Held: Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose.

Shorter version: Bigotry isn’t enough.

‘Touch The Sound’ is a really wonderful film. It’s a documentary that follows Evelyn Glennie as she goes to find the sound all around the world. She’s a deaf percussionist. And lest you think this is the punch-line to a joke, she’s totally bad ass. In fact, I think I’m in love with Evelyn Glennie.

The flow of the film is Glennie and Fred Frith being avant-garde in an abandoned warehouse while tape machines run. We always come back to them after, for instance, jamming with some Afro-Cuban musicians in New York City, or jamming with some taiko drummers in Japan. And on the surface, the film is about her, and about the music she’s making. But under the surface, it’s really about sound. And even deeper than that, it’s about perception.

And there just aren’t a lot of movies about perception, are there?

People who are interested in different ways of learning, or different ways of perceiving the world should seek out this film. This means you, mr. narrator.

I’ll have more to say about this. I’m going to watch it again tomorrow night.

Movie web site (with trailer).

Also, while I was watching ‘Touch The Sound,’ I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the same filmmaker who did the documentary about Andrew Goldsworthy. And it turns out: Yes, it was.

(via Bob Harris, whose new book I’ve been meaning to get)

The wombat is wise.

Brought to you by the fine folks at the Foundation for Global Community. I like a think tank with ‘global community’ in the name. Mostly because it yields a sense of nostalgia for the moments of sanity before 2000. Then again, the FGC uses the Enneagram as a model for interconnectedness. Sigh.

A while back I started writing a mini-manifesto, which was actually just a list of declarative sentences about stuff. It was to be the foundational document of an imaginary think tank I was going to pretend to form called Greentank. Excerpt:

Greentank believes the tweak is better than the torque, and the torque is preferable to the protracted, time-wasting battle.

Greentank believes that a protracted battle over something that is right can be a liberating experience for all involved.

Greentank believes that a political battle is really a spiritual experience disguised as a quest for the destruction of the enemy, which will eventually make the concepts of ‘destruction’ and ‘enemy’ obsolete. Greentank can’t help it if our opponents choose not to dance with us, and would rather fight the flow, though we try and help them see otherwise.

Greentank believes that the flow of the dance, and the appropriateness of each step, is just as important as the political end result, if not more so.

Greentank beleives that each step *is* the political outcome. What people do is politics. How people respond to what is going on around them is politics. How people seek to influence and/or control the social forces around them is politics.

Greentank believes that two forces opposing each other equally is a shitty way to create stability, since one force could be right while the other is wrong. Greentank says that the logical fallacy of the middle ground is an important point of meditation when it comes to partisanship.

Greentank believes it will be wrong from time to time, and that this is unavoidable, and that all political opponents of greentank will also be unavoidably wrong from time to time, and that neither of these things is really all that big a deal, from the perspective of all the things that have gone wrong throughout human history.

Greentank believes that you’re a beautiful expression of spiritual motion through the material world, and that you’ll get better at it as we get better at it.

Ok, so much experimentation with boost later, I think it’s a better way to read random Xanga stuff than simply going to random sites. First of all it’s categorized by whoever did the nomination. Secondly, it’s also passed the threshhold of being boosted by someone, so it’s just one notch better than random. Plus if you get something inane, you can rate it at -2. W00t.

The main downside is that it doesn’t work with Safari. Which is a pretty big downside for me. I’ve used Firefox to do the boost routine, which works fine.

And the reason it won’t work is this: Someone has to spend a bunch of time looking at random Xanga stuff to rate it before the ‘boost’ becomes meaningful. And frankly, most of Xanga isn’t worth the time. It’s interesting in a sociology kind of sense, seeing what’s on the minds of a kerjillion teenagers who boost each other to be nice, but that charm wears off pretty quickly.

As for tags: Let’s say you’ve tagged a bunch of stuff over the last few months. You click on a tag in your ‘tag cloud,’ and see a few older articles. You realize you want to add a tag to one of those articles, but how? If you click through to the article, you’re at the read/comment page, which doesn’t let you edit the entry. The only way to add a tag to the article that’s staring you in the face is to go to the posting calendar thing and put in the proper date. Then you can click on ‘edit’ and add tags.

Useability: It’s what’s for breakfast.

Update: This entry being edited with sean’s super-spiff ‘bookmarklet.’ See comments.

I’d appreciate it if you could take ten seconds or so and boost this entry. Please, if you can, just boost it until it appears on the boosted content page.

It’ll give you a chance to figure out how the boost system works. You know you’ve been meaning to see what it’s about. It’s not as easy as it should be, but it’s also not that difficult.

Click on ‘boost this entry.’ For category, select ‘Other’ and enter ‘boostbomb.’

Then go to the rating page, and start being relentless. All those ‘blog entries you disdain? You get to express your disdain.

Go on. Boost me now. I’ll be your friend.

