Monday, April 30, 2007

Why the Lies Mattered

It doesn't bug me that Randall Tobias hired prostitutes. I mean good for him. He wasn't accosting women on the street. But it matters because he was appointed by the Head Liar as Director Overseeing Aids Funds.


And see, to get any funds from America you had to do 2 new things the Bush Administration put into place. (And I quote from the Washington Post). "He previously held a top job in the Bush administration overseeing AIDS relief, in which he promoted abstinence and a policy requiring grant recipients to swear they oppose prostitution."

You see if a country talked about using condoms to save lives, we wouldn't give them money. It prostitution was legal, even if regulated, checked for safety and required condom use, no AIDS relief funds.

So yeah, the fact that Randall Tobias was the poster child of a holier than thou administration matters. It just makes America look like buffoons. Who gave these people keys to the cookie jar. They are not nice people.

Sprinter for Finland

Okay, he might not set any land speed records, but I am hoping he is turning up in Beijing! Lauri Kalima: Finland.




Okay, one more gratuitous shot (for Julie).


Friday, April 27, 2007

Clean Question

So Ed decided to clean the shower yesterday. I mean really scrub and clean it. So we went and got cleaner and all.. and I have a question.

Okay, I get "hard water stains". I mean there are minerals in hard water that make giant stalagmites in caves. I get how water can leave stains.

But "soap scum". Really? If soap leaves scum, then why are we using it to wash with? Shouldn't we be washing with whatever cleans up soap scum. That is like washing with pond scum, "It's abrasive and as long as you rinse, you are aces!" I don't know if I want to wash with scum of any type.

I don't know, it sounds weird to me.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

I like Penquins

I like this picture from MSNBC. It is a hopping penquin (actually I think the species is called a "Rockhopper").




Here is a bigger picture in context.

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Eddie's Back

Well, Edwardo returned last night. He changed flights and so he got a direct to Newark (Continental flies direct from Bejing to Newark.. go figure). He had a great time and accomplished a lot. I am gladhe made it home.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Greatest stupid line in a marginal sit-com.. EVER


So in “How I Meet Your Mother” tonight, Barney was complaining that he had to watch Canadian ;porn to see if Ted’s girlfriend had done it (long story). Anyway, Willow (I forget her name in this sitcom) says” Yeah. Like watching porn is such a struggle for you.”

And Barney says, “CANADIAN porn. Listen, they may have great health care but it doesn’t cover breast implants. If I gotta watch one more flat chested Nova Scotian girl ride a Mountie on the back of the Zambonie, I am going to go “ooo-uut” of my mind.”

Oh, I know. It is easy to get that may stereotypes in one sentence. But these are stereotypes about CANADIANS. That is a whole lot tougher without relying on the obvious clubbed baby seals thing. (And yes, they included a French joke earlier).


LILY! Her name is Lily.

So I was thinking....

So the other day I was reading something on the web about what makes a person gay (it was related to the whole Virgina Tech thing in this guy's mind). Anyway, he related the old chestnut about absent / weak father and strong mother making someone gay.

And I thought, what if they are right about the circumstances, but wrong about the causality? Let's look at this from a purely biological function. There is some research that says gay genes (and I am talking male only here) run down the mother's genetic line, AND that the changes of a gay child increase as the number of children increase.

So let's say there is a gay child born in an hunter / gather type society. Well, the father has no interest in raising the child (from that whole "will further his genetic line" viewpoint). The child clearly will not pass his genes on. So he ignores the child and leaves him alone: hence absent father with this child

The mother, on the other hand, has an interest in the boy to stay around the fire as a strong or tall pair of hands to help. This would explain the whole "passed down the female genetic line" thing. So she helps to raise the child and teach him skills: hence strong mother.

These circumstance stay in place throughout most of history (the movement from hunter / gatherer to farming to feudal systems).

From a genetic standpoint, once you have a child, the genetic need for multiple children reduces - this would explain why subsequent children have a higher incidence of homosexuality.

In modern times, this would change as a gay child actual might further the family fortunes. In a modern / barter society, connections are important. From the family viewpoint a gay member of the family could increase contacts or wealth.

In recent times (with mass communication) gay people are expected to have unique skills (whether stereotype or true). Therefore, a gay child moves from hardship to neutral or positive - and the incidence of the "absent father" reduces.

If I am right, you would see this family change as a society progress from (the western thoughts) of "traditional" to "modern". It isn't just that being gay is accepted. It is that there are skills that are useful to the genetic family.

Of course, there is also the possability that I have chosen the explanation to fit the facts - given my predisposition to see the whole gay thing as "normal". But that is a mobias strip of causality I don't want to get into.

(I wish Ed would come home too. My brain hurts.)

Saturday, April 21, 2007

ut-oh! There went my best shot.

