TheBoyfriend™ and I are not in any danger, though the land we own (and haven’t put a house on yet) could come under threat if they don’t get the fires under control by the end of the day or so. We have several friends however who are already under voluntary evacuation from their homes and who could be facing the possibility that they won’t have homes to come back too if firefighters can’t get the fires under control ASAP (as of this morning no home or people had been damaged, though firefighters are in “structural protection” mode, putting firetrucks in the driveways of the most at risk homes).

Please keep do whatever it is you do in situations like this (prayers, well-wishes, fingers-crossed, good energies, protection spells, whatever) for them.

It’s been at least a couple of months since I’ve had to create anything at work containing a “button” (well I’ve had a few app interfaces to design, but nothing needing a generic web button). Today, I needed one. I went through all the motions on auto-pilot and popped out a nice little button but as I reached for “Save,” I stopped dead in my tracks. There on my screen, I noticed that, without a second thought, I had just created something that looked so incredibly old-fashioned that I couldn’t CMD+Z fast enough to get it off my screen. That’s when the sad fact hit me. The “glassy” button is dead. A moment of silence, please.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d been telling my boss for a long time now that glass was going out. The trend over the last couple of years had been towards increasingly simple glass effects, and finally dropping the sharp highlight altogether for a more matte look. Still, there’s a difference between “going out” and “gone out” and it’s jarring when that which at one time reigned as the very epitome of modern “Web 2.0″ design elements finds itself in the latter categorization, and even beyond that and into the “dated” and “old-fashioned” categories.

Kip does a good job discussing why the photo shouldn’t have been taken*, so I’d like to talk about why it was. One of Kip’s commenters defines VA Beach as “Falwell and Robertson country” to explain the over-sensitivity to even the tiniest hint of semi-nudity. I grew up in the VA Beach area, and I’m currently in what IS Falwell country. I can speak with some authority when I say that it’s inaccurate to refer to the area as either. Jerry Falwell held influence in only a relatively small geographical location, and it certainly didn’t stretch across the state to Hampton Roads. While Pat Robertson is actually based in VA Beach, his influence (while greater than Falwell’s) doesn’t have the same kind of regional sway. I see that difference easily every time I go to visit my parents and am surprised to hear the word “ass” used on the radio (it’s censored here) or pass by a Hooters restaurant (plans to build one here faltered after Falwell’s crew all but stormed City Hall with pitchforks and torches). The reality is that Hampton Roads is one of the liberal hot spots in VA (you got HR, Richmond, and Northern Va).

So why are the religious right (undoubtedly the complaining customer would put themselves in that group) making a fuss in a not so religious right-wing area? I think we need look no further than Huckabee’s numbers in the primary. The reign of the religious right is faltering and collapsing. These types of displays are nothing more than the cries of a petulant child, unhappy because they aren’t getting the attention they want. I really think, on some level, bouts of faux outrage like this are simply an attempt to flex some muscles and try to appear relevant while the rest of society is moving on. I think we’ll be seeing more of them in the coming months, and then they will fade to be born again (pun intended) another day.

Of course I’d be remiss not to note that, in my opinion, this photo wasn’t singled out for the quarter inch of crack showing, but rather for who owned that quarter inch of crack. While it doesn’t touch much of the A&F imagery, this image is fairly homoerotic. The female is all but cropped out of the frame and we’re presented with three attractively-built shirtless men, one of whom is either in a state of undressing or re-dressing. Had it been a more evenly mixed group, perhaps with a female’s waistband drooping ever so slightly, would there have been the same complaint? Perhaps (see the above paragraph), but I also think there’s a good possibility that there wouldn’t have been. Anti-gay bigotry has long been the basis for such a double standard in imagery (nude woman=art, nude man=porn), and nowhere is anti-gay bigotry more at home than among the religious right. It’s an area where they’ve been bolstered by the successful passing of a number of anti-gay legislation. If these types of thing really are desperate grabs for the power they are so quickly losing, you can bet they will focus their efforts around gay-related media.

*Update: Upon re-reading, perhaps I should clarify that Kip discusses why the photo should not have been taken from the store, not why it should not have been shot.

I can understand the fatigue, and how it can be easy to forget about. We were told the war would last as little as six days and surely not past six months, so as we approach our sixth year over there, it’s not surprising that other things have grabbed our attention. But the fact that military suicide attempts have increased more than five-fold since the war began (setting them at what is a potentially an all-time high) should remind us that for too many of our friends, family, and neighbors, it’s not so easy to simply forget.

The economy, health-care, education, immigration and others are all important issues (no matter what you think should or shouldn’t be done regarding any of them), but I think we owe it to the soldiers and their loved ones, who likely place the war towards the top of their lists, to perhaps bump it up a bit from where ever it’s fallen on ours. When we hear our elected officials casually talking about staying in Iraq for another 50 years (or even 100), we need to stay focused on the fact that we’re talking about real people, just like us.