Plenty o’ Nuttin’ goes to New York!

I am happy to announce that the Plentynuff International Headquarters have relocated to Brooklyn, NY, USA. I started my new life out right by catching this show by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings at a local venue, because I can do that sort of thing now, and should you ask me "Was it funky?", I will assure you "Oh yes it was." Sharon Jones is the baddest soul sister since Lyn Collins and she is even badder than that. Ledisi*, if you’re even still out there, Sharon Jones is who you’d wish you were if you had the good sense to go wishin’. Yeah, so, anyway, it was a great show.

I remember when I first moved to Berkeley, one of my first impressions was Man, this whole place could use a coat of paint. Similarly, my first impression of Brooklyn is Man, this whole place could use a pressure wash. It’s a bit grungey everywhere you look, but I learned to love Berkeley’s weather-worn drabness, so I’m sure I can learn to love Brooklyn’s gritty dingyness.

I’ve been here on and off for a couple of weeks now, shuttling back and forth between here and Hanowhere. Even though I’m not really through with Hanover-bound obligations, I realized it was time to make Brooklyn my home base because I just wasn’t mentally in Hanover anymore, anyway. Too much has happened in the last month to do a play-by-play, but allow me to abstract the experience – with all respect to Merlin Mann’s hilarious 5ives – in the form of a few lists:


Things Learned Too Late to Do Me Any Good
1) New York is warmer than New Hampshire. A little. A very little.
2) The elevator at the medical school labeled prominently with a sign that says “This is the A elevator” is, in fact, the B elevator.
3) There’s a street in Lebanon named “Hough Street.” I don’t know about you, but I can think of only one way to pronounce that.
4) The snow shovel with the grippy handle on the top end was probably worth the extra five dollars.
5) When the physician’s assistant asks about allergies, she really just means allergies to medicines. Not cats.
6) When you’re defending a dissertation, and the defense committee asks you questions, they’re not always trick questions.
7) If you walk around in sub-zero windchill temperatures, getting your exposed parts good and chapped, and then you shave, you’ve got a two-tone face.

Things I’d Prefer Never to Do Again, Which I Stand a Good Chance of Being Able to Avoid.
1) Defending a dissertation. At 4 1/2 hours, I’m told I hold the department record. Nobody told me not to argue, I thought that was the whole idea.
2) Moving during a snowstorm. All of the bad part – that bit where the truck fishtailed – only took up a few seconds. It was the anxiety over what might happen that made it suck.
3) Drive from New York to New Hampshire with no heat in the car.
4) Drive from New Hampshire to New York at night during heavy freezing rain.

Pleasant Surprises
1) I live near a bakery. This is pleasant not only for the obvious reason – the yummy bread-baking smell greeting me in the morning – but also because it’s a blast of nostalgia. When I was in high school, I drove past the Melita factory every morning, and the baking-bread smell was such a welcome incongruence, zooming past on the highway, and a punctuation to an otherwise dreary commute. It’s a two-for-one.
2) Some New Yorkers are indeed cranky and unpleasant. But others are not, and you can’t always predict which way it’s gonna go.
3) The City of New York is quite flexible about the parking laws during and following a snowstorm.
4) Right here in the neighborhood is a French bistro and jazz bar that doesn’t charge a cover, even when they have big-name acts playing.
5) My local grocery store, Tops, while it’s no Co-op, and it’s certainly no Berkeley Bowl, is still really pretty good. And the entire cheese-beer-meat-juice-egg-produce-dairy section is one giant refrigerated room, which is kind of cool.

*Apparently Ledisi IS still around, and she's got herself a website, which I was going to link to, until I saw that it's so bloated with Flash and illegibly funky fonts, and so full of remarks like, "with the chops of Ella Fitzgerald" (I mean, for pity's sake) that there's no way I would send my faithful readers (and they'd have to be faithful, wouldn't they?) there. If you really want to know, there's always Google. Ledisi, baby, the longer you go, the harder you suck.

