The Tin Man » 2004

Saturday, May 1, 2004

A couple of Saturday mornings ago, Matt and I were snuggled up in bed together in our underwear, talking about compiled versus interpreted computer languages.

This morning we were snuggled up in bed together talking about the upcoming Tony Award nominations and then about what TV was like before cable.

This is just one of the reasons I know this is a great relationship.

10:46 AM | 4 drops of oil

Sunday, May 2, 2004

Matt and I saw “Mean Girls” last night and loved it. I’ve long been a fan of Tina Fey; with her beauty, her intellect and her wit, she’s one of the few females out there who could probably de-gay me.

In honor of her feature-film debut (and I hope this doesn’t go too much against the spirit of the film), I present the following photo from one of my old yearbooks:

Tina Fey at UVA

That’s Tina’s senior class photo at the University of Virginia. She graduated in 1992.

Tina and I were fellow ‘Hoos. She was a fourth-year at UVa when I was a first-year. (That’s “senior” and “freshman,” respectively, for all you non-Jeffersonians.) Although I never knew her, I was, like her, an aspiring drama geek. I performed in “Sweeney Todd” during my first year at UVa, in a cast consisting entirely of fellow first-years. That spring, I tried out for my first college-wide show, “Cabaret,” but I didn’t even make callbacks — I was that bad. (My drama career ended shortly thereafter.) In hindsight, I wish I’d made it into the show like some of my “Sweeney” comrades did, because then I might have had the chance to get to know Tina; she played the lead female character in “Cabaret,” Sally Bowles. I think I would have liked her.

Tina, congratulations on your top ranking at the box office this weekend and on your hilariously bitchy yet ultimately sweet movie. I wish you continued success at “Saturday Night Live” and in all your future projects.

(More on Tina: Anchor Woman: Tina Fey Rewrites Late-Night Comedy, by Virginia Heffernan, November 3, 2003.)

11:42 PM | 7 drops of oil

Tuesday, May 4, 2004

I have to run to the dentist, but for now, check out this photo from last night’s NY Blogger Talk! There in the front row are Sparky, me (in the white shirt), Matt, and the Matt of Capn Design.

More on this event later. In the meantime, that Gothamist entry should be chock full o’ trackback links about it.

9:09 AM | 2 drops of oil

Looks like Defamer.com, a.k.a. “Gawker goes to Hollywood,” is public as of this morning. Choire gave us all a preview of it at the NY Blogger Talk last night.

From Defamer’s site stats, it looks like it opened its doors sometime between 9:00 and 10:00 EDT. Sometime after 11:00, the word must have begun to spread. [This was easier to see when the graph had a shorter range. Now the numbers are all squooshed.] I love the science of information propagation! (Or, uh, how the word spreads.)

And — coolest for me — my blog entry containing Tina Fey’s yearbook photo is linked from the front page today.

As for my dentist visit, the purpose of which was to determine the cause of some jaw pain (no jokes, okay), I have been given some antibiotics and I might need my wisdom teeth removed.

Perhaps this is penance.

12:16 PM | Comments Off

So, Matt and I went to the New York Bloggers panel at the Apple store last night. We ran into Sparky, Mike, Andy, Chris, and Matt Jacobs. I was worried about not getting a seat, so I got there about 30 minutes early, only to find that hardly anybody was there yet. I saw Sparky and we wound up sitting in the middle of the front row. By the time the event started, the place was full. Nerd glasses were in abundance, including those worn by me and by most of the people I knew.

There were three panels — a publishing panel, a technology panel, and an editors’ panel, in that order.

I was put off by the publishing panel, because of the focus on money. Jason Calacanis wasn’t my cup of tea — he came off too slick. And I’m kind of annoyed that Nick Denton’s name keeps popping up in connection with so many different blogs/sites (Gawker, Wonkette, Fleshbot, Kinja, and now Defamer), and that he makes money off these blogs without actually writing them. Then again, I’ve never been very business-oriented. Everyone’s got to make a living, I guess.

I enjoyed the technology panel more. Anil and Meg focused on those of us who are among the majority of bloggers. They get blogging — it’s not primarily about making money; it’s about self-expression and connecting with other people. They’ve both been blogging practically since the beginning, and they just seem like cool people; I greatly admire both of them.

The final panel, consisting of Choire, Jen Chung, and Lockhart Steele, was the most fun. Choire was… Choire. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, but he’s as wacky as ever. Jen Chung is so cute and smart, and Lockhart Steele’s a cutie himself.

