I got an email earlier today from one of my relatives who has ties to South Africa, which read:

Last week a 3 year old girl (in South Africa ) was beaten and raped. She is still alive. The man responsible was released on bail yesterday. He is walking the streets. If you are too busy to read this then just sign your name and forward this on. The Government is planning to close the child protection unit and this is a petition against it. This is a very important petition. It is an essential part of the justice system for children. You may have already heard that there's a myth in South Africa that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. The younger the virgin, the more potent the cure. This has led to an epidemic of rapes by infected males, with the correspondent infection of innocent kids. Many have died in these cruel rapes. Recently in Cape Town, a 9-month-old baby was raped by 6 men. Please think about that for a moment. The child abuse situation is now reaching catastrophic proportions and if we don't do something, then who will?

Kindly add your name to the bottom of the list and please pass this on to as many people as you know. If you are signature no.: 120 please forward the mail-list to childprotectpca@saps.org.za

Please don't be complacent, do something about the kids of South Africa. You can make a difference. That child is fighting for life. This is just 1of the million cases of child abuse, so please pledge your support and help keep CPU (CHILD PROTECTION UNIT) open. Please give your support to the petition and ensure that it goes to as many people as possible. Please don't just leave it, make a difference. In order to write your name copy this messege and paste it in a new mail (compose). Or click on forward and add your name to the list and send it on to others.

Again, if you are number 120 please send this to childprotectpca@saps.org.za

[Lots of forwards stripped, as well as 97 signatures from South Africa, India, Nepal, the UK, and Australia.]

My immediate reaction was that this has to be a hoax. It has all the hallmarks:

• Alarmist subject matter

• Unsubstantiated assertions (but see note below)

• Pass this letter on to everyone you know

• No dates, no end dates

• No provenance

Admittedly, many well-meaning but incompetently written petitions share the same problems.

Here's what I wrote back to everyone whose email address I could mine out of what I had been sent:

Stop! It's a hoax. Do NOT uncritically believe everything you get in email.

First thing you should do when you get a chain letter urging you to send email to everyone you know, is to Google around to see if it's horseshit. Nine times out of ten it will be.

The first link that shows up when you google for "childprotectpca chain letter" is this:

http://www.joewein.net/hoax/hoax-saps-child-protection-unit.htm

Which led me to the South African Police Service:

http://www.saps.gov.za/_dynamicModules/internetSite/faqBuild.asp?myURL=242

Snopes.com is the go-to site for all Internet hoaxes. Here's what they have to say about this one:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/babyrape.htm

If you read any of these links, read this one. Then look around the Snopes website and get a feel for some of the crap that's out there.

Now, please go and forward THIS email to everyone you forwarded the previous email to, and also send this email to everyone who sent you the chain letter in the first place. Stamp it out before it spreads any further.

(Note: Snopes indicates that some of the rape stories mentioned in this letter are true. A nine-month-old girl really was raped, though it turns out that it wasn't the six men who were initially arrested, but the ex-boyfriend of the mother.)

I later followed up with the somewhat softer:

Let me just add this.

Hoax chain letters are a bad thing because some twit thinks it's fun to cause trouble and spread lies. This one has been circulating for four years. I'm sure it will still be turning up in four years' time.

About their only redeeming feature is that they get good-natured, if naive, people such as yourselves to do a little something in an attempt to make the world a better place. If these hoax letters actually achieved something constructive, I wouldn't mind nearly so much.

I've shot down a few chain letters before. Every single time, Snopes has already written up an extensive page about it.

Raven is now Doctor Raven. She successfully defended her doctoral dissertation in biomedical informations this morning. Six long years in the making.

Dr. Raven and Mr. Raven came over this evening for Games Night, a twice-monthly get-together we have for our friends to play board games. Emma and I had been given a bottle of Dom Perignon '92 for our wedding that we had never quite found a suitable occasion for until now, so we chilled that in anticipation of tonight's celebration. I generally don't care for champagne, but that went down nicely.

