Tonight Matt and I will be in the studio audience for The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. Matt put in an order for tickets when the show first went on the air in October, and a few weeks ago he got an e-mail stating that we had tickets for tonight. Appropriately enough, the guest will be my former governor, Christie Whitman. We just have to make sure to get there early enough, because they give away more tickets than they have seats in order to ensure a full audience.

It should be fun. I’ll let you know how it goes.

So, the Colbert Report taping was fun.

We got there just after 5:30 p.m. and waited on a line. There were four people behind us from Chicago.

Shortly after 6:00, two people came through the line and handed out numbered passes. Not everyone on line got passes – there are only 109 seats. We were number 60 and 61.

At around 6:20, they sent us into the building. We emptied our pockets and passed through a metal detector. My bag was searched. Then we waited in an outer room for about 20 minutes. There was a small TV hanging from the ceiling – showing Comedy Central, of course.

At around 6:40, a woman quieted us down and gave us some ground rules – turn off our cell phones, laugh and clap loud, don’t yell out things like, “We love you Stephen!” Then they sent us into the studio, ten people at a time.

And we got to sit in the front row! We were on stage right, which is where Colbert’s main desk is. Pretty cool.

A comedian came in to warm up the audience. He entertained/taunted us for about 35 minutes – there seemed to be some delay in Stephen coming out, so he needed to keep pattering for a while. He had a balding shaved head and was kinda hot, and he kept lifting up his shirt for some reason. He also introduced the camera crew and stage manager to us.

Finally, at around 7:30, Stephen Colbert came out and we all cheered loudly. He took questions for about five minutes and then started the show.

There are several TV screens high up in the studio, so you can see all the on-screen graphics that you see when you watch the show. I kept switching my eyes back and forth between Colbert and one of the screens.

He messed up his pre-credits introduction, and we all laughed. He had to do the whole thing over. That was cute.

The Wørd tonight was “Aggravated Assault” – all about the Superbowl. I didn’t pay much attention.

His next segment was an installment of Better Know a District. It happened to be our very own Congressional district, the New York 8th. He did a taped interview with our Congressman, Jerrold Nadler. He sufficiently humiliated him.

The guest tonight was Christie Whitman, plugging her book, It’s My Party, Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America, about how the Republican Party is pushing out moderates like her. Colbert told a cringe-inducing joke about Rudy Giuliani and 9/11.

After the final “commerical break,” he did a few final lines. Except he screwed up a line again. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s Thursday, and my tongue’s already in the car going home.” (The show tapes Monday through Thursday.) So he had to do that over again, too. Then it was over, and we applaused for a long time, and then he bowed and we applauded again, and then he left. And then we left.

Fun, fun, fun.

Next we need to get tickets to The Daily Show…

[Note: This post is for comic-book geeks only; my apologies to everyone else]

Holy crap. I haven’t read comic books in a long time, but I just found this on Wikipedia. Infinite Crisis? A sequel to the legendary Crisis on Infinite Earths? They’ve brought back Earth-2 Superman, Earth-2 Lois Lane, Alexander Luthor, and Superboy-Prime from the paradise universe where they’ve been consigned for the last twenty years? Whatever happened to “that door can never be reopened without the complete and utter destruction of all life everywhere”? I thought that was supposed to be a way to write Earth-2 Superman out of the DC Universe without actually killing him. So much for that.

Looks like I may have to catch up on some comics.

Here’s an old interview with a VP at DC Comics that gives some interesting background.

This was a nice photo to see on the front page of the New York Times Metro section this morning.

If you have Google Earth, you can see my high school, the American School in Japan.

I’m disgusted by the reaction in some Middle Eastern countries to the cartoon that was printed in a Danish newspaper. Granted, the cartoon was in poor taste. But that doesn’t excuse attacks on Danish embassies and consulates. The reaction is infantile. That’s the only word I can think of to describe it – infantile. We don’t like it, so we’re going to resort to violence, because violence is so much easier than putting together a coherent argument. And since we feel anger, we’re going to act on it – forget about having a filter between emotions and actions. Never mind actually thinking about what you’re doing.

Infantile.

Well, there goes my day.

