These would suck any time, but today’s Easter, and these things suck:
A fire burned down 40 buildings at a Christian Center in Alton Bay, which is across (more or less) the big lake from where I grew up. No one was killed, fortunately. I have no connection to the religion or the center, but my heart still goes out to the people having to deal with this back in the great Granite State.
Amazon has started removing sales rankings on gay and lesbian materials for some reason, classifying the books as “adult”. Now, there’s every possibility that some of the books have some content that could be argued, but the lists of materials that I’ve seen include a lot of books that don’t have anything “adult” in them, while books like collections of Playboy centerfolds continue to appear in sales rankings and search. There’s a petition available, but really I’m hoping the shitstorm this has started in various places online (Twitter’s a good one) will be enough to cause Amazon to get their collective head back on straight (so to speak).
UPDATE: It apparently was a system glitch (no official statement yet that I know of). It had the unfortunate effect of looking like anti-gay bias, but it was not intentional. Good to hear. It’s still rather odd that a flag in their database could have caused this kind of thing, but at least it wasn’t what it appeared to be.