NEW DRINKING GAME

This lame president and the state of this union could drive anyone to drink. (Supposedly, even the president himself!) This drinking game may help take the edge off of Bush's address this evening.

DRINKINGGAME

ALITO'S CONFIRMATION

Well, it looks like the Senate voted down Kerry's proposed filibuster, so Alito will likelily be confirmed and become a jewel in the tarnished crown of King George at his Mis-Stake of the Union address today. It looks that way, but I tell you there is still hope! It did feel awfully good to phone Chuck Schumer's office and hear that he was supporting the filibuster--Hillary's line was busy. I intend to email both to thank them--there is probably a lot of pressure on them to not be viewed as a few far-left kooks. Who knows, maybe they have struck some secret deal on "The Hill" which trades Alito's confirmation for Bush's impeachment.

But until the second Alito is confirmed, there are certain unorthodox methods of getting things done outside of the legal system. We have our own secret deals and it's time to pull together and go into overdrive!



WITCHES AND RADICAL FAERIES: I know it's short notice, but see what you can do.

DC PROSTITUTES: Have your cellphone cameras ready to snap Alito the moment he disrobes. We'll make his wife cry, alright.

TAXI AND LIMOUSINE DRIVERS OF DC: Be prepared to lose your job to ensure that Alito is late for each appointment. If you can take a detour and "break down" so that he misses or is late for his actual confirmation, it's a touchdown. And with the press you'd get you could probably start your own DEMOCRATS ONLY car service in the capitol.

DC HAIRDRESSERS: Could you "mess up" on his next appointment and send him to court with a bright new color, patchwork bleach job or mohawk? International press would pick up on the humiliation.

DC TAILORS/ROBE CLEANERS: Have lice and scabies specimens on hand.

FOOD SERVICE WORKERS: I would hate for anyone to get food poisoning and miss work, but....

BERLUSCONI'S COJONES

from www.editorandpublisher.com


NEW YORK In a new kind of "campaign promise," Premier Silvio Berlusconi has promised Italian voters he will refain from sex until the April 9 elections, his brother's newspaper reports Sunday.

Il Giornale, a conservative Milan daily owned by Paolo Berlusconi, reported that the abstinence vow was made during a campaign rally in Cagliari, Sardinia, on Saturday.

A popular TV preacher on the island, Rev. Massimiliano Pusceddu, had hailed the twice-married premier for opposing gay marriage and defense of so-called family values, and promised that his followers would support the conservative leader because "if the left wins it will be the moral end for this country."

Berlusconi, 69, replied: "Dear Father Massimiliano. I thank you a lot. I will try to meet your expectations, and I promise from now on, 2 1/2 months of absolute sexual abstinence, until April 9."

SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME WHAT ABSTINENCE WILL ACHIEVE? I'M JUST GLAD THAT WE'RE NOT THE ONLY COUNTRY THAT PANDERS TO RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVES IN EXCHANGE FOR VOTES.

Berlusconi has had a facelift and a hair transplant in recent years. He has often been criticised by feminist groups for his use of sexual innuendo.

In June he sparked a diplomatic incident with Finland when he said he had used "playboy tactics" to persuade its female president to change her mind about one issue.

THE REAL DIPLOMATIC FLAP SHOULD BE DIRECTED TOWARD THE FINNISH PRESIDENT WHO ALLOWED HERSELF TO BE PERSUADED BY PLAYBOY TACTICS. MAYBE THIS IS THE ONE WHO LOOKS LIKE CONAN? STILL, YOU DO HAVE TO KINDA LAUGH AT THE STEREOTYPICAL ITALIAN MACHISMO OF BERLUSCONI. AND AT THE LOVABLE FOOL CONAN FOR PUTTING FINLAND BACK ON THE MAP.

VALENTINE'S GIFTS?

Shopping for that special someone for VD day? Here are some unique gift items which definitely won't be "regifted".

SKIDDZ BRIEFS



AND BROWN IN BACK! LOOK MA, I'VE FINALLY MADE MY MARK!

SKIDDZ


PEE & POO TOYS



A FEW WORDS FROM THE DESIGNER OF PEE & POO

The concepts I worked with are "pee" and "poo". My objective was to find out whether these two words could act as a starting point for creating soft toys with a sense of soul, of life. By letting the fabric be my source of inspiration, I used a reverse process to achieve something unexpected and unique, asking myself where the material might lead me - and what could I make from it? It led to two cuddly toys, Pee&Poo.

I wanted to explore whether these, in many eyes, taboo-charged body functions could withstand being translated into the form of cuddly toys.

And I wanted to find out what it took to breathe life into inanimate objects like pee and poo and, at the same time, create cuddly toys that do not disgust or shock people, but attract and tempt them.

I also put a great deal of thought and effort into the way they were to be made into a pair, belong together, in terms of design and shape.


PHOTOGRAPHIC SHOWER CURTAINS BY PATRICK MCMULLAN, CHRISTOPHER MAKOS, FAILES, AND MORE. You won't find these at Bed, Bath and Beyond! This site also features a great oversized zebra print and picturesque views of Rio, Paris and Venice.

PATRICK'S STUDIO 54 SHOWER CURTAIN


A FAB DESIGN BY FAILES


IZOLASHOWER


JIM BAILEY CD





Jim is the legendary femle impersonator who appeared on The Lucy Show, Carol Burnett and in concert halls around the world. He's famous for heart-stoppingly accurate vocal impressions of Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, but I didn't realize until checking his site that he impersonates several other divas, including Peggy Lee and Phyllis Diller. His cd's $20 and the backing tracks sound like they're a full orchestra, not some cheap karaoke. Listen to samples here:

JIMBAILEYWEB




BUT REALLY, WHAT SAYS "I LOVE YOU" MORE THAN A HOMEMADE GIFT?

THE REDNECK ELECTRIC TOOTHBRUSH


THE DOMINICAN COMPUTER

IN NYC?

LET'S ALL GO!

Bush Step Down - January 31st
Massive protest to demand that Bush step down and take
his program with him. As Bush gives his Mis-State of the
Union, the country is in a State of Emergency. Join
thousands of others as we drown out Bush and let the
world know we demand he Step Down NOW!

When: Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Where: Times Square
Time: 8:00PM - 9:30PM

Bring noisemakers, pots, pan, posters and, most
important - FRIENDS & FAMILY. How bad does it have to
get before you speak up?

WORLDCANTWAIT

FLYER

INTOLERANCE TO GAY/TG YOUTH

By Mona Gable

Adults could learn a thing or two about tolerance from the 15-year-old and his “cross-dressing” friends. As one reader sweetly posted after I described my son’s enviable fashion sense and his penchant for girls’ jeans. I’m glad my son and his friends don’t care about such petty things and aren’t hung-up in the least about gender.

If anything they’re gender blind. One of his friends has such feminine features he’s almost pretty. Like many teenage boys he also--brace yourself--dyes his hair and has a knack with a flat-iron. I feel neurotically protective of this friend. Because of his looks I’m always worrying he’s going to be jumped on the way to our house or get cornered in the quad at his big rowdy high school.

We always forget the changing whims of fashion. Think back now. Way back. Remember the long, Jesus-like hair? Tie-dyed T-shirts? Headbands? And I’m just talking about the guys now. During the sixties my Republican father constantly harangued my two youngest brothers about their hair. “YOU LOOK LIKE A GODDAMNED HIPPIE!” he’d roar. He really had no need to worry. Both brothers evolved into fervent Republicans with country club memberships and short hair.

I’ve been obsessing over teenage boys and fashion because of two disturbing incidents involving transgender and gay teens this week. The first has to do with five high school teachers in San Leandro, California. The teachers got their religious panties all in a bunch when they were asked to put a poster in their classrooms. The poster was quite nicely designed with a rainbow and pink triangles and a warm and fuzzy slogan that read “This is a safe place to be who you are.” But the teachers didn’t like it and refused to display it. Why? Because the poster was part of a school district program to promote tolerance for students who are--oh, let’s just stop beating around the bush and say it--homosexual!

I guess there’s just no pleasing everyone, is there? The teachers, being the big-hearted souls they are, felt the poster violated their religious beliefs. Or something like that. I say hogwash. If your religious sensibilities are so offended by gay or bisexual or transgender teens, then go teach at Pat Robertson High School for The Intolerant and Bigoted. Whatever. Don’t do it on my dime. Or the public’s. Obey the law.

WHOLE POST: HUFFPO

KINKY COURTROOM DRAMA

(AP) A dominatrix was acquitted of manslaughter Monday in the death of a man who prosecutors say suffered a fatal heart attack while strapped to a replica of a medieval torture device.

The device, known as Lypsinka, performed it's entire repetoire which left her victim gasping in horror. Reached for comment, Lypsinka offered "Many have died from boredom at my shows, but this is the first heart attack to my knowledge." KIDDING!

The jury in Norfolk Superior Court deliberated for eight hours over two days before finding Barbara Asher, 56, not guilty of involuntary manslaughter and dismemberment.

During his closing argument, prosecutor Robert Nelson re-enacted the bondage session that allegedly killed Michael Lord, 53, of North Hampton, New Hampshire, in July 2000.

Donning a leather mask and speaking to the jury through the zippered mouth, he said Lord flailed about and died while strapped to the rack in a makeshift "dungeon" in Asher's Quincy, Massachusetts, condominium. Nelson said Asher did nothing to help him for fear authorities would find out about her business.

"She did nothing, nothing for five minutes," Nelson said, his voice muffled through the mask.

Then she summoned her boyfriend, who chopped up the body of the 275-pound retired telephone company worker before they dumped it behind a restaurant in Augusta, Maine, Nelson said. Police searched an Augusta landfill, but his remains have never been found.

READ THE REST: CBSNEWS

EARLY GAY WARNING SIGN

image courtesy of of Robert Maldonado via Harmonica Sunbeam

DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS

FROM YAHOO NEWS

Republican lawmakers urged President George W. Bush on Sunday to release records of White House contacts with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the center of a mushrooming probe into influence peddling.

But the White House stood firm that the records, including photographs of Bush with Abramoff, are irrelevant, and that federal prosecutors have not even asked for them.

In making the case for disclosure, Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, said, "Get it out."

"Why give -- if you want to talk about it in strict political terms -- why give the Democrats an opportunity, or the press to keep this story going?" Hagel told ABC's television show "This Week."


