The Gideonse Bible   With the beard? Yeah, you!

Happy 9.02.10!

I think this is simply the best scene of “Beverly Hills 90210.” The show, which inexplicably ran for 10 years, was absurd — a simplistic, unaware, and whitewashed depiction of rich kids in high school, and then in college. It is a key cultural icon of the 1990s, and yet it was utterly without irony, which, given the times, is in itself rather ironic. Especially in the first half of the show’s run, the stories were always morality tales, and the morals were almost hilariously conservative. The only irony about “90210” was in watching it. For a year in college, I went to a “Bev and Mel” party every Wednesday at which we watched “90210” and it’s sillier, slightly more aware spin-off “Melrose Place,” and we cruelly mocked both while drinking beer and eating pizza. (Good times.)

Over the years, as the original leads became “stars” and left the show to find fame (and without fail, they failed), Tori Spelling, who was cast only because her father was the show’s executive producer, became one of the show’s leads, and in a way, a star. Famously, Tori’s character Donna Martin was naive and a forever virgin, and she wasn’t allowed to have any fun because Tori’s overprotective dad called the shots. When she did anything wrong, she got in trouble. At the end of the 1992-93 season, Donna — gasp — got drunk at the prom and got caught by the principal. Here’s that classic scene and a re-cap of the whole episode (which has been voted as the “best” of the entire series). Her punishment? She wasn’t going to be allowed to graduate. For some reason, she was so popular among the other students that they rallied behind her. Literally. They stormed a school board meeting while chanting “Donna Martin graduates!”

This is the view from the office where I do my fieldwork interviews. That’s the Coronado Bridge and the bay in the background.

• Did you hear the @JACK_fm DJs make fun of the Ugandan kill-the-gays pastor? They agreed with him: gay sex is nasty. http://t.co/ocOoju2 #
• I’d rather be at the beach. #
• I’m torn. I just can’t decide. What is the appropriate punishment for Ken Mehlman? #lgbt #mehlman #toolittletoolate #
• Ground turkey should not be grilled. At least, it shouldn’t be grilled by me. #
• Wait… the US has credibility? // First Military Tribunal Case Could Damage U.S. Reputation – http://nyti.ms/b3Cv8L #
• I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and realize that Glenn Beck is just in it for the money, and maybe the power. #p2 #tcot #

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I started this post weeks months ago when it seemed that whatever cosmic force out there that rules our universe was getting really mean, and bitter, and cruel. But it was just too depressing to comment on how everything is terrible. But then it got worse, and I started collect links — to collect data to prove my claim that “everything is terrible.” And to be fair, I also collected data that worked to counter my argument, data that can then be sneakily incorporated into my own argument.

(Terrible: That I’m using the language of college composition in my blog posts. Not terrible: That I was able to make some extra cash the last few weeks tutoring comp students, which explains the vocabulary. Still terrible: I needed, and still need, extra cash. But: We’re not desperate; we can pay the bills.)

Some of the terrible is gut-wrenching, and it’s personal. The father of one of my closest friends — one of my first New York roommates — passed away in early July. He was kind, funny, wise, and he was a wonderful father and grandfather, and he was too young. A few days before Richard, my friend Todd died. We weren’t close, but he was beloved by so many of my friends in San Diego, and their grief has been palpable. He had a smile so amazing that if you saw him and that smile when everything seemed terrible, suddenly everything would seem just fine.

And then my friend Sam died. Like Todd’s, Sam’s death was bizarre and sudden and at least 50 years early. In the week that he was in a coma, love and support for Sam, who was a DJ and a blogger and a minor Internet celebrity, poured onto the Internet, and it was amazing and sweet and not terrible. A Facebook page was started for him, and it was called “Clapping for Sam Storicks.”  Why?

If you know Sam, you’ll know he’s not fond of religion and prayer. So I’m starting a CLAPPING CHAIN rather than a prayer chain for Sam. And you know what they say about clapping… it helps to bring fairies back. Let’s help bring Sam, one our most favorite fairies, back to us. (He would rip me a new one if he thought I had created a prayer chain for him. This I think he’d love.)

