WHEEEEEEE!!!!!

Was that a wild week on Wall Street or what? I don't think things are over just quite yet. And I'm wondering how extensively this whole financial episode is going to be spun and twisted and tweaked in the presidential campaigns. I made this photo illustration to commemorate it all. While putting it together, I realized: Red is not only the color for the Republican party, it is also the universal sign for deficit, loss, uncontrolled spending and bloodshed, whether actual or merely financial.

I can't help but think that the entire thing was generated by the quick and dirty, anything-for-a-profit financiers (the same ones who keep sending me a half dozen credit card applications in the mail every week), and now they're going to be forced to retire from their positions, accepting multimillion-dollar golden parachutes while previous homeowners that they talked into guaranteed-to-fail loans are living (if they're lucky) in roach-infested mobile home trailers instead of the homes they dreamed of buying with these institutions' assistance.

None of that sounds like a Democrat's state of mind (except, perhaps, the trailer home). One day McCain's against any kind of bailout for anyone and then, when the Bush White House comes out 180 degrees from that position, McCain falls into lockstep with the party. Maverick indeed.

And now Palin's office in Juneau is being run by the McCain campaign. Call Juneau with a question about Troopergate and you get forwarded to a McCain operative (excuse me, representative) who stalls and spins and then forwards you to the McCain-Palin campaign headquarters in Virginia. Try to get information out of Wasilla, Alaska, and the same thing happens; McCain cronies have taken over there, too. Even the Alaskan Republicans are getting pretty pissed off by all this.

But today we pause from the campaign trail and reflect on the wonders of televised entertainment as the 60th Annual Emmy Awards are given out. The limo just arrived to take the publisher and top editors to glitter at the ceremony. The rest of us grunts get to stay here, put out a paper and eat catered Mexican food. Hopefully, I'll be out of here by 8 or 9 o'clock, while some folks will be staying until 1:30 a.m.

All I can say about the Emmys is the Oscars they ain't. One of the guys I dated before Steve and I got together was a schlub of a sound editor, and he had an Emmy because he had worked on "Friends."

But the Emmys do herald the beginning of the Awards Season here in LaLa Land, and that means more pages (and more advertising) for The Reporter, which means more work and more income for us all, theoretically. Just as the retail sector makes the lion's share of its profit during the Christmas season, so do we make the majority of our ad income from now until late February, when the Oscars are held.

In closing, I wanted to say that Steve has a really great story about having lunch with a coworker in Van Nuys. It's really funny. I have to goose him to write it for y'all. I'll even provide some art. Until then, you'll have to digest my whiney political droning.

One point of interest: today I've been blogging for a year and 10 days. I guess you can keep some things going.

Find the Pig

I'll give you a hint: He's not wearing lipstick.

This photo illustration is of my own concoction. It's a reaction to the entire electoral process so far since the end of the conventions. Everything seems so preplanned this time around and the electorate seem to be once removed from everything that's going on.

And I don't even know if we should be blaming the candidates. The handlers seem to be coming out and saying the really nasty things, at least on the Republican side. The candidates themselves are spun as commodities; products that we're being marketed, and Palin is a shiny new SUV, just the kind you've always wanted. ICK!

I see the polls each week, like we all do, and I am astounded at how divided this country is. It makes me wonder just how these opinions are being arrived at. What are the questions that are being asked? How do the pollsters arrive at the simplified numbers via their statistical processes? We're remote enough from the process that we have to choose answers like brands of cereal. Then the numbers come out, telling us what we want to have for dinner.

Just like the candidates were chosen long before the conventions, I have a sneaking suspicion that the outcome of the election is sitting in an envelope somewhere in Washington, and the process of voting has become just another formality, like the conventions, to validate a decision that has already been made.

It won't be hanging chads this time around. Now we're going to get faulty tabulations from electronic voting systems, and many of them have no backup to allow hand counting. It's all suspect in my mind.

All I can say is this Palin woman is dangerous. Anyone who's ordered a cafe espresso has more foreign affairs experience than she does. I spent a year involved in government in Alaska back in the '70s, and I can tell you it's no training ground for a president. With just over a half-million people in the entire state, it's really more like a little club where everyone's on a first-name basis. If it weren't for the enormous amount of income from the oil concerns on the North Slope, the state would be another West Virginia populated by disgruntled folk who couldn't take life in the lower 48.

Two months. We've got to wait two months to see the outcome. Two months of sleazy Republican jabs at the Democrats that are so two-faced and self-serving that it's unbelievable the number people who are actually listening to the messages and buying them as sincere and accurate.

Perhaps we should program the presidential election, call it "Americana Idol," and let people vote on their cellphones. Not only would the election be approximately as accurate as the old way, but the charges for all those phone votes would help defray the monstrous debt that Baby Bush has amassed in the last eight years while dangling the boogeyman of terrorism over the heads of the American people.

God, I can't wait until November. The weather will be cooler, too.