Watch “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof in Japanese. I love it.

This is a great column by David Brooks today on the Danish cartoon/Muslim violence issue. Since it’s hidden behind the Times Select wall, I’ll reprint it here, followed by some thoughts.

You want us to know how you feel. You in the Arab European League published a cartoon of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank so we in the West would understand how offended you were by those Danish cartoons. You at the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri are holding a Holocaust cartoon contest so we’ll also know how you feel.

Well, I saw the Hitler-Anne Frank cartoon: the two have just had sex and Hitler says to her, “Write this one in your diary, Anne.” But I still don’t know how you feel. I still don’t feel as if I should burn embassies or behead people or call on God or bin Laden to exterminate my foes. I still don’t feel your rage. I don’t feel threatened by a sophomoric cartoon, even one as tasteless as that one.

At first I sympathized with your anger at the Danish cartoons because it’s impolite to trample on other people’s religious symbols. But as the rage spread and the issue grew more cosmic, many of us in the West were reminded of how vast the chasm is between you and us. There was more talk than ever about a clash of civilizations. We don’t just have different ideas; we have a different relationship to ideas.

We in the West were born into a world that reflects the legacy of Socrates and the agora. In our world, images, statistics and arguments swarm around from all directions. There are movies and blogs, books and sermons. There’s the profound and the vulgar, the high and the low.

In our world we spend our time sifting and measuring, throwing away the dumb and offensive, e-mailing the smart and the incisive. We aim, in Michael Oakeshott’s words, to live amid the conversation — “an endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure in which, in imagination, we enter a variety of modes of understanding the world and ourselves and are not disconcerted by the differences or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of it all.”

We believe in progress and in personal growth. By swimming in this flurry of perspectives, by facing unpleasant facts, we try to come closer and closer to understanding.

But you have a different way. When I say you, I don’t mean you Muslims. I don’t mean you genuine Islamic scholars and learners. I mean you Islamists. I mean you young men who were well educated in the West, but who have retreated in disgust from the inconclusiveness and chaos of our conversation. You’ve retreated from the agora into an exaggerated version of Muslim purity.

You frame the contrast between your world and our world more bluntly than we outsiders would ever dare to. In London the protesters held signs reading “Freedom Go to Hell,” “Exterminate Those Who Mock Islam,” “Be Prepared for the Real Holocaust” and “Europe You Will Pay, Your 9/11 Is on the Way.” In Copenhagen, an imam declared, “In the West, freedom of speech is sacred; to us, the prophet is sacred” — as if the two were necessarily opposed.

Our mind-set is progressive and rational. Your mind-set is pre-Enlightenment and mythological. In your worldview, history doesn’t move forward through gradual understanding. In your worldview, history is resolved during the apocalyptic conflict between the supernaturally pure jihadist and the supernaturally evil Jew.

You seize on any shred — even a months-old cartoon from an obscure Danish paper — to prove to yourself that the Jew and the crusader are on the offensive, that the apocalyptic confrontation is at hand. You invent primitive stories — like the one about Jews who kill children for their blood — to reinforce your image of Jewish evil. You deny the Holocaust because if the Jews were as powerful as you say, they would never have allowed it to happen.

In my world, people search for truth in their own diverse ways. In your world, the faithful and the infidel battle for survival, and words and ideas and cartoons are nothing more than weapons in that war.

So, of course, what started in Denmark ended up for you with Hitler, the Holocaust and the Jew. But in your overreaction this past week, your defensiveness is showing. Democracy is coming to your region, and democracy brings the conversation. Mainstream leaders like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani are embracing democracy and denouncing your riots as “misguided and oppressive.”

You fundamentalists have turned yourselves into a superpower of dysfunction, demanding our attention week after week. But it is hard to intimidate people forever into silence, to bottle up the conversation, to lock the world into an epic war only you want. While I don’t share your rage, I do understand your panic.

I think he’s idealizing our society to some degree. Yes, we don’t have violent mass riots in response to cartoons. But not everyone in the West is “progressive and rational.” Not everyone spends time “sifting and measuring, throwing away the dumb and offensive, e-mailing the smart and the incisive.” There are plenty of Americans whose mind-sets are “pre-Enlightenment and mythological.” And the brisk sales of the “Left Behind” series of novels show that there are plenty of Americans who believe that “history [will be] resolved during [an] apocalyptic conflict.”

