So now with Who under wraps I can focus on other fannish activity.
SGA is about to restart along with Psych. I'm enjoying In Plain
Sight and the first season of Burn Notice - buy I'm not
anticipating getting seriously fannish about them.

It also means that my J/D Ficathon story is due in a week. I don't
know if it's good or bad that it's 80% done - it's certainly a lot
longer than I thought it would be. A good chunk of the length is me
convincing myself that this set-up is viable based on what I was asked
to write. I should have been working on it over the weekend, but you
know how that goes when all your time is spent anticipating the fandom
of greatest momentary interest.

Also, I haven't had that deadline adrenaline rush in so very long. I
need to get it done soon though, because it's in the 5K word range and
will take a bit of time to beta.

*cough* speaking of which, if anyone has a beta hankering, it's
Jack/Daniel, SG-1 first season, NC-17 I expect that I can have it
done by Friday sometime and need to post it sometime on Monday - er, I
think. There was a little discrepancy with the date that I asked the
mods to clarify. Anyway, if you'd like to beta, help would be
appreciated :-)

In the meantime I'm baking cupcakes - more from Vegan
Cupcakes Take Over the World. This book is awesome - a cheep
cookbook, small in size, big on drool worth photos and most important,
completely awesome tasting cupcakes. It's got the basics down with
chocolate and vanilla in a couple of forms but then it takes off into
the unique and exotic.

For tomorrow I'm working on an old favorite, Mucho Margarita (lime
tequila flavored). A new favorite Apricot Glazed Almond Cupcakes --
these were a big hit at work last week and bonus the topping is simple
and requires no icing. The new ones I'm going to try are the Orange
Pudding cupcakes and at rusty_halo's recommendation, the
Chocolate Stout Crumb Topped cupcakes.

I'll post more on these later in the week once I get to taste the new
ones and see how everything goes over. I finally tracked down a
couple of the more exotic ingredients, so I think the next one I try
will be the Coconut Lime ones.

For now, I'm off to the store because I was in the midst of all this
baking last night - and I ran out of sugar. Not limes, not oranges,
not stout, not apricot preserves, not almond flour - sugar. I actually
ran out of sugar *facepalm*

I was reading through some meta and had some thoughts on the subject, and suggested that if I did a poll...

And that's all I'm going to say until you answer my first set of questions. Under the cut I have more details. This poll is set up Kinsey style - a sliding scale of preference for the questions. The spot in the middle is for liking both equally. The extremes say you like one thing a whole heck of a lot more than the other. If you like Oranges a little more than Apples then give it a Orange (1), a bunch more - Orange (2), find it infinitely superior - Orange (3). <-- Three doesn't necessarily mean you won't eat an apple ever (although, it might). It's just that you know what you prefer.

ETA: I've just fixed the instructions above because they were mucked up. If you like something more, give it a bigger number *facepalm*

If you're familiar with one of the items we're comparing and gave the other a try but couldn't get into it - this poll's for you
If you're familiar with one of the items we're comparing and have never tried the other item - well, this isn't exactly for you, but it's not like we ever get any real scientific results out of an LJ poll anyway ;-)

Poll #1218843 Because I'm curious
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Fantasy or Science Fiction

SG-1 or SGA

( More questions and thoughts beneath the cut )

( Journey's End )

...except that the slowest download in a America is occurring right now on my laptop.

I've heard bunches of rumors and other than some casting ones, I don't know which rumors might be spec and which ones might be spoilers --- don't enlighten me ;-)

So I've been reading all sorts of spec around LJ about tonight's finale. A ton of stuff had never occurred to me, but once you get that spec ball rolling, it just doesn't stop. I was particularly intrigued by some of omphalos's spec and ran with it. ( all else, of course, belongs under cut )

A belated Happy Canada Day for you friends up North and a happy fourth of July for those around them there here parts :-)

Currently I'm waiting for the Direct TV repair man. I've got signal, but have been having issues with the system temporarily losing the signal when I'm trying to do important things like record. I mean, it does a lot of recording just fine, but then out of nowhere it craps out.

