doubting thom

As my boyfriend said last night, “There really is an ABBA song for any situation.” Mamma Mia! was fantastic, and we had incredible front-row orchestra seats, giving us great views of the shirtless boys in the chorus (though perhaps a little too close a view of one of the leading lady’s cellulite, as she straddled an inflatable mattress while wearing a skirt slit in four places).

Yesterday evening started off potentially distastrous; at 4:00 a “crisis” was dumped on me at work, and I called Jeff to let him know that while I was sure I’d make it to the theater by the time curtain was to rise at 8, I wasn’t at all confident I’d make it to dinner at Les Halles beforehand. But a rush of adrenaline had me working like a madman and out of the office only about a half hour later than usual, getting me to the restaurant at 6:00 sharp, about three minutes even before Jeff. After quickly venting about the past two days at work, I settled into my food and the evening quickly went uphill from there.

Originally Jeff had suggested a pre-theater dinner at either Les Halles or another restaurant whose name now escapes me. I hadn’t eaten at Les Halles in nearly ten years, so I decided I wanted to go there. After making that decision, though, I started seeing a number of reviews suggesting that the restaurant had gone badly astray since then, and I almost recommended to Jeff at the last minute that we go elsewhere. But our service was attentive and helpful (if the actual food delivery were sometimes a little slower than it should have been), and the food was excellent. From the pre-theater prix fixe menu I had the mesclun salade and their famous hangar steak and frites (some of the best fries I’ve eaten). Dessert on the pre-theater menu was listed as a choice of either profiteroles or gateau, and I was leaning toward the former; our server, though, brought out the regular dessert menus and told us we could choose anything from the one side, which included an incredible selection of mousses, tarts and other confections. After some discussion with the server, I eventually decided on a caramel mousse meringue, which I almost skipped over because the written description was short and bland. Her description, though, made it sound much more interesting, and it was an amazing dessert: a caramel mousse on top of a fluffy meringue, all encased in an upside-down chocolate shell (which the menu failed to mention altogether), highlighted with a caramel sauce and bits of toffee. I was in heaven.

A half-block walk to the theater found us ensconced comfortably in our front-row seats by 7:45, overlooking the orchestra pit (containing four keyboards, two guitars and a drum set, all that’s really needed for ABBA music). When the curtain rose, at first I thought I might be disappointed, as the short prologue, featuring three 20-somethings and a fairly spartan stage, felt like it might as well be a high-school play. Early in Act One, though, the music really kicked in, the stage design proved to be elegantly simple yet evocative, the actors well-cast and giving some excellent performances, and I started grooving and loving it (the costuming, especially, was inspired). By the time the shirtless groom and his best pals showed up to bust a move, it was just yummy icing on a cake I was already digging.

And I think that the curtain calls for Mamma Mia! may be the most fun and engaging I’ve seen; I felt nearly like I were at a disco rather than at a theater, and practically the entire audience was on its feet, dancing and singing along with the reprise of several of the best-known ABBA singles from the show.

Dancing queens, indeed. So, ABBA and cast, thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing. Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing. And thanks for a wonderful night’s entertainment that helped me forget completely, for at least a few hours, this hellish week at work.

With the invocation of “activist judges forcing their arbitrary will upon the people” still dominating his remarks, President Bush tonight issued a statement in response to the Massachusetts ruling on gay marriage calling the ruling “deeply troubled.” He went on to say:

“Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. If activist judges insist on re-defining marriage by court order, the only alternative will be the constitutional process. We must do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.”

What about the “activist judges” that arbitrarily and willfully handed him the presidency?

On a different note, I’m deeply troubled myself by this constant reiteration of the “sacredness” of the institution of marriage. Civil marriage is divorced from religion; you don’t have to be blessed by a minister or priest to partake of all the thousands of federal benefits bestowed by marriage. If it’s a “sacred” institution, then the state ought to be out of the business altogether of endorsing and rewarding it, for all, straight as well as gay.

Today’s ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court holding that only marriage for gays and lesbians, and not “Vermont-style” civil unions, will be sufficient to guarantee constitutional guarantees of equal treatment in the Commonwealth, is the latest in the roller-coaster ride that characterizes news stories around queer issues.

