babbling blue

HRC’s Buying for Equality 2010

Buying for Equality 2010 helps us support businesses that support us with every purchase we make.

Despite the economic downturn, more businesses than ever rated 100 percent on the HRC Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index — the basis for this guide — through banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, providing benefits for LGBT employees and their families and supporting LGBT equality publicly. Find out more about the criteria.

Please keep this in mind when shopping this holiday season and beyond. Thanks!

As long as I’m listing, I’m sad to say I’ve made very little progress on my burger to-do list from August. I’ve only had burgers at two of those places! They are:

Epic Burger: I think this place is over-rated. The burger itself was pretty bland and relied almost entirely on the toppings (which were good). Why even bother with a burger if it’s all about the toppings? Also, I had some . . . let’s just say gastro-intestinal discomfort after eating here, so I don’t think I’ll go back.

Marc Burger at Seven on State: This was a pretty good burger, though expensive. And it was really, really messy. I went whole hog and got the namesake burger and it came with a fried egg. It was either sunny-side up or over easy, and the yolk got everywhere!

I’m going to try to make better progress on this list next year!

I came across this list of “most significant” fantasy & sci-fi books a few years ago and started reading the books on it that I hadn’t yet. But then I kind of forgot about it. I tracked it down again and decided to post it here for the benefit of…well mainly myself. But if anyone else finds this useful, all the better. The ones I’ve read (to the best of my tattered memory) are in bold. I’d like to start working on the list again.

The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley (Started it but got distracted)
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
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Comcast + NBC = Bad Idea

http://www.freepress.net/comcast

Food is really cheap in the keys!

I’m in Miami, trick!

It’s cloudy here. No me gusta!

Please take a moment to go here to send a note to President Obama and your representatives in Congress urging them to support the repealing of the unconstitutional and discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act. It takes no time at all. Thank you!

I reluctantly admit it, Twitter is good for something. I was having gmail problems and wanted to find out if it was localized or if gmail was–as it appeared–down. I searched “gmail is down” (in google, of course) and the top result said “Is gmail down? Ask Twitter!”

Huh…well yeah I guess that’s good advice, thought I. So I went to Twitter.com only to be told that Twitter was busy, as there were too many tweets! Uh oh! Internet meltdown! But I hit refresh about 30 seconds later and I was able to search for “gmail”. I was greeted with a great many tweets indicating that gmail was down. Shortly thereafter a nifty Web 2.0-y notice appeared on the page telling me that there were 633 new results matching my query since I searched…and this was in less than a minute. That’s pretty impressive.

So yeah, gmail is down. And Twitter–a site I don’t really give a damn about–is good for telling me that gmail–a site I’m glued to all day–is down. Thanks for the tweets!

From two separate “30 Best Burgers in Chicago” lists, these are the places I want to try, in no particular order. Anything marked with an asterisk(*) appears on both lists; these places are top priority to try.

• Marc Burger* at Seven on State
• HotChocolate*
• Kuma’s Corner*
• Custom House
• Naha*
• David Burke’s Primehouse*
• Bull & Bear – I’ve had their Kobe beef sliders at a Yelp event, and they were amazing!
• The Capital Grille

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