Friday, January 28, 2005

And isn't "frog" a slang word for....

More from “Dr.” James Dobson, whom as you’ll recall is of the devil.

If you can stomach it, head on over to the Focus On The Family Website, then look for the link to Ribbits, a magical land filled with anthropomorphic Frogs.

At least three of whom have prominent pelvic bulges protruding from their nether regions. One of the frogs who sports wood is also purple, which is a clear indication he is gay.

Further examination of the Froggy Friends cast list reveals a Brazilian drag queen, and Sally, who “has a habit of breaking out into song and quoting lines from classic movies”.

Where’s a good homosexuality detection expert when you need one?

I urge you to Write to Dr. Dobson or simply dial 1-800-A-FAMILY and ask him why he's subjecting America’s children to such filth.



Thursday, January 27, 2005

Go, you Chicken Fat, Go!

The final nail in the coffin of purity and goodness. Sigh.

More on the SpongeBob Squarepants outing…another organization has apparently confirmed
confirmed “Dr.” Dobson’s suspicions about our poor little sea creature.

From the article:

A "homosexuality detection expert" at the similarly conservative Family Research Council told the NY Times that words like "tolerance" and "diversity" are part of a "coded language that is regularly used by the homosexual community."

I’m not sure which is creepier – that tolerance and diversity are bad words, or that an organization actually pays someone to be a homosexuality detection expert.

I detect it every day, for free, and I’m never wrong. Premature and optimistic in some cases, perhaps, but not wrong. Maybe I should be charging a consultation fee?

For all you busy mothers out there - Xavix Interactive Technologies has finally perfected technology to ensure that your children will never have to leave the house again! Now they can work up a sweat playing simulated versions of such American classics as bowling and baseball, without the risk that they might actually have to interact with a real person, especially one of another race.

Jesus, even I might actually get off my ass and drive to the bowling alley if I want to go bowling.

Poor LSBB is working so hard to make a better life for herself. She toiled for a year before being offered health insurance, and even excelling all that time she’s still low man on the totem pole. The latest insult is her new colleague Jessica the Hut, who waltzed in only to receive a better office and more smoke breaks per day than anyone else. As her nom de guerre might imply, she is ponderously fat – so fat that she informed LSBB that she didn’t even know she was pregnant (with her son-named-after-a-dog, Milo) until she was six months along. (Not being a medical professional I suppose I shouldn’t speak to such matters, but…wouldn’t you start to think something was up if you didn’t have a period for, like, two or three months?) When asked if she quit smoking during her pregnancy, she answered, “Well....................yeah, i mean, when I found out!" (Again, NOT a doctor, but…if you’ve already smoked for the first two trimesters, why bother quitting for the third?) The very picture of idealized motherhood, Jessica paid extra to have a c-section a week before her due date…so she could attend a PRINCE CONCERT.

Ms. Hut wears gargantuan Tori Amos concert t-shirts to work, apparently, and in fact has sent Ms. Amos several hand-crafted gifts, which she then follows up on via email to ensure that her gifts have been received and are being used for their intended purpose – say, as a door-stop in the studio or something. I’m CERTAIN Tori is touched by the thought.

As this week began with the most depressing day of the year, followed Tuesday by my singing at the memorial service for Washington Post columnist Marjorie Williams – where her high school chum Mary Chapin Carpenter sang a tearful goodbye, followed by Ms. Williams’ young children eloquently reading Shakespeare, followed by her 8-year old daughter singing “Fields of Gold” with a mournful, grown-up-sounding voice – you can imagine I was ready for a pick-me-up. Which arrived in the guise of a video of the only remaining episode of Luci’s Toy Shop, the beloved local children’s television show that anyone growing up in Columbus, Ohio from 1960-1972 will surely remember.

I don’t know WHY there’s only one show left, but there is, and it’s not a very good one, and it’s from before I was born, but I delighted to see it just the same. Luci, then, was a perky Sandy Duncan-esque gal who wore a red- and white-striped pinafore dress (every little girl in Columbus had an exact copy!) and, obviously, hung out in a Toy Shop, joined by her puppet friends Stanley Mouse, Mr. Dragon, Walrus, Pierre Poodle, Wonder Witch, Baby Giraffe, et al. I myself had all the knockoff puppets there were when I was a lad, including Charlie Horse who had to be operated with two hands!

