News in Briefs

The news is a rich soup today, full of luscious and sometimes certainly questionable, chunks of meaty matter. Instead of going to work, as I’ve made the mistake of doing, please consider kicking back in your favorite undies and enjoying some all American infoporn. Excerpts of the better stories below.

His all-meat diet is a well-known example. When he was younger, Bear read about the Eskimos eating only fish and meat and became convinced that humans are meant to be exclusively carnivorous. The members of the Grateful Dead remember living with Bear for several months in 1966 in Los Angeles, where the refrigerator contained only bottles of milk and a slab of steak, meat they fried and ate straight out of the pan. His heart attack several years ago had nothing to do with his strict regimen, according to Bear, but more likely the result of some poisonous broccoli his mother made him eat as a youth.

Having lost one of his vocal cords, he speaks only in a whispered croak these days. At one point, he was reduced to injecting his puree of steak and espresso directly into his stomach.

Full story here.

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This story about gay and lesbian gangs across the nation is typical of Fox News (SFgate.com’s Violet Blue correctly calls this particular story ‘Weekly World News on airplane glue and Anal Eze‘). You and I both know Fox News is nothing but pure bullshit entertainment. Violet Blue knows it, you know, I know it. But the millions of stupid Americans living in the flyover zone/down South don’t know it, and worse yet, believe and buy it, hook, line, and sinker.

Check it out. . .

A “national underground network” of pink pistol-packing lesbians is terrorizing America. “All across the country,” they are raping young girls, attacking heterosexual males at random, and forcibly indoctrinating children as young as 10 into the homosexual lifestyle, according to a shocking June 21 segment on the popular Fox News Channel program, “The O’Reilly Factor.”

Titled “Violent Lesbian Gangs a Growing Problem,” the segment began with host Bill O’Reilly briefly referencing for his roughly 3 million viewers the case of Wayne Buckle, a DVD bootlegger who was attacked by seven lesbians in New York City last August. Deploying swift, broad strokes, O’Reilly painted a graphic picture of lesbian gangs running amok. “In Tennessee, authorities say a lesbian gang called GTO, Gays Taking Over, are involved in raping young girls,” he reported. “And in Philadelphia, a lesbian gang called DTO, Dykes Taking Over, are allegedly terrorizing people as well.”

After this introduction, O’Reilly went to a split-screen live interview with “Fox News crime analyst” Rod Wheeler.

“Tell me what’s going on,” O’Reilly said.

The original newscast is here.

Now check out GLAAD’s response, including, if you click on the video news story on this page, a rebuttal against a clearly defensive, but still insistently rabid, O’Reilly. And speaking of deep South dumb asses believing this bullshit, check out a few who don’t aka The Southern Poverty Law Center and their reaction to O’Reilly’s masterpiece.

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It’s about time someone revealed the truth about this scumbag, who profited and continues to profit from the tragedy he was a witness of. He wasn’t a hero, he was a lousy manager. He is an immoral person. The firefighters were and are the heroes. I am a Republican, by the way.

Who could this commenter be talking about? Giuliani gets his. Let’s hope it sticks.

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And finally, this jewel. . .

Bunch, who was listening to Metallica while mowing the grass at his home in Castle Rock, Colorado, still has mild hearing damage in both ears, despite two reconstructive surgeries to repair ruptured eardrums. He had burns from the earphone wires on the sides of his face, a nasty burn on his hip where the iPod had been in a pocket and “a bad line up the side of my body,” even though the iPod cord was outside his shirt.

Presidential Potluck

We’re so having a potluck (steamed baloney) and watching this go down on a big screen televizzle.

deets on the upcoming prez candidate glbt forum from HRC
you get hot when i talk all street ‘n shit, don’t you?

Updates on the LOGO/HRC Foundation Presidential Forum

July 11, 2007
Chris Johnson

The response to the news about the Presidential forum has been quite amazing. We’re continuing to work out the details and have some updates.

We learned today that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) will be attending the forum. Still waiting to hear from Governor Richardson….

We did make an effort to have a Republican debate as well. The Foundation’s first ground rule was that we needed to get confirmations from at least two of the top three candidates on either side before we’d proceed with any forum. On the GOP side, Mitt Romney said no — and we never heard back from Rudy Giuliani or John McCain. That’s right: no response. Furthermore, none of the Republican presidential candidates returned HRC’s questionnaire. Without any responses from any of the top three Republicans, there would obviously be no GOP debate.

