Clicky-click here, and then watch from the four-minute mark on.

Good times, man.

...please take a few minutes (really, that's all it takes) to play The Ocean Conservancy's "Go, Fish" game; it will quiz you on your knowledge of sustainable fishing, and you'll probably learn a lot of things you didn't, but should, know. (I did!) Best of all, for every person who plays, $1 is donated to TOC's efforts to institute and maintain sustainable fishing.

If you eat seafood of any kind, you should do at least this much. Right?

Click here to play.

I strongly encourage all my friends who give a damn about gay rights to sign the following letter in support of Army National Guard First Lieutenant Daniel Choi. You can do so here:

Support Daniel Choi.

As a progressive who nonetheless believes in the value of a strong military, I feel strongly about the rights of gays and lesbians in our country's armed services. However you may feel about the armed forces, I hope you'll consider supporting First Lieutenant Choi.

That is all.

They're at it again next door, this whole floor,
I swear they're out to drive me crazy.
But not right now, I'm high as a cloud,
I'm soft and grey and lazy
Neon in the window
Sirens far away
News on the radio
Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday....

Whose birthday, you might ask? Why, none other's than my spirit animal.

Happy birthday, Lionel!

...I'd never read this poem before (it's in an anthology I just bought to use with one of the classes I'll be teaching this summer), and I loved it instantly:

My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,
At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,
Whose palms are bulls in china, burrs in linen,
And have no cunning with any soft thing

Except all ill at ease fidgeting people:
The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.

Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror,
Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime
Yet leaping before red apoplectic streetcars --
Misfit in any space. And never on time.

A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only
With words and people and love you move at ease.
In traffic of wit expertly maneuver
And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

Forgeting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
Your lipstick grinning on our coat,
So gaily in love's unbreakable heaven
Our soals on glory of split bourbon float.

Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses --
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should yor hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.

-- John Frederick Nims

Any moment, you could just be going along, and then you read or hear or see something that changes your world forever for the better. Who says there's no point in living, when every day holds the possibility that life will give us something new and wonderful?

From lotsa folks:

Take no more than fifteen minutes to produce a list of fifteen books that have influenced you in style, ideas, relationships, language, or other ways that you find important, and/or books that have really stayed with you -- you keep thinking of that quote, you are always remembering that character, you are frequently reminded of that moment...that kind of thing. This is not a favorites list.

The line between influential books and favorites is a parlously thin one, and in many cases -- for me, at least -- meaningless, so I'm going to ignore that last line.

1. Winter's Tale
2. Jane Eyre
3. Taran Wanderer
4. The Lord of the Rings
5. The Great Gatsby
6. The Serpent and the Rainbow
7. The Prince of Tides
8. The Magus
9. Something Wicked This Way Comes
10. Their Eyes Were Watching God
11. Carter Beats the Devil
12. Swamp Thing: Love and Death
13. The Secret History
14. The Vampire Lestat
15. The Last Unicorn

This was not hard; I have long polyamorous love affairs -- plural marriages, really -- with a great many books that are as dear to me as the people I love. I only regret the certainty that I've left some worthy volumes out.

And here, because she wants to play and doesn't ever use her LJ, are Kat's:

1. Tara Road
2. The Pure Land
3. Memoirs of a Geisha
4. Playing Beattie Bow
5. Poor Man's Orange
6. The Floating Girl
7. Fortune's Rocks
8. A Wild Sheep Chase
9. Trans-Sister Radio
10. The Distant Land of My Long Lost Father
11. The Ginger Tree
12. Where the Heart Is
13. The Tale of Genji
14. Out
15. The Namesake

It's my birthday this year!

This pleases me.

So my wife likes Vin Diesel. A lot. And that's cool: while Fast and the Furious doesn't do much for me, I dug Pitch Black, and I think Vin is generally pretty fun even in schlock. That said, it's hard not to feel a trifle resentful toward a man whose triceps are the size of my entire head.

Then I remembered that Vin Diesel is a HUGE Dungeons & Dragons fan.

Suddenly, I think I love him more than Kat does.

Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of fortune, what time the milkman gets up, the position of the electron, or the occurrence of one astonishing frigid winter after another. Even electrons, supposedly the paragons of unpredictability, are tame and obsequious little creatures that rush around at the speed of light, going precisely where they are supposed to go. They make faint whistling sounds that when apprehended in varying combinations are as pleasant as the wind flying through a forest, and they do exactly as they are told. Of this, one is certain.

And yet, there is a wonderful anarchy, in that the milkman chooses when to arise, the rat picks the tunnel into which he will dive when the subway comes rushing down the track from Borough Hall, and the snowflake will fall as it will. How can this be? If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined, it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given - so we track it, in linear fashion piece by piece. Time however can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was is; everything that ever will be is - and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we image that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.

I <3 NY.