This episode has something to do with a circus, and Luci’s efforts to enlist her pals to audition for it, only everyone runs away to join a real circus, because they don’t know about the auditions, except they don’t really run away….something like that. I suspect the episode had been written, bleary-eyed, over a cup of coffee at the all-night diner, because Luci keeps looking desperately off screen for cue cards, and situations that are resolved one minute are still present the next.

The most surreal moments are when Luci reaches into the sky to beat an imaginary gong, which even though imaginary, is apparently located somewhere because she looks frantically for it, and acts as if there’s a risk it won’t be found. Once struck, the gong magically blanks out the screen for a few seconds, and when the picture comes back we are greeted by a new puppet friend, Chan Ten, a shocking Chinese caricature who says things like “Me rikey” and “Gorry”. I have no recollection of Chan, I think he must have been fazed out by the time I came along, but I’ll be sure to ask Code Dependent about it.

The rest of the show is spent dancing to songs from the Mary Poppins soundtrack, and trying to prevent Dragon from getting angry (because when he does so, he turns from a puppet into an adult man wearing a vaguely dragon-shaped bedsheet, with dress slacks and wingtips sticking out the bottom. And who wants THAT?)

And just when you think the fun is over, the tape keeps going….first comes a series of news clips talking about the anniversary of Luci’s Toy Shop, and what Luci’s doing now, and how another local children’s show had recently filmed a special reunion/tribute/documentary thingie about Luci.

And THEN…a Buckeye Potato Chip commercial from the 60’s, with a dancing cartoon female potato chip (it’s hard to explain).

And THEN…the actual reunion/tribute/documentary thingie! Mind you, all but the episode itself was completely un-heralded on the video jacket. You can only imagine my glee, and Jet’s revulsion, at the hours of enforced misery that lay before him!

Sadly, Luci passed away in October 2003. Sniff. I guess I’ll go back to being blue now.





Monday, January 24, 2005

Goodnight, Johnny

January 24: Welcome to the most depressing day of the year!

I don’t know why I should be so worked up over the death of Johnny Carson, but I start to tear up every time I think about it. I was not a particular fan of him OR the Tonight Show, though I did watch it every now and again, especially when I was a post-college young adult and it made me feel urbane to do so. I haven’t watched it since Johnny left, however, as the sound of Jay Leno’s voice makes me want to smash his face in.

I DID have a fantasy-life, starting at about age 9 or 10, which involved me being a precocious child star and making requisite appearances on The Tonight Show. My spot always followed either Shelley Winters, Hermoine Gingold, or a cast member from It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. (Only once did I fantasize following Robin Williams, and the subsequent predicament of how to make him keep his mouth shut during my interview).

I suppose I mourn more for what Johnny represented – the last true vestige of the Borscht-Belt entertainment of my parents’ generation, which I always thought I would be quite good at had I been born forty years earlier. I can do a slow burn with the best of them, but there’s not much call for it nowadays.

I also nursed imaginary lives as a singer on Lawrence Welk, a cast member on Hee Haw, and a star of a Beach movie, so you can see my love of cornpone pop culture of the past is longstanding.

In other news….

- My sanity is saved. Liberal talk radio that I can hear at work!

- The emperor with no clothes? YOU be the judge (WARNING: may not be appropriate for the workplace!)

- Jet and I DID make it to see Kate Mulgrew play Katharine Hepburn. Amazing. Not just amazing acting and script, but a remarkable physical and vocal impersonation of Ms. Hepburn at age 31 (Act I) and 76 (Act II) - though Ms. Mulgrew is, in our opinion, far prettier than Hepburn ever was.

I’m sure you’ve heard that Fundamentalist kook James Dobson, who as you recall is of the devil, has come out swinging against beloved star of stage and screen, SpongeBob Squarepants, for being a subversive homosexual.

