Je suis Paris – Je suis humain

In support for the people of Paris in the wake of the horrible attacks of 13 November 2013Last night the world was saddened by the terrorist attacks in Paris. As I was listening to coverage while one my way home from the grocery store I decided I wanted to make an avatar that included “Je suis Paris” in support for the city, similar to how so many people said,”Je suis Charlie” after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January.

It took a while to make it, after finally finding how Facebook was allowing people to add the French Tricolor to their profile pictures. A few hours before I heard that some were using “Je suis Paris”  but others were using “Je suis humain,” because it wasn’t just Paris values that were attacked but human ones as well.

I’ll be making this picture my profile picture on all the social networking and forum sites I’m on, and I want to help others use the text as well. I can’t help you with getting your image tinted with the Tricolor, but you can download this png image, a 720×720 image with a transparent background that you can use in your favorite image editor to add it to any picture you care to use it with. I’m publishing it with a Creative Commons attribution 4.0 International license. If you want to share the file I created all I ask is that you give me the credit for creating it, but you are completely free to do anything you want with any images you create with it.

 

As an aside, I find that France 24 has the best coverage of the attacks, and the link goes to the English version. There is also a French version (bien sûr) and there is also an Arabic version available. Both are available from the page I’m linking to.

Je suis Paris et Humaine (layer)
Creative Commons License
Je suis Paris et Humaine by J.M. Hardin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

 

Thinking about the word “marriage”

With Friday’s ruling from the US Supreme Court that made same-sex marriage the law of the land there has been a lot of blowback, with a lot of it saying they were either changing the definition of the word “marriage,” something that’s been with us since time began, and/or saying the Bible says marriage is between a man and a woman. Except as I heard the ongoing coverage this morning it got  me to wondering about the etymology of the word “marriage.” And the more I look into it the more I realize that some of the claims about that word simply don’t hold water.

(Updated at 1350 ET to include the sources I used to write this, as I meant to do before I published it.)

Please note: I’m not looking at whether same-sex marriage is right or wrong. That’s a rabbit hole that I’m staying away from because of the passion on either side of the debate. I’m looking at the word itself and I hope we can have an adult, rational discussion on that level. more “Thinking about the word “marriage””

Top Ten Reasons We May Need New Car Talk Shows

I’ve long been a listener of the NPR show Car Talk, and with the retirement of Tom and Ray Magliozzi I’ve become a regular listener of The Best of Car Talk on WBUR (the show’s home station). For those unfamiliar with the show, every week they start with Tom reading something funny that a listener sent in. This weekend’s show, however, was very different. Tom didn’t have anything to read this week and begged listeners to send him something to read.
more “Top Ten Reasons We May Need New Car Talk Shows”

Tanj this week…

I haven’t forgotten to post ebooks I’ve found during Read an Ebook Week, I just didn’t have a chance to find any. I was going to post and say I’ll try to find some on Thursday but I lost a lens from my glasses Wednesday night, turning me from a 4-eyes to a 3-eyes, and had to scramble to least make arrangements to get a new set of eyes. My exam appointment is Tuesday morning and it turns out I’ll have to wait 4-6 weeks to get my new ones. (Tanj it Mass Health!) more “Tanj this week…”

A funny thing happened while drinking my coffee…

I had a funny thought this morning as I was reading the ebook of Larry Niven’s Flatlander on my ‘Droid as I was finish my morning coffee:

Server years back I was talking to a barista friend of mine and mentioned that one of his coworkers punched in things on the cash register terminal with her middle finger, but when I was her age using the middle finger like that would be a (possibly) subtle insult. He had never noticed it but it made him chuckle when told him about it.

Lately I’ve noticed that when I type on my phone I use…

You’ve got it, my middle finger. It makes sense though because I have my phone on the table as I type this, my left hand angling the phone toward me slightly, and my middle finger extends out the farthest. If I try to use my index finger to type on my phone it feels odd. How things change over forty years.

/me lifts my cup of coffee in salute to my friends from the coffee joint