Category: Personal Posts

About America’s State/Church separation…

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Pennsylvania State Rep. Brian Sims: “As a reminder, Mr. Speaker, I do believe this has been forgotten entirely by many of my colleagues today: Each of us put our hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. We did not place our hands on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.” And of course not everyone swears an oath of office on a bible, Congressman Keith Ellison swore on a Koran (but that probably doesn’t count because it was Thomas Jefferson’s Koran).

The cruellest words from John Scalzi are ‘To Be Continued…’

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John Scalzi’s modern take on the serialised novel has come to an end. ‘The Human Division‘ saw 13 chapters published digitally over 13 weeks, a sort of Amazon Kindle version of ‘King of the Rocket Men’. It was billed as an experiment, and now the hardback is ready to be published in a more regular fashion, Scalzi has asked for feedback on his blog. I think it will be a tough book to read in one sitting, as opposed to thirteen blocks of content. Much like classic Doctor Who stories relied on the gap between the cliff-hangers to build up

The story behind IsThatcherDeadYet.com

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And then, finally, yesterday, almost three years after we originally registered the domain, we were flooded by a very sudden and very certain torrent of texts and Facebook messages, emails and Twitter replies. She is dead, they all said. In a panic, I forgot the site’s password, and then put up the wrong page for a few seconds, by accident. Jared did the same. It lived, it burned, it died. What now? It’s a monument, a story, a mad idea seen through to competition. It’ll be imitated, but never bettered. In their own words, this is how Jared and Antonio

And now the late arrivals at the Austin Film-makers Ball

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The day after I leave Austin, ‘Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia’ plays the Alamo thanks to the Badass Digest. Damn. [Sam] Peckinpah gets a lot of love for The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs and The Getaway – and rightfully so. But Alfredo Garcia holds a special place in the Peckinpah canon. It’s his grimiest, sickest, weirdest movie but also his most personal. It’s about how Bennie, an ex-pat American living in Mexico, learns that a local crimelord wants the head of the gigolo who knocked up his daughter. The reward: a cool million. But Bennie has some