PLEASE give us some credit. Oh, sure, we radical homosexuals, along with the Jews, have been busy taking over Hollywood for the past fifty years PRECISELY so that we could subversively homosexual characters in children’s programming and recruit children to our deviant lifestyle. But we’re not so foolish as to use such OBVIOUS agents like SpongeBob, Tinky-Winky, Vanity Smurf, the Pink Panther, and Bugs Bunny in a dress. No, our secret weapons are much more insidious.Now that the cat’s out of the bag, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to give you a sampling of some of our success stories;

Archie
Black Vulcan

Mr. Magoo
Jem
Goofy
Yosemite Sam
Schleprock
Captain Planet

The entire cast of Scooby Doo, including Scrappy

I could literally go on forever, but I don’t want to give away ALL our secrets. If this sort of thing upsets you, I encourage you to drop a line to Dr. Dobson right away and ask him why he’s been so slow on the uptake. Children’s programming is teeming with secret queers!

Before I go, a couple MORE things about Dubya’s prayer meetin’: I’ve had several reports that, indeed, Dubya was NOT prepared to contribute to the collection plate, but that Daddy slipped him a twenty. I can’t vouch for it, as I only saw Dick ante up, but I suppose if it was on TV, then it’s so.

Also, I forgot the excitement witnessed as I was driving home after the service. Lining Massachusetts Avenue were abortion protestors, with giant placards displaying photographs of bloody, dismembered fetuses. So they took their obviously expensive protest materials and set up shop:

a) outside the VATICAN EMBASSY;
b) on a strip of Massachusetts Avenue traveled primarily by BUSLOADS OF REPUBLICANS coming back from the inaugural prayer service

Ummm….isn’t that kind of preaching to the choir?

Saturday, January 22, 2005

Snow Day!

Not that there was THAT much on the schedule, it being Saturday and all, except that we were planning to go see Kate Mulgrew in Tea at Five tonight...but Ticketmaster informs us we can have our tickets honored at one of two shows tomorrow, so we're staying in, mixing drinks for Floozy Flingland and watching Dino cavort in her first snow.

Unfortunately, having worked in a box office or two, being able to exchange our tickets for our choice of performances tomorrow tells me the show must not be selling well. A shame, as we adore Kate Mulgrew (gay men are perhaps the only people who like Captain Janeway and her ilk), and we love Katharine Hepburn, the subject of Tea at Five.

Thanks to all my peeps at Democratic Underground for all the kind words of encouragement, and I promise to try and be witty and insightful always, now that people I don't actually know are apparently reading. If you're linking from there, scroll down for yesterday's report. And here are a couple fo things I forgot to mention:

- Despite being caught without his wallet last inauguration, Dubya was again unable to conribute anything to the collection plate...though Dick did ante up. The proceeds, apparently, go to USA Corps.

- Rumor has it that Laura's hairdo cost $700. I achieved the same sort of look on Little Sister with a round brush and a blow dryer, when I was thirteen years old. She could have saved a bundle by coming to me (and one's mind reels at the hubbub that would have been created had a Hilary Clinton or, say, Therza Heinz Kerry been caught spending that much on themselves).

That's all for now. I've got to go learn an opera and figure out how to make a Bloody Mary that doesn't turn my stomach. Ta ta!

Friday, January 21, 2005

I, witless to History

As promised, here is my on-the-spot report of The Fifty-Fifth Presidential Inaugural Prayer Service, held this morning at The Washington National Cathedral.

First, my assessment of security. The choir had to arrive at 7:45, so that we could be safely escorted through in plenty of time to eat our muffins, warm up, and get to our places. Once we were all gathered at the College of Preachers, a separate building from the main Cathedral, we marched up the hill to a side entrance, where we were to stow any bags or packages that we had brought. Then we had to march back outside, aaaalllllll the way around the building to the main West entrance, where we could be magnetometized and wanded before entering the building. Then we were allowed to proceed to the choir room, where our muffins were waiting.

The choir room, which is just inside the entrance where we had first stowed our bags.

Our bags, which we still had free access to, with NO ONE WAITING TO WAND OR MAGNETOMETIZE US.

Should any one of us taken it upon ourselves to hide, say, an atomic weapon in our Hello Kitty lunch pail, it would have been a pretty simple thing, I should think.

