Remember Young Adam?

It's a movie starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton. Some people might refer to it as the movie where you see Ewan McGregor's penis. No, not the movie in the first picture. Or the one in the second picture. It's one of the other movies where you see Ewan's not-so-little McGregor.

The plot for those who don't remember: Ewan plays Young Adam who goes to work for a guy on a canal boat. One night, while the boat owner is at a bar getting drunk Young Adam sneaks back to the boat and boinks the guy's wife. Exahusted by their love-making, they fall asleep in each other's arms. The guy finds them naked (nice shot of little McGregor).

That's sort of the plot for this news story.

A guy in the UK came back to his canal boat drunk and discovered his girlfriend and his friend having sex. He stabbed them to death. According to the BBC, this week he was cleared of their murders, which isn't completely true. He was convicted of manslaughter.

Of course, like in any good script, there were subplots in the true story. The killer's 55 day old son had died on the same couch where he found the trysters just a few months earlier. And the baby had been named after the guy's brother who died in a fire in Australia.

After the trial, the guy said:

"I can't believe this has happened to everybody. I just walked in there and lost my rag completely."

Scary thought for the day

Sally Kern, bikini waxers & other rapscallions

Remember Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern? She's baaack. She introduced a proclamation that blames abortion, gay marriage, porn and "other forms of debauchery" for the economic crisis but she and her apostles are appealing to "the Supreme Judge of the world" to save us.

And by "Supreme Judge of the world," I don't think she means Simon Cowell.

More quickies:

• In 2007, a guy in Nebraska abandoned 9 of his children under the Safe Haven law a month after his wife died. He told officials he had lost the will to be a parent. Now, he's expecting a baby with his girlfriend.

Local anesthetic and a couple of snips will fix that for ya, mister.

• From a Colorado news story:

The witnesses described the robber as a man wearing red and white face makeup, a red and purple wig, a fake nose and a denim dress. Employees told police they didn't think anything was peculiar when he walked into the store ...

• From a Connecticut news story:

It was a simple request: Don't defecate on my lawn. But shortly after making it, the head of homeowner ... was met by a black plastic milk crate Saturday night ...

Gabriel Venegas was ... the guy who unbuckled his pants and squatted on Ramirez's lawn. When ordered off the property, he ... became enraged, threw the milk crate and took off.

• Today's Jeopardy answer: GPS units, cell phones, jewelry and strawberry Pop Tarts. The question: What did the Florida cop find in the pants of the rappers who danced in front of his car then asked for a ride?

• So this guy in Maine jumps on the hood of a VW, breaks the windshield, breaks through the glass door of someone's house, overturns the furniture, then takes his clothes off and leaves them behind, along with his wallet. That part's easy to explain - he was drunk. What's not explained is how he ended up covered in Pepto Bismol.

• On Monday, the Air Force test fired three ICBMs on the Pacific coast. Fark explains: Dear North Korea, thought you'd like to know our ICBMs still work. See you soon, the US Air Force.

• This just in: Beware of the Killer Bikini Wax!

Quote of the day

They say celebrities die in threes. Leave it to Billy Mays to throw in one extra COMPLETELY FREE!

~ from tiki humor

How I spent my day

"Debbie, I'm hungry!"

"Debbie, I have to poop!"

"Debbie, can I put the cheese in?"

"Debbie, wipe me!"

"Debbie, there's a brown spot on my macaroni!"

"Debbie, Baby's climbing on the table!"

"Debbie, my leg itches!"

"Debbie, I have to poop!"

"Debbie, wipe me!"

"Debbie, I want grapefruit juice!"

"Debbie, the kitty's getting out!"

"Debbie, I don't like this juice!"

"Debbie, there's a spider!"

"Debbie, Baby pooped!"

Children are delightful. Especially when you're kissing them goodbye.

Mrs. O'Leary's having a cow

The fundies aren't content with campaigning against gay marriage. Now they're renewing their attacks on gay adoption. Dale O'Leary, a Catholic activist, says children of gay couples are more likely to experiment with homosexual relationships and more likely to be confused and hurt. Of course, she admits she's never actually met any same sex parents or their children, and all the scientific research points to the opposite conclusion. But religious nuts never let that get in the way of a good crusade.

More quickies:

• Billy Mays, the Oxiclean guy, was found dead today. On Saturday, his US Airways flight landed hard in Tampa and he reported being hit on the head. He wasn't examined by a doctor at the time and there's no word yet if that had anything to do with his death. He was 50.

• People have a lot of misconceptions about Iowa but we do more than sit around and watch the corn grow. A guy in Cedar Rapids spent 3 days stalking a 79 pound carp with a bow and arrow. He caught that sucker too.

• A 10 year old girl won the annual worm charming competition in the UK. Yes, there is such a thing:

Worm charming is an ancient, noble and mysterious art, which, while intended primarily to bring worms out of the soil also manages to bring out the worst in its ultra-competitive practitioners.

Cheaters do things like hide worms in their pant legs or cut worms in half to double their count. Winners use things like playing rock music or sticking a garden fork in the ground and hitting it to produce vibrations that bring the worms rushing to the surface. One researcher says the vibrations sound like moles digging, and moles are worms biggest predators.

• Today's Jeopardy answer: Dead animals, a bloody prosthetic hand, false teeth and a digideroo. The question: What are things lost in the mail?

• Talk about irony: A comic book artist was recently detained by TSA when they discovered a script he'd written in his bag. It was a story about a guy who worked for the government thinking up the worst possible terrorist attacks, then the government suspects him of being a terrorist.

• Fark headline of the day: Not news: Dog bites man. News: Man bites dog. Fark: Man & dog fall through airport floor into lagoon of excrement.

• More from the department of You Can't Make This Stuff Up, the first paragraph of a news story from Atlanta:

A former mayor found sitting naked and holding a beer at a Rabun County campsite told police he wasn’t the same naked man seen walking around earlier.

• Your canoe has been kidnapped. The ransom is a case of beer. Notice how beer is usually involved?

