soapbox time!

I usually try, sometimes a little too hard, to play devil's advocate in issues. I fall pretty far to the left of the political spectrum, but if at all possible, I like to acknowledge that on many issues, there is a valid opposing viewpoint, even if I don't agree with it. (This is called being civil, which I know is an unheard of idea on the Internet.) I am pro-choice, for example, but I recognize that some people just think that it is never ok to willingly take a life, even in the form of a fetus. If anybody needs to me to run down the list of reasons why I disagree with that, I will, but that's not really where I'm going with this.

On some issues, though, there's no devil's advocate. If you are against gay marriage, I think you're flat out wrong, and I've said it before, and I'll say it again, in 50 years you will look as foolish and ignorant as you would if you stated today that a white woman should not be allowed to marry a black man. I was reading, in an article about the California Supreme Court's ruling that essentially legalizes gay marriage (at least until this fall), about a lesbian couple in their 80s who have been together for 55 years, who can finally get married (they were married in that two-week window where gay marriage was legal in San Francisco, but it was annulled when it was decided that the mayor had severely exceeded his authority). I would rather appeal to ration and common sense, but emotion will do sometimes, and I just can't imagine how anybody could look at this couple who's been waiting since the Eisenhower administration to tie the knot and tell them they shouldn't be allowed to do so.

Really, if you've got a rational and logical argument against gay marriage that doesn't involve God or your own personal squeamishness, I would very much like to hear it.

whatever makes you happy, whatever you want...

Sometimes I think that for all the amazing things they've done, Radiohead have never really topped "Creep."

Most of the time I don't really think that, but I don't think most people will argue with me if I say they've never done anything so immediate or nakedly emotional since then. Everybody in the world loves that song, with the possible exception of Radiohead themselves.

That song is kind of an anomaly, now that I think about it. It came out in the middle of the grunge era, when mainstream music was dominated by somber bands that were all about pathos and self-pity and nihilism, (for an intolerably boring example, see the Stone Temple Pilots song of the same name, released a year earlier), and along comes this band of goofy-looking British dudes aping REM and U2, and they blow everybody else out of the water, almost by accident. Apparently they weren't even going to put "Creep" on Pablo Honey, which sounds strange, considering that it's basically one of the two really good songs on that album. Eventually Radiohead took a few astronomical leaps forward, but they're always going to be associated with "Creep," whether they like it or not.