The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage after the California Supreme Court had previously found that same-sex couples had the right to marry. You can find a link to the actual ruling at SCOTUSblog.

That doesn’t mean, however, that same-sex couples in California can start getting married again immediately. SCOTUSblog adds “The Circuit Court said its ruling would remain on hold until it issued the formal mandate to put the ruling into effect. In the meantime, the proponents of Proposition 8 have the option of asking the full Ninth Circuit Court to reconsider en banc Tuesday’s ruling.”

There’s also an expectation that an appeal to the Supreme Court is forthcoming.

Slate Jurisprudence Columnist Dahlia Lithwick is blowing up Twitter right now with the decision. No hashtag, so that link has a limited lifespan. She points out that Judge Reinhardt, who authored the opinion, keeps coming back to the principle that Prop. 8 eliminated a right the state had already granted, that the “only purpose and effect of Prop 8 was to lessen status and dignity of gays and lesbians in California.”

The 9th Circuit also “refused to invalidate [Judge Vaughn] Walker’s ruling on the grounds that he should have disclosed he was in a long term same-sex relationship.”

It’s taken 20 years, but Russian scientists are about to breach Lake Vostok, which has been covered by the Antarctic ice cap for 14 million years.

Hey you folks–if you need volunteers to test these virtual reality contact lenses, right here. Call me.

New life forms have been found in “blue holes”. Scientists think it might help them identify life on moons like Enceladus and Europa (when we eventually get there, that is).

GRAIL takes video of the dark side of the moon.

Pythons are messing up the Everglades.

A lot, really. First of all, we’re about to chat with Aase Berg and Johannes Gorannson about Berg’s book Transfer Fat It’s the first time we’ve done a translation, and we’re very excited to be able to talk with both the poet and the translator. Look for the transcript later this month.

February’s book is D. A. Powell’s Useless Landscape. Those are in the mail and we’ll start talking about them soon. Look for my essay on why I chose this book later this week. March’s book will be Linda Hogan’s Indios, and Camille Dungy will be leading that discussion.

Finally, this really isn’t book club news, but what the hell. The Rumpus is holding a fundraiser at the AWP convention, so if you’re going to be in Chicago on March 1, come by 826 Chicago. Readers include Nick Flynn, Cheryl Strayed, Peter Orner, Sommer Browning, Brian Spears and Stephen Elliott.

I usually try to start things out on the light side on Saturday mornings. I mean, I haven’t watched Saturday morning cartoons in twenty years now I guess (do they even still exist?) and I’ve traded in sugary cereal for homemade breakfast burritos (so good I included a promise to make them at least once a week in my wedding vows, not that I’m bragging), so why start with a downer?

But this story is too important, and too shitty, to open with a joke. Read this Rolling Stone piece on Anoka, Minnesota and the damage its residents are doing to its teenagers, especially the LGBTQ ones, but also to the bullies who aren’t being called out the way they should be. This community is damaging their next generation.

Now for something lighter. Have you been told you should read Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land but you really don’t want to? Here’s the important parts, made more palatable by the use of cat photos.

I’d be wary of this idea if Alan Moore were writing them, but there’s no way this is a good idea.

I think you’ll like this essay, The Admiring Ignorant, by an old friend of mine, William Bradley.

Dahlia Lithwick on how Stephen Colbert is hammering the Supreme Court over Citizens United.

Update: The Susan G. Komen Foundation has reversed its decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood.

I doubt the board of the Susan G. Komen Foundation had any idea what sort of blowback they were going to get when Planned Parenthood announced that Komen had decided to stop funding some of Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer work. After all, the Susan G. Komen foundation and Planned Parenthood have been, in some ways, mirror images of each other in recent years, at least as far as public perception is concerned. The Komen Foundation is pink ribbons and races for the cure and corporate tie-ins and–until this week–maybe the safest corporate donation a company could make, whereas Planned Parenthood has been demonized by right-wing activists and politicians alike as a pro-abortion, pro-child sexual abuse haven of sin and degradation.

