Wading in the Internet

I thought I would follow the lead of my Blogging Buddy Roger Green and share some of what I’ve been taken with on the web. There’s no theme to this, by the way—these are just things I thought were interesting.

First up, only because it was posted today (and I Tweeted it twice), is a piece on SciBlogs “Molecular Matters”. But it’s not about science (which the site does very well, by the way), it’s about marriage equality. “Stupid Arguments against Same-Sex Marriage” lists and scores points against the stupid arguments against marriage equality. He also does so far better than I could (I tend to get a wee bit too intense…).

Meanwhile, and sort of related, at Scoop’s Werewolf online magazine, Alison McCulloch looks at the polls put out by the far right New Zealand christianist group “Family” First to see how they manage to get their polls reported on so uncritically by the NZ news media. It’s a wide-ranging look at private polling and how easily the findings get reported as fact, even when the group draws an unsupported conclusion from the results, or when the questions themselves are flawed. It’s a great analysis

Life is not all politics and advocacy, of course, and I was taken aback when I saw the trailer for the new Dark Shadows movie. I’m sorry, I really like Johnny Depp and all, but they made it a friggin’ comedy!! That’s just wrong. I grew up with the original TV soap opera, rushing home from school to see it. When the movie House of Dark Shadows was released, my friends and I went to see that, too. I even had a Barnabas Collins Dark Shadows game, though I seem to remember getting gum stuck onto the glow-in-the-dark fangs that came with it. So, messing with Dark Shadows, they’re messing with my childhood (a bit like when the Thunderbirds movie was done as a kids’ movie). Actually, speaking of Johnny Depp and messing with things, I’m not sure that making a 21 Jump Street movie as a comedy is a good idea, either.

Back home in New Zealand, the “talkerati” have been frothing over the speeches this week by current Prime Minister and leader of the conservative National Party, John Key, and Opposition Leader, and head of the Labour Party, David Shearer. While Key was dismissed by everyone (what did he say again?) the argument has been whether David Shearer is selling out the base of Labour Party. Rightie John Armstrong thinks Shearer is moving Labour right, while Lefty Matt McCarten sees him as playing a longer endgame. Personally, I think McCarten is closer to being accurate, but we’ll see.

These are only a few things that caught my eye the past couple days. Imagine if I paid attention over a week—why, I might give Roger a run for his money! Or, not.