Turn ons: naked men
Turn offs: naked men covered in mosquito bites

I hid the good toilet paper

... because my niece is coming to stay tonight. I'm blogging about this because I don't want to vacuum.

A few real news headlines:

• Stoned wallabies create crop circles (Or: Wallabies are our alien overlords.)

• Urine-filled soda cans vexing York merchants (Vexed? I'd be pissed.)

• Speaking of urine: Monkey urinates on president

• Canadians breed cows to burp less (Having sex with cows causes you to burp less? Who knew?)

Filipino dancing prisoners tribute to MJ

The video starts slow but builds. I'm sitting here bawling my eyes out, reminded why I loved Michael Jackson. Human beings are complicated. The bad doesn't take away all the good. He brought joy to the world.

I heart a hairy man

Eye candy for the weekend. Simon Cowell.

More Michael

I wrote Michael Jackson off years ago as a pedophile and a crazy, tragic person who chose his own path to ruin. But now I'm so sad he died. In the back of my mind, I was hoping the comeback tour would really happen, that he would somehow turn his life around and be the thrilling entertainer we all loved.

A lot of bloggers are blaming his family for not helping him, but if someone is determined to self-destruct, you can't stop him.

This is from Lisa Marie Presley's blog:

Years ago Michael and I were having a deep conversation about life in general ...

I can't recall the exact subject matter but he may have been questioning me about the circumstances of my Fathers Death.

At some point he paused, he stared at me very intensely and he stated with an almost calm certainty, "I am afraid that I am going to end up like him, the way he did."

I promptly tried to deter him from the idea, at which point he just shrugged his shoulders and nodded almost matter of fact as if to let me know, he knew what he knew and that was kind of that.

14 years later I am sitting here watching on the news an ambulance leaves the driveway of his home, the big gates, the crowds outside the gates, the coverage, the crowds outside the hospital, the Cause of death and what may have led up to it and the memory of this conversation hit me, as did the unstoppable tears.

A predicted ending by him, by loved ones and by me, but what I didn't predict was how much it was going to hurt when it finally happened.

The person I failed to help is being transferred right now to the LA County Coroners office for his Autopsy.

All of my indifference and detachment that I worked so hard to achieve over the years has just gone into the bowels of hell and right now I am gutted.

I am going to say now what I have never said before because I want the truth out there for once.

Our relationship was not "a sham" as is being reported in the press. It was an unusual relationship yes, where two unusual people who did not live or know a "Normal life" found a connection, perhaps with some suspect timing on his part. Nonetheless, I do believe he loved me as much as he could love anyone and I loved him very much.

I wanted to "save him" ... from the inevitable which is what has just happened.

His family and his loved ones also wanted to save him from this as well but didn't know how and this was 14 years ago. We all worried that this would be the outcome then.

At that time, In trying to save him, I almost lost myself.

He was an incredibly dynamic force and power that was not to be underestimated.

When he used it for something good, It was the best and when he used it for something bad, It was really, REALLY bad.

Mediocrity was not a concept that would even for a second enter Michael Jackson's being or actions.

I became very ill and emotionally/ spiritually exhausted in my quest to save him from certain self-destructive behavior and from the awful vampires and leeches he would always manage to magnetize around him.

I was in over my head while trying.

I had my children to care for, I had to make a decision.

The hardest decision I have ever had to make, which was to walk away and let his fate have him, even though I desperately loved him and tried to stop or reverse it somehow.

After the Divorce, I spent a few years obsessing about him and what I could have done different, in regret.

Then I spent some angry years at the whole situation.

At some point, I truly became Indifferent, until now.

As I sit here overwhelmed with sadness, reflection and confusion at what was my biggest failure to date, watching on the news almost play by play The exact Scenario I saw happen on August 16th, 1977 happening again right now with Michael (A sight I never wanted to see again) just as he predicted, I am truly, truly gutted.

Any ill experience or words I have felt towards him in the past has just died inside of me along with him.

He was an amazing person and I am lucky to have gotten as close to him as I did and to have had the many experiences and years that we had together.

I desperately hope that he can be relieved from his pain, pressure and turmoil now.

He deserves to be free from all of that and I hope he is in a better place or will be.

I also hope that anyone else who feels they have failed to help him can be set free because he hopefully finally is.

The World is in shock but somehow he knew exactly how his fate would be played out some day more than anyone else knew, and he was right.

I really needed to say this right now, thanks for listening.

The rumor mill

On Michael Jackson's death. Almost all of this is from anonymous sources so take it for what it's worth:

• There was a doctor living at his house. He was there when MJ went into cardiac arrest but has disappeared. The doc's BMW was towed from MJ's house last night. A "law enforcement source" says the doctor may have given MJ an overdose of Demerol shortly before his death. (This is from TMZ and their sources are usually pretty accurate. They were the first to report his death.)

• MJ's family, including siblings Janet, Randy, Jackie and Rebbie staged an intervention in Las Vegas. They believed he was addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol. He had an aide who had contacts wherever they went. His drugs of choice were straight morphine, Demerol, opiates like Oxycontin, Valium and Xanax. MJ denied he had a problem and refused help.

• "A close member" of the family says MJ received an injection of Demerol daily.

• His children ages 7, 10 and 11 are staying with his mother Katherine. According to fame whore and family lawyer Brian Oxman, they're "doing fine" because they're "well-trained."

• Debbie Rowe, the biological mother of the 2 oldest children, will probably get custody. Even though it's been said she gave up her parental rights for a huge pay out from MJ, her rights were never actually terminated.

• MJ's former publicist said he's not surprised by his death: "Michael has been on an impossibly difficult and often self-destructive journey for years. His talent was unquestionable but so too was his discomfort with the norms of the world."

• The night before he died, MJ was at a rehearsal at the Staples Center in LA. He showed up 3 hours late and was "listless" but that was normal, according to the source.

• A tour bus was in front of MJ's house when he was taken away by ambulance.