But the blowback has been fierce and swift, and most importantly, deserved. People who work with nonprofits have complained about the Komen Foundation for years, from their abusive trademark strategy (where they threaten to sue anyone who uses the phrase “for the cure” or “to the cure” or a pink ribbon) to the way their size makes it harder for smaller nonprofits to raise money, to the salaries of their top executives, to the way breast cancer has become, in some ways, the only women’s disease which matters. …more

The SOPA/PIPA debates have reopened the discussion over the issue of online piracy, over whether or not it’s stealing, over the amount of economic damage it does to content producers, and whether or not the response will destroy the internet as we currently know it. Over at Slate, Matthew Yglesias and Caleb Crain are hashing out the question of copyright. Crain takes Yglesias to school here on the question of whether or not copyright infringement is theft, but even so, I think they miss an important issue. …more

Some interesting symmetries between social networks today and in the Pleistocene.

Rebecca Boyle deals with the question of whether some research is so dangerous that it shouldn’t be pursued.

Crazy solar flares have been causing amazing light shows in the night skies, but they’re having another effect, too–they’re cleaning up some of the space junk in orbit.

Google has a new privacy policy. I can’t tell you what it means, but Scientific American apparently can.

Legos are headed toward space. Leave it to Canadian teenagers, those wacky kids.

Getting a late start today, but I still have some interesting reading for you to do.

Tell me if you’ve heard this story before: legislator puts forth a bill which targets a mostly powerless group of people, then withdraws it when its onerous requirements are potentially turned around on him.

It bears repeating: spending public money on the arts is a good investment if nothing else.

Apple introduced its new iBooks platform this past week (which has some intriguing possibilities for creative work as well). Wired goes into why the college bookstore won’t be going away any time soon.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has been having a rough time of it lately. Not only is he facing a recall, he had his State of the State address spoofed by protesters who handed out fake programs. Make sure to look at the actual program.

Who knew this was a problem? Now I feel like I need to head to Oklahoma and try some aborted fetus before it disappears from the food supply. Kind of like when Four Loko was banned in a bunch of places.

I’ve applauded Anonymous in the past, but this is not cool. The second you start drafting people into your cause without their knowledge, you become the thing you rail against.

Hello again grizzled langurs. Glad you’re not all dead after all.

LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, may still fly, albeit in a scaled-down version.

The argument over the leap second–what, you didn’t know there was an argument raging–continues until at least 2015.

Scientists who are researching a deadly strain of the bird flu have agreed to suspend their work for 60 days.

The weather app on my phone has stopped giving me the temperature and has started simply laughing at me. That is, when it’s not giving me the temperature in Kelvin as a way of cheering me up.

Rumpus superstar Roxane Gay takes on “The anger of the male novelist at Salon.

SOPA and PIPA are, for the moment, on hold. Clay Shirky really nails why this legislation is such a big deal when he goes into the history of the entertainment industry when it comes to control.

Oddly enough, if you want a good example why SOPA and PIPA are unnecessary, the shutdown of MegaUpload is a pretty good one.

2011 was the year of the Arab Spring, but it looks like overall, most people there aren’t much freer than they were before.

Employers who offer health insurance to their employees will have to make sure they offer birth control as part of the deal, thanks to rules put out today by the federal government. Religious nonprofits who object will have an extra year to come into compliance, but will not be given an exception.

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), recently noted as a finalist for the California Book Award. She was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of two previous collections of poetry, …more

Can’t help myself–I’m a sucker for high speed video of birds in flight. There are few things I find more elegant.

Russia’s Mars probe, Phobos-Grunt (not making that name up), is probably going to crash to earth on Sunday. Most of it is expected to burn up in the atmosphere.

Ever wonder how cosmic magnetic fields shape the solar system?

It’s not just the world’s smallest frog–it may be the world’s smallest vertebrate.

Tissue engineering is awesome.

