Wrong. It was overturned because Prop. 8 was clearly unconstitutional. Study civil rights law as I have and you'll understand. These are the facts: Marriage may be considered by some people as a holy thing but as far as the government is concerned, it's nothing more than a civil contract. When the government prohibits certain persons from entering into such a contract simply because of their sexual orientation or gender without there being a rational reason for that prohibition, it's unconstitutional because it's then considered to be arbitrary. There is no good reason for that prohibition that makes any sense. The excuses used by religious conservatives in the past have been shown to be crap. Gay marriage is almost a fait accompli in the U.S. and there is very little anyone can do about it.

Incidentally, recent polls show that California voters would not pass an initiative like Prop. 8 today and that a majority support gay marriage.

Some believe that it's not possible that life arose from simple organic compounds. Sure, there are people who believe a lot of things. There are the Mormons and the Scientologists who have their space alien fantasies. There are those who think that Jews and black people are inherently inferior to those of "Aryan" ancestry. There are those who still cling to the idea that Obama was not born in Hawaii, that he is a Muslim, etc. etc. etc. Yet, nearly everyone to actually analyzes such beliefs can find no credence for them. "Cosmos" is science, after all, what has been demonstrated to be true or seems to be so based upon the evidence.

If the lunatic fringe want equal time, they can make their own damned show and show it on one of the Christian nutcase cable channels.

Oh yes. Such as being asked to give someone a gun and the person complies, starting with the bullets.

Oh, we've learned something. We've learned that this is something the government doesn't want to deal with. How much sludge does a company have to pour into a river before the government not only takes notice but does something about it?

This rover has been running ten years and has been used to do great science, far more than anyone ever anticipated. All the rovers have far exceeded their intended lifetimes. In other words, they're cheap. X number of dollars was spent to delivery Y amount of science and they got far more than they bargained for. Continuing the funding for the the rover means that this science gets even cheaper.

What Congress really ought to do is give NASA $10 billion, tell them to build and launch more rovers of this type, and send them all over Mars. $10 billion will pay for a lot of rovers.

Well, more specifically, why airlines won't install this device unless they're made to do it... and they won't.

If you were Malaysian Airlines right now you might wish you had one of these devices installed on the plane because it would resolve much of the public relations headache they are currently facing by letting them know NOW what was happening to that plane before it disappeared.. But that's about all it would save them. It won't save them anything else.

An airline is only going to want to install such a device if it directly benefits them financially and this device offers very little.

I doubt the FAA is going to require US carriers to install it because it offers very little the black boxes don't offer. It doesn't happen very often that a black box is unreadable or unrecoverable after a crash. It happens, but probably not often enough for installation of this device to be worth the cost and the trouble, especially that when those boxes are unavailable investigators have almost always been able to figure out what went wrong by using other evidence.

It is an amazing place and easy to get to without a car. They also have either a woolly mammoth, a mastodon, or both on display, or did the last time I was there. The museum is evidence that the Los Angeles area was a kind of Garden of Eden during the last Ice Age. Of course, every Eden has to have its serpent to spoil it. In that place, the serpent was the saber-toothed lion.

And while you're there, the county art museum is next door if you like that kind of thing.

You are probably confusing the subway with the trolley lines and the Metro Link trains, all of which run above ground for the most part.

This is very interesting. You aren't going to find clams and sea lion heads in the La Brea tar pits. The most unusual thing I can recall they've found in there was a human skeleton of a native American woman who was bashed on the head and her body dumped in a pit.

Ordinary domestic pussycats do just fine living in groups. That's one of the reasons why they do well living with humans and with other cats and dogs as well. But cats are solitary hunters, unlike dogs and wolves which hunt in packs.

That actually is not true. My experience is that my evil cat knows when I'm in a evil mood myself. She stays away. She also knows when I'm sick or feeling sad.

I am pretty sure that my beloved evil black cat knows my voice quite well. Indeed, she not only has figured out my voice, she's figured out everything else. She's highly manipulative. While I have trouble training her, she's got me well-trained.

As I sometimes say to my evil black cat when she gets a bit crazy and decides to sink her claws into me, "Cat, the other white meat." So far she hasn't worked.

Grind the beans? Well, I don't drink coffee that much so I'll stick with the ground coffee I buy from Starbucks or Peets. But I use a small four-cup drip drip maker I've had for well over a decade. It's not quite as simple as the Keurig system but it's pretty simple. Empty old filter and grounds into trash, insert filter, scoop in coffee, pour in water, turn on switch, wait.

Historically, there have been easier and cleaner ways of making coffee not dissimilar to the Keurig system. I have vivid memories of my Ohio grandparent's coffee percolator gurgling and growling early in the morning. Those machines used circular filter pouches not unlike oversized tea bags and many coffee producers sold them. What they poured out smelled wonderful and tasted awful. Coffee making as gotten better.