2017's most-, least-gay-friendly U.S. colleges

Yale Daily News 2009 photo of gay supportive Yale students
baiting antigay New Haven street preacher 

The new Princeton Review survey is out for 2017, rating virtually everything about colleges, from dorms to libraries to social life to professors to political complexion of the student body to campus radio stations, newspapers and theater.
     Included are student attitudes toward LGBTQs. The rating is predicated on how strongly students agreed or disagreed with the following question:  Students treat all persons equally, regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.

LGBTQ-Friendly

1. Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY
2. College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME
3. Warren Wilson College, Asheville, NC
4. University of Wisconsin—Madison, Madison, WI
5. Stanford University, Stanford, CA
6. Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA
7. Emerson College, Boston, MA
8. College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA
9. Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA
10. Brown University, Providence RI
11. Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA
12. Smith College, Northampton, MA
13. Bennington College, Bennington, VT
14. Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
15. Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA
16. Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME
17. Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH
18. Drew University, Madison, NJ
19. Mills College, Oakland, CA
20. Yale University, New Haven, CT

LGBTQ-Unfriendly

1. Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL
2. Hampden-Sydney College, Hampden-Sydney, VA
3. College of the Ozarks, Point Lookout, MO
4. Gordon College, Wenham, MA
5. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT
6. Auburn University, Auburn, AL
7. Baylor University, Waco, TX
8. Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI
9. Grove City College, Grove City, PA
10. University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
11. Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MI
12. University of Dallas, Irving, TX
13. University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR
14. Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, NC
15. Montana Tech of the Univ. of Montana, Butte, MT
16. Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA
17. Catholic University of America, Washington, DC
18. University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND
19. Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA
20 University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT

SNL: Diego calls his Mexican mom from North Dakota

Don't tell the agriculturally ignorant writers at SNL, but it's nearly three times as likely that Diego would have been calling his mom from a wheat field in North Dakota than from a corn field, and likelier still that he would have phoned from a man camp near a field where oil is raised.
     Still, last week's vignette was whimsical, touching, funny and a refreshing Screw You to demagogues like Donald Trump. We liked it a lot. (Especially Diego's description of his best bud's "baby blue eyes.")

Twitter suspended its surveillance service for cops after finding out how they were using it

Here's why Twitter is axing a surveillance tool used by police pic.twitter.com/xAIYFZJRyy

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) October 12, 2016

Lady Gaga Rips Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer for "supporting misogyny"

.@SenatorFischer you are a female senator supporting misogyny. Putting our daughters in danger. Has your young courage faded?

— JOANNE (@ladygaga) October 12, 2016

Politico documented Fischer's about face on calling on Trump to drop out of the race (last Saturday after Pussygate broke) then reversing herself after Trump's second debate with Hillary, in which he did not self-destruct (or prevail).

CBS: Real jocks rip Giuliani, Trump alibis about 'locker room talk'

"Guys have their kids in here. This is probably more of a family environment than any locker room." -- @blakegriffin32 on "locker room talk" pic.twitter.com/HtDzoL92be

— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) October 11, 2016

Across the country, athletes and coaches from professional sports leagues had similar reactions.

     “There’s players in our locker room with sisters, wives, and daughters. There’s not that type of talk in anyone’s locker room,” Los Angeles Clippers head coach Doc Rivers said.
     “I’ll have my son in here. CP has his son in here. Guys have their kids in here. This is probably more of a family environment than any locker room,” Clippers’ Blake Griffin said.
     “There’s no excuse to talk that way about women, to women, to other people,” Detroit Lions wide receiver Golden Tate said.
     “To say that locker room culture is somehow this defense for what Trump is saying is really denigrating all professional athletes,” former Minnesota Vikings player Chris Kluwe said.
     Kluwe was with the Vikings for eight seasons. He said that some locker room talk could be seen as disrespectful, but that it never reached the level of Trump’s comments.

Buffett shreds Trump over his debate lie about Omaha billionaire's tax deductions

Trump tried to drag Buffett and Soros into his freeloading pit of carry-forward tax avoidance, but Buffett was having none of it and released a statement eviscerating Trump's hip-shooting lie. The statement is below the video, below:

Proof that the VP debate would have been much improved had Randy Rainbow moderated it

No matter how pious you are, never say you try to spend time on your knees every day to a gay moderator.

AKSARBENT bestows its awards on those cities with the best I Charleston videos

Behold now, the AKSARBENT Swingdance Honors conferred on those most deserving cities, the denizens of which have produced I Charleston videos named after their communities:

Overall winner: Roma!
Unbelievably terrific soundtrack, seriously good dancers, impeccable editing, glorious cinematography and snappy pacing. Marred only by a 40-second intro which you can skip.



Runner up: Berlin
Didn't care for the vintage photo grading, but well-edited and beautifully focused on some talented dancers, especially in the second half. Wonderful!