Certainly, this mind-set is much more prevalent in the Middle East. But let’s not pretend it’s exclusive to that region of the world.

From Dan Savage: Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Ex-Gay Cowboys.

Evangelical Christians seem sincere in their desire to help build healthy, lasting marriages. Well, if that’s their goal, encouraging gay men to enter into straight marriages is a peculiar strategy. Every straight marriage that includes a gay husband is one Web-browser-history check away from an ugly divorce.

There’s also a line about Jack and Ennis “pitching tents together.” I love that it got through.

Julian Bond, head of the NAACP, skipped Coretta Scott King’s funeral:

Bond, who has served as NAACP chairman since 1998, was teaching in Charlottesville Tuesday and told the approximately 300 students of his “History of the Civil Rights Movement” class why he chose not to attend King’s funeral that day. According to several students in the class, Bond said he felt King would oppose the views concerning gay rights held by New Birth’s senior pastor, Bishop Eddie Long.

In December 2004, Long and members of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church held a march in favor of a constitutional ban on gay marriage, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Have you ever been drunk, but only like 70 percent of you is drunk, and the sober 30 percent of you is watching Drunk You but is trapped inside your head and can’t do anything about it? That’s how I was last night. Either I hadn’t eaten enough or I’d drunk too quickly, but before I knew it I was standing in my friend’s kitchen, looking at my image in the mirror as it kept scrolling up before my eyes like a TV with a vertical hold problem. Then I was lying on the dining room floor, while Sober Me wished Drunk Me would just go away.

Matt took me home and I was asleep by 11:30. Some Friday night.

The snow was fun. 26.9 inches. Excellent. I love watching snow fall, and I’m always a bit sad when it finally stops. Falling snow is like being under a warm blanket; nobody’s outside, everyone’s insulated in their homes. When it stops snowing, everyone’s out and about and it sort of ruins everything.

I have today off from work for Lincoln’s birthday (which was actually yesterday). As a state employee, I get separate days for Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays. The problem with a Monday off that nobody else has off is that there’s not really anything to do. But it beats going to work.

Coincidentally, yesterday, Lincoln’s actual birthday, I began reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. This, a day after I finished reading the mammoth The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz. I guess I’m on a Lincoln kick. Or, I’m on a reading-books-I-got-as-gifts-over-the-holidays kick.

As another commemmoration of our 16th president, here’s a photo I never knew existed: Lincoln at Peace, taken the day after he was murdered. Creepy, but calming.

Just when I thought Matt was an anti-romantic, he surprised me this morning. Several times.

He left the apartment this morning before me. When I went into the kitchen to make breakfast, I found one of these leaning against my container of oatmeal. (He knew I would have oatmeal? Am I that predictable?)

It was so sweet of him.

Then I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and found another one tucked between my electric toothbrush and the toothbrush holder.

Then I found one underneath my cellphone.

Then I found one tucked into the collar of my coat.

Then I found one on my computer keyboard.

Matt’s so sweet.

I put them all onto his desk chair next to the (really sentimental and cheesy) card I got him.

Then, while I was waiting on the PATH platform for the train to arrive, I took my book out of my bag and opened it. Tucked in next to the bookmark was yet another one. That one really made me smile.

Then I was at my office, putting some stuff into my bag to go to a meeting, and I found another one!

Hmm… there are eight on that website. Is there one more I haven’t found yet?

Awesome.

I may have to start reading this guy.

The oral arguments in Lewis v. Harris (which I watched via webcast) were so fascinating! David Buckel of Lambda Legal, attorney for the gay couples, was up first. After a few minutes of speaking, he was peppered with questions from five of the seven justices. I got nervous, because they were challenging him pretty hard. But after his time was up, it was Patrick DeAlmeida’s turn, the attorney representing New Jersey, and he was challenged even harder – at least four of the justices seemed very skeptical of his arguments. (Two of the justices didn’t speak at all.)

You never know how these things will turn out, but it looks good.