The whole event (especially hanging out with Sparky for the first time in a long while) made me nostalgic for my early blogging days of 2001 — back when the coterie of New York bloggers was smaller, back when Choire was just a blogger doing East/West with Philo, back when the term “warbloggers” didn’t exist — back when the blogging world more closely resembled the blogging world that Anil and Meg know so well.

Blogging is the most fun when you don’t take yourself, or it, too seriously. I hope it stays that way. Even if it doesn’t stay that way as a whole, however, that’s OK — blogging has never been about the whole. It’s been about these niches, these little groups of people that read each other, write about each other, meet each other, get to know each other, and generally just have a good time. The wonderful thing about blogs is that you can do whatever the hell you want with one.

Still — blogging business models? Bah.

5:11 PM | 1 drop of oil

Wednesday, May 5, 2004

I haven’t written about it in a long time, but gay marriage becomes legal in Massachusetts in just 12 days. (The date kind of snuck up on us, eh?) While tooling around on the Boston Globe’s same-sex-marriage site, I came across a couple of blogs sponsored by the paper: one for gay marriage and one against it. There’s also a gay-marriage blog that covers the topic generally, not just in Massachusetts.

I guess on May 17 we’ll see if Armageddon comes. I have a feeling it won’t.

12:22 PM | Comments Off

I’ve added Word Spy to my Bloglines feed. Word Spy is a cute little site “devoted to lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases… new terms that have appeared multiple times in newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, and other recorded sources.” Now that it’s on my daily feed, I can just click on the link and see a new word every day. Good stuff.

12:31 PM | Comments Off

Thursday, May 6, 2004

~~Here’s the Debbie Downer skit from “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend.~~ (Update: the Debbie Downer skit can be found here and here.) I can’t remember the last time I saw so many cast members lose it at one time. What a meltdown.

(via College Humor, a site I came across only because my Tina Fey photo is currently getting about 500 or 600 hits an hour from it)

9:54 AM | 4 drops of oil

The day after tomorrow I will get into a large metal tube that will fly thousands and thousands of feet above the ground and zoom across the sky at hundreds of miles an hour.

Human beings weren’t meant to do this. There’s a reason we don’t have wings.

(OK — technically, there is no reason we don’t have wings, and there is nothing human beings were meant or not meant to do, because there is no such thing as intelligent design, and we evolved from previously-existing species, and will eventually evolve into not-yet-existing species, species that presumably will never have to worry about such things as war, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, or verbal speech. But I was trying to be cute.)

I’ll be flying to San Diego, and it will be my first time on an airplane since before 9/11. Flying used to make me nervous enough as it was. Of course, millions of people have flown since then without incident. Actually, I’ve been more worried about accidentally setting off security by having nail clippers in my carry-on or something, but then again I’ve been nervous around such authority figures as police officers and store security guards ever since I was a kid, afraid that I was on some Suspiciously Imperfect Children’s List or something.

Anyway, I’m leaving for San Diego on Saturday morning and returning next Friday. I’ll be at a work-related seminar, and I’ll be staying at a very nice resort, possibly bored out of my mind but at least getting nicely tanned. I’ll probably rent a car, even though driving around an unfamiliar city makes me a little unsettled (can you sense a theme here?). I plan to bring my old laptop, which is six and a half years old, originally came loaded with Windows 95 (and now has Windows 98), and has 32 MB of memory and a slow processor. I figure I might want to blog or Web-surf while I’m there, which I will presumably do via dial-up. On the other hand, I might just lie out by the pool and read and unplug myself from the cyberverse for a week. I’ll see.

Wish me luck.

10:37 AM | 1 drop of oil

Friday, May 7, 2004

I TiVo’d the “Friends” finale last night, because I was at the theater. But thanks to NBC’s ever-so-accurate program data, the recording stopped in the middle of what I presume was the final scene. The gang was hanging out in the empty apartment, and Phoebe said, “Hey, do you guys realize that each of us has lived in this apartment at some point?” and then *BING*. It stopped. GRRR!! And that was despite my padding an extra minute onto the end. The same thing happened to Matt, so I’ll have to either get it from Netflix next week or hope that NBC “spontaneously” decides to do an encore broadcast this weekend (they did that for the “Cheers” finale) and my TiVo picks it up for me to watch when I get back from San Diego. In which case I should make sure I pad my “Friends” season pass with several extra minutes before I leave tomorrow morning.

Oh, and the show I saw was the Encores! production of “Bye Bye Birdie,” which was the best thing they’ve done this year. Bright candy-colored sets and costumes and hilarious performances that brought the house down again and again and again.

