Warp factor haaaaay!

George Takei, Mr. Sulu of "Star Trek" fame, has revealed that he is gay.

What, was he waiting for Sheryl Swoopes?

High and outside

Nice work, White Sox. It's fun to live in Chicago when teams are winning championships. I should know; the NBA's Bulls won their six titles during my tenure in the Windy City.

Not counting a summer I spent in the South Loop, I lived on the South Side all ten years of my stay in Chicago, and part of me fancied myself a fan of the White Sox, one of the great South Side institutions. The Cubs always seemed so, well, bourgeois. So I occasionally hopped on the Dan Ryan El for nine innings at Comiskey Park, which is now named for a wireless telephone company.

But to tell you the truth, I don't really care about baseball.

Slow news day

So this is what it has come to: an interview with the guy who's going to interview Paul McCartney.

My eye lit on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer headline, "DJ is primed for Paul McCartney," because I thought it referred to one of the most intriguing aspects of the McCartney show: the opener, a DJ who spun remixes of McCartney tunes. Good stuff. Among other magic tricks, the DJ transformed the bouncy disco sheen of "Coming Up" into something altogether dark and ominous.

What's left when interviewers interview interviewers?

Can keyboards really talk?

Last night Ereck and I went to a performance by Jeffrey Siegel, he of Keyboard Conversations fame, and I wrote about the experience on Isthmus' thedailypage.com site. Read my observations here.

Fun with optics

I enjoyed the Paul McCartney concert all the more because of these little babies. Yes, I bought my first binoculars for the occasion, and Pentax's model UCF-X II was perfect: compact, inexpensive and well suited to the task of inspecting an aging rock star from the second balcony.

And because the Mars opposition is upon us (did you mark your calendar?), my new purchase is going to get more good use right away. Watch the skies!

Paul is live

It was just as I predicted: last night's Paul McCartney show in Milwaukee made me cry. However, the biggest waterworks were triggered not by "Yesterday," which was my hunch, but by "Blackbird." As Charles rightly observed after the show, every doofus with an acoustic guitar learns that song (include this doofus), but it was enormously moving to hear it performed by its composer.

Still, I could not have predicted the second-most moving moment for yours truly: the triumphant strumming of an acoustic guitar (played by sideman Brian Ray) that begins the bright, third mini-movement of "Band on the Run." It was a deliriously sunny moment in an evening full of them.