I recently attended a Safe Zone training program at my university. It is designed to help faculty and staff be more aware of LGBT issues and thus create a more welcoming atmosphere. After completing it, one gets a Safe Zone badge that one can stick on one’s door so that anyone who comes there knows that you are accepting of them.
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Some time ago, I wrote about a study that said that we humans could smell 390 different smells. This seemed big enough to me but as commenter ChasCPeterson pointed out, this was not the full story because that number referred to the distinct number of olfactory sensors we have that can identify specific molecules but that we can actually smell combinations of these basic smells and the number of combinations can thus be much larger.
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Bill Donohue, head of an outfit called the Catholic League and who is more Catholic than the pope, seems to make a good living and gains publicity by protesting loudly at anything that can be interpreted as a slight on Catholicism. He was predictably outraged (his outrage meter is always at 11) at the attempts by LGBT groups to march in the St. Patrick’s day parades in New York and Boston. When they were rebuffed, Donohue was again outraged that beer companies Sam Adams, Heineken, and Guinness withdrew their sponsorship and vowed not to drink their beer.
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The big US internet technology companies protested loudly that the mass spying by the NSA on the people using their systems was done without their knowledge or consent. One could be excused for being skeptical of their claims of innocence and now a top lawyer for the NSA confirms our doubts, saying on Wednesday that Silicon Valley companies knew all along that the NSA was spying on their systems.
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When I was reading the Harry Potter books, although J. K. Rowling told a good yarn and plotted her stories well, the romance between Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley never seemed to me to be plausible. It seemed like the author was trying to avoid the obvious narrative device of the leading man and leading woman getting together at the end and was going for the slightly counter-intuitive relationship. It just did not work for me. Harry’s romance and marriage to what’s-her-name was also implausible as can be seen from the fact that I can’t even recall her name (or her face from the films) and remember anything about her except that she was Ron’s sister.
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You may have heard of the Christian school teacher in Louisiana who ridiculed a student in her class who happened to be Buddhist. She seems to be a real piece of work and what was worse, was backed up by school and district authorities.
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Jon Stewart of The Daily Show never gets tired of the opportunity to make fun of Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s facial resemblance to a turtle and to try out his voice at how a turtle might talk. McConnell’s latest campaign commercial has provided Stewart with another golden opportunity to poke fun at his stiffness.
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Cleveland is your ordinary mid-western town in a state (Ohio) that is not known for its liberal views on social issues. But I must say that when it comes to LGBT rights, it has shown itself to be well ahead of some cities that have ostensibly more liberal reputations.
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The Christian Science Monitor has reproduced the 32-question survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life to gauge people’s knowledge of religion.
According to the Pew results:
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Via Jonathan Turley, I came across this shocking story of pregnant women in police custody who, when it came time to deliver their babies, were shackled to the beds. This is even if they are not accused of anything remotely dangerous. One woman has sued to stop this barbaric practice.
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