So I don't know if you heard this, but here is the Headline from Reuters:


I'm in trouble now. You see limbo was for un-baptized babies. And I wasn't baptized. So I was hoping for that "young at heart" pass into limbo.

That d*mn Ratzinberger.

How Tired is My Dog

So, we went to the far dog park at 52nd and 11th. I don't know if you know this, but the poor pupster is not built for endurance. He is built for speed.

52nd and 11th is about a mile away. So we walked a mile away, and then a mile back. And at the park he played and played. Now he is X-hausted.

And, FYI, the far dog park is like gay pick-up central. It makes the Laurel Canyon Dog Park look positively Orange County.

I am in a better mood now.

Well I am in a better mood today. The sun helps, but the big change was that I took a nice excursion out on the #3 subway to Brooklyn.


Brooklyn, you ask? What is in Brooklyn?


Target

Friday, April 20, 2007

Eddie's Hotel

This is where Eddie is staying in Shanghai.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

So, Ed's out of town. I hate this place.

So, Ed's out of town for a week, and Nincompoopery is blocked in China (I'm subversive in Commie Land). So let us for a moment let our hair down.

I hate this place. Maybe it is today. And maybe I am sick, but I hate this place. This place with it's crappy weather. This place were everyone wears black, LIKE IT IS SOME KIND OF STATEMENT - instead of pure-ass laziness. This place where the words Excuse Me are verbotten - and Thank You is in a diffferent language.

I hate the constant piles of un-picked up dog-crap. I hate the lack of smiles, the lack of color, the lack of Hawaiin shirts, the lack of fake boobs, the lack of a Mexican restaurant I can enjoy, the lack of jews that know ANYTHING about entertainment. I hate being alone without my friends.

I hate my grey hair and my extra weight I can't get rid of. I hate the fact that I have to wear eyeglasses again because I am so old my eye surgery stopped working.

I hate the constant constant noise, the drunks, the street people, the police that seem to do nothing, the tourists that won't move, the horrible news. I hate working remotely where everything is a crisis and people are assholes to my employees and I can't do a damn thing about it from here.

I can't relax, EVER (okay so in a tanning bed for 8 minutes every now and then). I am not happy today.

Karl Rove explains who's idea the Iraq War was

So yesterday in Ohio, there was a question to Karl Rove. Lets repeated both the question and Karl's answer here.


In a question-and-answer period after his speech, Rove was asked whose idea
it was to start a pre-emptive war in Iraq.

"I think it was Osama bin Laden's,'' Rove replied.


Ummmm!!! No. You see, Karl, Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan - not Iraq. As a matter of fact, Sadam was on Osama's hit list before we, you know, took him out FOR bin Laden. You lying sack of crap.

And, surprise surprise, he is also on the list of top 100 least sexy men I discussed earlier.


The Lovely Wierd Wild World of the Net

The Boston Phoenix (and I assume this is a paper, but I am not sure) has published an hilarious look at the 100 most un-sexy men of the year.

I have no choice, but to share some of these with you (in no particular order).


I particularly like the wide range of hideiously unsexy men.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Eddie in China

Eddie is in China for work for a week and Trev and I already miss him. Here is a picture from a couple of weeks ago with Lisa, Jane and Eddie at the Top of the Rock.


Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Roxy Hart!



Lisa Rinna was on "Dancing with the Stars" tonight. Apparently she is in Chicago. She sang a song on the show. The song "Roxie Hart." The problem with song is that it starts, "Who's name is on every body's lips?"

Lisa Rinna should NEVER sing a song with the words "lips" in it. She has scary lips.

And, just fyi - she is the triple threat. She can't sing, she can't dance and she can't act.

Legally Blonde was Fun-Knee

So, we saw Legally Blonde.



It was fabulous. The picture above is from Elle Wood's Harvard "Essay" for entrance. It is a song and dance number with the UCLA band and cheerleaders. It was funny and I loved it. Particularly the line from her friends. "Why do you want to go back there? Everyone has a different nose!"

It is, like totally, made for teenage girls or L.A. gay boys or those who are one or the other at heart. It even has a song titled "Gay or European" and "Ohmigod You Guys!". It was fun.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Old yet?



There are many ways of having your age thrust into your face. None of them pleasent. One of the least pleasent, is to know who died last week, but have no idea of what pimply face little puke is hosting Saturday Night Live.

Don't you have to have pubic hair to host that show (Dakota Fanning was an exception)? Really I thought that was a requirement in order to get drunk and high at the cast party. I mean I know that 21 or 18 is so de-classey. But Jez... the little shit can't even wack off yet!

It's not that we wasnt' funny (although he wasn't) it just that he George W was his first Bush President.

Come ON!!! Cut Scooter some slack here.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Lisa and Ed outside their FAVORITE show


We saw this show last night. Lea Salong was in the show. And she was very good. But the show itself was.... dated (to quote L Hunt). I think dated is a nice way to say pure crap. The snoring man and the ringing cell phone did not help.

