....well it's no wonder, with that crazy wife of his

Wanna see George W. Bush give a “one-finger victory salute”? Go here.

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Anyone see the Today Show this morning? Republican lap dog Rudy Giuliani knows whose fault it is that all those tons of explosives went missing from Iraq…

…THE TROOPS.

Yes, those darn troops. First Abu Ghraib, now this. Good thing they keep screwing up, otherwise the administration might actually have to take responsibility for something.

Idiots.

Which reminds me, have you heard about this Vaccine A business? The theory is that the government added squaline (an accelerant) to a bunch of Anthrax vaccine, then injected it into the troops going to Iraq for the first Gulf War, with full knowledge that the long-term effects were unknown. Trouble is, squaline seems to cause a whole host of auto-immune deficiencies, and could be behind Gulf War Syndrome, which the government has yet to acknowledge even exists.

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On to happier things, like titillating gossip about whom in American History might have been gay. I needn’t go into the oft-repeated rumors about bachelor President James Buchanan and his live-in bachelor friend William Rufus King (whom Washington wags of the day called “Miss Nancy”, “Aunt Fancy”, and “Mrs. Buchanan”), need I?

Well, now there’s a resurgence of rumors about Honest Abe, also a proponent of sharing beds and nightshirts and such with other men, only this time it seems someone was diligent about their research. The ribald poetry angle is new to me, and I try to keep abreast of these sorts of things. Sort of makes one wonder where the term “Lincoln Logs” came from.

That’s all I have. Good Day, and go vote!

In the Green

So who knows what to make of President Bush’s statement yesterday that he supports gay civil unions? (Gee, fellas, sorry about that constitutional amendment business, heh heh!) Regardless of his intentions, the result has been to finally draw out the fundamentalist Republican base as the hate-filled morons they are, and reveal that their goal is not to “defend” marriage, but to demonize gay people and prevent them from having any civil rights, ever.

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Tip of the day: If you need to get someplace in a hurry, absolutely do not drive behind any of the following people:

Taxi Drivers in and around Washington, DC
Any man wearing a hat (baseball caps excluded)
Anyone with a bumper sticker indicating that they are a veteran of any branch of the armed services
Anyone with an American flag affixed to their car (Regrettably, this includes beloved Mother Rubble)

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While stuck behind slow drivers this morning, I happened to think of our friend Miss J, who is, I am convinced, Bette Midler's given-up-for-adoption daughter. (Before you ask, there is plenty of evidence to support this, and yes, Bette Midler really did give up a daughter for adoption). Anyway, she appears in an Altoids print ad (Miss J, not Bette Midler) and here it is.

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Jet and I are gearing up for an intensive evening of laying under the covers reading comic books, which we’ll do after attending Floozy Flingland’s recital (at 8pm in the Gildenhorn Recital Hall at the University of Maryland, if you’re free). After that, we will go home to Dino and act like fat pimply-faced losers who live in their parents’ basements for twenty minutes. (Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to cast aspersions, as I am fat, was once pimply-faced, and lived in my grandmother’s basement for awhile…but I’ve just updated my C.V. this morning and am feeling really full of myself).

It is rare that Jet will get more excited than me about a comic book, but today might be it. It’s the return, you see, of Hal Jordan, the greatest Green Lantern, ever (not that I necessarily think so, I’m just reporting what others have said).

‘Bout ten years ago, ol’ Hal went a little crazy, after an intergalactic terrorist blew up his hometown, and as many crazy people do, he went mad with power, murdered the person who taught him everything he knew, absorbed the Central Power Battery on the planet Oa, and became a bad guy. He was replaced as Green Lantern by the young, hip, cute, and recently revealed as half-Hispanic Kyle Rayner (below).

Then he tried to go back to the Big Bang and re-start the Universe.

Then this giant space creature that looked like fake vomit snuffed out the sun, and the Earth had just about had it, until Hal re-ignited the sun in a final act of selflessness, which seemingly did him in.

Except then he came back as a re-animated corpse which housed the supernatural Spirit of Redemption.

Still with me?

Meanwhile, Kyle Rayner started being written by Judd Winick, whom you may remember as a cast member on Real World: San Francisco. As every story Judd writes has to revolve around someone being gay-bashed or having AIDS, and Kyle was neither gay nor had AIDS, he was pretty much made irrelevant in his own comic book.

Also meanwhile, the Cartoon Network started up a Justice League cartoon, and in the interest of political correctness shoehorned in an African-American Green Lantern, which meant that the comics had to shoehorn him into the comics, further simarginalizing poor Kyle.

All this while, fat pimply-faced losers have been generating petitions in their parents’ basements demanding the return of Hal Jordan, The One, True, Green Lantern. I won't bother to point out that Hal Jordan himself is actually a revised version of the Golden-Age Green Lantern, and the reason that there are so many different Lanterns - see picture, below - is that he's always been a boring character and hasn't been able to sell a series on his own in a good thirty years. I'm just sayin'.

So, in six issues, we are promised that all these loose ends will be tied up, Hal will somehow justify murdering his friend or turn out to not be a murderer at all, and somehow stop hosting the Spirit of Redemption, and be alive, and not evil, and be accepted by the hero community as a good guy again, and leave room for the black guy who is still on the cartoon show.

Yea, comics!

If Ashlee Simpson fell down in the forest, would she make a noise?

God works in mysterious ways.

I wrote, briefly, about Jehovah’s Witnesses last week (nothing bad, mind you, but probably mildly irreverent). The post subsequently, and mysteriously, disappeared.

Then Sunday morning, on my way to church, I was tracted by a Jehovah’s Witness – tracted is probably not a real word, but I mean to say I was given a tract, a copy of Awake! magazine. Aside from the cover story (“How to Be a Good Father”) there is a wide range of topical articles (“Teens Ask: How Can I Avoid Pre-Marital Sex?” and “Reaching Pygmies With Bible Truth”) with lots of highlighted text boxes outlining the salient points (“Discussing your problems with your parents can help you stay chaste” and “Adult Pygmies average 4-5 feet high!”). There’s even a personal witness story involving chorus leader Fred Waring, who is a much-beloved figure in the history of the Bamm-Bamm family.

Depending on how vulnerable I’m feeling on any particular day (i.e. how much time I have on my hands to sit and obsessively ruminate), I’m likely to interpret this chain of events as a sign that God wants me to:

a) be a father
b) stop having sex
c) become a Jehovah’s Witness, or
d) minister to Pygmies

I’ve been able to eliminate b, c, and d this morning; b) because I don’t want to, c) because I’ve come across a bushel of websites to help “ex-Witnesses” in their recovery process, and d) because I can’t travel someplace where there wouldn’t be showers or Cottonelle Flushable Moist Wipes. So that leaves a), and I think I’ll wait a while to see how Dino turns out before making THAT level of commitment.

Ascribing universal importance to everyday coincidences is the reason I can’t read fortune cookies or horoscopes anymore, and why I must divert my attention during the day with mass media. I trust if God ever really wanted to get in touch with me, he would have sense enough to appear on a television show, or insert Himself as a special feature on a DVD.

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I fell asleep after the news segment on Saturday Night Live this weekend. And so I WAS going to write about how retarded Ashlee Simpson looked during her first song, because she was OBVIOUSLY lipsynching, and her “choreography” consisted of marching back and forth in a straight line. (I mean, isn't the point of lipsyncing to free your body up to do a showy dance?)Imagine my dismay at learning that I missed her comeuppance.

I have it in for that Simpson family anyway. I don’t know why, I just do. I can’t stand the sight of that simpleton Jessica and her lunkhead husband. (He’s SO handsome, why the hell can’t he shave once in a while?) I can tell you one thing, she and her husband do a new version of “A Whole New World” on the new Special Edition Aladdin DVD, and if she sings with as much sterno-clydo-mastoid tension as she lipsyncs with, she’s got about two years of vocal production left before she ruins herself (Mariah Carey, anyone?)

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Jet is headed off to evening opera rehearsals for the next month, and so I’ll be watching lots and lots of horribly written and acted shows and movies that he doesn’t enjoy, and will have lots to tell you. Last night, on our final evening of relaxation together, we watched Goodbye Mr. Chips, and also a bit of a documentary on bush pilot Tom Claytor, who left home in 1990 with the aim of flying solo around the world, and has not been home since. He flies somewhere (usually a place inaccessible by any other method), works a while, learns the language, then moves on. Nothing funny to add, just interesting if you’re into that sort of thing. Plus he’s pretty easy on the eyes.

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Code Dependent fell off a horse. Read about it here!

The Death of Science and the Niemenschmeider Sisters

Forget Zogby and CNN, self-proclaimed prophet John Hogue has predicted Bush will win the election. By his own account, he has correctly predicted the results of every Presidential election since 1968 (with the exception of 2000, when he predicted Gore would win by 500,000 votes – which Gore technically did, though he didn’t become President…) Hogue then goes on to predict lots of icky things for Bush’s second term.

Okay, so he’s a kook…. it makes for interesting workplace reading.

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PIPA, the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland has issued a report finding that a majority of Bush supporters believe things about the world that are objectively untrue, while the majority of Kerry supporters dwell in the reality-based community.

