The news from around the world has been horrifying lately, so it is good to get a gleam of good news: the California Supreme Court has overturned the ban on same-sex marriage.

Kate Evans, a professor at my alma mater and one of the directors of the Center of Literary Arts, reprinted on her blog her essay "Spouses for Life," which she wrote after marrying her partner, Annie, when Gavin Newsom allowed San Francisco City Hall to marry same-sex couples in 2004. It's a lovely read.

Hey, look, another east-coaster insulting John Steinbeck's writing!

Whatever, east coast book critics. I dismiss you with all my Californian naivete and sincerity.

I talked with some super-star librarians (Kat Kan, Robin Brenner, and Mike Pawuk) about comics and libraries, and the results are in my Life in Comics column in this week's Publishers Weekly Comics Week. Go straight to the article, here.

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And I read this excellent piece in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: Beyond Rape: A Survivor's Journey.

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I fear I pulled a Marianne Dashwood and am now getting a cold after sitting in the cold at a night game in the Coliseum. I know being cold doesn't cause colds, but I've been fighting it off and now I feel worse. I shook Frank Thomas's hand, though.

There's a new Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now by me and Brian up at Blog@Newsarama.

I was supposed to have sheet draped over my knees in the fourth panel. Brian is such a perv.

Someone asked for it, so here it is: How I make pasta puttanesca. If you click on the picture, you'll find more photos from each stage of preparation.

Ingredients

A whole mess of garlic (Six cloves at the minimum; I usually use eight at least -- Filipino food has given me a high garlic tolerance threshold)
1 largish red bell pepper (A sweet Italian red pepper is even better if you can get it; sometimes I use several baby red and yellow bell peppers that I get at Trader Joe's)
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes (More if you want! But be careful.)
1 28 oz. can of whole stewed tomatoes, with their juice (Since we're not going to put anchovies in it, you might want to get canned tomatoes that have salt added)
Kalamata olives, however many you want. (I usually use five or six -- it's hard to tell because I eat a slice here and there while I cut them.)
1 T capers, found in the store near the pickles, not the seafood. (I've heard that salted capers are preferable to pickled, but I've never been able to find them.)
2-3 T olive oil
Parmesan cheese to taste (Freshly shredded or grated, not the crap in a green can.)
Parsley for garnish, if you want it
Pasta of your choice, about four servings' worth

Smoosh the garlic cloves with the flat side of your knife, then mince them very finely. Remove the seeds and membrane from the pepper and dice it into eighth-inch squares. (Once, when Brian was cooking, he minced the peppers, and I got mad in a really irrational way. He is much more skilled in the kitchen than I am, and he tends to class up recipes that I make homemade-style. It is my goal to cook pasta puttanesca like the Neapolitan prostitutes for whom it was named.)

Heat the olive oil over low heat in a heavy, wide saucepan that has a lid. I use a 12-inch cast iron pan. Add the garlic and red peppers once the oil is ready. Make sure that the oil is not too hot, as it will burn the garlic. Let them saute for a minute or two, and then add the red pepper flakes. Turn down the heat if you need to (it should be quietly sizzling), and let it cook, stirring occasionally, while you prepare the tomatoes.

I don't use pre-diced stewed tomatoes because the juice in the can is too watery. Take the tomatoes out of the juice however you like -- straining in a colander works -- but DO NOT throw out the juice. The tomatoes are going to be pretty squishy, so just go over them a few times with your knife until they're a pulp. Now, do your hands smell from mincing all that garlic? You're gong to take care of that now: Pick up the tomato dice/pulp stuff, and let the seeds and water that will have splooshed out of them when you cut them sift through your fingers as best you can. Then dump the tomato pulp into the juice. If you get your hands covered in enough tomato doing this, it will take care of the garlic smell.

Check on the garlic/bell pepper/pepper flakes. The bell peppers should be tender. If they're not yet, just let it cook longer. Ten or twelve minutes should do it. Just keep an eye on it. Don't let the garlic burn. Once the peppers are ready, stir in the tomatoes and their juice. If you want the sauce to thicken, leave the pan uncovered. Otherwise, cover it and let it simmer while you prepare the olives. Slice the olives however you like 'em, and put them aside for now. The capers, you leave whole.

