I've long puzzled over what to call gay couples - or, more to the point, I've been stumped as to what would be the best term that one gay person could use to introduce his or her ... well ... uh ... what? Partner? Significant other? Lover? Spouse?

You see my problem.

No term is satisfactory. "Girlfriend" and "boyfriend" are playful but immature - fun at the beginning of a relationship but ludicrous after a few years. "Partner" has a coldly legalistic - if admittedly comfortable - air. "Lover" is a bit too racy for polite company, not to mention being reductionist. "Significant other" sounds vaguely psychomedical while "life partner" has an uncomfortable "peace, love, and beads," über-Californian feel to it. Finally, "spouse" is simply not true if you adhere to its dictionary definition, which is "a husband or wife."

And this last one - "spouse" - brings me directly to my point. But before I pound that point home, hang in there for a bit of background.

Here in California the religious troglodytes are again rolling out their hatin' machine to put an anti-same-sex-marriage amendment to our state Constitution on the November ballot. Put aside for a moment the obvious cynical ploy by the Republican party to dangle red hate-meat to entice knuckle-draggers to lump their obese, gun-toting semi-selves to the polls to give Old Man McCain a snowball's chance in Barstow of beating his Democratic opponent. Focus instead on the pure hatefulness of scarring our Constitution with a provision that's simply a legalization of religious bigotry.

I could, of course, spend a few hundred words picking apart the specious reasoning behind the concept of "one man, one woman" marriage, but I'll spare you that detailed pain. "Marriage is for procreation?" Tell that to elders and the choose-to-be-childless. Same-sex marriage would "destroy marriage as we know it?" I think heterofolk such as Montel Williams, the Promise Keepers, and Britney Whatsherface are already doing quite well on that score, thankyouverymuch.

No, it's simple religious bigotry, coupled with an inculcated "eeww factor" and the need for the down-and-out to brand another group as even lower on our teetering cultural totem pole.

Here's the good news, however: The whole bigoted mess would be even more up-chuckable if it weren't for the simple fact that the gay bashers and bible-thumpers are undisputedly going to lose this war.

This particularly evil form of religious extremism doesn't have a prayer - in the long term, at least.

Every day, another couple of hundred GLBTs come out to their friends. Their friends - who know the aforementioned GLBTs to be, well, just normal folks, warts and all - then say "No biggie" and liberation marches on. In another generation or two, most Americans will look back at this flurry of anti-gay legislative attempts with the same shame and wonderment that we feel when we see photos of "Whites Only" drinking fountains from the 50s.

Betcha.

And so, yeah, it's a colossal pain in the ass to have to deal with the likes of Focus on the Family, the Traditional Values Coalition, and - may sweet Jesus snuff him soon - the Reverend Fred Phelps. But those unreasoning homophobes are indisputably on the losing side. The arc of history and human liberation is against them. Their children - well, maybe their grandchildren - are or will be against them. Reason is against them. It'll take time - maybe until well after I've shuffled off this mortal coil - but they will lose. Same-sex marriage will become an accepted legal practice. Not a religious practice, to be sure, but that's perfectly acceptable - let the bigots hurt themselves and alienate their offspring, that's fine with me.

So, back to my original point: What term should gay folks use when introducing the person to whom they've acknowledged their love and committed their future? Well, how 'bout the same term that we straight folks use when we introduce the person with whom we've decided to spend the rest of our lives, but whom we've not yet married?

"Mom and dad, I'd like you to meet my fiancé."

Bonus goodness: Using the term fiancé (or fiancée for womenfolk) reminds the hearer that you're not yet allowed to be married - which will fire up the good guys and piss off the bad guys.

A win-win, don't you think? [back to top]

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Recently I've been on the road; been busy; been involved in a number of other things; haven't posted much - sorry, and so it goes.

I'm reading a marvelous book about China, The Three Faces of Chinese Power, which carefully and cogently delves into China's rise over the past decade or so and lays out a convincing argument about how comprehensive planning can lead to comprehensive results.

