Gay marriage cake by Giovanni Dall’Orto

The liberal wing of the Supreme Court, notably including swing Justice Anthony Kennedy, today made same-sex marriage legal in every state of the Union. Millions, gay and straight, rejoiced.

Writing the majority opinion, Justice Kennedy acknowledged that the Constitution says nothing about gay people, let alone gay marriage, because when it was written there was no visible gay population. Same-sex marriage was not an issue. Justice Kennedy explains:

The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and…

Dustin Hoffman is profoundly moved as he remembers and tells what he learned when he played the lead role in “Tootsie.” The video, recently surfaced and now gone viral, reveals how little men understood what it meant to be a woman 30 years ago. Playing a woman was of course challenging to Hoffman as an actor, but the experience also challenged his assumptions and attitudes that he had never questioned.

Playing Dorothy Michaels, Hoffman had an epiphany when he realized that his character wasn’t beautiful, and there was nothing he and his makeup artists could do about it. He would never have given Dorothy, his character, a second look, because he would have judged her exclusively by her looks. Hoffman is moved to tears when he thinks of how many fascinating women he never met or learned from or laughed with, because he was “brainwashed.” Watch the video after the…

This is just a note to myself, to remind me that sketchpads, about the 9 x 12 size, are essential to the process of writing a paper.

Also, a pack of markers/highlighters in as many colors as possible.

And butcher paper… which makes me deeply glad that Pratt is an art and design school as well as a library school. I can usually get a couple of big sheets of giant paper, without having to figure out where to buy a roll of my own, how to get it home, and where to put it in my wee apartment.

I definitely do not think of myself as An Art Person. I don’t draw. I barely even doodle. I resist playing Pictionary. Nor do I think of myself as A Visual Person. I have trouble with sizes, juxtapositions, assembling furniture, and visualizing anything in detail.

But, for a paper- give me…