THANKSGIVING WEEKEND WARNINGS House rules: leaves blow when unbagged; new paint is less colorful upon application; new couches, like new blinds, are always late; other people's parties supercede your own.

THE EVIL EMPIRE Credit Greg Ritter with discovery of this gruesome tale. No, it's not about Squanto and Miles Standish. It's about Wal-Mart, the retailer that sells more product in three months than the nation's #2 retailer sells in a year. If you ever wondered why Rome burned, this article is for you. Money-quote: "We're shopping ourselves out of jobs."

FOUND. Greg Ritter, one of the co-founders of Caffeine Magazine, has washed ashore in the District of Columbia.

SUGAR RUSH I suddenly love Daily Candy with its daring splashes into the water fountain of arts and culture.

AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES ON IRAQ Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan; his weblog surveys the state of Middle East relations, daily events and their consequences.

POLISH YOUR VINYL Rolling Stone does an admirable job of scoping out their take on the 500 greatest albums (erm, recordings) of all time. With The Clash, Springsteen and Public Enemy among the first 50, you know it can't be all bad.

BUSTING LOOSE FROM MICROSOFT The freeform coders at Mozilla introduce Firebird, the latest, new generation broswer. It works on any platform. It's fast. It's small. It blocks those damned pop-up ads.

BIG MAN BEATTY If you only know Jack Beatty from "Deliverance," get thee to the video store. Or to Broadway to see how a real actor can transform a lackluster cast in the production of "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof."

KILLING ME SOFTLY Dahlia Lithwick calls a spade a spade, denouncing the haggard shrew-set who gasped audibly recently when Massachusetts' courts basically said, "Well, why the hell shouldn't we let gays get married?" What's killing the institution of marriage isn't that gays are changing it, it's the straight couples continue to treat it like a joke.

Do you want to know what's destroying the sanctity of marriage? Phone messages like the ones we'd get at my old divorce firm in Reno, Nev., left on Saturday mornings and picked up on Monday: "Beeep. Hi? My name is Misty and I think I maybe got married last night. Could someone call me back and tell me if I could get an annulment? I'm at Circus Circus? Room—honey what room is this—oh yeah. Room 407. Thank you. Beeep."

It just doesn't get much more sacred than that.

Here's my modest request: If you're going to be a crusader for the sanctity of marriage—if you really believe gay marriage will have some vast corrosive, viral impact on marriage as a whole—here's a brief list of other laws and policies far more dangerous to the institution. Go after these first, then pass your constitutional amendment.

1. Divorce
Somewhere between 43 percent and 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. If you believe gay marriage is single-handedly eroding a sacred and ancient institution, you cannot possibly be pro-divorce. That means any legislation passed in recent decades making divorce more readily available—from no-fault statutes to the decline of adultery prosecutions—should also be subject to bans, popular referendum, and constitutional amendment.

2. Circus Circus
In general, if there is blood in your body and you are over 18, you can get married, so long as you're not in love with your cousin. (Although even that's OK in some states). You can be married to someone you met at the breakfast buffet. Knowing her last name is optional. And you can be married by someone who was McOrdained on the Internet. So before you lobby to ban gay marriage, you might want to work to enact laws limiting the sheer frivolousness of straight marriage. You should be lobbying for an increase in minimum-age requirements, for mandatory counseling pre-marriage, and for statutory waiting periods before marriages (and divorces) can be permitted.

3. Birth Control
The dissenters in the Massachusetts decision are of the opinion that the only purpose of marriage is procreation. They urge that a sound reason for discriminating against gay couples is that there is a legitimate state purpose in ensuring, promoting, and supporting an "optimal social structure for the bearing and raising of children." If you're going to take the position that marriage exists solely to encourage begetting, you need to oppose childlessness by choice, birth control, living together, and marriage for the post-menopausal. In fact, if you're really looking for "optimal" social structures for childrearing, you need to legislate against single parents, poor parents, two-career parents, alcoholic or sick parents, and parents who (like myself) are afraid of the Baby Einstein videos.