Many arguments, to be sure, can be found to challenge China's methods of re-establishing its major-power status, but those will remain for future posts. Tonight, however, I want to keyboard-scribble a bit about our country's relationship with Israel.

"China? Israel? Huh?" The connection isn't immediately obvious, is it? Well, it shouldn't be - what I'm interested in is that reading this book has focused my mind on international politics in a way that I haven't focused for many a year: that power-plays at an international level are (and, possibly should be) cold and calculating affairs, designed to ensure one's home country's health, influence, and perhaps even its survival.

And so, after reading the first quarter of this book, and after considering the authors' careful analysis of how a country calculates its alliances and resource investments, I had to ask myself, "Why, then, is the US so solidly supportive of Israel? Why do we shovel billions of dollars to them annually? Why do we allow them to continue to violate international norms of decency while we continue to stand behind them as never-say-die allies?"

Sure, there's the power and money of AIPAC, but that can't be the only reason. Sure, there are the historical leftovers of the Cold War, during which Israel stood in as our surrogate while the Soviet Union bankrolled Syria and other clients. Yes, there's the deep emotional linkage of our power elite and Christian millennialists with the idea of a Jewish homeland. But in the cold light of the early 21st century, are those reasons - in realpolitik terms - still enough?

Israel - due to its harsh treatment of both its Palestinian minority and the Palestinians in the territories it occupies, its refusal to stop the building of more settlements in the occupied West Bank, its inspiration of multiple levels of anti-US hatred throughout the Middle East, and its illegal possession of nuclear weapons - has been rapidly becoming far more of a liability to our geopolitical interests than it was during the Soviet period. Why should we still prop up their beleaguered regime now that their presence and activities are causing us more pain - and death - than security, profit, and prestige?

Or so I asked myself until this morning.

Today the US Congress was given an intelligence briefing about Israel's bombing of a Syrian nuclear reactor last September. Just for argument's sake, let's assume that the reactor did, indeed, exist, and that the Israelis did, indeed, destroy it to prevent Syria from developing a nuclear capability. We can't know if those two assertions are true, but for now let's assume that they are.

Let's also put aside the fact that the Israelis possess a few dozen nuclear weapons of their own, a fact that they have refused to acknowledge to the world, because doing so would put that possession into the purview of negotiable capabilities.

Let's just talk about the Israelis destroying a Syrian nuclear facility.

Washington - as is blindingly obvious - doesn't want another Islamic bomb. A. Q. Khan took care of supplying the first one, and look at how gingerly we're treating his home state - and him, for that matter. There's no way on god's green earth, however, that US forces could have overflown Syria and destroyed that reactor. You think the Arab street is virulently anti-American now? Had our air force attacked yet another Arab state, the streets would have exploded.

So that's where Israel comes in. Certainly, it knew that a Syrian nuclear capability would have weakened the power of its own nuclear forces - remember MAD? Equally certainly, however, Israel was acting in the interests of not only itself but also of its protector, the US. If we want to extend our control over Middle Eastern oil - which (duh...) we do - we simply can't allow the proliferation of Islamic nuclear capabilies.

And so, yes, our relationship with Israel may very well cause us more pain than benefit these days, but when we need someone in the Middle East to, as they say, "take out the garbage," they're there for us.

Oh, and one last point: Dana Perino today said that "The Syrian regime must come clean before the world regarding its illicit nuclear activities." Sounds fair - Israel, you first. [back to top]

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Every so often, something appears that's so jaw-droppingly lame, so astonishingly clueless, that I have to rub my eyes, blink, squint, and pinch myself to ensure that, yes, I am seeing what I think I'm seeing, and, no, this is not merely a bad dream.

Some background: Last year, Microsoft released the latest iteration of its Windows operating system. To say that this new version, Vista, met with a tepid response would be kind. Frankly, it bombed.

