Good news for all you gay people

Well, all you gay people who got married somewhere else and then moved to New York.

According to the appeals division of the NY Supreme Court your marriage will be recognised.

At least until they pass a law saying they won't.

Huzzah.

Making assumptions

This is a study into people's responses to the same woman, with headscarf and without. Interesting to see.

Clearing out the spam folder

In the last 17 days I've had 2292 spam picked up by gmail. And 3 non-spam. Which isn't bad.

That includes about 250 bounces on one day, when someone was clearly sending emails pretending to be me...

I love critical theory

Paragraphs like this make me happy:

Big Brother on the other hand, to take a typical pseudo-modern cultural text, would not exist materially if nobody phoned up to vote its contestants off. Voting is thus part of the material textuality of the programme – the telephoning viewers write the programme themselves. If it were not possible for viewers to write sections of Big Brother, it would then uncannily resemble an Andy Warhol film: neurotic, youthful exhibitionists inertly bitching and talking aimlessly in rooms for hour after hour. This is to say, what makes Big Brother what it is, is the viewer’s act of phoning in.

Another nice snippet:

The pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless.

and a final one:

This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism.

From a fascinating article called The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond.

Some day I want to conduct my own theme music

Just like Darth Vader:

(cheers to drjon)

Another recommendation request

I have gas boiler insurance with British Gas HomeCare. They charge me a tenner a month to fix my boiler when it breaks.

It broke.

I phoned them.

The next time they can get a person to me is Tuesday morning,

Frankly, this doesn't strike me as great, considering I have no heating and it's January in Scotland.

Anyone care to recommend a better company to go with?