(Update: here’s a PVRblog post about the “Friends” ending being missed on TiVo.)

9:30 AM | 6 drops of oil

There’s been a last-ditch attempt in the last few days by some members of the Massachusetts Legislature to challenge the Massachusetts high court’s same-sex marriage decision. The members of the legislature have made a motion to the Supreme Judicial Court to vacate its own ruling, claiming that the court does not have jurisdiction over marriage issues because the state constitution gives jurisidiction over marriage to the legislative and executive branches.

Here’s the legislators’ brief in support of the motion. Here’s GLAD’s reply brief in opposition. Apparently this issue has already come up a few times over the course of this litigation and has been dismissed each time. I can’t see the court denying its own jurisdiction over marriage, especially at this point. And since this is a state-law issue, it can’t be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, so the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts will have the final word on this.

1:00 PM | Comments Off

Sunday, May 9, 2004

Hi! This is Matt posting for Jeff since he is stuck using slow dialup while in California…

Greetings from San Diego!

My god, the United States is so fucking huge. I’d forgotten. I haven’t been to California in a long time.

Saturday morning I woke up in Jersey City, pretty close to the Hudson River, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean, and I went to Newark Airport. Then I got on an airplane, and over the next several hours, I traversed the entire country until finally, as the plane descended, I could see the Pacific Ocean. During those several hours in the air, the entire history of our country’s engagement with its manifest destiny passed before (well, below) my eyes. I saw northeastern suburbs, home sweet home. Then more suburbs, and then the population thinned out, and then the Delaware River, and then eventually the mountains of West Virginia. Then everything was flat and the ground was covered with perfect checkerboard squares. Agriculture, Bush country. And then the Mississippi River. Huck Finn! Then I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I saw the amazingly huge Rocky Mountains, and then snow-capped peaks, and then vast empty expanses of untamed nature right inside the very borders of our country, and then I saw deserts, and then ~~Lake Tahoe~~ the Salton Sea, and then finally southern California and palm trees and the Pacific.

I tend to think of travelling in terms of going overseas. I lived in Japan for three years, and I’ve been to a bunch of different parts of the world, so I associate travel with exotic locations and cultures. While I’ve also travelled widely inside the U.S., I’d forgotten that it can be just as exotic. I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around the vastness of this country.

I don’t know if I can quite explain how I feel. I guess you’d have to have lived my life, to have been where I’ve been, and to have my overthinking, romantic-waxing brain inside your head in order to understand this. I feel simultaneously that I haven’t travelled far at all and that I’ve travelled to the other side of the planet. I sort of feel like I’m in a foreign country. And yet how can that be? People here still speak English and use U.S. dollars and watch the same TV shows and use the same products and drive the same cars as everyone else. In fact, is there any place more American than southern California? It’s uber-America. Los Angeles, the heart of our culture, is just two hours north, where TV programs and movies are filmed and then beamed out and consumed in Peoria and St. Louis and Boston and Austin and Seattle and Biloxi and Tampa and New York. And Valley-Girl-speak and American high school culture come from the California suburbs. Today I was driving around, seeing the convertibles and the palm trees, and somehow I started thinking about “Buffy” and “Saved By the Bell,” two southern-California-based shows. I felt like Sunnydale could be really close to me — this town that was filled with evil things and dark spirits precisely because it was so all-American.

Back in college I desperately wanted someday to take a big chunk of time and drive all over the country. I read Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley” and Douglas Brinkley’s “The Majic Bus” (the former was sort of boring, but I absolutely loved the latter). After college I took three and a half days and drove out to Colorado. But that trip didn’t include California. Driving across the country without going all the way to California is like — well, like coitus interruptus, sort of. Being here has reignited that dream — someday I want to just drive all over the nation, see everything everywhere.

My seminar doesn’t start until tomorrow, so today I went to the Hotel Del Coronado, where much of “Some Like It Hot” was filmed. It’s beautiful and old and huge, very turn-of-the-century with lots of wood paneling all over the place. It’s a National Historic Landmark, and it’s also where the novel that was the basis for the Christopher Reeve movie “Somewhere in Time” took place.

I’ll probably write more as the week goes on, although I’m dealing with an ancient laptop and connecting to the Internet via dial-up, which combine to create an incredibly slow and very annoying experience. In fact, Matt is posting this for me, because for some reason I can’t access my MT account from this computer.

More later. For now, this is Tin Man in southern California, signing off.