Otherwise, the SS (Secret Service) took every opportunity they could to make us stand erect with our arms outstretched so they could rub their wands all over our bodies. Yes, it’s JUST as homoerotic as it sounds. Several of the choir men commented that they had had many fantasies that began just that way.

Fun Fact for the day: The leading health complaint of Secret Service officers is bladder infections, because once they’re on duty they’re not even allowed to take pee breaks!

We took our places in the Great Choir shortly before 10 o’clock. For those unfamiliar with the National Cathedral, the Great Choir is a little cordoned-off section nearest the altar, separate from the main church, which is where most of today’s action took place. Fortunately, I was positioned in just such a way that I had a perfect view of the ront rows of the nave, which is where the President’s family was seated.

George H.W. and Bar were already in place when the choir arrived. Of course, I’ve already sung for THEM, in 1998 at the University of Miami. I’m certain they would have remembered, had I been able to chat them up a bit. Bar was wearing a black dress with a black-and-white houndstooth jacket, and of course her signature pearls. HW wore the Republican uniform of the day, a dark suit, though he spiced it up with a pale blue shirt and red tie. My 1998 assessment still holds true: she looks great in person, he looks like the Cryptkeeper.

Five minutes AFTER the service was to supposed to begin, the JennaBarbaras traipsed in. JennaBarbara One (the brunette) looked lovely and poised, and a sweet little teal Audrey Hepburn-esque number. JennaBarbara Two (the other one), in winter white, looked, as she always does, a bit...well, dirty. She certainly showed too much cleavage for church, and that’s a fact. At least her hair was brushed, not like at yesterday’s swearing in ceremony when it was secured by a RUBBER BAND and looked all kookity. The JennaBarbaras weren’t hungover THAT I COULD TELL, but I imagine by now they’re pretty good at spritzing a bit of perfume in their mouths, pinching their cheeks and sallying forth to meet the world.

The JennaBarbaras were followed in by the Cheneys. Say, did you know they have a lesbian daughter? Dick wore a dark suit with dark mauve tie. Lynn wore a Norwegian Blue suit accompanied, unfortunately, by MATCHING EYE SHADOW. Dick, as always, lurched along like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and looked as if he begrudged every breath he took.

G.W. and Laura were the last to enter, he in a dark suit with puce tie, and she in a lovely pale pink suit. She really CAN look elegant when she wants to, and I have to tell you that the camera doesn’t do her justice. I always think she has a plump face when I see her on tv or in photographs, but she really has quite strong cheek bones and a nicely defined jawline.

The service began with the singing of “Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee” – all sang except Dick – followed by Reverend Billy Graham’s opening Prayer. He is on a walker, and had to helped to the podium, but he still has a fierce, Charlton-Heston-in-the-second-half-of-The-Ten-Commandments look about him. His hair is so white it glows, his voice is strong, and I do believe he could whup some ass if he really had to. (I do wish he’d whup some sense into that son of his, but that’s a topic for another time). The National Anthem was then sung, and then we all sat down for the parade of multiculturalism:

The first lesson, read in Hebrew by Rabbi Mort Yolkut (A Jew!)
A prayer by Bishop G.E. Patterson of the Church of God (An African-American!)
A Psalm led by Reverend Luis Cortes, President of Nueva Esperanza, Inc. (A Latino!)
A reading by the Meropolitan Herman, Orthodox Archbishop of Washington (A Greek!)
A reading by Cardinal Keeler of Baltimore (A Catholic!)
Prayers by all of the above, plus Cardinal McCarrick of Washington, (another Catholic!)Archbishop Demetrios of New York (another Greek!) , and Imam Yahya Hendi of Georgetown University (gasp! A Muslim!).

The sermon, by Rev. Mark Craig of Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas, was some claptrap about living every day to the fullest, and then degenerated into a coy re-wording of Bush’s speech yesterday – you know, spreading freedom throughout the world, yadda yadda yadda.

