Indicia of magazine for sale on eBay: Ace Annual, published semi-annually in 1973.

And the world is even faster-paced to-day.

As I was showering to-night, I was thinking about hypotheses concerning sexual and gender orientation and environment, and wondering how they might be tested. Then it occurred to me that some of them would become far more testable if same-sex marriage were legalized, as it would effectively register a significant share of homosexuals and bisexuals as such.

At that point, a normative concern awoke: With the push to place homosexuality on equal footing, databases are being creäted that could later be used to facilitate persecution of homosexuality and of bisexuality.

I have in the past asserted that the state ought to treat marriage as simply a contract. It's not that I think that marriage itself ought to be an ordinary contract, but that I don't think that its extraordinary aspects are the business of the state. I don't think that the state should be effecting marriage, nor promoting or shaping it beyond simply assuring that any contractual obligations creäted by marriage are met.

My basic reason for this position has been and remains that the state shouldn't be engaged in active social engineering, whether it be the sort dear to the political left or that championed by Focus on the Family. But I now see that there is some danger — albeït perhaps fairly small — that records creäted by this one sort of social engineering programme might be used for a far more dire programme later.

Yester-day I received an old Haldeman-Julius catalogue that contains a picture of David Oliver Cauldwell. He looked like some cross between a stereotypical Marine and Beaker.

The mail to-day brought four tickets from Television Preview:

You have been selected to participate in a survey whose findings will directly influence what you see on television in the future.

The thing is written to make it seem that the audience will be evaluating a show or shows (and my gut reäction was to be appalled that any of us in SoCal should be asked, it being bad enough that the thinking in Los Angeles has such a disproportionate and otherwise perverse effect). But I did a quick check on the WWWeb, and what I've learned is that the audience will really be used to test commercials, and otherwise be surveyed for their reäctions to consumer products. The shows presented will be old-and-probably-failed pilots or series.

I stopped at La Vache for lunch, and ate too much food. I entered planning to eat a salmon sandwich, and found carrot soup on the menu. I ordered a bowl (rather than a cup), and this in itself was a good choice; but I should then have forgone the sandwich (and its side of mashed potatoes), in spite of the anti-depressant virtues of salmon. I am now parked at David's Coffee Place, attempting to remain relatively inert.

Speaking — well, writing — of David's Coffee Place, my understanding is that the new owners are going to change the name to Babycakes. I think that this new name is a generally bad idea. First, David's Coffee Place (AKA just David's Place) is something of a neighborhood institution — a well-regarded institution — and a wholesale name-change will make people feel as if that institution is gone. Second, I see the particular name Babycakes as the sort of thing associated with something at best briefly fashionable.