11:11 PM | 1 drop of oil

Saturday, May 15, 2004

I’m back from San Diego.

It was a wonderfully uneventful week. I learned a lot from my seminar; I went for long walks along the promenade of Coronado, on the San Diego Bay; I read much of “Cryptonimicon” on my own private patio attached to the back of my big hotel room (I’d been reading “Cryptonomicon” for a few weeks and finally finished it this afternoon); I walked through Hillcrest, San Diego’s gay neighborhood (I’ve decided that there is some International Language of Gay, because gay people look the same everywhere, or at least the same sub-groups exist everywhere). Anyway, the week went by in a big fast blur.

So I’m home, and it’s so nice to be back on my regular computer instead of using my old slow crappy laptop, which for some reason wouldn’t let me log into my Movable Type account. Thanks to Matt for posting the previous entry for me, and also for taking care of comment spam while I was gone! *Mwah*.

I definitely want to return to California. (This was my first trip there in 14 years.) I’m hoping maybe Matt and I can visit San Francisco or something this summer. We definitely plan to go somewhere for a few days if we can manage it.

So anyway, I’m back and I’m alive, and it’s humid and I don’t feel like writing anymore right now. More later, then.

3:36 PM | 1 drop of oil

Monday, May 17, 2004

A year ago, gay couples weren’t allowed to have sex in Texas. As of today, those same couples can move to Massachusetts and get married.

As they say in “Rent,” how do you measure a year?

Here’s the front page of today’s Boston Globe: “Free to Marry.” And here’s Howard Dean on gay marriage, also in today’s Globe.

You know, I’m realizing that gay Vermonters have basically been able to do for the last four years what gay Massachusetts residents are able to do as of today, except that it’s called something different. Both states now grant gay couples all the same rights as straight couples, and neither arrangement is recognized by the federal government. There was a lot of criticism a few months ago that calling such an arrangment a “civil union” as opposed to a “marriage” would have set up a scheme that was supposedly “separate but equal,” a concept that was deemed a failure 50 years ago today. But would it really be unequal?

In school segregation, separate was unequal, but that was because all-blacks schools didn’t receive the same funding and support as all-white schools and were therefore patently inferior. One benefit of integration was supposed to be that racist local governments would no longer be able to provide benefits to white students without also granting them to non-white students, because the students would all be mixed up in the same schools. In other words, it wasn’t the lack of white people per se that made black schools inferior, but rather the unequal funding and attention given to all-black schools. In fact, there are liberals today who disagree with Brown, who support the idea of separate schools for blacks as a way of instilling racial pride and identity. There are also those who think that Brown would have been better decided had the Supreme Court instead chosen to rigorously enforce “separate but equal,” which would have forced states either to create equal schools or just cry “Uncle” and integrate.

The point, anyway, is that it is not separateness itself that creates inequality, but rather the way that that separateness is dealt with. Vermont civil unions and Massachusetts gay marriages are completely the same, as I mentioned above. The only way they could be treated unequally is if the federal government someday recognizes all marriages, gay or straight, leaving Vermont “civilly-united” couples in the dust. But I think that if the federal government (whether of its own volition or under order of the U.S. Supreme Court) takes the big step of recognizing gay marriage, it will be such a seismic shift that there will be no logical or psychological reason not to recognize civil unions as well. After all, it’s just semantics. We’re talking about marriage as a civil institution (courts can’t force churches to do anything), so does it really matter whether a governmentally-recognized same-sex relationship is called a civil union or a civil marriage?

To some degree, yes. The real legal breakthrough might have occurred four years ago in Vermont, but today has great symbolic value. First, it just feels wonderful to think that there are now legally-married gay couples in the United States. Second, symbolism can lead to substance, because symbolism can affect the way people think about things. Calling legal gay relationships “marriage” forces people to think about equality and gay relationships, and it really puts the idea out there for people to see.

The causes of change are really murky. As one of my law professors argues in today’s Times, Brown did not lead to integrated schools; a shift in society’s views was first required. But a court decision can affect society’s views. Change occurs due to lots of “soft” factors. It wasn’t the Goodridge decision alone that led to legal gay marriage in Massachusetts, but rather Stonewall, the AIDS crisis, Rock Hudson, Clinton’s 1992 courting of the gay vote, Ellen DeGeneres, Matthew Shepard, and Lawrence v. Texas, as well as lots and lots of people coming out of the closet and thereby enlightening their families and friends, as well as lots of other things that are unmeasurable, that led to today.

