shot-online is not just an online sports game either, but it is a highly accurate simulation and a deep role-playing experience. it is the rpg quality that makes shot-online the unique game it is, especially with the community interaction and the enhancement and leveling of your character. speaking of community and role-playing, shot-online offers both realistic and rare items drawn from the celebrated history of golf. practicing every day, competing against players with different skills, allows the gamer to advance their characters abilities. quests and item exchanging and more add to the community feel.

columbus - two ohio judges have issued differing rulings in the past week on whether the state's constitutional amendment banning gay marriage bars prosecutors from charging unmarried people with domestic violence.

a franklin county judge on friday decided against dismissing a domestic violence case, disagreeing with arguments that the law doesn't apply to unmarried couples.

..."in this court's view, the ohio constitutional provision called the marriage amendment has a limited scope," franklin county common pleas judge richard a. frye ruled friday.

frye said previous court decisions about marriage do not discount that people living together can be considered family household members.

frye's ruling came in the case of terry rodgers, 39, of columbus, who is accused of beating his girlfriend in january. he is scheduled to go to trial in may.

a gift from the inertnet: the david hasselhoff 2005 photocalendar.

you're welcome.

(via metafilter

wapo's richard cohen spares no one in the sick and sad spectacle of congressional intervention in the schiavo case:

by late sunday, when the debate had reached the house of representatives, barney frank stood almost alone in opposing the bill. cliches suffered. here was an openly gay democrat, the massachusetts liberal of all massachusetts liberals, defending the founding fathers, federalism and the american tradition of keeping the government's nose out of a family's business.

it was a bravura performance and one could only have wished that it had been matched by john kerry or hillary clinton -- or any of the other democrats who are being mentioned as presidential candidates. most of them seemed to be cowering in some bunker, calling their consultants and pollsters, asking what they should do and how they should do it. please, have a memo on the desk by morning.

...but for me the real loser was the democratic party. it showed that it's almost totally without leadership. if there is a national figure (other than frank) who stood up and took on the gop in this matter, his -- or her -- name does not come to mind. in the senate, oddly enough, it was virginia's john warner who pointed out that he opposed the bill -- and he's a republican, for goodness' sake. the democrats were nowhere.

and a corollary:

kerry's words and moves suggest that he thinks nov. 2, 2004, was merely a detour on his road to the white house. he has been holding private dinners with potential fund raisers and policy advisers, signaling he might run again and blaming his political strategists for many of the mistakes his campaign made last year, such as not responding swiftly to ads attacking his vietnam service. he has set up a political-action committee to finance his travels around the country, which will include stops in 20 cities over the next two months to give speeches and headline fund raisers for other democrats. and he is constantly e-mailing his list of more than 3 million supporters to promote causes he championed as a candidate, like expanding health insurance to all children and preventing oil drilling in the arctic national wildlife refuge. kerry plans to write a book on his views on national security.

no, clearly, it was all someone else's fault, john. it's not because everyone's got you pegged as a gutless poll-watcher. (this coming from someone who voted for you.)

le sigh.

hell on wheels
smack the snooze button so often the alarm is pointless? massachusetts institute of technology's media lab has just the thing. "clocky" is an alarm on wheels that lets you snooze once, then rolls off the table and zips away to another part of the room, the new scientist reported. if you want to go back to sleep the next time it goes off, you'll have to find it first. and every day it finds a new place to escape to.

and so it begins: a cuyahoga county common pleas court judge has ruled that domestic violence statutes cannot be used against an unmarried man accused of pushing and slapping his live-in girlfriend. the reason? ohio's new constitutional amendment prohibiting any law recognizing, creating or approximating a marital relationship for unmarried persons means "domestic violence" laws, drafted to protect "families", recognize a marital-type relationship in unmarried persons.

ooops.

which leaves me in a quandary the next time i get an unmarried client in here who wants to file domestic violence charges against boyfriend/girlfriend/etc. we don't know how other courts are going to rule on the issue if and when the other party brings it up, so yeah, you might be sol. personally, i think the judge's decision is the right one, given how ridiculously broad the amendment was, but so far cleveland's the only place in the state that's said as much...

