So much to do; so little time. It's shaping up to be a busy fall. First, the honeybear and I will be taking a quick weekend trip to beautiful Toronto to celebrate our fifth anniversary. When I tell my friends this, they all say "Five years? Has it been that long?" But I'm never certain if they mean it like "Wow, the time has flown so fast!" or "Wow, we never thought you'd make it that long!". Next comes the 25th wedding anniversary of my best friend from college. It's always been a matter of pride for me that I was the only non-family member invited to his wedding -- and that I was the one his bride-to-be put in charge of the pre-wedding trip to Barney's in NYC to get him a suit and matching tie. (This was before I came out to them. I guess my fabulous taste in clothing shone through even then.) Then in early November comes my 35th high school reunion. 1969 seems so far away, yet I've managed to make it through. A less pleasant trip comes in November as well -- I'm flying down to Florida, where my sister and I will scatter our parents' ashes (along with her husband's). At that time, it'll be just short of a year since my father died, and two months short of a year since my mother passed. It's a nostalgia-laden autumn this year.

Me? An athlete? Stranger things have happened. I've started bowling in a gay league that meets Wednesday nights. I'm on a two-man team (our third teammate never showed up for any games), the "Bear Necessities", and my teammate's name is Mike -- we're both big men, so the team name is appropriate. We've just finished our third week of play; next week, I understand, is when I get my official average, woohoo!

Bias in the media, or at least my 2 cents' worth. Once upon a time, there were lots of newspapers and magazines and other news outlets. They each had a viewpoint on the news -- the more honest ones would remind you what it was every now and then -- so you could remove the facts from the opinion (what we nowadays call slant or spin), or read two papers with opposite viewpoints and figure out the truth from there. Then along came the consolidation of the news media. Corporations formed, buying ownership of news outlets in a town, a state, the country. Along with this consolidation came the notion that reporters and editors (or, to use the current term, journalists) were dedicated to objectivity -- at least, as much as humanly possible -- and that there was no viewpoint informing the reporting (called today media bias).

Recently, we're being shown that this just ain't so. Fox News (and other media holdings of Rupert Murdoch) have a decidedly conservative/Republican/rightward slant. ABC, CBS, and NBC (owned by, respectively, The Disney Company, Viacom, and General Electric) have a decidedly liberal/Democrat/leftward slant. So does the New York Times (and its subsidiary, the Boston Globe) and the Los Angeles Times. The Washington Post slants somewhat to the left, but considering the town it's in it does a very good job at keeping the slant to a minimum.

Is this a bad thing? No. Nothing says that having a viewpoint and reporting honestly are mutually exclusive. What's bad is having a viewpoint, acting on it, but swearing that you don't have it at all. Case in point: CBS, which broadcast (on its 60 Minutes II show) a report claiming that the President failed to fulfill his duties while serving in the Texas Air National Guard. Backing up the report were documents supposedly written by one of his superior officers detailing the pressures applied to make sure George Bush got a "pass" on fulfilling his duties. What was the problem? The documents were fakes, and CBS -- the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite -- not only didn't check them out thoroughly, but ignored warnings voiced by the document experts they hired. Making the situation worse was reporter Dan Rather's insistence that the papers were legit -- and when they were proven not to be, insisting that even though the papers were false the story was still true. Oh yes, and Rather has no bias against the President, especially in this election year (which is turning out to be more of a battle than anyone may have thought).

Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes (who has been working on "Bush in the Guard" stories for the past five years) will probably take the fall for this, one way or another. But the myth of the unbiased media has, I hope, with this been blown to smithereens for all time. Give me an honest partisan over a fake neutral any day -- especially when they're selling me the news.