• Helicopters flew overhead to get pictures of his sheet-draped body as he was taken into the coroner's office.

He died like he lived - entangled in controversy, surrounded by vultures and fans.

Quote of the day

There is a very small chance any Republicans will vote for this health-care plan. They were against Medicare and Medicaid. They voted against children's health insurance.

We have a moral choice. This is a classic case of the good guys versus the bad guys. I know it is not political for me to say that ...

But do you want to be non-partisan and get nothing? Or do you want to be partisan and end up with a good health- care plan? That is the choice.

~ Sen. Jay Rockefeller

In 3's

Ed McMahon died earlier this week, age 86. He'd been suffering from cancer and other health problems for years. And Farrah Fawcett died earlier today, age 62. She'd also been suffering from cancer for awhile.

Now, there's a report that Michael Jackson died of a heart attack this afternoon, age 50. He was a monster, a freak and a pathetic human being but he was once a brilliant musician and incredible entertainer. A sweet little boy. It's all so sad.

Sad

Don't Cry for Me, Argentina

Quote of the day

"If it causes us to lose the stinking rot of self-righteousness and causes us to understand we are all in need of some grace, it could be a very good thing for the Republican Party."

~ South Carolina Republican Bob Inglis, on Gov. Mark Sanford's affair confession

Hiking the Appalachian Trail

Tonight, Jon Stewart said Gov. Sanford is, "Just another politician with a conservative mind and a liberal penis."

Olbermann and others are making fun of Sanford's emails to his mistress, but reading them makes me sad. Clearly, the guy had serious feelings for this woman. It was more than a fling and from the beginning, he felt conflicted. If they had met in a different time and place ... If he hadn't been such a self-righteous, self-congratulatory, egomaniacal asshole ...

Ah, love.

You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night's light ...

Turns out I do know how to say no

As I posted a couple days ago, I was really getting stressed out. There were a couple of things I was semi-committed to do on Tuesday and Wednesday but I managed to get out of them. I just stayed home and zoned out. Played spider solitaire. Watched a few movies. I really needed that.

I rearranged my living room furniture last weekend. There are 2 furniture pieces I'd like to get rid of but it's really hard for me to let things go. I'm always afraid I'll need something after it's gone. Crazy, I know. It's just an old dresser and a wicker shelving unit. Neither one is in very good condition and they're easily replaceable. I'm definitely going to take the shelf to the flea market this week.

A few quickies:

• A Tale of Two Cities: Los Angeles and Tehran, June 15.

• Mark Sanford, the Republican governor of South Carolina, just needed a few days to himself so he could write. Er, he wanted to get back to nature and hike the Appalachian Trail. Um, well, okay, he flew to Argentina to get laid. Abandoned his four young sons on Father's Day. But he's really, really sorry.

• Imperfect rhyme but funny and true: "10 Little Republicans."

• In the true spirit of Christ (insert eye roll), the Southern Baptist Convention has kicked out the Broadway Baptist Church of Fort Worth, TX, because they once considered including photos of gay couples along photos of other families in their church directory. The SBC's constitution excludes churches that are "welcoming and affirming" of gays.

Pet peeves of the day

1. Drivers who slam on the brakes and then signal. The whole point of a turn signal is to let me know you're going to be slowing down.

2. Drivers who start drifting into my lane then look at me like I'm crazy when I honk at them. Next time maybe I should just ram your cute little Honda off the road, asshole. Wouldn't hurt my old piece of shit any.

I spite myself sometimes

The last few days, I've been having wicked mood swings, from elated to suicidal to enraged and back again in no particular order. I'm stressed out.

Now that my mom's home from the hospital, my brothers seem to have forgotten she exists. She won't ask them for anything, even if they called and offered to help, which they don't. I'm the one she leans on - I drive 90 miles round trip to help her help around the house, take her to get groceries, etc.

Between doing things for her and for other people, I haven't had a whole day to myself in a month. I'm someone who really needs time alone to de-stress.

It caught up with me on Thursday. I had a therapy appointment scheduled for that afternoon but had forgotten it. I made a commitment to someone else and couldn't get out of it at the last minute, so I had to cancel therapy. Cue the rollercoaster - anger, sadness, suicide thoughts, rage.

Once I calmed down, I had to call Qwest about a minor tech problem with my new internet service. (Their home page, which was supposed to have all kinds of cool gadgets I could use, wouldn't load properly.)

Their tech support line was a nightmare. I got caught in an endless loop with one of those annoying-as-hell taped voices. No matter how many buttons I pushed, I never got an answer for my problem and there was absolutely no way to get through to a real live human being. Meanwhile, I was using up my cell phone minutes.

One of the selling points for Qwest was supposed to be live, 24 hour a day tech support.

I screamed at the fucking mechanical voice. I was ready to start smashing things.

Then I went online to try their chat option. Took forever before a tech person responded, even longer to go through the standard script before I could ask my question.

He shot me a long list of instructions. Basically, they wanted me to change all my computer settings. Every other website loads just fine - why should I have to change all my settings for them?

Cue more rage, more suicide thoughts, more tears.

I told him I wanted to cancel my service and he told me to call customer support. Yay. Another trip through taped voice hell. More buttons to push but at least I ended up talking to a human. Then we had to go through that script, the sales pitch, the offers to take half off the cost. More of my cell phone minutes ticking away.

The first customer support person wouldn't cancel my service and wouldn't let me talk to a supervisor. I hung up on her, called back again and got a real, live sensible human being who was nice and understanding. If she'd been the first person I talked to that day, I wouldn't have cancelled my service.

But by then, I had enough. I just wanted out.

I'm sad about it now. The connection was about 4 times the speed of my cable connection and $14 less per month than what I'm paying now. I'd been wanting to switch to Qwest for a long time.

This was probably the wrong week to do it though. I just didn't have the energy or the patience or the emotional stability to deal with it.

World Refugee Day

Quote of the day

Team Obama keeps telling lesbian and gay Americans like me to be patient. If we just wait a little longer, administration officials whisper to us lovingly ... your time will come. In the meantime, cheer up -- we put a gay band in the inaugural parade!