Now start the water boiling for the pasta. Be sure to salt the water -- drop in about a tablespoon. I use spaghetti lunghi from Trader Joe's, which always cooks nicely al dente and is two feet long, which I find awesome. Puttanesca has a strong flavor, so it tends to match well with whole wheat pasta, too. When the water starts boiling, add the olives and capers to the sauce (not to to the boiling water, duh, but I don't want to confuse you). Cook the pasta according to its instructions, drain it, and then mix it with the sauce. Add the cheese now or when you serve it, doesn't really matter. The cheese isn't really necessary if you don't want it, or if you're vegan (and, yes, fellow vegetarians, I make sure to get Parmesan with non-animal-source rennet), but since we cut the anchovies out of the recipe, it adds that bit of rich saltiness. Garnish with chopped parsley if you want.

Om nom nom nom.

As with all aromatic, spicy sauces, this puttanesca sauce is even better the day after you make it. This recipe is enough for dinner for Brian and I and one lunch for me. It goes well with sausage (I buy Tofurky veggie Italian sausage, but I imagine regular made-of-pig sausage will do just as well if you're into that kind of thing), arugula or spinach (either cooked or as a salad with vinaigrette dressing), and wheat sourdough bread.

I wonder how I managed to make it through the day while smiling some of the time. I feel horrible -- I think my brain has been replaced with lead. If I were to cry (and it hurts almost enough), dull, molten metal would ooze from my tear ducts, and then I'd be sorry for being a weak woman.

The Magic Flute last night, at the San Jose Opera. It was a very nice production, and I'm such a ninny that I tear up at the overture. I'm sure Mozart would say it is the endcap to his life rather than the Requiem, beautiful as that is, and romantic as the story is. I just think about how his life was beginning to turn for the better when he wrote it, how pleased he was with it, and it makes me sad. There's something so melancholy and wistful about the overture.

Papageno and Pamina were played by a friend of my boss and his wife, which explained why they sung the "We Live By Love Alone" duet so convincingly. (It was sung in German -- I just can't be bothered to look up the correct German spelling). Sarastro and the Queen of the Night were a little squeaky, but those are such difficult roles to sing; I can't be too critical.

Luckily I feel like this today and not yesterday.

Here, have an appropriately gothed-up Diana Damrau singing the Queen of the Night's arias.

The shoes are Jessica Simpson. I will not be ashamed.

"...open-work stockings and a pair of charming little shoes..."
-Stendhal, The Red and the Black, Chapter 13

Sorry about the ugly office carpet. I should have taken the photo here at home on my faux-Oriental carpet.

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The two artists, by the way, were Ben Walker and Michael Slack.

A very small convention today, and it gave me the opportunity to observe and interact with humanity. Somehow, though, I have to associate it with my dinner the night of set-up at Sweet Tomatoes, a buffet restaurant. It's typical of buffet restaurants in that it is loud and crowded, with dirty floors and unruly children. They're doing lemon-themed dishes right now, one of which is penne with lemon cream sauce and capers. This dish was labeled "non-vegetarian." I puzzled over this, and an Indian lady in line next to me asked about what exactly made the dish non-vegetarian. The Sweet Tomato employee informed us that it was the capers.

"But capers are vegetarian," I said. "They grow on plants."

"No," the woman said, "vegetarians don't eat them."

"Yes, we do, actuallty," Brian said. (And we do! I make a delicious anchovy-free pasta puttanesca.)

The woman was adamant, and glared at us as if we were exhausting her with our accurate information. "Vegetarians consider them seafood," she said.

At which point Brian and I determined this woman was too stupid to interact with. Meanwhile, another employee said that the pasta sauce was made with chicken broth. (I won't get started on restaurants pulling shit like this when they could easily have a vegetarian dish without anyone knowing the difference.) The capers-are-seafood woman largely ignored this, and I wandered away with my macaroni and cheese.

This morning I went to Peet's and took note of two men in line before us, thinking that they must be on their way to the same place we were. They had an artsy look about them, you know? And, indeed they were. When I talked to them, they said they had thought the same thing about Brian and I. They were very pleasant, and gave me stuff, which I felt bad about. But they're super-talented artists, and I'll give you their names and links to their sites if they have them when I'm not typing in the dark in the middle of the night.

