Today is a good day…to linkdump.

[bodlon]

- Bill O’Reilly thinks being transgender and presenting as one’s proper gender is like dressing up as an Ewok. Man. You know, I just can’t tell you how often I show up to my dayjob wearing a furry little suit and a raggedy cape.

- Rachel Maddow’s commencement address on the virtues of a life well-lived versus personal success. This is beautiful. I hope lots of people listen to this and take it to heart.

- One from the “Catherynne M. Valente is right about everything ever” files: her reaction to a scare article about children of divorce — shock, horror — divorcing.

“It’s because we saw that divorce wasn’t the end of the world, our parents didn’t die because their marriage didn’t work, that one and only one forever wasn’t the only way, and that sometimes it’s better to leave than to be unhappy for the rest of your life.”

I am, technically speaking, a child of divorce. My mother married twice, both times before I was born. I don’t remember my father at all, though I half-remember riding in the car and my mother and my grandmother discussing something which might have had something to do with her filing, but I’m not sure.

What I am sure about is that my mother’s own divorces have surprisingly little to do with divorcing my own ex, who’d come to the United States on a student visa, and who I married because it was that or split up (with an added bonus of my ex telling stories of standing on rail tracks with suicidal intent back home and being terrified of going back). It was ugly and dumb, and to say we were profoundly incompatible barely scratches the surface of how bad things became.

As one of that article’s oh-so-shameful 91% of divorcees who are also children of divorce, I want to say that’s not such a bad thing. I think I prefer being divorced to miserable, mutually abusive, or dead.

- Nick Mamatas on what Senator Ben Nelson might not be aware of in light of his statement that he’s unaware of ATM fees, but knows “about the holograms.” I would have benefited from a beverage warning on this.

- The Party of No hates science. Not surprising (this is the party of abstinence only education, global warming skepticism, and intelligent design), but it’s rare they’re so overt in damaging education and research infrastructure just to be dicks. Memo to everyone and everything: you too can be a political football for the Republican Party.

- Science is awesome because it lets us hear other planets. Want more? Go here.

- LA boycotts Arizona over crazy-ass racist legislation. Arizona utilities commissioner threatens to turn out the lights. Turns out it doesn’t work that way. Boy, that big hole of stupid AZ is digging just keeps getting deeper.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com