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.
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?