I clapped. But when Sam passed away, it was still awful, awful, awful. I was in Palm Springs when I got the email, and I became a crying, drunken mess. The letters that his partner has been writing to him since he died have been beautiful and, to repeat a term, gut-wrenching. And his ex, Jeff, wrote a wonderful blog post about Sam that is, well, wonderful, if difficult to read without crying.

And yes, there’s other terrible-ness in my personal life. Hermia is now getting IV fluids and still poops everywhere, and her occasional hypoglycemic seizures are just awful to deal with, particularly on an emotional level. And then I got athlete’s foot and my face broke out and “Party Down” was canceled. These last three things seem to be so much worse that they should be because, well, everything else is terrible. And by everything, I mean the economy, the environment, and the never-ending, seemingly increasing, spread of evil.

Let’s start with an article from The Financial Times. In “The crisis of middle-class America,” we learn what, well, we already knew: that American prosperity has stagnated, and while 90% of America is slowly getting poorer and poorer, struggling more and more, losing optimism and gaining pessimism, the rich are still getting richer. As George Carlin said, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Here’s the money quote:

The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation”  by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the ­multiple is above 300.

The trend has only been getting stronger. Most economists see the Great Stagnation as a structural problem – meaning it is immune to the business cycle. In the last expansion, which started in January 2002 and ended in December 2007, the median US household income dropped by $2,000 – the first ever instance where most Americans were worse off at the end of a cycle than at the start. Worse is that the long era of stagnating incomes has been accompanied by something profoundly un-American: declining income mobility.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French chronicler of early America, was once misquoted as having said: “America is the best country in the world to be poor.” That is no longer the case. Nowadays in America, you have a smaller chance of swapping your lower income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed economy – even Britain on some measures. To invert the classic Horatio Alger stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe.

This is just echoing what everyone has been saying about our current recession. Paul Krugman says it’s not a recession, it’s America’s third depression, and every day on NPR’s Marketplace, I hear from economists and finance folks saying that even if the economy “grows,” unemployment is still going to hover at 10%. And that, as few people seem to understand, doesn’t mean 10% of America is not working, just 10% are applying for unemployment benefits. The real number of people who aren’t working because they can’t find a job could be somewhere between 15 and 20%. Because of our professions, Rob and I are doomed to work in the contracting, increasingly impoverished public sector for the rest of our lives; basically, we’re doomed to struggle in the lower middle class forever. You should see our student loan debt. It’s too embarrassing to explain why, but we have about as much as most medical doctors.

Speaking of medicine, a pretty hideous example of our pretty hideous economy (and extremely hideous moral viewpoint on socialized medicine) is the failure of our government to provide medicine to poor and un- and under-insured people with HIV and AIDS. There are now thousands of people on wait-lists for antiretroviral drugs in the United States. Hundreds have died while on the wait-lists. And we live in the richest country ever to exist. You can blame it on tax revenues, but I think you should really blame it on people who think that if you can’t pay for medical care, you should just die. Who are those people? The entire Republican Party, many Democrats, and people like the commenters here, one of whom wrote, “AIDS is a disease of conduct. You contact [sic] AIDS only because of your own behavior. Frankly, it galls me that taxpayer monies are spent on people whose illness is a result of thier [sic] own life style.”

But why worry about medical debt when we’re probably going to be killed in some made-man environmental catastrophe? If this summer’s insanely awful weather (San Diego was freezing, the Northeast boiled, Russia was in flames, and Pakistan is under water) isn’t a rather damning sign that the environment is fucked up beyond belief, I don’t know what is.  As one eminent scientist recently said, “We’re going to become extinct [like the white rhino]. Whatever we do now is too late.”

He says the Earth has entered the Anthropocene. Although it is not an official epoch on the geological timescale, the Anthropocene is entering scientific terminology. It spans the time since industrialisation, when our species started to rival ice ages and comet impacts in driving the climate on a planetary scale.

Fenner says the real trouble is the population explosion and “unbridled consumption”.