So the word is not necessarily crucial, but it does matter. Civil unions are not inherently unequal, and marriage does not make everything equal. The word does not automatically make other people respect you or your relationship. But it’s one of those little things that, combined with other things, eventually creates change. You can’t control change — it’s like chaos theory. But you do what you can.

Therefore, congratulations, all you happily-married gay couples!

And save me some cake.

4:47 PM | 4 drops of oil

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Scenes From a Marriage:

A couple describes what it was like in Cambridge, Massachusetts, early yesterday morning, as they got their marriage license.

There are times when I think people are capable of not being so bad after all — times when it’s impossible to keep the grin from spreading, and you wonder if you’re really worthy of all this spontaneous stranger-loving goodwill, and maybe they should save it for the elderly ladies who must’ve been through so much more. I feel like a kid — a 28-year-old who’s lucky and ahead of the game, even though my straight peers all seem already married and property-owning, but they’re in such a different world, these guys are closer, really, and even the straight cheerleaders can’t quite know what it’s about, though they’re intoxicated by it all, too. I love you, Brian.

Peter was there, too, and he took this picture.

12:46 PM | Comments Off

I’ve finally, finally cancelled my AOL account. From now on, I will access AIM with AOL’s stand-alone client (or, more accurately, with Trillian). My new screen name is Tinmanic73; when I cancelled AOL I had to give up my old name. And for some reason, “tinmanic” by itself was already taken, which is odd, since I invented the damn word. So I just tacked on my birth year. Tinmanic73 it is.

It is so frickin’ hard to cancel AOL. I got DSL in March 2003 (along with a new computer); before that, I used AOL dial-up. But when I tried to cancel AOL last spring, the guy on the other other end of the line told me that they have an AOL-via-Broadband package at a lower price; if you have broadband Internet access, you can still use AOL’s features at the lower price. I figured it would be nice to have an extra e-mail account and keep my screen name. Plus, the irrational side of me wanted an Internet backup in case something happened to the DSL. But most importantly, the guy on the phone offered me two free months of AOL. Figuring there’d be nothing wrong with getting something for free that I didn’t really need, I accepted (plus I wouldn’t have to get a new screen name). Two months later, I forgot about it, and they began charging me again. So I called back and got another two free months. This happened several times, and now here it is, May 2004, and I’ve still got AOL. It came in handy last week when I was in San Diego, but I’ve finally decided to get rid of this stupid AOLbatross.

So I called up today, and I must have had to tell the guy four or five times that no thank you, I really appreciate the keywords you want to send me that could show me some great stuff, but I’d really just like to cancel.

I was beginning to worry that AOL cancellation was really a myth and that they actually didn’t have a cancellation process and that I’d get stuck in AOL-purgatory or they’d threaten to kill my first-born if I didn’t keep my service or something.

But no. I managed to hold my ground and make it to the end of the obstacle course. At the end of my current billing cycle, my AOL service will end and my billing will automatically stop and I’ll finally be AOL-free. This was according to a legal statement that I had to listen to.

It’s always nice to get rid of clutter. If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything — even cancel your AOL service. Hallelujah.

2:15 PM | 4 drops of oil

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

I’m getting my wisdom teeth removed on Saturday.

The right side of my jaw has been hurting for the last three weeks, and I’ve also been getting headaches on the right side of my head. I saw the dentist right before I went to San Diego, and he said they needed to come out.

I’ve heard bad things about wisdom-teeth removal. My brother’s ex-girlfriend’s face got all swollen when she had hers removed, and she was home for a while. My dad didn’t get his out until he was 50, and he was miserable for a few days as well. Matt said that his experience wasn’t so bad. I’m hoping mine isn’t, either.

Coincidentally, while I was in San Diego last week, I read a passage from Cryptonomicon about one character getting his wisdom teeth removed. It turns out (of course) that it’s online (it takes up the first half of that page). It sort of scared the bejeezus out of me (not that I had any bejeezus in me — I’m Jewish). Fortunately, though, my dentist X-rayed my teeth and it doesn’t seem like there’ll be a problem.

I’ll still be happy when it’s over, though.

12:52 PM | 8 drops of oil

Thursday, May 20, 2004

Last night I watched the season finale of “Smallville” and the final episode of “Angel.”

I was really impressed with “Smallville” — particularly the last few minutes, in which they managed to juxtapose at least seven different cliffhangers:

1) What will happen to Clark (naked, ooh) on the other side of the cave wall?
2) Who poisoned Lex and what will happen to him?
3) Will Lionel be executed?
4) Will Lana really get on the plane to Paris? (God, I hope so.)
5) Will Chloe and her father survive the explosion?
6) Will Jonathan survive Jor-El’s attack?
7) What’s that big symbol doing on the ground of the Kent farm?

