet, tidy, and square kitty on the couch.
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Now that I’m on the subject of British TV, I’ve recently gotten into watching “The Kumars at No. 42,” a wacky satire on chat shows set in the rec room of an East Indian family that live somewhere in British suburbia. The episode with Richard E. Grant (and Michael Parkinson) had me convulsed, but David didn’t really get what was so funny, and I couldn’t explain it. Comedy is haaaard.
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BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Doctor Who is Saturday night hit The reviews are good; I hope it shows up on BBC America soon. I’d love to watch Doctor Who again after all these years – I watched almost all of the Tom Baker episodes and quite a few of the Peter Davison ones, long ago and far away in another dimension. All the Doctors are gathered helpfully together here. There used to be a very, very active Chicago contingent of Who fans; I wonder what they’ll make of the new series? I’m subscribed to a local SF mailing list,…