NY turns to celebs to push gay marriage bill

This is a pretty cool story from the New York Times:

State Senator Shirley L. Huntley, a brassy, big-haired Democrat from Queens who opposes same-sex marriage, received a call on Wednesday that left her momentarily stunned.

Maya Angelou was on the line, and she wanted to know if the senator might reconsider her position. Ms. Huntley, hardly the type to be played for a fool, at first thought her staff might be pulling a fast one.

“I said, ‘What?’ ” Ms. Huntley recalled on Thursday, adding that she was not convinced that it was Ms. Angelou until she heard her deep timbre. “I heard the voice, and I said: ‘My God. It is her.’ And that was that.”

The NYTimes also says that former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue and Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon (a Google image search tells me that she's the redhead) made calls to state Senators to try to get them to back the bill.

“We think the most effective lobbyists on marriage are actual constituents, not Hollywood stars,” Maggie Gallagher, president of the much-mocked National Organization for Marriage told the Times. “That’s the most effective thing we can do.”

Come on, even I know that Angelou and Tagliabue are anything but "Hollywood celebrities."

Tagliabue has a gay son and Nixon is a lesbian.

Gay marriage is legal and has not caused an unraveling of society in Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont.

Five things you need to know about Madden 10

There are few gaming franchises (if any) that have the type of loyalty that the Madden NFL video game can boast. It has been played on everything from the Apple II to the Playstation 3 and everything in between (I remember playing an old Sega Genesis version and later a N64 version).

And ESPN has a short sneak peak into Madden 10 (the "10" refers to the year 2010, not the tenth edition -- the Madden video game has been around since 1993).

Worth a read if you like football, video games and especially if you like football video games.

Enhanced Cookie Interrogation

From the E&P Pub:

Fascinating piece coming in tomorrow's TIME magazine. Reporter Bobby Ghosh writes, “The most successful interrogation of an al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or ‘walling’ and no waterboarding. All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies.”

No torture necessary.

Bing vs Wave

So Microsoft's newest new search engine (kind of) dropped today. At least for reviews.

That meant that Google, of course, had to one-up Microsoft and announced Google Wave. If you want to know what Wave is, check out this post from Mashable. It looks really, really good.

According to CNET, Bing is actually pretty good.

While the service doesn't reveal all its riches at once, it rewards exploration and yields pleasant surprises to users who poke around.

Google keeps improving in the area of in-search collation and display as well, but Bing makes Google look complacent, and that's not good for Google. For the moment, Bing's on top in this game. Try this search engine. I do not think you will regret it.

Though Needleman writes a bit like a robot ("I do not think will regret it" is a phrase that wouldn't help him pass the Turing test), he has convinced me that when Bing launches to the general populace, I'll give it a shot.

NBA TV ratings are at record highs

With Kobe Bryant in the Western Conference Finals and Lebron James in the Eastern Conference Finals, the NBA is doing better than ever when it comes to TV ratings.

From Multichannel News:

After ESPN set a record for most-viewed NBA playoff game in cable history Monday night, TNT donned the crowd Tuesday with its coverage of Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals. TNT's telecast of the Orlando Magic's 116-114 overtime win over Cleveland averaged nearly 10.1 million watchers on May 26. That toppled the 9.88 million ESPN drew the night before for the fourth game of the Western Conference finals when the Denver Nuggets evened the series at two games apiece.

Slam Online notes that the game between the Los Angeles Lakers Denver Nuggets game on Monday "annihilat[ed] ABC’s The Bachelorette and NBC’s Dateline."

Which is made all the more impressive by the fact that the game was on ESPN -- basic cable, not network TV.

And the next night's game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Orlando Magic had even higher ratings, becoming "the most-watched show on cable this year!"

The ratings for last night's Lakers victory over the Nuggets (on ESPN) will be available later today.

Update 4:07

Something else that I thought about: my dad, who has had just about no interest in the NBA since Jordan retired if not before, wanted to see a Lakers/Nuggets game so bad the other day that he resorted to listening to the ESPN radio version of it on his cell phone.

Despite the horrible officiating, it appears that the NBA is as strong as ever, even among casual fans.

Mark Cuban is a very smart guy

Bill Simmons did some podcasting with Dallas Mavericks owner and overall successful entrepreneur Mark Cuban yesterday.

They spoke for about 50 minutes (mp3) about business, basketball and everything in between.

Cuban not only owns the Mavericks, but he also owns HDNet, Landmark Theatres and the search engine Ice Rocket. He also is a blogger, over at Blog Maverick.

He made the Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan.

Sure he can be annoying at times, but he is good at just about everything he puts his fingers on. So listen to what he has to say.

This creeps me out

I'm not exactly sure why, but this creeps me out. Maybe it's the robotic woman's voice which sounds like a voice from Command and Conquer telling you that your base is under attack.

Or maybe it's the fact that I'm scared the Now Network might become self aware and launch a nuclear attack against humanity then start sending Terminators back in time to kill John Connor.

But at least I learned something -- my hair grew five-millionths of an inch in the last second.