Marriage News Watch, April 21, 2014

Fortunately, this one's easy. I'm exhausted, and I cut my left little finger very badly, which means because of the bandage, I keep hitting "CAPS LOCK" by mistake.

Anyway, on to Matt Baume:

I know, I know. . .

I haven't posted for a looong time. I moved. It was horrible.

And it seems like I've read all the news stories before -- several times.

Give me a few days.

Marriage News Watch, April 14, 2014

With, of course, the adorable Matt Baume:

Paul Ryan Has Another Budget

And it's even worse than the last one. Bernie Sanders sounds off:

I don't know the details of Ryan's "new" budget, but given his past performance, I can guess. I doubt that it has any redeeming qualities at all (unless you're worth a few hundred million -- or a military contractor).

And I wonder how much it's going to increase the deficit.

Here's some commentary by Digby, taking off from this news report. This is good:

Republicans say the new "premium support" system for future Medicare retirees who are now 55 or younger would prevent the budget from spiraling out of control as more baby boomers retire and the present system collapses. They also say the redesigned Medicare program would offer seniors more choices and curb costs.

The doomsday scenario is good -- Medicare "spiraling out of control"? Is it any wonder no one except Fox News junkies takes this seriously?

Oh, and the part about repealing the ACA? Read this. Because it is so totally not working.

On Brendan Eich, Public Discourse, and the "Gaystapo"

I'm preparing to move, which is why I haven't been posting much lately, and why I haven't commented on the whole Brendan Eich/Mozilla brouhaha -- I've been ambivalent about the whole outcry, dismayed by the vitriol in the comments of a few blogs that usually have intelligent discussions, and just too distracted to write anything coherent about it. There have, however, been a couple of good posts on the lot of issues around this whole event. Rob Tisinai has written one of the clearest at Box Turtle Bulletin.

Marriage News Watch, April 7, 2014

Saturday Science: Hummingbirds' 22 Million-Year-Old Family Tree

22 million years. I had no idea hummingbirds had been around that long. And they've been very successful at being hummingbirds.

The new, time-calibrated evolutionary tree shows that ancestral hummingbirds split from the swifts and treeswifts about 42 million years ago, probably in Eurasia. By about 22 million years ago, the ancestral species of all modern hummingbirds had made its way to South America, and that's when things really took off.

The Andes Mountains are a particular hotspot for hummingbird evolution, because diversification occurred along with the uplift of those peaks over the past 10 million years. About 140 hummingbird species live in the Andes today.

Hummingbirds are the major, if not only, pollinators for certain species of orchids, which, funny thing, also show remarkable diversity and adaptation in the Andes. Hummingbirds are, however, a New World phenomenon. Their niche as orchid pollinators in the Old World seems to be largely the province of certain species of moths. Well, where there' a niche, there's an organism, I always say.

(Not that hummingbirds pollinate only orchids, or that orchids are only pollinated by hummingbirds. But there's a strong relationship among certain species, and a lot of evidence for co-evolution.)

And a little bit of a romantic vision, courtesy of Martin Johnson Heade (who did a lot of paintings of orchids and hummingbirds, if I remember correctly):

Orchid with Two Hummingbirds, 1871

Another Day, Another Page

Epinions music reviews now published.

Sometimes I surprise myself. I'll let you guess what that means.

Idiot du Jour

From noted Constitutional scholar Louie Gohmert (R-Nowhere on this planet):

Gohmert pointed out that a Congressional Research Service report revealed that President Thomas Jefferson, who coined the phrase "separation of church and state," had also attended church services at Statuary Hall.

"But it was to be a one-way wall, where the state would not dictate to the church," the Texas Republican insisted. "But the church would certainly play a role in the state."

Somehow, using Thomas Jefferson as an example of an observant Christian betrays a certain lack of familiarity with the man.

And, as one commenter asked, "Whose church?" You do notice, I trust, that Gohmert's little "historical example" is all about Christianity. Sort of leaves the rest of us out in the cold, doesn't it?