... Last week our president had his Department of Justice file a brief in defense of DOMA, a law he had once called "abhorrent." In that brief, filed on the 42nd anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia (which outlawed bans on interracial marriage), [Obama], not lacking a sense of historical irony, compared our love to incest and pedophilia.

Shit, meet fan.

~ John Aravosis (the full article is worth the read)

(See also: More Gay Donors Drop Out of DNC Fundraiser)

Political quickies

This is not a post about Sen. Ensign dilly-dallying with a staffer.

• A survey of GLBT high school students in Illinois shows that 89% of them experience verbal harassment based on sexual orientation, 43% have been physically harassed and 21% were physically assaulted. About 20% experienced homophobic remarks from teachers. The students who were frequently harassed were more likely to skip school and their grade point average was lower.

• When a gorilla escaped from the Columbia, SC, zoo, the state's Election Commission chairman, a Republican, posted on Facebook that it was probably one of Michelle Obama's ancestors. An employee of a SC Republican consulting firm made a post on the company's website that said President Obama is going to tax aspirin "because it's white and it works."

They've both since apologized, but the silence of Republican leaders on this issue is inexcusable.

• Check out Health Care Reform DOA?

OMG the lulz

On Wednesday, Republican Congressman Pete Hoekstra made a fool of himself by tweeting:

"Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down."

And the twitterers responded. Some of the soon-to-be-classics:

• My neighbor stopped me to talk today. Now I know what it is like to be questioned by the Basij!

• Walked out onto Constitution Ave in D.C. and was almost hit by a taxi. Reminded me of Tienanmen Square.

• Ran through the sprinklers this morning, claimed solidarity with victims of Hurricane Katrina.

• I got a splinter in my hand today. Felt just like Jesus getting nailed to the cross.

• Someone walked in on me while I was in the bathroom. Reminded me of Pearl Harbor.

The photo is from a new blog devoted to Pete Hoekstra as a meme.

Drink a beer, eat a steak, watch Rambo

A few quickies:

• Zero tolerance is stupid: When a high school student in Maine was walking across the stage to receive his diploma blew a kiss at his mother, the panty-twisted superintendent sent him back to his seat without the diploma. The crowd booed. A deputy sheriff escorted another student out of the auditorium because he was playing with a beach ball.

Anyone out there who doesn't believe we're living in a police state?

• Unaccompanied minors: Last weekend in 2 separate incidents, Continental Express mistakenly put an 8 year old and a 10 year old girl on the wrong planes. Years ago (I don't remember when or where), I remember reading about a young girl who was also flying alone and was molested by the man in the seat next to her. She was too terrified to signal for help.

I don't think children - at the very least pre-teens - should be allowed to fly anywhere alone. I know plane tickets are expensive but how much is your child worth?

• Damn, I missed it: Did you know Monday was National Man Day? It was a day set aside for men to be men. One way to celebrate:

Drink a beer, eat an 18-ounce steak and watch all the Rambo movies back-to-back from a new recliner where you can scratch yourself in manly places.

Isn't that pretty much every day for some guys?

Can you spell hypocrisy?

I'll admit I had to look it up in the dictionary.

On Monday, Republican Senator John Ensign announced that he had an affair with a staffer who was married to another staffer. He confessed after the husband pressured him for hush money.

Ensign used to tell people he wouldn't be alone in a car with a woman to avoid the appearance of impropriety. So I'm guessing he didn't get his groove on in the back seat. They probably drove to No-tell Motel in separate cars.

Ten years ago, he said President Clinton should resign after he got Lewinskied. When Larry Craig was arrested for tapping his foot in the men's room, Ensign said he should resign because: "There's too many people that paint with a broad brush that we're all corrupt, we're all amoral."

Ensign's a member of The Promise Keepers. A couple of their rules:

• A Promise Keeper is committed to practicing spiritual, moral, ethical, and sexual purity. • A Promise Keeper is committed to building strong marriages and families through love, protection and biblical values.

Maybe Larry Craig was a Promise Keeper too, because they're also "committed to pursuing vital relationships with a few other men."

The more things change the more they stay the same

After refusing to release documents that detail the CIA's torture of Gitmo prisoners and pictures from Abu Ghraib, Obama is now refusing to release the logs of who's visiting the White House, even though a judge has ruled the public is entitled to see them.

But that's not the worst of it. Obama's Justice Department is currently arguing against a court case that challenges the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA):

He actually argued that the courts shouldn't consider Loving v. Virginia, the miscegenation case in which the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to ban interracial marriages, when looking at gay civil rights cases. He told the court, in essence, that blacks deserve more civil rights than gays, that our civil rights are not on the same level.

And before Obama claims he didn't have a choice, he had a choice. Bush, Reagan and Clinton all filed briefs in court opposing current federal law as being unconstitutional . . . Obama could have done the same. But instead he chose to defend DOMA, denigrate our civil rights, go back on his promises, and contradict his own statements that DOMA was "abhorrent." Folks, Obama's lawyers are even trying to diminish the impact of Roemer and Lawrence, our only two big Supreme Court victories. Obama is quite literally destroying our civil rights gains with this brief. He's taking us down for his own benefit.

The "Justice" Department took things a step further by comparing gay marriage to incest and child rape. And they argued that gays don't deserve the same rights as other minorities, including African Americans.

One of the people who helped write the brief was a Mormon who's a hold over from the Bush administration.

On Tuesday night, Obama tried to throw gay rights proponents a bone. A White House official says he's going to sign a memo that extends benefits to the partners of federal employees who are gay.

Sorry, bud. The damage is done.

A bikini bug ate me alive

Some quickies:

• A Chinese father grieving the loss of his son hired some hoodlums to dig up a young woman's corpse to marry his son and join him in the afterlife. It's part of an ancient Chinese tradition.