If you are wondering what Ed is doing he is Marching In Place, just like in the show! (left, right, lean forward, rock back, left, right, lean forward, rock back, repeate).

Friday, April 13, 2007

Soduko from a non-lover


My personal favorite columnist right now isn't political or entertainment oriented. He is Patrick Smith, the "Ask the Pilot" columnist from Salon Magazine (online here)
Apologies to the Soduko players amoung us, but I am dumbfounded by the game. As is he:

The most alarming trend to strike air travel in the past half-century is not suicide hijackings, surly service or overzealous pat-downs from the Transportation Security Administration. No, the most troubling thing about flying, and perhaps humanity in general, is sudoku, this generation's dumbed-down answer to crossword puzzles. Sudoku was invented by an American, but popularized in Japan. Need you be reminded that these are the people who eat meat-flavored ice cream, carry women's panties around in their wallets, and think it's fun to go indoor fishing? I'm not saying the game isn't challenging. But so is solving quadratic equations, or sword swallowing. That doesn't mean we should all be doing it for fun. People enjoy sudoku, I suspect, because it requires a lot of thinking, but only from a small and highly specialized corner of the mind. It's very egalitarian, in a way, because it's an entirely left-brain exercise with a single and absolute solution. (I think back again, as I often do, to my favorite movie of the 1980s, Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." Mind-numbed citizens of Gilliam's sick dystopia entertained themselves with a small, toylike device that dropped a pendant onto a board, randomly indicating a result of "yes" or "no.") More to the point, you can be a failure at sudoku without guilt. Crossword puzzles make you feel bad about yourself -- for not knowing the capital of Canada or forgetting the name of a Shakespeare play. Sudoku is numbers, and for most of us there's little shame in being lousy at numbers.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

God Bless You, Mr Rosewater

Once again I find myself saying good-bye to someone I never knew - and yet sad about it. I think there is something about this to be discussed later. However, let me start with saying Adieu to Kurt Vonnegut.

I tried to read "Player Piano" early in high school, when my really smart friends said it was brilliant. I couldn't get through it (although it is one of his most liner stories). But in 1974 I read "Breakfast of Champions", a fictional story that was an autobiography of a (fictional) Science Fiction writer who was turning 50, by Kurt Vonnegut who wrote Science Fiction and was also turning 50.

Kurt Vonnegut taught me that seeing the absurd side of things was sometimes necessary in order to escape 'conventional wisdom' (for example, what if Sadam Hussein is keeping out inspectors just to piss people off, not because he has weapons of mass destruction) but that seeing the absurd side was not, in and of itself, any better or worse than seeing the normal side of things. It only provides a different perspective, not a different reality.

Kurt V also taught me that sometimes the only possible response to the heaping piles of lies and bile that authorities spoon-feed us (and I include all stripes of authorities here, this isn't a diatribe against Bush) is to laugh at it. Nothing pisses off the powers that be than to take them non-seriously. It is a lesson that he had to will himself to re-learn over and over through the years.

You know, ladies and germs, there was a time, not so long ago, that lasted years and years where my favorite authors were people that commented on the social and political landscape of the day - but refused to check out of that landscape. They soldiered on for what they felt right, in the only way they could. And they were the V's. Vonnegut, Vidal and Varley.

Well, Vidal has worked himself into such a lather about the latest Republican administrations that he can no longer follow his own advice and make quiet changes. He now prefers the outrageous and ineffective rants. John Varley has moved from allegorical Science Fiction as real life has become more absurd and scary than anything he could write.

And now Kurt Vonnegut has died.

I am comforted by the though that he often wrote of living "unstuck" in time. Where yesterday, tomorrow and today come in no particular order. And so perhaps he died years ago, and will play ball tomorrow as a 12 year old in his beloved Ohio.

God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

CNN Gives Anderson Cooper a little Competition

So, in the "Humpy / Dreamy Eye'd Report" contest, no one has really stepped up to give CNN's Anderson Cooper a run for his blue eye'd money.

Until CNN gave us Rob Marciano. (It has been a slow news day)

Why So Quiet Scott

Well, this is the headline in MSNBC:

Citigroup may cut, reassign over 26,000 jobs

I have no reason to think I am one of them. But, then again, Tom the Turkey can be excited for the "Big Surprise" at Thanksgiving - blissfully unaware.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Grey Gardens

So Lisa and Jane are here for Lisa's (30th) birthday. We took her to see the show she wanted to see - The Grey Gardens.


It was an amazing and funny and quirky show - without being too weird or too sad or too over the top. Christine Ebersol (the big star) wasn't in it; she is on vacation for a couple of weeks. But they brought in a great woman to take over for her vacation. It was really really fun.

