There's a GREAT piece by Michael Rowe posted at The Huffington Post right now in which he likens the relationship of LGBT Americans with the Obama White House as being that of a battered spouse. Pretty insightful stuff.

From the article:

"One would be hard pressed to imagine any other group with substantial economic clout being told to sit tight and wait their turn by the administration of a president they helped to elect---not women, not Jews, not African Americans. No other group would tolerate it.

There is a great deal that can be done now, and if there is to be a culture war, it's an inevitable one. The quest for "bipartisanship" should not be an excuse for sacrificing political integrity, or honoring a long-overdue commitment to a long-loyal and significant voting bloc. Ignoring the problem isn't going to make it go away, nor is pointing out the obvious fact that the Republicans are no friend of the LGBT community, or that a McCain-Palin administration would have been an express train to oblivion for gay rights. LGBT Americans voted for Obama to be their president too, not just the lesser of two evils."

Amen to that.

There's a new attraction on the Skydeck of Chicago's famed Sears Tower...glass balconies that literally let you step out over the city from 103 floors up.

This is pretty ingenious if you ask me. I've visited the Skydeck close to a half-dozen times (usually with first-time visitors to the Windy City), and these babies have me ready to pay the price of admission again!

Though I do have to admit that I am disappointed to learn that the building's owners still intend to go forward with a plan to rename the historic landmark "Willis Tower" later this year. I was sincerely hoping that was just a joke.

FYI: the names in the following entry have been changed to prevent potential lawsuits.

I was having breakfast at the office with two of my favorite colleagues a couple weeks ago when the subject of nursery school came up. Given that I don't have any kids myself, I pretty much just sat back and listened to the conversation...which they naturally carried on in lightening-fast Swedish.

At one point Anna was describing an incident on the playground several years ago in which a child at her sons' school had a rather embarrassing "accident" from which her parents had yet to recover. Initially I thought I had missed a pertinent detail of the story due to the rapid-fire Swedish, but it turned out Anna was being purposefully coy about the precise nature of the "accident" because, well, we were having breakfast after all.

So I waited until both she and Eliza had finished eating before asking, in English, for a clarification.

"Are you saying that the kid crapped the slide?"

At which point they both burst out laughing because evidently the phrase "crapped the slide" is a lot funnier than its Swedish equivalent. My colleagues liked it so much that we decided to start a campaign to make it part of the company lexicon as an idiom for an incident so mortifyingly embarrassing that you and your family end up being scarred for life.

We were still laughing about it a couple of days later when Eliza and I were experimenting with a new feature of the content management system we use to run the company websites. It allows you to place a block of text in quote format so that it stands out in a client case or customer reference page.

Using a draft of a client case page that had not yet been published on the site, Eliza added the following text:

"Oh Lord...I've really crapped the slide. Sure wish there was a Global Company XYZ service technician on hand to give me advise."

-- Shazzer MyRealLastName 

The new quote box rendered just as we expected it to and we had a nice chuckle over how "official" it looked on the dummy page, in spite of the typo...which we didn't bother to correct. It was just a draft, after all.

Fast-forward to yesterday afternoon when I was working on a different client case page. After hitting the "publish" button, I noticed a link where there shouldn't have been one. That's right...the draft page with the "crapped the slide" quote attributed to me had been LIVE on our corporate website for about 3 weeks.

Worse yet, neither Eliza nor I could not get the content management system to take it offline no matter what we tried! Panicked (and yet still laughing uncontrollably) we ended up having to delete the page entirely just to get it to go away.

Later I sent the following text message to my co-colleague in crime:

"You do realize that accidently publishing the "crapped the slide" quote on the corporate website is a perfect example of actually CRAPPING THE SLIDE?"

This past weekend marked the third one in a row in which we entertained out-of-town guests...not a record by any means, but kind of stressful none-the-less.

This is because Dr. Darling, a classic INTJ, is physically exhausted by any kind of prolonged social interaction and I am driven crazy by my in-laws' unwillingness to let us act as actual hosts. And by that I mean the simple things like having a vote as to whether or not we should attempt to have a cook-out in a windstorm. At the beach. Hauling everything (including the grill) by bike so that they can have wine or beer w/dinner. I wish I was kidding.

Now I need to be clear that I'm talking about my father-in-law and his wife, not my mother-in-law...who is a pretty easy-going house-guest by comparison. She was down from Halmstad the previous weekend for Midsommar and we had a very nice visit. My father-in-law, and more specifically his wife, are much higher maintenance in spite of the fact that they always bring their own sheets and towels.