MORE: YAHOONEWS

"In strict political terms--why give the Democrats an opportunity, or the press to keep the story going?"

The press should keep the story going because it's important. Whether I agree with them or not, a lot of people trusted Bush and felt safe because of him. They're developing a sneaky feeling now that they were wrong. And it's not "strict political terms" or any other kind of sanity-based terms which cause you to respond to "Release the photos to clear your name" from your own party with gibberish like "the photos aren't "relevant"? They are THE MOST RELAVENT evidence in the case! The clearest proof of whether you do or do not know Abramoff. Why not clear your name by producing the photos! Unless those pix would have the opposite effect......I guess we'll see if and when the federal prosecutors get around to asking for them.

SPIES, LIES, AND WIRETAPS

NY TIMES EDITORIAL 1/29

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.

The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant.

Sept. 11 could have been prevented. This is breathtakingly cynical. The nation's guardians did not miss the 9/11 plot because it takes a few hours to get a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail messages. They missed the plot because they were not looking.


WHOLE ARTICLE: NYTIMES

TRY NEW WIZAGRA!

STOP ALITO NOW!

Or at least fucking TRY! The news reports that Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court is likely. But there is still a little hope. You can never lose hope. Just look at Rosa Parks! She was a solitary black female who stood up and said NO. ENOUGH. THIS IS WRONG AND I DEFY YOU. With no political party behind her and facing the specter of the discrimation, jail, or even the attack dogs that were sicked on other African-American freedom fighters, this ballsy bitch really "rosa" to the occasion. Ok, I apologize for the cheap joke, but face it, we're still reaping the benefits of her boldness today. At her memorial, Al Sharpton criticized today's youth for having a home phone, two cell phones, two pagers and an email account, so many different ways to communicate, and yet they aren't using them to speak up for themselves and demonstrate the same courage and righteousness that this lady had--decades before any one even knew what a cellphone, pager or email was! Maybe Rosa's still teaching from her grave! Are we listening to her? I think we'd better get a jump start on Black History Month and pay attention before all of our rights are history!

Senator Kerry, speaking more forcefully than usual, announced just a few days ago that he would try to filibuster Alito's hearings. He was the only democrat with this position on Thursday. Now, 10 senators support the filibuster. But 10 is a long shot from the 41 needed for the motion, so there's work to do, fast. Bush and co. want Alito confirmed so that their camp can have one bit of good news when Bush makes his state of the union adress on Tuesday. So they're pushing. Let's push back! Let's meet every one of their thrusts! (Ooh! Sounds kinda kinky!)

If you aren't familiar with the issue Alito's confirmation or any other Supreme Court nomination, I can dig it. Until this hearing I'd never heard the legal term "stare decisis". But I do know this. A filibuster is just a delay, to discuss this important appointment in more detail. The Bush administration is afraid the truth may come out about Alito if more in-depth hearings crack his robotic, well-rehearsed answers. That's why republicans pay for commercials which urge for an "up or down vote"--in other words, a vote with as little discussion of their not-so-moderate candidate as possible. Look. Those commercials aren't being run for the 100 Senators. Or the states' representatives. They're being run to alter public opinion and the republicans can afford a lot more than moveon.org can. And I bet those well-organized conservatives have sent out plenty of letters to their senators and representatives urging a vote for Alito. So it's time for ours.

For a different point of view, here's a way to inform yourself on this complex and dry issue in a passionate, very entertaining broadcast by AIR AMERICA's Randi Rhodes.

Go to RANDIRHODESSHOW.COM

Click on her 1/24 broadcast "Samuel Scalito" and prepare to gag at this fiasco. I've been intending to write an in-depth love letter to Randi and her incredible AIR AMERICA broadcasts for months and have spent many afternoons giddiliy scribbling notes for a blog post which I can't read afterwards. But there is no time now for love letters. We all have to write a different kind, TODAY. I wish Randi's Friday show was archived on her site, but it isn't , so I'll attempt to decipher/paraphrase my dictation of her brilliant words. If this doesn't goad you into action, you're either dead or republican. (Or is that being redundant?) Isn't democracy supposed to be government by the people? Well, then start governing yourselves and take a stand, motherfuckers! Some nominations are a tad more important than the OSCAR nominees, people!

Opinion polls show the president's approval rating at the lowest ever. It took 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, a decrease in our standard of living, top republicans stepping down amidst scandal and impeachment proceedings over Bush's illegal spying to get the message into our heads, but we ARE waking up. Maybe Bush will wind up being impeached and jailed. At the very least, once he's out of office and his propaganda machine is turned off, without a doubt he'll be remembered as one of America's most irresponsible, incompetent and corrupt leaders. But even after Bush is disgraced, his judicial appointments will continue to affect all of our lives for decades. That's why it's so important to act now. To those women who may need an abortion, or who may have a daughter who'll need one. To gays, blacks, latinos, miners, the poor, transsexuals, handicapped folks who wants to get into Princeton or just onto the damn bus, unjustly accused folks on death row, families who want to retain the right to pull the plug on their own Terri Schiavo--anyone who can't afford to hire lobbyists to fight for their rights/bribe congressmen. And anyone who enjoys the benefits of the sexual revolution and doesn't want to turn back the moral tone of this country to the 1950's. Or anyone who doesn't want to be spied on, held without charges, or tortured.

Hopefully, this is all of you. So what fight are you waiting for? Unless you are ready to drop dead before Tuesday, Alito's appointment will affect you all gravely. Alito would give the office of the presidency MORE power. Does this sound like a plan? The rogue in the White House now has practically run this country into the ground, so is the answer backing a Supreme Court justice who'll enhance this madman's and his successors' strength? Do you really want to aid the breakdown of our Constitution's system of checks and balances between the executive, legislative and judicial branches? As Randi cleverly put it, "Does this president have the Constitution printed on his doormat so you can wipe your feet on it before entering?" Though Bush acts all "traditional values" and "patriotic" for the cameras, in truth, he ignores the very contract that our nation is built upon.

A vote for Alito, a corporate lawyer, also means placing the interests of big business over that of the individual. Are you enjoying your exorbitant cost of your health insurance? Loving higher gas prices? Thrilled that you have no job and that you can never compete with greedy corporations who can outsource your jobs to foreign workers who'll glady work for a fraction of our minimum wage? (Or hell, just sick of having to translate the heavy accents of these foreign workers every time you phone a credit card help-line?) Does it fill your heart with joy to hear that Dick Cheney's "former" company Halliburton is given no-bid contracts to quench american soldiers' thirst in the desert with shit-tainted water which sickens them? (How's that for "supporting our troops?) If so, do nothing. But if any of these things bug you, now is the time to speak up. There's one thing that every senator has in common--they require your votes to be re-elected. If they aren't hearing from you, then they are only hearing from lobbyists. Just because you aren't accustomed, as I admit I'm not, to voicing your concerns to the people who you elected, DOES NOT MEAN THAT THEY WON'T BE HEARD. But they CAN'T BE HEARD if you never voice them.

SO HERE'S WHAT YOU CAN DO ON MONDAY

1. PHONE OR EMAIL BOTH OF YOUR SENATORS. If you are unsure what to say, simply say that you have called to urge your senator to support the filibuster against Samuel Alito. When calling, you may be asked whether or not you voted for this senator. If yes, mention that you'd withdraw your future support from the senator unless they filibuster. If you did not vote for this senator, simply admit it and say that by filibustering, the senator would gain your future support. (In other words, LIE LIKE A POLITICIAN TO A POLITICIAN!) Do not fall into the trap of thinking "I live in a democratic state so I'm sure that plenty of other people will be calling. My call/email won't make a difference." WRONG! Liberal-ass NY senator Hillary Clinton didn't even support the filibuster until a few days ago and she represents one of the most liberal states in the country. We got to her, people! But opposing factions could be typing their pro-Alito emails now! Your voice counts, even if both of your senators are republican!

If you're in NY, I'll make it easy for you. Contact both:

Clinton, Hillary Rodham- (D - NY) Class I
476 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-4451
Web Form: clinton.senate.gov/contact

Schumer, Charles E.- (D - NY) Class III
313 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-6542
Web Form: schumer.senate.gov/SchumerWebsite/contact/webform.cfm

If you are outside of NY and unsure of who to contact or how, the Senate's site makes it a cinch to do, with all the necessary contact information. Even if you don't know your senator's name, for chrissakes, you can find them by party or location.

SENATE.GOV


2. GO ONLINE AND SIGN JOHN KERRY'S PETITION. We need every bit of ammo we can get. If you see an online poll regarding the filibuster on your news channel, sign that shit too!

JOHNKERRY

You can add your own message as to the online petition, but this is what Kerry's says.

"Judge Samuel Alito Jr., whose entire history suggests that he holds extreme views about the expansive powers of the presidency and the limited role of Congress, will almost certainly be a Supreme Court justice soon. His elevation will come courtesy of a president whose grandiose vision of his own powers threatens to undermine the nation's basic philosophy of government — and a Senate that seems eager to cooperate by rolling over and playing dead.

It is hard to imagine a moment when it would be more appropriate for senators to fight for a principle. Even a losing battle would draw the public's attention to the import of this nomination."


3. CRUCIAL: SPREAD THE WORD! Forward this email or find one on moveon.org or johnkerry.com. But after Monday, it, like your constitutional rights until Alito dies possibly 30 years from now, may be a dead issue.

I found Randi's Friday rant on how this country is descending into fascism particularly interesting. One reason is, that though I have a vague notion of what fascism means, I'm a little ashamed to say that I probably wouldn't feel confident using it in a sentence. Just on the off chance that you may need to bone up on your political science too, I'll let Webster's handle this one.

fascism: a system of government characterized by rigid one-party dicatorship, forcible suppression of the opposition (unions, other, especially leftist, parties, minority groups, etc.), the retention of the private ownership of the means of production under centralized governmental control, belligerent nationalism aand racism, glorification of war, etc,:first instituted in Italy in 1922.