So winter finally showed up in Des Moines this week. It’s been a nice run, what with temperatures in the 50s, but yesterday it barely got above 20, and I’ve been looking for a tauntaun to slaughter and climb inside of ever since.

Some good news for opponents of SOPA–Rep. Lamar Smith (whose website was recently outed as being a copyright violator) has stated that he will pull the DNS-blocking provision from the bill. It’s not a complete victory, but it’s a start.

SOPA’s sibling bill, PIPA (the Orwellian-named Protect IP Act) is in trouble too apparently. Keep the pressure on.

Interesting way by Barrelhouse to publish a poem–with mouseover annotations by the author. I don’t know quite how I feel about it yet–I’m not a big fan of prefatory explanations by poets at readings, and this feels like another version of that–but it is a different and potentially fascinating way to present poetry.

Sledding Crow

I agree. The “Men Can Stop Rape” ads do rock.

I don’t know what bugs me more about this story–the fact that there’s a police department which doesn’t want its officers to be too smart, or that the court upheld the policy. Not to put too fine a point on it–we as a society give police the right to use deadly force on the public, and give them the benefit of the doubt most of the time if they claim that a member of the public was killed in error. Why on earth would we not want the smartest people we can get in that job?

Independent journalists are taking to the skies, attempting to use drones to capture footage and livestream it.

Even though I’m a huge fan of tech, I’m not sure I feel this is an improvement or even a welcome development.

Scientists are trying to map electrons in action.

Very interesting way to look at the universe–the scale of everything.

Nice piece on the myth of the “girl brain.”

Okay, so a wearable tv is cool, but what I really want is the internet injected into my brain. Who’s going to make that happen?

I survived my first Iowa election season mostly intact. The secret? No television that wasn’t streamed. I think I saw one political commercial out of the corner of my eye on a screen in a restaurant, and I kept my Florida phone number when I moved here, so I dodged the pollsters. If anyone in New Hampshire wants to share their attempts to dodge primary season, I’m all ears.

Amazing photos of a Chernobyl discotheque.

How good are you at telling the difference between a real site and a fake one that’s looking to scam you?

There are so many ways in which this story is messed up I can’t even begin to list them. And for the record, I don’t buy the pharmacist’s story that they don’t sell emergency contraception to men because they’re afraid men might be giving it to rape victims.

Dahlia Lithwick lays out the history of the Montana Supreme Court decision to ignore the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizen’s United.

What’s the real reasoning behind the Stop Online Piracy Act? Hollywood’s unwillingness to innovate.

If you weren’t already afraid of scorpions, then you probably don’t want to hear that their exoskeleton sort of acts like one big eye.

Popular Science takes us on a tour inside Space Shuttle Atlantis.

Twenty-five bucks will soon get you a bare-bones computer capable of playing back H.264 video at 1080p.

The first fast-charging station for e-cars went live in Washington state.

Farhad Manjoo says 2011 was a horrible year for tech, and I have to admit I see validity in his argument. I don’t experience it myself because I’m pretty much a single-platform person, but if you’re like Manjoo I imagine it could get frustrating.

11 people in tech who died this year and weren’t named Steve Jobs.

Welcome to the end of the year.

This time last year, I was living in Fort Lauderdale, which was going through the coldest December on record, according to NOAA. This year I’m in Des Moines, going through a much milder winter than usual. The low then is almost equivalent to the high now. This is weird.

Terrific interview here with Kate Eichhorn, who’s archiving zines (among other things) at the New School for Liberal Arts.

Barbara Terry’s life is amazing. She’s 52 and has been a prostitute in New York for over 30 years.

Check out this retelling of Beowulf by Joshua Gray, complete with audio of Joshua reading it. Really cool.

These carved book landscapes are beautiful. Wonder what he could do with a Kindle?

The Atlantic Wire called 2011 the year of the troll. We’ve been lucky in that trolling hasn’t been a huge problem for us, but honestly, that’s in part because we try not to let it start. It’s more because our readers trend towards the awesome.

So glad that Wired Science didn’t title this piece “A Star is Born” because that would have been really cheesy.