• A 4 year old in Britain flushed a puppy down the toilet. The puppy's okay but I'm wondering how he managed to flush a puppy when I can't even get poop to go down mine.

• Mmm. Buffalo turds. How many can you eat?

• Fark headline of the day: Having fixed the economy, brought our troops home, and restored peace in the world, Republicans set out on their new crusade to make English the official language of the US. Because the 8,743rd time's a charm.

• Crop circles in England - not just circles anymore. Check out the phoenix, the dragonfly, and the jellyfish. (By the way, the world will end on December 21, 2012. Don't say I didn't warn you.)

• Actual headline from The Daily Mail: "A bikini bug ate me alive."

From the article:

There is not much that makes me Definitely Not Feel Like Shopping, but strutting around Hampstead with an African maggot chewing its way out of my body really put me off.

She went to Kenya, a tumbu fly laid eggs in her wet t-shirt, the larvae penetrated her arm, and she went home with what looked like a mosquito bite but turned out to be maggots. Pain, swelling, pus and a really good-looking doctor ensued.

Quote of the day

“Like many LGBT people, I knew I was gay from a very young age so that also meant that I knew that I was less than most kids, meant that something was supposedly wrong with me ... It meant that I was a second class citizen and that according to my church, I was right down there with all the sinners and the murderers and the rapists ...

And I had two options: I could shrink away, I could try not to be noticed, not to excel, and to vanish in school and in all my activities. Or, the more permanent solution which was to take my own life. And sadly, that’s not a unique ciurcumstance in our country today.

Even today, one in three kids seriously contemplates suicide and gay and lesbian kids are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight brothers and sisters and nine times more likely if they come from non-accepting homes. … For those who do come out, those who do have the bravery and do survive, 26 percent - over one-quarter - are kicked out of their homes.”

~ Dustin Lance Black, who won the Oscar for writing "Milk"

Olfactory hallucinations

Every so often, I start smelling something like formaldehyde - a strong chemical odor so bad it makes me nauseated and keeps me awake at night.

There's nothing I can do to make it go away. I've tried air freshener and scented candles - I can hardly smell them - and I put mint-flavored chapstick on my nose, which helps a little.

Last fall, it happened in August, September, October and November, then I went until March then not again until now. Usually it lasts a day then stops on its own.

I googled olfactory hallucinations awhile back. They said it's a sign of temporal lobe seizures, also a symptom bipolar disorder, which I have, which also may have something to do with temporal seizures.

One of the many joys of being crazy.

On a side note, the hot water was off all weekend. Again. I called the manager on Sunday. He said the plumber had been here to check it and told him he'd have to call the boiler guy, who's supposed to be here now.

The manager also told me the landlord wants to install a whole new boiler system, which could mean there'd be no hot water for a week.

I think that's illegal - he's responsible for providing hot water or making other accommodations for us. I've heard of cases where landlords had to pay for hotel rooms for their tenants.

The guy would flip if asked for that. Might be worth it just to see what color his face turns.

Turn ons: a nice hot bubble bath
Turn offs: memories of Zoology 101 - dissecting dead cats and headaches from formaldehyde

People who don't get laid still read about it

Update on the rotting corpse smell: It's getting worse. Now it's seeping into my living room.

I found out it's not a dead body but a really filthy apartment. I feel sorry for the elderly couple who live there. But I'm so pissed the landlord let it get this bad. He's known for a long time that they weren't keeping their place clean.

I'm thinking about calling county social services to help them.

I have a hundred things I promised myself I'd do this weekend - most of them involve cleaning out closets, which is something I actually enjoy. But am I working on that? Nope, I'm wasting time reading lame Yahoo! relationships articles.

So far today, I've learned:

• "Men with good self-esteem also have a big peen." (But I think it's the other way around.)

• "Men's sensitivities about their love stick can lead to other issues like depression, anxiety, and OCD."

• "In 1999, researchers Siegfried and Roy Bogaert and Hershberger found that gay men have bigger, girthier penises than there hetero counterparts."

The article also said tall men have bigger dicks. I'm left wondering - does a short homo have a bigger dick than a tall hetero?

Since I'm too lazy to turn off the computer and start cleaning, I also learned:

• The Gallup Pole: SUNY researcher Gordon Gallup has a theory that women can get pregnant by a man she's never had sex with. Basically, Jane has sex with Dick. The next day Jane has sex with Harry. Some of Dick's sperm gets caught under Harry's coronal ridge. Then Harry goes home and has sex with his wife and John's sperm ends up in Harry's wife.

The moral of the story is don't believe everything your hear on Maury Povich. DNA does lie. She wasn't cheating on you, Harry! And Karma's a bitch.

• Also: If you spit or swallow right away, you're less likely to catch an STD from giving a BJ. If you let his love juice linger on your tongue, the germs are absorbed through the mucus membranes in your mouth.

• A frisky female sexpert shreds a Men's Health article about how to turn a woman on. He said: Sending her flowers is overdone; send a card instead. She said: "Okay, and from now on, we’ll just show our appreciation for you with a magnetic poem on your refrigerator. After all, blowjobs are so overdone!"

And here's their list of 10 Things That Are Way More Awkward to Buy than Condoms:

1. Monistat
2. A 16-roll pack of toilet paper
3. Upper lip bleach
4. Metamucil fiber powder
5. Lice shampoo
6. Man's deodorant
7. Wart-off
8. Douche
9. KY Warming Jelly Personal Lubricant
10. The morning-after pill

The explanation for #9 was priceless: "Regular lubricant = not so embarrassing. K-Y Jelly that heats up = your fussy vagina is awfully high maintenance."

I have to say, one of the good things about getting old is that I'm not embarrassed to buy anything.

The picture is a chandelier. I don't know if it was intended to look like what it does.

Penis Quote of the Day

"I’m not worried about how small my penis is —
I’m worried about how dark it is. I have
a Dominican penis. My penis hit six home runs last year;
my penis wears shoes without socks."

~ John Mayer

Eye candy for the weekend

Karl Lagerfeld's bodyguard. A guy that good looking could definitely do better.