Also, is Clark’s friendship with Lex really over?

It was neat that the writers managed to bring in Kara, who, in the original Superman mythology, was Supergirl. I was disappointed that she turned out to be human, though. And I loved hearing the opening movement of Mozart’s “Requiem,” one of my favorite pieces of music, during the last few minutes, even if I was distracted by the editing of the music.

As for “Angel” — what a way to go. I wasn’t looking at the clock, so I was utterly floored when the words “Executive Producer: Joss Whedon” suddenly appeared on the screen at the onset of the huge apocalyptic battle. There won’t be a Buffyverse next fall, so we’ll have no idea what happens, unless there’s a Spike spinoff (unlikely) or a TV movie (unlikely) or a comic book series (possibly). If none of those pans out, the surviving characters will be frozen in time, forever on the brink of battle. I liked it — well done.

Poor Wesley; he really didn’t have anything to live for anymore, did he? His character has come so far since he first appeared in the Sunnydale High School library in season 3 of “Buffy.” As for Lorne, I was moved by his elegant, disillusioned “Good night, folks.” And Spike — he unfortunately never had much to do during his one season on “Angel,” which was anticlimactic given his heroic sacrifice at the Hellmouth last spring. But I loved his recitation of the “effulgent” poem. It’s so much fun when Joss winkingly alludes to prior events.

Anyway, just one more finale to go — “Alias” on Sunday (although I have to catch up on the three most recent episodes first) — and then that’s it until the fall. Oh, the vast TV-less wasteland of summer… I guess I’ll finally be able to make some headway on my Netflix list and start tuning into Turner Classic Movies again. My TiVo will not go gently into that good night.

4:59 PM | Comments Off

Friday, May 21, 2004

In a poll, 81 percent of professional historians have labeled W’s presidency a failure. In finishing the sentence “Bush’s presidency is the biggest failure since (blank),” the most popular choice was Nixon. The second most popular choice was that W is the worst president in American history.

Here are some choice quotes.

“He is blatantly a puppet for corporate interests, who care only about their own greed and have no sense of civic responsibility or community service. He lies, constantly and often, seemingly without control, and he lied about his invasion into a sovereign country, again for corporate interests; many people have died and been maimed, and that has been lied about too. He grandstands and mugs in a shameful manner, befitting a snake oil salesman, not a statesman. He does not think, process, or speak well, and is emotionally immature due to, among other things, his lack of recovery from substance abuse. The term is ‘dry drunk.’ He is an abject embarrassment/pariah overseas; the rest of the world hates him… He is, by far, the most irresponsible, unethical, inexcusable occupant of our formerly highest office in the land that there has ever been.”

Also:

“After inadvertently gaining the sympathies of the world’s citizens when terrorists attacked New York and Washington, Bush has deliberately turned the country into the most hated in the world by a policy of breaking all major international agreements, declaring it our right to invade any country that we wish, proving that he’ll manipulate facts to justify anything he wishes to do, and bull-headedly charging into a quagmire.”

Finally, check out the long list of bullet points towards the end of the article, which sums up most of the horrible things he’s done since he became president.

The mind reels at the fact that this man runs the country.

1:43 PM | 4 drops of oil

Hot Toddy has an audio link to one of the best movie quotes ever, spoken by Madeline Kahn in “Clue.”

7:17 PM | 2 drops of oil

Saturday, May 22, 2004

Unfortunately, Matt and I were unable to make it to this last night. I hope it was fun! Matt’s sick, and on top of that he’s really busy with students checking out and therefore can’t stray too far from his building. And I wanted to spend the night with him because I was feeling nervous about my wisdom-teeth removal today. (My appointment is in one hour.) So we went out to dinner and then went back to his place and watched some TV. We are such the exciting couple, aren’t we? :-) Seriously, it’s great to have a boyfriend who is so often on the same wavelength as I am. I do hope to meet most of those guys at some point, though.

Anyway, my kitchen is stocked with apple sauce, oatmeal, Jell-o, pudding, Ensure, soup, and two bottles of juice. I’m taking off from work Monday and Tuesday. I’ve got a few DVDs and books. I’m still really nervous, but it’s probably just fear of the unknown.

Wish me luck.

12:03 PM | 5 drops of oil

Sunday, May 23, 2004

Well, I survived.