The dittohead apples don’t fall far from the administration tree, I suppose. This news comes at the same time that the administration has decided to stand by its approval of a book, on sale at National Park gift shops, that states Noah’s Flood formed the Grand Canyon.

What exactly is the process by which one claims political asylum in, say, Denmark?

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Little Sister Bamm-Bamm, who is an avid concertgoer, was at a Cake concert last night (the band, not the dessert) and ran into our old neighbor Leeza Niemenschmeider (name changed to protect the innocent). The Niemenschmeiders lived behind us in our childhood neighborhood, separated by an alley. They had a strange little house, which was tall and narrow, and always under renovation because Mr. Niemenschmeider would start projects that he never finished. I mean, literally, their kitchen cupboards were being re-faced for, like, twenty-some years.

There were two older Niemenschmeider sisters, slightly older than me, and Leeza, who was LSBB’s age. The oldest, Carrie May, was smart and sensible, and about four feet tall when she reached adulthood. The middle girl, Janice, was tall and dark, and had that “fast girl” sort of look when she reached high-school age. Leeza sort of split the middle, though according to LSBB she hasn’t aged well (more on that later).

Their mother, Hyacinth (Hy for short), was the neighborhood babysitter-slash-busybody. When I was four, Mother Rubble took up a job at the Highlights for Children plant, and I had to go to Hy’s house for half-days til I started kindergarten. The Niemenschmeiders had all sorts of neat things that we didn’t have at our house, like Don’t Break the Ice and Mousetrap, and a sit-n-spin, and Hy always tried to get me to do puzzles and things that were educative, but I was always more intent on watching television – and let me tell you, it was a constant battle. The morning line-up on the local CBS affiliate included Captain Kangaroo, Luci’s Toy Shop, The Lucy Show, and Gomer Pyle USMC, and as I recall there was some intricate set of negotiations to go through – like, I could watch Lucy and Gomer if I didn’t watch BOTH Captain and Toy Shop, unless Toy Shop was doing a live telecast from the State Fair, in which case I could watch the whole line-up. But then I had to take a nap so Hy could watch her “ladies’ programs”.

They also had a beagle that barked ALL THE TIME with NO provocation, who was good only for one thing, to have litters of puppies, by which we got our beloved mongrel Socks, who despite his maternal parentage was a giant sheepdog-looking thing.

Funny and gross story: when Leeza was being born, Carrie May and Janice came to spend the night at our house. Carrie May, despite being smart and sensible, decided to teach me the secret way she had to wake up Janice from a deep sleep, which involved sticking her finger up her own butt and then holding it under Janice’s nose. I don’t make this stuff up. Why do you think I have to change names?

Later, I developed a sort-of crush on Carrie May, and for at least a solid year would “help” her on her afternoon paper route. She and Janice both had routes for the Columbus Dispatch, which was the evening paper when Columbus was a 2-paper town, and their father had built them giant wheeled carts, painted orange, with which to deliver their wares. Janice was mean, so I preferred to aid Carrie May in her rounds (which actually involved me pretty much just walking alongside her, and collecting a quarter at the end for a candy bar or a pair of wax lips).


Carrie May Niemenschmeider

LSBB was also taken to Hy’s house when she came of age, and remembers Hy being quite a bit meaner than I do. Maybe she was harder on girls, being the mother of so many herself.

LSBB also faced the wrath of the Niemenschmeider daughters. Once when Janice was babysitting, and LSBB was tinkling before bedtime and asked if she could sing on the toilet because it was her favorite thing (oh, the preciousness!), Janice said NO!

Janice Niemenschmeider

Leeza was also particularly torturous to our little LSBB. LS took her revenge by pulling a chair out from under her while she was practicing flute (which, I might add, was a legacy instrument, passed down from Big Sister BB to me and bought for a good price by the Niemenschmeiders). This brazen act of defiance resulted in Mother Rubble having to be called home from the Highlights for Children plant in the middle of the day, and I imagine was near the end of our association with the Niemenschmeiders.

Leeza Niemenschmeider

Hy Niemenschmeider remains the best source of gossip from the old neighborhood, as she knows everybody’s business and is quick to report it. Mother Rubble, whenever she passes through town, always drops in on her unannounced.

So, LS happened upon Leeza last night, and she has crow’s feet and a hot boyfriend (I guess the town gossip that she was a lesbian are false), and was dressed like she just finished a leisurely game of tennis at the club, and she was drunk, and apologized for being mean so much. Warms the heart, doesn't it?

Elongated Man's wife is dead, and I don't feel so good myself

I can hardly manage to get through the workday today, I’m all on pins and needles until I can get to the comic book store today and get my grubby paws on Identity Crisis # 5 (of 7). Identity Crisis is a glitzy new ground-breaking series by award-winning mystery novelist Brad Meltzer. It revolves, so far, around the murder of Sue Dibny, the wife of The Elongated Man (The Stretchable Sleuth!), a one-time member of the Justice League of America. A classic locked-room mystery, where the murderer got in through a fool-proof security system, while Elongated Man was off staking out a crime scene.

Oh, and it was the night of his surprise birthday party.

Oh, and his wife was pregnant, and was going to surprise him with the EPT home pregnancy test that showed positive.

Oh, and as it turns out, the grieving Elongated Man and his ex-Justice Leaguer cronies have apparently been harboring a secret for years, the fact that Sue Dibny was raped by the villainous Dr. Light, and in retribution the super-heroes used magic to alter his personality and turn him into a goofball. And in fact, may have turned a whole bunch of other super-villains into goofballs.

It’s a far cry from the days when Lex Luthor would build a super robot worth billions of dollars and then use it to steal a thousand bucks from the First Metropolis Saving and Trust, but there are so many delicious teases so far that I can’t put it down! Like, another super-hero’s wife was attacked but survived. And, like, Dr. Light remembers Batman being at the scene of the rape, but the other super-heroes DON’T remember him being there. And, like, Lois Lane just got a note from the killer indicating that she’s next on the hit list (although my money’s actually on Jimmy Olsen getting it). And we’ve yet to get the results of Sue Dibny’s autopsy, which I’m sure will show that she wasn’t pregnant at all.

Jet is patiently indulgent of my obsession, as long as he doesn’t have to go into a comic book store WITH me, as they are always poorly lit and in disarray, and have disturbing names like “Collector’s Crypt” or “The Closet of Comics”. Which is a shame, because every time I go in, there’s a heated discussion about who would win in a fight between Snuffy Smith and Catwoman, or if Robin has to shave his legs, or if Wonder Woman’s a lesbian, or something of the like.

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Dick Cheney, who incidentally is a war criminal, continues to warn of the imminent danger of nuclear or biological attack to places like Waterloo, Iowa, undoubtedly high on the terrorist “must-strike” list.

Ummmm….where exactly does the “America and the world are safer with Saddam Hussein out of power” part come in?

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I have come to the unhappy conclusion that I’m addicted to sleep aids. But only on Mondays and Tuesdays.

My drug of choice is The Science Channel, which is where they shuffled off all the programming from The Discovery Channel once The Discovery Channel started showing Trading Spaces and Monster Garage 24 hours a day.

During the week, The Science Channel has theme nights, much like The Mickey Mouse Club but with heavier textbooks. Monday is “Prehistoric Planet”, with shows about cavemen and dinosaurs and such, and Tuesday is “Cosmic Odyssey”, with lots of things narrated by Patrick Stewart and William Shatner.

We have an odd cable arrangement, in that we have analog cable in the bedroom and digital in the living room, and The Science Channel only comes on digital. Since Jet disdains having television on while he’s trying to sleep, I have gotten into the habit of leaving halfway through The Daily Show and trotting out to the sofa with my pillow and blanket, finishing the Daily Show and then switching straightaway to The Science Channel. Whereupon I fall into a sound sleep immediately (it often takes me a half hour or more to fall asleep in the bedroom with the television off.) At 2:10 am precisely, Dino comes to check on me (or to try and get me to play, I can’t quite tell ) and I go back to the bedroom and sleep soundly the rest of the night.

So there you have it. I’m a dirty addict. I can abstain Wednesday through Sunday, so far, as the themes are stupid and I tend to lie awake fuming that there isn’t something more intriguing for me to fall asleep to. Am I wrong for being so blatantly indulgent?

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You’ll be gratified to know that all the young, healthy members of Congress have managed to get their flu shots. The CDC considers them at high risk because “they shake hands a lot”.

Turn your head if you’re averse to obscenity.

Assholes.

Thank you.

The Circus is a Wacky World

I long for the day when I can give you hard-hitting, up-to-the-minute Hollywood gossip, but for now you’ll have to settle for a tidbit about the Landers sisters. For those too young to remember the 70’s, or had dates on Saturday nights when Love Boat, Fantasy Island, and BJ and the Bear aired, the Landers Sisters are America’s home-grown answer to the Gabors – that is, a mother and her two daughters who all look roughly the same age, are famous for doing nothing, and parlay that fame-for-nothingness into guest shots on bad TV shows. Between them, they have racked up one each of Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica; three Charlie’s Angels; four Love Boats; and a whopping eight Fantasy Islands.