Yesterday, I posted a picture of the I-90 bridge over the Columbia.

It’s not a very good piece of documentation, since you can’t even see all of the bridge. But I do think it conveys the bigness of the Columbia, and some of the eerie harshness of the landscape.

Today, however, I’m planning a route. I’m planning to drive to Texas over a lot of blue highways. The plan is to drive a large part of US route 12 across Idaho (lots of primitive hot springs), then up to the eastern edge of the Rockies in Montana (Montana state highway 200, US route 89), and then to Choteau, MT.

Choteau is the northernmost point of US 287. And Port Arthur, TX, is the southernmost point. So it stands to reason that an obsessive person such as myself would want to drive the whole thing.

Anyway. Getting back to the bridges… Winding my navigational way across Washington, trying to figure out the best way to get from I-90 to US 12, I come across WA 26 and 261, which serve my purpose nicely. 261 crosses the mighty Snake River, just downstream from the confluence with the Palouse. (Note: Always refer to the mighty Snake as ‘the mighty Snake.’ For it is, indeed.)

Up until 1968, there was a ferry boat to take traffic across at this point. It was called the Palouse ferry or Lyons ferry. But in 1968 someone decided to put a bridge there. The dams on the mighty Snake were changing the flow of the river such that it took much longer to get across. So a bridge was needed. It had to be big, but for a three-digit state highway, how much do you want to spend?

It turns out that in 1927, a bridge was built over the Columbia where I-90 now crosses it. In 1963, that bridge was dismantled in favor of the interstate bridge you see in my picture. (Note: No need to say that the Columbia is mighty. Everybody knows. It’d be overstating the case. It would be like saying that the Mississippi is ‘jazzy.’)

The former bridge from the Columbia was taken out of mothballs and rebuilt over the mighty Snake at Lyons ferry, six years after it was taken down, and forty-one years after it was originally built. It’s still there now: The Lyons Ferry Bridge.

And here’s an article about it.

It’s not many bridges that can say they’ve spanned more than one river in their lifetime.

Here’s a quiz: Did George W. Bush ever give the message that the US had to ‘stay the course’ in Iraq?

Answer in comments, please.

Today:

Previously:

And the one that started it all:

And yes, I was there in my van (note Northwest Forest Pass tag hanging from mirror):

I had to go for a drive today. It’s the first day the van’s been up to it, and that there’s been sun. So off I went.

I went the back way through Woodinville, mostly to get a burger, but also to avoid some traffic. The Woodinville-Duval road… The fog still hung over the Snoqualmie valley. Up the Skykomish valley on Ben Howard Road. I haven’t been able to find out who Ben Howard was, or why there’s a road named after him.

Highway 2. Up the valley, over the pass. Lovely day, thinking about stuff while my soul was going through its reboot process.

By the time I got to Icicle Creek, all the thinking was done, and I was ready to just enjoy it. Climbed around on some boulders, took a few pictures (none very good)… The trees were golden yellow and orange on the streambed with evergreens up higher. The creek valley is a fantasyland of eroded granite.

High up on the plateau to the south, is an area called the Enchantments. Not many places warrant such names, but this place does. Not that I went there today; just that I kept thinking about it while I was there. The age-old problem of discontent because of what’s in the next valley over.

In Leavenworth, they were putting up the Christmas decorations. I can’t say I blame them, because it’s not clear when the next sunny weekend will be. Leavenworth is a little town that decided to theme itself as a faux Bavarian village. Everything in the town has to look like a Disneyland version of the Alps. Even the McDonald’s has a big, wooden, hand-painted sign.

At some point I decided to keep heading east. I don’t know why. At some other point I had to decide to go all the way to the Columbia to head south instead of going south on 97. So after consulting the map, that’s what I did. Crossed to the east side at Wenatchee.

I hadn’t seen that section of the Columbia. I’m always amazed at how big it is. Even without the dams it would be huge. It’s a big, wide valley in the volcanic basalt. Dramatic cliffs. Hoodoo-like formations in the middle of the river.

Apple trees. Pear trees. Orchard after orchard. A sign: “Pickers needed.” Mexican restaurants with Spanish-language signs. El Pacific Norteno!

A diversion in the route, out of the gorge, onto the plains. Half-hour later:

I-90 crossing the Columbia.

Uneventful return home across western Washington.

I love me some billmon. Someone should be paying him money to ‘blog. Just ‘blog all day long and end up rich. That’s what should be happening to billmon.

Anyway, I’d just like to take a moment and point out some military newspeak billmon quotes in his ongoing ‘Hirohito Watch’ series:

“In Baghdad, Operation Together Forward . . . has not met our overall expectations in sustaining a reduction in the level of violence.” –Major Gen. William Caldwell, Press conference, October 19, 2006

‘Sustaining a reduction?’ You mean ‘reducing?’