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I had never made the connection consciously myself until I was writing my post and thought about the impact that the two characters had upon my life. Interesting that others see it, too. His novel Why We Are in Vietnam was a failure with the critics, and probably commercially, but I found it explained a lot much better than any political analysis I've read, and I still think of it when I try to make some sense of current events. And no, my interest in the book was not primarily because it was about horny teenage boys in Texas. Many books have profoundly moved me and made me ponder really significant things in life, but I wouldn't say they changed my life, at least not directly. Two that come to mind are C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

That's so contrary to my experience. Growing up, I had pastors who were rather well educated and who taught us kids to think for ourselves, to question easy answers, and some of the rudiments of critical biblical scholarship. When I was in high school I found a copy of J. B. Phillips' Your God Is Too Small in our church library. I'm not sure there is a "The Book That Changed" My Life, but that one certainly help inoculate me against a lot of the kind of simplistic thought that passes for religion these days. From the school library, there were Flatland and How to Lie with Statistics. I still recall that book when I read much of what passes for political discourse. My senior year a friend loaned me his copy of Cat's Cradle, and that had some impact on me as well as introducing me to Vonnegut. I never read that, but seeing the movie profoundly influenced my basic stance in a lot of things in life. Much later QAF came along at just the right time for me when I faced some challenges that could best be (or only be) met if I brought a good measure of detachment to the task. Brian Kenney became my hero in a way, perhaps ironically. Maybe I'm the only person who sees similarity in the two characters, but it worked for me at that time, so who cares if the similarity is really there. I need to reread that some day to understand. I read it when I was 16 and had the profound sense of reading my own autobiography. I have no idea why. I never had anything in common with Holden Caufield that I can think of. Generations of young men have had a similar reaction. I should reread it, and Franny and Zoey, too. In ninth grade I checked out from the school library a volume of Hemmingway's (complete, I think) short stories. I read it in a relatively short time for such a think volume. It certainly got me interested in literature, and set the stage for all the great books I read in 11th grade. And some time in junior high I got a book on physics from the public library. One chapter was on the physics of music, using organ pipes as examples. That helped develop my interest in music and led to my learning to play the organ and to my continuing interest in acoustics and later as adult to pursuing interests in synthesis and computer music, and thence computers in general. In terms of shaping my academic and professional pursuits, maybe that physics book would qualify as "The Book That Changed" My Life, more than any single other one.

Up on the housetop, reindeer paws. (Or maybe hooves.)

A lady at Netflix suggested to me that I routinely use Windex on their DVDs. I wouldn't use it on my personal DVDs, but if it's OK with them for theirs, that's what I'll do. I have had some unplayable ones suddenly do fine after Windex. I don't know about Blu-Ray. I've not had a problem with any of them so far. Maybe they are newer and have been handled less. Probably most folks who have Blu-Ray players are not the sort to put grubby fingerprints on the discs, also.

The Golden Age of Television was in the '50s: live dramas every night Edward R. Murrow I Love Lucy Sid Caesar Steve Allen pioneers the Tonight Show Ernie Kovacs Groucho Marx, Burns and Allen, Jack Benny Ed Sullivan's show etc. There were a lot of good shows in the '70s, but the best grew out of the ones listed above.

I heard part of a radio show about research on "gay" fruitflies. I asked a biologist friend about it, and he said they had been noted long ago. Geneticists used to give cutesy names to various fruitfly genes as they are discovered. The chromosome active in male fruitflies that engage in courting behavior toward other males was called "fruity". The term has been replaced by something more dignified since then. The same chromosome winds up in mice, too, I think, on the X chromosome.

Some gay men fantasize about being a supporter, I understand.

Without getting too pornographic, can you share what it is that you like that makes you prefer one or the other, or if versatile what appeals to you about each role?

If you identify something as a UFO, does it cease to be a UFO? I can use the power of blue energy, but it's usually to watch movies in high definition.

Right now I drive a Chevy most of the time, but my own car is a silver Oldsmobile Intrigue. I tried cranking it a couple of weeks ago, and I had not driven it enough to keep the battery charged up. I tried putting a battery charger on it (which I'm not sure worked), but then was going out of town, so I didn't try to crank it. I have to turn in the Chevy next week, so I guess I'd best try getting the Olds going again this week. I lost the red cap that goes over the remote positive terminal, so I hope the whole thing doesn't short out or electrocute me.

