There are a lot of well-deserved tributes to Hitchens today. I was especially moved by Ian McEwan’s in the New York Times. Turned out Hitchens was a man who faced death with bravery and even scorn right up to the end.

In March of 2001, I wrote an overview for the Boston Phoenix of Hitchens’ devastating portrayal of Henry Kissinger, first published in Harper’s and later turned into a book titled “The Trial of Henry Kissinger.”

Which calls to mind my one and only Hitchens anecdote. I can’t remember where I picked it up, and it has the ring of something that ought to be true rather an actual occurrence. But, supposedly, Hitchens was once introduced to Kissinger at a party. Kissinger’s eyes narrowed while Hitchens waited nervously to see what the former secretary of state would say.

“So, you called me a war criminal,” Kissinger told Hitchens.

Hitchens averred that, yes, he had, but that he’d also called Bill Clinton a war criminal because of his air strikes in the former Yugoslavia.

“Bill Clinton,” Kissinger was said to have replied, “doesn’t have the moral courage to be a war criminal.”

If it didn’t actually happen, it damn well should have.

Cathy’s big idea is that down-on-their-luck cities like Lowell and Springfield may be due for a revival as economic and environmental constraints make urban living more appealing. And unlike major metropolises such as New York or Los Angeles — or Boston, for that matter — small cities have the capacity to develop their own self-sufficient ecosystems, including locally grown food.

The book is based on an essay Tumber wrote for the Boston Review in 2009 titled “Small, Green and Good.”

I read “Small, Gritty and Green” in galleys last spring, and I recommend it highly. Cathy also has given me invaluable advice for my own book-in-progress on the New Haven Independent and other community news sites, tentatively titled “The Wired City.”

The Boston Comedy Festival is cooking up a welcome back roast and toast for Barry Crimmins, the comic and producer whose hard work, vision and terrific sense of humor helped bring the Boston Comedy scene into the modern era. Crimmins founded the fabled Ding Ho Comedy Club in Cambridge and then later was pivotal in starting Stitches in Boston. These clubs were where Steven Wright, Paula Poundstone, Bobcat Goldthwait, Kevin Meaney, Jimmy Tingle and many, many others cut their comedicteeth. Crimmins has gone on to make a name for himself as an internationally renowned political satirist. He is the author of “Never Shake Hands with a War Criminal” (7 Stories Press).

This tribute will be hosted by Boston comedy legend Tony V. The dais will be jammed with noted wits rarely seen on the same stage, including: Jimmy Tingle, Steve Sweeney, Mike McDonald, Randy Credico, Boston Globe cartoonist Dan Wasserman, The Steamy Bohemians — Niki Luparelli, Lainey Schulbaum and John Ennis (Mr Show, Studio 60). This lineup of all-star talent is sure to fricassee your funny bone so expect great laughs, celebrity surprises, topped off words from the wizened and hilarious forefather of our Boston comedy scene.

Barry also says on his Facebook profile that he’ll be at Occupy Boston today at 4 p.m.

Buckwheat Zydeco

No, really. It’s true. There they are, on the Rotary Pavilion outside the Peabody Institute Library. Buckwheat Zydeco performed in a free concert this evening, and a wicked good time was had by all.

Gay marriage advocates march in San Francisco

Following New York’s legalization of gay marriage, more than 11 percent of the U.S. population — 11.37 percent — now lives in an area where same-sex marriage is a right, according to U.S. Census data. New York, with a population of nearly 19.4 million, was a huge victory in the movement toward marriage equality. Take away New York, and the percentage drops to just a shade over 5 percent. Jurisdictions where gay-marriage is now a right, with populations, are:

• New York, 19,378,102
• Massachusetts, 6,547,629
• Connecticut, 3,574,097
• Iowa, 3,046,355
• New Hampshire, 1,316,470
• Vermont, 625,741
• Washington, D.C., 601,723

The total U.S. population is 308,745,538.

To this day, the largest setback was California’s Proposition 8, which killed off that state’s nascent right of gay marriage. If California’s more than 37 million people were added, then the proportion of the country where gay marriage is recognized would rise to 23.4 percent, or nearly one-fourth of the national population.

According to the New York Times, the next most likely states to recognize gay marriage are Maryland and Rhode Island. That would inch us up to nearly 13.6 percent. Progress, yes, but slow progress. Although I don’t believe the majority should hold sway over basic human rights, the fact is that 53 percent of Americans now favor same-sex marriage.

Gay marriage harms no one, and is a vitally important substantive and symbolic benefit to gay and lesbian couples. A trickle isn’t good enough. Let’s hope that what happened in New York opens the floodgates.