Early this February, Microsoft released its first major update to Vista, known as SP1 (SP stands for service pack - and, by the way, current Vista users couldn't get SP1 through Microsoft's Windows Update service until mid-last-month ... but I digress). Now, I'm in no way an expert on Vista, so I can make no intelligent comments on the details of SP1 - but that's not what I'm concerned with today. What I would like, instead, to bring to your attention is an internal Microsoft video that's intended to fire up its sales team and inspire them to sell, sell, sell Vista to enterprise customers.

That video, below, is arguably the most embarrassing corporate video ever produced - and that, my friends, is truly saying something. If you're brave, of strong stomach, and can bear with equanimity the sight of civilization crumbling, click, watch, listen, and marvel.

Yes, I am a devoted Mac user, but one who tries hard not indulge himself in the snooty pleasures of Mac superiority. There are, however, some times when doing so just can't be helped. [back to top]

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Did any of you catch this? Was this reported in any major media? Are we all so glazed over by the appalling cluelessness of our curent administration that nothing surprises us anymore?

Stephen Hadley, the director of the National Security Council - Condi Rice's replacement, by the way - was on George Stephanopoulos's not-well-regarded Sunday talk show two days ago, and was asked about whether his boss would be going to the Bejing Olympics' opening ceremonies. He danced around the question, saying the Bush would be "attending the Olympics," but refusing to say whether our Fearless Leader would be attending the opening ceremonies.

Fair enough. Political toadying as usual. No biggie.

What was appalling, however, was Hadley's stunning ignorance in a discussion of the Chinese government's current problems with one of its occupied provinces - Tibet, to be exact. Hadley, in discussing this wrinkle in the government's plans, was apparently clueless about what part of the world the troubles are in.

Check this out:

Nepal? Nepal?! No, Stephen, Nepal is peaceful, independent, and outside - for now - the Chinese government's sphere of influence.

One slip of the tongue might be forgivable, but repeated usage of the name of the wrong country can only mean that Mr. Hadley is ... well, let's not put too fine a point on it ... a clod.

Who are these jokers who are running our government? [back to top]

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Today's post has two widely divergent inspirations:

• I'm getting more than a bit tired of my recent tendency towards pure pontification, and...
• My younger daughter called me this afternoon with some cooking questions, and it dawned on me how few   cooking basics we're taught these days.

So today's simple topic: my no-fail, mortal-lock, can't-miss method for the perfect roasted chicken.

INGREDIENTS:
• one three-to-five-pound chicken - Make sure to get an organic, free-range chicken that's been raised decently. As my butcher puts it, "I want to make sure that the people we buy our meat from have treated their animals well and kindly before they kill 'em, we sell 'em, and you eat 'em." Sounds fair.
• three or so tablespoons of olive oil - Flavored olive oils are just fine - such as those from Stonehouse - as long as they harmonize with the herbs you choose.
• a couple of teaspoons of fresh herbs - Here's where you can get mildly creative. Pick sage, and mix in a teaspoon of microwave-warmed honey to your oil. Pick rosemary, and slop a tablespoon of fresh lemon juice into the oil. Mix one teaspoon of fresh parsley with a half-teaspoon of dried oregano and a half-teaspoon of dried basil. Knock yourself out.
• a half-teaspoon or more of sea salt - As you've probably noticed, there are a squllion different varieties of sea salts. Experiment. Ask for some for your birthday.
• a quarter-teaspoon of freshly ground pepper - Coarse or fine, your call - but if it's coarse, use more, of coarse ... uh, course.

PREPARATION:
Turn your oven up to 500 degrees, and let it heat up while you prepare the chicken. Trim as much fat off the chicken that you can without letting any skin show through, then thoroughly wash the chicken and dry it well, inside and out. The reason for drying it is simplicity itself: You want to roast the bird, not steam it, and any water that you leave on and in the bird adds to the steaming effect.

Truss the chicken tightly - that is, tie it so that its legs and wings are held close to the its body. Everyone has a different trussing method, but you can find a simple and effective one here.