Happy New Year

My only New Year's resolution for now: in 2005, I will always compose my posts in a text editor first, and then copy it into Blogger so that I don't lose any more long posts like the one I just finished that was supposed to go here. (self-administered dope-slap)

I'm not going to try to rewrite it, so here's the distilled version:

Salutation and theme: Happy New Year's (like the title says)
Dissertation: Turned in.
Defense: Scheduled; this Tuesday. Committee members making scary noises about what to expect. I can take it.
Freedom: Imminent.
Date of relocation: Second week of January; to be confirmed.
New Contact Information: Will distribute after arrival in NY; don't panic, current e-mail address is good for another 6 months.
New Year's Resolutions: Postponed until I have some basic information about what my life is going to look like - will I be working crazy hours? will I be in NY or Paris? will the temptations of urban life lead me down the path of wickedness? To be continued.
Likelihood of more frequent posting after the move: High, but I'm not promising anything.
Likelihood of more frequent contact of some other sort after the move: High; I will promise something, but I won't say exactly what, or when.
Self-pity level: Refreshingly low, for a change.
Valediction: I can't promise to be a truly new man in the new year, one who remembers all the birthdays and promptly returns the calls, but I can say for sure that once this shit is over with, I will be in a much better position to earn the loyalty my friends and family have shown me. I am looking forward to rejoining the living and talking a lot more, and more personally, to everyone who still reads this, who used to read it and gave up, and who I wish read it.

That is all for now. Stay tuned.

Taking it personally

I’m over the worst of my post-election mourning but even though the disappointment and disbelief are lifting, I’m still left with a sad feeling that's just lingering on.

The post-mortem analysis that I’m reading makes a lot of the increased turnout among Christian evangelicals, and people who reported in exit polls that “moral values” was their primary issue. “Moral values” is being interpreted by liberals as code for gay marriage, and whether or not that’s exactly true, a significant part of that increased turnout was undoubtably driven by the anti-gay-marriage amendment propositions that were on the ballots in eleven states. Of course, that’s exactly why they were on those ballots, to drive up the evangelical vote. Every one of those eleven anti-marriage amendments passed, and all by healthy margins. I believe that I read that with the exception of Oregon, they all passed by at least a 2-to-1 margin; several passed by 3-to-1 margins, and in Mississippi, it passed by an incredible 6-to-1 margin.

The lesson to take from this is that the gay marriage issue is a useful one for scaring up (and I use that expression deliberately) Republican voters, and therefore we can expect to see anti-gay-marriage amendments on more state ballots in the future. Combined with the 2-4 Supreme Court appointments that Bush will make during his second term, civil rights for gay Americans have effectively been put on hold for a while.

Those civil rights will come in the end, of course, because polling also tells us that young Americans could give two shits about preventing gay people from getting married, and my experience with college students confirms this; the difference in attitude toward gays between the college students I interact with now, and the attitudes I encountered when I was in college (which was not THAT long ago) is truly striking. But these things take place in the context of human lifetimes, so if you want to get married and particularly if you want to raise children, timing counts.

I honestly don’t expect gay issues to be especially important to straight people when they go to vote and god knows, I am not a good candidate for Big Gay Martyr status myself. None of the high profile gay legal issues really affect me personally right now – I work in a generally tolerant field and hell, I’m not even dating, much less contemplating marriage or children.

But recent events require me to acknowledge that, whatever the short-term practical outcome, I hold a secondary legal status in America. And because in these days right after the election, politics is a little like sports or weather, I’m expected to talk about it casually.

I share an office with a Republican, I’m friends with a couple, and I’m related to a bunch. So now that the election’s over and it didn’t go my way, I have to talk to them about politics without being a dick or a crybaby or a bad sport. Politics shouldn’t spoil personal relationships, after all, right? As much as I might like to drop guilt-bombs like, “Hey, hope your tax cut was worth my human rights,” I can’t do that because I know the story’s more complicated than that (and liberals love complexity!) and anyway it’s just not cricket.

Gay people and black people understand about “passing”and what it costs. Now, again, the world is asking us to pass by pretending not to take it personally, that hey, it’s just politics. I can do that because there’s really no other way. But I don’t have to enjoy it.

Good Feelings Gone.

I live in a nation of strangers.

Just Voted!

And boy did it feel good.

(click, click "There's no place like home, there's no place like home..." click, click)

Strangest moments at Neurosciences ’04, Part II

You would think that the restrooms in a conference center full of PhD’s and grad students would be pretty tame, but no. I’d sooner go to the bathroom at a rock concert than run across a convention center floor with a colon full of fish taco (did I mention the conference was in San Diego?) only to find the kind of mess that was typical at Neurosciences and have to change direction at the last minute and run for the next gent’s, a mere football-field’s length away.

