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Everybody’s making marble magnets, so I thought I would too. I headed into the city today with a simple list: silicon glue, magnets, and glass marbles. Items #1 and #2 were fairly easy to come by, but #3 was the killer. THERE ARE NO CLEAR FLAT GLASS MARBLES IN ALL OF SYDNEY. I went to every arts, craft, and homewares store in the CBD. I’m not exaggerating; I went to at least 12 stores and it took me almost three hours. Lincraft (our version of Micheal’s) had them, but only as part of these silly Christmas gift packs with a big-ass vase and a candle. Grace Brothers had spherical pink ones. Nobody had the clear flat ones. Everyone I asked was convinced that somebody else was selling them. Nobody sells them! I get so lulled into thinking that I can get everything I could get in America here – I mean, we’ve got Taco Bell and Borders! But then every now and then I enter the Twilight Zone and discover some item that is just unknown in Australia. (Remind me to tell you about my spaghetti squash misadventures sometime.) So now I’m tapped. I’ve got magnets and glue, but no damn marbles. Where else can I look? There’s no worse feeling than heading out all ready to buy something and then being DENIED.

Foxtrot rocks. I laughed my ass off when I saw today’s Ellen Feiss parody.

Fun Flash Game O’ The Day: Toboggan Jump 2001. I made it up to the bonus round but I kept setting my team on fire. How well do you do?

Hey Hoosiers! Fort Wayne got mentioned on Slashdot! They’re reporting on how DeBrand’s chocolate company is fighting back against an unscrupulous e-commerce patent lawsuit. They even linked to the News-Sentinel‘s story. My sister writes the obituaries for them! I’m two degrees from the Slashdot front page! (Hey, it’s closer than I ever got before.)

Happy birthday to my brother Anthony, who turns 20 today! I hope those Boilermakers show you a good time.

Does anyone else think Mariah Carey sounds legitimately insane? (Scroll down.) Seriously, who calls people “lambs”? Crazy people, that’s who.

The Herald is running a good article about fan fiction. It starts with a sample of Harry-Draco slash, so I expected the tone to be pretty hysterical and anti. Instead the author explains the origins of the whole practice and of slash in particular. (It was all about Kirk and Spock in the beginning, baby.) She does a great job of explaining the various theories about why people write fanfic, even relating it to folk traditions that go back as far as The Iliad. The only complaint I have relates to a few minor misspellings. But come on, anybody who’s done their research on this stuff should know it’s Sunnydale and Dagobah! 🙂

As part of the ongoing Gay Games activities, the Sydney Convention Centre is displaying the International AIDS Memorial Quilt this week. I went to see it today. Where I come from, quilting commemorates happy events: births, marriages, birthdays. I was curious to see how it could be used to memorialize a death. I’ve never known anyone with AIDS (though one of my best friends in college went through a scare and had to get tested), so I didn’t expect it to have that much impact on me. Within five minutes I was choking back tears though. It’s impossible not to. It’s not that the quilts are sad; in fact, most of them are cheerful celebrations of people’s lives. It’s just the sheer number of them, and knowing that each panel (and there had to have been over 1000 that I saw) was put together by friends, families, and lovers trying to come to grips with a life cut short. As I walked along, I marveled at how many of the tributes were for white thirtysomething men. I’ve heard gay men lament that an entire generation has been lost, but I didn’t really understand what that meant. And yet they didn’t all fit the stereotype – there were women and old people and young people and even little kids. It was just heartbreaking stuff.

I liked seeing the different ways people chose to commemorate their loved ones. Some just had a name and a date, while others actually attached items that were important to the person (teddy bears, jean jackets, even a CD). The volunteer assured me that I could take pictures, so I snapped a few of some of the panels that stopped me in my tracks. You just wouldn’t believe the creativity and work and love people have poured into this project. (The last one is for an eight-year-old boy named Troy. The pictures around the border were drawn by his second-grade classmates.)