I Charleston, San Francisco

• Most charming: Lyon (surprisingly, not Paris's which is surprisingly Bohemian)
• Slickest city promotion without looking like a commercial: Chicago
• Most relentless city promotion that totally looks a commercial: Los Angeles (great music though)
• Most hyperkinetic, grab-you by-the-lapels: Memphis 
• Tennessee honorable mention: Nashville, very well done. But then, Music City, USA has a reputation to uphold, and it does
• Goofiest/Funniest/Best Display of Male Nudity: Seattle
• Just because it's New York: New York City (fun, diverse, and of course it's well executed)
• AKSARBENT's personal favorite: San Francisco (mostly because of the adorable, fiercely talented short guy. Ouch!)

     In an age in which a shitty K-pop video can rack up a billion YouTube views, the fact that none of the above videos has cracked 500,000 is truly a scandal.
     Omaha, which is as big as Lyon, France, doesn't have an I Charleston video because apparently no one in this city realizes the promotional value of dance memes on the Internet.

Hi. We're from the government and we're here to help you. Watch our gay dance video!

The CDC has released this HIV prevention video, targeted at gay men. It will enrage Tea Partiers, but doubtless it cost way less than the $400,000 the Air Force spends on each F-35 helmet, so it's probably a good deal, considering the lifetime costs of HIV treatment.



You may not like the above, but government entity-produced dance videos can be much, much worse.

These Midwest Senators took the most money from Wells Fargo

All are Republicans.

Too bad our descendants will miss the collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies

Artist's impression of the Earth scorched by our Sun as it enters
its Red Giant Branch phase in 5-7 billion years. The oceans will boil
before then, as the sun's luminosity increases 10% every billion or so years.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Fsgreg

What a pity that the increasing luminosity of the sun will cause the oceans to boil over in 3.5-3.75 billion years. Nobody will be around to see the Andromeda Galaxy collide with the Milky Way, which will happen in 4 billion years. Missed it by that much!

Just because Matt Lauer made Hoda sexually harass this jock doesn't mean he's not a fun guy

Yeah, we know: You can't sexually harass the publicity-hungry willing.

Tim Kaine, back in the day

Kaine says his wife thought he was "goofy looking."

Who would a self-driving car sacrifice? Its 70-year-old passenger, or a kid on the sidewalk?

So you're in a self-driving car on a busy two-lane highway, and an oncoming car swerves into your lane.
     The car knows from your credit card (and cross-linked databases) that you are 70. An average 70-year-old male has eight years of life left.
     Will the car swerve right, into the back of a parked semi, avoiding a head-on with the errant vehicle and oncoming cars but decapitating you, or will it save your life by swerving into the path of a kid on the sidewalk next to the truck, a kid who has 70 years left?
     MIT is collecting crowdsourced moral decisions about what self-driving cars should do when the worst happens.

A new project from MIT tests the moral decision making behind self-driving cars pic.twitter.com/JOKmDZkmqS

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) October 6, 2016

Class-action suit of credit card firms alleging collusion; judge on their case: "I never saw anything this good"

Credit card with embedded microprocessing chip

Small businesses are mad as hell over the way major credit card firms are implementing their tardy switch to European-style chipped credit cards to finally reduce fraud in the U.S.
     The transaction-clearing machines are expensive, don't eliminate fraud, and small merchants are now responsible for charges made on old-fashioned cards — charges banks used to eat. From CNN:

      The grocery store owners point to something Visa CEO Charlie Scharf told analysts in 2014: that Visa met "in a room" with fellow credit card companies, trade groups, banks and select retailers to come up with a plan.
      That astounded U.S. District Judge William Alsup, a former antitrust prosecutor, at a court hearing in September.
      "It's remarkable ... you don't get many antitrust cases where the CEO admitted they were 'in a room,'" he said, according to a court transcript. "I did antitrust cases as a lawyer. I never saw anything this good."
      On Friday, the judge issued an order allowing the case to move forward. He said the case "raises a plausible and reasonable suggestion of collusion" by the credit card industry, which operated "in lockstep."
      According to the grocery store owners, the industry eliminated free market competition by banding together to impose uniform penalties. If they hadn't, any single credit card company could have offered better terms.

Which of these states watches WAY more gay porn than the others: NE, KS, OK, IA, SD, CO or MO?

Why, it's Kansas, says the Daily Dot, which is not short for Dorothy, played by gay icon Judy Garland, whose father... oh, never mind.

     The Daily Dot relied on stats from PornHub, the huge Internet erotic portal.
     And what do gay porn viewers in each state look for? Below are the categories each state viewed more than those in other states:

     Bad news for antigay Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and Secretary of State Kris Kobach, huh?

That time Downton Abbey's Allen Leech called gay footman Rob James Collier his "sister from another mister"

The actors, both straight (Rob James Collier is married, Allen Leech isn't) are drinking buddies.

Last night's SNL open was political satire as good as anything in the show's history

Unbelievably good writing performed by Alec Baldwin and SNL resident genius Kate McKinnon.

Celebrities vow to force Mark Ruffalo to take one for the team in his next movie if you vote against Trump