And that's a shame, because she really should have a doctor look at that cut on her cheek.

For years, I've marveled at the sort of life I lead where I find myself being told what's normal by Mr. Sulu.

But as I think about it today, I begin to realize some of what he was saying, and what he was hoping for.

Here he was, watching some of his friends getting married-- and he couldn't get married to the person he loved, the person he'd been with for fourteen years. It was four years before he went seriously public about being gay, but most people who knew him knew his status.

And getting married to the person you love was simply the normal thing to do.

It would take another seven years before he could legally get married to Brad Altman. And then his marriage was declared illegal by California's Prop 8.

So today, eight years later, the California Supreme Court ruled that no one else could get a homosexual marriage in California. And yet, George's marriage, and the other 18,000 marriages are still allowed to stand.

Which, sadly, is a legal status about as far from normal as you can get.

All George wants is for him, his friends, family, heck, everyone, to enjoy a normal happy life. Why are so many people trying to prevent him and his friends from having it?

Scriptures from the First Amalgamted Church Of JMS, Book Of Joe:

THE PARABLE OF CASTING BREAD UPON THE BROOK

1. And The Great Maker did travel to the Brook as a guest of honor of I-Con.

2. And he was obliged to go to the I-Con banquet, in the Student Union of the University at Stony Brook, for he was to be honored there.

3. But the forces of darkness did congeal around the buffet table, so none could pass and eat.

4. And after an hour of waiting for food, it was as the Bataan Death March in the Student Union Ballroom.

5. And Joe did realize,
  "Wait! We're in the Student Union! There's food right outside those doors!"

6. And Joe did walk outside the hall, and promptly returneth with two pizzas to the table of honor. And the multitudes did give him a standing ovation.

7. And Joe did eat, and Kathryn did eat, and Julie and Susan and Rene and Peter did eat, and Harlan did nibble a little, and yea, even little Ariel did eat, though she got tomato sauce on her cheek.

8. And the buffet workers did see this, and realized they had best get their act together, and five minutes later they did start to feed the multitudes.

9. And it chanced that the line to feed the multitudes did wind its way past Joe's table, and supplicants did ask Joe,
   "Hey, man, you bring enough for everybody?"

10. And after the sixth time he was asked, Joe did realize that the wiseasses, obnoxious as they were, had a point. For it is written that the closer you get to heaven, the harder it is to share it.

11. And Joe did venture back to the pizza place, and asked for fifteen more pizzas. And the pizza boy was so stunned by the brilliance of Joe and his request to be part of the miracle, he did faint dead away.

12. And Joe did go to the deli instead and bought up all the single packs of Oreos and Swiss Cookies and yea, even the Mini Chips Ahoys, numbering eight score and fifteen. And he did borrow the basket that they were displayed in, to give to the tables as a sower spreads seeds.

13. And he did return to the banquet and travelled from table to table and did give of the wafers as an oversized demented Easter Bunny running on a DDD Energizer battery, saying "This is my gift." And the masses did partake of his gift and got massive sugar rushes, which enabled them to survive the rest of the ceremony.

14. And the next day he did preach of his lesson, as an example of creating a random act of magic. And the audience saw that by casting bread upon the Brook, they would return a hundredfold in tasty little bite-size morsels.

15. And those in the audience who had kept hold of the wafers for fear that if they ate them the miracle of the transubstantiation would mean they'd be swallowing some part of Joe they'd rather not think about, did produce them to testify to the truth of the parable and show the unbelievers.

16. And The Great Maker did look at the nearest disciple who proffered the manna and spake unto him,
    "I'm not going to autograph those cookies."

17. And the disciple did leave and turn to his electrical scribe to record the parable, for it is also written that every man has his disciples-- and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

Here endeth the lesson.

If you have a web site, or a blog, or anything else like that, you can help by creating links yourself. The main link for Peter is http://www.peterdavid.net, and Bob's is http://www.bobgreenberger.com. Even better, if you go deeper into their site and come up with a link to a particular article you like, that will help even more.

