Jordin Sparks just sang a really great rendition of the national anthem.

But why, whenever someone sings the national anthem during the Superbowl broadcast, do we have to see soldiers overseas? And why does the song always have to end with a flyby of Air Force jets? Why do they have to make it all so goddamn militaristic? Yes, the song narrates events that took place during a war, and yes, our nation was founded on the blood of soldiers, but the military isn’t the be-all and end-all of our nation.

I have as much respect for the U.S. military as any American, but doing all this stuff during our national anthem just reinforces the idea that our country is jingoistic and bloodthirsty and arrogant.

And it’s not like there isn’t enough testosterone in the game already.

Courtesy of Logo, I’m giving away a copy of “The Big Gay Sketch Show” Season 1 on DVD.

They’ve asked me to use the following trivia question. The first person to leave the correct answer in the comments wins.

The Big Gay Sketch Show Season Two launches February 5th, 10PM ET/PT on LOGO. Who is the show’s executive producer?

A. Donald Trump

B. Margaret Cho

C. Rosie O’Donnell

[Update: Bart wins!]

Gay New Yorkers Talk Politics.

And the first of those gay New Yorkers is… yours truly.

Okay… according to my site stats, someone from Gettysburg College is WAY into my blog.

Some voters in Wisconsin and Virginia went to the polls today to vote in the Super Tuesday primary. Only problem? Wisconsin and Virginia aren’t holding primaries today.

Here’s a Super Tuesday viewer’s guide, hour by hour.

Here’s a district-by-district map of how NYC Democrats voted on Tuesday. In Manhattan it practically digs down block by block. Really cool.

The writers’ strike appears to be near an end. If it ends, when do your favorite shows come back? Here’s an ongoing list.

In December, pianist Leon Fleisher (father of jazz singer and former NYC gay blogger Julian Fleisher) was celebrated along with several other legends at the Kennedy Center Honors. In today’s Washington Post, he writes about the unease he felt.

I was flattered to be included in so distinguished a group and to be recognized for whatever contributions I may have made to American life. I was pleased to be part of an event that raises money for an institution as vital as the Kennedy Center and to be with my family and to see their joy at the ceremony.

What made me unhappy and continues to trouble me was that I was required to attend a White House reception on the afternoon of the gala. I cannot speak for the other honorees, but while I profoundly respect the presidency, I am horrified by many of President Bush’s policies….

For several weeks before the honors, I wrestled with this dilemma, deciding in the end that I would not attend the reception at the White House. That decision was met with deep, if understandable, disapproval by the powers that be. I was informed that I was hardly the first honoree to express such reserve; cited to me, among others, were Arthur Miller and Isaac Stern during the Reagan years and several during the present administration. I was asked to attend all of the scheduled events and to follow the well-established protocol of silence….

In the end, I decided to attend wearing a peace symbol around my neck and a purple ribbon on my lapel, at once showing support for our young men and women in the armed services and calling for their earliest return home. My family did the same, as did a number of fellow attendees who, over the weekend’s various events, asked me for ribbons of their own.

What would you do if invited to the White House?

Today’s the Virginia primary, and yesterday Hillary Clinton spoke at my alma mater, the University of Virginia. She spoke to Larry Sabato’s Introduction to American Politics class.

Maybe one day, after all the votes are counted, the oaths sworn and the stories filed, 1,000 people will remember witnessing a uniquely University of Virginia moment in the carefully scripted world of presidential politics: Hillary Clinton and U.Va. politics professor Larry Sabato swaying arm-in-arm onstage as the University Singers led an Old Cabell Hall audience in a rousing rendition of “The Good Ol’ Song.”

She spoke in Old Cabell Hall, an auditorium I know well, because it’s in the music building and it’s where my choruses performed most of their concerts. It’s cool to see photos of her there.

Here’s a podcast of the event.

Who is the youngest superdelegate to the Democratic convention this year?

A 21-year-old gay man, Jason Rae.

A junior at Marquette University, he has been courted by both Democratic candidates, including a breakfast with Chelsea Clinton and phone calls from both her parents.

You can see video of him being interviewed here.

The Senate Ethics Committee admonished Larry Craig today.

Oh, snap! His ass just got admonished! Harsh!

What are they gonna do now? Make him step down at the end of his term?

Here’s the official letter. (It’s not scarlet.)

Ever wonder how Stephen Colbert makes sure he doesn’t actually piss his guests off when he interviews them in character? I stumbled upon this 10-month-old video while looking for something else: Stephen Colbert explains his character to Sen. John Kerry before the show begins taping.

The oddest part is hearing John Kerry refer to the blogosphere.

The other day I went searching for a Valentine’s Day card for Matt. I hunted through the cards and found one that both made me chuckle and seemed appropriate.

Yesterday I took the card out to sign it. And that’s when I realized there was something wrong.

It didn’t say “Happy Valentine’s Day.” It said “Happy Anniversary.”

I should realized something was amiss when I had to take a red envelope from behind another stack of cards because the envelopes behind this particular card were cream-colored. But hey, there are so many similar letters there — V, A, E, N, N, I, A, Y — and it was among the Valentine’s Day cards.

