If you want to get any more work done today, do not click on this list of YouTube videos. Many of these videos are 9-minute compilations of various TV show openings from 1979 to 1992. This one from 1983 contains “We Got It Made” (sexy maid) and “Jennifer Slept Here” (Ann Jillian as a ghost). This one from 1981 contains “Mr. Merlin” (Merlin’s alive today as an auto mechanic), an obscure sitcom I’d always remembered but had sometimes thought I’d imagined.

You can also see the cast of “One Day at a Time” change through the years.

How did I never hear that Glenn Scarpelli, my childhood crush from “One Day at a Time,” came out a few years ago?

We’ve moved! We’re in the new place. The Time Warner guy left about 45 minutes ago, so we have cable and Internet, and I can blog.

The move went off without a hitch. Moving is SO much easier when you pay people to do it for you. We used Rabbit Movers and they did a good job.

I unpacked all my books yesterday, most of which I hadn’t seen in months. I got rid of tons of books last fall, but I still have too many. Last night I’d open a box and find yet more books in it and shake my head. I like having shelves of books, though. They make a home more homey.

It’ll take more time to unpack everything, figure out where it all goes, get curtains, get settled, etc. But eventually this will be home.

Tomorrow we’re moving to the new apartment. I worked from home today so I could pick up the keys during lunch. (Matt has been crazy busy at work so I volunteered to get the keys. I work in New Jersey and the apartment’s in New York, so it was easier to just stay in the city today.)

Packing is annoying. Matt’s way more stressed about the move than I am, although I’m not what I would call calm. Fortunately, since we knew our current apartment was going to be temporary, we left much of our stuff in boxes. I never unpacked my books or DVDs, so that was one less thing to worry about.

We’ve been really spoiled these last six months. The temporary apartment that Barnard (Matt’s employer) gave us has two bedrooms and two bathrooms and a huge living room. So we’re going to have to downsize again. I know, boo hoo. We told ourselves we wouldn’t let ourselves get spoiled… but we let ourselves get spoiled. Still, it’ll be fine.

Tonight we finish packing, and tomorrow morning the movers come. I was trying to figure out the best way to not be stressed about the move, and I decided that the best way to do that is to not expect perfection. If there are glitches, if we have to pay a little more than we expect, if something breaks, then whatever. It’s not like it’s death.

Wish us luck.

The Flash is back! Barry Allen, that is.

(That link also explains “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” which I referenced the other day.)

Aha. Here’s a good reason why we should keep using capital letters:

Using capital letters to start sentences is similar to indenting, or doublespacing, to indicate paragraph divisions. The practice makes it easier for readers to move through a piece of prose.

As a reader, it is harder to keep one’s place, or to locate a key passage, if one is faced with a large block of words. If writers stop using caps, the next step may be the elimination of spaces between words.

As a former teacher of writing and rhetoric, I emphasized that writers should be sensitive to the needs of their audience. Keeping caps in standard English is one way of showing concern for readers.

The purpose of linguistic rules is to make communication easier. If we all agree on a set of such rules, we can more easily understand each other. That said, the rules do change over time, and the human mind is adaptable. Once a critical mass of people has adapted to new rules, those new rules become the norm.

DJRainDog is disappointed that in my post about the New York Times article on gay couples getting married in their 20s, I didn’t express an opinion. So… here goes.

I really want to talk about the accompanying photos. But first, the piece itself.

I’m happy for all the gay couples that get married in their 20s. It surprises me that gay couples would do this so young, because I think people in general get married at a later age than they used to, and this seems to go against the trend. But as gay people come out younger and younger than they used to, their life stages might start to parallel those of their straight peers. If straight couples can get married in their 20s, gay couples should be able to do it, too.

But I envied several of the couples mentioned in the piece. It made me feel old, and it brought up all my old feelings of regret about not coming out until I was 24. Now that I’m 34, age 24 doesn’t seem quite as old as it used to, but I still regret that I never had a college boyfriend (at least not while I was in college — I did date a college freshman for two months during my final year of law school). Those were crucial years that I wasted, and I’ll never get them back, no matter how hard I’ve tried to make up for it.

Lewis, who is in his early 30s and came out at 23, captures it well:

There was a reason, of course, why so many gay men my age and older seemed intent on living a protracted adolescence: We had been cheated of our actual adolescence. While most of our heterosexual peers had experienced, in their teens, socialization around courtship, dating and sexuality, many of us had grown up closeted and fearful, “our most precious and tender feelings rarely validated or reflected back to us by our families and communities,” as Alan Downs, the author of “The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World,” puts it. When we managed to express our sexuality, the experience often came booby-trapped with secrecy, manipulation or debilitating shame.

No wonder, then, that in our 20s so many of us moved to big-city gay neighborhoods and aggressively went about trying to make up for lost time. And no wonder that some of us — myself included — occasionally went overboard.

“The expectation for many years was that if you did any dating in your 20s, they were essentially ‘practice relationships’ where you did what heterosexual kids get to do in junior high, high school and college,” says Jeffrey Chernin, a Los Angeles psychotherapist and the author of “Get Closer: A Gay Men’s Guide to Intimacy and Relationships.” “But for many gay men, your 20s were about meeting a lot of different people, going out to bars with your friends and having a lot of sex. That has long been considered a rite of passage in the gay community.”

I don’t know what I miss more: that I didn’t get to have all that casual sex earlier or that I didn’t get to have a relationship earlier. I’m envious of these people who have gotten their shit together so young.