I’ve decided that wisdom teeth are an excellent argument against creationism. If there’s a God, I don’t think He’s stupid enough to design beings with such useless, problem-causing teeth that are so painful to remove.

At the last minute my dad decided to go with me, which was fortunate. It was nice to have him drive me home afterwards; and then he spent the rest of the afternoon and evening with me at my apartment.

The removal itself was pretty brutal. I was really nervous, and the dentist wasn’t planning to give me anesthesia, just novocaine. But I asked for gas, which I thought might help. It did — for a little while, anyway. Eventually I became nervous again; I think the disorientation of the gas actually made me feel more unsettled, or perhaps I just wasn’t breathing deeply enough. I definitely felt intense pain at some points. I whined several times, and my eyes even filled with tears. It was that bad.

When it was all over, there were several drops of blood on my t-shirt and on my forearms, despite the fact that I was wearing two or three bibs. The dentist said it was pretty tough to get the teeth out; my bone apparently wasn’t as soft as it is when most people get their wisdom teeth removed, because I’m about 10 years older than the average patient.

I looked at the little blood-covered things afterwards. Wow. Those things have been inside my head all this time?

I held ice packs on my face for 20-minute intervals for the next 24 hours. I’ve been eating soft foods. Surprisingly, and thankfully, I haven’t really been any pain, although my cheeks are a little bit swollen. I’m taking off from work tomorrow, and perhaps Tuesday, too. I’ll see.

Thank goodness I’ll never have to have my wisdom teeth removed again. Whew. I’m glad it’s over.

6:34 PM | 1 drop of oil

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Today I finally accomplished something I started more than 20 years ago.

I’ve been reading a lot about old computers lately, and since I was home today (still waiting for my mouth to get unswollen), I decided to look for an emulator for the home computer I had when I was a kid, the TI-99/4A. My parents gave me one for my ninth birthday, in December 1982. Compared to the other popular computers at the time, such as the TRS-80 and the VIC-20, the TI-99/4A was kind of crappy, and its version of BASIC was annoyingly quirky. But I found a TI-99/4A emulator this morning and downloaded it.

The cool thing about the emulator is that it comes preloaded with tons of games that you originally had to buy as separate cartridges. (I have fond memories of going to Toys ‘R’ Us with my dad and coming home with a couple of new games.)

So, the thing I finally accomplished today? One of my favorite games was Adventure, by Scott Adams (generally known as “Pirate Adventure”). Today it would be considered primitive — it was entirely text, no graphics, and you could enter only two-word commands, verb-object. And I loved it. (I remember having to save my place on a cassette tape; whenever I wanted to start from that place again, I had to play the tape and wait several minutes for the tape counter to get to 054. The tape machine would make this annoying electronic crunching noise the whole time, until it got to the right spot on the tape.)

But while I got really far in the game, I was never able to solve it.

So today I played Adventure again — and I still couldn’t solve it.

I’m 30 years old now and I still couldn’t figure it out. Even more embarrassing, I discovered today that the game is designated as “Beginner.” I had to look for some hints and the solution online — and I was disappointed to realize that I’d always been much closer to the end of the game than I’d always thought, and that consequently the universe of the game was much smaller than I’d always thought. I’d always thought that perhaps there were whole new settings in Pirate Adventure for me to explore, but no.

I feel like some fond illusions from my childhood have disappeared.

Anyway, now I’m nostalgic for all those old Infocom games, like Zork and whatnot. I’ll have to find those online, too.

(Oh, and here’s the list of commands to complete Pirate Adventure from start to finish. I counted 261.)

7:25 PM | Comments Off

Here’s a fascinating article about the history of marriage, and how gay marriage fits into the equation, from this week’s New Yorker.

7:50 PM | Comments Off

Thursday, May 27, 2004

The mayor of Jersey City, Glenn Cunningham, died suddenly of a heart attack on Wednesday night. Now, I feel no allegiance to Jersey City and have no interest in Jersey City politics — I still consider myself a temporary resident — but still, wow. Jersey City’s one of the biggest cities in the state and this was so out of the blue. The mayor was just 60 years old.

I actually met the mayor last spring. As part of my job as a state lawyer, I have to be at a polling station on state election days to make sure that the state’s election laws are being followed, including making sure that eligible voters are not turned away and that ineligible voters do not get to vote. State judges are on hand to hear emergency voting cases, and they usually rule in favor of letting people vote. Last spring, on a state election day, I was working at the Hudsdon County building in Jersey City when the mayor and his wife walked in, accompanied by a lawyer.

