Events

...the New Hampshire legislature has authorized gay marriage. It should be law in a week or two, depending on whether Gov. John Lynch signs it. (It will likely become law if he vetoes it; it'll just take longer.) Legislators in Maine introduced a likely-to-pass bill this week. And to think, 300 years ago New England was a theocracy.

Via Sullivan, David Frum thinks of Arlen Specter's defection pretty much what I do—except he's not as happy about it: Pat Toomey is of course the former president of the Club for Growth who planned to challenge Arlen Specter in the 2010 Pennsylvania Republican primary. Polls showed Toomey well ahead – not because he is so hugely popular in the state, but because the Pennsylvania GOP has shriveled to a small, ideologically intense core. Toomey now looks likely to gain the nomination he has sought – and...

Parker is asleep on my back porch and not allowed in the house because he decided, within 15 seconds of being off-leash at the park, that it would be fun to roll in a pile of gross, green, grass-covered, glistening, goose poop. We are now on our way to Petco for an emergency bath. Dogs.

While in San Francisco for the weekend, I decided to continue the 30-Park Geas by seeing what the Oakland A's were up to. Last place, it turned out; but then, so were their opponents, the Tampa Bay Rays. From the moment you get off the BART, you know you're not going to the Friendly Confines of Wrigley Field. Wrigley, for example, has less concrete and barbed wire: Of course, Wrigley has fewer "World Champions" banners, too, but we'll skip that for now. Not a bad game, on balance. The home team won, it...

Arriving home this evening, after three days in San Francisco and frequent email checking while there, Outlook presented me with 295 unread messages (not counting the hundreds of messages in my spam filter). Of these, almost all were on my RSS reader—75 Facebook status updates, 50 posts from Andrew Sullivan, etc., etc. It's amazing how much better you can feel after hitting +A, right-click, "Mark As Read". Problem: solved. Still, I hate feeling like I missed something....

I'm returning from San Francisco this afternoon, so tomorrow I'll have photos from Saturday's A's game and, if I get my very own YouTube account, a video of my sister's dog. I'll leave that for now. This morning, just a link: TheExpiredMeter.com, of interest to anyone who deals with the Chicago parking system. I found it because I discovered only yesterday that, sometime today, my car will get a parking ticket. I discovered this when my alderman's office sent a notice of street sweeping yesterday saying...

Via Dan Savage: More from Garfunkel and Oates...

So confusing. At my last Cubs game, they beat the Cardinals to get into first place. But here's yesterday's result: Let's see that in close-up, just to drive home the pathos and pain: So yesterday, as they got schooled by the fourth-place Reds, St. Louis won their game. So the Cubs swapped places with Reds and dropped to 4th place. It's going to be one of those seasons...

The Chicago Tribune reports today that the City Council now, five months later, wants to have hearings about the late-night, rush-rush, badly-managed parking meter privitization they pushed through in December: Less than five months after the Chicago City Council quickly and overwhelmingly approved the deal, aldermen buffeted by public complaints pushed a slew of ordinances Wednesday targeting the $1.2 billion lease of Chicago's parking meters to a private company. One measure calls for hearings to...

Via TPM, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) thinks he stumped Nobel laureate Stephen Chu: Barton: You’re our scientist. I have one simple question for you in the last six seconds. How did all the oil and gas get to Alaska and under the Arctic Ocean? Chu: (laughs) This is a complicated story, but oil and gas is the result of hundreds of millions of years of geology, and in that time also the plates have moved around, and so, um, it’s the combination of where the sources of the oil and gas are– Barton: But, but...