Oooh! The Electric Company on DVD! Well, 20 episodes, at any rate. Here’s an appreciation.

HotOlympians.com has been shut down by the U.S. Olympic Committee.

The domain name hotolympians.com is infringing on federal trademarks. When I registered the domain name, I did some research on olympic trademarks and came to understand… that “olympic” was trademarked and “olympians” was not. I was wrong. And thus we will continue publishing under a new domain name which will be up shortly…

When asked why a local newspaper could publish a feature of an athlete right next to an advertisement, I was told that we weren’t a news operation. I was told that hotolympians.com jeapordized American athlete’s right to participate in the games.

Olympic dorks.

Today (which we have off for Presidents’ Day) Matt and I finally finished watching the Battlestar Galactica Season 1 DVDs, which I’d borrowed from Jon. We’ve been watching Season 2 every week with a group of friends, but I was confused for a long time because I hadn’t seen the miniseries or the first season. Now everything is clear to me. (Or at least everything that is supposed to be clear.) And perusing various aspects of the show via Wikipedia helps even more.

What an absolutely terrific show this is. While it’s sci-fi, it’s not your typical sci-fi. A good term for it is naturalistic science fiction. The characters are rich, realistic and flawed.

It’s a complex, character-driven show with multiple long-term story arcs. One way in which TV is superior to movies is the ability to do things like that. It’s the modern-day version of reading Charles Dickens novels in weekly or monthly installments.

It’s just great.

“The Government’Â’s argument echoes the classic rejoinder of bureaucrats throughout history: If I make an exception for you, I’Â’ll have to make one for everybody, so no exceptions.”

I like the Chief Justice’s writing style.

Gothamist has an annoying habit of posting about very hipsterish events populated overwhelmingly by white people. Still, this is good. (Found it here.) A slew of cell phones started ringing simultaneously in the bag-check area of the Strand. Not just once, but several times, over the course of 20 minutes. They rang together and then in categories: Nokias, then Motorolas, and so on. Turns out it was an elaborate prank.

As I watched the video and listened to all the ringing, I couldn’t decide if it was good or just damn annoying. Had I been in the store at the time, I probably would have thought the latter.

Still, well played.

O happy day: As of yesterday, my student loan has fallen below $30,000. Since Matt and I moved in together, I’ve been paying down my loan like lightning. At this rate, it should be almost all paid off by the end of 2007. I can’t wait to be debt-free again.

Birth of the Nation: The First Federal Congress, 1789-1791. How do you create a Congress from scratch?

(See also: Major events and legislation of the First Congress)

I’m going to file this away for future reference as an all-purpose rejoinder to all Internet know-it-all blowhards, because it’s brilliant.

I for one would love to see Glider’s C.V. I’m sure it will provide ample documented proof that he knows the contextual issues of the arguments he’s presenting. I’m sure he is also aware of the providences of the knowledge he is drawing from and providing as evidence. I’m sure he knows how rules of evidence works in the field, what counts, what has already been left behind as no longer useful.

He has probably written widely on this subject, deepening his research and expanding his understanding of it along the discursive boundaries recognized by other similarly interested scholars. He has readily attacked the simple binaries that smack of amateur thought and has developed a complex understanding of the nuances of the problematic issues in the field. He constantly questions his own knowledge, continually looking for new theoretical perspectives with which to frame it.

Or perhaps he is just another know-it-all computer programmer with a big mouth who thinks that vomiting back his weekend pleasure reading counts for a warrant of authority? If that is indeed the case, I should submit my C.V. to be a project engineer at Google right now.

Just out: the National Journal’s latest rankings of members of Congress from most liberal to most conservative. Senators; Representatives. Senators John Sununu (R-N.H.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) are at the median. You can also browse by state.

Pitch and temperament explained. Awesome.

This post is rambling and gripey.