Yesterday was an early day at work, followed by a New Moon gathering. Didn't get home until 1:30 -- and up by 8 to wait for the DTV guy and you know wash a couple of icky dishes and move a bookshelf that was in front of the satellite cable connector. -- it was a small book case with mostly paperback. This also gave me the opportunity to vacuum the mouse poo that had been under the book shelf from previous residents. Scary what you find when you rearrange the furniture.

In the meantime, I've got the Fourth Doctor and Genesis of the Daleks in the DVD player, gearing myself up for tonight's DW finale. I have *LOTS* more to say about that but it will require it's own separate post. I tried to put up one last night, but I was having problems connecting at the friends house and then got home too late to keep my eyes open.

*** And in LJ news...

In the meantime, LJ is being reasonable and thoughtful again - I know, seriously.

Over in lj_policy they've pre-announced some upcoming changes in the suspension process that make complete sense and will overturn the previous slash and burn for first offense policy that was put in place by those idiots from Six Apart.

More importantly, they are in the discussion phase of other changes to the suspension process and have asked our opinions. They're going to modify the code so they have some options about how to handle temporarily suspended accounts. Currently they have to suspend the whole journal - which is one of the things that leads to your own posts being gutted when every comment they ever made on LJ gets suspended with them.

They are looking at options to block single posts and let the remainder of the journal continue to function - something I favor for communities. The other option they're looking at is blocking the offending content and making the journal some level of "read only" so that non-offending posts are still open to viewers but the suspended owner has lost use of the journal until the issue is resolved -- I like that for user journals because I think that you'd have a ton of people blow off the first option if it was only one entry they lost. But hey your mileage may vary and that's why you should go post your opinion, and hey, if you think they're doing a better job with this communication thing, don't forget to scratch them behind the ears and say good boy, so they keep it up.

Bonus - none of those damn cat macros ...yet. Actually because it's in lj_policy instead of news, it looks like the idiots are staying way. There's 3 pages of thoughtful comments, questions and discussion.

It's been all over my flist, but Don S. Davis - General Hammond of SG-1 - passed away over the weekend at age 65 from a heart attack. The Gateworld tribute indicates that Don's retirement from the show in Season 8 was due to health conditions that required him to lessen his workload.

As most of you know, I post pics over at jd_daily - a Jack/Daniel photo community. General Hammond wasn't the subject that I was focusing on, but I dug through my galleries and put up a brief tribute post with the ones I was able to find.

I was chatting a bit jokingly with tx_cronopioa short
while ago that I was envisioning President Obama ending some of the
most appalling (imho) Bush policies on day one - things run by
executive order like the family planning gag order and of course,
Faith Based Initiatives.

But apparently, Obama is planning on Expanding
Bush's Faith Based Initiatives. Oh, the article has quotes from
various folks including the former and current heads

--By the way, which one was it, John DiIulio or another guy who said
that he didn't believe that pagans existed and even if someone could
prove it, there was no way he would direct any of the Faith Based
money in the direction of their charitable effort. Damn, does
someone still have the link -- the link led to the Whitehouse.gov site
because he said it in a weekly blog post where he answered questions.

It just reminds me of the multi-year struggle for the VA to approve
the pentacle for use on Wiccan grave stones. - never mind that they
fast tracked several other religious groups in the meantime and one of
them had less than 20 known followers. Never mind that Wicca, as
opposed to the fast tracked sects, had been listed and explained in
the Army Chaplains Handbook for over a decade. Never mind that it
took the ACLU finally suing the VA for them to finally come to the
conclusion of their investigation.

And you know, what I'm saying here is not that I want it gone because
pagans get the bums rush. I'm saying it because every minority
religion gets treated like crap. Heck, many of the minority religions
don't have the kind of infrastructure to run a charity and would never
be entitled to participation, showing favoritism to the big religions
because, aw shucks, the small fries just aren't eligible.

