Decent weather today, though: nothing too hot, the fan blowing a cool breeze over Ms. Emmy who lies somewhat precariously, what with me typing and all, on my lap. Lunch Sunday with MSM, so I have something to look forward to for the weekend.

The photographs I took Sunday of the Dykes on Bikes segment of the Gay Pride Parade seem OK. I'm getting so I notice women who are missing from the photographs I've taken of past parades. More than a few of them can get an old man's heart a going pitty-pat-pitty-pat. Silly old man. Some good photographs, though. Could have been more, but there could always be more: more photographs, more sake, more common sense.

Speaking of common sense I notice the Senate has been debating an amendment to the Constitution to allow the states to make burning the flag a crime. Some have suggested they're burning the Bill of Rights by placing the flag off limits: flag burnings, you understand, which are currently raging across the land, something like three of them reported over the last five years, being a danger to the nation. Some suggest it's just the party in power re-invigorating their base prior to an upcoming election.

One of my senators, Diane Feinstein, a Democrat, has voted for this thing which somehow doesn't surprise me as she demonstrated what I thought was a less than firm grasp on what freedom of expression was about when she was the mayor of San Francisco and pushed a measure to round up all of the adult bookstores in the city and force them to relocate to a small area near where I lived on Potrero Hill. Planting them at the base of Nob Hill or of Telegraph Hill would have provided a glimmer of irony, a glimmer of intelligence, but Potrero Hill was close to being a ghetto back then and the mayor knew ghettos don't vote in mayoral elections.

You were offended she wanted to put them in your neighborhood?

I was offended she wanted to round up a bunch of bookstores and hide them away under the 280 freeway. “Adult” bookstores, sure, but bookstores none the less. They always use an inflammatory target when they're talking about chopping pieces off the Bill of Rights. No use in campaigning against bookstores that specialize in great works of fiction. There's that unique in the entire world first Article in the Bill of Rights that our Founding Fathers were so excited about that puts bookstores under its protection, the framers understanding there would always be pressure to take it away using whatever scurrilous methods they could devise if we didn't pay attention. Or does this give me away, a paid up ACLU prole out here in the provinces?

They know that.

At least with a journal you can't hear the laughter.