Apparently there was some dumb technical thing wrong with Mrs. Cunningham’s voter registration, and she hadn’t been permitted to vote. And in this election, the mayor himself was running in a primary for a state senate seat. Mrs. Cunningham was essentially moving to have her ballot declared valid.

The case had to be heard by a judge on duty, and I had to go represent the state’s position. Based on a technical reading of the election laws, I had no choice but to oppose Mrs. Cunningham’s motion, even though I thought my position was dumb and I was sure the judge would disagree with me.

So on one side of the courtroom were Mayor Cunningham, Mrs. Cunningham, and their lawyer, and on the other side of the courtroom was me.

When it was my turn to speak, I said a couple of sentences about the legal reasons for opposing Mrs. Cunningham’s motion. I felt like an ass, standing there opposing the mayor and his wife on a technicality, but I had to do it. Guess I’ll never be getting any favors from City Hall, I thought.

The judge, of course, allowed Mrs. Cunningham to vote.

So that’s the story of how I met the mayor.

Rest in peace, Mayor Cunningham.

10:09 AM | 2 drops of oil

Here’s Jon Stewart’s commencement address at the College of William & Mary.

10:37 AM | Comments Off

“The Return of the King” on DVD was waiting for me from Amazon.com when I got home late last night. (I’d been at the theater with Matt — more on that later.) I popped it into my DVD player and watched the first 10 minutes or so, and then I skipped ahead to the big climax, starting with Frodo at the Cracks of Doom, and watched the final 40 (!) minutes of the film, including closing credits. The 250-minute Extended Edition will come out in the fall, but for now, it’s nice to have the whole 3-hour-20-minute theatrical release on one DVD. I was curious to see what the exact halfway point of the film was — a mere 1 hour and 40 minutes into it (known in most films as “the end”) — and it turns out it’s Frodo getting tangled up in the webs of Shelob’s lair. Creepy. I look forward to sitting down and watching the whole movie in one sitting.

Then, of course, this fall, I’ll have to buy the Extended Edition, lock myself in my apartment for the day, and watch all three extended editions back to back. That’s 208 minutes plus 223 minutes plus 250 minutes for a grand total of 681 minutes — or 11 hours and 21 minutes.

And then the paramedics will have to come and peel me off the couch.

11:33 AM | 2 drops of oil

Last night Matt and I saw the revival of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart at the Public Theater. I’d never seen the play before, but just a few months ago I read Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On, a sweeping, absorbing history of the AIDS epidemic from its beginnings to 1985. Kramer looms large in Shilts’s book, and Kramer’s play and Shilts’s book cover much of the same territory — the founding of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, GMHC’s closeted president, the ignorance of the Reagan and Koch administrations. So although I’d never seen the play, I felt like I’d seen it before.

Raul Esparza is, as Matt put it, a force of nature as Ned Weeks, the fictional analog of Larry Kramer in the play. Given my past history of trying to see Raul Esparza in a show, I figured we’d be out of luck last night, since that’s what happened to me when I tried to see him in “Tick, Tick… Boom!” and “Taboo” (I saw his understudy each time). I’m glad I’ve finally seen him, though. Joanna Gleason as Dr. Emma Brookner was cold and reserved and played the part well.

The biggest treat for me, though, was seeing Billy Warlock play Felix, Ned’s lover. I’ve had a crush on him since I was 12; I met him back in 1988, when he was on “Days of our Lives” and I got to visit the studio. I still have his autograph from that visit. To see one of my crushes kiss a man — several times — made me swoon. Unfortunately, he’s apparently straight, although I’m shocked that he’s already 43 years old — he still looks like he’s about 25.

My eyes welled up with tears near the end, when Dr. Brookner married Ned and Felix as Felix was dying in his hospital bed. I was so overcome that I wanted to have a full-on cry, but I couldn’t seem to make it happen.

The show was an intense theater experience, with lots of yelling and screaming and crying. I’m of two minds about it. As a play, it’s flawed; it’s very preachy, and the anger is too unrelenting. But as theater, it’s terrific. At the end of the show, Matt and I were both drained.

Here’s a New Yorker profile of Larry Kramer. (Here it is as a PDF.)

4:24 PM | 2 drops of oil

Friday, May 28, 2004

Chelsea is becoming de-gayed.

…in the classic pattern of gentrification � first come pioneers, then come families � Chelsea is once again evolving. As mostly straight families move into Chelsea, gay residents are now gravitating toward Hell’s Kitchen and beyond.

12:57 PM | 1 drop of oil