I use Safari mostly. I'll also check web pages in Firefox. It doesn't support some of the old ways of doing things, so I have to add some CSS for Firefox that I can get away with leaving out for people using other browsers. I don't have access to a computer running IE 8, but I see that its usage to access the main site I maintain has gotten a foothold. I was so relieved when looking at the stats for that site to see that nobody comes there via IE 5. I've quit putting in the hacks you have to use to make it act semi-normal. There's still a fair amount of IE 6 traffic, so I do support it. Dreamweaver now takes care of adding the main hacks you need for that. On average, the neighborhood site logs hits that are around 60% IE, 25 - 30% Safari, and 10% Firefox, and small amounts from the others, including Konqueror. I figure it helps to know what your visitors are using and to try to support them. I'm not used to all of the quirks of Safari 4, but I recognize that it is an improvement. I got used to the progressive bar in the URL line, and still wonder why something is not coming in when I don't see it. 4 is more compatible with Mother's bank's website than was 3, so that's one less use of Firefox for me.

I subscribe to the New Yorker. I don't get a lot of it read each week, but between the cartoons and what I do read, I find it worth the subscription.

This is like some of his other lyrics I've read. When you hear them in a rap, they seem to rhyme, but when you look at them in print, you see no rhymes at all. If there weren't some level of skill there, you'd think he'd slip up and rhyme something occasionally. I haven't studied much of his opus, so I don't know how typical this is, and he may well have raps that rhyme.

One of my favorites is "Billy and Danny," found in the Gay/College section of Nifty. It doesn't exactly fit the genre you were asking for, but they do have major contrasts of that come into play. And the story is good enough that I'll recommend it anyway. I mention it in part because it somehow didn't make the "Best of Nifty" list. You have enough suggestions to keep you busy for a while, I see.

Anybody old enough to remember "The Pi

And that's just a matter of opinion. And the first time, it was the opinion of the majority of the Supreme Court that counted. And while I know I'm treading too near the Soapbox territory, it is relevant to this thread to add that the second time was arguably because of homophobia.

Doesn't there seem to be an underlying assumption that there is something wrong with the bottom? Not that it is the attitude of the majority of posters in the thread or anything, but still seems to be a basis in the discussion. Isn't the 85% - 90% "statistic" meant to be (and taken to be) a put down, for example? To what degree do you think gay subcultures retain the attitude, at least in speech, of the "male" role as superior and the "female" inferior? The "top"/"bottom" terminology reminds me, first of all of the old Cole Porter song, but also of a joke I heard in high school. A girl tells her boyfriend that her mom instructed her not to let a boy get on top of her. So she gets on top. And from greypath's photo, I can see why he is kept busy.

Embalming is just as effective. One reason to be treated for sleep apnea is so that your spouse/partner can get some sleep.

Any time you want to check how it looks, you can just open your file in your browser. For example, on a Mac you could just drag the icon of the .html file to the Safari icon in the dock.

I hope to have a Blu-Ray player by the time it is out on disc.

A lot of good advice here, especially about avoiding using Word to convert. Even after applying all the fixes in Dreamweaver to Word-generated code, you can kill most of a day cleaning up after it manually. Dreamweaver is great if you can afford it. You can create a very basic page by just using a plain text editor and putting <p> at the start of every paragraph and </p> at the end of every paragraph. If something is a title, use <h1> . . . </h1> instead. You can do subheads by using numbers 2 through 6 in place of the 1. Put <body> and </body> at the beginning and end respectively of the whole business. Save it as a text file, and change the extension to .html, as suggested above. You'll wind up with a page that can later be subjected to all sorts of fancy formating without a lot of work clearing out machine-generated junk, with just adding a few lines of code. But I think it will work as is, and it will use the browser's default stylings.

I have a similar experience with fortune cookies. Mother's daily horoscope yesterday said she would come into some money, and her $250 stimulus money from Social Security came in.

I think July 15 is the opening date for Harry Potter. The reviews I've seen of Star Trek look good.

I'm so out of touch that every time I read "Paul Potts" in this thread, I think of the Khemer Rouge.

That's not how it works. The kid concludes "Gee, I must have been molested then at some point." A helpful counselor will teach him the phrase "repressed memory." I recall in the '90s two young women who called me up saying they were suicidal because they were molested as children. The stories sounded dubious to me, especially the one from the girl I had known since her childhood. But more telling was how similar the stories sounded. I wasn't surprised to find that they both went to the same psychologist. Neither committed suicide then, or later as far as I know. We all know how those families without gay children never break up. That may be what the book is really about. Well, of course. The helpful counselor becomes the father figure and fills that need for the kid, so he no longer has to have sex with other guys. That apparently is not a problem, because by the author's reasoning, the boy gets attention from his father and doesn't turn out gay.