So anyway, there I am, rather anxiously scanning the john for an empty stall when I walk past a stall in which a tidy-looking middle-aged man in a navy suit is seated, pants around ankles, presumably doing what anyone would be there to do. The fact that he’s doing it with the door to the stall wide open is not the strangest part of the picture, however. No, the strangest part would have to be the blue latex gloves on the man’s hands.

An exhibitionist germ freak, I gather. Not that there’s anything...uh... so wrong with that, you just don’t see it every day, that’s all.

I just returned from the 2004 Society for Neuroscience meeting, and I am happy to bring you…

Strangest moments at Neurosciences ’04, Part I

I actually arrived for Neurosciences early this year, to attend a satellite conference for evolutionary neuroscience. I checked into the hotel on Wednesday night and Leanne joined me on Friday night so that she could start the Neurosciences meeting on Saturday.

So Leanne gets in Friday and I meet her and Russ and Fay out for drinks. We get back into the room after midnight, to find this message in a woman’s voice on the hotel voice mail, left at 9:30 pm:

Hi, this message is for Leanne and Josh, um, if this is your guyses room… Josh, are you a little dick suckin’ homo or what? Why are you leavin’ my man, um, your guyses number, your hotel number? Um, really cool of you… if you guys are pretty fucking gross. And, uh, if I ever see you, I will beat you like a bitch. Okay? And your woman probably has nasty piss flaps. Okay? Bye.

Let me cut you off before you even ask: no, I have no idea. None. I thought it was a joke at first, but after many repeated listenings, I’m finally convinced that it wasn’t. What I know is that this woman knew both my name and Leanne’s, but clearly doesn’t actually know us at all. No idea where she got this information. And I probably never will. For the record, someone had to explain to me what "piss flaps" are. Gross.

Why I Love America

So many wonderful things to buy, and so many wholesome activities for the family.

Tastee Freeze

This looks like fun, and some of the real bloggers are doing it, so why not?


1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? Gene Kelly. Sang better, too.
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? Hemingway always wins.
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? Ellington.
4. Cats or dogs? Cats, fer sure.
5. Matisse or Picasso? Matisse.
6. Yeats or Eliot? Pass, although I suspect I'd prefer Eliot.
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? Keaton.
8. Flannery O’Connor or John Updike? Pass.
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Pass.
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning? de Kooning.
11. The Who or the Stones? Don't listen to either, but I kind of like The Who on principle.
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath? Pass.
13. Trollope or Dickens? Pass.
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? Everybody loves Billie, but you know what? They're wrong. Ella was a better singer, formally and stylistically. If you don't believe me, watch the Strange Fruit documentary and watch her chop her way through the song that defined her. Painful. A mannerist.
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? Tolstoy.
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair? Pass.
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham? Pass.
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? Blech.
19. Letterman or Leno? Blech.
20. Wilco or Cat Power? Pass. And, shut up.
21. Verdi or Wagner? Verdi, are you kidding? Life's too short.
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? Hm, tough, but I'd probably go with Grace.
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? Johnny Cash, and for the last time, just because I like jazz doesn't mean I'll like bluegrass.
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis? Pass.
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? Brando, but only by a little. And I know a certain grandmother who likes her some Mitchum, rowr!
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp? Pass.
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? Rembrandt by a mile.
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? Hm, tough. Chopin, I guess.
29. Red wine or white? Red.
30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde? Coward.
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity? High Fidelity. GPB was silly.
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? I would have said Prokofiev until I heard the Emerson Quartet play Shostakovich. Wow.
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? Nureyev.
34. Constable or Turner? Turner, but I like Constable too.
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Pass.
36. Comedy or tragedy? Tragedy, I'm afraid.
37. Fall or spring? Spring, as long as I live in New England.
38. Manet or Monet? Monet, and I don't want to hear any snorting about it either.
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? Sopranos.
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? Wow, hard. Can I say Porter?
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? Conrad.
42. Sunset or sunrise? Sunset. Ahhhhhh... the light, the LIGHT!
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? Oh, dammit. Rodgers and Hart, I guess.
44. Mac or PC? So, so, so Mac, for now and forevermore.
45. New York or Los Angeles? New York.
46. Partisan Review or Horizon? Pass.
47. Stax or Motown? Stax, baby.
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? Van Gogh. Gauguin was not only a lesser painter, but an asshole, too.
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? Steely Dan.
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? Blog. Yep, the transformation is complete.
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? Olivier.
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers? Uh... what?
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? Chinatown.
54. Ghost World or Election? Election. hee...
55. Minimalism or conceptual art? Minimalism.
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? Bugs, but Daffy has his charms.
57. Modernism or postmodernism? Modernism (wistful sigh)
58. Batman or Spider-Man? Spidey, unless I can specify Adam West.
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? Pass.
60. Johnson or Boswell? Pass.
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Pass.
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? Dick Van Dyke for sure.
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table? Like 'em both, and they're probably equally comfortable to sit on.
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity? Pass.
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? Hm, Marriage I think.
66. Blue or green? Green.
67. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It? Midsummer Night's Dream. Did you know that "Spot" is Shakespeare's dog?
68. Ballet or opera? Opera.
69. Film or live theater? Film.
70. Acoustic or electric? Jazz? Acoustic, if I really had to choose.
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? Vertigo.
72. Sargent or Whistler? Whistler.
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera? Pass.
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? Music Man.
75. Sushi, yes or no? Oh hell yes.
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? Pass.
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? Albee.
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove? Huh?
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham? Cunningham. He's such a sweetie, and he hung out with John Cage.
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? Wright for sure.
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? Jones for timbre, Krall for style and craft.
82. Watercolor or pastel? Pastel. Anyone who picks watercolor hasn't seen Redon.
83. Bus or subway? Subway.
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Igor.
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? Smooooove.
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? Pass.
87. Schubert or Mozart? Schubert.
88. The Fifties or the Twenties? Fifties if I can hang out with musicians or beats.
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? Huck.
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce? Oh god, neither, please.
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Hm, tough. Lester I think.
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? Emily.
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? I feel guilty about it, but I'd have to say Churhill.
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann? Pass.
95. Italian or French cooking? What a cruel choice. Can I say Italian by a French chef?
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? Piano. Dynamic variation is the bomb.
97. Anchovies, yes or no? Yes indeed.
98. Short novels or long ones? Short, but no matter.
99. Swing or bebop? Bebop, definitely.
100. "The Last Judgment" or "The Last Supper"? Pass.