The choir then sang “The King of Love My Shepherd Is”, the fifth verse of which was my solo verse, written just for me – and JennaBarbara talked ALL THE WAY THROUGH. I can tell you one thing, if we chilluns ever acted up in church, Mother Rubble would have had us outside getting spanked so fast, it would’ve made your head spin! Seems to me a good whack every now and again might do those girls a world of good.

Shortly thereafter, one of the boy choristers lost his muffins in a most ungainly way (apparently, he had eaten lots of cherry Danish). Bless his heart, he had no sooner wretched than he was right back up, ready to sing. But THAT SOUND, and the SMELL, it’s a wonder the lot of us didn’t have one of those chain-reaction vomit-offs you’re always hearing about.

So then we sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”. Overlooking a pile of fresh vomit.

The only other dignitaries I was able to pick out were Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who I see EVERYWHERE, and John Ashcroft, who practically fell over himself trying to shake Billy Graham's hand.

Most hopeful portent of the day: Reverend Craig, amidst the claptrap and political shilling, managed to let us know that God actually DOES love Hindus and Moslems and Buddhists and Jews, right in line with the Gospel reading, Matthew 5:43-48;

You have heard it said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in Heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect , therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Most troubling portent: The singing of the obscure second verse of the National Anthem, which reads, in part (emphasis mine): “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just…”

Spreading freedom, indeed.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Coronation Day....

…and the town is abuzz with Inaugural activities for Emperor Shrub. I myself will take part tomorrow, when I sing at Dubya’s Prayer Service at the National Cathedral. A solo. Written just for me. But I’m not bragging. Upstaging me on the marquee will be peg-leg Irish tenor Ronan Tynan, who butchered Ave Maria so badly at Reagan’s funeral, I guess they decided to give him a chance to redeem himself. And, lest I appear on television, rest assured I have grown a bit of a beard so as not to receive any long distance complaints (you KNOW who you are).

I WAS sorry to miss Jenna and Barbara’s “Youth Concert” the other night, if only to hear the gasps of horror when a musician inadvertently uttered the “f” word for the audience. That would have been the ONLY event of interest, apparently, as the following account relates (emphases mine - the image of Stephen Baldwin makes me especially giddy):

While the message was positive, the concert's cool quotient was in question. "I guess it would be a cool concert if you're a 17-year-old girl," said Roy Trakin, senior editor of Hits magazine. Not really, said Millicent Bolin, 17-year-old from New Orleans. Many in the audience were on school trips, and some weren't thrilled that the concert was on their itinerary. "We had to come," Millicent said. "I don't like these people ... they're too fake and mainstream." If the concert fell short on the hip scale, it wasn't for lack of trying. Stephen Baldwin took the stage on a skateboard. "Are you guys rockin' or what?" he enthused. While the star power was only so-so, according to Trakin, he gave the Republicans credit for persuading a half-dozen acts to perform. "It's not all country and polka," he noted. Still, the GOP line-up didn't compare to the Democrats' star-studded concerts last fall that featured Bruce Springsteen, the Dave Matthews Band, R.E.M. and other heavy hitters, Trakin said. "All the action is still on the Democrats' side," he said. "Bill Clinton had Fleetwood Mac ... George Bush has Hilary Duff."

Of course, I'm astonished that any activities could proceed as planned, being that we've had AN INCH of snow, throwing the city into chaos. Tuesday, BEFORE the snow came, several school systems closed anyway...because it was COLD. I'm not kidding. Rather than wake up a few maintenance men to go down to the bus yard and warm up the fleet, they cancelled school for 200,000 children in a week where they had already had a holiday.

When I was a lad, during the blizzrd of 78, there was two feet of snow and the school building was without heat for two weeks, and we STILL had to go in to school for half-days, bundled up in our woollens and caps. And the other half of the day we had to go to the public library and do our homework. Kids today, sheesh.

A moment of silence, please, for Ruth Warrick, claimed this week by pneumonia. She is, of course, the creator and 35-year portrayer of the second-greatest female soap opera role ever, Pheobe English Tyler Wallingford Matthews Wallingford (number 1 is Erica Kane, number 3 is Dorian Lord). She also appears in a host of old-timety movies, such as Citizen Kane and the never-to-be-seen-again Song of the South (though my sources tell me Disney is itching to get it out on DVD, if they can just find a black actor with enough cache in the black community to support it. Wayne Brady volunteered, but he’s not black enough, apparently. I, of course, have a bootleg copy of my own.)