According to their website, principal production on their new feature film, Circus Island, is finished “on time and on budget!” The film, again according to the website, is “A feature film in which two estranged sisters reunite, and due to life's circumstances, are forced to blend their very different backgrounds and families to live together under the Big Top.” My sources close to the production tell me it also manages to seamlessly incorporate a love triangle and manatee rehabilitation, does indeed take place on a “circus island” (!) , and is staggering in its awfulness. Which means it’s not to be missed. Make your mental notes now, as it most assuredly won’t be distributed to theaters and will probably have to be tracked down, at great trouble and expense to the connoisseur of horrible film.

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I know I told you a couple of weeks ago that I hate Heloise. But I really hate Heloise. This morning’s column had a letter which began, “Dear Heloise, what to do with all those leftover hard-cooked eggs?”

Who the f*&# has leftover hard-cooked eggs??!? Why would you go to the trouble of boiling eggs if you didn’t have an immediate use for them? And even if you’re, say, a working gal on the Adkins diet, and you cook up a bunch of hard-boiled eggs to take in your lunch pail, wouldn’t you, like, only boil a dozen or so? At two a day that would last a week, WHY would you have enough left over that you would need to worry about “what to do” with them?

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I’m about to sound really racist. So if you don’t want your image of me marred, stop reading.

So, I was driving to work this morning. I was cut off three times, by three different people who then proceeded to get in front of me and drive really slow. I was delayed by having to wait for someone to move who had driven out into the middle of an intersection as if there was no traffic coming in either direction, which there was. And I was almost hit by someone who decided to turn left from a lane that was not the left turn lane, even though they had plenty of opportunity to get into the left turn lane.

Here’s the racist part. All of the above were Hispanic. And though this was a particularly bad day, I have noticed that Hispanic drivers are especially aggressive.

So why, is it a cultural thing? Do Hispanic countries have unusually lax driving laws? I’m not trying to sound like an idiot, or be insulting, or say that ONLY Hispanics are bad drivers (and honestly, they’re not bad, just aggressive). I just really want to know if there’s some sociological explanation for my observation, or if it’s all in my head.

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Number 1 in a new ongoing series of untrue things that will make my head blow off if I hear one more time: "Terrorists hate Freedom".

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That’s all for now, keep those cards and letters coming, and be sure to check today’s Found Foto!

Flytown ladies, sing this song, doo-dah, doo-dah

Amidst ongoing investigations with Big Sister Bamm-Bamm, about what sorts of neuroses, bad habits, obsessive thoughts and attention deficit disorders we might have inherited from our parents, I’ve been thinking about, you know, one or two good things that actually may be a part of my genetic make-up. Well, aside from the strong cheekbones and ageless facial skin, that is.

Besides a love of strong drink, I have inherited something from the late Big Ray Rubble that never fails to serve me well in times of distress; the uncanny ability to say anything, to anybody, at any time, no matter how insulting, and have them think that it’s a good-natured joke (which, because I am kind and good, it usually is. But you’d be amazed at what I can get away with.)

Big Ray Rubble who was…errr…well, let’s just say he was a drinker. Which occasionally caused a great deal of duress, especially during those difficult “teen” times. But I’ve been less and less apt to lay blame at anyone’s feet as I’ve gotten older, because…well, I have a pretty sweet life, and anything I want to change, I can, so why sit and grouse about the past?

Anyway, when Big Ray reached retirement age, and having spent his fair share of weekends in the hospital for various and sundry reasons (usually having to do with indigestion that he thought was a heart attack, and actual heart attack, or bottle-cap-sized kidney stones), he took to wearing hospital scrubs. Like, ALL the time. Not to work, of course (though he would’ve if he could’ve), but most evenings and every weekend. Just the basic blue model, no greens, pinks, or iron-on Winnie the Pooh characters, like I’m going to buy for Code Dependent when she graduates from nursing school.

So Big Ray was, one day, heading out the door one summery evening to attend a block party, which was likely organized to celebrate a Flytown reunion, as we lived in an all-Italian neighborhood. Flytown, for the uninformed (which is just about everyone, I suppose), was a Thurber-esque low-income neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, where they shuffled off all the Italian, Irish and black immigrants at the turn of the century and made them live in squalor while they did all the work of building the city. Today it’s better known as the tony “Short North”, but in 1955 it was a run-down slum and it was demolished to make way for Interstate 670, driving all the immigrant families out into the suburbs.

When I was growing up, there were only three non-Italian households on our street in the immediate vicinity; us, Hazel Devitt, and the Turners. Hazel Devitt was a mean old woman, who had a husband that I don’t remember, and after he died she would sit on her front porch and spray soapy water in the eyes of any curious dogs that would come near her porch. When I came of “age” (i.e. old enough to not chop my toes off with the mower), Big Ray made me mow her grass, for which I would occasionally, but not always, receive a shiny quarter.

The Turners were a trashy hillbilly family that lived across the street. And by hillbilly, I mean the hardcore Jed Clampett variety. They had one normal child, Lonnie, who had a mullet but otherwise was peaceful and quietly went about his business. Their other son, Danny, was crazy as a loon, and was often the cause of police activity on our block, and their daughter was the town tramp.

The rest of the neighborhood was composed of immigrant or first-generation Italian-Americans, and since our family was gregarious and beloved by all, we got invited to big Italian family buffets, and Flytown reunion picnics, and the like. And that’s how Big Ray came to be drunk at a block party.

So, Big Ray was stumbling around, and tripped or something (I don’t know, I wasn’t actually there), and busted his head open on the side of a barbecue grill, and the squad was called, and hauled him off to Riverside Methodist Hospital, where he sat and sat, I imagine. But because he was dressed all in medical scrubs, he apparently was believed by some to be an actual doctor.

So, by and by this black woman was sitting beside him, and (to hear Big Ray tell it), she was moanin’ and fussin’. So he asked her what was wrong.

“Oh, doctor,” says she, “my foot is in terrible pain!”

Never one to pass by a chance to put someone on, Big Ray had her plop her foot up on his lap so he could take a look at it. Apparently she was oblivious to the fact that he had a GIANT GASH ON THE SIDE OF HIS HEAD. But oh well.

So he pokes and prods around on her foot for a few minutes, and then says, “Ah, I see your problem.”

“What is it, doctor?”

“You’ve got gangrene, it’s turned your foot black!”

And that’s the story of Big Ray, and the Flytown picnic, and the barbecue. It never fails to get a laugh at parties, try it and see!

Meanwhile, be sure and check my new page, Found Fotos.

Master(de)bating: the climax

How nice that the Republican party has finally taken it upon themselves to stand up for the rights and dignity of gay people….well, ONE gay person, who happens to be Dick Cheney’s daughter. One might wonder where their outrage was when Pat Robertson blamed 9-11 on gay people. Or when Rick Santorum compared homosexuality to polygamy, bigamy, adultery, and incest. Or when Alan Keyes specifically called Mary Cheney a “selfish hedonist”. But, there you have it. At least they’ve found their compassion at last.

Listen, Mary Cheney RUNS HER FATHER’S CAMPAIGN. She is actively supporting a platform that, in order to get Bush re-elected, would forever make her existing relationship constitutionally invalid. She deserves whatever she gets, which could be a lot worse than having John Kerry use her as a illustration of someone being who they were born to be. The only reason Dick and Lynne and other Republicans are outraged by Kerry’s comments during the last debate is because they find homosexuality something to be ashamed of, which it is not. So shut up already. The GOP must know it’s in trouble if THIS is all they have to make noise about.

And speaking of the debate…did anyone else notice the spittle at the corner of George Bush’s mouth for, like, the whole first half hour? Or how he had that stupid plastered-on grin the whole time? Someone must have really drummed it into his head not to grimace. Or how he looked so pleased with himself every time he completed a sentence? Or how he kept pausing for laughs and got only cricket chirps? I’m not entirely enthralled with Kerry, still, but he does look a lot more composed and Presidential than Bush ever could. And I’m NOT a Johnny-come-lately, I ALWAYS disliked Bush, and my primary motivation for that dislike is that he just doesn’t come across as intelligent. Not lacking-common-sense unintelligent, I mean just dumb. You can see it in his eyes, when he’s not squinting. Anyway, after the debates, I’m much more willing to vote for Kerry because he’s Kerry, instead of because he’s not Bush. I guess we’ll see.

I really got mad when Bush turned a question about unemployment and started talking about “No Child Left Behind” and his retarded “Jobs for the 21st Century” nonsense.

First of all, No Child Left Behind….you DO know that teachers hate it, right? Not because of getting money taken away from their schools, but because now they can’t teach children how to think, they have to teach them how to answer test questions, which is very different. And you DO know that there is no allowance made for, say, children with special needs or children who are learning English as a second language? Those children’s test scores are added into the general school population, and if that brings the mean result down, then the school loses funding, and the children can not-learn with even fewer resources.

And this jobs business…look, if someone is 50 years old, with a college degree, and their job is outsourced, and they have a family to feed, and they are LUCKY enough to find a temp job that pays, say, ten dollars an hour, and maybe a little Wal-Mart greeter job on the side, just so they can continue to feed their families and pay their bills, they’re not going to have the time or inclination to attend classes at a community college so that they can become a home theater repairman making about the same crappy wage as they are already making. Sheesh. Nothing against community colleges, mind you. It’s where I met my darling Jet. But you get the point. I think we should have a civil war, really I do, and before you can hold office you have to take a test, administered by, say, Ben Stein or Helen Thomas, and if you don’t have any common sense you aren’t allowed to hold office. Think it’ll fly?

