I can’t get enough of this.

Stop-motion Justin Long is so cute.

As of today, there are 400 days left in the Bush presidency.

Makin’ progress…

I’m sick with laryngitis. I started to develop a sore throat on Thursday night, and I had to deal with it all day Friday. Yesterday morning I woke up and I couldn’t speak. Really — I’d open my mouth and practically nothing would come out.

This came at a bad time, because we had a concert last night up at Vassar in Poughkeepsie. I went anyway — there was no way I could sing, but I wanted to be a part of things and at least watch from the audience.

Luke was there — he just got home to New York yesterday from the end of his first semester as a grad student at Duke, and he took the train up for the concert. He had a double incentive, because he used to sing in the chorus and he graduated from Vassar. It was so great to see him — he and I wound up sitting together during the concert.

It was a different experience hearing the music from the outside. I heard things I hadn’t heard before, because usually I’m so focused on singing my own part correctly. When I’m singing my own part, it feels like the most important thing in the world, but yesterday, when listening to the entire chorus, my ear naturally went to the melody of any particular piece. Sometimes the music you work so hard to sing turns out to play just a supporting role.

We carpooled back with Luke to the city afterwards (the chorus guy Matt and I rode up with had room in his car), and he wound up being the first visitor to our apartment. He’s staying not too far away from here while he’s in town.

Anyway, I still can’t talk and it sucks. Having a sore throat sucks even more. It hurts! I hope it goes away soon.

I was thinking about an electoral dilemma last night.

This is the most open presidential election in years. How does a primary voter decide whom to vote for when he doesn’t even know who’s going to be the other party’s nominee?

Suppose the Democrats have two candidates, A and B, and the Republicans also have two candidates, 1 and 2.

Suppose you’ve evaluated the various candidates on factors such as experience, likeability, skill, policy positions, and so forth, and your calculations have led you to conclude the following about the American people:

In a general election contest between A and 1, A would beat 1.

In a contest between A and 2, 2 would beat A.

In a contest between B and 1, 1 would beat B.

In a contest between B and 2, B would beat 2.

So, A > 1 > B > 2 > A. If I could type a circle, that would be a circle.

Again, A and B are the Democrats.

Whom do you vote for if you don’t know whether the Republicans will nominate 1 or 2?

I don’t know.

Eight years of aging on video. A picture every day for eight years. And he’s hot. I could stare at him for, oh… eight years.

When I sang with the Virginia Glee Club at UVa, the Annual Christmas Concerts were the highlight of our season. Each Christmas Concert spanned the gamut from wackiness to sublimity.

The highlight of the concert was always “The 12 Days of Christmas,” which included audience participation. The conductor would divide the audience into 10 sections. The entire audience would sing the words for “a partridge in a pear tree,” and as the days went on, a different section would take the words for each of the days, with “five golden rings” reserved for the Glee Club. As the song went on, it would get stranger and stranger, with veteran audience members coaching their sections to sing something different from the traditional words.

But the highlight of the song was always the Glee Club’s version of “five golden rings” on the twelfth day.

I just found a video of this year’s version, from the 67th Annual Christmas Concerts, and I see that little has changed. I’m feeling waves of nostalgia right now.

(The back wall of the stage contains a replica of The School of Athens.)

As a “Heroes” fan, I’m enthralled by all the photos on director/producer Greg Beeman’s blog of cast members goofing around.

Question: how much of a crush do I have on Nicholas D’Agosto, Milo Ventimiglia, and Zachary Quinto?

Answer: much.

And this photo of Zachary Quinto and Kristen Bell might actually become the first fanboy wallpaper I’ve ever put on a computer screen.

Apparent this post got forwarded to the entire gay band, the gay band’s board, and my chorus’s board.

Excuse me while I discreetly implode into nonexistence.

Neurobiologists have discovered that sexual orientation can be manipulated back and forth in fruit flies.

People sometimes discuss the implications of a “cure” for homosexuality.

I wonder if someday, 20 or 30 years from now, parents will be able to eradicate potential homosexuality in their fetuses.

I picture a homosexual Children of Men. “The youngest homosexual on earth died today at age 18…”

Then there’ll be nobody left in the gay bars but us bitter old queens.

And then we’ll die, and there’ll be nothing on Broadway but Stomp, and eventually the whole country will look like Kansas.

According to a new poll, only 36 percent of New Yorkers view Governor Spitzer favorably.

I guess I must be part of the minority that still likes him.

