For the next few weeks, I am house-sitting in Seddon. Well, cat-sitting really. But it does put me back in the old neighbourhood. Don't miss the dump of a house I used to live in, but do miss the area.

And the cats seem to be tolerating me. Well, I feed them and let them go about their daily business. And I am often around, so I guess they are used to me.

Wandering around the YouTube universe (you can get lost there for hours), I came across the phenomenon of Sterek. There are lots of fun YouTube Sterek compilations. Such as this, this, this and this. Including my favourite and runner up.

(I should point out that the Stiles-Derek pairing is a complete creation of the fans, it is not part of the show; but knowing how made up it all is adds to the fun. That the two actors play up to it, also here and here, further adds to the fun. This great Teen Wolf primer explains all. Sort of.)

Watching such led me to TeenWolf, which is fluff teen tv, but fun fluff teen tv. It also knows what it is--the third disc of the first series on DVD, has a shirtless montage as one of the special features.

On what can be found on YouTube, how to make a very public marriage proposal with musical accompaniment and reduce your beloved to a sobbing-with-happiness wreck. Very Glee, I felt. Life imitating art, in a good way.

Of course, that one can find musical gay marriage proposals just shows what a varied net-universe it is :)

Saturday night, drove to Sapporo restaurant in Mitcham for a nice dinner with J&D and K&P. Decided to go via Kensington, which was a mistake. Traffic was stuffed from top of Smithfield Rd to Royal Parade. I forgot the rule--don't go through Kensington. Trouble is, enough time goes buy and you forget the horror ...

Oh well, something to cheer up by: a young Daniel Day Lewis being very hot in My Beautiful Laundrette. A young Rupert Graves being willing in Maurice. Brent Corrigan (pornstar) becoming Sean Paul Lockhart (actor) in Judas Kiss. Perhaps kissing dares from the Polish movie Suicide Room. Or with Placebo musical accompaniment. An utterly charming coming out scene from Ugly Betty. And just to finish off, Graham Norton having great fun with a fairly adorable gay couple in the audience.

I will be driving up to Canberra on Friday 21st, staying with catsathome, training to Sydney Sunday evening (23rd), staying with my brother and his wife, driving back with catsathome on Saturday 29th, staying in Canberra and then driving back to Melbourne on Friday 4th January.

Have fun folks! :)

Internet at the new Chez Snake & Lorenzo will be connected sometime Friday. Normal email service will resume then. Until then, please be patient.

This post from Stratfor points out that the US faces much less stressful challenges than the EU or China or Iran. So, the re-elected President Obama faces a world where the US's hand, vis-a-vis other Powers, is strengthening rather than weakening.

I really don't get the angst about President Obama's foreign policy. Yes, he has been less friendly to Israel, but that is likely to be, if anything, helpful in wider Middle East policy. Yes, he should have been stronger in supporting the Green Revolution in Iran, but that is partly a learning curve matter, including trying too hard to be different from the preceding Administration. (And the intervention in Libya strikes me as a backhanded way of saying they got it wrong in Iran.) Hilary Clinton is a popular Secretary of State for good reason. But, really, he has prosecuted the anti-jihadi war vigorously, Libya is now ex-Qaddafi and the al-Assad have too much to worry about back in Syria to play games elsewhere. Even better, Iran has over-committed its dwindling resources in propping the al-Assad regime up which are making sanctions more effective.

There are issue about Executive power overreach, but that is a hardy perennial in war, particularly a struggle as inherently legally murky as the jihadi war. Yes, the US has more debt than it should, but that is because the President listened to Larry Summers (who believed monetary policy had no options) and so did not make timely and helpful appointments to the Fed Board which could have allowed Ben Bernanke to do more quicker. (Leaving Fed positions vacant for months was criminally stupid: not a mistake any Oz Government would make with the RBA Board.) And doing yourself strategic damage through getting monetary policy wrong has been done before -- notably by the UK during the interwar period.

Meanwhile, the US dominates world military spending -- it spends wildly more than enough to defend itself; whether it spends enough to manage the global system is more moot, but see original point about improving relative position. Given that the US spends more on military R&D+Testing and Evaluation than the total military budget of any country except China, its qualitative and quantitative superiority is not going away anytime soon. While the upside of the Iraq and Afghan Wars is that the US's ground and air forces remain battle hardened. (China's last serious outing was a less than stellar performance on the ground against Vietnam over 40 years ago.)

So, a relatively comfortable global situation. Perhaps it is not so surprising that Ben Affleck has apparently produced a fine thriller that has CIA officers as good guys and portrays the Iranian regime as the terroristic thugs they are.

I am moving and I have a lot of books.

I have been LiveJournaling a lot less than I used to. Still, there is a whole lot of personal history and comment wrapped up in my LJ that I would hate to let it go entirely. But the spam attacks are getting to such a ridiculous level that I am seriously thinking of deleting the whole thing.

First, as a non-American, I prefer American Administrations to have as flat a learning curve as possible. Breaking in a new one is tedious (and it is not as if Obama and Romney had any serious foreign policy disagreements anyway, Romney's attempt to invent some were pretty pathetic).

Second, solidly re-electing a black President will hopefully kill off some of that "Americans are SO racist" stuff. Yes, there is racism in the US, but clearly the country is not defined by it.

On a more personal note, it was a good election for the queers. But that extended well beyond Obama being re-elected.

Not aware of the TV series Everwood, but a lovely teenage coming out sequence here and here.

Dream sequence. Part of a longer montage from a Spanish language TV series Ti Ti Ti. Another version, both using Eva Cassidy singing "True Colours"