Our booth was next to the Fanime one, so awkward socializing was always within earshot. There's an affect I notice with awkward people -- a nervous over-friendliness, I guess. It makes me uncomfortable and all the more likely to act awkward in my own way. One of the guys at this table played video games (not sure which one, one of those real-world war ones that I think should feel as wrong to other people as they do me) for at least four hours straight. Later, he absolutely needed to unplug his computer from the power strip, which was near my feet, while I was looking at the sketchbook of a very talented artist. There was absolutely no where else for me to stand -- it was really tight on the endcap where our table was. Why he couldn't wait a couple of minutes until I was done so I might move out of his way, I don't know. Maybe his ass was going to light on fire or something. So he fussed around around my legs while I tried my best -- I don't know why -- not to step on him.

Speaking of asses, I had a view of the ass crack of a comic book store employee throughout the day. I kept trying to take a picture, but this ass crack was elusive. Brian finally managed to. My scruples and I are debating whether I should post it. I mean, the guy deserves to be shamed! There were children present! And how can you not feel the breeze whistling down your ass when that much of it is exposed?

Anyway, the artist I was talking to hailed from San Jose, and his sketchbook had several street scenes from downtown that I recognized. The Togo's on Paseo de San Antonio. The light rail stop on Second. Fun characters, interesting people with interesting expressions. And dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were awesome. He had a line that reminds me of Sonny Liew's work. And he was not awkward, so I felt comfortable talking to him.

We broke about even on the show. It is far too difficult to get kids who are manga-obsessed to be interested in any other kind of comic, but at least they've found something they're excited about, I guess. They bought far more toys than books

Though I never requested it, nor do I pay for it, I receive a subscription to Glamour. It's a particularly inane women's fashion and "lifestyle" magazine that gives such beauty tips as how to make it look like you slept on your hair -- only requiring a large-barrel curling iron, two kinds of product and about a half hour. (The results pictured look approximately like what my hair looks like when I've... yes, slept on it.)

In every issue, it seems, there's a "Men Like Sex" (surprise!) feature that I always find completely repellent. If I were a single woman and had nothing but women's magazines to go by, I would want to have nothing to do with men. (I wouldn't want to have anything to do with women, either, because if Glamour is any indication, all they do is waste time making it look like they slept on their hair, wear hideous and expensive clothing, and wonder what men think of them.) This month's "Men Like Sex" feature was called "Men's New Sexual Needs." Because they have new sexual needs besides just fucking these days, you know? Like... fucking like you're a porn star!

To the left is a little inset in which four douchebags tell the readers what they expect, fucking-wise. (Click to see it larger.) I really do think that Glamour included this because they are secretly cooperating with the federal government's abstinence advocacy programs. What woman would ever, ever want to have sex with these men?

OK, Chris, the first guy, is just kind of dork. Har, har, another woman. Because that's what all you guys want, right? Whatever. The second guy, Matt, needs his woman to put out every damned day, so no excuses! He'll compromise and drop three times a day to once, so maybe you'll get only one urinary tract infection a month. Last guy, Jonathan, loves him some "Latin" ladies. Because they're passionate? Who fucking knows. But the third guy, Christopher, he just creeps me the hell out. Is it his country club blond hair flip? His overly groomed eyebrows?

No... it's how he uses the word "perform": "She needs to be able to communicate what she wants so I can perform." Who talks about sex like that? Is he a man or a mutual fund?

Actually, my aversion to the word "perform" in sexual contexts probably dates back to ninth grade, when I read a book called Heaven by that paragon of literary production, V.C. Andrews. You see, Heaven is a pretty girl of, I dunno, thirteen or fourteen, who comes from a large, poor family. Her skeevy dad decides to sell her off to make some money. Heaven has a choice between being bought by some older, conservative looking people (the woman wears simple pearl earrings) and a younger, tacky nouveau riche couple (the woman wears big, dangly earrings). She chooses the nouveau riche couple.

Stay with me here. The woman of this couple gets it into her head that Heaven is filthy, so she scrubs her in a tub of scalding hot water and PineSol, then sticks her in an itchy nightgown and takes Heaven to bed with her. The woman then puts on a tiny negligee and gets into bed, too, whereupon her husband sees them both, and says to his wife that she couldn't possibly expect him to "perform with a child in the bed."

