No one said this was going to be easy, but we must keep our eyes on the prize. The gay marriage issue, which seemed so close only a month ago, is now caught up in the maelstrom that is Albany politics. "I had hoped today's march would have been a bit of a wedding march. It's not," Christine Quinn, the gay speaker of the New York City Council, told Reuters at Sunday's Gay Pride parade in Manhattan.

Some are saying that in the thick of Albany's meltdown, gay marriage in New York might have to wait. Although 42 U.S. states explicitly prohibit gay marriage, Congressman Barney Frank recently predicted that within five years thirty states will have legal civil ceremonies. Frank included New York in his prediction. Gay couples presently can marry in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa and they can marry in New Hampshire in January and in Vermont starting in September, just in time for lovely foliage season. In the last week pressure has been exerted against the President from his progressive base regarding the languid pace of his campaign promises to the gay community. And Obama's listening.

There is reason to be optimistic on gay marriage, even as the New York State Senate dithers. May's Quinnipiac poll showed that the demographics are on the side of gay marriage activists. Survey participants aged 18-34 backed same-sex marriage by a 61-33 margin. Participants 35-54 support it by a 48-44 margin. It was voters 55 and older that oppose gay marriage, 55-37. What does this tell us? "Young people are for this," Quinnipiac University Polling Director Mickey Carroll said. "If the gay advocacy groups are patient, they're going to win." No one said it was going to be easy.

[Image: Monkfish-Abbey.org]

Sure, we all have a thing or two to say about Bernard Madoff. But Diana Henriques of the New York Times, who knew Madoff for 20 years, reminds us that he was also a "visionary" who understood the financial industry well as anyone in the field.

She believed him as much as his clients. And why not? Madoff recognized how computerization and globalization would affect the trading of stocks in the nascent days of the World Wide Web. He was on the vanguard, and that he could carry out a fraud of this dimension, Henriques says, "stunned" her.

Has Facebook jumped the shark? Most people I know use Facebook dramatically less than they did a year ago. I haven't been on in about a week. But if I am off Twitter for more than a day I suffer acute Tweet withdrawal. Is Facebook going the way of MySpace?

When the Iranian protests exploded it was Twitter's moment. Yes, there were Facebook accounts registering protest. But the 140-character nature of Tweets was the perfect medium for protesters to place busts of information, for watchers to post notes of solidarity and for serious link love. It didn't help that cable news inexplicably took the weekend off, delivering canned programming as Tehran burned. Clearly Twitter is at the zenith of its influence, but does that entail that Facebook is in decline? P.S. You can follow us at @awearnessblog.

People get nose jobs all the time. It's become something of a status symbol: once you've made it, you get to make totally unnecessary and costly changes to your face. Jennifer Aniston got one, as did Katie Holmes, Beyonce, Marilyn Monroe, Halle Berry, and of course, the late Michael Jackson. The list is astonishingly long. What do the celebrities named above have in common? They were all beautiful before their nose jobs. So what gives?

In January, Ezra Roth wrote a piece for this blog about the nose job "epidemic" in Iran, where thousands of women aspire to the Western (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) ideal of beauty. He wrote that Iran leads the world in rhinoplasty, with up to 70,000 operations per year.

Now I don't know about you, but I find Iranian women very beautiful -- and not in the asexual way one might describe an elderly woman as "beautiful." No, I find them sexy and gorgeous. Indeed, desirable. And I find them desirable precisely because they don't look like the women I went to college with in southeastern Minnesota. Likewise, I thought Halle Berry was a lot hotter when she looked less like a white woman.

To wit, on Sunday I called a friend with whom I often have dinner to see if she was free. She said no, because she's recovering from a nose job she got on Friday. She didn't tell anyone she was going to get one, and she asked me to keep it a secret. (I figure as long as I don't name her here, I'm not betraying that trust by writing a post about it.)

About 15 hours after official word that Michael Jackson was dead ricocheted around the world last week, I realized something about what makes the headlines -- and it had nothing to do with Farrah Fawcett or Ed McMahon getting short shrift.

I was in a public space with two large TVs tuned to CNN on Friday, and news of MJ was everywhere. He dominated the front page of the Times and every other paper that morning, too. The subway was full of people reading articles about him. And above ground, he's all anyone seemed to be talking about.

Then it occurred to me: if Michael Jackson hadn't died, we all would have instead been talking and reading about one of the country's front-runners for the Republican ticket in the 2012 presidential election, and how he used tax payers' money to visit his mistress in Argentina. We'd have been talking about how he publicly denounced such behavior in other politicians just a few years ago, revealing himself to be a hypocrite who's arrogant enough to believe he could get away with it.

Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina who went missing over Father's Day weekend, only to turn up a few days later claiming that he'd been hiking the Appalachian Trail, was the hot story on Thursday morning. He had just confessed to his affair, and a case was mounting against him for all the betrayals and hypocrisies listed above. What's more, the GOP had just lost someone it was calling one of its strongest contenders against Barack Obama just three years from now.

But by the next day, he was a sidebar, and the news -- TV, newspapers, blogs, and chit-chat around the water cooler -- was all Michael.