It's raining shallow idiots

Sorry to be gone so long, dearests, but it was a four day weekend for me, and since I do all my best writing at work, while avoiding actually working, there seemed to be no time to jot down observations of the world. I didn’t you all cared so much. Besides, as you may have gathered from my last post, I was a trifle melancholic, but I’ve since decided to buck up and just let the melancholia be there if it must, and go on about my business. I’ve recently been intrigued by the Meyers-Briggs Personality test, and am convinced that my melancholy comes along because I don’t put enough faith in my inborn preferences. Like, I’ll be going along all happy and fine, but suddenly think, for whatever reason, that the things that do make me happy shouldn’t make me happy, and so I get the idea in my head that some big changes need to be made, when actually all I need to do is say “Yeah, such-and-such does make me happy, and that’s all right.”

For the interested, I test as INTP, but I think I’m really INFP, and test as T because I think that’s what I’m supposed to do.

Jet thinks he’s an ENFJ, which is, you’ll realize if you’re in the know, as perfect match as can be for an INFP.

A pleasant weekend was had by all, with Jet doing a little house beautification while I rehearsed, and then us packing up Dino and Floozy Flingland and taking a jaunt about the countryside, where we happened upon the Apple Butter Festival in scenic Berkley Springs, WV. The Festival was a little new-agey for our tastes, but Floozy found some great bargains, and we were all encouraged to return in a couple of weeks when the crowds were less oppressive.

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I nearly came to blows with an ugly, ugly woman last night while walking Dino, the cutest, most precious dog ever to walk the Earth. By ugly I mean ugly on the inside, where it counts, though she was no looker, and didn’t help matters that she hadn’t washed her hair in a while and was wearing what looked to be an Apache buckskin.

So I’m walking Dino, who is precious, and little, and had already done her dainty “business” for the evening, which I was dutifully carrying in a plastic bag until it could be disposed of properly. She stopped in someone’s yard, as she is wont to do, to “tinkle”, which certainly does no harm to anyone. Just as she squatted to do the deed, a car pulled up behind to park along the curb, so I hustled her out of the way, not even giving her time to complete her deed.

So on we walk, and suddenly from behind, I hear “Um, excuse me, sir, would you come back and clean up your dog’s crap out of my yard?” You will get the right impression if you go look in a mirror, scrunch up your face until it’s as ugly as possible, and then try to say the above while making your voice sound like Fran Drescher’s, only more annoying.

“It’s okay,” I called in a friendly, genial, neighborly tone, because I am friendly, genial, and neighborly in nearly every situation one could imagine. “She was just peeing!”

“Um, no, there are lumps in my yard.” (Continue to scrunch your face up. Pretend you are Fran Drescher, only younger and stupider, but trying to sound smart and mature.)

So I go over to see a turd the size of a summer squash, which if it HAD come from Dino, would have comprised about three-quarters of her total body mass.

“Do you really think this came out of HER?” I asked, incredulous but still friendly.

The response was a glare not only from her, but from her lichen-covered pinch-faced hangers-on who had crawled from her Vega Blowabout like potato bugs from under a stone.

“Well, it’s not hers, but I’ll clean it up for you anyway,” I said, only allowing a hint of sarcasm to slip through, so as to prove that I was their better in every way.

“Thank you,” (you’ll really have to scrunch your face up for this one), “and stop letting your rotten dog crap in my yard.”

Sounds like someone’s bucking for a fiery bag of dog shit on their front stoop on Hallowe’en night, hmmm?

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Monday evening I had occasion to be strolling the National Mall, biding my time before going to a rehearsal for a gig at the National Gallery of Art, when I was approached by two swarthy-looking types carrying armloads of video equipment. Imagine my delight when they turned out to be a news team from the Voice of America Indian division (those of you in the know about my true identity will recall my long-standing love of Indian culture – subcontinent, not Native American – which dates all the way back to age five when I caught chicken pocks from Chithra Stephens, and was recently reinforced by memorizing all the songs from Lagaan in order to get free muffins at Dunkin Donuts). I then proceeded to be interviewed, on camera, about what I felt was the most important issue in the upcoming election. I said something along the lines of “congenial relations with our allies”, and I said it several times, because the interviewer wanted to do everything in one take, and kept messing up when he turned to the camera, and said (in Hindi), “Blah blah blah Washington blah blah blah blah Teenage Bamm-Bamm blah blah blah blah.”

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Little Sister Bamm-Bamm almost crawled through the telephone and did back-flips in order to get me to watch Manhunt: The Search for America's Most Gorgeous Male Model, which I did, if only to remind myself why I don’t watch reality television. The premise, apparently, is to take a group of all-American fellows, set them up in a fast, hip lifestyle, and then systematically watch as they are overcome by their own vapidity until only one remains, to become America’s next male supermodel.

Oh, and one of the contestants is a real model, planted in the group as a spy. (hint: It’s Kevin P.)

Oh, and one of them is secretly gay (hint: there’s more than one. And it’s no secret.)

The problem, of course is that there ARE no male super models, because male models are accessories for female models. Set dressing, if you will.

Manhunt airs on Bravo, home of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which seems to be making a grab for gay viewers. I wonder if they have any gay people on staff, or at least, any gay people that don’t live in New York City and think that the pinnacle of social prominence is gaining admittance to that week’s hot club. Their programming choices seem to be on a par with BET suddenly deciding to show Amos and Andy reruns and Stepin Fetchit movie marathons.

In all fairness, perhaps I'm too hasty in assuming that a show featuring half-naked men is targeting gay men. Little Sister Bamm-Bamm and her straight gal friends could not contain their delight. They were giggling like schoolgirls pouring over the latest Tiger Beat.

The show is apparently hosted by Carmen Electra, although she barely appeared in the premier episode. A perfect choice, really. I imagine the production meeting went something like this:

Producer 1: “Hey, who can we get to host Manhunt: The Search for America's Most Gorgeous Male Model ?”

Producer 2: “Most gorgeous, huh? Hey, how about Carmen Electra, who married Dennis Rodman and Dave Navarro, the TWO UGLIEST MEN ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH?”

The big obstacle to overcome in the first episode was for the guys to strip down to their underwear and skydive…sort of. The real skydiving was done by actual skydivers, each of whom had one of the semi-nude models strapped to their chest. (One can only imagine the glee in the skydiver’s HQ when the duty roster was announced…”okay, guys, today we have safety training, plane maintenance, and then all of you will have a semi-nude idiot strapped to your chest for a jump.”) One by one we were treated to footage of each lad screaming like a girl on their descent, then high-fiving each other once they were safely on the ground. Riveting.

Oh, and….I KNOW they were skydiving, and I KNOW it was probably cold way up in the air like that…but these boys have NO reason to be prancing around in their underwear, if you get my drift. At least shove a sock in there, like real models do.

Once on the ground, they are harangued by Bruce Hulse, self-described as America’s first male supermodel. Again we are treated to a riveting few minutes of Mr. Hulse making the boys emote for him, and apparently there are only three emotions necessary for being a male model – “seductive”, “your dog just died”, and “Blue Steel”, whatever the f*&% THAT is. Frankly, they all three look like “I just crapped my pants and it really smells”, but oh well.

I rate reality shows by how many of the contestants I would want to invite to a dinner party, and so I give Manhunt a 2, (2 points higher than The Apprentice!) for Seth and Jason. Yes, the Christian and the redneck. Just to show you how open-minded I can be.

But only one carry-on, please

So, not only does the “do not fly” list only contain one-third of CONFIRMED terrorists, but as of today it’s legal to carry a gun inside Dulles and Reagan National Airports.

Reagan National, recall, is where the terrorists who crashed into the Pentagon left from.

Mmmmm….OK.

I’m CERTAIN that’s exactly what the founding fathers had in mind with the second amendment.

If you’re coming to see me, drive.

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Have beans changed, or have I? Being poverty-stricken, Jet and I have been eating a lot of beans lately, and the most curious thing has occurred – they do NOT make us gassy! Anyone who knows my true identity will tell you that WATER can make me gassy. So what’s up? Are commercially canned beans being secretly genetically engineered to not make a person fart? Is such a thing advisable? I mean, really – beans don’t taste THAT good, what could be the fun in eating them if not for the rush of exhilaration at scaring the dog with a loud noise every now and again, not to mention the glee of farting in bed and pulling the covers up around Jet’s head real quick? Has anyone else noticed this, or am I going crazy again?

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Jet and I, having just overcome about eight months of depression when we finished our terminal degrees and realized that we would no longer have life goals and the steps to accomplish them handed to us on a silver platter, now find ourselves wondering if this is it? You know, go to work, make money, come home, spend money (actually, the spend part has eluded us thus far, as we’re still catching up from a summer of not having two jobs apiece, which we need in order to pay all the bills). Is this normal, ex-academes? Should we keep searching for meaning, or just resign ourselves to a life of we-don’t-know-quite-what?

Succor, please. That is all.

The Mane Event (ha ha, get it?)

