I have a cat named Pete. You may have met him. He has had many, many nicknames (like all my cats, wives, and children):

• Furdis


• Festus


• Petey Petey Punkin Eatey


• Chubbs


• Tubbs (thereby occasionally making his sister Poly “Crockett”)


• Kreplach


• Kreppis


• Kreps

It is this last that has led, oddly, to me calling him “DJ Kreps-a-lot,” in the vein of Sir Mix-a-Lot. Stranger yet, I have found myself lately singing “He’s DJ Kreps-a-lot” to the tune of “On The Good Ship Lollipop“:

He’s DJ Kreps-a-lot

Brings the hot phat beats, makes your undies drop

His fuzzy face

Won’t permit the dance floor go to waste

That is all.

This is quite lovely.

When gay marriage became legal in the District, Henry set his sights on a wedding. Bob wanted no part of it. “We’re accepted as two human beings, always as a couple. I said, ‘I don’t see any reason for it,’ ” he recalls. “Besides that, Vera Wang will never make a gown for me to wear.”

Henry reminded Bob of the reaction to the Helen Hayes Awards speech. Their shared life is the contribution they’ve made to the gay rights movement, he argued, and marriage solidifies that. “We’ve been an example,” he says.

So on June 20, at 5 p.m., the white-haired men walked out onto the balcony of the presidential suite of the J.W. Marriott and faced each other under an arch of billowing silk and saffron-colored flowers. Sixty-two years — to the hour — after they got together in that Baltimore bar, Bob and Henry were wed.

Here’s an interesting tidbit:

“We’re not only friends, we’re lovers, we’re brothers and, incidentally, along the way, in 1990, I legally adopted Bob.”

True story. When Henry was 69, he legally adopted Bob, who was 70. It gave them legal protections, offered an advantageous inheritance tax rate and made the pair into a family.

Moral of the story:

These six decades together have gone “like that!” Henry says, snapping his fingers. “It’s like life goes. My advice to anybody is, ‘For God’s sakes, enjoy your life.’ “

I really do intend to get this thing alive again. I really do. But, let’s face it, I have two bloody children. It’s frequently 9pm before all the offspring are abed, which gives me roughly 90 minutes for myself before I have to start considering getting my beauty sleep. Last night I spent those 90 minutes installing a new toilet seat upstairs because my obese ass cracked the old one. So you can see where finding time for updates is, well, non-existent. I will try and do better.

I do have plans to discuss the Triathlon I did 2 weeks ago, and in fact started a post on that subject, which I’ve not had time to work on since, well, the day after the Triathlon. So, you know, don’t hold your breath too long. Although, frankly, the fact that a 257-pound human successfully completed a triathlon might be a tidbit that would cause you to expire from surprise anyway.

In lieu of coming up with something hilarious and original, I can offer a particularly foul-mouthed quote or two from a story on the feelings of elite soldiers on DADT by Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic:

As one former member of a special missions unit put it to me recently, “It’s really about competence. If you’re competent, it doesn’t matter who you are.” And then, switching instantly from an analytical posture to a machismo mode, he said, “If a guy saves my ass, he sure as hell can look at it.”

Damn right. To folks who are afraid of gays in the military, what exactly is the issue? Are you afraid of getting propositioned? I can count the number of times I’ve been hit on, in 32 odd years, on one hand, so I’m afraid you’re not getting any sympathy from me. I’d relish the thought of a gay guy finding me attractive, with the exception of the freaky gentleman that kept cruising me at a gay club in London in 2003, and the problem there was not his homosexuality but the fact that he was at least as old and doughy as my father, and wearing a white T-shirt and black pants that were at least 3 sizes too small.

How, exactly, is being hit on by a gay guy any different than being hit on by a particularly ugly woman? Either way, you just have to say “no thanks,” and usually that puts a stop to it.

The next quote has some particularly naughty language:

One soldier — call him Ben — checks his e-mail. “Fuck,” he says. He opens his cell phone and makes a call. … A beat. … “Heeeey cock breath, how are you?” … “Yeah, that sucks.” “Yeah, why is he doing this to us again?” “No, he told me his partner was in town for the weekend and he really needed to see him.” … “Dude, why can’t he break way for one weekend!”

The conversation continues.

“Yeah, well, you know I’m just going to come over and [perform an obscene act involving testicles -- this IS The Atlantic, after all, and I already typed 'cock breath'].”

He hangs up.

What was that about, I asked?

“Oh, this guy we haven’t seen for a while is in town, a really good buddy, but his partner is also in town and he wants to see him. So we were just complaining that he wanted to see his partner rather than hang with us.”

The soldier reminds me a bit of myself (minus the part where he’s undoubtedly in pristine physical condition and well-trained in the art of combat, and I’m filled with clotted cream and frequently walk into doorframes). For kids of my generation, you grew up insulting your friends by calling them either “gay” (or one of its many derivatives, such as “gaywad” or “gayon”) or “retarded,” sometimes combining the two into particularly biting forms such as “gaytarded.” It’s something I struggle with even now, because my first instinct upon hearing moderately poor news (such as “turns out that John won’t be coming, he’s got to work” or “I don’t like eggplant, it’s gross”) is to think, and possibly say if I’ve been overserved, “That’s gay” or “You’re a retard.” And yet you will be hard pressed to find a greater advocate for the rights of LGBT men and women that isn’t actually LGBT than I.

The fact that the soldiers use words like “cock-breath” and (I’m assuming) “tea-bagging” is not the salient point. The fact that the soldier used those words and clearly has no problem with homosexuality is. I think it’s a perfect reminder that political incorrectness is by no means an indicator of someone’s actual feelings on a subject.

3 minutes my DIMPLED PINK ASS.

The Big Picture has a rage-inducing set of photographs of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The most depressing:

A young heron sits dying amidst oil splattering underneath mangrove on an island impacted by oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in Barataria Bay, along the the coast of Louisiana on Sunday, May 23, 2010. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Sure would have been nice to have that $500,000 remote turn-off device that BP didn’t bother with, huh? I hard that so far, this has cost BP $760,000,000. That’s about 1% of the fine that should be levied on them.

The Tell-Tale Heart was the first story I ever remember reading that actually scared me. At some point I got into some crazy Lovecraftian stuff, like all extra-literate teenagers, but I remember reading The Tell-Tale Heart in about the 5th grade, in class in the middle of the day, and shivering. Ol’ Edgar Allen was a messed up individual.

Of course, so is Randall Munroe.

(What? I disappeared for almost 2 months and then suddenly 2 posts in two days? I have no earthly idea what you are talking about, crazy person.)

A bigger update later. Meanwhile:

Heehee snark snark snark!

I know, I know, all I’ve been doing lately is posting links to silly pointless crap, but at least this way I’m not leaving the site unattended for weeks at a time. Once again this year I’m caught up in musical theatre, and it sucks up a lot of time. We’re doing Fiddler on the Roof! It’s actually pretty rad. Anyway, here’s today’s pointless link to ensure that I don’t have to waste time thinking about words. I found it extremely hilarious, which should not surprise you since it’s pretty dumb: