Righteo, tomorrow I'm heading off for Hastings for a week (well, heading to Mum's, then on to Hastings on Friday), so it's likely to be a week Saturday before you start seeing my random comments starting to appear on your stories again :(

Spotted over at Crystal Hall, a link to a very well handled story about Laura Jane Grace. Laura was previously known as Tom Gabel, and remains the founder and lead singer of Against Me! - whose latest album will be called Transgender Dysphoria Blues:

Just spotted this:

Uruguay's Congress passed a bill on Wednesday to allow same-sex marriages, making it the second country in predominantly Roman Catholic Latin America to do so.

Using a slide rule and caliper, Professor Jean-Denis Rouillon spent fifteen years carefully measuring changes in the orientation of breasts belonging to 130 women, at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (University Hospital) in Besançon.

According to the counter at the bottom of the page:

The Commons have just voted 400:175 in favour of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill (HC Bill 126), despite a rebellion by nearly half of all Conservative MPs.

If you've been following Angharad's Magnum opus you may be aware that a few years ago I had the daft idea to compile a spreadsheet summarising every EAFOAB episode...

There's an interesting opinion piece in today's Independent:

I've just noticed we've passed yet another million view milestone! Twenty Seven Million (plus about twenty two thousand by now)

Spotted courtesy of the "Geeks are Sexy" blog, a set of rather impressive photo manipulations to illustrate what (live action) female versions of a trio of Avengers characters and a trio of Dark Knigh

So, it's that time of year again... heading off to relatives, eating too much, drinking too much, and generally enjoying the time off work while collapsing in front of the goggle box (TV).

One for the cycling fraternity on the site...

We all know homosexuality is a biological trait, right?

Not according to the people editing Charisma Magazine, who believe it's caused by something completely different.

Demon sex.

Is fate conspiring against (British Cycling) Team Sky?

Following on from TdF winner Bradley Wiggins and Head Coach Shane Sutton getting up close and personal with cars, Mark Cavendish has now collided with one (albeit this time in Tuscany rather than Manchester or Lancashire) and suffered a bruised arm.

An interesting article just spotted in the New Statesman:

Why are NHS doctors are still treating trans people like they’re mentally ill?

Read the article here.

In among the various ballots running in addition to the federal ones yesterday, several States were voting on the issue of same-sex marriage (the first to offer a vote on the issue).

It appears as though a significant portion of the Eastern portion of the US is going to get a bit wet and windy with the arrival of Sandy over the next few days.
Wikipedia has further information over the storm's current status and forecasted impacts.

If anyone's in an affected region (or knows someone that is), stay safe and we'll see you on the other side...

Definitely one from the weirder side of the news - Hong Kong property tycoon Cecil Chao has offered HK$500 million ($65 million) to any man who can woo her away from her lesbian partner.

California has become the first US state to ban unfounded therapies that attempt to turn gay teenagers straight.

Apparently today (September 19th) is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Lulu have used it as an excuse to have one of their famous flash sales.

Until Friday (21st) you can get 15% off any order with the code "PIRATA".

This week I received a letter from my local council containing a rather dry consultation on how to negotiate a cut imposed on them from on high.

However, there was a rather interesting error (corrected in another letter the following day) on their equality questionnaire...

(Helpful hint: look at the first question)

Alas Neil will be taking no more small steps anywhere. He died earlier today at the age of 82, apparently from complications following heart surgery three weeks ago.

Source: NBC News.

Obituary (BBC News)

Well, 24,036,165 24,036,376 since 16th June 2005, according to the counter at the bottom of the page...

It doesn't seem very long ago that someone was blogging about 22m... or was that 23,456,789?

Just in case anyone's wondering where EnemyofFun has disappeared to... he's got caught up in events that took place a long time in a galaxy far away :)

Courtesy of a post he made to Google+ this morning:

Sorry for being absent for so long in my writing...I assure you nothing bad has happened. I've actually kinda got sucked into Star Wars The Old Republic. I did writing almost 5 pages of my latest chapter for Season...here's hoping I can take some time off TOR to actually finish off the chapter :)

So now you know :)

...when you're having fun!

I've now been entertaining you all with my mixture of witty, inane, sometimes over-analytical and occasionally pertinant / well thought-out comments for just over three years now, believe it or not...

Just got back from a nice walk around the local area, checked the news to see if the TdF had finished...

...and yup, it had and there were no unforseen calamities, so we ended up with the perfect result as predicted for the past few days: Cav won the stage, Wiggo won the race, and Froome was second.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/18946960

Congratulations to all three!

Next stop: a certain quadrennial sporting event... which starts on Friday evening for most, but Wednesday afternoon for the footballers (!)

I've just noticed on the hit counter at the bottom of the page that we've now exceeded 23 million hits (plus an extra 9,000) since 16th June 2005. Yay us! :D

That works out at about 3¼ million hits per year, nearly 9,000 hits per day, 370 hits per hour or 6 hits per minute (have I ever mentioned I like playing around in spreadsheets?)

This has to count as one of the most bizzare stories ever to come out of the world of sport:

A female Indian athlete who won a gold medal at the 2006 Asian Games appeared in court on Friday charged with raping her former lover who has alleged that she is actually a man. Pinki Pramanik was remanded in custody for 14 days to await trial on allegations that she repeatedly raped her female live-in partner.

Source: AFP (via Yahoo)

It appears as though the US Anti Doping Agency can't leave Lance Armstrong alone - they've written a fifteen page letter to him littered with yet more allegations dating as far back as 1996, claiming a "pervasive pattern of doping" over many years.

Unsurprisingly, Armstrong has hit back: "I have never doped ... These charges are baseless [and] motivated by spite ... These are the very same charges and the same witnesses that the Justice Department chose not to pursue after a two-year investigation."

Spotted on Google+, shared by a prominent Googler (Kristoffer Sorensen):

The Danish Folketing has voted overwhelmingly in favour of a full ecclesiastical marriage service in the national Evangelical-Lutheran church for homosexual couples, to be instituted as a full, official marriage equal to that of heterosexual couples. After a lengthy and sometimes heated debate, which ran some three hours over its expected time, 85 members voted in favour of the law, 24 against and with two abstentions.

Source: Politiken.dk

Apparently, the reason the Folketing can rule in this way is that the Protestant Church in Denmark is a State Church.