Then again, getting married doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve gotten your shit together. And I wonder how many of these young gay marriages will end in divorce? Some will, some won’t. Sometimes straight people get married too young and it winds up being a mistake; that’s bound to be true for gay couples as well. Lewis does, in fact, profile two 26-year-old men who have each been through a same-sex divorce.

So it was an interesting article.

But those photos.

The photos were the first thing I noticed about the piece, of course — including the magazine cover. The photos are fun and campy, even if ironic faux-1950s style has become overdone. But what really struck me was that they were all photos of white guys. And that bothered me.

Lewis does address this, briefly:

To find out [what these marriages are like], I spent time over the next few months with a handful of young married and engaged gay couples — including Joshua and Benjamin. All were college-educated and white. (A 2008 study of gay and lesbian couples in Vermont, California and Massachusetts — three states that offer some form of legal recognition for gay couples — found that “couples who choose to legalize their same-sex relationships . . . are overwhelmingly European American.”)

Should he have sought out some non-white or mixed-race couples in the name of diversity? Or is diversity irrelevant because the article is about the people who most exemplify the phenomenon of same-sex married couples, and those people happen to be “overwhelmingly” white? I can’t answer that without knowing how many people “overwhelmingly” means or how much of an effort Lewis made to find non-white people. I’d be curious to know what some non-white gay men think about this aspect of the piece.

The photos also bother me because they play into the stereotype that all gay men are affluent and privileged and don’t really need the economic benefits that marriage would bring or the job protections that an employment nondiscrimination law would bring. They also play into the stereotype that we’re all fabulous curiosities instead of real people who don’t have equal rights.

Regardless of the benefits of marriage, I just don’t like being stereotyped. Matt and I are both white and make an okay combined living for New York City. But I’m still paying off my student loans and my savings aren’t nearly as high as they should be. We don’t have oodles of fabulous friends. We’ve never thrown a dinner party. Neither of us really knows how to cook. We both dress pretty plainly. We don’t accessorize. We don’t fly off on fabulous vacations.

Gay people are not all supercool. Enough already.

Another thing I don’t like about the photos: they really seem to paint an unrealistic portrait of marital bliss. Haven’t we learned anything from the 1950’s, when insecure housewives desperately tried to create the perfect roast and keep an immaculate home? Are those photos going to turn me into poor Laura Brown, Julianne Moore’s character in The Hours? Am I going to collapse into a heap of tears after I try to bake a cake and it comes out a lumpy mess?

It’s bad enough that we have to look like HX cover models. Now we have to learn to cook, too?

Still, I’d rather be tyrannized by some idealized vision of same-sex married life than not have the right at all.

I guess that’s what it comes down to.

Give us our rights; we’ll figure out the rest.

The cover story in today’s New York Times Magazine is about gay couples in Massachusetts who get married in their 20s.

Last November in Boston, Joshua Janson, a slender and boyish 25-year-old, invited me to an impromptu gathering at the apartment he shares with Benjamin McGuire, his considerably more staid husband of the same age. It was a cozy, festive affair, complete with some 20 guests and a large sushi spread where you might have expected the chips and salsa to be.

“I beg of you — please eat a tuna roll!” Joshua barked, circulating around the spacious apartment in a blue blazer, slim-fitting corduroys and a pair of royal blue house slippers with his initials. “The fish is not going to eat itself!”

Coincidentally, the piece is written by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, who wrote the piece about the Abercrombie & Fitch CEO that I re-linked to the other day.

Teenagers are letting their electronic communication styles creep into their schoolwork.

And as the English language evolves, he said, some e-mail conventions, like starting sentences without a capital letter, may well become accepted practice.

“I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,” said Professor Sterling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, he said, when his teenage son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.

Hmm… prescriptivism vs. descriptivism strikes again.

You know what’s weird? Every Democratic presidential candidate who has lost a general election since 1972 is still alive. George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry — all are still alive.

I’m envisioning some big forum or parade of Democratic losers somewhere. Maybe held at some university think tank and aired on C-SPAN.

(I’m sure some snarky Republican wants to add to that total.)

Nick was turned on by my use of the word internecine in this post. I decided to look up its origins, never having studied Latin, and it turns out that our modern use of the word is due to an error in interpretation made by Samuel Johnson in his famous dictionary:

The prefix inter– was here used not in the usual sense “between, mutual” but rather as an intensifier meaning “all the way, to the death.” This piece of knowledge was unknown to Samuel Johnson, however, when he was working on his great dictionary in the 18th century. He included internecine in his dictionary but misunderstood the prefix and defined the word as “endeavoring mutual destruction.” Johnson was not taken to task for this error. On the contrary, his dictionary was so popular and considered so authoritative that this error became widely adopted as correct usage. The error was further compounded when internecine acquired the sense “relating to internal struggle.”

This reminds me of one of those Passover Haggadah passages about rabbinical analysis that someone at the table reads aloud while everyone else is getting impatient for dinner.

Here’s David Tennant and Catherine Tate together in a comedy sketch. Doctor Who fans will enjoy this.

I love the New Yorker, but one thing that has always bothered me about the magazine is its snooty insistence on using accents that nobody else uses. Who writes elitism as élitism? Who writes cooperation as cöoperation or premiere as première?

The New Yorker, that’s who. No accents, please; we’re American. It’s not le Nouveau Yorker.

I guess it’s their way of being stylistically hyper-correct. The weird thing is, the magazine is totally incorrect when it prints a month followed by a year. Articles constantly use the formulation, “In November, 1962…” That comma between the month and the year annoys me to no end.

And now back to important things.