Given the name of this blog, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out this miniseries, which starts on the Sci Fi channel on Sunday night.

And no, it’s not a miniseries about me. It’s about the other Tin Man. I think.

We’re TiVoing it.

Two influential New York newspapers have front-page stories this morning about how Rudy Giuliani lies. One of them is a tabloid, so the story is splashed across the cover and will influence the masses:

Arguably more important, the New York Times has this on its front page: Citing Statistics, Giuliani Misses Time and Again. The article points to several statements Giuliani has made and says, “All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong.”

Does this mean a meme is finally taking root that it’s a Republican candidate who exaggerates?

It’s seeming less and less likely to me that Giuliani will be the Republican nominee (but what the hell do I know – I predicted a couple of months ago on Mike’s blog that it would be Fred Thompson). So these stories might be coming just a bit too early.

Still, after Gore and Kerry got raked over the coals for alleged lying and exaggerations, it’s nice to see the shoe on the other foot for once.

(Ooh, two metaphors in one sentence. Always wear shoes when walking over coals, I guess.)

How and when did illegal immigration became such a hot topic in this country? I don’t remember anyone even talking about this in the presidential election four years ago. There have long been parts of the nation where it was a big issue, but somehow in the past two years it became this pressing national controversy that masses of people are worried about.

Wikipedia, as usual, provides some enlightenment here.

I guess it doesn’t help that there’s a wide-open Republican primary full of candidates trying to pander to extremists on this issue — people who seem to care less about illegal immigration and more about being overrun by dark-skinned people in general.

As for me, I can’t get myself to worry much about it. I chalk it up to having spent my high school years overseas. Living in Japan for three years permanently changed my perspective on America’s relationship to the rest of the world. I don’t think this country is better than any other country. It’s better in some ways, worse in others. (Many others, yes, but just as we’re not angels, we’re not Satan either.)

More important than our individual national identities are our identities as citizens of the world. Our common humanity is more important than any national allegiance.

There are swaths of ordinary people on this planet who couldn’t care less about the United States. They spend days on end living their lives, going to work and eating and entertaining themselves, hardly thinking about Americans or the United States at all. Fancy that!

And I don’t think there’s a fixed American identity, at least not one that’s going to change just because we let lots of dark-skinned people come over the border. And Dick Cheney and David Addington have fucked up our constitutional system of government more than hordes of immigrants ever could.

It’s not that I don’t think people should come legally instead of illegally. It’s that I just can’t seem to get myself worried about it.

Xenophobia isn’t unique to Americans, by the way, or even to caucasians. For instance, Japan has long dealt with its own ethnic issues.

Someday every human being is going to be the color of coffee ice cream, and then we’ll find other stuff to fight about.

Flipping through the channels, I see that the Republicans are having a debate on CNN. It’s being moderated by Anderson Cooper.

The idea of a gay man moderating a Republican presidential primary is just too bizarre for words. I wonder if the candidates know? I wonder if the viewers know?

My chorus, the Empire City Men’s Chorus (formerly the Gay Gotham Chorus), is performing its annual holiday concert next Friday night, December 7 (Pearl Harbor Day!). We’ll be performing at:

We’ll be joined for one number by Barbara Walsh, who recently performed as Joanne (“Here’s to the ladies who lunch”) in John Doyle’s revival of “Company” on Broadway.

We’ll also be joined by the brass-playing members of the Lesbian & Gay Big Apple Corps, a.k.a. “the gay band.”

Oh my god — we rehearsed for the first time last night with the brass, and this one brass player was SO hot. He had glasses and a light-brown beard and wore a tight black t-shirt over his muscular arms. He was playing what looked like a tuba that stands on the ground — I’m not sure what it was. But several of us were talking about him after rehearsal.

And don’t make a joke about “asking to see his instrument” — too easy.

So come see us! Our holiday concert is typically our most highly-attended concert of the year.

And you can see a hot tuba-like-instrument player.

“Lord of the Rings” movie fans, note: The Return of the King: The Complete Recordings was released last week. Four CDs of music, plus an audio DVD containing the same music in surround sound. This completes the Complete Recordings, a total of 10 CDs containing the complete score of all three films. Isn’t that insane?

I’ve got my copy, though I haven’t had a chance to listen to much of it yet (nor have I yet listened to even half of “The Two Towers”).

Here’s a review.

Also, the writer of the liner notes for all the complete recordings, Doug Adams (not this one, of course) is writing a book, The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films, due out next fall. And the book has a blog.

Here’s yet another article about Giuliani and Clinton running against each other in 2000, this one from the front page of today’s NY Times.

Here’s a great recap of Rudy vs. Hillary in 2000.

(See previously.)

In honor of Thanksgiving:

God, I miss that show.

This past weekend was a bit of an emotional roller coaster.

On Friday evening, I went to the memorial service for my fellow chorus member Devin, who died a few weeks ago of lymphoma at age 33.

The service was at the church where our chorus rehearses every week (although it wasn’t a religious service). There must have been at least 200 people there, and there were several terrific, heartbreaking eulogies. Our chorus sang two pieces, and let me tell you, it’s hard to keep it together when tears are pouring from your conductor’s eyes while he waves his arms. I’d never seen him cry before. It was… hard.

