Dispatch from BlogHer/Chicago 09 #1: Just a quick note to be filed in the “I don’t get out often enough” file: some tidbits from the SkyMall magazine. No tidbits yet regarding the conference because Evening 1 all I did was eat some wonderful free food, sip some wonderful free wine, hug many people excitedly, come [...]

Sorry that I couldn’t find the Ernestine Anderson version of this, which is my favorite. (”Ain’t nothin’ in Chicago for a sweet little boy like you to do,” sez she.) Apart from his preamble, I do like this Joe Williams version as my second favorite.
As you read these words, I will either be en route [...]

Musical accompaniment courtesy Mr. Louis Armstrong. Okay so the “so sweet, so cold, so fair” part is a bit of an exaggeration.  I mean, they’re clammy, yes, but not cold. Certainly not in the sense implied.  I do feel a bit like an infirmary worker, I will say that much.
Upside? I got these people in [...]

Couldn’t have said it better myself: a series by Maira Kalman, “The Inauguration. At Last.”
She’s been given a berth the last Friday of the month at The New York Times, “And the Pursuit of Happines,” in which she’ll explore American democracy.  I might find myself tempted every now and then to send you over there.  If [...]

Okay, I could have foisted this trio of cameraphone videos on a pianist friend and asked her to try to identify the piece (hi, Skye!), but then I thought: wouldn’t it be more fun to ask the world wide internets?

Erm. Cool visual used to be here (okay, from Jan 23 ’til late Jan 28) but you’ll have to link to it below to see it, since it may have been lousing up some folks’ Internet Explorer-mediated connections to this page? ?
Made from words in Obama’s inaugural speech, and found here. Thanks [...]

What the man said, in 1978, not long before his assasination [with some gratuitous modern editorializing]:
Without hope, not only [white] gays, but those [nongay] Blacks, and the Asians, and the disabled, the seniors — the “us’s — the “us’s” — without hope, the us’s give up.  I know that you cannot live on hope alone.  But [...]

From Aden Nak, courtesy Tagen Goddard. Though it’s also on DailyKos.
The chart is prefaced by a cathartic rant/critique which, while it suffers from an unfortunate dip in rhetorical grace in the opening ¶, courtesy a ripple of unchecked misogyny, is peppered with some interesting insights and a nice Supreme Court case run-down.
For those of [...]