Catching up on the week's recorded shows, I was somewhat irritated by The Daily Show's interview with Mike Huckabee once the topic turned to gay marriage.

First, he stood behind the commonly repeated assertion that marriage is about producing the next generation - but if he truly believed this, he wouldn't just oppose gay marriage; he'd want to forbid marriage of people who are sterile or barren, past childbearing years, or who have had permanent birth control procedures. Or who simply don't intend to ever have children; which is why I personally find the "marriage is for procreation" argument particularly despicable: because when the anti-gay-marriage crowd plays that card, what they're saying is that Karen and I don't deserve to be married either.

But I'm used to that one. What I found particularly reprehensible about Huckabee's argument is his repeated complaint that gays were "trying to redefine marriage".

Pardon me, but so what? There's no American equivalent of the Académie française, staunchly protecting the language from any alteration from within or without. Words change in meaning all the time and our civilization has not yet crumbled as a result.

Marriage has been redefined many times before. As Jon Stewart pointed out, in the Old Testament, polygamy was not uncommon, even amongst those purportedly favored by God (David, Solomon, et alia). Marriages have been (and in some places, still are) familial arrangements imposed upon the participants without regard to whether they love (or have even met) one another. And in some places (e.g. Nazi Germany, South Africa, and close to 75% of the United States of America) marriage was redefined to only be valid between two people of the same race. Had marriage not been re-redefined in the United States to permit miscegenation, our next President might never have been born.

But more importantly, that particular argument reveals the truly monstrous nature of those who espouse it. How utterly without empathy - how devoid of anything resembling a conscience - how evil must one be in order to proclaim that the definition of a word is of greater importance than the civil rights of other human beings?

Not only did the rackett arrive, but I found the lost 16GB SD card that mysteriously vanished from my Eee PC (naturally, it turned up after I'd already purchased a replacement - a sure way to find a missing object).

And we prevailed in court against the Worst Landlord Ever, so we're now free to move into a better place (with a new landlord who seems a lot more inclined to protect his investment in his property by fixing problems with it... and who knows that we're willing to file lawsuits against landlords who refuse to do so).

Why Don't You Do Right?, the torch song closely associated with Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman (but probably more familiar to my generation as sung by Jessica Rabbit), was originally released by the Harlem Hamfats, with vastly different lyrics, as The Weed Smoker's Dream.

So on one of my weekly phone calls today, the manager of the Florida project informed me that one of his support techs was no longer with the company, as he was arrested Sunday for murdering his father.¹

I was dumbfounded. Bob was a nice guy; quiet,² but a good sense of humor. Of the Florida techs, he wasn't one of the ones I would have pegged as capable of doing something like that. Though he had been in the Navy, so I suppose he was trained to be able to.³ And he kept his van absolutely ship-shape, everything tied down and squared off. One sees a van like that, and one expects the owner's mind to be similarly tidy and well-ordered.

I have an uneasy feeling that within a year there's going to be a made-for-TV movie about him... or at least an episode of Law and Order.

1. Not that the company has an explicit policy against their employees murdering people; since he didn't show up to work for three consecutive days, the company considered him to have abandoned his job, and terminated his employment.

2. Of course.

3. Kill in a generalized sense, of course. I would not wish to be misinterpreted as suggesting that the Navy trains its recruits in the art of patricide.

Funny how something can be shipped here in four days from Saudi Arabia, but it takes five days to get here from Kentucky, which actually shares a border with Indiana - and it costs more to ship from Kentucky, too.

Correction: It took less than 48 hours for the package to get here from Saudi Arabia. The package from Kentucky? I can't even see where it is, because entering the tracking number into the USPS Web site takes me to an "Internal Server Error" page.

After years of being subjected to Garfield in the comics pages, Get Fuzzy was a welcome relief. Compared to Garfield, it was fresh and funny, consisting of more than just a guy, his cat and a former roommate's dog sitting around the house making the same six endlessly recycled inoffensive jokes.

But of late, Get Fuzzy has just been a guy, his cat and his dog sitting around the house making the same three inoffensive jokes, and a plethora of really bad puns.

As with Garfield, the original cast of supporting human characters has dwindled away to nothing; Rob's friends and family haven't made an appearance in a long time. As with Garfield, the trips out of the house slowed to a crawl, then stopped altogether. And as I found myself doing with Garfield, I'm now reading it out of habit rather than because I find pleasure in it.

The sad thing is, I'm not sure it could be improved by deleting the animals.

To say that Dirk Benedict isn't entirely appreciative of the changes that were made to "his" character when Battlestar Galactica was remade would be an understatement.

And he's none too keen on the rest of the changes in the show, either.

This latest Mutant Enemy show marks a radical stylistic departure for Joss Whedon. If I hadn't seen his name on it, I wouldn't have any idea he was associated with it. Whedon's shows, despite their subject matter, have all shared certain key aspects: genuine chemistry between the characters, lightning-fast dialogue full of unique turns of phrase, and characters likeable enough that you actually care when he inevitably kills one or more of them off.

Dollhouse has none of these.

Furthermore, both episodes they've aired so far have require more than the usual effort to willingly suspend disbelief:

• Really? A wealthy businessman hires a high-priced call girl to negotiate the return of his kidnapped daughter? Really?
• Really? They only verify the background details of their clients after something goes horribly wrong, even after that background had indicated that the call girl might be placed in some danger? Really?

Also, apropos of nothing, Eliza Dushku wearing glasses and an updo looks an awful lot like Jessica Alba did before she decided she had to go blonde in order to get nab roles in major Hollywood movies.