I’m baaaack. I spent the past two days just getting my body used to this new schedule (getting up early, going to sleep early). I *heart* bed.

A few things I’ve come up with this week, after reading a few people’s observations on their own sites:

• Rule #1: If you don’t like reading weblogs, then stop reading weblogs.
• Rule #2: If you don’t like weblogging, then stop weblogging.
• Corollary to Rule #2: Insulting other webloggers because you don’t like weblogging is sad, and exposes you as someone with those very traits you are insulting in others.

Yesterday was movie day. During the afternoon, I got sucked into Sweetwater, the VH1 movie about the band that opened Woodstock; I actually liked it, although I wonder just how dramatized the story is. Then last night I finally saw Fight Club (on DVD), and really liked it. Strange, brutal, intricate, and made me think a lot.

With this past Wednesday being the last day of the Supreme Court term, Linda Greenhouse has written a good wrap-up of the decisions handed down this year, and their probable impact on life in the United States. (Since it’s a New York Times article, it will probably disappear into their pay-for-access archive at some point soon.)

This week, Andrew Duncan passed on another New York Times article, this one assessing websites that keep tabs on Internet law. Looks good; you may want to print this one out before it, too, gets swallowed into the pay-for-access archives.

As a result of the Boy Scouts’ position against openly gay members, corporations and other sponsors have begun to withdraw support. Levi Strauss, the United Way, and the State of Connecticut have all severed their ties with the Scouts, and the United Methodist Church, which is the largest sponsor of Scout troops nationwide, has openly stated that if the Court were to rule in favor of being able to exclude gays, it would also pull all support. Interesting to me is that the Boy Scouts knew that this would happen (they acknowledged this in their arguments before the Court), and still felt like an anti-gay stance was worth pursuing.

There’s been a lot of hoo-hah about the ostensible completion of mapping the human genome, but it struck me this week how little people actually understand about what has been done, and how much more needs to be done for any of it to mean anything. It’s a huge thing to have completed a basic map of the DNA that makes up human life, but at this point, it’s just a rudimentary map, with very little meaning. Imagine a map of your hometown, without street names, addresses, or place names; that’s essentially what exists now. Now that the map exists, though, researchers can start identifying what each gene does, and how everything’s interrelated.