Tongues are wagging since yesterday’s post, apparently, desirous of knowing exactly what was said in the reply to my letter to William Shatner, regarding his chest hair. To recap: I wrote to William Shatner when I was twelve, demanding to know why he had chest hair in TJ Hooker and not in Star Trek (incidentally, I say TJ Hooker when I tell the story, but I don’t think it actually WAS TJ Hooker when I first noticed the change; I think it was actually Kingdom of the Spiders, a terrifically horrible ABC Movie of the Week.) I have no idea why I was obsessed with chest hair at such a tender age, but it was around this same time that I meticulously drew chest hair on my Six Million Dollar Man doll with a felt-tip pen, carefully studying episodes to make sure I got the pattern just right, and I can recall my delight when 7th-grade Health teacher Rick Bond declared that most men have some chest hair.

At any rate, I did receive a reply, and while I would give anything to still have it (think of the price I could get on eBay!) it has, alas, been lost to the ravages of time. The letterhead was emblazoned with the ostentatious logo of his then-official fan club, “The William Shatner Fellowship”. The letter was signed not by Bill himself, but by a secretary or publicist or somesuch. To paraphrase, the letter said something to the effect of “Mr Shatner has indeed always had hair on his chest, but the NBC censors of the late sixties felt that a smooth chest presented a more all-American image. Thank you for your interest.”

Writing this just now, I am appalled that anyone could think that a bare chest is more “American” than a hairy one. Why, what could be MORE wholesome or natural than a torso covered in thick, luxuriant hair? Our modern culture has unfortunately become fixated on reshaping oneself to meet some arbitrary standard of beauty that is dictated by the media. Thus, the “ideal” male form has been established for us all by silly twits who live in New York City, wear wrinkled, untucked shirts, and spread their gospel of inconsequence on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”.

Anyone who puts any thought into it – and trust me, I’ve put a LOT of thought into it - will realize that men with body hair are more sexy, appear more primal and aggressive, and markedly more mysterious than those without body hair. Therefore, they are also decidedly less feminine.

For men without natural chest hair I feel only pity. For men who have chest hair but voluntarily rid themselves of it, I have nothing but pure contempt. As Little Sister Bamm-Bamm so accurately observes, “There’s nothing sicker on a man than chest stubble, except maybe arm stubble. Chest hair is a sign of verility, manliness, and overall sexiness. The upkeep alone on shaving has got to be ridiculous and time consuming. If you're THAT hairy, on the back and such, then you may have the back waxed, but n'more.” (Personally, I'm even against back waxing. Though I've no need for the barbaric procedure myself, Jet Screamer earned his surname a thousand times over last time he tried it. Yeeeeowch!)

The only thing sillier than a man who rids himself completely of body hair is the peculiar South Beach-inspired custom of keeping a perpetual five o’clock chest shadow, as if you shaved yourself head-to-toe YESTERDAY, but just couldn’t be bothered TODAY.

Science can tell us little about the purpose of body hair – or perhaps more accurately, science can’t tell us why we don’t have MORE hair. As a trip to the local zoo will demonstrate, humans are the only primates NOT covered in hair, and in fact, are among only a handful of mammals, period, who are not hyper-hirsute. Of those mammals (whales, manatees, etc) we are the only ones whose hairlessness does not seem to be an evolutionary result of our environment, leading some scientists to postulate that man has recently been an aquatic creature and has only lately returned to land.

Others believe that man lost his hair in order to better regulate body temperature, but go spend a night naked on the African Veldt and tell me how well THAT works. Or, perhaps, we lost our hair to better protect ourselves from ticks and lice…unfortunately leaving us even more vulnerable to a whole host of OTHER parasites, as well as to the negative effects of ultraviolet radiation.

So what I suggest, scientists, is a comprehensive study of chest hair the world over, tracking both genetic and sociological trends. I will volunteer to be a researcher.

Finally, as an exercise in how busy we can keep ourselves at work WITHOUT actually working, Littlle Sister Bamm-Bamm and I have compiled our top ten lists of celebrities who are brave enough to display themselves in all their natural splendor.

Little Sister Bamm-Bamm’s list (italicized commentary is mine)

10. Rick Springfield (I argued with this, since I couldn’t find any pictures of him with more than three hairs. But I allowed it, as he starred on a cartoon show that only I remember, Mission Magic)

9. Paul Stanley (from Kiss. At least she didn't say Gene Simmons.)

8. David Lee Roth (Hasn’t aged well, but he was all right in his day)

7.Billy Bob Thornton (Ewwww. But it gives me a chance to add this link, in which he proves conclusively that he is a booze-addled kook)

6. Chris Noth (???? Less hair than Rick Springfield, AND he’s smarmy.)

5. JR Reed (lead singer of Trainwreck- see the archives for my review!)

4. Barry Williams (yes, Greg Brady, and who could argue?)

3. Bret Michaels (from Poison – I’m sure I knew who he was at one time, but am having trouble placing him)

2. Jeremy Piven (he was on my short list, but has recently been shaving, to my chagrin)

1. Alec Baldwin (see below)

My list:

10. Ed Harris (rent Swing Shift, and you’ll see more than his chest!)

9. William Holden (I’m ready for MY close-up, TOO, Mr. DeMille!)

8. Gil Gerard (don’t forget, The Complete Buck Rogers coming to DVD next month!)

7. Tom Selleck (so he’s homophobic. Nobody’s perfect.)

6. Stephen Collins (7th Heaven indeed. I'd bump him up to 3rd or 4th heaven)

5. Hugh Jackman (And what a range – Wolverine to Peter Allen in the same year!)

4. Alec Baldwin (you see, Little Sister Bamm-Bamm, we don’t have to argue about EVERYTHING)

3. Aldo Ray (LSB-B doesn’t even know who he is. I suggest she rent God’s Little Acre right away, with the added bonus of seeing Michael Landon play a retarded albino, and Tina Louise NOT playing Ginger)

2. Patrick Warburton (LSBB is very chagrined she forgot him for her list)

1. Sean Connery (So I lied, someone IS perfect. I don’t care HOW old he gets or HOW misogynistic he seems in interviews.)

So, there you have it. Commentary and additions will be accepted for a limited time only.

You know how bitchy fags can be

Sometimes I really hate gay people. As most of you probably know, DC secured the imminent move of the Montreal Expos by promising to build them a brand-new stadium on the Anacostia River, even though RFK Stadium is perfectly good enough, and in fact is surrounded by shoddy housing and crumbling school buildings that would be much better served by the millions of dollars that will be spent to build a new stadium.

The problem? “Leaders of the gay community” are upset that the new stadium will displace a strip mall filled with gay strip clubs and x-rated movie theaters.

First problem…there is no “gay community”. Gay people exist in every culture, every socio-economic strata, everywhere in the world. To imply that there is a unified “gay community”, well-organized enough to have “leaders”, does nothing but give credence to the fundamentalist nonsense that we’re hell-bent on overturning society and recruiting young people to our “lifestyle”.

Second problem….IT’S STRIP CLUBS AND ADULT THEATERS, IN THE MIDDLE OF A SLUM. If THIS is the best the “gay community” can produce as the self-described “homosexual entertainment district”, I think we need a new press agent.

Big Sister Bamm-Bamm called last night to tell us to be sure and watch Boston Legal, which we watched in the comfort of our just-completed Neo-Persian Market decorated bedroom, and we liked it. (Well, I liked it…Jet fell asleep). As many of you know, I am a longtime fan of William Shatner’s, and will likely watch anything he is in, even if it’s crap, which it often is. Many of you will recall that I wrote a letter to Bill when I was a pre-teen, asking why he had chest hair on TJ Hooker and not on Star Trek – and received a reply. A class act, that Shatner. Anyway, I may just have to start watching it on a regular basis – besides Shat, there’s a hot guy, a British woman, and James Spader, who says the sorts of things I think I’d like to say, if I could think quicker on my feet. Plus fellow Star Trek alum Rene Auberjonois, Christopher Guest-film fixture John Michael Higgins, and Sharon Lawrence. And you know how I love character actors!

Speaking of character actors, Little Sister Bamm-Bamm just spoke with Cynthia Rhodes, wife of songwriter-musician Richard Marx, and co-star of the only film I’ve seven times in the theater, Dirty Dancing. We then spent gleeful moments emailing back-and-forth about our favorite Richard Marx/Cynthia Rhodes memories, like when Jet and I sang “Right Here Waiting For You” in the Daytona Beach Community College Show Choir, and used sign language for choreography, or when I saw Richard Marx in concert at Muskingum College, and his bassist was the guy that played Jason on The Waltons, or when a close associate of Little Sister’s had to miss a Richard Marx concert to get her appendix out. Ah, memories. I myself have been recently obsessed with finding a “Best Of Animotion” cd, the mid-80’s band that was fronted, briefly, by Cynthia Rhodes. I of course cannot divulge Little Sister’s place of employ, but I WILL tell you that the Marx’s are headed for 5 days of train travel in Italy, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Be on the lookout!

After DAYS of anticipation, I finally got my hands on the Star Wars trilogy DVDs. I pulled the old bait-and-switch on Jet while we were shopping for house wares at Target. I pretend I want to buy something horrible, like Knight Rider Season One, and when it turns out I REALLY want something not-so-horrible, like Star Wars, I can usually get away with it. You know, sort of like, “Hey folks, I’m dying of cancer. Just kidding, I don’t really have cancer, I’m just gay”. Works every time.