Justa Montha Go

Yes, tomorrow marks the monthiversary of our nuptials. It seems to me like it's been a lot less time. Of course, we were domestic partners for a couple years already, so most of the economic and monetary situations of marriage were already with us. Still, I have to remind Steve that whether I write the check for repair of the air conditioner or he does, the money basically comes from and goes to the same place, so it's just a matter of cash flow.

Speaking of outlays of large sums of money, I finally broke down and purchased the Adobe Creative Suite Premium CS3 edition. I found it online for a measly $919 ($998 after tax and shipping). It was about time, too, since I have been using "borrowed" versions of the programs for the last decade or so and I'm tired of not being able to upgrade them. Also, the two major Web design programs, Flash and Dreamweaver, are included in the suite, and I have got to learn these if I'm going to stay competitive in the design field.

The small package arrived at work on Wednesday. It seemed so small for a grand's worth of programming data. I took it home and excitedly popped the DVD into my computer.

The first thing I saw was a warning: "Adobe Creative Suite operates best with a minimum of 1 gigabyte of RAM." My machine had only 512 megabytes. But since it didn't say "Don't load the program unless you have a minimum..." I decided to go ahead.

Over an hour later, it finally finished installing. When I opened it up, it took forever to start. I started looking around the Internet for how much new memory for my machine would be. The quote on the Apple Web site was about $400. Ick. I looked around for a place in Pasadena and discover Di-No Computers on Colorado Boulevard. They are Apple specialists and they really know what they're doing.

I asked for the memory cards the Apple Web site said I needed. The guy looked doubtful. "You live nearby?" he asked. I told him I was just a mile or two away. "Why don't you just bring in the machine," he suggested. Sounded good to me. As it turned out, the Apple Web site had been wrong; instead of a PJ4200 board I needed a PJ3200 board. We decided to max out the RAM at 2 gigs because, as I told him, the programs are just going to get bigger. And it cost me less than half of what was quoted on the Apple site.

Now my iMac is happy again. InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat and Fireworks all load up right away (yeah, I guess seven programs for a grand isn't too expensive), and I'm once again up to speed.

Forget It, Jake; It's Chinatown

The Labor Day weekend was quite nice, though the weather has been hot and muggy. It's not intolerable; I'm just getting tired of summer. I'm more of a misty-mornings, gentle-cloudy-afternoons, listening-to-rain-on-the-roof kind of guy.

Steve and I took the Gold Line down to Chinatown on Sunday and had dimsum. It was kind of overwhelming: two of us and about six servers with carts full of dishes, all trying to get us to pick theirs. We ended up with a plate of fried whole shrimp, their crispy little eyes staring up at us. I ate a couple, but had trouble with the shells. I did locate some sweet pork dumplings, so Steve got to try those. We ended with a really pretty gelatin thing that tasted like tapioca.

After brunch we wandered through the various shops (Steve's favorite thing, I'm learning). We got a ho-toi statue (a nod to dad), a cloissone egg Xmas ornament and a set of jade chopsticks. It was supposed to be cooler yesterday, but I'd say it was well into the low 90s at the peak of the day.

Today's cooler than all week. Everyone's waiting for Gustav to do its thing, hoping that all it disrupts is the nasty gusto of the Republican Convention. The downside: The Democrats have decided not to have a "war room" as the Republicans did in Denver. So Gustav is kind of forcing the Democrats to turn the other cheek, which might end up working in their favor.

All I want this November is Obama elected president and Proposition 8 voted down; all the rest is negotiable for me. I found this image on a Republican Web site and just had to put it on my Election TV because it's so cool. It kind of sums up the ridiculous process of politics.

On the creative front, Cousin Robin and I are working on a project together. We're spending Wednesday evenings on this. I'd give more information, but I'm not sure how much she wants me to talk about it. Let's just leave it at we're both really excited about it.

This coming week the weather promises to heat up once again. Even though we're only three weeks away from the beginning of autumn, California is in store for eight or nine more weeks of summer heat before the cool weather and, hopefully, rain come our way. Until then, we chill out and stay hopeful.

The Kitchen and the Woodpile

Nothing much happening, so no blog posts. But I must give you something...

There seems to be something parallel in this situation: Here we have same-sex marriage in California, and in the same year the Democrats have both an African-American and a woman candidate stumping for president. Is this the dawning of the Age of Aquarius? Ya think? But, hold your horses; now we have the Democratic National Convention, and everyone seems terribly upset, even with all these good liberal vibes invigorating the country.

But Denver's filled with girly-man whiny-babies (as our esteemed governor would say). Can't we just enjoy this watershed moment for America?

The Clintons are acting like prima donnas (which is probably their normal behavior; after all, they are the self-appointed royalty of liberal America and the Democratic party. Never mind that Bill stabbed the LGBT community in the back numerous times after courting our support in two elections). Everyone at the convention has their nose out of joint about something: Just get it together and unite behind the black guy! This gives Operation Get Behind the Darkie a whole new meaning (see "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut"). What's so freaking hard about party unity?