Well, Bush certainly seems to be heading towards an elite form of leadership favored by time-honored winners like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. But there are warning signs manifested by developing fascist states, which Randi pointed out. There is actually a wonderful explanation of the Bush administration's fascist tendencies in this article, with great illlustrations of their 14 POINTS OF FASCISM. Like this one:

Powerful and Continuing Nationalism: Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

EXAMPLE (as if anyone in this country needs an example of flag-waving):

American Nation Brainwashed: I spoke to some 2,000 students during their annual lecture at a Baptist college in Pennsylvania. After a short prayer service for peace centered on the Beatitudes, I took the stage and got right to the point. “Now let me get this straight,” I said. “Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ which means he does not say, ‘Blessed are the warmakers,’ - With that, the place exploded, and 500 students stormed out. The rest of them then started chanting, “Bush! Bush! Bush!”

I urge you to check out this site here 14POINTSOFFASCISM
, but for now, here are a few of Randi's signs of oncoming fascism in the US.

Fear is used to keep us in line, obsessing over national security.

Church and state intertwine, making it unpatriotic and even sacreligious to disagree with the state.

Corporate interests become paramount.

There is no curiosity. Thinking and the arts are frowned upon.


LET YOUR SENATOR KNOW THAT YOU ARE THINKING. YOU ARE THINKING, AREN'T YOU? You're probably thinking that this is an awfully long post and some one may have emailed your sex ad or myspace account by now. Well, check it! After you buzz you're senators, please. NOW!


4. TREAT YOURSELF. YOU'VE JUST HELPED RESTORE DEMOCRACY. Randi is on Air America daily from 3-7 (Eastern) and she's on CNN'S Larry King for the hour on Monday night! Enjoy a taste of this intelligent, forceful and hysterical gal. But don't wait til then to contact your senators!

CREATIVE TOURISTS

BUSH FAILING N.O.

From the Washington Post

Louisiana officials who are working with the president say that he is committed to help but that his administration has had to be pushed by Congress, and is failing to lead because its attention is focused on Iraq, the domestic spying debate and producing a new budget.

"This great city will rise again," said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). "The question is whether the city and the region will be doing it alone, dragging the federal government with us every step of the way, or will this administration get in gear and put their mind to the task at hand."

WASHINGTONPOST

Other reports indicate that 80% of the black population won't return to N.O., along with 60% of whites. Who'd wanna go through that again? And with the next hurricane season a few months away? But Bush's restoration efforts aren't as shocking as the warnings he ignored. New documents indicate that Bush's office was warned of Katrina's severity two days in advance, but Bush was on vacation. I still like Bill Maher's take on it on 9/2/05:


"Finally today convoys of troops and aid started to arrive along the Gulf Coast. Five days after the hurricane hit. Kind of makes you miss the innocent days when Bush only sat on his ass for seven minutes. It only took him four days to make a plan, but finally today he said he had a plan. Unfortunately it's a faith-based plan that involves getting two of every animal onto a big boat.

"He could have started planning on Saturday when the radar showed that a hurricane was going to hit the city, but Bush thinks that the jury is still out on weather forecasting. You know, there's one big difference between George Bush and Marie Antoinette, and that is when Marie Antoinette said 'Let them eat cake,' they had cake…Oh, I kid the president. President Bush was on the ground all day today, you saw him there hugging the starving and touring the devastated area. His quote was 'New Orleans is more devastated than New York on 9/11.' Then he grabbed a bullhorn and vowed that we would get Mother Nature dead or alive."

Take a look at US, the super-power's levee system contrasted with other lowlands in The Netherlands, UK, and Italy.







And let's hear it for the good ol' USA! Here's our high-tech system in N'Awlins!



I just hope New Orleans can restore the magic it once had (as seen below) but with more "chocolate".

PSYCHEDELIC SPAM

Am I the only one who gets this crap? Not regular spam, but spam that makes no sense whatsoever. I want online pharmaceuticals but their idiotic link doesn't even work. (Anybody know a good one? Not that I'm jonesing in a panic or anything, but I Tijuana's not exactly a day trip from NYC.) I was willing to overlook the fact that they can't even spell the drugs that they prescribe--I thought that might be their way around a legality--but ending with a gibberish haiku? Unforgiveable!

Vlixagra - $3.3
Levitrra - $3.3
Cialkis - $3.7
Imitrnex - $16.4
Fxlomax - $2.2
Ultrpam - $0.78
Viopxx - $4.75
Amxblem - $2.2
VaIiwum - $0.97
Xanxax - $1.09
Sotma - $3
Meriedia - $2.2

visit our website

Best regards,
Online Pharmaceuticals

dfgfhwpre XVNXTVdEXF1NdV1TV01XRFxdTRtfV0c=

An old lion is better than a young ass.
An old cat laps as much as a young kitten.
Come live with me and you shall know me.

DEAR DOCTOR RUTH

PRESIDENT JONAH

A Dig led by Gore Vidal


While contemplating the ill-starred presidency of G.W. Bush, I looked about for some sort of divine analogy. As usual, when in need of enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James version of 1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, I read that Jonah, who, like Bush, chats with God, had suffered a falling out with the Almighty and thus became a jinx dogged by luck so bad that a cruise liner, thanks to his presence aboard, was about to sink in a storm at sea. Once the crew had determined that Jonah, a passenger, was the jinx, they threw him overboard and—Lo!—the storm abated. The three days and nights he subsequently spent in the belly of a nauseous whale must have seemed like a serious jinx to the digestion-challenged whale who extruded him much as the decent opinion of mankind has done to Bush.

Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people, God noted disdainfully, “cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand,” so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom what democracy has to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush cabal. But the analogy becomes eerily precise when it comes to the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when a president is not only incompetent but plainly jinxed by whatever faith he cringes before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of prescription drugs. Who knows what other disasters are in store for us thanks to the curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so does he. Look at Nixon’s radiant features after his resignation! One can see former President Jonah in his sumptuous library happily catering to faith-based fans with animated scriptures rooted in “The Simpsons.”


READ THE REST: TRHUTHDIG

1 FOR THE STRAIGHTS

THE PERFECT DAY FOR HER:

8:15 Wake up to hugs and kisses
8:30 Weigh in 2 pounds lighter than yesterday
8:45 Breakfast in bed, freshly squeezed orange juice and croissants open presents and expensive jewelry chosen by thoughtful partner 9:15 Soothing hot bath with frangipani bath oil 10:00 Light work out at club with sexy funny personal trainer 10:30 Facial, manicure, shampoo, condition, blow dry 12:00 Lunch with best friend at fashionable outdoor cafe 12:45 Catch sight of partner's ex and notices she has gained 17 pounds 1:00 Shopping with friends, unlimited credit 3:00 Nap 4:00 Three dozen roses delivered by florist, card is from secret admirer 4:15 Light work out at club, followed by massage from strong but gentle hunk, who says he rarely gets to work on such a perfect body 5:30 Choose outfit from expensive designer wardrobe, parade before full length mirror 7:30 Candle lit dinner for two followed by dancing, with compliments received from other diners/dancers 10:00 Hot shower (alone) 10:50 Carried to bed . (freshly ironed, crisp, new, white linen) 11:00 Pillow talk, light touching and cuddling 11:15 Fall asleep in his big strong arms


THE PERFECT DAY FOR HIM:

6:00 Alarm 6:15 Blow job 6:30 Massive satisfying shit while reading the sports section 7:00 Breakfast: steak and eggs, coffee and toast, all cooked by naked, buxom wench who bends over a lot showing her growler 7:30 Limo arrives 7:45 Several beers en-route to airport 9:15 Flight in personal Lear Jet 9:30 Limo to Rancho Mirage Resort Golf Club 9:45 Play front nine - 2 under 11:45 Lunch: steak and lobster, 3 beers and a bottle of Dom Perignon 12:15 Blow job 12:30 Play back nine - 4 under 2:15 Limo back to the airport (several bourbons) 2:30 Fly to Bahamas 3:30 Late afternoon fishing excursion with all female crew, all nude who also bend over a lot displaying growlers 4:30 Land world record Marlin (1234 lbs) - on light tackle.

5:00 Fly home, massage and hand job by naked Elle McPherson 6:45 Shit, Shower and Shave 7:00 Watch news: Michael Jackson assassinated; 7:30 Dinner: lobster appetizers, Dom Perignon (1953), big juicy fillet steak 9:00 Napoleon Brandy and Habanos cigar in front of wall-size TV as you watch football game 9:30 Sex with three women 11:00 Massage and Jacuzzi with tasty pizza snacks and a cleansing beer 11:30 A night cap blow job 11:45 In bed alone 11:50 A 22 second fart which changes note 4 times and forces the dog to leave the room 11:51 Laugh yourself to sleep

GLOBAL ALARMING

FROM THE NY TIMES:

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

FULL ARTICLE: NYTIMES

ALSO ON THIS TOPIC

An excerpt from WASHINGTONPOST :

Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.

This "tipping point" scenario has begun to consume many prominent researchers in the United States and abroad, because the answer could determine how drastically countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. While scientists remain uncertain when such a point might occur, many say it is urgent that policymakers cut global carbon dioxide emissions in half over the next 50 years or risk the triggering of changes that would be irreversible.

DON'T ASS, DON'T TAIL

Army to investigate gay porn allegations

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Army officials are investigating allegations that members of the celebrated 82nd Airborne Division appear on a gay pornography website, a spokeswoman said Friday.

(BUNNY NOTE: Well, dammit! What's the friggin' web address? We want to support our troops in all that they do. Maybe that will shed a little light on why this division is so "celebrated.")

Authorities at Fort Bragg have begun an inquiry into whether the paratroopers' actions violated the military conduct code.
Division spokeswoman Maj. Amy Hannah declined to say how many paratroopers are involved or identify their unit within the division. A defense official speaking on condition of anonymity said up to seven soldiers are involved.

Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman in Washington, said the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy states that "homosexual orientation alone is not a bar to service, but homosexual conduct is incompatible with military service."

(BUNNY NOTE: So is common sense, considering the military's current mission.)

"We define homosexual conduct as homosexual acts or verbal or non-verbal communication that a member is homosexual," Vician said.
The 82nd Airborne is one of the most celebrated units in the military. Its 15,000 troops are trained to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours.

(BUNNY NOTE: Ooh, I bet they cum on command, too.)

NYC DRAG UPDATE

CARRIE ON, SHERRY!



