Today's Sign Of The Apocalypse

New Reality TV Show to Feature Tennis Sisters Venus and Serena: "Tennis super sisters Venus and Serena Williams will be featured in an upcoming reality TV series this summer.

The new show, which will air on the ABC Family channel in the U.S. with six episodes beginning in July, will reveal the behind-the-scenes life of Venus and Serena from on-court to off-court.

'It's about the Williams sisters,' said Serena. 'We lead very interesting lives off the tennis court as well, and then we're two fabulous world-champion tennis players. So it's kind of interesting to see how that works out, I mean, our training regime, our different jobs."

The Monkey Is Wise: Listen To The Monkey

Kung Fu Monkey: "Will of the People": "As of this month, going by the latest Quinnipac and CBS polls, recognition of SOME sort of legal agreement between gays comes in around 45-50% now -- using the word 'marriage' changes the numbers considerably, showing again the power of semantics. More tellingly, support for a Constitutional Amendment banning even marriage (the hot button word getting the biggest negative response) barely clears 40% in most polls. What does this indicate? What opposition there is, it's not as deep as it is broad. So, while one can argue either side of the issue, it's not so far out in the land of bizarre-o that the courts are breaking basic social construct by tackling the issue.

However ...

... when the Supreme Court struck down the bans against interracial marriage in 1968 through Virginia vs. Loving, SEVENTY-TWO PERCENT of Americans were against interracial marriage. As a matter of fact, approval of interracial marriage in the US didn't cross the positive threshold until -- sweet God -- 1991"

WOW

NASA World Wind: "World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there."

Dirty Little Secret or Mountain Out Of a Molehill?

MSNBC - Blogging Beyond the Men's Club: "So why, when millions of blogs are written by all sorts of people, does the top rung look so homogeneous? It appears that some clubbiness is involved. [Halley] Suitt puts it more bluntly: 'It's white people linking to other white people!' (A link from a popular blog is this medium's equivalent to a Super Bowl ad.) Suitt attributes her own high status in the blogging world to her conscious decision to 'promote myself among those on the A list.'" [Note: Consider that it's a little shortsighted to criticize a group for promoting it's own. Also what's considered "best" or "top" is pretty parochial. I mean it's like Baseball hosting the "World" Series every year without fielding teams from Puerto Rico, Japan, and Cuba to name a few. - Barry]

Christopher Priest Has Been Reading My Mind... tiny as it is

Riverside-cs.Org: The Ostracized Negro
More and more I feel like I want a divorce. I want to separate myself from my cultural roots, from home, checking into what other ethnicities might have me. Hefting one of his three trophies high, giving some rambling and quizzical acceptance speech, I just shook my head— not at [Kanye] West, who is who he is and I guess he's good enough at it to earn the little statue— but at the ignorance of Black America to hold this foolishness up as the highest and most visible form of African American art currently available.