4. Misc.
Here's what's really undermining the sacredness of modern marriage: soap operas, wedding planning, longer work days, cuter secretaries, fights over money, reality TV, low-rise pants, mothers-in-law, boredom, Victoria's Secret catalogs, going to bed mad, the billable hour, that stubborn 7 pounds, the Wiggles, Internet chat rooms, and selfishness. In fact we should start amending the Constitution to deal with the Wiggles immediately.

Here's why marriage will likely survive last week's crushing decision out of Massachusetts: Because despite all the horrors of Section 4, above, human beings want and deserve a soul mate; someone to grow old with, someone who thinks our dopey entry in the New Yorker cartoon competition is hilarious, and someone to help carry the shopping bags. Gay couples have asked the state to explain why such privileges should be denied them and have yet to receive an answer that is credible.

YOUR ONLINE OBIT From head-buttin' Wesley Willis to Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, all of your favorites are remembered here.

WAKE UP CALL The sound of boulder-sized prescription pills dropping on the heads of unsuspecting Democrats might be enough to coalesce the unfocused bunch. Or it could send them bolting in all directions like a herd of skittish colts. The Dems have a choice to make, or the Republicans will continue to set the agenda (and make the choice for the Dems) -- unify or die. There's a reason Newt Gingrich came out of the wilderness during the early Clinton years with his TV Guide insert outlining an ambitious conservative policy set: energize the base. It's time for the Democrats to work the same magic, or to continue losing credibility, power and influence.

In politics, there's nothing like having the other side steamroll your party -- using your own steamroller -- to jangle the emotions.


Democrats have owned the Medicare issue for nearly 40 years. But this week, the Republicans climbed into the driver's seat and mashed the gas pedal. In closed-door sessions that excluded nearly all Democrats, through rule-bending roll calls, dishing out goodies to friends and twisting arms of the recalcitrant, the Republicans passed $400 billion worth of changes. Democrats spent the day picking carpet fibers out of their hairdos and sorting out their reactions.

Should they be outraged or envious in the face of GOP audacity and discipline? Disheartened or energized by President Bush's latest victory? This inability to choose a voice, to stick to one path, was a worrisome sign for many Democrats -- especially after such a disorienting year for the party. They have been ousted from power at every level from statehouses to governor's mansions to Congress to the White House; divided over Bush's decision to invade Iraq; unable to coalesce early behind a presidential challenger.

IF THE KIDS ARE UNITED As the Democrats edge closer to coming apart at the seams, Ruy Teixeira wonders if a case can be made that more unites them than divides them.

SALAM TV Salam Pax has made the move from a text-based weblog -- now being maintained with angry energy by his friend Raed -- to a video journal, being shown on BBC2's Newsnight. He tells about the strange reactions an Arab with a camera receives in Iraq.

SEASON'S GREETINGS Someone should thank the owner of this website for having enough patience and devotion to scan and post the entire collection of Tim Burton stories that comprise, "The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy." It ranks among a small cluster of "must haves" for the holiday season, possibly edging out David Sedaris' story of his work as an elf in Santa Land.

YOUR OWN, PERSONAL EID Riverbend astounds with her command of English nuance in this snapshot of Eid Il Futtir, particularly the generally unspoken mandate that your home must be spotless for the three-day celebration at the end of Ramadhan.

Yes, Umm Maha is the Martha Stewart of Baghdad- I defy anyone who can show me a neighbor with a cleaner driveway. Her whole house is spotless… rain, shine or cluster bombs. Her kids are always groomed and ironed. Their car, while old and dented, is spotless. She's always the first one to make the Eid kilaycha. She's the first one who is out of the door and washing down the house, the car, the driveway and the TREES after an infamous Iraqi dust storm. She's the neighbor who will know the latest cleaning fads (like using talcum powder to get out oil stains), and the one who'll be chasing the stray cats away from the garbage bins with (what else?) a broom.

