Zesty Ping posts the Top Ten Reasons Gay Marriage Should Be Illegal, which is delightfully snarky.

This is one of those issues where we just have to wait for the irrational fear to clear away, maybe for some older folks to just give up.

What better way to comemmerate our savage betrayal of this land's prior inhabitants than to gorge ourselves catatonic? It's the American way. I can literally feel my guts distendeding under the strain of yesterday's excess.

I'm not one to quibble with tradition, and good eats is good eats. Julia did it up right and I'm sure she's enjoying FOOD FOR DAYS. It was a nice urban family thankgiving with Luke and Steve, Beth and Ryan from Capones and Julia's little brother Pat and some of his friends who are all confidant and 19, like we all were at one point. We managed to suck down the bottle of Laphroag I brought over and had a good old time with football and conversation. Made my way home in a daze, booty-text-messaging. What a wonderful holiday.

In other news, I took up re-reading Sometimes a Great Notion, one of my all-time favorites, and it's putting that pioneer spirit back in me. "Goddamnit, we'll whup 'em. We'll whup this swamp from hell to breakfast." How can you not love that?

Batten down the hatches, internetistas, because you're about to get hit with something you just might not be able to handle:

The man, the myth, the legend; my friend Frank is blogging. And it's good! Here's a typical entry:

Man oh man, Little Giant is about the best freaking thing on earth. I got to know one of the owner's Tasha, when I had this odd job working at the bar/cafe called The Cellar. She and her boyfriend used to come in cause they lived on the block.

Be that as it may, Tasha opened up Little Giant, and the place is excellent. The food, the atmosphere, music, wine list, it's like guaranteed anal sex. Laura and I came to the conclusion that had I taken her to Little Giant on our second date, we would have closed the deal. Little Giant, people, "the place to close the deal"!

Check it out for coverage of everything in the FER5 lifestyle: alleycat racing, dog co-ownership, and the ins and outs of New York livin' for the ever-thinning margins of us without suits, trust funds, or eurotrash accents.

The latest in blue/red cartography:

It's about a year late, but politics is a long game. I'll take it. Let's make sure this means something.

Anyone using Internet Explorer on a PC should just stop:

Exploit code for a critical flaw in fully patched versions of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer browser has been released on the Internet, putting millions of Web surfers at risk of computer hijack attacks.

The zero-day exploit, posted by a U.K.-based group called "Computer Terrorism," could allow a remote hacker to take complete control of a Windows system if the victim simply browses to a malicious Web site.

Ziff Davis Internet News have verified that the exploit works on fully patched Windows XP systems with default IE installations.

Click the button to go get FireFox:

I get a buck if you install it. Beer and skittles all around!

Hrmz... Google seems to be serving the wrong advert. Get Firefox Anyway, even if I don't get a dollar

Anyone using Internet Explorer on a PC should just stop:

Exploit code for a critical flaw in fully patched versions of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer browser has been released on the Internet, putting millions of Web surfers at risk of computer hijack attacks.

The zero-day exploit, posted by a U.K.-based group called "Computer Terrorism," could allow a remote hacker to take complete control of a Windows system if the victim simply browses to a malicious Web site.

Ziff Davis Internet News have verified that the exploit works on fully patched Windows XP systems with default IE installations.

Click the button to go get FireFox:

I get a buck if you install it. Beer and skittles all around!

Hrmz... Google seems to be serving the wrong advert. Get Firefox Anyway, even if I don't get a dollar

Jeff Jarvis and Bill Quick have a flamewar over the Pajamas Media/Open Source Media debacle.

Quick primer: a bunch of right-leaning writers, many of them online, are "Taking on the MSM" with a funded venture into online news and reportage. It feels a lot like dot-com hype from what I hear, and I think their take on things -- apparently the NY Times is the root of all evil -- is off the mark, but whatever.

Anyway, their whole launch process has been a rather humorous fiasco. This is a strange experience for me, watching people who are professionals, my elders and alledged betters, get bogged down in the quagmire of startups and flamewars.

I mean, hello?

This is another reason why I think The Book is potentially pretty important. We can lap the greedheads and power-junkies in a minute if we get aligned and in motion. They're lazy. They're not all that smart. They don't really Get It at all. So fuck 'em, I say. Let's do it better.

Jeff Jarvis and Bill Quick have a flamewar over the Pajamas Media/Open Source Media debacle.

Quick primer: a bunch of right-leaning writers, many of them online, are "Taking on the MSM" with a funded venture into online news and reportage. It feels a lot like dot-com hype from what I hear, and I think their take on things -- apparently the NY Times is the root of all evil -- is off the mark, but whatever.

Anyway, their whole launch process has been a rather humorous fiasco. This is a strange experience for me, watching people who are professionals, my elders and alledged betters, get bogged down in the quagmire of startups and flamewars.

I mean, hello?

This is another reason why I think The Book is potentially pretty important. We can lap the greedheads and power-junkies in a minute if we get aligned and in motion. They're lazy. They're not all that smart. They don't really Get It at all. So fuck 'em, I say. Let's do it better.

So this guy Murtha from PA, and ex-Marine Congressperson, has a meeting with some non-brass personnel from Iraq, get's all fired up, says "Hey! We're part of the problem over there! It's time we bugged out!" and suddenly we've got the beginnings of a real debate over this war. It's about three years late, but hey, it's something.

Let's take a look at the meme du jour from the hawkish Right, courtesy the ever-reliable NY Post:

No matter how great your team, you can't win the game if you walk off the field at half-time. That's precisely what the Democratic Party wants America to do in Iraq. Forget the fact that we've made remarkable progress under daunting conditions: The Dems are looking to throw the game just to embarrass the Bush administration.
....
What do the Democrats fear? An American success in Iraq. They need us to fail, and they're going to make us fail, no matter the cost.

Frankly, that's insane.

I was going to post something substantive about how this reflects the difficulty the war-freaks are having adjusting to the notion the differing opinions may exist and in fact be of some value, but why bother?

History isn't going to be kind to these people. They're going to end up isolated, embittered, like the hard-right post-fascists in France who tried to kill De Gaul because he pulled out of Algeria. Someone will write an insider's history and the pathetically human details will certainly be wreched indeed. One can only hope that when this is all over they'll be publicly whipped as a lesson to the children and allowed to retire in shame and obscurity in South America, rather than lobotomized and left as wards of the state as some will surely demand.

Get a grip, motherfuckers. The occupation is not producing results: stability, security, and improved quality of life. That's for the Iraqis and the US as well. We're driving terrorist training and recruitment, grinding away at our defensive capabilities, running up debt, and innocent people (theirs and ours) are killed every day. Saying it's time for this to end is not political opportunism or "fear of success." It's common sense.

It's really enough to make your head spin. Demonizing folks as unpatriotic for "politicizing the war" is a means of politicizing the war, you twits.

Well, that was slightly less annoying than a trip to the dentist. I just mashed up the server AND reformatted/reinstalled my laptop system all in the same day. Fun.

But it feels like progress. The cruft is gradually falling away. Comments are a little wonky (ignore the "Garbage Errors") and some other things remain in flux, but the main juice is flowing again. Hurrah for that.