an unordered list

> rm on 9/11.

> Marian Fontana writes about attending a 9/11 dinner at the White House; her account of sitting with Rumsfield at dinner as she's quietly repulsed by the Bush administration's reaction to the attacks is beautiful and very real. I know I mention The Terror Dream a lot around here, but both it and Fontana's piece are excellent portrayals of the widows who resisted the party line, and, perhaps more interestingly, the party's reaction to their refusal.

> On CNN, Calderon calls a spade a spade: " 'We live next to the world's largest drug consumer, and all the world wants to sell them drugs through our door and our window. And we live next to the world's largest arms seller, which is supplying the criminals,' Mexican President Felipe Calderon told CNN en Español Friday."

> Once again, Newt Gingrich is on crack. (When I was little, his name was the only word I wasn't allowed to say in the house. My dad hated him that much. True fact!). Anyway, this wouldn't be a story if it were coming from Rand Paul, who at this point basically exists to make everyone else look sane, but if Gingrich is gearing up for 2012: he has to know that comments like this will come back to bite him, and the fact that he's making them anyway suggests that he believes the American people won't care. But that's ridiculous! Of course we'll care!

...won't we?

> Add Emma Donaghue's Room to the reading list. From the reviews, it sounds like a cross between Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time but with what could be a seriously awesome mother character.

> HELP HELP HELP CANNOT STOP WATCHING SERENITY FIGHT REHEARSAL. The camera stuff is mostly the same, but it stars stuntwoman Bridget Riley, and now the movie version just feels really slow. Which is saying something, because it's a brilliant fight scene on its own.

> Also! This clip of "I'm Alive" from next to normal, which has recently supplanted Spring Awakening as my favorite musical (it's a mark of how much I hate Glee that I have difficulty listening to Spring Awakening anymore) (DAMN YOU, GLEE). ANYWAY, it is beautiful and emotional and will rip you apart and put you back together. Kind of. Great show.

> Similarly, we are not going to discuss how many times I may have watched this 28-second TV spot for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part One!). Hint: many, many times.

> Yesterday Z. told me that he thinks Meredith Brooke's 'Bitch' reminded him of me. I haven't been so flattered in years.

> Tanya Davis, where have you been all my life?

> Tanya Davis then led me to go reread and re-listen to Andrea Gibson, who is pretty much my favorite poet (and person) ever at this point. "Dive" would represent my religious views on Facebook if I didn't think my relatives would disown me for it. (On the other hand, that would possibly be not a great loss! Hmmm...)

> The tricky thing about Andrea Gibson is that her work makes me think thinky thoughts, and those thinky thoughts sometimes take me to uncomfortable places. I suppose this is somewhat the point of her work. But today, the thinky thoughts were about Let's Say Thanks, Xerox's thing where you can pick a card and a message and have it sent to a soldier stationed overseas as a way of, well, saying thanks. For what, precisely, isn't terribly clear (freedom! ...More freedom!), but I get the feeling you aren't supposed to Go There.

The thing about Andrea Gibson, though, is that she makes you Go There.

I don't Say Thanks all that often. I usually try to pick the least obviously hegemonic card and least weird message - something that won't feel like painting a bible verse on a shell casing. I always kind of figured I was a 'support the troops but not the war' kind of kid. But now...I'm increasingly of the opinion that sending cards is a hell of a lot less effective that bringing them home and accepting that the process of patching them up is going to take years and years and years. And it will not be pretty and it will not be good television, but maybe, if we do it right, maybe it will mean that twenty years from now one-third of our homeless will not be vets.

(Now would be a good time for you to go read/listen to "For Eli.")

> And lastly, on a somewhat lighter note...why Prop 8 will not seriously hold up in court.

Hopefully.