Friday, April 06, 2007

Before we get our panties in a bunch

Before we get our panties in a bunch about Nancy Pelsoi going to Syria, let us review who went less than 2 days earlier.

U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt of Haleyville, a Republican of Alabama and US Rep Frank Wolf of Virginia (Republican) and US Rep Joseph Pitts of Pennsylvania (Republican). Not a peep was said about that.


And less than 2 days after? Rep. Darrell Issa (California Republican) who actually critized Bush for failing to promote dialog with Syria (something Speaker of the House Pelosi did NOT do).


I short, it is not unusual, unseemly or unpatriotic to visit a foreign leader. Even one the President doesn't like. Even if you are a Democrat or a Woman or just someone that pisses Deadeye Cheney off.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

And Some Things are just for Lisa

Lisa is turning (age deleted at request) this Sunday. Some things are just for me, and some things are just for her. She likes her men with a little meat on their legs.



This is a kicker for the South Carolina team. Included below is a link to a full size pic. One note to my friends in the UK. "Cocks" and "Cocky" refer to the team name (South Carolina Gamecocks). And yes, the shortened version means the same thing in the US as the UK. Charming, no?

Big Picture (Happy Almost BDay)
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Wednesday, April 04, 2007

So Cool! Condor Egg in Mexico

So this is totally cool. In 2002 they reintroduced California Condors into Baja California. They hadn't been seen in the wild in Mexico since the 1930s.



Well, one of the Condors born at the LA Zoo has laid an egg. They found it in an abandoned Eagle next in a Mexican National Park (which is apparently how Condors lay eggs).

There are over 200 condors alive now. It is a big deal to me, because I remember when there were less than 20 of them alive and they captured the last 2 to breed them in captivity. No one really thought they would ever be released and fly again. So... yea!



All Hail Apollo Helios

I am working from the office again, which gives one time to think on the subway to work. In my case, not always a good thing.

I have decided that Christianity could only arise from a nice climate. When looking for spiritual answers in Los Angeles (or - one assumes- the Mediterranean) the infinite power and glory of man and something greater than man can be pondered. In Los Angeles I understood about a power greater than the individual - and the ability to redeem. I had time to question our inter-relatedness, to seek the truth (maybe even with the capital T).

Outside of LA, Jerusalem, Rome and Cairo, I would be worshipping the sun god, baby. I would get up every day and hope that Ra or Mars or Apollo would be driving that flaming coach across the sky.

Last week-end, Eddie and I were enjoying the city. It was sunny and held the promise (if not the actuality) of warmth to come. We wore shorts and sweatshirts and took to the streets. We froze, but we BELIEVED. Today it is drizzling, the highs for the next few days are in the low 40's and I am looking for a fatted calf to be offering up to Apollo.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Silliness

I am all for Yoga. And I am all for dogs. And yet...


I am not all for dog-yoga

Because you are doing such a bang up job yourself

So President Bush has told the Congress that their new funding bills are unacceptable. To quote ["That is unacceptable to me, and I believe it's unacceptable to the American people," he said. "Debating these differences should not come at the expense of our troops," Bush said. "Congress shouldn't tell generals how to run the war."]

Congress shouldn't tell the generals how to run a war. Donald Rumsfield should: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want."

Dick Cheney should; he replaced every general in the chain of command until he got one that support the "surge".

The Secretary of Defense should, unless Dick Cheney overrules him about keeping Gitmo open.

Note to dear leader, Iraq isn't your personal little sandbox that you and your cronies get to play in as Americans keep getting killed in the middle of a civil war. This war has now gone on longer than World War II, and to much less effect. I am glad someone is at least discussing the war. If you can't muster up support in Congress or at least have a discussion about it maybe you should take your toys and go home.

Monday, April 02, 2007

That's "Tarte" not "Tart"



So we recieved one of those "Just Sold!" cards today for an apartment in our building. We get them all the time (usually 2 a day). This one had the picture to the left and her name, Arline Tarte. You just know she has spent her whole life correcting people who called her Arline Tart. (That's Tar-tay).

So now you know what happened to Agnes Morhead.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Jonathan Rhys Meyers: Mascot for April

Jonathan Rhys Meyers is the Mascot for the Month. He plays King Henry the 8th in The Tudors starting tonight on Showtime. He was great in most everything I have seen him in. Bend if like Beckham and Match Point. The picture below is from Match Point where he was the bad guy and you rooted for him.




Jonathan is also the face of Versace and Hugo Boss. Below is a Hugo Boss ad.




Here he is as King Henry the 8th. Probably not realistic, but it makes one understand why 6 women would marry him.


Phil and Julie are in China

Phil and Julie are in China. They have adopted a lovely little girl, Dora. They have been traveling for 3 days, and the group heads to the orphanage today. I wish them well. Their story is here. Itis nice to know that Dora willhave loving parents.