Now get an open roasting pan that has a rack on the bottom, and place the chicken breast-down on the rack. (You may need to dry the chicken again before you put it on the rack.) Don't use a covered roasting pan - it'll add to the steaming effect - and if you don't have a pan with a rack, use something to lift the chicken off the bottom of the pan. A row of chopsticks, for example, is better than nothing.

Put the roasting pan with chicken into the hot oven. While you're waiting for the next step, mix your olive oil, chosen herbs, and any other ingredients you've decided to experiment with. (Don't use wine or other liquids 'cause they'd contribute to the dreaded steaming effect.) After about 20 minutes - a minute or three more for a larger bird, a minute or three less for a smaller one - take out the pan, pour about a third of your olive-oil mixture onto the chicken, flip it over, then pour (and brush) the remaining oil on the now-exposed breast. (Oily breasts - racy, eh...?) Put the pan back in the oven until the breast is nicely browned (between seven and ten minutes, in my experience). When it's browned to your satisfaction, baste it with pan drippings, turn the heat down to 325 degrees, and roast it until your trusty instant-read thermometer (a cook's best friend) reads 160 degrees (or a couple of degrees more) when it's thrust into the thigh without hitting bone - shouldn't take more than 20 minutes. Or more. Or less. Your mileage - and oven - may vary, but it's the thigh-meat temperature that's important, not the total time the bird's in the oven.

Take the chicken out of the oven, remove it from the roasting pan, set it on a cutting board, and let it rest for about five minutes while it settles its inner juices. If you want, you can scrape the bottom of the pan, de-fat the pan juices, and serve them with the bird after you've carved it, but I've found that this roasting method results in such as juicy bird that going through the pan-juices hassle is unnecessary.

Serve the bird as soon as possible after carving, then listen as everyone tells you how good it is. [back to top]

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The recent spectacle of our elected reps gently sautéing - as opposed to determinedly grilling - David Petraeus has illustrated yet again the fawning obsequiousness generally afforded to the utterances of our military leaders. Whatever a uniformed spokesmodel says - no matter how circularly reasoned or unabashedly self-serving - it's accepted with a solemn nod and an assumption of noble intent.

Two can play this game.

Read on, then, for a few quotes from American military men - and, yes, they're all men - that you'd never hear uttered in a pseudo-patriotic photo op.

"There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."
Smedley Butler, former U.S. Marine Corps General and two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor; 1933

"Soldiers are natural political scientists, because politics can be a matter of life or death to them."
Stan Goff, former U.S. Army sergeant, quoting a fellow soldier; 2003

"We'd thought they were little brown men and we were the great big white men. They were of a lesser species. The Germans were known as tremendous fighters and builders, whereas the Japanese would be a pushover. We used nuclear weapons on these little brown men. We talked about using them in Vietnam. We talked about using our military force to get our oil in the Middle East from a sort of dark-skinned people. I never hear about us using the military to get our oil from Canada. We still think we're a great super-race."
Gene Larocque, former U.S. Navy Admiral who was present during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941; interview, 1985

"I was walking to chow hall with my unit, and we were yelling, 'Train to kill, kill we will," over and over. I kind of snuck a peek around me and saw all my colleagues getting red in the face and hoarse yelling - and at that point a light went off in my head and I said, 'You know, I made the wrong career decision.'"
Jeremy Hinzman, paratrooper in the U.S. Army, recalling how he became a conscientious objector; CBS, 2004

"Speak out. And if you resist, there are hundreds of thousands who will support you, many of whom have already taken to the streets to oppose this war."
Jeff Patterson, the first active-duty U.S. military resistor to the Gulf War; 2002

"The sole purpose of war is to kill and destroy. There are no winners."
Douglas Rokke, Vietnam veteran and former director of the U.S. Army's depleted-uranium project; 2003