Sweetheart of the drag community Sherry Vine (aka "Scary Swine") is back from her 4-year stint in Berlin. She's rejoined forces with Erik Jackson, the resident playwright from Theatre Couture, the mad-cap ensemble of thespians which delighted '90's fags with productions like THE BAD WEED '73 and CHARLIE. After a 5-year hiatus, the teams hard at work with their latest project: creating a new stage version of CARRIE with Sherry in the title role. Stephen King, impressed by the quality of Erik's treatment of his classic flick, greenlighted the new version himself! (I guess the shame has subsided from the extremely short-lived CARRIE the Broadway musical which closed immediately after it's opening night, didn't it?) Rumor has it that Jackie Beat is being wooed for the juicy role of Carrie's mom, and I can't imagine anyone I'd rather see chew the scenery in that demented role than Jackie. She has quite an appetite, so the scenery budget will be enormous. Rumor also has it that although she's CARRIE's biggest fan, Jackie is hesitating to commit to the role and return to NYC for the extended off-B'way run, which will begin this spring. Jackie fans! Contact this whore and insist that she pour her rolls into that demented role! And make sure you tell her "They're all gonna laugh at you!"

SHERRY'S SITE: SHERRYVINE




I AM NOT MYSELF THESE DAYS

James Frey endorsing your upcoming book is kind of a mixed blessing. Of Josh-Kilmer Purcell's somewhat fictionalized autibiography, I AM NOT MYSELF THESE DAYS, the author of the controversial A MILLION TINY PIECES has said, "A wonderful book, a ridiculous book, a sad and beautiful book, a book I'll read again, a book I highly recommend. I went to jail for 87 days for stealing it and I girlfriend hung herself when I wouldn't lend it to her." I added the last bit, but hopefully Mr. Frey was telling the truth when he wrote this blurb for Miss-ter Kilmer-Purcell! Anyhoo, Josh cut quite a smashing figure on the '90's club circuit as his drag persona Aqua, in a dishevelled blonde mane and a Barbarella-looking costume with goldfish swimming inside of lucite tittie globes. To quote the advance copy's back cover:

"Josh-Kilmer Purcell lived a double life. By day, he was a successful young advertising executive. But by night, he wouldtrade in his corporate universe for high heels and sequins, performing in downtown nightclubs as a drag queen before returning to the uptown penthouse he shared with his crack-addicted male escort boyfriend. In this powerfully written, emotional roller coaster of a memoir, Kilmer-Purcell blends the tawdry and highly dramatic world of drag with a soulful and ironic perspective on his journey through life and love."

JOSH KILMER-PURCELL AS AQUA AT WIGSTOCK 1997



Aqua hung up her heels and banged out her autobigraphy, I AM NOT MYSELF THESE DAYS, which is published in February by Harper Perennial. Josh will do a reading at:

Wednesday, February 15, 2006 07:00 PM
BARNES & NOBLE/Chelsea
675 6th Avenue, New York, NY 10009

I'll be attending with my new boyfriend (Josh's ex). And please, no tacky fish jokes!



CASHETTA'S VANISHING ACT



Beloved drag magician/comedienne Cashetta has left Manhattan for the sunny shores of Fart Lauderdale. But she's locked in for a season at the Crown and Anchor in P'town this summer, so make sure you catch her act if vacationing there. Her magic tricks have become so polished, but she still can't make that pesky Adam's apple disappear!

CASHETTA'S SITE: CASHETTA.COM


LOOK OUT, LAS VEGAS!

HRH PRINCESS DIANDRA IN ROSS-INSPIRED KIMONO COUTURE



Vegas is still recovering from the onslaught of NYC drag royalty Joey Arias and Raven O relocating there for Cirque Du Soleil's ZUMANITY a couple of years ago. But watch out! Now that asian-themed drag restaurant Lucky Cheng's is opening a similar establishment in Vegas, and they're flying in HRH Princess Diandra, one of the world's greatest lip-synch artistes, to get the party started on the right calloused, heavily bunion-ated, hammer-toed, aching foot. Between Joey and Diandra, Vegas had better stock up on the liquor, cuz this "Twat Pack" could drink the Rat Pack under the table and then blow them while they're down there. (I know that the Rat Pack is dead, but that's never stopped Joey before. He has sex with a corpse every time he masturbates!) You've all heard the oldest drag saying "The more you drink, the prettier we look." Well it's a good principle, since with Joey and Diandra, the more they drink, the uglier they get. So it all balances things out. Joining Diandra at Lucky Cheng's is the legendary Hot Chocolate. They're incredible old school entertainers and they both impersonate Patti and Tina. Uh oh...........Catfight approaching.



IF YOU THOUGHT ALAN CUMMING'S PERFUME "CUMMING" WAS CHEAP...



Alan Cumming has tapped into talents the downtown drag community for his upcoming production of THREEPENNY OPERA, and dancing fool Edie, The Empress of Large Flotilla Debarge, and Pyramid/Wigstock founder/Jackie 60 goddess Hattie Hathaway have all nabbed parts. Wow! With hags that cheap in the show, maybe he should consider changing the title to TWOPENNY OPERA? Fortunately, Cyndi Lauper and SNL's Ana Gasteyer will tone up the cast. It opens March 24th at the Studio 54, a perfect setting for the "deliciously dark satire of respectable society" featuring "dashing thieves" and "saucy prostitutes". I hope Hattie isn't playing one of the "saucy prostitutes". "Sauced", yes. Prostitute? Well, this IS New York, so I'm sure there's somebody out there with a Mrs. Beasley-on-steroids-fetish and a pocketful of change. Hattie also appears in the soon-to-be-released autobiographical film on Diane Arbus, FUR, starring Nicole Kidman. Hattie is typecast as one of the legendary photog's freakish subjects.


THE INIMITABLE HATTIE HATHAWAY (left) JUST LOAFS THE THEATRE!



3PENNY






MIKE ALBO JOINS PU-PU PLATTER





Comic genius/author Mike Albo join the deliriously rancid comedy troupe PU PU PLATTER, every Wednesday at Starlite. 9:30 PM (10:00 in reality and it's free! (Except for on 2/14, when they went and got their fancy butts a gig in LA.)



FRIGHT OF 1,000 CLOWNS








The elaborate preparations are well underway for the 20TH ANNUAL NIGHT OF 1,000 GOWNS, a chi-chi affair which will draw hundreds of well-heeled, heavily-tiaraed and ball-gowned heifers fromThe Imperial Court to the Marriott Marquis on Saturday, April 1st, 1883. T.M.I.S.M. (What does this mean?) Emperor HIV--I MEAN XIV--Tony Monteleone and Empress XIX Robin Kradles, shown here in her 2005 coronation gown, will graciously bestow the crown, scepter and customary back-stabbing to the Emperor XV Fantasia and Empress XX Gefil Tefish. The $200 ticket price goes to benefit GOD'S LOVE WE DELIVER and to renting a hotel ballroom swanky enough to host these haughty ho's, many of whom even book suites at their host hotel--how on earth could a bona fide empress ever be seen hailing a taxicab? Enjoy a 5-hour open bar and "Viennese buffet" with co-chairs Whoopi Goldberg and Joan Rivers and Blaine Trump. Last year Deborah Cox sang fuh them faggots.

TICKETS: IMPERIALCOURT


MY COMRADE RIDES AGAIN



Linda Simpson has successfully revived her fabled 'zine MY COMRADE and a new issue is fast-approaching. It's scheduled to hit newstand (there's only one that sells that crap) in mid-February. For more info, check out MYCOMRADE . There is no better guide to the NYC "in crowd" of queens, with Linda, who moonlights at TIME OUT when not hosting bingo, as befits her advanced age. The new issue includes my interview with an especially "on" Jackie Beat, an erotically-charged photo story with Milan of Da Lipstyxx and plus-sized diva Sweaty--I mean, Sweetie (Oy vey! we should charge to have to look at these two in erotic situations!), Tom Eubanks recalling the colorful drag-queen slang of the Boybar era, Sister Dimension providing a nutty tale about the mystical journey that drag queens go through when applying makeup, and a remembrance of Eddie Murphy's infamous encounter with a transsexual prostitute by Peaches Henderson aka Xavier (of Give Me The Night fame.)



LYPSINKA WITH HAIRSPRAY'S COMPOSERS MARK SHAIMAN AND SCOTT WITTMAN AND UNKNOWN RABBIT



Lypsinka is taking a wig-break while her "male" altered ego John Epperson gears up for a run of the play he's been writing for years. Called MY DEAH (to be pronounced with a "Daddy, would you mind bringin' little ol' me another mint julep onto the veranda?" accent), it draws on the greek tragedy MEDEA--get it? But it's not a tragedy, or at least not intentionally, anyway. The new play spotlights Gator Hedgepeth, a former Mississippi football star, and his plans to abandon his wife, My Deah -- an ex-beauty queen from Louisiana with a penchant for a gossip-filled bridge game -- to marry Simplicity Bullard, the daughter of the corrupt, one-armed Governor Bullard. When My Deah confronts her card-dealing friends (and Governor Bullard) and she lays out her plans for revenge. Y'all just might could die laughin'!

STARTS APRIL 21ST!
Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex
312 W. 36th St.

Tickets: 212-868-4444 $19.00

April 21, 2006-May 7th 2006


WHO'S DOWNTOWN'S NEW "IT" BOY?



According to the NY Times, it's drag king Murray Hill. You have to visit Murr's cute--I mean, fittingly masculine--site to see every which way this geezer's swinging, with everything from a regular Wednesday night gig at Mo' Pitkins to hosting an Oscar party and The Miss Galapagozango Contest at Galapagos in Brooklyn. What an ol' trooper!

His full schedule here: MRMURRAYHILL.COM



A GREASY-FACED WHORE NAMED LADY RUNNY



As for little ol' me, I'll be performing at the MAO magazine party at Sol on 2/2 along with a stellar line-up of THE WORLD FAMOUS BOB, CANDIS CAYNE, DIRTY MARTINI and KITTEN DEVILLE. On 2/3 I'll be djing at Stella McCartney's white-hot boutique in the meat market for a fashion week shindig, and my next gig is in Tokyo, spinning for a Visionaire magazine soiree on 2/15. I ain't been there for 15 years, so I'm gonna hang around for a few days and try to make it to those ancient temples in Kyoto. By the time I get back I'll probably be throwing my high-heeled flip flops in the air in an authentic geisha wig squirting out fish and soy sauce through the rice-encrusted ass-hairs which surround my newly slanted asshole!