Caterpillars!

I wracked my brain for a solid 45 seconds trying to come up with a cute punny title for this post about caterpillars, and I couldn't, yet I must say my peace. (Or my piece, I don't know which it is...) The exclamation point is all I've got for cuteness this time.

Anyway, we didn't get any cicadas up here, which makes it safe for me to claim that I would have eaten some if only they were around. (I've heard more than once that they taste like "minty shrimp," and I can't decide if that sounds like something good.) Instead of cicadas, we got bucketloads of the decidedly inedible but much less noisy Eastern Tent Caterpillars.

I mean, they are all over the place. The last time I went running I was getting ankle cramps trying to dodge them on the sidewalk until I finally gave up and figured I could always wash the guts off the bottom of my sneakers. For those who are interested, if you get them just right they do make an audible pop -- I know, even with no chitinous exoskeleton, can you believe it? -- and their innerds are bright green and come shooting out one end like toothpaste. (Hm, maybe they are minty after all).

Far more serious than gumming up the tread of my running shoes is the consequence of a serious tent caterpillar infestation: they defoliate certain kinds of trees, which in turn detracts from the autumn leaf color show that New England tourism depends on.

Even more serious than that is the subtle sense of dread the little demons have injected into my lunchtime. In light of the relatively few warm sunny days we get up here in these parts, summertime finds all of us basement-dwellers up blinking our eyes in the sunshine, taking our lunchbreak out on the back lawn of the psychology building. Lately our midday reverie has been punctuated by periodic shrieks and spasms when one of the girls -- I won't say which ones, but it is always one of the girls, so sue me for being sexist -- finds one of the crawlies on her foot/leg/ arm, which, given the season, is as likely as not to be bare. The foot/leg/arm, I mean. Well, I guess the caterpillar is bare, too, if you don't count the fuzz, but they're always bare. You know what I meant.