In a completely different vein, on Saturday night I teared up again but this was for a good occasion: I went to a same-sex wedding for the first time. This was for a friend of mine whom I met about seven years ago. He and his partner have been together since the summer of 2001 (when they were in their mid-20s), and they finally decided to tie the knot. It wasn’t a legal ceremony — they will do that later in Canada — but they wanted the big celebration to be in New York, since they live here. And they did sign some legal papers during the ceremony, in the presence of a lawyer.

The event was at the Prospect Park Picnic House in Park Slope. The program contained silhouette drawings of the two grooms. The grooms processed in to Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors.” Someone sang an operatic rendition of “Simple Little Things” from 110 in the Shade. There were delicious hors d’oeuvres, and the main meal was served buffet style – a “comfort station” containing macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, salad, and something else that I can’t remember – and all that, too, was delicious.

The event was so wonderful and tasteful and I think my friend has a second career as a wedding planner if he wants it.

On Sunday afternoon we had a respite from all the emotion. We went to see an Off-Broadway play: Things We Want, starring Peter Dinklage, Paul Dano (the depressed mute teenager from “Little Miss Sunshine”), Josh Hamilton, and Zoe Kazan. We were in the front row of this small theater, pressed right up against the front of the stage, and we were therefore THISCLOSE to Josh Hamilton in his underwear. And Peter Dinklage, not in his underwear. And Paul Dano, who had his shirt off at one point and is completely skinny with not an OUNCE of body fat on him. We were close enough to see that his belly button is an outie, which always skeeves me out a bit (as do uncircumcised dicks, but that’s beside the point).

The play was okay – it was well acted, with great dialogue, but I didn’t buy the second act at all.

So that was my weekend.

This week I’m going to make two quiches to bring to my brother and his wife’s apartment for Thanksgiving. I’ve never baked a quiche before.

If real men don’t eat quiche, what does that say about someone who bakes quiche?

Anyway… wish me luck.

R.I.P., Mr. Whipple.

In his honor, here’s a curious Charmin commercial I just found on YouTube.

Republican Senator John Ensign: “The American people, I think, would rather have General Petraeus running the war than members of Congress.”

Fuck you, senator. In this country, civilians control the military, not the other way around.

Fuck. You.

You like football players? You like opera singers? Here’s a Harvard fullback who sings opera.

Be sure to check out the accompanying video clip.

Bob Herbert is underappreciated.

If you’re not a New York Times junkie like me, you probably don’t know who he is — he’s one of the paper’s seven or eight op-ed columnists. Others — Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Paul Krugman — they’ve got buzz. Bob Herbert? More of a buzzkill. He writes largely about the (primarily black) disenfranchised among us — those in the inner cities, those who are poor, those without health insurance.

T.A. Franks in the Washington Monthly asks: Why is Bob Herbert boring?

His underlying problem turns out to be simple: he doesn’t write with his audience in mind…. If he’d overcome his indifference to “chatter” and elite opinion and instead try to attract and coopt it—in other words, think about who his audience is and what he wants it to do—he could be one of the most powerful liberal voices in the country.

Herbert’s writing isn’t usually flashy or sexy or witty, but he almost always makes great points. It’s too bad more people don’t read him.

A member of our chorus passed away a few weeks ago. He was 33 years old. He died of cancer.

He was sick for a year and a half. During that time, he got sick and went to the hospital, got better and left the hospital, and then got sick and went to the hospital again. During that entire time, I never visited him in the hospital. Not once. I deeply regret this. I kept intending to visit, but I “never got around to it.” I didn’t even know when he was nearing the end. During the announcements in the middle of rehearsal a few weeks ago, our conductor told us that Devin had passed away the night before. I had to leave the room as unobtrusively as possible because my eyes were welling up and they wouldn’t stop.

The last time I saw Devin was at a friend’s birthday party last year. It was at the end of October, so it was the same night as numerous Halloween parties, and he showed up in costume. He was dressed as a fairy “godfather” – he wore a light-blue fairy outfit, complete with wings, with black boots on his feet, a bowler hat on his head, and an unlit cigar in his mouth.

Our chorus is singing at a memorial service for him on Friday. We rehearsed the pieces last night, and a few former members joined us, as they will on Friday. It was nice to see them.

Afterwards, several of us went to the bar across the street, as some of the guys always do after rehearsal. It was my first time at the bar this fall – I just felt a need to hang out with some of my fellow singers. It was pretty somber. Not completely, but more somber than usual, and lots of talk of cancer and dying young.

I didn’t know Devin as well as some of the other guys in the group did. I didn’t really see him outside of rehearsal. Still, I didn’t sleep well last night. I kept drifting in and out of dreams about Devin and some of the other chorus members. I woke up several times.

Sometimes it’s not that death is sad, so much as that it’s profound. It’s hard for the human mind to contemplate an absence. An absence is, by nature, intangible. How do you register that? Especially when the presence who’s now absent was so young?

It’s not easy.