No irony intended

Sonny and Cher's daughter Chastity Bono has announced that she's transitioning from female to male. He's going by Chaz now. The truly shocking part of this story? Chastity Bono is 40!

To me she's still that cute little toddler who walked out with her parents every week on The Sonny and Cher Show.

God, I'm getting old.

More quickies:

• Cue the Twilight Zone theme: An Italian couple missed the Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic because they were late getting to the airport. The next day they caught another flight out of Rio.

A little over a week later, their car was hit by a truck in Austria. The wife was killed and the husband is seriously injured.

• Is it really child pornography if you photoshop a child's head onto the body of a barely legal nude model? What if the guy who did it is an elementary school principal and the kids were students at his school?

• While actress Megan Fox was doing an interview about the new Transformers movie, she said she would tell Megatron:

"Instead of the entire planet, can you just take out all of the white trash, hillbilly, anti-gay, super bible-beating people in Middle America?”

Gay marriage is legal where I live in Middle America, unlike in California, land of Proposition Hate. Clean up your own back yard, dear.

• The rotting corpse smell I mentioned yesterday has dissipated somewhat. At first, it seemed concentrated near the door of an apartment down on the first floor. This morning, the odor was stronger upstairs than downstairs.

I didn't call the manager because he wouldn't do anything about it - he'd just add another strike against me as a complainer.

I realize I'm putting a picture of a dead guy next to a post about a rotting corpse. No irony intended.

Pondering

1. How can one child use so much toilet paper in such a short period of time? (Half a megaroll of Charmin in one night. That much usually lasts me a week.)

2. Why can't I sleep for more than 2 hours at a time?

3. Why can't I find a med that'll knock me out when I want to be knocked out and wake up when I need to wake up?

4. Why does the hallway of my apartment building smell like a rotting corpse?

5. Should I call the manager about the possible rotting corpse?

Even Fox News is worried about the wingnuts

In the clip above, Shepard Smith says he's frightened by the emails he gets from extremists on the right who have "ridiculous" and "preposterous" beliefs about Obama. He recognizes the extremism that resulted in the murder of Dr. Tiller and yesterday's murder at the Holocaust Museum could lead to violence against the president.

Quote of the day

I think we have to now see those two intelligence assessments that were released by Homeland Security earlier this year - one dealt with left-wing extremists, the other dealt with right-wing extremists. You have to see them in a somewhat different light.

It would appear ... that it does seem to be the act of an individual who had extremist views, and if it is indeed Von Brunn, someone who has a military history.

And as you remember, that was the element of the right-wing intelligence assessment which was so controversial and there was a lot of blowback on Homeland Security for that assessment.

~ a Fox News reporter discussing the murder at the Holocaust Museum (video)

I'm getting ready to go on a feminist kick

A couple links to a few things I've been reading:

• Excellent blog post at TPM: "Two Hundred Million Missing Women." It's about how women in parts of Africa and Asia are dying in disproportionate numbers to men because of unequal access to medical care, food and social services, as well as deaths by suicide and murder, often committed by their own husbands or family members.

• An article about sex tourism in Eastern Bloc countries, which has resulted in increased prostitution and human trafficking. The Ukraine now has the highest HIV/AIDS rate in Europe.

Help, I've fallen and I can't get up

My mom's health is very fragile right now and probably will be for the rest of her life. She's still in A-fib which makes her weak and she tires easily.

When I saw her this weekend, she said she wants to clean out her cupboards and closets and start getting rid of stuff, which I think would be a good idea for most people, including me. Then she added that it would make things easier for us when she's gone.

Years ago, one of my elderly neighbors fell in the bathtub and was trapped in there for several days before a friend checked up on her. She was very confused and disoriented, cold, hungry, tried, in pain.

Another elderly neighbor fell in her bedroom and broke her hip. She was able to get help by pounding on the wall with her cane but she was on the floor for at least an hour before anyone got to her. She lived below me and I heard the pounding but didn't even think she might be trying to signal for help. I finally went downstairs to investigate and by then, someone else had already tried to call the building manager (no answer) and then called the police. They had to break in.

That's my greatest fear for my mother - that she'll fall and be conscious and in pain and no one will be there to help her.

A couple nights ago, I couldn't sleep. When I finally dozed off, I had a dream where I was sitting in a recliner and suddenly my mother appeared and swooped down and put her face right in my face. She looked terrified and needed my help. It reminded me of how a scary face suddenly appears in the darkness in a horror movie.

It also reminded me of the morning my maternal grandmother died. I had a dream where she and I were going to a movie together. We were walking down the aisle looking for a seat and she suddenly said "Goodbye" and disappeared.

Later, I found out she died at about the same time I had that dream.

I had similar dreams after my father and my paternal grandmother died - dreams where they came to say goodbye - but those happened a few days after their deaths.

The dream about my mother startled me awake. My heart was pounding and I got worried that something was wrong. While she was in ICU a couple of months ago, I woke up and suddenly "knew" that something was wrong. I went to the hospital and found out she was awake and scared and agitated. She calmed down when I was there.

So the dream this week - it was about 4 a.m. I didn't want to call and wake her up just because I might be psychic, but I was afraid something was wrong. I debated and debated and finally opted not to call. I convinced myself that if it was her spirit coming to me she was already dead. I planned to call to check up on her later that morning.

I put off calling until afternoon. When I finally did, I got her answering machine but that's normal. She screens her calls.

When she called back, she was fine - as fine as she can be anyway.

First Alert here we come.

Adam comes out

Not that he was ever really in. He played it smart too - he finished 2nd on Idol and I think he made the cover of Rolling Stone before the winner did.

One of my best friends from college was Lesbian but she didn't come out until our senior year. I think I was one of the first people she told.

Some of the people in our circle were shocked and she lost a few close-minded friends but for most of us, once we thought about it, it was really no surprise.