(hat tip: chris geidner)

4 belfast homeopathy results
madeleine ennis, a pharmacologist at queen's university, belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. she railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

in her most recent paper, ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. these "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. the study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

so how could it happen? homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. no matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

you can understand why ennis remains sceptical. and it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. but the belfast study (inflammation research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "we are," ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." if the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

drop in on an average biology class and you will find the same slow, deadening march of memorization that i endured at 15. why not enliven this with a student debate on contrasting theories? why not have an intelligent design advocate stop by to be interrogated? many students, like me, find it hard to understand evolutionary theory, and the scientific method itself, until they are illuminated by contrasting points of view.

harry shearer, the actor/comedian (spinal tap, the simpsons) on dan rather's fade into the sunset, over on talking points memo:

what other distinguished personage of such lengthy service in the public eye suddenly decides, in the last few years of his career, to change the side of his head on which he parts his hair? that, my friends, is plain weird. sure, he changed the haircut, opting for the youthful short-and-semi-spiky look, and, after a lot of to-and-froing with the dye bottle, allowed himself to go gray, then white. but all that could have been consistent with the right-side part we'd come to know and....know. somehow, dan decided--and you'll hear from the clips that these are decisions to which he gives long and thoughtful consideration--that all that was not enough, that the twilight of a long life on camera had to be marked with a migratory part. and nobody asked why. until now.

okay, yeah, that's weird.

the bush administration has come under a lot of criticism for its attempts to fob off government propaganda as genuine news reports. whether federal agencies are purchasing the services of supposedly independent columnists or making videos extolling white house initiatives and then disguising them as tv news reports, that's wrong. but it is time to acknowledge that the nation's news organizations have played a large and unappetizing role in deceiving the public.

fingerprint food
sat mar 12, 2005 06:38 pm gmt

berlin (reuters) - customers of a german supermarket chain will soon be able to pay for their shopping by placing their finger on a scanner at the check-out, saving up to 40 seconds spent scrabbling for coins or cards, bosses say.

an edeka store in the southwest german town of ruelzheim has piloted the technology since november and now the company plans to equip its stores across the region.

"all customers need do is register once with their identity card and bank details, then they can shop straight away," said store manager roland fitterer.

the scanner compares the shopper's fingerprint with those stored in its database along with account details.

edeka bosses said they were confident the system could not be abused. the chance of two people having the same fingerprint is about one in 220 million.

in other words, i know i've unfinished business with msr. marcel [proust], but the sheer effort of trudging once more through the tall grass of l'oubli really pisses me off, because a) i've got a reading stack the size of two emannuel lewis's teetering at bedside, b) unlike new york city, los angeles isn't crawling with chain smoking, twenty year-old, brunette french waifs easily impressed by the meager virtue of simply having read proust, and c) actually, i don't think there is a "c"; i'm just obsessive about listing things in threes. currently, though, the appeal to my vanity being made by these new translations just isn't strong enough to grant them safe passage to the front of the line where mark steven johnson's adaptation of ghost rider waits treacherously on deck. am i okay with that? not really. but i bet some chain smoking, twenty-three year-old, brunette d-girl working on a competing comic book project is dying to hear all about the daredevil auteur's latest, looming travesty. and that, my friends, is... not why i changed coasts, but there's something to be said for being spared 1,000+ pages of solipsisitc prose. i believe it has something to do with "lowering standards".

cub fans are eating up the latest pitch to end team's curse

thu feb 24, 7:55 am et

chicago � the foul ball that unraveled the cubs' chance for a world series (news - web sites) appearance and left fans steaming is now simmering in a red spaghetti sauce.

harry caray's restaurant group last year bought and destroyed the infamous "bartman" ball, an object that to superstitious cub fans became the ultimate symbol of bad luck.

now a restaurant is using the ball's shredded remains as an ingredient in its "foul ball" spaghetti.