LE ANIME The new animated hit, "The Triplets of Belleville," is getting rave reviews, primarily because Sylvan Chomet's peculiar, French view of the world is, well, wonderfully odd. [NYTimes login: buttermilk.com, password: buttermilk]

Although that imagination has evidently been fed by sources as various as Betty Boop, Jacques Tati and European comic books, its products are too strange to be assimilated into any known tradition. "The Triplets," which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, may be the oddest movie of the year, by turns sweet and sinister, insouciant and grotesque, invitingly funny and forbiddingly dark. It may also be one of the best, a tour de force of ink-washed, crosshatched mischief and unlikely sublimity.

The film's two lines of intelligible dialogue have been dubbed into English since it was shown, to rapturous applause, at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Its sensibility, however, remains irreducibly French, and it may confuse audiences used to the cuddly multicultural moralism that defines American feature-length animation.

The overture is a black-and-white spectacle: naughty, exuberant and a little creepy. It evokes Josephine Baker and Fred Astaire (eaten by his own shoes) and introduces the Triplets of the title, a trio of gangly, cloche-wearing scat singers. (They sing the movie's theme song, a swinging piece of nonsense likely to stick in your head for hours after you leave the theater.)

NASTY ISN'T AS NASTY WAS When Prince released "Darling Nikki" 20 years ago, it sent tsumani-sized ripples through the world of music and culture. It gave Tipper Gore an aneurism; it spawned parental warning labels on everything from CDs to soda bottles. Now the Foo Fighters have payed homage to Prince with a chord-by-chord remake that is hitting the airwaves. Only this time, no one is shocked. The world, apparently, is full of women like Nikki, and no one is shocked anymore.

"I guess U could say she was a sex fiend," the song goes. "I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine."

The song was a soulful limerick from the "Purple Rain" days of Prince, whose voraciously fey Jheri-Curl Lothario act worked its spell even on the most suburban set. It was, at the time, the dirtiest song we knew.

And the world might have been a slightly different place if an 11-year-old Karenna Gore could have prevented her mother from listening to her "Purple Rain" cassette: "Darling Nikki" has the near-mythological honor in pop trivia of being the song that compelled Tipper Gore to co-found the Parents Music Resource Center with other congressional wives, who in 1985 successfully pressured big record companies to create a warning-label system for pop records.

Two slutty decades later, "Darling Nikki" is back, having been faithfully remade by the multi-platinum modern rock band the Foo Fighters...

... Same Nikki, same lobby, same magazine, same tawdry notions . . . only now a different world, a world so sleazy that Nikki sounds comparatively quaint, in retrospect...

... Last heard from, Prince was going door-to-door, witnessing for Jehovah. Karenna Gore Schiff is 30, married and has two kids of her own. Tipper seems, in hindsight, less like the evil queen of censorship and more like some kind of prophetic genius, even if parents are still helpless to ward off all that Nikki wrought. Porn became a legitimate industry and cultural dialogue, and the people who star in it find legitimacy and social entree into VIP rooms. Stripteases and lapdances are becoming part of the national folklore. Sex toys might as well be sold at Sears. (No, wait -- Target.)

Kids today, when they're not allegedly pirating media online, send instant-message come-ons to one another in the same shorthand that Prince wrote lyrics. (U C it in their homework.) Open-mouth kissing between girls in the school cafeteria is a Nikki kind of phenomenon. Britney Spears is nothing but a Nikki. The Hilton sisters are Nikkis. Pink is a Nikki.

Nikki was originally supposed to suggest something coarse, scurrilous, vulgar. Prince used to surround himself in Nikki-equivalents -- women in lingerie with names like Vanity and Apollonia -- and when he decided they were used up, he moved on to Sheena Easton. (Vanity and Apollonia both have made appearances in VH1 retromentaries about the '80s; both have found Jesus.)