Maybe it’s because this is the first Monday in three weeks that I’ve had to go to work (the past two weekends were three-day weekends), but I’ve been in a bummer of a mood since yesterday. I spent most of yesterday depressed about having to go back to work today. I’m always complaining to Matt that we don’t do anything on the weekends, but then when the weekend comes I can never think of things to do. Well, I do think of things, but then either Matt is busy with work stuff on the weekends (I shouldn’t complain, as his job gives us the free apartment, which is enabling me to pay down my student loan at such a quick rate) or I don’t actually want to do something when the opportunity arises. I’ve been wanting to go back to the Museum of the City of New York for some time now, but what’s with museums closing at 5 pm on weekends? By the time Matt and I got ourselves together to do stuff on the weekends, it would be too late to the take the subway up there and spend enough time in the museum.

The solution is that we need to plan ahead of time what we’re going to do on the weekends, so we can get up out of bed and go do it.

Matt says that this is all because it’s the winter and it’s cold out, and that once spring comes, we’ll go out and do more stuff. I guess that’s true. But I’ve been getting cabin fever on the weekends. Sitting on the couch reading the Sunday paper while looking at the back of Matt’s head as he sits at his computer gets a little old. And I don’t want to write off a third of the year just because it’s too cold.

Matt readily acknowledges this difference between us, that he’s perfectly content to code websites or watch TV on the weekend while I often want to do something enlightening or memorable. The thing is, my desire to go out and do something enlightening or memorable sometimes conflicts with my desire to take advantage of the weekend and just do nothing.

A few years ago I was house-sitting for someone in Kearny, New Jersey, not too far from Manhattan, on a long weekend. At the time I’d recently bought a recording of the Ring Cycle. That Saturday afternoon, I listened to the weekly Metropolitan Opera broadcast and then had a fantasy of suddenly hopping into the city and getting a ticket for the New York Philharmonic or something at Carnegie Hall. (Oh, look – I blogged about it! Wow, I’ve been blogging a long time.) I didn’t do it, and instead had a perfectly lovely, cozy weekend indoors by myself.

Tonight I’m actually going to the Met with Andy to see La Traviata – he had an extra ticket. It will be only my second time at the Met. I’m looking forward to it. There are three things I think of as quintessentially New York activities: museums, theater, and classical music/opera. The fine arts, basically. I don’t do enough fine arts. I need to do more of it. Particularly the latter.

It seems that the theme of this post is that if I want to go out and do stuff in the city, I should do it. But it’s more than that. I just seem to have this general malaise lately.

The gym – what’s the point of it? Actually, two different people have told me lately that they think my face looks thinner. But other than that, isn’t going to the gym supposed to make me feel good? Isn’t the cardio supposed to be making me feel good emotionally? So why have I been feeling emotionally mediocre lately? Isn’t the weight-lifting supposed to be giving me bigger muscles? Actually, the weight machines do seem to be working, albeit slowly. Yesterday my biceps were able to handle 10 reps of 55 pounds, whereas a few weeks ago I was struggling mightily with 40. And my arms are slowly, I emphasize slowly, getting some muscle definition. But to what greater purpose?

Then there’s my knees. I’ve only been able to have one physical therapy session so far, due to insurance issues. I’ll finally have my second one this week. Still, I’ve been doing the exercises I learned at the first session and they haven’t helped matters yet.

Then there’s a work meeting in south Jersey next Monday evening that I somehow have to get to even though I don’t have a car.

Then there’s other stuff.

Yesterday did turn better last night, actually, after I got back from the gym in the evening (so maybe the gym does have benefits?). I read about 20 pages of Team of Rivals, and then at about 9:30, Matt and I went out to the nearby Waverly Restaurant for dinner. There’s something really nice about a late dinner out. The place was relatively empty. I had a tuna melt and fries, and Matt had a patty melt and fries. We ate and talked. It was quite nice. Afterwards, we went home and watched a couple of second-season episodes of Battlestar Galactica. We’d already seen them the first time around, but they were a blur back then because I was clueless about the show. After having watched all the first-season episodes, though, the second-season episodes made so much more sense last night.

Then I read a few more pages of my book and then went to bed.

Saturday night was pretty good, too. For a change of pace, we went out for Indian food. Then we went home and watched Mysterious Skin on DVD. What a good, disturbing, effed-up movie.

I can’t seem to stop writing this post, as if continuing to write it will somehow make me feel better. Sometimes I just really need the written word, you know?

I don’t know.