BUSH DON'T KNOW JACK?

SAD-ONNA

Is the Queen of Pop's quest for eternal youth taking its toll?

Thu Jan 26 2006 DAILY MIRROR

SHE'S wowed the world for two decades - but even a fashion icon can have an off day.

And when Madonna arrived in Paris yesterday looking decidedly less than glamorous, fears were raised that her relentless fitness regime may be taking its toll on her looks. The 47-year-old's skin was stretched across razor-sharp cheekbones and her chin was puckered as she turned up for a Gaultier fashion show.

A fellow guest said: "Madonna usually looks so groomed. It was a bit of a shock to see her looking so ropey."

The mum-of-two exercises at least three hours a day, sometimes runs 10-miles, and eats mainly wholegrains and vegetables.


Is this just a REALLY bad photo? I'm not Madoooo's biggest fan but she looks fantastic in the HUNG UP video. Is she hung up on dieting? (Those rabbit-teeth!) Or is she hung up on tina, gurl? Or going for a Maria Shriver look?

I PUT A SPELL ON YOU

TOKYO (Reuters) - Police found a stun gun and tear gas Friday at the Tokyo
home of a man who said he persuaded 11 younger women to live with him by
chanting a spell, media reports said.

Police suspect he used the weapons to prevent the women, mainly in their
20s, from leaving, the reports said.

Hirohito Shibuya, 57, was arrested Thursday for allegedly threatening a
20-year-old woman who was reluctant to join the commune by telling her that
if she left she would be turned to mincemeat, they said.

He denied threatening the woman, Kyodo news agency said, adding that he also
allegedly told her he was a former senior officer in Japan's military with secret agents
around him.

Shibuya, a bald, rotund man with bags under his eyes, has attracted heavy
media attention this week after claiming he chanted a spell to attract the women.

He had married and divorced several of the women, who continued to live with him, the reports said.

Asked what the incantation was, he told a newspaper: "When you say it, even
unattractive men become attractive. But I won't say it because if I do, I'll die."

Police confiscated several books on hypnosis from his home, Kyodo said.

RAZORBACK MOUNTAIN?

Arkansas Razorback players Clarke Moore, Brett Goode and Casey Dick need to stop hanging out on the sidelines!

PETER BERLIN IS BACK!

Actually, it's Golden Girl Bea Arthur getting butch(er) as she "pleathers" herself in an animal-free Castro Street look, which may cause those sex change rumors about her to resurface.

A MILLION TINY FECES

What the fuck is this shit? A former junkie writes a book and (surprise, surprise) it turns out to be chock full of lies. Oprah recommends it to her book club and it shoots to the #5 on the best-seller list. The author's lies are revelead and a national uproar ensues. Today alone, the story garnered hour-long shows on Oprah, Larry King and Anderson Cooper. Among other "fascinating" tid-bits, an expert was dredged up on Larry King to verify that a former drug addicts are routinely given novocaine by a dentist without fear of them relapsing. I'll file that under completely useless information. Well, until I return from rehab, anyway.)

Give me a fucking break. So a fool lied. Put the damn book in the fiction category and call it a day. If Frey's fictional writings have helped so many people with their own problems, who cares if it's true or embellished? Oprah has absolved herself and the liar's been exposed. Let's move the fuck on.

Let's move on to the president who lied to start a war which has killed thousands that isn't anywhere near over. I'd settle for one hour-long special on the impeachment hearings that the White House is bracing for. Or the laws that he's broken by spying on us. Or an in-depth look at Jack Abramoff's ties to the president, including the photosof the two of them which Abramoff just sold! Some fool tricks Oprah. Big fucking deal. The fool in the White House has methodically tricked the entire nation. But the news doesn't care about that. Frey has his feet held to the fire and the Oprah's entire audience gasps at each revelation today. They feel so cheated. But the important cheat is ignored and so few, even democratic politicians, will stand up and say, THE PRESIDENT LIED. AND BROKE THE LAW. He didn't "side-step" or "circumvent" or "mislead" or any of the other polite jargon they all use. He lied and broke the law. But "the news" is more concerned with a dumb book from a troll that didn't kill anyone.

And the real scandal that NO ONE is mentioning? Oprah's hair was incredible today! Those side-swept curled wings? Some fag is working overtime on that ho. Can someone introduce him to Star Jones? She looks like a bug-eyed, drowned dog with that snatched ponytail.

I just checked HUFFPO and there is a more in-depth blog by Rob Spillman with the same view, but better informed. (He actually watched the Oprah show yesterday--I just saw clips and was distracted by the Barbara Mandrell 'do.) Some great comments after it, too.

READ IT HERE: HUFFPO

DENISE RODWOMAN

Pete Burns is not the only transvestite on the UK's hit TV show BIG BROTHER. Dennis Rodman is back in drag and looking horrible! Denise! Could you not hire a make-up artist? You've dated beauty queens like Chicago trannie wonder of the world Mimi Marks and Miami's lovely Elaine Lancaster. Hell, I was told that even I entered a toilet stall in a Chicago club with Dennis 10 years ago and stayed in there with him for 20 minutes. (What a great argument for not drinking! I was so bombed that I don't even remember blowing that big-dicked bastard! Although on one drunken binge following San Francisco's Exotic Erotic ball, Dennis, his handler, Carmen Elektra, Elaine and I went clubbing and Dennis walked into the men's room to find me blowing his handler!) Anyhoo, I'm certain that any of your drag friends would have gladly flown over to do your make-up. There is no excuse for this fright, big sister!



So from a sister, here's a few well-meaning tips.

1. Shave before you do drag.

2. Lashes should not be lop-sided, unless you are intentionally going for a club-kid effect.

3. If you are wearing foundation, it isn't thick enough or powdered right.

4. I've heard of glitter used on the eyes, cheeks, lips, cleavage, etc. But a big clump of silver glitter on the...side of the throat? Hungh? Is that to cover razor bumps? If so, try a scarf instead.

5. Your ordinary hoop earrings that you wear as a man ain't gone get it.

6. Those white extensions frame your face--and your hairdresser. Busted!

7. Saddest of all, I'd still suck him in this awful get-up.

BUNNY ON LUCAS ON BUNNY

Porn star, director and twisted, hilarious nut Michael Lucas and I reviewed each other's latest dvd releases for NEXT magazine. (His latest--I've only released one!) Apparently, his new flick is sexy and selling like hotcocks. I wouldn't know, because I thought I'd watch it for my review on a train to Boston. Unfortunately, the Friday rush hour train was so packed that an elderly lady took a seat next to me and I didn't feel bold enough to watch porn. Popping a valium instead, I stupidly left the dvd in the seat back pocket. So maybe the old lady got to enjoy it after all! Since I was on deadline, I fashioned this "review" from the press release and by googling the film's stars. Michael's review of my dvd, RATED X (FOR XTRA-RETARDED!), follows.


FIRE ISLAND CRUISING 7 BY LADY BUNNY
(lucasentertainment.com)

Oh, how I adore the cinema! But for this prick flick, skip the popcorn and grab the poppers to better enjoy porn director extraordinaire's latest fuck-fest FIRE ISLAND CRUISING 7. All the films in this series have been hot, but I enjoyed the seventh installment so much that I...ummm..."lost" every inch of the remote while watching it. It was so far gone that I actually forgot about it for a full two days--until I finally realized why the channels on my television changed every time I farted!

Anyhoo...if you're a fan of sizzling porn, I can't think of a sexier film to snuggle up to this winter. The legendary gay resort Fire Island makes, with it's picturesque beaches an boardwalks, makes a perfect backdrop for the enticing fantasies of Michael's XXX stars--and I'm all for fantasy, 'cuz these porn stars outshine any of the leathery old trolls and backstabbing big fish on a small island drag queens which populate "Tired Island" and it's "Weary Grove." And I'd much rather spot Chad Hunt's donkey dick poking out of a bush in the Meat Rack than Brini Maxwell's tongue, even though I'm sure that Style Channel maven Brini's bush would be much more tastefully decorated than Chad's.

And talk about hanging chad's"! If Hunt lived in Florida instead of New York, they'd still be recounting the 2000 Presidential "Election"! He's hung with the kind of horsemeat that makes queens smack their lips and clench their buttholes simultaneously--even when he's fully clothed! And though I hold the distinction of being voted Genre Magazine's Top Drag Queen, I regret to say it was an honor bestowed in error--I'm a sloppy pig bottom, so I totally appreciate the fervor with which Kent Larson worshipped Chad's monster manpole. I haven't seen action this passionate, wild and frenzied since Kevin Aviance dropped that plastic baggie at Wigstock a few years ago! And for all you Chad-aholics who still want more, there's a 30-minute bonus scene with Hunt and John Lamb included in the dvd's extras.

But let's not forget about the other actors in FIC7: Derrick Hanson and Brandon Aguilar hook up on the boardwalk and Aguilar gets bored (as in drilled) by Hanson's sizeable piece, which stays as hard as Linda Simpson's face, right through to the finish! And after seeing greedy bottom Brandon's butt transformed into a human glove in the dvd extras, I began to wonder if it was possible to trade in that pair of Isotoners I just bought for a pair of Mr. Aguilar's "oh-so-toned" cheeks! Things really get down and dirty between hunks Erik Grant and John Lamb, and hairy stud Parker Williams bends it for Beckham (Bruce Beckham, that is) in a scintillating scene so that's nastier than Flotilla Debarge's pantyhose after a night on a park bench. Andy Hunter, Adrian R. and Chad Leigh complete the Michael's comely cast (and for the record, they do all come to completion!). In the spirit of the season, Michael Lucas's FIRE ISLAND CRUISING 7 is a gift that will keep on giving...you orgasms!


O, HOLY SHIT! LADY BUNNY'S NEW DVD IS RETARDED! BY MICHAEL LUCAS

When I heard Lady Bunny's new film was titled RATED X (for Xtra-Retarded), I new it was made for me. Lady B. is a drag queen who has never hesitated when it comes to pushing the envelope, and she pushes it damn near the limit in this DVD--but beware: this bitch is downright dangerous at times! I made the mistake of trying to show the movie to a family member and they completely lost their lunch before the opening menu even had a chance to fully load. (At the very least she could have included a MAY INDUCE VOMITING warning label on the cover.) Around our office, though, it's got us pissing our pants.

