Marriage Jurisdiction

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.

Damn You, NBC

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.)

Flying

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.