As I put this list together on Saturday morning, it’s a crisp, clear, chill autumn day. Daylight savings time last weekend has ushered in early nights (Hanna is happy) and brought us back the earlier sunrise (I am happy), at least for the next month or so. Leaves are turning and falling and we definitely need our heat on overnight, as temperatures are dropping to around freezing. It’s both difficult and easy to believe that Thanksgiving is just around the corner. Meanwhile, here’s what I’ve been reading on the internets this week.

Leading off with some good news from last Tuesday’s election day, the town of Kalamazoo, Michigan (not too far from where I grew up), passed an ordinance against discrimination in housing, public accommodations, and employment based on sexual orientation and gender identity. (I like to think they did it in part so they’d get congrats from feministing :)!).

In similar news, the Louisiana justice of the peace who refused to perform a marriage ceremony for an interracial couple has resigned. I’m really only disappointed he didn’t get fired first. And the couple is still pressing a federal civil rights suit against him.

On a sadder note, Britain’s only Steiner Waldorf teacher training course, at Plymouth University, was forced to close due to lack of funding.

This offensive sign from a doctor’s office in Aspen, Colorado, has been making the rounds on the feminist and pregnancy/birth blogs. The folks at Unnecesarian are holding a photoshop contest to re-design the sign to say more directly what it actually means (e.g. “if you want to have a say in your health care and the health care provided to your children, then fuck off”). Go check out some of the submissions here and here!

Ophelia Benson, over at the Guardian argues that atheism is not, and cannot, constitute a political or religious movement: “Mere non-belief in any X can’t by itself constitute a movement, because it’s merely an absence (or at most a refusal) of belief. If every absence of belief in [your chosen belief-object here] amounted to a movement, the traffic jam would be a nightmare.” Since I’ve been thinking a lot about counterculture activism right now, I appreciate the distinction between criticizing X activity or philosophy and actually articulating an alternative. Living one’s life defined by opposition seems like a very impoverished mode of being to me.

Speaking of believers and nonbelievers, when Hanna and I were in Vermont a few weeks ago we saw a news blurb in one of the local papers about , Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, an organization that offers to care for your pet in the event you are taken up in the rapture and your pet (not being in possession of a soul) remains behind. ClizBiz over at blogher also saw the story and wrote a post about post-rapture pet care.

Following links this week, I discovered a web magazine, killing the buddha, “a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the “spirituality” section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God. It is for people who somehow want to be religious, who want to know what it means to know the divine, but for good reasons are not and do not.” Since I definitely fall into the category of “people made anxious by churches” I’m looking forward to seeing what this magazine has for me :).

Cracked.com brings us the five most ridiculous sex self-help books, which had me in tears on Thursday night. Sample commentary from book #1 (How to Make Love With Your Clothes On: 101 Ways to Romance Your Wife): “Reading the introduction to this book is like reading the panicked ramblings of a man with his dick caught in a Bible while his wife is flapping directly at him on leathery wings holding a Bible laser.” (As a side note, you can see from the URL that the post was originally titled “How to F*** Like a Librarian” and has since been changed . . . I’d like to think a few of my fellow librarianistas gave the poster a piece of their mind because, as Hanna said, “well, we know that’s patently false.”)

From the Guardian again, via Hanna, comes a fun run-down of films in which architecture stole the show. I haven’t seen all of them, but it sure as hell made me want to see Blade Runner again (and my dad had the same reaction when I sent the story to him!)

And on a final happy note, Wallace and Gromit celebrated their twentieth birthday on 4 November! Many happy returns of the day, you two. Hope the cheese was tasty.

*photo credit: Autumn sail, Boston by Kportimages @ Flickr.

As this posts, I’m somewhere in the air between Michigan and Massachusetts, retracing the route I took last week to visit family and friends. Even though I was vacation, I didn’t entirely tune out the blogosphere. A few things that made it into my Google Reader “share” queue:

The gals at Pursuit of Harpyness point out the importance of the Oxford comma. Are conservative Christians really arguing that “the exclusivity of Christianity as a path to salvation and homosexuality”? Somehow, I think not :)!