And finally today, the mystery of why I like caveman movies has finally been solved.

Back tomorrow or the next days with my full prayer meetin’ report!




Friday, January 14, 2005

Is it hot in here, or is it just me?

The Today Show, which for some reason I can’t stop watching even though I hate it, has given me two frights this week; The first, yesterday, when it showed a clip of a man being fished out of a Los Angeles river. Apparently, he had been wearing sweatpants when his car became trapped by rising water, and at some point in the course of being rescued and hauled to shore, he lost said sweatpants…and apparently wasn’t wearing underwear. The point being, the Today Show producers just ran the tape without digitizing the poor man’s wiener. Not that I object to the sight of a penis, obviously, but not at 7 o’clock in the morning, and not on the Today Show! Subsequent airings of the tape did utilize digital obfuscation, and Lester Holt was even kind enough to mention to the poor fool during a live interview that they were, in fact, protecting his modesty – except for that one time, I guess.

The second scare was on today’s installment, with Katie Couric unashamedly flirting with Newt Gingrich, who looks like a grown-up Cabbage Patch Kid and reeks of pure evil. How he can still be going on about moral values, after serving divorce papers to his second of three wives while she lay in the cancer recovery ward, is beyond me. Who still listens to this fool?

Thankfully, more and more real Christians are reclaiming their faith from the kooks.


And speaking of religious kooks, Mel Gibson has driven the Fundamentalists crazy by recently coming out as staunchly anti-Iraq War, as well as pronouncing a kinship with fellow kook filmmaker Michael Moore. Makes me more inclined to watch my copy of The Passion which Mother Rubble gave us for Christmas, which I’ve been avoiding because of the gore, seeing as how I didn’t sleep for three weeks after watching the trailer for Dawn of the Dead. But that’s another story.

So it’s almost 70 degrees, and my allergies are causing me to have burning pain in my lungs, and I, like the rest of the world, am wondering what happened to winter. And just when I think THAT’S bad enough, I go and find that it may not be just the Earth that’s in trouble.

Now, who can help me figure out how to blame this on the Bush administration?

In addition to finding scary interstellar climate theories while surfing the internet, not doing my work, I ran across this interesting theory which caused me a good hour-and-a-half of sleeplessness: seems a mathematician has come up with a theory that the Dark Ages may never have happened – like, those years, roughly 614-911 AD, simply didn’t exist, they were just kind of, inserted into history as if they did exist, but there’s really no independent archaeological or literary proof of it. Which means it’s really only about 1700 or so. Wonder what this does to millenialists who think the end of the world is overdue?

Consuela, my workplace cubicle-mate, not only makes and receives cell phone calls, in Spanish, all day long, but also plays some kooky radio station that she streams from the internet. Here’s a sampling of today’s playlist:

Never On a Sunday (on vibraphone)
Once I Had a Secret Love
Mona Lisa
Born Free
Somewhere My Love
Witchita Lineman
Mack the Knife

Not that I have a particular aversion to these songs individually, but en masse they’re a bit much to take, especially without a cocktail in one’s hand. The last straw was Over the Rainbow – not the Wizard of Oz soundtrack version, but the old, boozed-up Judy Garland. That’s enough to make me want to end it all on the best of days.

More internet fun, about

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Now that THAT'S over...

…we can all say goodbye to our fun and visits and eating and get back to our boring, humdrum lives, and be thankful we don’t live somewhere that God can smite us with a tidal wave for being Hindu (and I’m NOT EVEN KIDDING that I heard someone say that THAT was the reason for the tsunami that surely killed lots of Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists, too)….

So Jet and I had a lovely nine-day visit with Mother Rubble – actually, it was mostly Jet, since he was off work and I wasn’t, and plus had to work extra down to the Cathedral and all. But Jet was kind enough to run her out to the grocery store, and up to Pennsylvania to visit the Reverend Uncle, and such, while I labored away. All for the sake of appearing on television on Christmas morn, along with Jet and Mother Rubble, only to hear that the lights washed me out and I looked pale and sickly! And from Code Dependent, no less, who now has the medical authority to back up her opinions!

