I don’t even really know what to say about Falwell dying except that one of my first reactions was to think, “Well, finally.”

I felt a nugget of guilt trailing around behind the overwhelming glee. I asked bascha what she thought of that and got this bit of wisdom: “I don’t think our religion believes in ThoughtCrime(tm).”

I mentioned it to The Boyf and he produced this shining truth: “Imagine that we - all the gay men, the lesbians, the bisexuals, the feminists, everyone he hated - had all dropped dead today. What do you think he would be saying about us?”

So yeah. Good riddance to bad rubbish. As I’ve seen noted in more than one place, Virginia just became a slightly nicer, smarter place on average. I fail to see the downside. I had two pieces of cake yesterday to celebrate. It beats drinking in some respects, anyway.

To compound yesterday’s joys, the new Rufus Wainwright album Release the Stars came out which meant iTunes prompted me to go ahead and download it (I’d pre-ordered). I downloaded it and noticed with excitement that it came with the video for one of the songs on it, Going to a Town. I fired that puppy up and… well…

Wow.

It’s so good.

I know not all my friends like Rufus, and I guess I can comprehend that intellectually in the same way I can comprehend someone not liking, I dunno, Reese’s cups. Regardless, it’s pretty amazing. Going to a Town is a break-up song, but not in the way you’d expect. It’s about breaking up with the United States. That’s a long row hoed by the guy who sang California with such enthusiastic abandon. It’s a fantastic example of one of Wainwright’s greatest gifts: expressing the global experienced as the personal.

It left me vaguely breathless at the end, the first time I watched it.