I signed it anyway, crossing out “Anniversary” and writing in “Valentine’s Day.” And when I gave him the card I apologized in advance.

Maybe I’ll give him an Arbor Day card on his next birthday.

Warning. Nerd alert.

For the last three nights, I’ve played a little game in bed while trying to fall asleep. I’ve tried to see how many current U.S. senators I can name.

(Shut up. Matt conks out the instant his head hits the pillow, sometimes even before.)

On Tuesday night I went state by state. I managed to name about 64 senators before giving up. I was surprised I could name that many. Some of the names I pulled straight out of my ass.

The next morning I looked at a list of current senators to see which ones I’d missed.

On Wednesday night I racked my brain and managed to increase my number to about 90.

I looked at the list again the following morning.

Last night I did it! I’ve managed to memorize the names of all 100 senators.

You know, there are some obscure senators out there. I dare you to name the two senators from Wyoming off the top of your head.

Here’s the sortable list I used.

Conservative Michael Gerson writes:

Though it is increasingly unlikely, Clinton may still have a path to the nomination — and what a path it is. She merely has to puncture the balloon of Democratic idealism; sully the character of a good man; feed racial tensions within her party; then eke out a win with the support of unelected superdelegates, thwarting the hopes of millions of new voters who would see an inspiring young man defeated by backroom arm-twisting and arcane party rules.

Or she could win Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania. Still, ouch.

I was digging into the New York Times archives the other day to read stories about JFK’s assassination. I’m reading a book that takes place during the Kennedy years, and the other day the Dallas district attorney released some long-stored documents related to the assassination, so I got interested.

While digging, I came across a short article that ran on the morning of November 22, 1963.

Catholics Can Eat Meat At Kennedy Lunch Today

DALLAS, Nov. 21 (UPI) – Roman Catholics who attend tomorrow’s luncheon for President Kennedy have been given a special dispensation and may eat meat, a church spokesman confirmed today.

Sirloin steak will be served. Catholics are generally forbidden to eat meat on Fridays.

“Since most of the people at the luncheon will be non-Catholics we felt it would be easier to give a dispensation,” said the Rev. J. A. Schumacher of the Dallas-Fort Worth diocese.

He said President Kennedy would not have needed a dispensation.

“Since he is commander in chief of the military, he is a soldier,” Father Schumacher said. “The law says soliders don’t have to abstain.”

Kennedy never made it to the luncheon.

I was looking up an old TV miniseries I remember that dramatized the life of Jacqueline Kennedy. It was called A Woman Named Jackie. It aired in 1991; I remember watching it alone in my dorm during the fall break of my first year of college. Everyone else in my suite had gone away for the holiday, and it was so nice to have the entire place to myself.

Well, it turns out that Sarah Michelle Gellar played young Jackie!

An article about reverse commuting. Cool. That’s what I do every day, too.

Awesome chart: The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 – 2007. You can also type a movie into the search box and find it. (Type in Titanic and see how long it played in theaters. Months and months!)

Congratulations to Freeheld, the documentary about NJ Detective Lieutenant Laurel Hester’s attempts to transfer her pension to her domestic partner, Stacie Andree, as she was dying of cancer, which won the Oscar last night for best Documentary Short Subject. I have yet to see this, but I intend to.

The names of the nominees in this category were read to the Oscar audience by a group of soldiers in Iraq. A different member of the military announced the name of each film, and, ironically, the guy who announced Freeheld was a cute little gayboy Navy officer. (He sounded that way, at least.) Here’s the video.

The soliders didn’t announce the nominees for Best Documentary Feature, though. Two of those were about Iraq, a third was about extraordinary rendition, and a fourth was a Michael Moore movie. I guess that would have been a bit too much.

Andrew Sullivan is fun when he’s brutal:

Clinton is a terrible manager of people. Coming into a campaign she had been planning for, what, two decades, she was so not ready on Day One, or even Day 300. Her White House, if we can glean anything from the campaign, would be a secretive nest of well-fed yes-people, an uncontrollable egomaniac spouse able and willing to bigfoot anyone if he wants to, a phalanx of flunkies who cannot tell the boss when things are wrong, and a drizzle of dreary hacks like Mark Penn. Her only genuine skill is pivoting off the Limbaugh machine (which is now as played out as its enemies)….

How did they come this close to losing this? They had all the money, all the contacts, all the machine levers, the entire establishment, the biggest Democratic name in decades, and they’ve been forced into a humiliating death-match by a first-term black liberal with a funny name. It seems obvious to me that the Clintons blew this because they never for a second imagined they could. So they never planned to fight it. Once put in a fair contest, they turned out to be terrible campaigners, terrible politicians, bad managers, useless executives, wooden public speakers. If you’re a Democrat, that’s good to know, isn’t it? All that bullshit about Day One and experience? In retrospect: laughable.

Matt and I have to find a new apartment by mid-May and it’s causing me agita.

Neither of us has actually had to look for an apartment in Manhattan before, so we’re both heading into the unknown here.

Should we use a broker? We were discussing this last night.

Pros: it would save us the stress of having to use Craigslist and compete with tons of other people for the same apartments.