Years later, she was living with a girlfriend - they even bought a house together. I asked her if she had told everyone she worked with and everyone in her family. She said, "If they want to know, they've figured it out by now. If they don't want to know, I'm not going to tell them."

I think it was the same way with Adam Lambert. Anyone who wanted to know already knew. He did musical theater for gods sake.

Yeah, okay, that's a stereotype. But he sang a Cher song during the auditions. Cher. Musical theater. Makeup. Polish. Pictures all over the internet - in drag, kissing other guys, holding hands with guys. And he was exceedingly polite.

Gay ga-gay gay gay.

And sexy as hell without the rock star swagger. I can't wait to buy his album.

More on health insurance

Jon Taplin at TPM, commenting on insurance companies' objections to Obama's plan for a public plan similar to Medicare:

So let me get this straight. It's not fair to have a public option because they don't have to make obscene profits for their shareholders and they can use the leverage of the combined group of medicare and public option customers to negotiate better fees with doctors, hospitals and drug companies.

Isn't that the point?

And a reader responded:

I think that they have just conceded the game. They fear the public plan because it really is substantially better and cheaper than anything they can or would provide.

Real Cher, wax figure or drag queen?

You be the judge.

69

Tom Jones - 69. Sadly, that's his age not his favorite position. Happy birthday, big guy.

A few quickies:

• A 72 year old woman in Texas got tased because she refused to sign a speeding ticket and she cussed out the cop. Big ol' girly man was scared of grandma.

• The best-selling car in America? The Little Tikes Cozy Coupe.

• Cars and houses aren't the only things that are going for bargain prices nowadays. In Toronto, the price of a blow job has dropped from $60 a pop to $20.

Snowe's trigger

Follow up on "Single payer universal health care." From Robert Reich:

Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging health care bill.

You know why, of course. They don't want a public option that would compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to negotiate better rates with drug companies. They argue that would be unfair. Unfair? Unfair to give more people better health care at lower cost? To Pharma and Insurance, "unfair" is anything that undermines their profits.

So they're pulling out all the stops -- pushing Democrats and a handful of so-called "moderate" Republicans who say they're in favor of a public option to support legislation that would include it in name only. One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to the states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they've been doing for years. A third is bind the public plan to the same rules private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers ...

None of the three proposals has emerged as the leading candidate for those who want to kill the public option without showing they're killing it. Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy and his staff are still pushing for a full public option, but with Kennedy ailing, he might not be able to round up the votes ...

Enter Olympia Snowe. Her move is important ... because she's well-respected and considered non-partisan, and therefore offers some cover to Democrats who may need it ... Under Snowe's proposal, the public option would kick in years from now, but it would be triggered only if insurance companies fail to bring down healthcare costs and expand coverage in he meantime.

What's the catch? First, these conditions are likely to be achieved by other pieces of the emerging legislation ... Second, as Pharma and Insurance well know, "years from now" in legislative terms means never. There will never be a better time than now to enact a public option.

Much the same dynamic is occurring in the House ... Snowe's "trigger" is already buzzing among members.

Snowe's trigger will shoot a bullet to the brain of true universal health care in America.

Check out the reader comments to Reich's article. Very informative and right on point.

The saddest picture I've seen today

Kurt Cobain before he was famous, maybe 10 years before he killed himself.

Missing Baby Found in Sandwich

That's an actual news headline from Boston. The outcome wasn't quite as tragic as it sounds.

For some reason, Blogger hasn't been emailing me all the comments submitted to the blog. I'm getting some but just found a couple at dashboard that hadn't been moderated yet. Hmm. If your comments don't show up, it's just because I'm slow getting to them.

Some quickies:

• A 15 year old boy in Florida was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. A year later he was found slumped over in his hospital room with blood dripping from his mouth and nose. He died of a heart attack caused by the combination of psychotropic drugs he'd been prescribed - a total of 6 drugs at the time of his death; 16 different drugs during the course of the year.

Every once in awhile, I think the Scientologists have a point when they say psychiatry is evil.

• While Pres. Obama's wasting time being all serious with the Israelis and Egyptians, he's missing out on the party over at the Italian PM's villa. Paparazzi got shots of Berlusconi lounging around the pool with a bevy of young beauties. And the Czech PM was there too - without his pants. With a boner.

• Speaking of men without pants: Penis t-shirt (not safe for work)

• Just so you know: If you refuse to give a DNA sample, the police will tase you, bro. And it's legal.

• The Smoking Gun's mugshots of the week: No shortage of product here.

• I've had one of those nights before - how about you?

Single payer universal health care. Now.

A study from Harvard and Ohio University reports that more than 60% of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are caused by medical bills. 75% of those families had medical insurance but still couldn't pay the bills. One of the researchers says:

"Unless you're Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy."

Many consumer advocates say none of the health care options being considered will fix the problem. Dr. Sidney Wolfe from Public Citizen:

"Expanding private insurance and calling it health reform will fail to prevent financial catastrophe for hundreds of thousands of Americans every year."

The only way to make health care affordable to everyone is to eliminate the billions of dollars that are wasted on administrative costs of dealing with insurance companies. Single payer universal health care.

What's so fucking hard to understand about that?

Eye candy for the weekend

I have no idea who he is.

Quote of the day

They are everything that's wrong with America…they are insincere, lazy, entitled and they claim the devil has possessed them ...

What they don't realize is that they are now going to be examined and their value system utterly deconstructed. They are going to spend the night somewhere in isolation and guarded with lots of surprises…but not traditional reality [stunts].

~ an NBC vice president reacting to the diva behavior of Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt on "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here."

Freaks and goons

Two Sacramento talk radio goons engaged in what one writer called a "pageant of brutality towards transgender children." They called such kids "idiots" and "freaks." One of them said that if his own son ever put on high heels, he'd beat him with one of his shoes. He also said he looked forward to when transgendered children go out and "society beats them down."

When their female co-host objected, they laid into her: "You're actually defending allowing people to become freaks?"

Read the rest here.