This post ranking is highly upsetting to Mr. Wead, who would like to control his image of himself very scrupulously. Somehow, I'm more important to him than that newspaper article or his Wikipedia entry, and it's got him stuck. In fact, he's just done another post about it, attributing to me quotes from the original article, such as the apparent error about him being a Baptist minister, and comparing his situation to the John Seigenthaler situation on Wikipedia.

If he wants to go edit the hell out of Wikipedia-- and apparently he does-- let him. As for me, well, y'know, I've got this anti-censorship thing, so I'm not going to take the article down outright, but I am giving him the benefit of the doubt and striking out the entire thing.

Onward.

Got this:

Sorry, the page you tried to reach does not exist

You may have used an outdated link or you may have typed the address (URL) incorrectly.
To find what you are looking for please use the search feature in the upper right hand corner or try one of the links on this page

Figures.

• Why Pundits Are Bad Predictors. "The best predictor, in a backward sort of way, was fame: the more feted by the media, the worse a pundit's accuracy. And therein lay Tetlock's first clue. The media's preferred pundits are forceful, confident and decisive, not tentative and balanced. They are, in short, hedgehogs, not foxes.
  

  That bestiary comes from the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who in 1953 argued that hedgehogs "know one big thing." They apply that one thing (for instance, that ethnicity and language are primal; ergo, any country that contains many ethnic groups will break up) everywhere, express supreme confidence in their forecasts, dismiss opposing views and are drawn to top-down arguments deduced from that Big Idea. Foxes, in contrast, "know many things," as Berlin put it. They consider competing views, make bottom-up inductive arguments from an array of facts and doubt the power of Big Ideas. "The hedgehog-fox dimension did what none of the other traits did," says Tetlock, who described the study in his 2005 book "Expert Political Judgment": "distinguish more accurate forecasters from less accurate ones" in both politics (will Iraq break up?) and economics (whither unemployment?).

  In short, what experts think matters far less than how they think, or their cognitive style. At one extreme, hedgehogs seek certainty and closure, dismiss information that undercuts their preconceptions and embrace evidence that reinforces them, in what is called "belief defense and bolstering." At the other extreme, foxes are cognitively flexible, modest and open to self-criticism.
   
• Why the Republican Party Must Die - Generational Theft and End of Republicans - Esquire
   
• Diamond is no longer nature’s hardest material
   
• Mind Hacks
   
• Why Facebook Is for Old Fogies and Facebook: 25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You - TIME
   
• Judge Takes Money to Jail Children. Ain't that heartening...
   
• Odysseus 1.0b14. Finally, a replacement for Eudora... maybe. Yes, I may be the last person to use Eudora for the Mac.
   

Wow, two posts in two days. This could be a trend.

• Quote of the day: "Insisting that society cannot have a concept of morality without god is like insisting that an adult cannot have a concept of morality without parents." From Spiritual Atheism: Buffy, Angel, House and Doctor Who. Also from the piece: "If our failures are not our fault, then neither are our triumphs."
   
• Think You'd Remember the Face of Your Torturer? Think Again
   
• Anonymous Caller? New Service Says, Not Any More
   
• Five *Free* iPhone Apps Every Geek Must Download

* How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a killing.

* The High Priests of Snark.

* The Bush Years: Then And Now.

UNEMPLOYMENT RATE
Then: 4.2% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 2001)
Now: 6.7% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 2008)

DOW JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE
Then: 10,587 (close of Friday, Jan. 19, 2001)
Now: 9,015 (close of Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009)

BUSH FAVORABILITY RATING
Then: 50% (1/01 NBC/WSJ poll)
Now: 31% (12/08 NBC/WSJ poll)

CHENEY FAVORABILITY RATING
Then: 49% (1/01 NBC/WSJ poll)
Now: 21% (12/08 NBC/WSJ poll)