Cons: it would be pricey and not necessarily more helpful. When I lived in Jersey City, I found my first apartment through a broker and my second apartment on my own through an ad. My second apartment was better, quieter, and cheaper and I had a saner landlord.

But the idea of using, say, Craigslist, and having to compete with other people for an apartment, really drives me nuts.

What should we do?

[Update: 3 1/2 hours later. Really? Nobody has anything to say?]

Caught up in a post-Oscar reverie, I went searching on YouTube for some Chuck Workman films. Chuck Workman has put together some wonderful movie montages over the years. Here are two. I love this kind of stuff.

(1) 100 Years at the Movies (1994).

Here’s a list of all the clips featured in it.

(2) Precious Images (1986). This won the Oscar for Best Short Film.

Here’s a list of all clips featured in it (in chronological order, not in the order in which they appear in the film).

Happy Leap Day.

I know it’s 2008, but I love how February 29, 2000, was an exception to an exception to an exception.

Rule: February has 28 days.

Except for years divisible by four, when February has 29 days.

Except for years divisible by 100, when February has 28 days.

Except for years divisible by 400, when February has 29 days.

I would have blogged about this on February 29, 2000, but I didn’t have a blog then.

Or know what a blog was.

Unlike some people.

Do the gays need a Martin Luther King?

I’ve wondered about this for a long time. It seems to me that there are so many lazy gays out there who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about gay rights.

Meanwhile, the major gay organizations, as Chris Crain points out:

are so focused inside the Beltway that gay-friendly ignorance is permitted to persist. When was the last time you saw one of our national groups mount an effective public demontration of the rights denied gay and lesbian Americans? The Millennium March on Washington, perhaps? That was April 2000…

I’ve been reading Parting the Waters, the first part of Taylor Branch’s history of the black civil rights movement. Where is our Birmingham? Where are the gay people willing to go to jail for what they believe?

Granted, it’s hard to see what laws we could break that could force us into jail. Showing up at the county clerk’s office for a marriage license doesn’t get you thrown in jail. Sit-ins at lunch counters in the ’60s could get you thrown in jail, because the segregation laws barred black people’s actual physical presence from lunch counters and libraries and so forth. There are no laws that bar gay people’s physical presence anywhere.

Without the threat of jail and violence, what can we do to further our rights?

The point of the nonviolence movement of Martin Luther King and his allies, transmitted to them through Gandhi, was to show that justice and love can prevail over injustice and hate. By practicing nonviolence, they let the segregationists become the aggressors and thereby created sympathy.

What can we do today?

One difference between blacks in the ’60s and gays today is that the two groups have had to fight against different perceptions. Blacks Americans had to fight against the 300-year-old stereotype that they were stupid and shiftless and scary. Gay Americans today have to fight against the stereotype that we’re rich and privileged dilettantes who don’t have to deal with the same problems that “real, hard-working Americans” face. We also have to fight against the stereotype that we’re all white.

The public doesn’t see that gay couples aren’t all rich enough to hire lawyers to attain the same rights that straight couples get for free. The public doesn’t see that gay people suffer from employment discrimination. That gay Americans can watch their non-American life partners get deported.

The movements are not the same. Even into the 1960s, black Americans were denied the right to register to vote — they weren’t even allowed to participate in the political process. At least we don’t have to face that problem.

But we do have to face other misperceptions. As an uninformed straight person wrote to me in an email a few months ago:

As a group, homosexuals are portrayed in a significantly more positive light in the media than any other group in our culture. Homosexuals have the highest degree of societal acceptance of any community in the nation.

We’re like the Jews, apparently. While blacks were hated because they were powerless, Jews used to be hated because we appeared to have too much power.

We’re so entertaining, we gay people, aren’t we? How nice to have a cool gay friend, as long as he remembers that he’s just a court jester and doesn’t deserve equal rights.

Will and Grace did so much to hurt us. Rich, white, privileged Will Truman and his funny minstrel friend Jack. We never saw any gay bashings or any gay couples striving for the right to marriage on that show. I don’t mean to criticize it too much; it was a sitcom, and most sitcoms aren’t meant to be anything more than stupid trifles. (All in the Family notwithstanding. Maybe we actually need a gay Norman Lear.)

But last week on The View, the women were discussing a children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, based on a true story about two male penguins who cared for a baby penguin in a zoo because it had no mother. Sherri Shepherd stated that she didn’t want to teach her young son about such things “right now.” As usual, she didn’t know how to articulate it beyond saying that this was her child and she didn’t want him to know about such things “right now.”

Less than a week later, Mario Cantone showed up as one of the guests. As usual, he did his queeny little minstrel show. (Nothing against Mario Cantone; he’s a funny guy.) Sherri Shepherd enjoyed it like everyone else, laughing along with the other women. I would have loved for Mario at some point to have turned to Sherri and asked her, out of the blue, why she wants to “protect” her child from learning about non-traditional families and, by extension, gay rights. I would have loved to see her sputter something nonsensical in response.

They love laughing at us as long as we don’t, you know, make them uncomfortable by fighting for our rights.

I have to run. More later.