X-Men bacteria

Comet Lovejoy is pretty badass.

The National Institutes of Health will not finance new research on chimpanzees.

Tonight, I will be geeking out hard. There will likely be evidence of this on my various other interweb presences. Klingons are involved.

Gene Marks, writing for Forbes, informed the world of how clueless he is about the lives of people in the underclass when he typed “If I was a Poor Black Kid” and some dummy let him post it. The responses were quick and cutting. I especially liked this one from Touré (whose book Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? I am currently devouring). But the current winner, for my part, is Ask a Poor Black Kid. Funny stuff.

I have mixed feelings about Christopher Hitchens, which is as it should be–he was a complex man. One might say he contained multitudes. And there were times when I hated being on the same side of an argument with him. But he was a great writer and had a powerful effect on the world, which will be a lesser place for his absence. My condolences to his friends and family.

Internet in a Suitcase is being tested at Occupy DC.

Nerdy snow sculptures. I might have to try some of these when we get some snow.

Do you know what SOPA is? Iowa Republican Steve King (or one of his staffers) finds the whole discussion tedious.

Rumpus contributor Roxane Gay’s book Ayiti was listed by the The National Book Critics Circle blog as one of their Small Press Highlights of 2011. Of Ayiti they write “The title is the Haitian Creole name for Haiti and in this brief but powerful collection of stories (most no longer than three pages), Haitians navigate their beleaguered homeland or their adopted country (the U.S.) as immigrants, refugees, and undocumented bordercrossers pining for their loved ones left ‘kneeling in a bed of sand and bones’ in one of the world’s poorest nations. Gay doesn’t shy away from critique, showing how Haiti’s misfortunes appeal to the exploitative foreign media and well-meaning though condescending outsiders: ‘Then the world intruded. It always does.’”

Congratulations, Roxane!

Harriet, aka the Poetry Foundation blog, has posted an excerpt of the Rumpus Poetry Book Club’s recent chat with T. R. Hummer. Watch as I learn what the Bald Man Fallacy is and more. Fortunately, they didn’t quote my alternate reading of the poem. I appreciate that.

Rumpus Poetry Editor Brian Spears on why he chose Amy Newman’s Dear Editor as the December selection of The Rumpus Poetry Book Club: …more

Everyone who’s been able to light their water on fire when gas companies started fracturing shale to get to natural gas just said “No shit, EPA.”

NASA scientists announced that they’ve found the closest thing to an earth orbiting a distant star. Here’s how they find exoplanets.

So you have an EV but you hate going to the trouble of plugging it in? Nissan and Mercedes are working on that problem.

Just studying to be a London cab driver can change your brain.

Rumors are still swirling about the discovery of the Higgs boson. The announcement is December 13.

I woke up yesterday, saw that the temperature outside was 36 degrees and thought “that’s not so bad.” I think I’m adjusting to the idea of winter, though it’s still early yet.

I already watch Mythbusters regularly, but I can’t wait to see this episode, given that they accidentally shot a cannonball through someone’s house.

Rick Perry’s “Strong” ad, which has spawned numerous parodies, also hit the most-hated list on YouTube, because the Perry campaign forgot to turn off the function which allows users to rate videos. How bad was it? It got more dislikes than Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video.

You have got to be kidding me. What the hell is wrong with them?

Can you tell the difference between quotes from a men’s magazine and from rapists?

A note to my fellow atheists out there: Bill Donohue, uber-jackass leader of the Catholic League, wants a Catholic to adopt you. If someone approaches me about it, I’ll tell them I’m down as long as I’m in on the inheritance, but I want the treasure stored up on earth, not the stuff waiting in heaven.

Lastly, I’d like to take a moment to remember my uncle, Bee Spears, who died unexpectedly late Thursday night. He was Willie Nelson’s bassist for over 40 years, and even though I saw him rarely, he had an incredible impact on my life. I’ll miss you, Uncle Bee.

