Chris Bowers has some numbers over on MyDD.com (which is now my go-to politics page) which seem to suggest that the Dems are poised to take the House of Representatives this November.

If this prospect excites you, the time is now to donate, volunteer, send out emails, and talk it up with your friends and family. I think putting a check on the Bush administration is VERY important. Among other things, it will mean much less of a chance of bombing Iran. But we've got to bring it on home.

If this isn't exciting, or you're cynical about the possibilities here, stay tuned. While it's true that there are massive institutional problems with our political system, this is still step one towards: universal health care, reversing global warming, keeping the internet free and open, ending the imperial occupation of Iraq, developing alternatives to fossil fuels, and any number of other important things that require (at a minimum) that the Federal Government not be pushing in the wrong direction.

I'll be blogging more about what might be done soon.

This is a test of SmartyPants module, which should (like my old WordPress blog) convert two minuses into dashes -- allowing me to make my much-beloved paranthetical insertions like this -- as well as doing "curly quotes" and other such punctuation...

Yep. Works. Also added tags.

This may be nerd-prejudice talking, but in my years of experience, if you want to publish yourself online, you should become HTML literate in the basics like bold, blockquote, link, etc. These basic tools plus smart ASCII conversion like SmartyPants or even wiki-like Textile (which does bulleted lists, etc) are going to continue outperforming javascript-based markup toolbars for some time, and will be much more portable.

All that changes if/when Google releases the toolbar they use in Gmail and their web 2.0 office apps for public consumption, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Just peeped the season premiere of BattleStar Galactica. Holy motherfucking shit. These people are dropping bombs. I suggest you start watching.

The series has been something I enjoyed from the start because it innovates and pushes the envelope on both stylistic and substantive levels. There's been no other "dark, sexy, science fiction" on television that I can recall -- the only thing that really comes close at all is Ridley Scott's Blade Runner -- but this season the production values seem to be up even a notch further.

I deeply enjoy and appreciate the intelligence with which this piece of culture is crafted, and that which it grants the audience. In addition to being dark and sexy, it's also very smart. This is not TV for morons -- which I think, by the way, means that it is what most people really want; which is to say, high quality shit.

It's on the level of a feature film, their technique: the way in which they utilize jump-cuts and cinematic camera angles, how they'll play with narrative time. For instance, the producers feel free to intersperse scenes that were never aired in the "previously on BattleStar Galactica," and have made a practice of including quick flashes of the episode-to-come in the opening credits. That's stylish.

And then there's the richness of the settings, costuming, etc; the willingless to be frankly sexual, or ugly, or to juxtapose music with action. The attention to minor details, small shots and gestures. The commitment of tha actors and their work is tremendous: British actor Jamie Bamber (aka Lee "Apollo" Odama) not only rocks a great standard american accent, but also put on about 45 pounds for this season. Who the fuck does that for TV, let alone a season?

So the conventional TV season is starting up (I watched Lost and BattleStar Galactica last time around) which means I'm firing up my bittorrent. I'm curious how early I'll be able to get stuff here on the west coast. Depending on torrent speed, maybe close to real-time!

So, to that end, I'll be firing back up my torrentfeed (which will also pick up torrents for new episodes of The Wire and other HBO shows I dig, plus the odd film). I'll also be posting some sort of essay defending the morality of this behavior, since a buch of squares and duped-teenagers seem to thing that this is somehow theft.

Anyway, that and a new site design, and hopefully some Rebel Unicorn info this weekend.

Made it home... I got up from Andrew and TK's couch about 18 hours ago (4am eastern) to get on the subway to get on a plane to fly back to Cali to rent a car and drive 300 more miles north. Luckily for (Tylenol PM) me, I was able to get about 4 hours of sleep on the plane.

It's good to be back. Lots still to digest.

I'm beat. I got another low-sleep night ahead of me (4:30am date with the A-train) and a flight back to Cali and a drive up to Humboldt. I'm hoping I don't get sick.