And then of course there's the part where I don't believe for a
*fucking* nanosecond that there isn't some level of proselytizing
going on. Even if there isn't any active proselytizing the charity is
being handed out in a bag with a religious logo all over it.

I do think that the government should have programs to assist the
poor. I just think they should remember the first amendment, not
endorse a specific or group of specific religions, and find secular
organizations to provide the outreach.

The NY Times asked, Dr.
Bowden, author of "The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth," to update his
list with some favorite foods that are easy to find but don't always
find their way into our shopping carts

1. Beets
2. Cabbage
3. Swiss chard
4. Cinnamon
5. Pomegranate Juice
6. Dried Plums
7. Pumpkin Seeds
8. Sardines
9. Turmeric
10. Frozen Blueberries
11. Canned Pumpkin

(Dr. Bowden was trying to list things that would be available year
round, so it's not an endorsement of canned or frozen over fresh -
just trying to make folks understand that they can be available out of
season.)

I was immediately struck by the first three on the list - beets,
cabbage and Swiss chard - because these were items that I hardly ate
at all until I joined a CSA. In fact it's one of the most important,
but little talked about features of a CSA - Variety. Every CSA
member has at some point stared into their box and frowned, what is
that? And eventually, you decide that you've got to try saving it
from the compost pile and actually cook it.

--Sure, anyone could get adventurous down the produce aisle, but how
many of us do? The safe and familiar become very habit forming.
( more discussion under cut )

There was a bunch of response overnight for this week's 30 days episode of the anti-gay, Mormon woman coming to live with the gay couple raising children.

So I thought I'd post some additional info.

The actual episode title was Same-Sex Parenting and will re-air on FX

6/27 11pm
6/29 11pm

Amazon Unbox has the episode for $1.99

uhm...if I find any other downloadable source over the weekend, I'll post them ;-)

Also, kattahj passed a link to an article that describes how the mental mechanism works that allows deeply rooted beliefs to become more cemented when faced with obvious contradictions. -- Definitely worth a look if you want to understand something about how religious extremism works.

This week's episode was hard, hard, hard. They took a Mormon housewife from the OC and sent her to live with a gay male couple that were raising 4 boys that they adopted. As you might expect, she strongly believes that marriage is between a man and a woman, that every child needs a mommy and a daddy and that it's wrong for gays to adopt.

In most episodes of 30 Days, the opposing sides come to some insights into the other's pov. Sometimes this leads to a lessoning of aggressive feelings towards the other side, sometimes it leads to modification in views, but rarely does it lead to conversion. In this one, the two sides learned that the folks on the opposite side of their issue were scarier than they ever thought.

( More details about the episode )

George Carlin was the host of the first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975 - NBC is reairring the episode in SNL's normal time slot this coming Saturday Night.

The friends list has been filled this week with clips of George that warm my heart. I saw much of his most renowned stuff with the college friends either on VHS (possibly Beta) or at new apartments on that brand new cable thing, HBO. Speaking of which, the Wired article link in the next paragraph has HBO's schedule for rebroadcasting Carlin's HBO specials starting today and going into the weekend.

Every news provider is talking about the Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV - which, of course they're not saying, because the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that the FCC was allowed to punish broadcasters for airing indecent speech - a NYC radio station had played Carlin's performance on the public airwaves. The part of the ruling that's not mentioned as often is that the Supremes also said that, The words of the Carlin monologue are unquestionably "speech" within the meaning of the First Amendment... This article talks about how the monolog is required viewing for broadcast majors.

thebratqueen linked this fab editorial cartoon about Carlin's death.

wolfshark pointed out this YouTube clip
Carlin on why Pro-Life is Anti-Woman -or- Chickens are Decent People too - if you think you're going to be offended by this, you're probably right. I was all Amen! Go Rev George, Go!

I'm going to embed for you one of my favorite Carlin routines - Stuff




George, we're really going to miss you.
'