(BUNNY NOTE: AND AROUND MICHAEL'S OFFICE/BROTHEL, THERE'S NORMALLY A FEE FOR URINATION!)

As a porn director, I was really surprised to find that Lady Bunny had travelled to even places I haven't gone--and I'm not just talking in terms of global destinations. Bunny reveals herself to be one kinky bitch--but instead of inspiring me to masturbate, her movie inspired me to giggle. Yeah, that's right, I giggle.

When it comes to filth, RATED X is far dirtier and much sleazier than anything I've ever produced, that's for sure.

(BUNNY NOTE: MICHAEL, AREN'T YOU FORGETTING THAT SWEET GROUP DOUCHE-SQUIRTING COMPETITION THAT'S FEATURED AS AN EXTRA ON ONE OF YOUR RECENT "RELEASES"?)

"How does American Idol Clay Aiken remove a condom?", she asks? He farts!"She's grosser than gross: nastier than nasty--basically, the bitch is a total pro. And I haven't even gotten to her musical talents...

Bunny's DVD makes those idiots on Saturday Night Live and Mad TV look like total hacks in comparison. I'll never be able to listen to classic songs in the same way since I've heard our fair Lady's versions of numbers such as DON'T LET YOUR SON GO DOWN ON ME, ALL THAT JIZZ, and THERE'S A STRANGER IN MY ASS will forever taint your memory of the originals after you hear them too.

I'm also happy to see that the diva's legendary Wigstock performances are preserved here for eternity, as well as a ton of footage likely captured long past midnight in god-forsaken drunken flophouses across the country. This DVD blessedly allows me to enjoy Bunny's routines without having to share the same air with a room full of beer farts, belches and last-call floozies.

(BUNNY NOTE: BUT SINCE I PACK AND SHIP THE D-VD'S PERSONALLY, YOU MAY STILL CATCH A WHIFF OF THE ABOVE LIST OF ODORS.)

Bunny is not just an outrageous jokester and a costuming genius,: she's a truly talented all-around performer as well. Her dancing, expressions, and hilarious vocalizations laced with Southern charm are sensational--and with this dvd, I can press play whenever I find myself longing for a Bun-Bun bon-bon. No subject is sacred and no star is safe--just the way I like it.

WATCH PETE BURNS' LIPS SQUIRT PUSS!

YOUTUBE.COM

THE YEAST OF 3 EVILS

You have 3 choices to hear Madge Weinstein, the bloated, lesbian drag queen with a yeast infection, rip George W a new one on her latest podcast--Rebuttal: DEATH TAX MY WHORE HOLE. A thrilling mix of biting political commentary and senseless, hilarious observations like Laura Bush's "cunt smells like Windex." In this delightful podcast, she picks apart Bush's recent Kansas speech bit by putrid bit. Don't miss this kook!

Tonight at 7PM tonight on Sirius's Stars 103.

Or at 7AM EST. Channel 103 is not available by trial subscription on Sirius. You have to pay for a real subscription to hear myself and Richard Simmons, who is also on Stars 103.

Or of course it is available anytime at YEASTRADIO

I've worshipped it 3 times already this morning!

JUVENILE DELIGHT

GREATWHITE

HILLBILLY HUMOR

After living in the remote wilderness of Kentucky all his life, the old
hillbilly decided it was time to visit the big city. In one of the stores he
picks up a mirror and looked in it. Not knowing what it was, he remarked,
"How about that; here's a picture of my daddy."

He bought the 'picture', but on the way home he remembered his wife, Lizzy,
did not like his father, so he hung it in the barn and every morning before
leaving for the fields, he would go to the barn and look at it.

Lizzy began to get suspicious of these many trips to the barn so one day
after her husband left, she searched the barn and found the mirror. As she
looked into the mirror, she fumed and said to herself, "So that's the ugly
bitch he's running around with."

Ba-dum-pum!

PERPETUALLY SURPRISING

Huffpo's Nora Ephron made a list of facts which never cease to surprise us. HUFFPO In the comments section following it, readers posted their own. I've included a few of my favs from different readers, starting with Nora's.


3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs are initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor says, this might work better as a memoir.

4. Beautiful young women sometimes marry ugly, old rich men.

6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

34. Sex without Love is totally fun.

35. Pornography is a reflection of who we are. Human. Animals. Genetically programmed by evolution.

36. Golf is actually much more than a game.

37. Everybody wants to be rich.

26 The Iraq war is over we lost.

26: Tony Danza is still working in show business.

27: Barbara Bush is not the Quaker Oats guy.

34: Michael Jackson was once the most admired entertainer in show business.

38: Prince Charles preferred Camilla to Diana.

40: They still have not found WMD's in Iraq

45: Richard Nixon had the highest I.Q. of any recent Republican President

46: George W. Bush actually does have the lowest I.Q. of any recent President

47: Ronald Reagan was offered the Humphrey Bogart role in "Casablanca."

WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH $25,000,000,000?

Not this:

The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft.

NYTIMES

CLAY'S CUMRAG

Some guy tricked with Gay Aiken and stole and preserved his cumrag for possible DNA blackmail? I'm not too sure of everything DNA can prove, but is there's always the old-fashioned test: Is there shit on it and if so, is it Clay's? (As if we need proof.) Wait--doesn't he usually wipe it in his hair and spike it in that adorable punky-in-a-show-tune kinda way? I'm getting hot, but I'll save it for the court room scene. Can you imagine pulling out a rotted cumrag from a ziploc--I mean in court. Of course we all do it at home everyday.

QUEERDAY

RETREAT IN DEFEAT!

From Yahoo News

By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer

WASHINGTON - Stretched by frequent troop rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has become a "thin green line" that could snap unless relief comes soon, according to a study for the Pentagon.

Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who wrote the report under a Pentagon contract, concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency. He also suggested that the Pentagon's decision, announced in December, to begin reducing the force in Iraq this year was driven in part by a realization that the Army was overextended.

(BUNNY NOTE: NOT TO MENTION A REALIZATION THAT YOUR COMMANDER-IN CHIEF IS A DUNCE.)

As evidence, Krepinevich points to the Army's 2005 recruiting slump — missing its recruiting goal for the first time since 1999 — and its decision to offer much bigger enlistment bonuses and other incentives.

(BONUSES AND INCENTIVES LIKE ARMOR AND CLEAN WATER, UNLIKE THE DIARRHEA-WATER YOU PAID HALLIBURTON THROUGH THE NOSE FOR?)

"You really begin to wonder just how much stress and strain there is on the Army, how much longer it can continue," he said in an interview. He added that the Army is still a highly effective fighting force and is implementing a plan that will expand the number of combat brigades available for rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 136-page report represents a more sobering picture of the Army's condition than military officials offer in public. While not released publicly, a copy of the report was provided in response to an Associated Press inquiry.

("NOT RELAESED PUBLICLY? HIDING SOMETHING, PERHAPS?)

Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), the Pennsylvania Democrat and Vietnam veteran, created a political storm last fall when he called for an early exit from Iraq, arguing that the Army was "broken, worn out" and fueling the insurgency by its mere presence. Administration officials have hotly contested that view.

(HE WAS RIGHT THEN AND HE'S RIGHT NOW. AND NOW THE PENTAGON'S RESEARCH INDICATES THE SAME THING MURTHA'S BEEN SAYING? TOO BAD KING GEORGE DOESN'T CARE ABOUT THE TROOPS SO WE'LL KEEP ON FIGHTING.)

FULL ARTICLE: YAHOONEWS

WALLY'S WEDDING NIGHT

At 85 years of age, Wally married Lou Anne, a lovely 25 year old.
Since her new husband is so old, Lou Anne decides that after their
wedding she and Wally should have separate bedrooms, because she
is concerned that her new but aged husband may overexert himself if
they spend the entire night together.

After the wedding festivities Lou Anne prepares herself for bed
and the expected "knock" on the door. Sure enough the knock comes, the
door opens and there is Wally, her 85 year old groom, ready for action.
They unite as one. All goes well, Wally takes leave of his bride, and
she prepares to go to sleep.

After a few minutes, Lou Anne hears another knock on her bedroom door,
and it's Wally. Again he is ready for more "action".
Somewhat surprised, Lou Anne consents for more coupling. When
the newlyweds are done, Wally kisses his bride, bids her a fond goodnight and leaves.

She is set to go to sleep again, but, aha you guessed it - Wally is
back again, rapping on the door, and is as fresh as a 25-year-old,
ready for more "action". And, once again they enjoy each other.

But as Wally gets set to leave again, his young bride says to him, "I am
thoroughly impressed that at your age you can perform so well and
so often. I have been with guys less than a third of your age who were only
good once. You are truly a great lover, Wally."

Wally, somewhat embarrassed, turns to Lou Anne and says:
"You mean I was here already?"

Senior moments have their advantages.

BUSH ON SOCIAL SECURITY

From the moron's press conference in Kansas today. He actually took questions from audience members. He didn't exactly answer them. But he shore did try!

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: 'I don't really understand. How is it the new plan
going to fix the problem?'

Verbatim response: PRESIDENT BUSH:

'Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big

cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on

the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price

increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being

considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers,

affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to

get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to

that has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of

muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for

example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as

opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate

-- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, supposed to wage

increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were

put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the

promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will

help on the red.'


Forward this to others -- so they, too, can understand...

MEDIEVAL LESBIAN FANTASY

From Craig's List. Hey, whatever turns you on!

Heyyy girls! I'm a str8 UCLA frat jock and I want to pretend I'm a LESBIAN. I'm looking to fuck around with another hot masc bro who also wants to get into some wild lesbian play with another dude.

I've been thinking we should pretend we're gals living in the Middle Ages, maybe we're a couple of quiet nuns living in a stone convent in the middle of France somewhere, like in around the year 1100 or so. I'll call you Matilda and you can call me something like Guinevere. I think our convent would be surrounded by nothing but rivers and trees and shit, so we'd get lonely. Then one day the mother superior leaves to go sell some fabric or something and you come into my room while I'm reading scripture and thinking about Jesus and you lift up my dress and say "I want you Guinevere," then you'd start fingering my clit while I pull off your habit and kiss your dyke mouth and say "Oh yeah do me Matilda." We'd just fucking go at it, like the mad women loving women that we are!!.... Fuck that makes me hot! Send ur pics and stats, and please just be a normal young dude like myself - no weirdos.