The number of Homo sapiens is projected to exceed 6.9 billion this year, according to the UN. With delays in firm action on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, Fenner is pessimistic.

“We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island,” he says. “Climate change is just at the very beginning. But we’re seeing remarkable changes in the weather already.

“The Aborigines showed that without science and the production of carbon dioxide and global warming, they could survive for 40,000 or 50,000 years. But the world can’t. The human species is likely to go the same way as many of the species that we’ve seen disappear.

“Homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years,” he says. “A lot of other animals will, too. It’s an irreversible situation. I think it’s too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off.

“Mitigation would slow things down a bit, but there are too many people here already.”

Case in point: The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the worst marine spill in history, with more spilled than was spilled during the entire first Gulf War. The only spill worse was in 1910. And for Christ’s sake, Deepwater Horizon took three months to stop. It seems we haven’t learned much in 100 years. The gazillion gallons of oil spewed in the Gulf killed so much marine life, not only cute turtles (who were being burned alive) (no, really, they were) and yummy crabs and schools of fish and seabirds, but also small and insanely important plankton, microbes, and bottom-of-the-chain stuff that keep the entire marine ecosystem functioning. This is the sort of thing that can lead to the collapse of food chains. If history proves predictive, the damage will last for decades. (Though there’s some data that says it’s not going to be that bad. I kinda think that that’s gotta be hooey.) And then there’s the egregious harm to the economy of at least four states.

And how did people respond? Well, many responded as they should, by doing what the could to stop and clean up the spill. Some became so depressed they killed themselves. (The APA set up a whole resource directory for mental health issues and the spill.) And others used the spill to win cheap political points against enemies, or rather, one enemy, Obama. Here’s Rand Paul saying that Obama criticizing BP, whose fault the spill was, is “un-American.” Here’s a nice overview of psychotic conspiracy theories driven by Rush Limbaugh. Not all criticism of Obama is unwarranted, of course, but it takes a lot of gall, intellectual dishonesty, and moral turpitude for obsessive anti-regulation conservatives to lambaste Obama for not personally seeing to it that oil drilling regulation was strengthened in the year and four months he was in office prior to the the spill.

But, hey, why bother with honesty, ethics, and morality when it comes to politics? I mean, it’s just the fate of a country, the economy, the environment, people’s lives. Why bother even trying to do the right thing? What’s terrible — truly terrible — is that I don’t think a lot, maybe even most, people even know what the right thing is. When vast swaths of the American public support pathologically dishonest demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, it’s hard to have faith that people are good. Something along the lines of a third of the United States think Palin should be president and she’s a semi-literate buffoon with absolutely no policy ideas beyond “Taxes are bad, (some) Christians are good, and I hate liberals.” Meanwhile, nearly half of voters in Nevada plan on voting for teabagging nutjob Sharron Angle for Senate. Angle thinks that a girl who was raped and impregnated by her own father shouldn’t be allowed to get an abortion; instead, she should turn a “lemon situation into lemonade.”

And numerous Republicans — from Newt Gingrich to Sarah Palin to New York candidate for governor Charles Paladino – are stoking the racist, xenophobic, and paranoid fears of their base by opposing the building of a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center ruins. And it’s not actually a mosque, it’s a community center. And it’s not just that one mosque — all over the country, misinformed and uneducated jingoists are protesting mosques in general. Nevermind that the United States was built on religious freedom. Nevermind that “contemporary mosques are actually a deterrent to the spread of militant Islam and terrorism.” In a New York Times photo, one nut — from, of course, nearby Temecula, which is also home to the psychos behind Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” movement — is carrying a sign that says “Mosques are monuments to terrorism.” Following that logic, every church is a monument to the Crusades, the Holocaust, Waco, and Jonestown.

