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Archive | June, 2011

Marriage 2000: A Time Odyssey

By on June 30, 2011 2

The following passage (CHT Jesse Walker) from Ehrlichman’s Witness to Power: The Nixon Years, quoting Nixon on same-sex marriage in 1970 –

I can’t go that far; that’s the year 2000! Negroes [and whites], okay. But that’s too far!

– irresistibly reminds me of these lines toward the end of the recent Doctor Who episode “Day of the Moon,” set in 1969:

a different Doctor Who and a different Nixon

DOCTOR: Canton just wants to get married. Hell of a reason to kick him out of the FBI.

NIXON: I’m sure something can be arranged. … This person you want to marry – black?

CANTON: Yes …

NIXON: I know what people think of me, but perhaps I’m a little more liberal –

CANTON: … he is.

NIXON: I think the moon is far enough for now, don’t you, Mr. Delaware?

CANTON: I figured it might be.

It struck me because I’d seen DW viewers complaining that it was “unrealistic” that Nixon would even have so much as considered the issue of same-sex marriage.

No Sex Please, We’re British; No Lemonade Jokes Please, We’re American

By on June 28, 2011 6

Gwen and Jack

Well, this is annoying:

When Torchwood returns to television next month, there’ll be two different versions of every episode. Some scenes will only be in the US version, while other scenes will only be in the UK version. … Off the top of my head, there’s one somewhat racy sex scene in the third episode that I could easily see being trimmed for UK broadcast television. And presumably some of the British in-jokes that no American will get (like the one about lemonade being “fizzy”) might find themselves on the cutting-room floor in the US. … It sounds like, overall, the British versions will be the longer cuts because of the refrence to “episode timings.”

So I guess nobody gets to see the fourth season in full until the dvd comes out.

Them Poor Old Slaveholding Founders Need All the Help They Can Get

By on June 28, 2011 6

Walter Williams writes:

Here’s my hypothesis about people who use slavery to trash the Founders: They have contempt for our constitutional guarantees of liberty. Slavery is merely a convenient moral posturing tool as they try to reduce respect for our Constitution.

Well, I don’t regard slavery as “merely a convenient moral posturing tool,” but yes, I do have contempt for the Constitution’s so-called guarantees of liberty, and I am certainly out to try to reduce respect for that statist and statism-enabling document. So yes, he’s essentially right about people like me.

His Days Like Crazy Paving

By on June 24, 2011 2

When you’re selling a book of poetry and you offer a sample poem as an enticement, you will presumably pick one of the better poems in the collection, not one of the worse ones. And so if the sample poem is unbelievably wretched, that would tend to bode ill for the book as a whole.

I’m just saying.

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