First off, they always invite themselves, though I can't really blame them for that because the Swede -- whose responsibility I believe it is to issue such invitations -- never seems to get around to it.  So I don't really mind that part, especially since they tend to give us plenty of notice. But once they arrive, they totally run their own agenda...which was even more aggravating than usual on Friday night since it was Dr. Darling's birthday.

This visit, besides the ill-timed BBQ at the beach (which did not happen courtesy of the weather, thank you Mother Nature), their plans included watching the EUFA Under 21 soccer match between Sweden and the UK (which we had to record so as not to interfere w/dinner), getting a tutorial with how to organize pictures on their laptop, and having us explain of all the accessories that came with their latest mobile phone, including installation of the accompanying software on the aforementioned computer. Oh, and did I mention it's a WinDoze machine equipped with Vista? I wish I was kidding.

Now why they rely on us for this kind of technical assistance is kind of a mystery considering that my step-mother-in-law has two highly tech-savvy sons of her own, and Dr. Darling's brother, a mobile network engineer, lives less than a half-hour away from them. The only thing we can figure is that none of those guys have the patience to explain things to them in terms they understand. Score one for the "alternative lifestyle" branch of the family that includes the foreigner.

They left about 3 p.m. on Saturday, which means they accomplished a hell of a lot in less than 24 hours. We, on the other hand, were left exhausted and kind of dazed, actually. On the plus side, they did give us our birthday presents (mine's this coming Saturday) in the form of cash, but it was tempting not to see it as "payment for services rendered."

Many thanks to New York Times columnist Frank Rich for this Op-Ed piece commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village, New York.  He offers a couple of plausible scenarios for why the Obama Administration has been so completely flat-footed regarding “the gays” since the inauguration.

He also rightly notes that even with the progress being made in places around the U.S. (besides Washington D.C.), full civil rights are still far from being available to gay citizens.

From the article:

It’s a press cliché that “gay supporters” are disappointed with Obama, but we should all be. Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws.

I hope the President read it. In fact, I think I’m going to e-mail it to the White House.

My Swedish “hometown” of Malmö has been in the country’s news a lot lately for reasons that my American readership will likely find somewhat entertaining.

The first instance is a story about a cost-saving measure implemented at the city’s main police station in which several of the building’s restrooms were closed for the summer.

Nothing wrong with the plan in principle considering that much of the administrative staff will be on vacation during some portion of July and August. No, the problem was with the execution of it. Turns out the folks in charge of building maintenance didn’t bother to inform the affected departments before they locked them out of the toilets.

Don’t get me wrong…in these tough economic times, I truly do appreciate any government agency’s efforts to save tax money. But I’m not sure that forcing police to search a huge building (it serves as headquarters for regional law enforcement operations in this part of the country as well) just to find an open bathroom is making our streets any safer.

Then a few days later, the Malmö sports and recreation committee ruled that women have the right to swim topless in the city’s public pools if they want to, a ruling that can reasonably be considered more of a victory for teenage boys than for the women who filed the discrimination complaint.

And finally, on the VERY SAME DAY, Malmö customs officials were in the news for a seizure of 9,000 Viagra tablets that someone was trying to smuggle into the country through the mail. Talk about bad timing…the topless female bathing policy will probably cut the demand for erectile disfunction medication by at least 50%.

Today marks the summer solstice for 2009, but Swedes have been celebrating since Friday. They have a talent for conveniently re-scheduling their holidays so that a 3-day weekend results. It is also Swedish custom to celebrate the "Eve" of the designated holiday, presumably so that the holiday itself can be used to recover from the previous night's party.

This means that the summer solstic, which actually occured this morning and marks the BEGINNING of summer for the rest the Northern Hemisphere, was celebrated on Friday here in Sweden, where it's considered the "middle of summer". Are you confused yet? Welcome to my world.

Since both Dr. Darling and our Midsommer party host, AKA the Alpha Geek, work in Denmark (where it's not an official holiday), we gathered on Saturday for lovely meal with family and friends. The menu featured four different kinds of herring and two different strawberry-centric desserts...both Swedish Midsommar staples.

Saturday also happened to be the 7th anniversary of my move to Vikingland from the United States. Back in 2002, I thought it was a good idea to have my arrival in Sweden coincide with the country's biggest holiday outside of Christmas, but in hindsight...not so much. The anniversary of the start of my life here gets lost in chaos of party planning and trying to remember the holiday opening hours for the the state-run liquor store. In fact, I'm not even sure Dr. Darling would remember if I didn't happen to point it out.

Good thing I'm not "the romantic type."