Now, I like watching girls scream and freak out when they touch something icky as much as anyone, but it does get tiresome while you're trying to eat and converse, and what's worse is that it draws your attention to the ground around you as you check to see if you, also, are about to be crawled upon by a caterpillar. And you are. Once you look around, you come to the unsettling realization that there are hordes of the things crawling through the grass, and they're all headed right toward you. Say you pick a few up ("With your fingers?! Eeeew!") and fling them away. They come back. Say you get up and scout out a new grassy spot with no sign of caterpillars and settle down anew. Three shakes, and they've found you. Inching along, slowly but surely, deterred only by obliteration, like little furry zombies. (And no, that was not an oblique reference to John Kerry, who is certainly not little, nor, as far as I know, furry. I said I wasn't gonna do that kind of thing anymore.)

What all of the preceding is really about is setting up justification for a particularly ugly bit of violence I engaged in recently. Last weekend, I followed Laurie out into her garden to see if she was growing anything I wanted to eat help out, and whaddya know but it's pulsing with the furry black devils. (My god, do you think the phrase "black devils" is going to bring all sorts of creepy white supremicists to the site via Google? I mean, I'd like more traffic and everything but I'm not that desperate. If I were, I'd do much better by dropping in mentions of REAL NUDE GIRLS, etc., don't you think?) Laurie, for what it's worth, makes absolutely the most entertaining girlie gross-out noises I've ever heard. But something about her shrieks brought out the knight in shining armor within, or alternatively, the 12-year-old boy within, and I grabbed a stick and went completely kung-fu on about a zillion caterpillars. No, make that "went completely Tarantino" because there was way more minty green guts than you'll ever see in a kung-fu movie.

It was a foul deed, I'll admit, but don't you see, I HAD to do it. Think of the poor garden vegetables, devoured as Laurie looked on, screaming in distress! Think of the New England tourist economy!





I'm a bad person, aren't I?

Doctor Delicious

Dartmouth's commencement ceremony was yesterday. I had no idea that we were giving an honorary doctorate to Alice Waters (who is a wee small thing in person, FWIW). How cool. If I had known, I might have come prepared so I could throw some underwear on stage like a good groupie. Edible underwear, of course.

What the hell does "Gipper" mean, anyway?

If this were a political blog, I probably try to write something nice and moderate about the recent passing of Ronald Reagan, something honoring the good he did for the American psyche, while regretting those policies I dislike and some precedents he set, in light of our current leadership.

But this isn't a political blog, and at this point I'm already in danger of picking a fight that I don't actually want to have with a substantial portion of my readership (i.e., the portion I'm related to). So instead, let me tell you about the time I dressed up as Ronald Reagan.

I don't know exactly what year it was, but it would have to have been 5th or 6th grade for me, so sometime in the first half of Reagan's first term. I also don't remember what the occasion was - couldn't have been Halloween, because we were all dressed up as American historical figures, but it couldn't have been the 4th of July either, because this was at school and the 4th of July is, you know, in July.

Anyway, pretty much all of the girls put on poofy blouses, skirts, and bonnets, and went as Betsy Ross. A lot of the boys went as historical figures (meaning dead guys), but I, already sure of Reagan's greatness and historical stature, put on jeans, a plaid shirt, and my blue blazer, put some of my mother's rouge on my cheeks, and I can't remember what kind of crap in my hair, and went as Ronald Reagan. I went around all day, leaning my head to one side, saying "Well..." a the start of each sentence, and doing the best impression of Reagan's voice that a prepubescent boy could manage.

There's not much more to the story than that, although in retrospect it occurs to me that even at a private school, Reagan was probably not overwhelmingly popular with my teachers, who therefore probably didn't think I was as cute as I did. I had completely forgotten about that until this week, and I'll probably forget about it again, but it's a funny memory while it lasts.

Dirty Minded

So I just went to my friend Hai's thesis defense. He's an MD-PhD doing medical engineering, and his research has been on brain imaging during neurosurgery. So, say you have a brain tumor. The docs'd take an MRI image of your brain to use for guiding the surgeon. The problem is, once you pop open the old brain pan, stuff starts moving around. Brain tissue is very soft and floats around in a bath of cerebrospinal fluid. (God, brain words are cool. "cerebrospinal") Once the skull is open, the tissue can swell, CSF can slosh out, and that's before the surgeon even starts poking around. So these engineers like Hai try to come up with ways to model the movement and deformation of the brain tissue so the surgeon can keep tabs on where the tumor's going with all that movement.