Turns out running a wedding really takes a lot out of you. I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for hundred years.

Got a lot of exciting things coming on in the next weeks... need to get back on top of my cycle here, and quick.

Just a quick one: wedding went well. Lots of compliments for my performance which is quite an honor. The families involved are both amazing, and all their contributions were above and beyond. It was a beautiful evening full of laughter, a few tears, and lots and lots of heartfelt love.

NYC in October is possibly my favorite place in the world to be. I'm still looking forward to getting back home and staying put for as many weeks in a row as I can put together, but I'm glad I had this experience to remind me why I love the city and to make me want to come back.

I think we'll just have to be wildly successful and open an office here. It's really the only option.

An interesting bit of history: back in 1983 there was another Congressional Page sex scandal, in which one GOP lawmaker confessed to relations with a female page in 1980, and also in which Gerry Studds -- a Democrat from Massachusetts, the first "out" Congressman, and posessor of an apt name for this story -- admitted to a relationship with a 17-year-old male back in 1973.

Studds won re-election and the Republican did not. Most of Studds' constituents already knew he was gay, and he basically didn't apologize for what he did:

Studds, however, stood by the facts of the case and refused to apologize for his behavior, and even turned his back and ignored the censure being read to him. He called a press conference with the former page, in which both stated that the young man was legal and consenting. Studds did not break any U.S. laws for that time, in what he and page called a "private relationship."[1] He continued to be reelected until his retirement in 1996

Bill Clinton could have learned quite a lot from this guy.

Now, let's be clear. Being an adult and getting intimate with a 17-year old is ethically dubious. It's almost certainly unethical if there's a workplace power relationship. If you happen to be considering trying something like this, don't.

However, I think the response of Studds shows the power of standing behind your choices. I may find Studds and the 17-year-old iffy, but if the 17-year-old is willing to stand by his man ten years later and say it was all good, that's a strong statement.

This requires you to embrace your actions in the first place, of course, and to have a solid internal moral gyroscope you can live by. But if you've got those things and a clear head, you can potentially break a lot of social rules to little ill effect.

So the other night I was writing in my paper journal, and I noticed that I was talking about my own life the way I do about work when I have my Project Manager hat on. My first reaction was that this was pathetic, but then I checked that and I remembered that actually this is natural, and I do the same thing when I'm in an "actor" or "activist" mode as well.

So I decided to embrace it, started an open-ended todo list that started with "California drivers license" and "medical insurance" and ended up at the bottom with: wife, land, kids.

Heady, brah. No doubt influenced by my thinking a lot about Frank and Laura's wedding this weekend.

But I'm embracing this exercise and so I start to try and build a timeline around these things, because that's what you do when you're a project manager. If I'm doing it, I gotta do it.

So the upshot is that I figure I should have met and started a relationship with my wife by 2009, after which I've got five years or so to wrangle the land and kids bit. Prior to that there's getting a car and a dog to consider.

All this is assuming I stay on a track to remain in California. This is far from certain, but it seems to be the direction I'm headed for the moment, so I figure why not take it as far as it can go.

Now that I've got a five year plan, all I need is to meet some of those college girls that would ask you about that sort of thing. With 2009 as a milestone, why, my wife could still be in High School. Ho ho ho.

Kidding aside, meeting the women is perhaps the greatest challenge/unknown up here. I'm single again after almost a year of relationshipping. At the moment I'm not quite ready to really get back out there and mix it up, but it's going to have to happen sooner or later.

1) Wow... I went right back into a politics binge, eh? Big week for that. I also posted something on Future Majority about how the NetRoots negative campaign against Kinky Friedman is probably a bad idea.

2) HFS: N. Korea to conduct Nuclear test. This is a bad thing, will have unpredictable results.

3) I've been writing a lot in my paper journal lately. Liking that. I'm still working on a better design for this site, and I should be putting up a page someday in the next couple weeks for the Rebel Unicorn, but right now I've gotta get some serious work done.