DON'T BELIEVE ME? CRAIGSLIST

AIDS SHOCKER!

I am just hearing about this shocker, in which Libyan kids were used as HIV guinea pigs. It reminds me of the US government-sponsored Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment performed on Alabaman black men from 1932-72, in which poor uneducated participants were intentionally infected with the venereal disease.

TUSKEGEE

But here's a new one, from www.edgeboston.com. Have you guys heard about this before?


CAIRO, Egypt - The families of hundreds of HIV-infected Libyan children asked for $12 million in compensation for each child Saturday as part of efforts to resolve the case of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor charged with intentionally infecting the children.

The nurses and doctor have been held in Libya since 1999. They were convicted in May 2004 on charges of intentionally infecting the children at the al-Fath Children’s Hospital in Benghazi as part of an experiment to find a cure for AIDS.

Europe, the United States and human rights groups accused Libya of concocting the charges to cover up poor hygiene conditions at its hospitals they say caused the infections. The six medical workers said they were tortured to extract confessions.

FULL ARTICLE: EDGEBOSTON

WHOOPS!

THE EVER RESOURCEFUL JAN SENT ME THESE:



AND FOR PRE-OPS WITH CRAMPS:

"BROKEBLACK" MOUNTAIN

As the gay columnists and bloggers (including me) rush to defend BROKEBACK as a triumph of homosexual subject matter rightly taking it's place in the mainstream, this is a fascinating if troubling read which sheds light on a different perspective--a black woman who's saddened by the thought of her man cheating on her with another man, and aware of the dangers involved. Of course, AIDS didn't exist in the time period in which BROKEBACK was set, which explains the hot barebacking scene with spit for lube. Ah, memories of dad... And for an even wronger perspective than that, the pornflick BAREBACK MOUNTAIN is actually about be released:

FLESHBOT


WHY THERE WILL NEVER BE A BLACK BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

The phenomenon of black men cheating on women with other men is
fuelling a relationship panic in the US

From today's Guardian, by Gary Younge


This is a tale of two love cheats and the many paths yet to be cleared
on the road to Brokeback Mountain. The first is the former governor of
New Jersey, James McGreevey. On August 12 2004, with his wife at his
side, McGreevey confessed: "At a point in every person's life, one has
to look deeply into the mirror of one's soul and decide one's unique
truth in the world, not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but
as it is. And so my truth is that I am a gay American." McGreevey, who
opposed gay marriage, had allegedly given his lover a high-paying
job for which he was totally unqualified. His gay partner repaid the
favour by blackmailing him.

The second is Jonathan Plummer, the former husband of the novelist
Terry McMillan. McMillan fell for Plummer, who was less than half her
age, when she was on holiday in Jamaica. She took him home and wrote a
bestselling novel about their romance called How Stella Got Her Groove
Back, which became a blockbuster film. Last year, about six years after
they were married, Plummer told McMillan he was gay. McMillan tried to get
him deported and, Plummer says, wrote "Fag juice, burn baby burn", on a
bottle of Jamaican hot pepper sauce. Plummer,
disingenuously, responded as though McMillan's rage was entirely
misplaced. "She is an extremely angry woman who is homophobic and is
lashing out at me because I have learned I am gay," he said. The two
parted ways until their very public acrimony in the courts mellowed
into a very public resolution on Oprah's couch.

McGreevey is white; Plummer is black. Although McGreevey was a public
official, his transgression was generally regarded as a personal flaw.
Although Plummer was a private citizen, his infidelity was regarded as
part of a public health crisis. McGreevey's infidelity drew a mixture
of contempt and pity; Plummer's betrayal fed a moral panic. McGreevey
was being unfaithful; Plummer was on the "down-low".

The down-low refers to black men who are in committed heterosexual
relationships and then slip off to have sex with other men on the sly.
Like "political correctness", it is one of those media constructs that
gained currency but never acquired real meaning. Articles mentioning
the term "down-low" in the context of black gay life ballooned from six
in 2002 to 114 in 2004 in the American mainstream media. The New York
Times magazine ran a cover story on it; the hit show Law and Order
based an episode on it; the Village Voice opened "The Great Down-Low
Debate".

Black radio stations buzzed with it. "I'm disgusted by the whole
down-low thing," Jennifer Shamwell, a 31-year-old single woman, told
the Philadelphia Inquirer following news of Plummer's infidelity. "It's
a horrible deceit to live a secret life as a gay man - and then get
married." She had a point. Deceit is a terrible thing. But, for all the fanfare,
the "down-low debate" was never that "great". The term, as it was
coined, never stood up to even the most basic scrutiny. Infidelity is
nothing new. Nor is the idea that married men might have affairs with
other men. McGreevey was not alone in proving that race had nothing to
do with it. Mark Oaten's predicament (BUNNY NOTE: Oaten is an english
politician who just last wek stepped down from office after his affair with male
hooker hit the press.) suggests this issue will be with
us for some time. Rock Hudson, Michael Barrymore, Ron Davies, Elton
John - the list of married men who turned out to be gay goes on and
on.

What was Brokeback Mountain but a brilliant film about two men on the
down-low set to glorious music and enchanting scenery? "It's pretty
clear that if they had been two black men it would have been a
different reaction," says Keith Boykin, the author of Beyond the Down
Low. "It would have been an evil, nefarious story about deception and
disease. These are guys who blatantly cheat on their wives with other
men. There's no way it would have been called a love story if they were
black."

Left there, the down-low would be just one more attempt to pathologise
black male sexuality - a titillating riff on the long-held myth of the
untamed bestial urges that increase with the melanin count. But the
down-low is different. It has gained legitimacy and traction in the
African-American community because of the dramatic rise in HIV among
African-American women. In 2003 the rate of Aids diagnoses for black
women was 25 times that of white women, according to the US
government's Centres for Disease Control; between 2001 and 2004 black
women accounted for 68% of new HIV infections. HIV/Aids is now the
number-one killer of black women aged between 25 and 34. The leading
cause of infection, says the CDC, is heterosexual contact. Meanwhile
other CDC studies reveal that a "significant number" of black men who
sleep with men still "identify themselves as heterosexual".

Put it all together and it is little wonder that the black women's
magazine Essence insisted that "brothers on the down-low pose a serious
Aids risk to black women".

That is certainly true if they are having unprotected sex. But not
otherwise. The down-low may be a component in fuelling the epidemic.
But since it is neither new nor racially specific and has not obviously
changed over the years it is unlikely to be the main culprit. Indeed
between 2000 and 2003, the very period when the media interest was
ramping up, infection rates among black women fell by 6%. Other
explanations might include the high rate of incarceration of black men,
who contract HIV in prison where gay sex is the only sex available and
protection is rare, and the gender imbalance between black men and
women in the nation at large.

Thanks to exceptionally high rates of murder (which was the biggest
killer of young black men at the end of the last century), Aids/HIV
(which replaced murder in the top slot at the beginning of this
century) and imprisonment (at current estimates one in three black boys
born in 2001 will end up in prison), viable and available black men are
relatively scarce. According to the census there are 30% more black
women than men in Baltimore, Chicago and Cleveland. In New York the
figure is 36%; in Philadelphia 37%.

Discrimination, segregation and societal collapse have created a
perfect storm for a higher turnover of sexual partners than would
normally be the case, and heterosexual women feeling pressure to lower
their standards and demands where men are concerned.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, a professor of women's studies at the
historically black women's college of Spelman in Atlanta, told the Los
Angeles Times: "Many of the women on campus are panic-stricken because
of the feeling of scarcity. I see a lot of problematic sexual
decision-making among black women across class and age lines."

Which brings us back to Brokeback Mountain - a film that sensitively
illustrated how even our most intimate human relationships are framed
and shaped in no small part by the power, prejudices and conventions of
the world around us. It is the only movie I have ever heard of where
women cry, in sympathy rather than anger, at the sight of two men
routinely betraying their wives, set in a place that embraces rather
than stigmatises human frailty - where people cheat because the rules
are stacked against them. On the down-low up high in the hills.

BUSH DRUNK

Did I already post this link to Bush's "drunk" speech?

WIMP.COM

HANGOVER HELL

Happy Monday! In case you had a little too much fun this weekend and need a little sympathy giggle, check out the Six Circles of Hangover Hell from Modern Drunkard magazine online. Here's # 4:

4th Circle: The Hunchback of Cheap Champagne

You have lost the will to live. Your head is throbbing. You can't speak too quickly or you’ll punctuate your sentences with vomit. Your boss has already lambasted you for being late and reeking of booze. The clothes you put on won’t win you any fashion awards and your face looks like a golf green mowed by a blind junkie (ladies, it looks like you applied your make-up with a shotgun). Your eyes are red enough to give your features a lizardish cast and your hair makes your coworkers ask if you’re starting up a new wave band. You vaguely remember doing some really dumb and embarrassing things last night and you don’t care. You would murder your favorite bartender for a foot-long Bratwurst smothered with dijon and fried onions.

READ THE REST: MODERNDRUNKARD

Other articles on THE MODERN DRUNKARD include LADIES THIRST, about legendary female drunkards and an article which asks "Are drunks hiding from reality, or changing it?"

IRISH HUMOR

An Irish daughter had not been home for over 5 years. Upon her return,
her father cussed her. "Where have ye been all this time? Why did
ye not write to us, not even a line? Why didn't ye call? Can ye not
understand what ye put yer old mum thru?"

The girl, crying, replied, "Sniff, sniff....dad....I became a
prostitute...."

"Ye what!!? Out of here, ye shameless harlot! Sinner! You're a
disgrace to this family."

"OK, dad-- as ye wish. I just came back to give mum this luxurious
fur coat, title deed to a ten bedroom mansion plus a savings certificate
for $5 million. For me little brother this gold Rolex and for ye daddy the
sparkling new Mercedes limited edition convertible that's parked
outside plus a membership to the country club....(takes a breath)....an
invitation for ye all to spend New Years Eve on board my new yacht in the
Riviera, and.... "

"Now what was it ye said ye had become?" says Dad.

Girl, crying again, "Sniff, sniff....a prostitute dad! Sniff, sniff."

"Oh! BeJesus! -- Ye scared me half to death, girl! I thought ye said
'a Protestant'. Come here and give yer old man a hug!"