Congratulations, Raven!

Well, fuck! The Washington State Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited decision today on the constitionality of the state's Defense of Marriage Act. Somehow, they found that it didn't violate the state constitution's Equal Protection clause.

No same-sex marriages in Washington state anytime soon.

I attended the rally at the First Baptist church earlier this evening. (Find me in the photo!) Some anger, some disappointment. Mostly upbeat. The young Latina couple were very affecting. The Serkin-Pooles invited everyone to join their club, as they announced their formal engagement to each other. One speaker pointed out that even if the court had handed down a favorable decision, the process would not have been over.

Tomorrow we fight another day. I've been supporting same-sex marriage since 1993, when I heard of the Hawaii Equal Rights Marriage Project. I didn't expect the war to end today, though it would have been nice to win this battle.

The LMA have more on what it all means.

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate ably skewers the court's decision in Rational Lampoon:

If you vote to uphold the ban, on the other hand, you'll get to join your colleagues on the New York and Nebraska courts, who just did the same thing. You'll also find yourself in the warm embrace of your buddies on the Georgia and Tennessee courts (who ultimately ruled against gay marriage in recent weeks on narrower, more technical, terms). Nobody will excoriate you in the op-ed pages. Instead of causing widespread fury, you will unleash, at most, widespread resignation.

Still, you feel bad. You hold no personal animus toward gay people. You even think there is something slightly mean-spirited behind your state's Defense of Marriage Act. You talk it over with your wife/husband/clerks. It's a pickle. Months pass.

Until you hit upon the solution: Shift the blame. Make the legislature the bad guys. Find a way to frame the ban on gay marriage that makes it impossible to strike down. Rule that unless the ban is utterly insane, it's constitutional. Suggest that as long as the legislature passed it, it must be rational. Use the word "deferential" six times.

The key to appearing reasonable will be to vilify the dissenters. You'll want to use your majority opinion to emphasize that judges who vote their "personal views" are behaving like "legislators." Quote liberal lion Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens for that proposition. Then condemn—without quite using the words "judicial activist"—the dissenters for having been "uncharacteristically … led to depart significantly from the court's limited role when deciding constitutional challenges."

Be sure to tell your "readers unfamiliar with appellate court review" that your state's decision to ban gay marriage is solely the fault of the legislature. Because you yourself, of course, still love everyone.

Sometimes spammers can be taken in by their would-be victims. Here's a hilarious, if long, story of just such a case.

It's even funnier if you're already familiar with the character of Derek 'Del Boy' Trotter.

I hadn't really planned to visit Ireland this year, but then my sister Michelle phoned the other day to say that her boyfriend, David Bowles, had just proposed to her. Not a big surprise. They had moved in together earlier this year, and we were all assuming that it was a question of when, not if.

They plan to get married quite soon, as his father has been given six-to-nine months to live, and they want him to be at the wedding. I don't know if the date is firm yet, but the latest that I'm hearing is November 11th.

At SIFF 2004, I saw an acclaimed trilogy from Hong Kong, Infernal Affairs, Infernal Affairs II, and Infernal Affairs III on three consecutive nights, Yan is a cop who's been in deep cover for ten years, infiltrating the triads. Lau is a triad who joined the cops about ten years ago, rising to the rank of inspector. Only their respective bosses, Superintendant Wong and Big Sam, know who they are. Each becomes aware of the other about the same time, and the chase to find the moles is on.

It's a tense and complex thriller and a meditation on good and evil. Yan has long blurred the line between cop and gangster. Lau is having second thoughts about being beholden to his old gang boss. Both men are in quiet agony, hating the deception and the danger.

I just watched the first movie again on NetFlix, and it holds up well. The other two movies are further down our queue. IA II is a prequel, showing Lau and Yan as young men just setting out on their long-term infiltrations. IA III is a sequel to IA I.

Martin Scorcese has remade IA as The Departed, due out later this year.