More McGreevey

My favorite thing about the McGreevey situation: since New Jersey counts as local news, on Friday morning the story got the front-page above-the-fold four-column 72-point-all-caps-headline treatment from every newspaper in the city, including the free daily commuter paper that's available in every subway and train station, and which almost everybody picks up when they take public transit. And you can probably guess which five words, out of the governor's entire speech, were turned into those banner headlines. So this is what I saw on the subway on the way home on Friday: just about everybody on the train, from the guys in suits to the guys in overalls, from the women in stilettos to the women in flip-flops, from the people with briefcases to the people with strollers, was carrying a paper declaring I AM A GAY AMERICAN. And you know what? The world wasn't ending. Straight people weren't turning gay, gay people weren't turning lavender, no one was getting propositioned, no one was getting bashed. It was truly a beautiful sight.



My second favorite thing, which I heard on the radio alarm clock this morning when I wasn't entirely awake, and wasn't sure wasn't a dream, but have since confirmed on the radio station's Web site: McGreevey's approval rating has actually gone up since the announcement—two points higher right after the speech than it was two weeks ago. Not that it makes any difference, since he isn't running for election again, but it's an interesting side note to the whole situation.

Month meme

Found this over at Tenth-Muse; it's being propagated from La Mancha. You copy the text pertaining to your birth month, then use the <strike> tag to cross out the things that don't apply to you.

JUNE:

Thinks far with vision. Easily influenced by kindness. Polite and soft-spoken. Having lots of ideas. Sensitive. Active mind. Hesitating, tends to delay. Choosy and always wants the best. Temperamental. Funny and humorous. Loves to joke. Good debating skills. Talkative. Daydreamer. Friendly. Knows how to make friends. Abiding. [Editorial comment: Abiding what? Law-abiding? Biding one's time? Abiding by the judge's decision? Gotta be more specific.] Able to show character. Easily hurt. Prone to getting colds. Loves to dress up. Easily bored. Fussy. Seldom shows emotions. Takes time to recover when hurt. Brand conscious. Executive. Stubborn.

The obligatory Gov. McGreevey post

Okay, the McGreevey thing. Do I have to? Well, let's run the numbers:

You're gay (50) and you live in New Jersey (50) = 100 = You have to talk about it



You're gay (50) but don't live in NJ (0), or you live in NJ (50) but aren't gay (0) = 50 = You probably have to talk about it



I'm sort of gay* (25) and live near NJ (25) = 50 = Yeah, I guess I have to talk about it



(What would be a low score? You're not gay and don't give a hoot about gays (0) and you don't live in NJ and don't care about it either (0) = 0 = You can ignore it. Lucky you.)

So anyway. Yep, he's gay, and yep, he's resigning, but it's not post hoc ergo solum propter hoc.† I think it adds up like this (yes, I'm doing a lot of adding-up today):

"I'm gay."



Okay.



"I had an extramarital affair."



Ummmmmmmmm...okay.



"I appointed a personal acquaintance to a major government position he was unqualified for."



Oooohhh. That's not good.



"I'm gay and I had an extramarital affair with a guy I appointed to a major government position in the state homeland security office, even though he's unqualified, and now he's threatening a sexual harrassment lawsuit."



Oh. Damn. Yeah, you'd better get out.

Really, I think McGreevey made the best overall decision he could. The guy's not only threatening a lawsuit, he wanted $5 million to quash it—can you say "extortion"?—and by coming out, coming clean, and stepping down, McGreevey took control of when and how the news came out, refused to succumb to $5 million in blackmail, and prevented extremely nasty politicking in the present, by people saying he should step down, or the future, by very nasty campaign ads if he ran for reelection. By making his resignation effective in November, he spares us an interim election, and makes sure a person we all at least know of will become governor (that would be Richard Codey, the state senate president—not a household name, but at least a single person you can point to, not the God-knows-who you could end up with after an emergency election). And, as a person in the New Jersey political campaign ad viewing area, I can't thank him enough for that. Politics around here—NJ, Philly, the nearer parts of Pennsylvania—can get ugly, and the campaign ads are uglier; they're generally along the lines of "my opponent drinks the blood of puppies, vote for me." After last fall's nasty Philly mayoral election, this spring's nasty primary elections, and facing a fall of nasty presidential and congressional and local elections, knowing there's one less campaign to abide counts as a blessing, and there aren't many politics-related blessings to count.



*How can I be sort of gay? I'm absolutely 50-50 bisexual, but I'm married—monogamously—to a man; so I'm not heterosexual, but I engage in heterosexual behavior.



†Hopefully that means "After this, therefore solely because of this." Maybe it should be solus propter hoc; it's been a while since I took Latin, and it's hard to figure out declensions with the Perseus collocation lookup tool.

The night before the Olympic opening ceremonies; our local news people doing their shout-out from some ancient stone street; J.: "I bet you can't piss on a street corner in Athens without hitting a media person. And actually, that's not a bad idea."

Back in July I posted a lament about how I wanted to be a Firefox person, but couldn't do it without the Internet (H)explorer toolbars I live by. Well, I don't know why it took me so long to find this out, but...those fabled Firefox extensions and plugins of which I've heard (greengrl and j-mo have rhapsodized about the BugMeNot extension) include (drum roll) a Yahoo! Companion emulator, the which I cannot live online without, and a Google toolbar emulator to boot. This made my day. My week, even. I was actually feeling weepy about it: the very things I need and thought I couldn't have, yet here they are, and now I can be one of the cool people too!



So I installed the Google and Yahoo! toolbars as fast as I could figure out how; the browser interface isn't as pretty, and some of the buttons don't do exactly what I expect them to, but it's nothing I can't get used to in a day or two. And now? I'm a Firefox convert. Oh yes. I love it. I want everyone who doesn't know about it to love it. I'm ready to start sending epistles to Ephesus and Laodicea. I'm sold, baby.



The first Mozilla-inspired improvement to my blog: my very own favicon, which I had to get when I realized Mozilla displays them in the address bar and the browser tabs, instead of just the favorites menu like IE. Props to the Web site I used to make it: Chami.com Favicon from Pics turns any image, regardless of size or format, into a favicon and puts it into a ZIP file you can download. It's fast, it's free, and they didn't even ask for my e-mail address. Highly recommended.



(My favicon doesn't always show up on the archive pages, but you should be able to see it on the blog homepage: http://www.zhaba.com/blog/.)



More improvements (and more posting) to come, I expect, once I get past the "omigod let's see what else Mozilla can do" stage and stop spending every free online minute looking for extensions and plugins on Mozilla.org and MozDev.org.

No, the other other Simpson

Reuters Entertainment headline: "Simpson's 'Autobiography' Rebounds to No. 1"



My first thought: "O.J. has an autobiography? Dear God, no."



My second thought: "But I haven't heard anything about him recently. Jessica Simpson's in the news more, anyway. Does she have an autobiography? What would a 24-year-old write an autobiography about?"



Then I actually went to the story, which is about Ashlee Simpson's album entitled "Autobiography." Jeez, what does a 19-year-old sing an autobiography about? But I'd rather have a lot of people buying that than buying anything from O.J. Simpson.

Spies and lies*

(A day late; I would've posted this yesterday if I could've found a link with an exact quote.)



During President Bush's speech nominating that Goss guy as CIA director (link goes to official White House transcript):

President Bush: Because their work is secret, the men and women of the CIA receive little recognition...



Me: Yeah, except when their names get leaked to the press because their spouse pissed off the administration.

* The unofficial title of a popular poli-sci class at Yale; it was listed in the course book as "Intelligence and Covert Operations."