Hi, I'm a Tea-Partier

Video games and marriage?

I got to thinking about the “sanctity” of marriage (interesting that the definition of sanctity in addition to the word holy, uses the word inviolability).

The thought process started as I was watching a video Cataclysm Cinematic Intro(World of Warcraft)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq4Y7ztznKc&feature=youtube_gdata while waiting for some files to upload to our large file format method of transfer.

I don’t know how I got from the video to marriage, but some of the steps were these:
Why in games and their movies are the societies quaint, often medieval-looking, when they have technology (and magic) to create warriors and weapons that fit the WMD category? Do we credit/blame Tolkien and other story/myth creators (and Joseph Campbell)?

Is it a comment on our tribal-mindset past as our world moves ahead in its ability to create technological methods to destroy while the distrust of ‘the other’ remains in us?

Somehow I got from there to the idea of using another’s idea to build on and from there to the idea of someone objecting to their ideas being used (perhaps because on my way to work I was looking at a blurb for a book on intellectual property while remembering the Harry Potter/Willy the Wizard lawsuit).

From there I jumped to the Supreme Court case (not a difficult jump, yesterday I was reading an item from the New Yorker that commented on the activism by the current SCOTUS’s conservative justices) about Fred Phelp’s and his Westboro Baptist crew protesting at military funerals. (For the record, I totally disagree with Phelps and his crew’s position and have some problem with their right to protest, but not based on my disagreement with their views. My issue is why they have the right to protest without restriction when people going to voice their opinions in political convention cities are restricted to ‘free speech zones?’ This is because of my firm belief that the First relates to Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” which is based on Voltaire’s statement "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.")

I recently read about the LGBT issue with the current administration’s talk of support but arguing for laws that are anti-equality. Part of me can see a law professor’s reason for dealing with the law in legal fashion, but do not consider it activism when a judge applies Constitutional principles to overturn wrongful laws.

Combine that and the right to free speech and disagreement, and the religion-based statements about marriage between one man and one woman, allowing marriage equality undermines the concept of marriage, etc.

Having been in 3 serial relationships in my life, I don’t define sanctity for other people, nor do I demand that they define/base their relationships on my terms/beliefs. While not Christian, I do like the Golden Rule concept and therefore I expect the same courtesy for freedom of thought be returned.

Finally (and luckily the 13 large memory files were now uploaded) this led to my thoughts on sanctity and how one-man-one-woman has certainly had some problems in upholding that concept (on another somewhat personal note, in an extended family with 13 grandchildren for one of my grandmothers, only 2 are in their original marriages).

So, in our celebrity-obsessed culture where movie stars testify before congress on the plight of the farmer and sell us everything from political opinion to aspirations to a similar lifestyle, here are some famous people with their examples of the holy estate:
• 8 months - Jennifer Lopez and Cris Judd wed October 2001, split July 2002. (Another Jennifer Lopez marriage to Ojani Noa – wed February 1997, split March 1998 – lasted13 months.)
• 8 months - Elizabeth Taylor and Nicky Hilton May 1950, split January 1951.
Famed bride Elizabeth Taylor got a jump on her string of weddings with her first marriage to hotelier (and grandfather to sisters Nicky and Paris Hilton) Nicky Hilton. 19 year-old Elizabeth reportedly said about the wedding, "I have a woman's body and a child's emotions."
• 7 months - Courtney Thorne-Smith and Andrew Conrad wed June 2000, split January 2001. They couldn't even make it to when their wedding pictures were infamously published by Instyle Magazine in February/March 2001.
• 5 months - Shannen Doherty and Ashley Hamilton wed September 1993, split February 1994. [Shannen Doherty also married Rick Salomon (of Paris Hilton sex tape fame) wed February 2002, split November 2002 for a total of 9 months.]
• 5 months -Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman wed November 1998, split March 1999. Like Britney and Jason, these two were wed in a quickie Vegas wedding. Rodman initially tried to get an annullment after nine days of wedded bliss, but the two managed to stick it out another four and a half months.
• 4 months, 24 days - Charlie Sheen and Donna Peele wed September 1995, split February 1996.
• 3 months, 15 days - Lisa Marie Presley and Nicolas Cage wed August 2002, split November 2002. (Lisa Marie Presley was also married to Michael Jackson wed May 1994, split December 1995 for a tally of 20 months.)
• 32 days - Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman wed June 1964, split July 1964. 32 days (and I am not sure which I sympathize with more as to why it didn’t work out)
• 30 days - Drew Barrymore and Jeremy Thomas wed March 1994, split April 1994. (Drew Barrymore also married Tom Green wed July 2001, split December 2001, a length of five months.)
• 9 days - Cher and Gregg Allman wed July 1975, split July 1975. Kids, another example of why you've got to watch out for those Vegas weddings. Just three days after divorcing Sonny Bono, Cher and musician Gregg Allman spontaneously flew to Vegas in his Lear Jet to wed. However, she reportedly soon discovered that his drug and alcohol problems were too much for her, and filed for divorce after only nine days.
• 8 days - Dennis Hopper and Michelle Phillips wed October 1970, split November 1970.
• 55 hours - Britney Spears' and Jason Allen Alexander wed January 3, 2004, split 2 days and 7 hours later.
• 6 hours - Rudolph Valentino & Jean Acker wed and split November 1919. (The jury's still out on whether Britney's marriage was shorter than famed lover Rudolph Valentino's. After just six hours, the bride locked Valentino out of the honeymoon suite! He soon gave up and headed home. However, they didn't finalize a divorce until 1922.)
• And, least we forget, a 1-m-1-w marriage is holy for both
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQTe47cR-Ws&feature=related

Addiction?

A quote in an e-mail from Bill (“Reading is the last act of secular prayer.” - Richard Powers) and a Facebook post by Deborah (“Once you learn to read you will be forever free." --Frederick Douglass) made this happen. Reading is my crutch, my education, my solace, my inspiration, my fear, my religion and my basis for home decoration; in other words a big part of my life:

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Mortimer J. Adler

A library is a hospital for the mind.
Anonymous

Read books. They are good for us.
Natalie Goldberg

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
Gaston Bachelard

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
Henry Ward Beecher

I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.
Groucho Marx

Outside a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

Read in order to live.
Gustave Flaubert

Don't join the book burners. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books.
The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
Atwood H. Townsend

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature,
to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
Eleanor Roosevelt

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.
Mccosh

Life happened because I turned the pages.
Alberto Manguel

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.
It is not true that we have only one life to lead; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
S. I. Hayakawa

The closest we will ever come to an orderly universe is a good library.
Ashleigh Brilliant

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me.
I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
Malcolm X

Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.
Yevgeny Zamyatin

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Virginia Woolf

When the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerers and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading. (1932)
Virginia Woolf

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
Henry David Thoreau





In books lies the soul of the whole past time.
Thomas Carlyle

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past,
the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
Amy Lowell

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape.
It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
Arthur Christopher Benson

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry.
Emily Dickinson

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.
Thomas Carlyle

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Marcus T. Cicero

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges

I have good reason to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.
John Keats

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
Lady M. W. Montague

The libraries have become my candy store.
Juliana Kimball

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury

He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.
John Milton


One half who graduate from college never read another book.
Herbert True

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
Chinese proverb

Read, read, read.
William Faulkner

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.
Desiderius Erasmus 1466-1536

Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
Austin Phelps

My home is where my books are. (1909)
Ellen Thompson

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
Henry Ward Beecher

Books do furnish a room.
Anthony Powell