Once we received affirmative responses from Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama, we proceeded with working with LOGO to plan the Democratic forum. Then, John Edwards also said yes.

The other standard we set was that the candidates we invited had to have raised $100,000. On the Democratic side, that meant we also invited Sen. Chris Dodd, Sen. Joe Biden, Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Gov. Bill Richardson. We wanted to make sure that with the limited time we had to present this forum, our community got to hear from candidates who could actually be President. We have gotten some feedback about not inviting Mike Gravel. Unfortunately, he didn’t meet the $100,000 threshold.

Knowing this event is the only forum that will be devoted solely to questions about GLBT issues, we put a lot of thought into how we can maximize the response time from the candidates who could win their party’s nomination. We really want to do the best thing for the community and make this forum as productive as possible.

In addition to Joe Solmonese and Melissa Etheridge, there will be a moderator at the event. We’ve got asks in to several top-tier journalists to serve as moderator and we’ll have more updates on this as soon as possible.

One last thing: We’re working with LOGO to set up a process for the Foundation to solicit questions for the candidates from the GLBT community. More details on that soon.

I’ve Got a Hero

Your friends will want to see this one.

Best. entrance. ever! Watch Superman for 30 seconds, wonder what the fuck he has bouncing in those red briefs, and then prepare to be stunned. And the rest of the act ain’t bad either. She won, natch!

Don’t Have to Try

Was reading just the other day about the big hoopla about Avril Lavigne supposedly stealing a hook from some old Rubinos song for her admittedly awesome song Girlfriend. Compare and decide here.

For my money, it seems far more clear that Avril robbed Peaches’ I’m the Kinda to make Avril’s lesser known (at least to me) I Don’t Have to Try. Decide for yourself.

Haint Blue

If the window sills of my current dwelling ever need repainting, I’ll suggest choosing a distinct color of blue for two reasons. ‘Haint blue’, an electric, powdery shade of blue (picture the blue pool cue chalk color), covers the doorways and window sills of more than a few homes deep in the ‘Lowcountry’ from which I hail (the comments alone on this link make it worth reading).

First, haint blue would look nice, I think, against the darker, deepwater blue that serves as the base color for most of the exterior. My second, more important reason for suggesting haint blue would be because it keeps out ghosts.

Ghosts. Or haints, if you have at least one person in your family that speaks Gullah, believes in the evil power of cats (they’ll suck the breath out of a baby) and who believes in ghosts.

I don’t, or didn’t, until just recently. When I moved in four months ago, I got the full tour of all the finicky touches in a house which will celebrate its centennial this summer (a number of SF houses will, given the construction following the 1906 quake).

The draft from the bathroom window will bang the door unless it is tightly closed. The toilet handle requires some insistent fondling before the water will stop running. The energy-efficient, on-demand hot water is moody at best.

Told all that, but was left to find out about the ghost myself. Come to think of it, I’m certain frank disclosure of supernatural activity is probably the law in spooky places like Savannah and Charleston. Disclosure and a can of blue paint is I suppose all you can hope for.

Now that I think about it, painting in haint blue won’t do much good, as I now recall it is used to keep ghosts OUT of a house. Ours lived here long before I did, and she shows no signs of moving out, or on.

Anne was the original owner of the house, according to our downstairs neighbor who knew her from living there for more than twenty years. Anne passed away in the house next door, which she also owned.

Despite owning so much of prime cocksucker-Castro real estate, Anne decided to occupy, in her final years, a very small part of the top floor of one house so she could rent out the rest of the flat and building. Of course, her room is now my room, and it is upon leaving it that I see and sense her the most often.

Thankfully, Anne seems pretty laid back. I catch her out of the corner of my eye in certain consistent areas near my room, and there have been times when I’ve definitely felt someone else in the house. This has been confirmed by the behavior of the house cats and by G-boy, who has also had a number of spooky experiences.

Recently though, Anne has upped the ante and begun wearing perfume (again). I walked out of my room recently into a cloud of stench that immediately made me think of my own grandmother – a gaggingly sweet scent reminiscent of rosewater, age, and Raid bug spray.