However, I don’t think any grammatical errors are responsible for the misinformation about c-sections and (on a lighter note) Halloween candy being bandied about the media; as Stephen Colbert points out, gay marriage appears to be levying a “terrible toll on fact-checking.”

Urban Prankster shares a photograph of a living sculpture project that just makes me imagine lots of blood pooling in lots of heads.

Speaking of heads, here’s a short and helpful college library instructional video on how to print documents at the library while avoiding the zombie horde.

Via Skepchick comes Wondermark’s handy guide to supernatural collective nouns.

My friend Rachel passed on this list of 10 Reasons Why the Quiddich World Cup is the Best College Sporting Event from the Mental Floss blog.

Hope you all had a good Halloween weekend (with lots of appropriately-cursed candy, of course)

*webcomic by xkcd.

Hanna and I are off to Burlington, Vermont this weekend to attend the fall meeting of the New England Historical Association (as well as wander around Hanna’s former home turf and make the rounds to an ever-icreasing list of lovely-sounding shops). Here are a few links from this week to keep y’all busy while I’m gone.

Historian and author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was the first woman to be awarded the Massachusetts Historical Society’s highest honor this week at our annual dinner. Sadly, I wasn’t able to attend the reception because the topic of her talk, “A Mormon Apostle in Boston: Sightseeing, Riot, and Martyrdom,” sounds promising!

On 23 October, the Library of Congress is opening a Young Readers Center. The Library of Congress doesn’t appear to have any web pages related to the Center up yet (I really want to see what the space looks like!) but I’ll keep you posted after the opening.

Recently, author Bethany Moreton spoke with Amanda Marcotte on the RHReality Check podcast about the rise of “Christian free enterprise”; Moreton’s book To Serve God and Wal-Mart has been on my “to read” list for a while, and she had some really insightful things to say about how service workers — from tenured professors to hourly workers at Wal-Mart — understand the value of their labor. Even if you don’t want to read the book, her interview is really worth a listen. (It’s about halfway through the twenty-minute podcast).

I was kind of overwhelmed by the avalanche of blog posts surrounding the arrest of Roman Polanski, but this Salon piece by Kate Harding of Shapely Prose titled Polanski, “Hounddog” and 13-year-old voices was my runaway favorite because of the way it foregrounded the voices of girls and young women who experience sexual violence every day — and our collective failure to recognize and deal with girlhood sexuality is.

The University of Florida has a disaster prepardness plan that covers a zombie outbreak. The blog post links to a PDF that I swear is worth clicking into. It includes an “Infected Co-worker Dispatch Form” to fill out when you are forced to kill a fellow employee in order to survive. Because of course there would be forms to fill out. And then I’m sure the records manager would file them appropriately to cover the University’s ass!

You may have heard that a group of folks at Conservapedia (the right-wing answer to Wikipedia) have taken it upon themselves to re-translate the Bible and expunge all the insidious liberal, socialist passages, such as “let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” Read the slightly bemused commentary here, here and here.

While we’re on the subject of conservative whackaloon Christianity, Antonin Scalia tried — in recent Supreme Court oral arguments — to claim that the cross was not a Christian-specific religious symbol, but rather a universal way of mourning the dead. Neither I nor the lawyer he was debating know what planet he spends his time on.

BHAstronomer over at Shakesville provides a laugh-out-loud, line-by-line smackdown of a movie review of Whip It in which the reviewer argued that the movie was a “lesbian fantasy disguised.”

In the “random awesome idea” category, a photographer in San Francisco is offering to pay people $2 in exchange for letting him take their photograph.

And finally, my brother captures this awesome video of swifts out in Portland, Oregon circling an abandoned chimney before settling in for the night.