George Takei is everywhere these days. He’s all over Facebook with some of the funniest memes of all. He’s always in the news. And he seems to be getting work everywhere—he’s been on The Big Bang Theory, Hawaii Five-O, The New Normal, Pound Puppies, and a dozen other shows, all in the preceding year. Look him up on IMDB and you’ll see he’s getting more work than a Republican spin-doctor.

I was not alone in the alcove long. It wasn’t Elisabeth who returned. Sivar came back in with someone in tow and she gestured towards me. “As I said, a form of justice has been served. I hope this assuages your suspicions, Inspector General Michael?”

I walked into the crowd, taking a direct course to Sivar. Octo’s voice was a sardonic, coaching presence in the back of my head. “Stop rushing. You won. Bask in it. Make a circuit of the room, especially to the orchestra. Request a song. Make it look like you won a duel, instead of surviving an unexpected, emotionally messy assassination attempt. You are the victor of tonight’s scheduled entertainment. Now smile. Not so big. Not so many teeth.”

A gentle pinging woke me up. I was surrounded by linen and warm, hard skin. Sebastian was a great mass in the bed next to me. Black being “slimming” was an understatement; he was every bit as muscular as Paulos, only on a lithe frame that gave an impression of leanness under the black. In sleep, roles changed and he held me in the crook of his arm.

I understand now why Christmas arrives in the stores sometimes even before Halloween has departed. It is a desperate attempt by the retailers to slow down Christmas’s approach, an effort to pile up a steep bank of days for the snowplow of the holiday season to barrel into.

The angel’s black eyes fixed on me. “Interesting,” was all it said before turning to Dion. “Playing with your toys again, Dionysian Apollonian?” Dion was uncharacteristically quiet. He let the salvo pass. Mentally I dubbed the octopus headed angel “Octo.”

I sat up, scrabbling at whatever was covering my head. The more I touched it the more ominous it felt; plastic studded with thick wires that ran off... someplace. My limbs were barely responsive and throbbing with pain.

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.