I forgot to post birthday wishes Sunday...

...for dandelion_diva and ailsaek, both of whom had birthdays on the 18th. Belated happy returns of the day to you both and apologies for spacing out on you, and I hope the day was pleasurable. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. (Or, to use suecochran's version, "Me a cowboy, me a cowboy, me a Mexican cowboy.") .

Neil finally 'fesses up about who "Sweet Caroline" was...and is

In a Newsvine.com repost of an AP article here, pop-music legend Neil Diamond comes clean at last about the real woman (child, actually, at the time) who inspired him to write his 1969 #1 hit song "Sweet Caroline," which has enjoyed a recent resurge in popularity...and a rousing sing-along of which Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm finished their concert here two weeks ago. Hint: he finally got to sing it for her in person at her 50th birthday party recently.

Sexiest. Teapot. EVAR.

Courtesy of Gizmodo.com, for all you fellow tea drinkers/oatmeal eaters out there who want a hip way to boil your water:
The Soropot® Teapot

Will this Friday be "Shop 'Til You Drop Day" for you...or Buy Nothing Day?

If you work for or own a retail store, or a chain of them, this Friday, November 23 is more than just the day after Thanksgiving for you: it's "Black Friday," the official launch of the annual December holiday shopping season for Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa/Solstice etc. and the biggest shopping day of the year in consumerist nations such as ours, with the possible exception of December 24th. (Full disclosure: I currently work for a temporary staffing service on long-term assignment to one of the world's biggest retail operations.)

If you happen to be an environmentalist, a social justice activist or just someone concerned about the impact of rampant  consumerism on our lives, our psyches, our planet and our polity, this Friday is something else for you as well: Buy Nothing Day, the 15th annual observance of a day of activism around reducing our global resource footprint, purposely timed for one of the West's biggest consumer spending orgies each year and sponsored by Canada's Adbusters Media Foundation, publishers of the quarterly radical journal Adbusters. (I highly recommend the magazine; its strident anti-corporate tone and far-left ideas/proposals may sometimes make you mad, but it will always make you think.)

The money quote on this comes from AMF founder Kalle Lasn: “So much emphasis,” he notes, “has been placed on buying carbon offsets and compact fluorescent lightbulbs and hybrid cars that we are losing sight of the core cause of our environmental problems: we consume far too much. [Emphasis added.] Buy Nothing Day isn't just about changing your routine for one day. It’s about starting a lasting lifestyle commitment. With over six billion people on the planet, it is the responsibility of the most affluent – the upper 20% that consumes 80% of the world’s resources – to set out on a new path.”

Something to think about as you sit down to your traditional abundant holiday meal.

Wanna bet you're not infringing someone's copyright this very minute?

So says a study reported on at BoingBoing.com by way of TechDirt.com here. The gist of it is that current copyright law in the USA and elsewhere, even with the enactment of the now-notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (fill in your own derisive alternate acronym for "DMCA" here), has still not kept up with current understanding and practice of the concept of intellectual property. Thus even seemingly innocuous actions all or most of us commit on a daily basis—including right here in LJ-land, with things like that userpic I have up there—could open us up to literally billions of dollars in liability each year, were the letter of the law to be completely, strictly and uniformly enforced:

"Replying to an email with quoted text? Infringement! Reply to 20 emails? You're looking at $3 million in statutory damages. Doodle a sketch of a building? Unauthorized derivative work. Read a poem out loud? Unauthorized performance. Forward a photograph that a friend took? Infringement! Take a short film of a birthday dinner with some friends and catch some artwork on the wall in the background? Infringement!"

You get the idea. So watch it, bub...
♫ "Next time they sing you a song with your birthday cake,
Hope they remembered to pay B-M-I!" ♪

For those who don't simply avoid talking politics with family over the holidays

You've had it happen to you any number of times over a holiday weekend when you go home to see the family (especially if, like me, you're a liberal from a red-state, largely conservative family). That awkward moment when some uncle or brother or parent or cousin pipes up with a political opinion that sets your teeth on edge.

Well, now you have resources to deal. You can print out the American Civil Liberties Union's handy list of "Turkey Day Talking Points" and keep a copy handy to help you refute their positions (whether they're actually informed and thought out or just parroted from the latest talk-radio broadcast or newspaper op-ed).

Or you can point them to these TV ads put together by the Center for American Progress and hosted at MoveOn.org's website. They outline just exactly what a real liberal (or "progressive," if you prefer) actually believes, as opposed to the caricature of us usually presented by right-wing groups and Republican politicians and operatives for propaganda purposes.

Either way, you're guaranteed to have something to talk about besides whether the local football team is losing their Thanksgiving Day game.

Joss finally gets to do Season 6 of Angel...sort of

On the heels of Dark Horse Comics' recent launch of the late, lamented TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer's "eighth season" as an ongoing comic book overseen by none other than Buffy's creator himself, Joss Whedon, comes news that IDW Publishing will launch a similar four-color continuation of the Buffy spinoff series Angel, also helmed by Whedon. (Yes, each show's comic-book rights are held by a different company; shades of The WB/UPN split...) TVGuide.com reports the story here.

According to the report, we will finally get to see what happened after Angel's series finale—not immediately after, but within a couple months at least. Fans will recall that when we last left our heroes, everybody's favorite ensouled vampires (Angel and Spike, played by David Boreanaz and James Marsters), along with mortally wounded sidekick Charles Gunn (J. August Richards) and Illyria, the primordial god-demon possessing the dead body of Winifred "Fred" Burkle (Amy Acker), faced a horde of not-even-God-knows what kinds of creatures summoned up from the depths of Hell by the mysterious "senior partners" of the evil-drenched law firm Wolfram & Hart in a rain-soaked Los Angeles alley. Wesley Wyndham-Pryce (Alexis Denisof), former Watcher of Slayers and now occult-lore expert for Team Angel (and Fred's erstwhile lover), had just been killed, and Illyria, feeling surprisingly grief-stricken at his death, wanted "to do more violence." And showbiz demon Krevlornswath AKA Lorne (Andy Hallett) had turned his back on them and walked away after carrying out Angel's last orders to him. Angel said, "Let's go to work," and the screen faded to black.

Curiously, IDW's website has the title of the book but no actual information beyond that. TFAW.org, however, obliges us much better with a page devoted to the new book here. TV Guide's site also informs us that Marsters is slated to appear as a time-traveling killer in the upcoming second season of the BBC Doctor Who spinoff series Torchwood (see story here).

Today's meme: The 2-Question Enneagram

Gacked from about half my friends list:
( So what kind of person am I? (This may not be news to you.) )