Anyway, I bring it up because it turns out they rely on existing models of soil movement to model the brain movement. Soil movement. You know soil: some solid stuff, some liquid stuff, oozing and drifting around under pressure. Just like brains. Who knew?


In unrelated news, Leanne is arriving tonight for a little New Hampsha visit and I've gotta go get ready, so I don't even have time to tell you about my trip to New York last weekend. Brief preview: still crowded, still expensive, traffic still shitty.

Have a good holiday weekend, y'all.

My Last Kerry Insult Post

I think it's clear that my position on Kerry is pretty much the same as this guy's, but the time has come to accept the fact that the upcoming presidential election will once again be a choice between the lesser of two evils, with one of them being a whole lot lesser than the other. It's time to rally, it's time to unite, it's time for Democrats and scared reasonable Americans of all stripes to back away from the circular firing squad and support our best hope against four more years of Bush the Usurper.

So, after this post, I will refrain from taking cheap shots at Kerry, but I did have to do this one last one just to point out that this was pretty funny, even though William Saletan doesn't know what he's talking about when he tries to talk science.

Everyone's Doin' the Relaunch!


Blogger has relaunched (which is presently causing me no end of confusion), The Robot has relaunched (which I suspect is related to some nosy little robots), and around here, Mother Nature has certainly relaunched (Fiddleheads! Yay! Flowers! Yay! Seminude undergrads! Yay!). Obviously, the time is now for a relaunch of my anemic little blogging effort. (As I believe I said something about a New Year's Resolution a while back, I'd like to point out that we're not yet through the halfway mark of the year. It seems like that should count on my side, for some reason.)

So here's to a renewed promise of plenty of nothingness from the life of yours truly. Much bloggy goodness to follow. In the spirit of renewal, I'd like to congratulate all of the happy couples in Massachussetts who are launching Relationship 2.0 today, and offer this from the man who could have been our president, if only we were good enough to deserve him.

Happy Rat Day

So, what will YOU be doing to celebrate World Rat Day?

(Ever have one of those conversations about who's weirder, dog people or cat people? Looks like those folks have some competition.)

Link 'n Run: Gay Marriage

There is of course much more that I could and should say on this subject, but dammit, I just don't have time and I missed my best opportunity when all the San Francisco weddings were going on anyway. While I realize that link-n-run posts aren't really good form on a personal blog, I just had to share the two very best posts I've seen elsewhere on the subject which have just recently come to my attention. Neither are long and both are worth your time:

If you like words

If you like pictures

Go Get 'Em, Killer!

Now that I've had a little time to get used to the idea of John Kerry being the candidate I'm gonna have to support if I want to get rid of George W. Bush ? and lord knows, I want to get rid of George W. Bush ? I'm trying to warm up to the guy a bit. To help the warming-up process along a little, I thought I'd give my new candidate a nickname. You know how it was kind of cute to call Howard Dean "Hoho" and say stuff like "The Doctor is in!," etc. But what to call ol' Johnnycakes...

Fortunately, thanks to that Dern Lib'ral Media and the completely non-existent Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (TM), I've got an idea!

First there we found out that Johnny O'Kerry wasn't really an Irishman like he (never) claimed to be, but was in fact a big ol' jewy jew.

Then there was this from Brian Sullivan, who has rather recently developed a dislike for Kerry for not singlehandedly predicting the 9/11 attacks and stopping the hijackers at Logan Airport:

"He just did the Pontius Pilate thing and passed the buck" on back through the federal bureaucracy, said Brian Sullivan, a retired FAA special agent from the Boston area who in May 2001 personally warned Kerry that Logan was ripe for a "jihad" suicide operation possibly involving "a coordinated attack."

So you see, he's a jew and he's Pontius Pilate, all in one. Now, thanks to a little helpful dot-connecting from Mel "Intestines-on-a-stick" Gibson, I think you can see where this is going.

John Kerry killed Jesus.

John Kerry, Jesus Killer. It's perfect, see? Even the initials are the same. Yeah, I know they're trying to work the John Kennedy connection by calling him "JFK" all the time, but I think we all know what that 'F' really stands for...

Ouch!

Rats — they bite, the little darlin's.

I'll take one order of "brains of the living," please.

I've been joking for a while now that I'd vote for a dead body before I'd vote for Bush. I guess now I'll actually have that option.