Please enjoy these photos of my father and stepmother’s tour of the “Five ‘Stans”: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan.

Dad’s still figuring out how Flickr works, so his captions (which contain a fair bit of historical context for what you’re looking at) are actually posted as comments. Although some of the comments, like this one, are courtesy of Ray Ann.

In my inbox this morning, on the morning of the first gay marriages in California, I found the following item from Chemistry.com, a spinoff of Match.com:

Yes, that’s right. Chemistry has decided that the best way to market themselves to their generally liberal and potentially queer audience is to nakedly commercialize one of the most important court rulings in decades.

I can’t even imagine that marketing meeting: “Now that gays can get married, there’s clearly going to be a stampede to meet soulmates through the magic of the internet. We should take advantage!”