This development was met with some degree of skepticism by the boyfriend, who probably thought it more a by-product of yours truly walking around in his own self-generated cloud of pot smoke.

So I was relieved to return home just last night to have the BF relate the following : he’d been downstairs playing cards with the neighbors, popped upstairs into the dining room (across the hall from my room) to fetch (another) bottle of wine, only to run into the same wall of dime store scent.

He called up the kids from downstairs, the long time resident of which related that Anne did indeed overdo it on the scent, back in the day when she was, you know, alive. I feel bad bagging on a dead woman’s choice in cologne, but here’s the real kicker.

The scent won’t dissipate if you open a window, because, and this is the part that actually creeps me out, it isn’t REALLY a scent. It is the ghost of one, and our normal laws of air diffusion, physics, and good taste do not apply.

Furthermore, it lingers for a considerable time, and it really is very thick and unpleasant.

And so, for the slew o’ folk coming in to visit and staying in my room during their visit, I’m giving you fair warning. Watch the toilet handle, close the bathroom door tightly, and know that Anne may be walking around, and it smells like the old girl might be lonely and lookin’ for love.

So Proud

Hundreds of thousands of homos recently marched, rode, or waddled through San Francisco celebrating gay pride.

Not that I have gone all post gay on you or anything, but it has been years since I’ve felt uplifted by the actual Pride parade. Crowds, long waits between floats only to discover it is entery #4,987, Gay Dental Hygenists of Walnut Creek, well.. .meh.

The closest I’ve come lately to feeling my own demented definition of gay pride happened just two days ago. Even though I’m largely out of the gay, Rough Trade World o’ Warcraft loop, I still keep in touch with loads o’gayming homos through my secret network of spies and informants.

One which recently shared this Xtube video (so VERY Not Safe For Work) of an AWOL Tainter named Jebb. As I watched Jebb work his impressive cam magic, I felt, much like the Grinch when he sells out at the end of his story, my heart grow three times as big.

Or something. It is just beautiful and impressive and I’m hecka happy to have someone that talented in my extended circle o’ pals.

She Was Set Up!

I’m sure we’ve all noticed how most major online news outlets now give you bullet points at the top of the news story to convey the main points. We’ve become too lazy, busy, and/or illiterate to read full articles now, and even though I generally find the little blurbs annoying, in some cases the brevity makes the whole situation read like some inflated, absurd haiku.

For example:

Woman in teen net tryst ‘was set up’

• Woman allegedly tried to abduct internet boyfriend
• Family says boy’s parents paid her airfare to US
• Couple met on internet playing World of Warcraft

Really, other than the fact that this happened in the, yep, deep South, what more do we need to know?

WHO Says

Fresh off a five hour flight to and from Hawaii, I laugh in the face of DVT probability. Laugh, I say.

Long-Distance Air Travel Doubles Risk of Blood Clot, WHO Says
By Dermot Doherty

June 29 (Bloomberg) — Flights lasting more than four hours about double a traveler’s risk of life-threatening blood clots, World Health Organization studies found.

The clots, called venous thromboembolism, can form in the legs and can be fatal when they move into a patient’s lungs. The risk of VTE also applies to travel such as car, bus and train where passengers are seated for long periods, the Geneva-based agency said in an e-mailed statement.

More than 600,000 people in the U.S. have a pulmonary embolism every year and more than 60,000 of them die, according to the country’s National Institutes of Health. The disorder is one of the most common causes of death in bed-bound hospitalized people. Long airplane journeys or car trips, childbirth within the last six months as well as use of drugs including estrogen and birth control pills have also been linked to clots.

“There is a clear need for travelers to be given appropriate information regarding the risks and for further studies to identify effective preventative measures,” the Geneva-based agency said.

The conclusions announced today were the result of the WHO Research Into Global Hazards of Travel, or WRIGHT, project aimed at confirming previous studies linking VTE and air travel. The project also sought to determine the extent of the risk.

My Puss

The True Colors concert was, with the painful exception of Debbie Harry, off-the-leash awesome. I was never a big Cyndi Lauper fan back in the day but that tiny, toy keychain terror tore. it. up.

Erasure was likewise awesome, with about the best back-up dancers seen in recent memory. And even Rose O’ was fun.

Highlight of the evening, other than not falling down the cheap seat lawn hill, was the following.