On Friday, November 30, the United States Supreme Court will decide whether or not to review California’s Proposition 8 and the various lawsuits challenging the Defense Of Marriage Act. Their decisions on whether or not to hear those cases will be made public in the first week of December.

God, it was fucking hot. At least the Central North American Principality’s beanstalk city was blanketed with a “nice” baking, dry heat. The buildings effectively screened it out, plus air conditioning could work wonders. At night, the heat left with the sun.

Thanksgiving is over, but gratitude doesn’t have to be tied to the calendar. This week, Hootenanny presents an unlikely gospel groove by a self-proclaimed "white chick from Wisconsin".

November used to be the cruelest month for LGBT people. 32 times a majority of voters legalized discrimination, denying the rights of gay men and lesbians to marry. Every time, it was a tough blow. And then, a couple of weeks later, we would have a national day of Thanksgiving. For gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people, it was difficult to be thankful. How can you be thankful in a nation that denies your citizenship?

November 20th is a day that gives me problems. For most people in the Northern Hemisphere it’s just a late-autumn day; for Americans this year it’s two days before Thanksgiving with all the attendant pressures on cooking and cleaning, and it’s certainly that for me, too. It’s also, for me, the day my housemate’s mother arrives for a week-long visit. She likes things tidy and organized, we live like the bachelors we are, I’ve never met her, and he hasn’t seen her in five years—that alone ought to be enough to make Tuesday troublesome, but there’s more.

Teleporting back to my room, I crouched to the floor doubled over with numbness and crowning anxiety. Did I perform my role properly? Did I go too far? It was a public denunciation... very public... too damned public. Were we supposed to make up later? That’s kind of hard in exile.

In 2011, San Francisco’s Mark Etheredge left a 21 year career in software to try and make a living with a different kind of keyboard. A lifelong musician with a love of jazz and new age, he released his first CD, Change Coming, in September.

Pablo Picasso was an artist. Everyone knows this. He revolutionized modern art. Pablo Picasso, just the name, brings to mind images of distorted features, of sideways noses, bold lines. Maybe a specific work comes to mind. Maybe the term Cubism.

Here are the rules of the road.

“I did not expect this,” Sifu commented. We were in the wasteland, many, many miles from base of the Central North American Principality’s beanstalk, and it was a very bad day.

Liz Hogan and Lilli Lewis are a musical couple from Hammond, LA, about an hour outside of New Orleans. As The Shiz, their music leaps fearlessly between gospel, jazz, and folk, always featuring great harmony and compelling, poetic lyrics.

The President has just won re-election. Health care reform, marriage equality, and “fair share” taxation, among other once-reviled public policy ideas, have been solidified as winning messages in the American political dialogue. For many, myself included, this is a soul-gratifying moment.

Anyone who studies science, especially biology, is going to come to the very messy discovery that everything is connected to everything else.

The silence in the elevator car suite built well past awkward and finally Sivar broke the tension. “What should I do with you?” Sivar asked. “Your Name may have changed, but otherwise you are still you…. No one else will feel compelled to accept that you went through instant reclamation and became a new person. The demon taint is still there. If you went to the Legion, you would disappear… dead or worse.”

Hans York has a unique voice, and it’s not just because of the German accent. He grew up near Ramstein Air Force Base and left home at 18 to play and live with American musicians. “After a short period I was dreaming in English,” he says.

In college I loved the intense thunderstorms of Iowa. I relished the power, the electricity, the wind. Sophomore year, a late spring storm caused a tree to fall on my parked car and crushed poor Daisy Mae Jones like a beer can.