It Had to Happen

[Take it as a good sign of my eventual return that I found this funny enough to post on.]

Canada recently made same-sex marriage legal. Now, two Ontario men want to get married and it's getting notice. Why? Because they are openly straight. Why, they've even been married to women before!

Guess who said this:

"Generally speaking, marriage should be for love," he said. "People who don't marry for love will find themselves in trouble.... If someone wants to do something foolish, let them do it."

It was the gay right activist! What a prude.

It occurred to me long ago that straight young people ought to take advantage of gay-marriage laws for the tax and health care benefits. Two roommates -- just out of college and just starting out in life -- get married and get all kinds of tax breaks. They also, as a married couple, get a lot of benefits in health care and access in the event of trauma and emergency. This is especially true if one friend gets a great job with excellent health care benefits as part of the compensation package. The other can then be listed as the "partner" and get identical coverage at a huge cost savings!

The two men in the story are retirement age, but they have also sussed out the tax advantages for themselves. No reason they can't marry now. It's a win-win for them. Why more young Americans haven't figured this out, I don't know. It's not like there's a divorce stigma anymore.

Besides, what's love or sex got to do with marriage?

Service Interruption

Ah, yes. Regular readers will recognise the Unexplained Lack of Posts as a sad, if occasional, feature of Half-Bakered. I'm afflicted by depression and, if I get knocked off my center, it's hard to get back to regular. Such is one of those times.

Add to that some weird and annoying computer problems. The computer is taking longer and longer to boot up. It goes through multiple startup cycles until something "catches" and it goes into safe mode. Nothing is clearly wrong, but when I reboot from their, it will usually boot all the way up. Today, I got an "unable to read File Allocation Table on Drive C" error message. Eek!

So, I may be computerless soon, and for several days, on top of the other problem.

I'm shooting for the first of next week. See ya then.

WordPress Design Help Needed

Is anyone in the readership good with WordPress templates and CSS? I want to finally move the blog to my domain, but the idea of learning PHP (and coding the underlying text) is daunting. So is trying to write the CSS page, though I don't doubt I can do that.

I want the WP version to look exactly like this: two fixed-width side columns filled with links; variable-width middle column for posts. Same color and look, etc. I know it's "bad form" but I can live with keeping this as table-formatted if it's simpler to achieve. I can rewrite the CSS page to create a reversed B&W version (for those deluded folks who hate white text on black), as well as some other color variants, I think.

If you can do the job, drop me an email and give me an idea of your costs. I'm really poor, so I can't afford much, but I'd like to explore this more seriously and get it over with.