The insanity of the mosque controversy has reached a level of awful that I cannot remember ever seeing. Even the anti-gay demagogues who regularly lie and dissemble in their campaigns have a better grasp on reality than the anti-mosque forces. The anti-Islam forces have such little regard for truth or decency, and they are so nakedly racist and hypocritical and cynical, that I have regularly dropped my jaw in disbelief. Rick Santorum actually called Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the community center project, a jihadist. Of course, Rauf is not a jihadist by any stretch of the imagination; his entire career has been about encouraging moderate Islam and inter-faith dialogue. From an op ed in the Times:

Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.

In the pages of The New York Post, in speeches from Republican candidates, and on Fox News (of course), various contributors have lied repeatedly about Rauf, his comments on 9/11, the placement of the Park51, the meaning of Islam, the meaning of America, and how the Constitution protects, or doesn’t, the right to discriminate against brown people who worship God differently. Perhaps the height of the Republican insanity came when Fox News said that Park51 was being funded by a jihadist. The jihadist in question happened to be the Saudi prince who is the second largest shareholder, after Rupert Murdoch, of News Corp, which owns Fox News. Jon Stewart pointed out the absurdity, and offered us an option: Either Fox News is stupid or they’re evil. I’m pretty sure they’re the latter. Those who run Fox News simply don’t care about what is morally or ethically good; they only care about pushing their agenda, which is, clearly, that the entire world should be arranged to benefit rich white Christians (and sometimes Mormons).

Please, someone, show me that this is not the case. I’d like to see some good in what Fox, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh do. But there simply is no evidence — at all — that they have any other motive beyond benefiting themselves and people just like them. I find the racism, classism, hatred, hypocrisy, and sheer lunacy of it all so hard to believe, so hard to take. It’s just so terrible.

(But hatred, logic, politics, and facts rarely meet. Engage any supporter of SB1070, the anti-immigration, pro-racial profiling law passed in Arizona this spring, and you will be bombarded with one lie after another. Mexicans are stealing American jobs! Lie. Mexicans steal services they don’t pay for! Lie. Mexicans don’t pay taxes! Lie. Mexicans are stealing your cars and raping your daughters! Lie. It’s not about Mexicans! Lie.)

Also terrible, but not hard to believe? That Obama couldn’t actually stand by his own statement in support of the center. He has a tendency to do that sort of thing. See: gay rights, public option, Guantanamo Bay, torture, rendition.

Everything is terrible.

And even when things seem as if they aren’t terrible, it turns out they are. A few weeks ago, Prop 8 was found unconstitutional in a federal court. Judge Vaughn Walker, to quote Wikipedia’s paraphrase of Walker’s words, “concluded that California had no rational basis or vested interest in denying gays and lesbians marriage licenses. He further noted that Proposition 8 was based on traditional notions of opposite-sex marriage and on moral disapproval of homosexuality, neither of which is a legal basis for discrimination. He noted that gays and lesbians are exactly the type of minority that strict scrutiny was designed to protect.” In the findings of fact, Walker wrote that everything we’ve been arguing about Prop 8 is true: that gays and lesbians are oppressed, that this is a civil and not a religious issue, that domestic partnerships are not socially equal to marriage, and that the backers of Prop 8 don’t have a shred of evidence that same sex marriage harms anyone or anything.

And then what happened? The gays were jubilant… until the decision was stayed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear the appeal in December. The legal issues are complex, but ultimately this will all come to down to whether the Supreme Court, and really just Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is the key swing vote on gay rights issues, agree with Walker or with the bigots and loons. This was expected. As was Obama’s silence on the decision, and having to wait years and years for equality. However, I was actually surprised by the rhetoric in the responses to the decision from anti-gay leaders. I mean, I expect Chicken Little stuff in comments sections and Santee, but people who actually make a living in anti-gay political organizing probably shouldn’t refer to a federal judge’s ruling of a case as “tyranny,” especially when his ruling was based on a trial featuring the most incompetent anti-gay lawyers on the planet. It’s not tyranny to say, “Your claims of fact are not supported by your evidence. Because you didn’t even offer any evidence.” Nevertheless, the bigots lost their shit:

