The Librarian of Congress has chosen Kay Ryan of Marin County, California, to be the next US Poet Laureate.

From SFGate:

Ryan learned about the honor Monday, when she and her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair, arrived home from the Aspen Ideas Festival  ...

The next day was a busy one, because she and Adair were scheduled to be remarried, having married the first time in 2004 at City Hall in San Francisco. "We'll have to get the rings re-engraved with the new date," she said.

Since there is a lot of uncertainty out there about the process -- in California all it takes to amend the constitution is a vote of 50% plus one.

The relevant passage:

CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION
ARTICLE 18  AMENDING AND REVISING THE CONSTITUTION

SEC. 4.  A proposed amendment or revision shall be submitted to the
electors and if approved by a majority of votes thereon takes effect
the day after the election unless the measure provides otherwise.  If
provisions of 2 or more measures approved at the same election
conflict, those of the measure receiving the highest affirmative vote
shall prevail.

source: California State Constitution online

Amory Lovins, author of Winning the Oil Endgame, which prophesies various ways we will escape dependence on Big Oil, is an optimist.

"Sometimes after I give a talk, some folks get irked that I talk only about solutions and not about problems," [Lovins told The New Yorker] "And typically someone will get up and give a long riff about all the bad things happening and all the suffering in the universe, which is basically true."

I don't distrust Barack Obama. On the whole I find him likable and think he's done a decent job in the Senate.

But it's long seemed to me he could do better.

In Innocent Killers, a book Jane Goodall wrote with her then-husband, the nature photographer Hugo van Lawick, Jane engages in a little activism via grammar:

"It may seem strange, to some, that I write wildebeests, using the plural. Most people will talk about a herd of wildebeest, or zebra, a pride of lion, and so forth. But to us [meaning herself and Hugo], this use of the singular suggests that the individuality of each animal in the group is being ignored. It implies, to us, that every lion is just a lion. After all, who would dream of talking about a boatload of Italian, a classroom of German, or even a gathering of man?"

Kyoko Mori was born and raised in Japan but she has lived her adult life in America. On her first return to Japan she visits the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima. She wonders, are the horrors in the pictures of the atomic bomb aftermath really making an anti-war argument?

Mori thinks about her stepmother. "To her, the war was like some natural disaster that inconvenienced her family; it had no other implications."