Eeeeyu. Eeeyu. Eeyu. This Christopher dude is that guy from the V.C. Andrews novel. Later on, he and Heaven find themselves alone, and he gets so horny that he works himself into some sort of weird trance-like state and fucks her. This is before Heaven gets away from these crazy people and unwittingly has sex with her uncle.

Oh, V.C. Andrews.

All right, less than fascinating, but I'm going to write about it: My hair.

It was a Louise Brooks bob for some years, then chopped into a stab at an Audrey Hepburn pixie cut (the stylist screwed that up, but it eventually grew into what I wanted), dyed partly or wholly magenta, red, burgundy, purple, blue, chestnut brown and blue black. It was a choppy A-line thing with asymmetrical bangs for a little while. But now it is past my shoulders, a rumpled, heavy-banged, natural-colored mop. Not willing to put in the effort of flat-ironing it straight or encouraging waves, I have been having trouble loving it.

This is because I need models for my personal aesthetic. Not, fashion models as in, like, Gemma Ward -- because the only thing those poor vacant-eyed waifs can inspire in me is body dysmorphic disorder -- but women with iconic looks that I can copy. I need a framework. And, until recently I just wasn't finding one I could relate to for this hair of mine. But voilà! I watched some Godard to get my disappointment with monster movies out of my system (also Bande à part happened to be next in my Netflix queue), and I realized:

Anna Karina.

I have 1960s French New Wave Cinema hair, and the collection of skirts, tights and flats and kitten heels, the penchant for liquid eyeliner and nude lips, not to mention the literary pretentiousness, to match it.

This helps so much.

For the curious -- moi et moi et mes cheveux -- as of about five minutes ago -- sans make-up, under the cut.

And, oh hey, I was looking up the Bible verse about a woman's hair being her glory, and I found this gem of a sermon. Watch out, ladies, you will not be able to resist being convinced by this preacher's commanding rhetoric:

After all, dear woman, if you are a Christian, if you love the Lord Jesus, if you acknowledge Him as the Master of your life, then His command ought to settle the whole question. To please Him, trusting Him to make it worth while, I would start out to be the kind of woman that this Scripture pictures. I would, with a surrendered heart, submit myself to the authority God has placed over me, whether of husband or father. I would have a symbol of my femininity on my head, long hair picturing my submission to the will of God.

Actually, this almost makes me want to have my hair cut. Then I could be what this guy calls "a woman with bobbed hair and a rebellious heart."

I've expressed my amusement with YourDictionary.com's Word of the Day before -- then because of the editors' repeated championing of obscure Latinate words that no one can use without sounding like a total git. But now they're revealing themselves as hilariously out-of-touch "intellectual" sorts in a different way, with today's word of the day.

And what is the word of the day today? I'll tell you:

It's jizz. And they're sticking with the story that it's still perfectly reasonable to use this word in its original usage: "The immediate, characteristic impression given by an animal or plant." And how might you use this word? Well, you might say: "I tell you, she was walking a fox on a leash—it was like seeing a dog with the jizz of a cat."

Yes. You could totally say that.

It's this kind of obliviousness that makes me love YourDictionary.com. Do they even know that jizz has another usage that is much more common? I imagine them like the old Bostonian Brahmins I saw in a documentary about American dialects, debating whether Charles Dickens or Jane Austen is the superior novelist.

Oh, well. I like their etymologies. The etymology of jizz indicates that it is derived from an acronym, which happens almost exclusively in words of relatively recent coinage  The etymology of jizz was rumored to be an acronym, but that rarely is true (if someone tries to tell you that fuck or golf come from acronyms, tell them they're perpetuating stupidity). YourDictionary.com decides to deny any knowledge of jizz's alternate meaning and its origins and instead say something about bird-watching. Read about it at YourDictionary.com's site, here.

I just watched The Mist, a heartwarming horror film about inter-dimensional monsters and the stupidest people in all of the state of Maine.

I don't think anyone makes good horror movies anymore. Every one I've seen lately relies on the characters making boneheaded decisions or being straight up idiots.

I feel like the assholes in movie theaters when I watch these movies. "No, no! The man just exploded into a bunch of baby spiders -- that means it is time to run. No, damn you, why are you shooting the spiders? Run! If you have limited ammo and you can run from the threat, run! Jeez, have you never played a single goddamn Resident Evil game?"