• Maggie Gallagher, Chairman of the Board of the National Organization for Marriage: ” The ‘trial’ in San Francisco in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case is a unique, and disturbing, episode in American jurisprudence. [This is, of course, absurd. The trial was quite similar to ones in Iowa, Massachusetts, Hawaii, and Connecticut. And those are the recent ones. But why bother with facts?] Here we have an openly gay (according to the San Francisco Chronicle) [Lie. He's never, ever said he was gay. If you don't talk about being gay, you're not "openly" gay.] federal judge substituting his views for those of the American people [This is simply a lie. Over 50% of Americans are in favor of same-sex marriage, and many more agree with most of the findings of fact. Also, he based on the decision on the facts entered into evidence. The anti-gay side didn't even bother to show up.] and of our Founding Fathers who I promise you would be shocked by courts that imagine they have the right to put gay marriage in our Constitution. [The Founding Fathers would also be shocked by a black president, a female vice presidential candidate, computers, and soy milk. The Founding Fathers don't matter. It's been 235 years.] We call on the Supreme Court and Congress to protect the people’s right to vote for marriage. [The people don't have a "right" to vote on everything. We live in a constitutional republic, not a democracy. And she knows this. She's a pathological liar.]“
• Brian Brown, President of NOM: “Big surprise! We expected nothing different from Judge Vaughn Walker, after the biased way he conducted this trial. [It would be amazing if Brown could actually show bias or explain what "bias" might even look like. Because it is only bias to Brown if someone doesn't bend over backwards to support his belief system.] With a stroke of his pen, Judge Walker has overruled the votes and values of 7 million Californians who voted for marriage as one man and one woman. [Brown, a Rhodes Scholar, is well aware of how the US government works. Federal judges exist for the purpose of deciding what is and is not allowed to put up to a vote. If Prop 8 had failed, he would have done everything to have a federal judge rule against the votes of millions of people he disagrees with. Also, I'm sure he was thrilled when the Supreme Court threw away the votes and values of the 51 million people who didn't vote for George W. Bush, who received 500,000 less votes than Al Gore. Brown's dishonesty and hypocrisy is galling.] This ruling, if allowed to stand, threatens not only Prop 8 in California but the laws in 45 other states that define marriage as one man and one woman. [Good.] Never in the history of America has a federal judge ruled that there is a federal constitutional right to same sex marriage. [Right. And that's not what he ruled. And Brown knows this.] The reason for this is simple – there isn’t! [But wait. You can't simply state "there isn't!" and make it so. Rights are decided upon; they don't exist in the ether to be discovered. Brown knows this. But he's a liar.]“
• Bryan Fischer, a blogger at the American Family Association: “Although almost no other organizations other than the American Family Association are making an issue of this, Judge Walker should have recused himself from this case since he is a practicing homosexual. [Of course, Fischer doesn't actually know this. But, again, facts are irrelevant.] This created a clear conflict of interest, and he had no business issuing a ruling on a matter on which he had such a huge personal and private interest. [Again, stupid or evil? If he was black, he couldn't rule on a case about racism? A woman couldn't rule on abortion? And since the AFA and the rest of the anti-gay mafia insist that gay marriage will doom society and harm heterosexual marriages, doesn't everyone have a personal and private interest in the case? But logic doesn't matter.] His own personal sexual proclitivies utterly compromised his ability to make an impartial ruling in this case. [This is simply a fabrication. Fischer knows nothing of the sort. He simply believes that if you disagree with his bigotry, you couldn't have been impartial.] After all, the bottom line issue is whether homosexual behavior, with all its threats to psychological and physical health [Lies. Lies. Lies. As the trial showed.], is behavior that should be promoted in any rational society. Judge Walker has already decided this issue for himself, and has no business putting himself in a place where his own personal value judgments could be substituted for the express will of the people of California. [The express will of a tiny majority of voters. Two years ago. But why both with facts?] He is Exhibit A as to why homosexuals should be disqualified from public office. [Ha. Fischer is exhibit A for why Christian bigots shouldn't be allowed to own computers.] Character is an important qualification for public service, and what an individual does in his private sexual life is a critical component of character. [I wonder if this standard applies to anyone who is a Republican. Probably not. I'm sure they'd endorse serial adulterer Newt Gingrich. Sure.] A man who ignores time-honored standards of sexual behavior simply cannot be trusted with the power of public office. [Ah, time-honored standards -- that's what matters. Polygamy! Stoning adulterers! The rhythm method! What an idiot.]“
• Concerned Women for America: “Judge Walker’s decision goes far beyond homosexual ‘marriage’ to strike at the heart of our representative democracy. [We live in a constitutional republic, you dipshits. Also, it doesn't do any such thing.] Judge Walker has declared, in effect, that his opinion is supreme and ‘We the People’ are no longer free to govern ourselves. [On what planet is this the case? This is one judge's ruling in an obviously lengthy process. Liars.] The ruling should be appealed and overturned immediately. [Immediately? Really? Do they even know how the law works?] Marriage is not a political toy. [LOL. As they say. The Republican Party has used same-sex marriage as a political toy for the last decade. Just ask Ken Mehlman, Karl Rove, and George W. Bush.] It is too important to treat as a means for already powerful people [LOL. We're so powerful that we've lost every single election on gay marriage and even with super majorities in Congress, we can't get ENDA passed or DADT or DOMA replealed.] to gain preferred status or acceptance. Marriage between one man and one woman undergirds [sic] a stable society and cannot be replaced by any other living arrangement. [It has been replaced. Decades ago. We have been in couples and families for decades. Duh.] Citizens of California voted to uphold marriage because they understood the sacred nature of marriage [Okay.] and that homosexual activists use same-sex ‘marriage’ as a political juggernaut to indoctrinate young children in schools to reject their parent’s values and to harass, sue and punish people who disagree. [Not okay, and not even remotely true. Read the polls and the laws and history. These women are clearly not "concerned" about the truth.]“