I HAVE finally gone to the doctor for my persistent cough, only to hear that I’m a bad patient for not paying close enough attention to the color of my mucous. Oh, for the days when they would pass out antibiotics like candy! Now I imagine I’ll be back in a week with the same complaint, my coffers being bled dry one 10-dollar co-pay at a time.

After church on Christmas Day, we had a happy present opening, where I got everything I wanted and Jet got everything that he wanted-even-though-he-didn’t-know-he-wanted-it. Best present for Jet: the collected works of David Sedaris on CD, read by the author.

Best present for me: The Complete “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” on DVD, or, as Jet likes to call it, “soft porn”. Added bonus – the discovery of the hitherto unknown theme song WITH lyrics, which opens the premier episode.

PS – Gil Gerard is perfection itself.

Best present for Dino: the “Bow-Lingual” bark translator. So far she says innocuous things like “Yippee”, and “Keep Up!”, though we did get one “Resistance is Futile”, and I’m keeping a guarded eye open for things like “Eat Drano” and “Bomb the Harbor”. You never know.

Mother Rubble left and at almost simultaneously we welcomed our old pal JubJub from Chicago. Though it pains me to disclose that I’ve known JubJub for twenty years, and we met as adults, we never fail to have a good time when she’s around, even though we never seem to do much except lay around and talk about what we might like to do if we could ever get off our asses and do it.

For all you serial daters out there, JubJub has a strong warning against eHarmony.com. After filling out her exhaustive questionnaire and being sent many unexciting romantic possibilities, she was finally sent an imminently qualified language arts professor (she herself is a teacher of English as a second language). So she excitedly clicked on the link to see the young gent’s pictures.

There she came upon some pictures of what she presumed to be the young gentleman’s mother, or perhaps him dressed as Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie for Halloween.

Nope, nothing so delightful as that…he was indeed a cross-dresser, and proud of it.

Oh, and blind.

So now I’m re-charged and ready to get back to work, eager in the next year to focus on my strengths – 1) exposing hypocrisy, 2) making fun of celebrities, and 3) complaining about slights to gay people.

To wit:

1) God did NOT send the tsunami to punish people for being Hindu, I’m quite sure. They’ve been Hindu a lot longer than there have even BEEN Christians, one would think God would have done something about them long before this.

NOR is he punishing Muslims for fighting amongst themselves.

NOR was it caused by a joint American/Israeli nuclear weapons test.

It’s just a natural phenomenon, all right? With terrible, terrible consequences, unfortunately, but natural nonetheless. Move on.

2) NOR, Star Jones-Reynolds, is there cause to thank the Lord on National television that you got home from your southeast Asian honeymoon “just in time” to avoid getting swept away. To paraphrase Jon Stewart, that’s like saying you narrowly avoided the Kennedy assasination because you were riding in a convertible the week before.

It seems Matt Lauer has finally decided to start growing his hair back. I’ll never forget the gasp of horror when he first appeared with that shorn look he’s been wearing the past few years. Unfortunately, he’s now at that awkward stage where all he can do is brush all his hair forward in a faux-Caesar look. He looks more like character actor Jay Robinson (that’s TV’s Dr. Shrinker to you, post-Baby Boomers!)

And can someone tell me HOW Stephen Bing, who looks like a toad, keeps getting hot women like Liz Hurley and Nicole Kidman?

3) Virginia is for lovers – just not gay ones. New legislation will promote the creation of vanity license plates embossed with intertwined gold bands and the words “Traditional Marriage”. Perfect for drivers eager to have their cars keyed whenever they drive into DC! I’m hoping to get my own vanity plate soon, but can’t decide between “Women belong in the kitchen” and “Jesus on my lips, hatred in my heart”.

That’s all for now, but never fear, I’ll try and be back soon. And stay tuned for next Friday’s breathless, eyewitness account of the Inaugural Prayer Service at the National Cathedral (and be sure to bid on my collection of bulletins and other ephemera on eBay shortly thereafter).