I’ve only watched Episode IV, A New Hope, so far. There seems to be quite a hubbub about all the changes George Lucas continues to make to these films. Frankly, I’m less concerned with him changing these films than I am with him making prequels that have, so far, SUCKED, but there you go. Most of the changes seem to involve cluttering up the background with CGI creatures doing slapstick visual humor that went out of style about the time of the advent of sound.

Another revelation: despite being in many of my favorite films, Harrison Ford is a TERRIBLE actor. Guess you CAN succeed on looks after all.

In other DVD news, I want you all to be on the lookout next week for a wholly unexpected DVD release, two volumes of ABC After School Specials from the glorious 1970’s, starring the likes of Eve Plumb, Kristy McNichol, and Melissa Sue Anderson. Unforgettable classics like Sara’s Summer of the Swans, Beat the Turtle Dream, Dear Lovey Heart, Francesca Baby, and more! For those of you too young to remember, I can’t emphasize enough the part these short films played in making sure we all stayed on the straight and narrow. The best part? The DVD’s come packed in facsimiles of the most important school-supply innovation since the slide rule, the Trapper Keeper. Get buying!

The art of making a living

As I and many of my close associates are artists who are forced by the ways of the world to do something else to pay the bills, we often find ourselves frustrated and much put-upon by the world of business, which we don't understand because we are gentle, artistic souls which believe in our heart of hearts that the world should always be beautiful and fair, which it isn't.

So, occasionally we call upon each other for reminders that it is, indeed, the world that is crazy and not us.

Here, a humble missive on some rules of the business world from a friend who never fails to give us succor in our darkest hours (it was written to Jet Screamer, scant moments ago, but I've stolen it for public dissemination. Only slightly edited, to protect the identity of its creator):

1. Never stop looking for jobs until you have signed a hiring letter.

2. Promotions and management are frequently completely unfair.

3. You may be doing the same work (or more) of equal or greater complication as your supervisor, but you will get paid 1/2 as much to do it because of your job title. And, forget about getting promoted about people doing less than you do. Politics rules - as do arbitrary management decisions.

4. Never believe you are getting a job promotion until you see the new paycheck.

5. Education only matters to a point. There are geniuses out there in the workforce with an Associate's Degree and morons with doctorates. Often, having a degree your boss doesn't have makes you seem like a threat to him/her. What matters is your experience, your job title, and how much you were being paid at your last job. Oh, and how you look and who you know. Stupid, but true.

6. Getting adequate appreciation for your work in an office is pretty much as difficult as getting appreciation as a musician. People suck in an office as much as in a concert hall. The difference is, you still get a steady paycheck without the appreciation in an office.

7. Your boss is the most typical of morons out there in the workforce.

8. But, most importantly, if you are looking for validation in your job (of yourself, of your work), you will usually be disappointed. The only way to feel validated in your job is to love what you are doing at your job and expect nothing but your paycheck in return. If you have a time where you get that extra encouragement and appreciation - APPRECIATE IT! It won't last forever.

9. Nobody will think to miss you until you're gone. And they'll be shocked when you give notice. They haven't thought of leaving their little world. Why should you?

Sucks dude. It's just so typical.

Master(de)bating

Well, I don’t know why, but I feel terrific today. This despite the fact that Jet Screamer, Dino and I were all awake and chipper at 4 am, for no good reason. Normally it would be linked to anxiety, but in this case we seem just to have spontaneously woken up, after not enough sleep, feeling great. We watched a fitness machine infomercial, and an episode of “I Dream of Jeannie”, which was unfortunately the first part of a two-part episode so I’m going to have to get up at four tomorrow morning as well.

I feel much better today about the possibility of voting for John Kerry, after his performance at the “debate” last night (which was in no way a debate, but we all knew that).

The University of Miami is, of course, one of my many Alma Maters, and I hope the candidates got a chance to take a stroll down by the lake, which this time of year smells like rotting corpses covered in feces and limberger cheese. I had my own brush with Presidential politics, sort of, when I sang the Fight Song at my graduation ceremonies in 1998, where President Bush ’41 and his lovely wife Bar gave thinly-veiled stump speeches for gubernatorial candidate Jeb – errr, I mean, commencement addresses. This was in the heady days before 9/11, and I was unfortunately misinformed about where to meet in order to ascend the dais with the rest of the Presidential party. At the very last instant I was rushed into line beside Bar, no asking for my credentials, no frisking to see what I might have concealed under my gown – ah, those were the days!

Just the other day I was talking with Dr. Proctor, Dino’s vet and father of one of Jet Screamer’s voice students, and we both agreed that we couldn’t vote for Bush, but didn’t want to vote for Kerry. But I think he handled himself all right last, clarified some things that needed it, and America seems to agree. I find I don’t really care so much anymore if he flip-flops. In the words of Walt Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I’ve been listening to conservative pundit Michael Graham this morning, and am delighted to hear the poor Republicans calling in to vent their disappointment in the President. The best Mr. Graham can say in his defense is that he “didn’t screw up”.

I’m happy to say the President met every expectation I had – lots of slouching, blank stares, uncomfortable silences, and petulant repetitions of “The world is better off without Saddam Hussein” (He may as well have stomped his feet. A couple of times he looked like Spanky on “Our Gang” having a conniption fit). He even threw in the Freudian slip of saying “Saddam Hussein” when he was really talking about Osama bin Laden. Having expected all of this, there’s only ONE thing that still manages to get under my skin….


THE FOLLOWING MAY CONTAIN LANGUAGE UNSUITABLE FOR SOME VIEWERS


Condoleeza, or someone, can you take some fucking initiative and FUCKING TEACH HIM HOW TO SAY “NUCLEAR”? He’s the FUCKING LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD. It’s NU-CLE-AR, it’s pronounced EXACTLY the way it’s spelled, NOTHING could be easier. Moron.

And when you’ve accomplished that, you can take a stab at “peninsula”, “Vladimir”, and “Mullah”.

My only advice to Kerry is to not try and smile so much. You’ll NEVER look better than your dreamy Vice President, so stop trying. When you smile, you look a bit like my beloved mother when the world is falling apart and she’s trying to put on a brave face so the children won’t know anything’s wrong. Just stay stoic-looking, it’s more Presidential.

In other news, Justice Antonin Scalia, an arch-conservative, thinks sex orgies will cure society’s ills. Nice.

I got nothin', so I'll just rant

Hey, Katie Couric, welcome back from your vacation! Here’s a tip, sweetie…if you want to allay suspicions that there’s a “liberal bias” in the media, it’s probably best NOT to begin your interview with Republican strategist Mary Matalin with the question, “So how worried ARE you about tomorrow night’s debate?” Maybe something more along the lines of asking how Ms. Matalin feels, rather than trying to put words in her mouth, which is a favorite tack of your fellow idiot, Sean Hannity.

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Hey, Mary Matalin – STOP HAVING PLASTIC SURGERY. Your eyes are on opposite sides of your head, you look like an anime drawing. For God’s sake, grow old gracefully. You’re not even THAT old. Trust me, there’s only one thing that looks worse than a woman who’s had plastic surgery, and that’s a man who’s had plastic surgery. Luckily, I and my kin are blessed with plump faces and strong cheekbones, we will always look fifteen years younger than we really are, and that’s no joke!

* * * * * * * * * * * * *
So, tomorrow’s the big debate, that may very well be a key deciding factor in the future of our nation…with that in mind, can’t we PLEASE find something more substantive to talk about than the color of John Kerry’s skin? Honestly, if that’s the worst the Republicans can do, then they really have nothin’, and they know it.

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There are lots of things DC needs, like better schools, and better roads, and representation in Congress, and Marion Barry run out of town. They do NOT need a baseball team and a forty-million dollar stadium plunked down in the middle of a slum, that no one will be able to get to because the Metro sucks and the traffic gridlock will be impassable. So shut up already about the baseball team. Sports suck.

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Attention, all men who are on the approved substitute list for the Washington National Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys: if someone calls you and asks you to sub for them, answer your goddamn phone messages. And if someone calls you AND emails you, and then calls you AGAIN, answer SOMETHING. And if someone secures your services and trusts you to be there the next day, GO. And if you don’t go, CALL SOMEONE AND TELL THEM YOU”RE NOT GOING. Idiots. I am petty and vindictive, and I have all your names. You’ve been warned.

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5 Comics that are stupid and should stop being printed in the newspaper:

Beetle Bailey – Hey, Mort Walker , next time you want to “spice up” the strip, instead of adding a new racial stereotype character, why not ship Beetle off to Iraq?

Family Circus – I’ve just gotten hold of Bil Keane’s Monthly Planner. Here’s what it says:

Sunday strip ideas:

Oct 3- Drawn by 7-year old Billy
Oct 10 – Not Me/Ida Know
Oct 17 – Dead Grampa
Oct 24 – Trail of dotted lines around the neighborhood
Oct 31 – All the kids talk at once

November – repeat

Cathy – too many damn words.

Zippy the Pinhead – I’m smart and I love pop culture, and even I don’t know what the hell drugs this guy’s on.

Garfield – Okay, he likes to eat. I get it.