If I thought these folks were actually on the fringe, I wouldn’t be too worried. But they aren’t. Maggie Gallagher — affectionately known on JoeMyGod as Slaggie Gilamonster — and Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council are on TV all of the time. They have tens of millions of dollars to spend on destroying our lives and spreading lies about our lives. It’s literally their lives’ work to make the world a bad place for gay people to live in, and they love their jobs. (Granted, they tend to get destroyed in actual debates settings. To the left is David Boies taking Perkins to the cleaner’s. Awesome.) Unfortunately, politicians of all stripes love their jobs, and the vast majority of them love their jobs more than they love doing the right thing. So, we have a massively Democratic and supposedly pro-gay federal government right now, and we still have DADT, DOMA, and no date for when ENDA will be voted on. And Obama still is opposed to same-sex marriage, while, as Rex Wockner recently pointed out, Dick Cheney, Ted Olson, Laura Bush and Cindy McCain, Glenn Beck (sorta), and Ken Mehlman all support same-sex marriage. Yes, it’s disgraceful.

And perhaps the most terrible thing is Obama, who we all pinned way too much on. He was so inspiring that we were almost set up to be disappointed. Being hampered by a dysfunctional Senate and a press corps that is more concerned with nonsense controversies (like Park51 or Shirley Sherrod) than accurate reporting on the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the essentially insane security situation in the United States is one thing. But he has failed to communicate a moral and ethical authority that is central to being a great leader. He has backtracked on essential positions, like Guantanamo and torture, and failed, miserably in the case of DADT, to live up to promises that he doesn’t even need a Senate to fulfill. I’m sure I’ll vote for him again, because there will never be a better viable option in this country, but the crushing defeat of “hope” is probably the hardest thing about being a progressive intellectual in this country.

If you’re not listening to Lightspeed Champion, you’re really missing out. My brother gave me “Life is Sweet! Nice to Meet You” for my birthday, and, well, it’s frakking awesome. I’m jamming to the album right now… as I make grilled leeks, turkey burgers, and pasta salad for dinner. (Okay, the pasta salad was made by Rob.)

Puppies are cute.

This is a photo of the empty sidewalk in front of my office. It is also a photo of a research subject not showing up for an interview.