CONGRESS APPROVAL RATING
Then: 48% (1/01 NBC/WSJ poll)
Now: 21% (12/08 NBC/WSJ poll)

SATISFIED WITH THE NATION'S DIRECTION
Then: 45% (1/01 NBC/WSJ poll)
Now: 26% (12/08 NBC/WSJ poll)

CONSUMER CONFIDENCE (1985=100)
Then: 115.7 (Conference Board, January 2001)
Now: 38.0, which is an all-time low (Conference Board, December 2008)

FAMILIES LIVING IN POVERTY
Then: 6.4 million (Census numbers for 2000)
Now: 7.6 million (Census numbers for 2007 -- most recent numbers available)

AMERICANS WITHOUT HEALTH INSURANCE
Then: 39.8 million (Census numbers for 2000)
Now: 45.7 million (Census numbers for 2007 -- most recent available)

U.S. BUDGET
Then: +236.2 billion (2000, Congressional Budget Office)
Now: -$1.2 trillion (projected figure for 2009, Congressional Budget Office)

* Iran's Hottest Porn Video. Politically and culturally hot, too.

* The Great Boob Bust. My thought: the web is wrecking everything.... which leads to:

* In a new nationwide survey of 1,280 teens and young adults, researchers found that one in five teens are using technology to send sexually explicit pictures of themselves to others — either posted online or sent via cell phone. One in five teens and one-third of young adults had said they had send a nude or semi-nude image of themselves to others.... nearly half of all teens have received a sexually suggestive message via email, text or IM, and that nearly 40 percent of teens have sent such a message. Most young adults have sent one (59 percent) or received one (64 percent).

Of course most survey respondents say they are sending this stuff to their boyfriend or girlfriend, but some of them (around 15 percent) have posted this sort of thing for an online friend.

The scary part is that most respondents agreed that engaging in this sort of behavior “can have serious negative consequences,” but do it anyway.

Although respondents realize how easy it is to save these images and share them (about 40 percent of respondents said they did so) with one’s friends or post them online (perhaps long after they’ve broken up), it doesn’t appear to be stopping anyone....

The online disinhibition effect is also strongly at work here. Nearly one quarter of teens say that technology makes them personally more forward and aggressive. Nearly 40 percent of teens believe that exchanging sexually-suggestive content with others makes dating more likely. And nearly one third of teens believe that such exchanges lead to an expectation of dating or hooking-up.

Since Ann can't really compete with Al now that he's a senator, I understand that she's now thinking of running for Senator in Idaho. Because when she says "Idaho", you believe her.

Li'l Bill O'Reilly. Could you tell the difference?

The top twelve insights of conservatives, 2008: My favorite is "Know-nothingness was no longer a stigma, but a badge of honor." Which makes the cries of "No one could have forseen--!" all the more pathetic. I know lots of people who could and did forsee what was going to happen, these are just a few. My question is why people persist in listening to people with lousy track records.

Child maid trafficking into the US: horrifying...

Late at night, the neighbors saw a little girl at the kitchen sink of the house next door. They watched through their window as the child rinsed plates under the open faucet. She wasn't much taller than the counter and the soapy water swallowed her slender arms.

To put the dishes away, she climbed on a chair.

But she was not the daughter of the couple next door doing chores. She was their maid.

...and yet, an improvement from where they came from.

Remembering Mildred Loving. There are days I think that all the people who complain that Barack Obama isn't a US citizen are just the people who remember that when he was born, lots of states wouldn't have allowed his parents to be married. Since they were, he can't possibly be a real American. QED.

To the Editor:

James Gleick compares the book to the hammer, “a tool ideally suited to its task.” Indeed, who can imagine crawling (happily) into bed with digital media, sharing a digital story with a child or giving a digital download as a present? Books are objects — of our love and of our lives.

David Jelinek
Brooklyn, Nov. 30, 2008

I'm reading that letter on this web page in my bed at 4:30 in the morning, with the screen as my own booklight. Happily, except for the fact that I can't sleep.