Speaking of freaks, I finally see what all the hype was about. Last night, I spent some time with my 11 year old niece and she insisted we had to watch "Twilight." It's her verrry favorite movie of allll time.

Surprisingly enough, I liked it even though I thought the makeup was bad. All the vampires and the non-vamp heroine were very pale but you could see the lines in front of their ears and on their necks where the makeup stopped. I hope they do better with the sequel.

Turn ons: Robert Pattinson but he's not THAT cute
Turn offs: people who pick on kids

Newt

Racist and political opportunist Newt Gingrich now says he was wrong to call Judge Sotomayor a "racist," right before he explains why she is a racist. God, I hope he gets the Republican nomination in 2012. I would so love to see Obama crush him.

As for now, his stepdown is even more delightful because the email where he ate his words also announces he's running a Father's Day sale on his book. Poor guy is reduced to shameless shillery. And plagiarism - he steals the Fox News line "You Read, You Decide."

He's also given me the opportunity to introduce a new label to my blog - "political buffoonery." Thanks, Newt. I'm sure you'll give me lots of chances to use it.

PS: Somebody forgot to click "Publish." I wrote this on Wednesday - it's Friday and I'm just posting it now. Der.

Somewhat random

Some quickies:

• I just calculated my carbon footprint. It's 25 - the national average for a 1-person household is 27, so I'm doing okay by that standard. But the world average is 5.5.

• A new Chinese delicacy: Poisonous snake-bitten chicken. Yum.

• "Alpaca fleece is said to be the warmest fibre you can get apart from polar bear fleece - but I'm not shearing them." So says the Australian alpaca shearer.

• "He was extremely uncooperative." So said the cop about the drunk driver who slipped out his handcuffs, bit and kicked an officer, and urinated in the back of the police van.

• So sad: A British couple, distraught over the death of their 5 year old son, threw his body over a cliff then jumped to their own deaths. A bag containing his toys was also recovered at the site.

• On the other end of the parenting spectrum: Somebody in Florida left a newborn baby to die in a box at the side of the road.

• Follow up on the murder of the Wichita doctor: To understand some of what was lost when Dr. Tiller died, visit "A Heartbreaking Choice" and read the Kansas stories.

Also, this quote Andrew Sullivan published, from the husband of one of Dr. Tiller's patients about Tiller's compassion for his patients:

My wife and I spent a week in Dr. Tiller's care after we learned our 21 week fetus had a severe defect incompatible with life. The laws in our state prevented us from ending the pregnancy there, and Dr. Tiller was one of maybe three choices in the whole nation at that gestational age. My wife just called with the news of his murder, weeping ...

I remember my wife, foggy with sedation after the final procedure, being helped from the exam table. He had her sit up and put her arms around his neck, and then he lifted her into a wheelchair. "You give good hugs" she whispered. He paused just for a moment. "You're just fine," he told her.

Quote of the day

The God we have in the Big Three monotheisms is a God who originated in a period when male superiority was absolutely taken for granted. That time has passed, but the superior male God remains and that God holds women in contempt. That God is the one who puts "His" imprimatur on all those tyrannical laws. That God is a product of history, but taken to be eternal, which is a bad combination. That is the God who hates women.

~ Ophelia Benson, co-author of "Does God Hate Women?" I guess the answer is yes.

Bert & Ernie sought for questioning

The picture is from a photoshop contest at Fark. The assignment was to mash together scenes from 2 different movies.

In a completely unrelated story, a horse trainer in Australia threatened to cut off the heads of his horses and send them to a government official after jumps racing was suspended because of a string of horse deaths.

Um, Mom, about that pocket rocket in my purse

A couple of weeks ago when I took my mom to the emergency room in Omaha, a security guard searched both our purses before he let us go in. I found it very invasive but Mom was sick and I wasn't going to argue.

I mention this because of an article I just read. Did you know some movie theaters search bags when you go to see a movie? They do it on the pretense of looking for video recording equipment to protect piracy. But, as one of the article's commenters pointed out, they're probably looking for smuggled snacks.

This particular Canadian movie theater made news because it was fined $10,000 for violating a teenager's privacy when they pulled her birth control pills out of her bag in front of her mother. Mom didn't know her little girl was on the pill.

What I'm wondering is if movie theaters can really afford this shit. They charge $10 for a ticket and $10 for popcorn and a Coke, then you have to put up with the moron behind you kicking your seat, the linebacker in front of you blocking your view, and the dipshit teenagers talking on their cell phones. Now they want to search your bags before they let you in?

Thanks, but I'll stay home with my Netflix. Ten movies a month with all the microwave popcorn I can eat for less than the cost of one night at the multiplex.

And I don't even have to put up with the chick squeezing her butt past my face and stepping on my toes on her way to the bathroom.

A few quickies:

• Fark headline of the day: Stuff you don't want to hear on the phone: 1. "This is the IRS." 2. "I'm calling from the hospital about your mother." 3. "I just drove by your field and your cows are exploding."

• Miss Peacock in the back yard with a baseball bat.

• A 25 year old Egyptian sliced off his own penis because his family wouldn't let him marry the woman he loved.

Kiss my dick goodbye
The sweetness and the sorrow
Wish me luck, the same to you
But I can't regret
What I did for love, what I did for love

The terrorists have already won

An OB/GYN in Wichita, KS, was shot dead in church Sunday morning. He was one of the few doctors in the country who still performed late term abortions.

Dr. George Tiller's clinic had been bombed in 1985 and he was shot in both arms in 1993. He often wore a bulletproof vest and drove an armored car to work.

Even the state had harassed him - he was recently acquitted of charges that he performed abortions illegally.

The suspect is an anti-abortion fanatic with previous convictions for making violent threats and possessing bomb making materials.

NOW president Kim Gandy said, "These people are organized. ...They're raising money and funding domestic terrorism."

As if to prove her point, the founder of Operation Rescue issued a statement:

"George Tiller was a mass-murderer ... We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama administration will use Tiller's killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder."

Strangely enough

This turns me on a little. Nothing ambiguously gay about that.