I've read in a bunch of places: "See! The country of the Inquisition just legalised gay marriage!" Not wanting to dismiss the barbarity of the inquisition, I wanted to do a little reading to place things like duration and body count (I mean, "The country of the Holocaust just legalised gay marriage!" "The country of slavery just legalised gay marriage!") since my history studies didn't quite get that far.

So I started with wikipedia.org, and don't think I can continue, because the following sentence is making me laugh too hard:

Unexpectedly, at the end of the 15th century, under Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile, the Spanish inquisition became independent of Rome.

Fuck.

Unexpectedly

Bwah.

Well, I'd hope any of those people would be interesting, at the very least. Agree with them or not, at least theoretically these are folks with really important jobs that they got primarily on the basis of their ability to judge things and form an opinion. It's not even like elected officials who could be yahoos who can just fool The People.

Yes, it isn't like "interesting" is that significant a compliment.

Big Fish:

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- Thai fishermen caught a 293-kilogram (646-pound) catfish that may have been the world's largest freshwater fish, wildlife conservation groups said.

The Mekong giant catfish was netted by villagers in a remote part of northern Thailand, the World Wildlife Fund and the National Geographic Society said in a statement.

When wildlife officials caught wind of the catch they urged the villagers to release the adult male so that it could spawn, but it later died and was eaten, the groups said. They did not say when the massive fish was caught.

Crap. Whenever I've taken those match-your-politics-to-the-government-official's quizzes, O'Connor has been the Supreme Court justice whose views tended to correspond most with my own. Can we arrange a trade where Scalia retires in her stead?

As promised, Spock the Sith Slayer

All about fanfic. Sadly, the article is shorter than I had hoped. But the woman who rewrote Chicken Run with the chickens replaced by humans is... I don't know... perhaps a bit confused.

My really crazy crazy person has shown up. She may have a fucking PhD in this fucking field, but she's WRONG. I knew this. But still I verified with 5 other fucking PhDs and educators and I'm really at a loss about what to tell her. If she refuses to use the STANDARD UNITS ACCEPTED BY the governing body and used for the past how many hundred years, well....I really can't help her.

I hold out hopes that we'll get another Stealth-Moderate. I think Souter was expected to be fairly conservative, but he's just an odd New England hermit intellectual. Dangerous folks, they tend to think about things.