From the absolutely horrific upholding in Kansas of a 17-year prison sentence for a young man who, at 18, had oral sex with a 14-year-old boy (the sentence if the 14-year-old had been a girl would be a maximum of 15 months), with its explicit ruling that the state can punish homosexual sodomy significantly more harshly than heterosexual; to the sad ruling in Florida upholding that state’s right to deny gay people the right to adopt, while 3,000 children remain parentless in foster homes or state facilities; to the new Ohio same-sex marriage ban, one of the strictest such laws in the country, recent news has seemed uniformly bleak and regressive.

And even today’s news from Massachusetts, so positive on the one hand, nevertheless leaves me dreading the continuing backlash, already begun around the country and fanned by the winds of Bush’s State of the Union Address.

Most frightening were the comments of Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, whose statement read, in part:

“We’ve heard from the court, but not from the people. The people of Massachusetts should not be excluded from a decision as fundamental to our society as the definition of marriage.”

Why frightening? Because our top elected officials–even our President, in his castigation of “activist Judges”–seem to understand so little about our political framework, and that the Constitution and the judicial branch are designed specifically to protect our rights against “the people,” when that term, as here, is used to mean “the majority.” That latter phrase isn’t used by these officials, of course, because it so clearly evokes its frequent antecedent, “the tyranny of,” which they would prefer to keep unstated.

The legislature of my own home, Virginia–with so glorious an early history and so repugnant a current political and ideological climate–is spending way too much time in this legislative cycle condemning gays and lesbians. The state already bans gay marriages, yet the House of Delegates recently overwhelmingly approved a resolution urging Congress to propose a federal constitutional amendment “protecting the sanctity of marriage” (whatever that means in this age of Britney Spears and Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire), and the state Senate is considering the resolution now. The House also is considering a bill, the “Affirmation of Marriage Act,” that would prevent the state from recognizing marriages, civil unions, partnership contracts or other arrangements that provide some or all of the benefits of marriage. One delegate is introducing a bill that would make it a crime, punishable by up to a year in prison, for gay couples to be married elsewhere, return to Virginia and sue within the courts for legal recognition. The same delegate has introduced other legislation that would make public sex a misdemeanor when heterosexual and a felony when homosexual.

But I want to be happy for the ruling in Massachusetts, I really do. And besides, tonight Jeff and I go to a wedding… of sorts, since we’ve got front row seats to see Mamma Mia! at the National Theater. Yippee!

I came home this evening after a particularly dreadful day at work, got onto the computer to blog some quicklinks, and discovered that several of the items on my serendipity quicklinks blog were gone. Vanished. Poof.

After the day I’d had, my first visceral reaction was to curse and moan. I posted a note on the usergroup about the oddity of the missing entries, and then went looking to see if I could recover them elsewhere–or at least determine the extent of the problem.

Thanks to Bloglines (I love me some Bloglines), which seems to cache old entries from the RSS feeds you access with it, I was able to pull up all of my serendipity entries. Comparing this to the current state of the blog, I was able to determine that I’d lost twelve items (after an initial miscalculation that had me thinking I’d lost 41, which started me swearing again), and precisely which twelve they were.

In the meantime, though, I’d already started receiving personal emails from the Dude development team, and over the course of the next few minutes they were able to track down the bug and fix it so that additional entries wouldn’t vanish. We also discovered that the entries only vanished when someone else had “duded” them (normally this just makes an additional copy) to their own blog; since this meant that all the ones that had vanished from mine still were available in the system, and I already had determined which they were, it was pretty easy to find them and dude them back to serendipity.

So, as upset as I was initially to see my links gone, I really have to give a lot of credit to the Dude folks for their incredibly prompt response (after regular business hours) and sense of humor. Thanks, guys.

Since first compiling it last November, I’ve continued to update the list of DC Metro Area gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, etc. blogs and journals.

With the most recent update, which brings it to a total of 105 sites, I’ve also included an OPML file containing the information of the 77 (at this date) with XML feeds, for import into your favorite aggregator.

In addition to the “serendipity” quicklinks blog I created at Dude, Check This Out!, today I also set up a Prius quicklinks blog.

To be more accurate, I’d had my nose in The Da Vinci Code since Friday, finishing it yesterday afternoon. It’s a quick and easy read.

I enjoyed it well enough–in fact, I did find it difficult to put down, especially since, moving through it quickly, I realized the end was attainable by weekend’s end–but I didn’t have the strong reaction I’ve noted elsewhere (e.g., Cornelia). Though it’s certainly true that I’ll never look at Da Vinci’s The Last Supper the same way again.