The most important thing in New York state government right now is to break up the antidemocratic power structure, where Joseph Bruno and Sheldon Silver control and conceal the entire agenda and ordinary senators and assembly members are not allowed to deviate. The system is rotten, and, unlike the somnolent and complacent Pataki, Spitzer is making a good-faith attempt to shake things up and fix them. No, it’s not going to pretty, but it needs to be done.

Has Spitzer made missteps? Yes. But he can learn from them. I still think his overriding goal is a noble one.

If you have time, read this lengthy but informative profile of Spitzer from last week’s New Yorker.

Here’s a little thing I’ve discovered:

When you’re making dinner for yourself — or on any occasion where you’re going to be taking some food from a pot or serving dish and putting it onto your own personal plate — and you’re planning on having seconds, it helps to take a smaller-than-average amount of food for your first serving. That way, when you go back for seconds, you get the psychological satisfaction of having seconds, but you’re actually eating less food.

I think it has something to do with the fact that the first few bites of a tasty meal are more satisfying than the later bites.

Dammit!

These fake filibusters have to stop. The Democrats aren’t even making the Republicans go through with actual filibusters. A true filibuster requires endless speechifying. But the Dems are making it too easy because the Republicans don’t even have to go through with it, apparently.

It should NOT take 60 votes to pass legislation in the Senate.

Just a reminder, if you’re interested, that my chorus, the Empire City Men’s Chorus, has its annual holiday concert tonight. Lots of cute gay guys onstage and probably in the audience.

It will also feature a really hot cimbasso player.

And we’ll also have Barbara Walsh, who recently sang this:

in the Company revival on Broadway. She’s singing two numbers with us and three numbers on her own, one of which is pretty hilarious.

It’s at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, at West 86th Street and West End Avenue, at 8:00 p.m. Tickets are $25 in advance (call 212-362-3179) or $30 at the door.

Japan’s Bloggers: Humble Giants of the Web.

Although English speakers outnumber Japanese speakers by more than 5-1, slightly more blog postings are written in Japanese than in English.

The Year in Gay Theater.

Isn’t that redundant?

It’s a cliché that the holiday season seems to start earlier and earlier every year. I don’t mind it, though. I get into the Christmas season — probably because I’m Jewish.

In the mid-80s, I used to watch “Days of our Lives” religiously (pardon the pun.) One year, on the Christmas episode, the Brady and Horton clans gathered around and sang cloyingly religious songs like “Silent Night.” My dad remarked that the writers were probably Jews who were trying to imagine what Christmas must be like for the Christians.

Anyway, one reason the holiday season is so long this year is because Thanksgiving was the earliest it could possibly be. Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday in November, so it ranges from November 22 to November 28. This year it was on November 22. That’s 33 days before Christmas.

The earliness was brought home this past Saturday night, December 1. We went to the Big Apple Corps’s holiday concert. It was great, but they played lots of holiday music, and at the end there was a big holiday singalong.

On December 1.

Even worse, in early November, Matt and I went to Macy’s to buy a couch, and the furniture department was fully decked out for the holidays. Trees covered with lights, golden angels, stuffed animals, depictions of Santa, holiday music blasting from the speakers. I joked to a saleswoman that she must be sick of it already and she said yeah, especially because the holiday display had been up since September.

Soon enough, New Year’s Eve will come, and we’ll all go to bed, and we’ll wake up the next morning, and just like that, the holiday season will be over and we’ll have a long, dark winter ahead. That always makes me sad.

So enjoy it while you can.

As a reminder, my chorus, the Empire City Men’s Chorus, is having its holiday concert this Friday night, December 7, at 8:00 pm, on West End Ave. and 86th Street. If you’re around, I hope you can make it.

“Kansas O’Flaherty… Secret Agent,” the new weekly comic strip on Salon.com, is so entertaining to read because it’s such a horrible trainwreck. The comments by readers are so wonderfully vicious. Either (1) the writer and illustrator of the comic have no clue how to write a comic strip, (2) they think they’re being pretentiously cool with their anti-art but are failing miserably, or (3) it’s all an experiment and they’re trying to pull a fast one on the audience.

I can’t decide which.

Judge for yourself:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

We watched part of Part One of “Tin Man” last night. It’s a very silly attempt to be a darker version of “The Wizard of Oz.”

Instead of “Oz,” the magical land is called the Outer Zone, or “the O.Z.”

Characters keep talking about “The O.Z.” I keep expecting Adam Brody to show up, to the strains of angsty pop songs.

It’s very silly.