I think white Middle America still has a problem with voting for a black person. I suspect a lot of Hilary's loyalists are willing to go over to McCain just because they don't want a black man in the White House. And they don't want gays to marry because it's just not right; no real reason, they just want to keep us where we are. People do have a driving need to create "others" in their world.

To be honest, I haven't seen a minute of the TV coverage of the convention. I was commuting home last night while it was on, and I'm afraid I have to report that Steve has little to no interest in watching. (I know this will break my mother's heart; she's a real convention freak. The up side is that's perhaps the worst thing about him.)

The Hollywood Reporter has people in Denver, but there's scant coming out of the convention from them. We're even having trouble getting photos. Is this a nonhappening?

But next week we get the Republican convention, and then things will return to normal: women to the kitchen, colored folks to the woodpile (or somewhere where they won't been obtrusive or even noticed, just like the gays and handicapped and people who aren't white and/or upwardly mobile and/or just plain rich) and the heterosexual men will take over and decide what's best for all those "others" they're so fond of leading.

I love American politics.

Yummy, Yummy, Yummy

"I've got love in my tummy."

The lyrics are repulsive, I know, the song idiotic, but doesn't it make a cute headline and lead? (No?) In any case, I do have an inner glow of late.

It's from a kind of flow I've been feeling in the last week since all the ceremony and celebration. My coworker Darah put it nicely: "Being married just feels different, doesn't it?"

Yes, it does.

It's not just the ring sitting eternally on your finger. It's not all the people fawning over you when they find out. It's just something that vibrates while you're sitting together with your spouse at home, or looking at him/her across a restaurant table. It's an intangible thing: It's marriage.

I'm not being sucky or saccharine about this.

I'm realizing that if a right's denied to you, you never really experience it. Being able to marry the person I love has opened a whole world of human experience that I'm just starting to sense, something most people take for granted and have shared for a lifetime.

Which I guess is a good way to explain why the right to marry is so important. A domestic partnership is a legal arrangement, a privilege doled out by the state like your driver's license, but marriage is a condition that completes us as human beings. It fosters so many good human qualities and I suspect it provides this flow I feel. It's much pleasanter than routine, and it makes routine even more endurable.

Wait. Maybe this is sucky and saccharine.

I don't care. It's really nice. It's a very nice feeling of inclusion, both internal and external, that I've never felt before.

I'm sure it wears off after a while, this inner glow, this flow; but the marriage stays. And so does he.

Pickup Entry

I promised a piece about my week off before the wedding, so I'm making good. First, we start with a picture of my brother Steve and myself. He hit me over the head with a pogo stick when we were kids (not on purpose) and cut my face open with a ballpoint pen (not on purpose, either). Amazingly, I don't detect guilt issues in either one of us. We see each other every few years and have deep and profound discussions. I like hanging out with him because he makes me feel smart.

Here I am with "the girls," as I like to call them, because every gay man should have someone he calls "the girls," and I prefer mine to actually be girls. This is, from left, Amanda, Pam, me and Emily at the Grover Beach train station. Actually, it all began on Monday, Aug. 4...

Steve and the girls (doesn't that sound great?) flew into LAX from Wisconsin. They took the FlyAway bus from the airport into Union Station. I took the Gold Line in from Pasadena and met them at Patsouras Plaza (the modern end of Union Station where the buses come in), then we all took the Amtrak Surfliner train up to Grover Beach for a visit with the moms and others.

Tuesday we went to Pismo Beach, had clam chowder and bought some shells (I got a really nice one for Steve [my Steve]). I only stayed until Tuesday afternoon and came back to L.A. on the train, since I had to get ready for the license-getting and wedding-doing on Thursday and Friday, respectively.

Well, we have lots written about that, so I'll skip to Saturday, when Steve and I actually did some grocery shopping (but not enough) and watched a DVD before heading down to Olvera Street, which is the historic center of Los Angeles and happens to be across the street not only from Union Station, but also from the hotel at which Steve et al., were overnighting before jumping the FlyAway to LAX and a return to Wisconsin.

Dinner was at El Paseo Inn, which is a restaurant that's been on Olvera Street forever. Mom, sister Kittie and her husband David drove down just for the dinner, which was really touching for me (you know how I hate to drive). Robin and Evan (refer to wedding entries) also joined us.

The appetizer platters were excellent but the mole sauce (a wedding meal staple) was pedestrian. There were 13 in the party and the waiter didn't seem to know how to deal with that many people. Also Dave Willmon, a longtime friend of Steve's (which doesn't mean what it used to) attended with his new(ish) wife, so the party devolved into several jabbering groups (which every good party should do).

We all broke up around 10; Amanda and Emily wanted to go drinking. Cousin Robin wanted to join them. Me, I had to get home and get ready for a workday on Sunday.

We had loads of fun and are considered it a dry run for the reception we're planning for next spring. More on that as it develops. (Note to self: Hawaiian shirt/Tiki theme may not be that tacky after all.)