Perhaps the book just had been hyped too much. Personally, it felt like Dan Brown was trying too hard to be Umberto Eco, and definitely failing to reach that level of skill; I’d venture that I found Katherine Neville’s The Eight and practically anything by Artur Perez-Riverte much closer to that ideal. In fact, while looking up the Amazon codes for these latter authors and their works, I found that someone there already had put together a guide entitled “So you’d like to… read a book like The Da Vinci Code, but better?” and I’d have to say I agree with most of the choices on this list (though number 6 on this list, As Meat Loves Salt, failed to keep my interest about halfway though, and I haven’t yet finished it).

Similar to the MyWorld66 meme, by way of Amanita.net.

bold the states you’ve been to, underline the states you’ve lived in and italicize the state you’re in now…

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington DC /

Total: 40/51 (including Washington, DC)

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

[updated: 04 May 2005, to reflect April trip to Nebraska and Iowa]

The “Washington Whispers” column in the January 26 issue of U.S. News and World Report notes, in the “Master of His Web: Colin Powell” entry:

Hey, State Department Web gang: Think twice before blowing off those E-mails asking what may look like niggling questions. They’re possibly from Secretary of State Colin Powell. The latest proof that Powell is a 24-7 techie who E-mails with abandon and would rather Google an issue than phone an aide comes from insiders, who say he has set up an anonymous E-mail account from which he “bombs in” questions about what’s on the State site. “He’s checking response times,” says one insider. Powell’s desire to have the best government Web site doesn’t end there. He recently showed off a cheapo digital camera from Amazon.com and said top aides should have one. “When you travel,” he said, “we can put your pictures up.” Pals say Powell is proud of making the Internet available to over 43,000 State computers–up from a few hundred–and wants it used. Overseas, he often steps into the ambassador’s office “to see if the computer is in use or being used as a hat rack,” we’re told. And he’s not just an at-work techie. At home he loves his TiVo, taping shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy for fun.

I’m responsible for the intranet at one of the State Department’s bureaus, and we’re always very good about responding promptly to our webmaster email, but you can bet I’m paying very close attention to every one that comes in these days.

I can vouch for some of this piece. It’s true that until Secretary Powell’s tenure at State, employees here did not have Internet access at their desktop. When I took this job in the summer of 2002, I was stunned to discover that my colleagues had only had Internet access for about 18 months, when I’d been using it at all my previous (albeit non-government) positions for at least 8 years. I’m very grateful that the Secretary made changing this situation a priority on his watch.

I also remember the Monday morning I came into the office to be summoned immediately to the Executive Director’s office; the Secretary had been trying to access his online distance learning account on Sunday night, had been unable to log in, and sent a fax to the Director of my bureau that night. We were on it first thing the next morning (it turns out that the third-party site that provides some of the online training does maintenance on Sunday nights, so fortunately it wasn’t something for which we were responsible), but it was interesting to see that even at home on his own time he was making use of the Department’s online resources.

But I don’t believe that I’d label the Secretary a “techie.” He certainly is an avid user of the Internet and other new technology, and he’s a wonderful evangelist and supporter for our efforts in using multimedia and technology for training, but my suspicion is that the Internet and related technology is not something that he understands at a more fundamental level (this is not a criticism). And that’s fine, because that’s why I have a job.

Yesterday at lunch I finished reading an amazing Irish novel, At Swim Two Boys, written over a ten-year period by openly gay author Jamie O’Neill, whom many critics are calling the successor to James Joyce and Roddy Doyle. Fortunately I was eating lunch late, when few other people were still around, because I was a little embarrassed sitting in the cafeteria trying unsuccessfully to fight back my tears as I read the final few pages.

I strongly recommend this new Irish epic, but one caution: I think of myself as a reasonably literate person, and have always taken some pride in my vocabulary. This was the first book I’ve read, though, where I really did have to keep a dictionary nearby. And even that wasn’t always helpful, as a fair amount of the words I didn’t recognize weren’t just obscure, or just Irish regionalisms, or even just early 20th century usage, but were simultaneously obscure, early 20th century Irish regionalisms. The language is so beautiful and so rhythmic, though, evocative of Joyce, in fact, and much of the unknown vocabulary was at least guessable from context.

Now I’m jumping on the bandwagon and turning my attention to The DaVinci Code, while also finishing up the last half of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe.