The news at 1100ish GMT, read by Aaron Hawkins

Things I leave out of the actual entry, for reasons which should become obvious as you read:

I do worry that people will think I only mention this story and ask after the actress because I have a thing for busty Italians.

Actually, it's half-Italians.

The top half.

On second thought, since my Physical Attraction Test at Match.com spit out busty redheads, guess it's not half so much as. . . right, that's not going anywhere good. . .

ampersand mentioned something that caught me attention on Angel, but that I let go without comment:

But what's with the ending, in which. . .

Freeze.

Spoilers ahead, in case you're watching on tape/TiVo delay. Not feeling like doing the <font color="same as bgcolor"> thang, and there's no ^L equivalent for MT (and no, I'm not writing Ben and Mena to suggest such a thing, because it would be very, very silly).

Ok, go.

. . .the visual representation of Andrew's growing up is that he's going out for a night on the town with two gorgious [sic] babes (female variety)? The implication is that "growing up" consists of a movement from not-very-closeted homosexuality to the adolescant [sic] vision of heterosexuality represented by James Bond - and, in the sixth season of Buffy, represented by Warren.

Those sics are gonna come back to bite me in the ass, I just know it.

Let it pass without comment because I'm not sure that was the auctorial intent, though I don't deny it's a possible reading.

Hey, at least I get weasely about scenes in a canceled television show, rather than our nonelected leaders doing it about our national security.

Another bit in that same entry mentions never-seen-it My So-Called Life, then transitions smoothly to:

But then I got to thinking: Why is it that we can't seem to get away from viewing the black civil rights struggle as the Platonic civil rights struggle, the struggle that all other struggles must resemble or else be illegitimate?

Think of the debate, in recent months, over if same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue. It's almost always presented in the same way: as a question of if the gay rights movement is similar to or different from the black civil rights movement (those who are pro-SSM say "similar," those who aren't say "different"). It's rarely presented as a question of if justice and equality are being denied to same-sex couples, taken on their own terms.

Something else that's been annoying me for a while. I'm completely hypocritical about this, of course; no problem with people protesting Chief Illiniwek saying no one would debate for one second about the propriety of a white guy in blackface performing during halftime shows, but towering self-righteous rage when someone starts claiming that the only group it's acceptable to mock/discriminate against nowadays is men/heterosexuals/Christians/fat people/smokers/et fucking cetera. First time I hear a dog owner say something like that in response to a sign outside a store or coffee shop politely requesting they not bring their little flea factory inside is going to have a hell of a time explaining to the people at the ER how they managed to get the thing shoved up their. . .

Ahem.

Anyway, the comparisons usually also carry at least the implicit suggestion that the (black) civil rights struggle is not just over, but that the Good Guys (that's us, by the way) won. I'd argue both of those contentions, if I thought there was any point in doing so, but since white conservatives generally know so much more about what it's like to black in the US these days than I could (presumably from watching Good Times and either having a black friend [who, curiously, never, ever posts to their site, in the case of the warbloggers] or having fucked at least one black person at some point) that I figure my time is better spent trying to find decent photos of Gina Lollobrigida, really.

Bonus round: Kenyon Farrow - "Is Gay Marriage Anti-Black???" at just-added-to-links-list Anzidesign:

Since the Christian Right has money and access to corporate media, they set the racial/sexual paradigm that much of America gets in this debate, which is that homos are rich and white and do not need any such special protections and that black people are black � a homogeneous group who, in this case, are Christian, asexual (or hetero-normative), morally superior, and have the right type of �family values.� This, even though black families are consistently painted as dysfunctional and are treated as such in the mass media and in public policy, which has devastating effects on black self-esteem, and urban and rural black communities� ability to be self-supporting, self-sustaining, and self determining. The lack of control over economic resources, high un/underemployment, lack of adequate funding for targeted effective HIV prevention and treatment, and the large numbers of black people in prison (nearly one million of the 2.2 million U.S. prison population) are all ways that black families (which include non-heterosexuals) are undermined by public policies often fueled by right wing �tough on crime� and �war on drugs� rhetoric.

Which really deserves an entry, rather than passing notice.

But isn't that enough for one day?