Honorable mention: Heloise – if you need to save money so badly that you will cut up old towels in order to make washcloths, or hoard old cardboard paper towel rollers so you have a place to store your hair scrunchies, THEN have the time to WRITE A LETTER ABOUT IT, then you have enough time on your hands to get a second job and alleviate your money woes.

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READER MAIL: Okay, I don’t have any. I DO have lots of comments from known associates, as well as many anonymous posts (I’m certain it’s all the same person, but I delude myself into believing that each “anonymous” post is from a new reader). Rest assured, if you DO write me a letter that invites response, you’ll get one, and it will be pithy.

Yes, we have second bananas, Part II

3. Lok, Valley of the Dinosaurs



Okay, I may lose some of you with the next two. Valley of the Dinosaurs has been largely ignored, having premiered the same magical autumn as the more popular and much-beloved Land of the Lost. But, since VotD premiered fully a month before LotL, I have to give my Valley peeps credit for launching a life-long love of dinosaurs, valleys, and buff young cavemen wearing loincloths.

The show revolves around the Butler family, who are rafting down the Amazon River (maybe not the most family-friendly vacation spot) and are sucked down into a whirlpool. They end up in a prehistoric land and are befriended by a caveman family, and the Butler family spends the rest of the series condescendingly teaching the brutish savages how to make useful things, like soap, fishing rods and espresso machines.

Lok was the buff young son of the cave family, who had a thing for the Butler’s similarly-aged daughter (who looked remarkably like a young Susan Dey). Contrary to cartoon custom of the day, the teenage characters were not the sole focus of the show. The comedy bits were given to the Butler’s dog and the cave family’s pet (!) stegosaurus, and the problem solving was always done by father Butler (except on the rare occasion when the producers threw a bone to the cave father, in the interest of showing that cavemen aren’t always backward morons). So Lok and his gal-pal did a lot of standing around looking pretty.

The cards pictured above were found in packages of Wonder Bread, and though I remember having the cards, I don’t remember how I acquired them, as Wonder Bread was far too fancy to have ever been seen at the Rubble household. Store brand was good enough for us! Perhaps I stole them from one of my little friends. Around the same time, I stole a pack of Viewmaster slides from the Big Bear, with pictures from Land of the Lost (although I had no Viewmaster to view them with). Mother Rubble discovered the crime, and dragged me back to the store to confess, assuring me that there was nothing she could do if they decided to take me to jail. And you see, I’ve been a good boy ever since!

2. Clarabelle Cow, Walt Disney Cartoons



So low on the totem pole, she even ranks below the shrewish Daisy Duck and Johnny-come lately Gyro Gearloose. On a recent trip to Disney World, Jet Screamer spent many a patient hour waiting for me to scour a gift shop for a single image of my beloved Clarabelle, to little avail (I did buy the only thing they had, a mini-milk pail filled with packets of coffee creamer. I cherish it to this day).

Clarabelle, like yours truly, is an odd mixture of liberated views and traditional values. She is always seen in a modest, floor-length skirt, and one can only imagine the undergarments necessary to conceal a full rack of udders. The more liberated Daisy resents how Clarabelle is satisfied to spend her time guzzling soda-pop with her beau, Horace Horsecollar, and not in a more original pursuit.

On the other hand, her inter-species romances show a remarkably forward-thinking worldview. She has apparently been engaged to the aforementioned Horace, a horse, for about sixty years. (These things happen. I had an uncle who was “engaged” to his girlfriend for that long. They ended their days living in sin.) Clarabelle also spent much of the 1960’s dating Goofy, and who knows what the hell HE is.

Ignored by Americans since Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, Clarabelle (like David Hasselhoff) has enjoyed huge success in Europe. Next time you’re at a fancy cocktail party with Europeans, bring up her name and see if their eyes don’t just light up with delight! Here’s a translation guide:

German: Klarabella Kuh
Danish: Nora Malkeko
Finnish: Heluna Ammu
French: Clarabelle
Italian: Clarabella
Dutch: Clarabella Koe
Norwegian: Klara Ku
Swedish: Klarabella Ko

And now, the moment you’ve all been breathlessly awaiting……

1. Ethel Mertz, I Love Lucy




Ethel, we love you. Who couldn’t? While I grew up knowing only of the far less frumpy “Viv” on The Lucy Show (which I would watch in carefully planned rotation with Captain Kangaroo, Luci’s Toy Shop and Gomer Pyle, USMC, against my day-care provider’s better judgement), as an adult I came to appreciate Vivian Vance’s energentic performance as Ethel, Lucy and Ricky’s ex-Vaudevillian landlady.

And surely, there has not been a more put-upon actress than Ms. Vance, has there? Not only was she paired with an old druink twenty-five years her senior (William Frawley, who himself is a great performer, though he can barely contain the shakes from episode to episode), but she was contractually obligated to remain at all times fifteen pounds heavier than Lucille Ball, so as never to appear too glamorous. And yet, she remained true to Lucy the rest of her days. Brings a tear to me eye.

Vivian got her big break understudying for Ethel Merman in “Anything Goes”, and was signed by Desi Arnaz to play America's archetypal wacky neighbor. She was rewarded by becoming the first winner of a supporting actress Emmy in history.

Ethel was always willing to risk life, limb, and Fred’s wrath by helping Lucy in one of her schemes, which always involved tricking Ricky in order to get Lucy 1) more money, or 2) on stage, even though Ethel was clearly the poorer of the two, as well as the more talented (at least within the conceit of the show). So loyal was Ethel that she talked her skinflint husband into accompanying the Ricardos to Hollywood, Europe, and moving with them to Connecticut to live on a chicken farm. Only one time did Ethel refuse to help, and luckily Betty Hutton was guest starring that day and was able to fill in. (Lucy exclaimed, “Betty, you’re just what I’ve always dreamed of – Ethel Mertz with money!”)

Ethel, with or without money, the underdogs of the world salute you. Remember, the meek shall inherit the Earth!

Tomorrow – comic strips that should be banned from the newspaper, according to ME! Plus – reader mail!

Yes, we have second bananas

In my pack, I am the beta male. It’s a pretty sweet deal, I must say. Lots of power that people don’t realize you have, and little of the responsibility. A few of the perks:

*The dog doesn’t come to me first to be walked or fed
*Like Chandler on Friends, I can say snarky, offensive things to anyone I please, and people still think I’m adorable
*At work, I can goof off all day long writing blogs, and no one cares because I’m not the boss of anything

I think it must be due to my pack position that I’m obsessed with secondary characters. Ever since Big Sister Bamm-Bamm introduced me to the phrase “fourth banana” (in reference to Lee Majors’ role of Heath on Big Valley), I have sought out as much information as I could find on characters from literature and theater (by literature and theater I mean, of course, comic books and TV) that seem unimportant to the grand scheme of things, yet actually are like the grease to the main characters’ wheels, utterly indispensable to the continued success of the storyline.

Just as I am much happier being Jimmy Olsen instead of Superman, so secondary characters are much better off staying where they are, rather than shuffling off to their own shows (witness Rhoda, Gloria, Flo’s Yellow Rose, etc.). One can well imagine NBC’s zeal to retain even ONE of the Friends for Thursday nights, but I fear Joey will not last long without a strong leading cast to antagonize (after all, Friends itself was a cast made up entirely of secondary characters.)

So, without further adieu, I will present my top ten favorite secondary characters. (Okay, one more adieu: it has not escaped me that my list is composed entirely of women, minorities and emasculated men. I’m sure there’s a psychological reason someone can tell me about someday).

10. Bat-Girl, Batman comics

No, not THAT Bat-Girl. You’re thinking of Batgirl, the fiery-haired “Dominoed Dare-Doll” clad in glittery spandex, that never got to anything but jump up on a table and do ballet kicks. I’m talking about Bat-Girl, WITH hyphen, who predates Yvonne Craig by a good five or six years.



THIS Bat-Girl wore a costume she stole from the girl elf in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, complete with skater’s skirt and pointy shoes. In reality, she was tennis champ Bette Kane, niece of circus owner Kathy Kane, who herself was secretly Batwoman. These plucky gals fought crime with their “Crime Compacts”, including powder puffs filled with sneezing powder, spring-loaded lipsticks and the like ( I guess mace wasn’t invented yet). Mostly they rode around on their Vespas, got crowned “Miss Gotham City”, “Miss Police Department”, “Miss Arkham Asylum”, and so on, and tried to insinuate themselves into Batman and Robin’s boys-only club, where it was abundantly clear they WEREN’T welcome. (Well, Robin’s raging teenage hormones led to a couple of uncompromising situations with Bat-Girl, but some strenuous workouts in the Batcave set his head straight again.) Yes, Bat-Girl, we salute you, paragon of an earlier age, when girls were silly, flighty, and flattered to be allowed to do things the same as boys!

9. Miss Beadle, Little House on the Prairie



Miss Beadle, of course, is Walnut Grove’s beloved teacher. Laura likes her because she smells like lemon verbena. (Why this is attractive to Laura is never quite explained. If you’ve ever smelled lemon verbena, you’ll know it falls somewhere between fresh-mown hay and French whore). Like all residents of Walnut Grove EXCEPT THE INGALLS FAMILY, she lives in a fully-finished home with painted walls, glass windows, wood floors, and dainty china cups and saucers on display. If she appears outside the school setting, you know trouble’s afoot – she’ll soon be thrown by a wild horse, or temporarily fired by the school board, or be assaulted by a forty-seven year old actor playing an elementary school student.