"Murder is murder, and somebody must answer. Somebody must explain the streams of blood that flowed in the Indian country in the summer of 1838. Somebody must explain the 4000 silent graves that mark the trail of the Cherokees to their exile. Let the Historian of the future tell the sad story with its sighs, its tears and dying groans. Let the great Judge of all the earth weigh our actions and reward us according to our worth."
John G. Burnett, a soldier who served in the federal militia that forced the Cherokee Nation west on the "Trail of Tears;" from "The Cherokee Removal Through the Eyes of a Private Soldier," 1890

"If only more of today's military personnel would realize that they are being used by the owning elites as a publicly subsidized capitalist goon squad."
Smedley Butler, former U.S. Marine Corps General and two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor; 1933

"The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We ... must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."
Dwight D. Eisenhower, former Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II and 34th President of the United States; from his farewell address as president, 1961

"I hate it when they say, 'He gave his life for his country.' Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don't die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them."
Gene Larocque, former U.S. Navy Admiral; interview; 1985

"One weekend a month, my ass!"
Sign placed in the windshield of a U.S. Army truck in Iraq; The New York Times, 2003

That's it. I just thought you might be interested in the viewpoints of a few military men who see the world differently than do our current Commander in Chief and his hand-picked überwarrior.

Just because you put on a uniform doesn't mean that you have to put your conscience and your soul in a blind trust for the duration. [back to top]

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This Saturday, the top four teams in men's college basketball will meet in San Antonio for a series of three games that will earn their schools and the NCAA a steaming heap of cash. CBS's "March Madness" ad revenue, for example, is estimated to be around $545 million. Ticket prices range from $140 to $220 at an arena that seats 65,000 - a three-day sellout would net around $35 million. Add to that sponsorship revenues, Final Four 2008 merchandise, ancillary events such as The DiGiorno College All-Star Game, and much more money-milking mayhem, and we're talking mucho, mucho moolah.

The players, however, won't make a dime.

You see, to be an NCAA athlete, you must be a certified amateur - meaning, if you follow the latinate root of the word "amateur," that you play for the love of the game and not for personal gain. That gain is reserved for your keepers: the collegiate athletic cartel.

Take a moment to ponder the absurdity of this situation. If you, as a college student, work in the library, food service, or lab, you get paid - even though books, squishy pasta, and even squishier petri dish contents aren't exactly what colleges consider major profit centers. Work for an NCAA team, however, and you merely get help with tuition while your school may make millions.

And when I say "work for an NCAA team," I mean work, not play. And hard work it is. Practices are many and arduous, travel is frequent and exhausting, the pressure for peak performance is overwhelming, and community appearances are expected and eat up even more time that should be used for studying.

Ah, studying. There's the justification for the existence of "student-athletes." Admittedly, many Final Four hoopsters are attending colleges that they or their families couldn't otherwise hope to pay for - or, for that matter, wouldn't qualify for if they didn't have the ability to hit the fall-away three.

So that sheepskin that awaits at the end of four (or five... or six...) years of on-court servitude is worth the price, right?

Not so fast. According to a recent study by the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, three of the schools now represented in the NCAA men's basketball Final Four have team graduation rates of under 50 percent - 45 percent at Kansas and 40 percent at UCLA and Memphis. (Kudos to the University of North Carolina's Tar Heels for graduating 86 percent of their players - guess who I'm rooting for this weekend?) Things were even worse at two of the tournament's number-two seeded schools: At both Tennessee and Texas, only 33 percent of players graduate.

The rates are even lower if you consider only the African American players, and those guys make up the vast majority of basketball players these days - which you may not have noticed if you haven't taken a look at a game since, oh, the days of Bob Cousy.

So, a bunch of young, strong black guys are working their asses off to make a ton of money for a bunch of rich white guys. They're not paid a dime, and are tossed out when they're no longer useful. Hmm... Does this sound at all familiar?

In the NCAA's most recent Guide to the College-Bound Student-Athlete, the organization's president, Myles Brand, pontificates in his welcoming letter to aspiring collegiate athletes, "Without question, obtaining your college degree is absolutely crucial - to you and to us."

With all due respect, Mr. Brand, that's bullshit. [back to top]

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