Photo (cc) by AJ Alfieri Crispin and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Clarence Clemons

Clarence Clemons spent most of his career in the awkward position of having been the key to a musical idea that Bruce Springsteen lost interest in early on.

Clemons, who died on Saturday at the age of 69 after having suffered a stroke last week, was the heart of the great horn section that played on 1973′s “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.” It was unlike any album Springsteen made before or after — an amalgam of rock, folk, soul and Latin music played by a first-rate band with lots of room for stretching out and soloing.

This early version of the E Street Band featured two black musicians — Clemons and keyboard player David Sancious — and a drummer, Vini Lopez, who was fired after a fight with the brother of Springsteen’s manager, but who on “The E Street Shuffle” plays with a wonderfully loose, propulsive feel that is the opposite of Max Weinberg’s hard-rock pounding. It may or may not have been Springsteen’s best album. I do think it’s the greatest summer album ever.

But Springsteen decided to go the rock-god route, although he continued to grow as a songwriter and, especially, as a lyricist. His next album, the elaborate, rococo “Born to Run” (1975), carved out large spaces for Clemons, especially on “Jungleland.” But “Darkness on the Edge of Town” (1978) is a traditional hard-rock album, with scarcely any room for Clemons at all. For the most part, Springsteen has stuck with a spare, stripped-down approach ever since.

What to do? Clemons and Springsteen were friends, and Clemons was the biggest draw at the live shows other than Springsteen himself. The solution was to keep him, let him play percussion and sing back-up, and of course play sax on the old songs — as well as on the occasional newer songs Springsteen would write to give Clemons something to do other than bang a cowbell.

It was a workable and honorable solution. But I always thought it was too bad that Springsteen abandoned his original (in more ways than one) idea of having an integrated band play integrated music in favor of becoming just another white rocker — albeit the best in the world for a time — with a black foil/sidekick on stage.

Tuesday is the first day of summer. Sparks fly on E Street, and I know what I’ll be playing in my car that day. God bless you, Clarence Clemons.

Photo (cc) by Martin Olbrich and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

dwarf The preferred term for people with a medical or genetic condition resulting in short stature. Plural is dwarfs.

midget Considered offensive when used to describe a person of short stature. Dwarf is the preferred term for people with that medical or genetic condition.

My 2004 edition of the AP Stylebook does not contain an entry for either word. Clearly the dwarfism community is making progress in its efforts to educate the public about the “M”-word.

In 2009, the New York Times’ then-public editor, Clark Hoyt, wrote that the Times had concluded the “M”-word was offensive.

I discuss the rise and fall of the “M”-word in Chapter Seven of my book on dwarfism, “Little People.”

Here is former New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt’s 2009 column in which he acknowledges that the “M”-word is offensive and would no longer be used in the Times.

Last week the “M”-word popped up when commentator Bernard Goldberg used it on “The O’Reilly Factor” while critiquing former MSNBC talk-show host Keith Olbermann. In observing that Olbermann’s relatively low ratings in comparison to Fox News were nevertheless higher than anyone else’s at MSNBC, Goldberg compared Olbermann to “the tallest midget in the room.”

My friend Bill Bradford, who’s the senior vice president of Little People of America, called my attention to it on Facebook, and we hashed it out a bit. My inclination was to give a pass to Goldberg on the grounds of his well-documented cluelessness. But another friend, Julie Holland, quickly discovered that Goldberg knew exactly what he was saying. Last February, in defending the use of such charming terms as “Negro” and “retarded,” Goldberg told Bill O’Reilly:

If you use the word midget, the little people community are going to jump all over you. I mean not literally, but they’re going to get on you.

That sound you hear in the background is O’Reilly snickering.

On Sunday, meanwhile, the Boston Herald ran a feature on a show at the Seaport World Trade Center charmingly called “Motorcycles, Midgets and Mayhem,” starring dwarf wrestlers called the Half-Pint Brawlers.

Another LPA friend, District 1 director Barbara Spiegel, is quoted as objecting both to the spectacle and to the use of the “M”-word. The story, by Renee Nadeau Algarin, is benign enough, and I’m not suggesting the Herald should have ignored it. But it’s accompanied by an extensive slide show and a come-on to buy reprints. The comments are about as bad as you would expect.

There’s no question that the way people with dwarfism are depicted in the media is far more positive than it was a generation or two ago. Reality shows such as “Little People, Big World” and “The Little Couple” have helped normalize dwarfism in the eyes of the public.

Yet in the more benighted corners of the media, it seems that things haven’t changed much at all.