She has a tough job, since none of the same children (with the exception of Laura, Mary, Nellie and Willie) ever come to school twice. Occasionally, and without warning, a special needs child will drop by and have to be taught an important life-lesson, as only Miss Beadle can do.

She is not without her enemies; when Mary is told she’ll have to wear glasses, she is horrified to think she’ll turn out to be an “old maid” like Miss Beadle, the only other glasses-wearing woman in town. (Karma pays Mary back in spades for THAT one). In Miss Beadle’s final appearance on the show, she gives Mary a cameo brooch, given to her by HER first teacher. It never fails to bring me to tears. (Jet Screamer interrupts: “You f&!%ing cry at EVERY episode, retard.”) Shut up.

8. Mr. Bingley, Pride and Prejudice
Mr. Bingley is the dandy milquetoast from Pride and Prejudice who waffles around about marrying Jane Bennett, driving the plot for a good 200 pages. He is a lily-livered mama’s boy, who allows his opinions to be molded and re-molded by his sisters and his “friend” Mr. Darcy. He eventually marries Jane, of course, and they spend the rest of their lives sitting around not offending anyone.

Speaking of Regency England, guess what? Back in the day, after dinner, the men and women would separate for a spell so they could all go to the toilet. The women would go stand in a corner someplace, lift their skirts out of harm’s way, and pretend they were lost in thought. The men would retire to the smoking lounge, and whoever needed to would simply whip it out and aim toward the chamber pot without skipping a beat in their political discourse. Read a book on daily life in the 19th Century sometime, kids, it weren’t for sissies!


7. (Tie) The Professor and Mary Ann, Gilligan’s Island



So insignificant, they were collectively known as “the rest” for the first season. Oddly, they are not only the two most attractive people on the island, but arguably the most intelligent and adaptable– the Professor’s MacGuyver-like skill is obvious, of course, and Mary Ann, a hardy farm girl, can do laundry all day, can a bushel of peaches, and still lay out a sumptious dinner complete with coconut cream pie for dessert. All with a smile.

A person’s stature on the island obviously is based on wealth – the Howells and Ginger are clearly in the upper eschelon, followed by the Skipper and Gilligan (they are likely Union men, and thus make a good wage). The Professor teaches at a State University, and so makes next-to-nothing. Mary Ann’s station in life varies with each crop. And so they are sociologically the bottom of the heap. A fascinating reflection of modern society.
One hopes that the Professor and Mary Ann, at some point, found solace in each other’s arms – I mean, really, who ELSE are they gonna get some action with? But if not, at least they can take comfort in the fact that they are the only members of the cast to have a drink named after them

The Professor and Mary Ann
Ingredients:
0.5 oz Apricot Brandy
0.25 oz Lime Juice
1.5 oz Vodka
4.0 oz Seltzer

Directions:
Fill a shaker half full with ice cubes. Pour all ingredients except Carbonated Water into shaker and shake well. Fill a Highball glass almost full with ice cubes and strain drink into Highball glass. Fill with Carbonated Water. Stir well. Garnish with two Banana slices and a Maraschino Cherry.


6. Lt. Uhura, Star Trek

Legend has it that Uhura’s place in Star Trek legend was assured by virtue of the fact that she was having an affair with Gene Roddenberry. I prefer to think that she was bumped up to semi-prominence because Janice Rand (the checkerboard-hair lady) was dumped after six episodes (because the actress who played her was a drunk that couldn’t get to work on time).

Chief switchboard operator for the starship Enterprise, her total screen time on three years of the original series totals about 17 minutes, but when she WAS given something to do it was usually memorable, like when she was reduced to mental infancy and re-learned everything she had ever known, up to and including how to operate a switchboard, in about half an episode. Or when the floating-in-space Abe Lincoln saw her and gushed, “Oh, a charming negress!” and she shot back with a quick treatise on racial equality. Go, girl.

Though given precious little to do in the original series or subsequent movies (besides stick some sort of metal thing in her ear and fall off her chair whenever there was a Klingon attack – oh, and that embarrassing feather dance in Star Trek V), and rarely if ever seen outside of Star Trek-related media, I would venture to say that more people alive today know who Nichelle Nichols is than could name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Take THAT, education system!

5. Uncle Henry, The Wizard of Oz

From the novel, The Wizard of Oz:

” Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.”

Editorial note: And apparently, he was a shitty house builder to boot. What, it would have killed him to put in a basement?

4. Betty Rubble, The Flintstones

Turn-ons: Giggling with Wilma, The Ed Sullystone Show, and when Barney does “that thing”

Turn-offs: Fred’s Get-Rich-Quick schemes, kangaroo poachers, and when yours truly throws the family’s Loggin Continental into Pterodactyl Lake.

Betty met her husband while she and Wilma Slaghoople were working as cigarette girls at a Cobblestone County hotel. They quickly fell in love and Barney soon presented to Betty a wedding ring from the Buddy Buddy Credit Jewelers. She happily accepted, and they were wed.
For years, Betty suffered the ultimate indignity of being passed over by the makers of Flintstones Vitamins in favor of the family car. This ludicrous decision was finally overturned in December of 1995, a date still celebrated in the Teenage Bamm-Bamm household (well, we sort of lump it together with Christmas).

Tomorrow: The TOP 3!

Fry in the Not-So-Friendly Skies

So, after Cat Stevens (err...sorry, I mean Yusef Islam. As a devoted reader so rightly commented, "there should be a rule you can't choose a new name that actually includes your new religion: Ex: Esther Judaism, nee Madonna, or Tom Scientology, aka Cruise, Richard Buddhism, aka Gere") effortlessly caught a transatlantic flight, despite being on an INternational No-Fly list, today we discover that only about 1/3 of CONFIRMED TERRORISTS are on said list. Rest easy, frequent flyers!

Black Eyes for the Queer Guys

"You know how bitchy fags can be" - Jennifer North, Valley of the Dolls

At the risk of being labeled a self-hating queer, I have to disclose that I hate "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy". Although the "Fab Five" are composed entirely of the sorts of silly, giggling nincompoops that I go out of my way to avoid, and perpetuate stereotypical gay behaviors from the Victorian Age, this is NOT the reason I hate the show.

Yes, it IS a despicable minstrel show, as is the inane "Will and Grace" and the horrifying "Queer as Folk", but I AM cognizant of the fact that Halle Berry wouldn't have won an Oscar if Hattie McDaniel hadn't played all those maids.

No, the reason I hate the show is that I've yet to see them impart any knowledge to a hapless straight man that couldn't have been picked up by reading, say, the Style section of the local newspaper, or the wrapper on a bar of soap. Is it really uniquely gay to tell someone that:

* Fruits and vegetables taste best when they are in season
* Fresh pasta cooks faster than dried
* Girls enjoy horse and buggy rides through the park
* Giving presents is a nice gesture
* You should wash your face once a day

I guess information like this seems more special, somehow, when delivered by someone who hasn't brushed his hair, is wearing a t-shirt that cost ninety-five dollars, and can turn any statement into a double entendre.

And now, thanks to the once-watchable Bravo channel, we've discovered that the only thing more annoying than five gay men in wrinkled second-hand clothing is five gay men in wrinkled second-hand clothing with British accents.

Love and Marriage

Well, Britney has sold her personal wedding photos to People magazine, bless her heart. Except they’re not really married, since they haven’t taken the trouble to get a wedding license yet, and in fact the whole thing may have been a big put-on. Just as well. Maybe when they’re “really” married, one or both of them will take the trouble to comb their hair.
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I hate to judge a book by its cover, but it certainly looks to me like Chuck Floyd, running for Congress in Maryland’s 8th District against popular incumbent Chris Van Hollen, had enlisted immigrant day workers from the parking lot of the 7-11 to wave his placards at the corner of University and New Hampshire this morning. I’m just saying. He DOES endorse “guest worker visas”, according to his website. He also opposes gay marriage. His campaign office is also in the building where I work. I’ll get something on him yet.

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So Cat Stevens is being deported, after waltzing onto a plane even though he is on an INTERNATIONAL DO NOT FLY LIST. I guess you’re right, Mr. President, America IS safer! I guess it’s all right, the only danger Cat Stevens presents is the possibility that he might pick up a guitar and start singing.

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I hate the Today Show. This morning Katie interviewed Ty Hensley, brother of just-slain hostage Jack Hensley. She ALWAYS gets to do the interviews with victims’ relatives, and she ALWAYS starts the interview with the I-don’t-really-care-but-this-will-make-me-sound-like-I-do question, “How are you doing”?

“Well, gee, Katie, my brother was just beheaded, how the f@#% do you think I’m doing, dipshit?”

Oooh, I’d like to get ahold of her shoulders and just shake and shake.

After keeping the camera on Mr. Hensley just long enough to watch him collapse into racking sobs, we then cut to Matt, who is interviewing White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, who instead of answering Matt’s question, throws in a couple of administration talking points about the war on terror and tries to make them sound like he’s conveying the President’s condolences. Shameless.
Matt’s got some skeletons in his closet, by the way. I have it from more than one source. Not that there’s much room in the closet for skeletons, if you get my drift. I’m just saying.