We are no fans of Amazon here at The Rumpus. When we link to books we review, we link to small publisher websites or spdbooks.org or Powell’s. We’ve written about the online behemoth’s desire to avoid collecting sales taxes in California multiple times. The Daily Show’s John Oliver recently did a piece on how the California initiative process makes it harder for the state government to deal with fiscal crises and how Amazon is currently exploiting that process in an attempt to stop the state from forcing them to collect sales tax.

I want to emphasize that for a second–this isn’t a tax on Amazon. This is sales tax, which you would pay if you went into any store in California and purchased something. Amazon doesn’t want to collect it because it would lessen the competitive advantage they currently hold over local retailers.

But Amazon isn’t satisfied with that. Nope, they want to run local stores completely out of business, it seems. They have announced that they “will pay customers $5 to go into a local store, scan an item, walk out, and buy the same item on Amazon.” Gawker responds with “By all means use Amazon – they have amazing selection! – but there’s no need to be a tacky jerk to your neighborhood store in the process. Unless that store is a Wal Mart, Target, or American Apparel, in which case go to town (by which we mean, go out of town).” I don’t know. I get the sentiment–pit the big retailers against each other–but really, I don’t think I can bring myself to do it. Amazon can bite me.

Has CERN found the Higgs Boson?

If I actually drank mixed drinks, I might be more interested in this story about the physics of mixology. But I like the flavor of the alcohol I drink.

The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear meltdown was way worse than we’ve been told.

So it was a Rembrandt, then it wasn’t, and now it is again.

How long before we discover the Goldilocks planet?

So two days ago, I walked to work in the snow. Flurries–it didn’t stick except on the grass in the shade–but snow nonetheless, enough for my 8-year old self living in Big Branch, Louisiana to crap himself in glee to see. Oh, it’s going to be a long winter.

Who’s that going big-time in this month’s Poetry? Our very own Rumpus Poetry Book Club Board Member Camille Dungy, with a really amazing poem and fascinating discussion following.

Ought to throw his ass in jail just for being stupid. Seriously, we make fun of dumb criminals all the time–this is arguably more serious.

There’s a church in Kentucky that recently banned interracial couples from becoming full members. They’re rethinking that position after local outcry condemning it. It would be easy to be upset that such a thing is happening in this day and age, but I take heart in the fact that it was so roundly condemned, since I grew up in an area and era where segregation was very much practiced, even though it was against the law. The fact that this was a big deal means we’re making progress as a society.

This story really makes me sad because I always thought the Aptera was a really cool looking vehicle.

If you want to ride Jaws (where TS Quint and Brandi Svenning were married), you have until January 2, 2012. It’s shutting down.

I like Balloon Juice blogger mistermix’s take on last night’s eviction of the LA Occupiers. “There was a chance that cold weather in the North, and general boredom in the South, would cause the Occupy protesters to quietly lose interest and abandon their encampments. The work of [LAPD Chief Charlie] Beck and other movement supporters, most notably Linda P.B. Katehi and Michael Bloomberg, ensure that current Occupy protesters will stay energized, and that new recruits will be added to the Occupy encampments.”

The LA Times blog, which did some decent coverage of the arrests last night, fails miserably here when they say the protesters left their belongings and trash behind. That suggests the Occupiers just decided to head out and left their crap in the yard, as opposed to being evicted and forced to leave their things behind.

The LA Occupiers are regrouping, trying to figure out what their next move will be.

Tom Hayden on why Naomi Wolf’s conspiracy theory can’t explain the LA Occupation. Wolf’s theory can’t explain any of the occupations, frankly.

Had to happen–major corporations are trying to work Occupy into their ads, but surprise! not in a very accurate way.

HYbrid cars not only save gas–they’re safer too. Suck on that, SUVs.

So this can potentially help you learn more effectively. But can it help me write better poems?

Watch Popular Science blow up a turkey with a deep fryer. In slow-motion.

Seems that the Permian extinction only took a couple hundred thousand years instead of the much longer period originally thought.

The sad story of the English bulldog.