A NOTE FROM COLE SLAW

Cole, a regular reader had this to say about Google refusing to give the feds their search records when subponaed. I just have to applaud Cole for being bitter and retarded, while applaudung someone. What a combo! --B

This story is frightening. I applaude Google. I'd like to know why these other companies caved in so easily.

Dubya has redefined presidential authority, taken the constition and ripped it into confetti, and rewritten american foreign policy so that we are now despised and minimalized by most other nations.

Can't wait to see what civil liberties will be pissed on during his final 3 years. The way things are going we might have a new name even. How sad does 'United States of Christian America' sound?

My advice is to make good friends in other countries. If necessary you can flee on one of the last planes out and know you'll have a place to stay. I picked Costa Rica because if I absolutely had to, I could drive there.

DO YOUR TITS HANG LOW?

MOORE VS MATTHEWS

The war of words between Michael Moore and Chris Matthews has taken a comical turn, with the gadfly filmmaker suggesting that the blowhard talk show host is Osama bin Laden's lover. It started earlier this week after the airing of bin Laden's latest audio tape, when Matthews said on his "Hardball" show that the world's most wanted terrorist "sounds like an over-the-top Michael Moore, if not a Michael Moore." After catching a ton of flack from Moore supporters, Matthews refused to apologize, instead saying he was misunderstood.

Moore has now shot back with an exclusive expose on "JIHADBALL," revealing the "special" friendship between Matthews and Bin Laden. View a series of amusing doctored photos Moore posted on his Web site providing damning evidence that Matthews and bin Laden are, in fact, lovers.

MORE PIX OF THE COUPLE:

MICHAELMOORE.COM


And while we're on the subject of Osama humor, here's a word from Maxine:

FOR MADGE FREAKS

Why IS Madonna Punishing Herself?

By RICHARD PRICE

EVERY woman of a certain age dreams of fitting into her daughter's clothes.

(BUNNY NOTE: I dream of fitting into my own!)

Few, however, would aspire to the reverse. Yet when Madonna attended a film premiere with her daughter recently, it was Lourdes who was wearing her mother's coat. Nothing shocking in that, you may think, until you pause to consider that the girl is nine years old and her mother 47.

Not that Lourdes is big by any standards. She is a healthy, slim and active little girl who has inherited the dark good looks and impressive physique, and huge uncircumcised penis of her father, a personal trainer. (BUNNY NOTE: Obviously I added the penis part.)

READ THE REST: REDORBIT

FAYEWATCH!

Just in rom Lypsinka:

Miss Faye Dunaway will appear this Thursday, Jan 26th, on CSI as a former Vegas showgirl with old mob connections. She writes a tell-all book.

This is, of course, akin to Joan Crawford appearing on THE VIRGINIAN. A must-see.

(CSI airs on CBS Thursday at 9 PM Eastern time.)

CHRISTINE JORGENSEN REVEALS

In 1952, Christine Jorgensen became the world's first recipient of sexual reassignment surgery--though according to Wikipedia, the world's first genital reassignment surgery was performed in 1930. (Revoke my "gender-confused ID card, but I'm am ashamed to admit that I don't know the difference between those two surgeries. I'm still saving up for the good ol' fashioned nose job and second chin removal!)

More on Christine from Wikipedia:

Christine Jorgensen once appeared on The Dick Cavett Show. Cavett insulted her by asking about the status of her romantic life with her "wife", and she walked off the show; since she was the only guest scheduled, Cavett spent the rest of that show talking about how he had not meant to offend her. (Oops! She's had enough of Dick and she fleeced!)

During the 1970s and 1980s, Jorgensen toured university campuses and other venues to speak about her experiences. She was known for her directness and polished wit. In her later years, Jorgensen worked as an actress and nightclub entertainer. In summer stock, she played Madame Rosepettle in the play "Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Locked You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad". In her nightclub act, she sang "I Enjoy Being a Girl" while dressed as comic-book heroine Wonder Woman: the act was terminated when the publishers who owned the copyright on the Wonder Woman character took legal action.



Friay night, I caught a play/performance piece/one "man" show called CHRISTINE JORGENSEN REVEALS at The Dodger Stages. Actor Bradford Louryk impersonates herm and lip-synchs to her 1958 interview album of the same name. It's a fascinating slice of history which has thankfully been preserved and brought to life by this unusual show, which only runs until 1/28, so catch it befor he/she gets the chop!

BRADFORD LOURYK AS CHRISTINE JORGENSEN IN CHRIS JORGENSEN REVEALS



The show starts with a montage of actual Christine clips, which prove that not only had Christine transformed himself into a woman, but into a woman who carried herself in the overly-poised and gracious manner of a 1950's Hollywood star. A bit like Lypsinka, except that Miss Jorgensen was poised and gracious...and a star. (Oink!) Though in one later clip shot when really huge Joan Crawford-esque brows were in, Christine did remind of me of a young Thurston Howell III from GILLIGAN'S ISLAND.

It's a show with challenges. We aren't used to watching a drag queen walk onto a stage and then plunk down in a chair, we're used to their musical numbers and rip-away costumes and histrionics. But Christine wasn't a drag queen. Bradford is, and without the aid of hormones, surgery, and a naturally petite size, the transsexual freak factor isn't in effect. He does a good job of impersonating her, with two knit-picks. One of Christine's most spookable traits was a receding hairline, which Bradford's (I'm guessing) custom lace-front did not feature. And in an attempt to add "business" or drama to the somewhat stiff hour-long chat, I think Bradford plays her a little too curtly. Christine was performing supper clubs at the time of the interview, but she was witty and charming to the press before her mangina had even healed up 6 years earlier. I don't think that 6 years after her groundbreaking surgery and worldwide front page headlines, she'd seem as flustered and mildly irritated as portrayed here. But these are minor gripes.



Unearthing this interview in any way is a treat. Who bought this kind of album? I can't imagine straights running out saying "Let's get the album of the ex-GI who cut off his dick and became a beauty queen!"--6 years after the surgery. I read one review that claimed that the original interview was conducted by Nipsey Russell. Are there two Nipseys? Because my mind is reeling to think of that the rhyming scene-stealer from MATCH GAME and HOLLYWOOD SQUARES was even around in '58, much less engaged to conduct a sensitive interview. I pray that someone digs up the original and remounts this production, co-starring Flotilla Debarge (in drag with that mercilessly short fro she's been wearing!) as the Nipster. If you remember this nut as fondly as I do, you may wanna check out a tribute website to this prankster:

NIPSEYRUSSELLSFUNKYPALACE



In this production, the role of Nipsey is played by Rob Grace, who appears pre-recorded on a TV screen which Bradford interacts with. The interviewer milks the dry "script" for what humor there is, as does "Christine", with her word-perfect lipsynch that even seizes on every bit of mic feedback and the sound of a well-manicured nail rubbing against a silk shantung suit to add interest. The questions are hard-hitting, but polite, including inquiries on sex life, hate mail, and the warmth of real women's reception of a transsexual in the powder room. And unlike the Q & A's of today, Christine did not have a press agent beside her coaching every response.

Now there's always a question mark about a post-op transsexual's performing career, which can still raise a manically plucked eyebrow or two. Should a transsexual, even if she began her transformation as a drag performer, continue her career lipsynching after her operation? Most tradtional drag pageants don't allow a post-op to enter. And trannies, who sometimes compete with each other to be more "cunt" (just like you real gals!), often talk of ditching their show biz careers and largely gay audiences after their surgeries to seek a fishier new life in the shadows with a husband and white picket fence. Or does having been bit by the show business bug cause her to crave the spotlight still? Does she reveal her true origins? Or perform as a woman? And if you're a woman, then why are you lipsynching? Or do you capitalize on your gimmick/media blitz to make a buck?

Of course it's different for everyone, and I certainly don't mean to imply that most transsexuals start off as drag queens. But Christine obviously chose to take advantage of her novelty and publicity to develop a night club act, which included, ballet en pointe and a falsetto rendition of a selection from Madame Butterfly, which were both yanked when audiences failed to appreciate Christine's humorous intent. (I know that feeling, gurl!) So she sang I ENJOY BEING A GIRL and performed "special material" with on-stage costume changes. One night she got some good advice from Jimmy Durante: (quoting from memory) "You could tell the funniest joke on earth, but for the first 15 minutes no one's going to laugh--they just wanna look at you."

Through her composure, Christine does get a little catty when she's bragging about her size 10 dress size, relaying stories from her electrolycist's office about hairier real women, and whining about female drunks being more boisterous than their male counterparts. Other interesting tidbits include her early military service at the ironically named FORT DIX, and one probably well-rehearsed answer about how (papraphrasing) "There's nothing sexy about years of doctor's visits and operating rooms." And when asked how she feels about putting Denmark, where she had the operation, on the map, Christine modestly answers that "Denmark didn't need me to become famous. They already had bleu chesse and the smorgasbord." Nutty! But I can't help but compare it to another drag interview lipsynch "play", in which Lypsinka mimed to a Joan Crawford interview. After the fact, largely due to MOMMY DEAREST, there's a lot of laughs in us knowing posthumously what a witch Joan really was. Most aren't as familiar with Christine's tales as we are with Christina's and "No more wire hangers ever!", and though she owns a unique slice of herstory, her personailty simply isn't as sensational as Joan. So CHRISTINE JORGENSEN REVEALS is more of a history lesson than a blockbuster. But, if you are interested in history and gender roles, this is definitely a show for you.

CHRISTINE JORGENSEN REVEALS' website (with a sound clip in the intro):

CHRISTINEREAVEALS

GRATUITOUS DICK PIC

In case y'all are starting to get sick of reading only about men who wanted cut off their dicks! ---B

LADY APRIL ASHLEY

Speaking of sex changes, April Ashley has a website! She's alive and well and living in San Diego! Resembling a cross between a young Liz Taylor and Vivien Leigh, April enjoyed a modelling career and set tabloids on fire when she married an English nobleman. Well, for 14 days, anyway. Then courts ruled that the marriage was null and void because April was biologically a male. Undaunted and looking incredibly glamorous, Lady April went on to hob-knob with celebs like the impossibly handsome Omar Sharif and the rest of the international jet-set. And with the wasp-waisted corsetierre Mr. Pearl, to whom April told this joke after a tipple or two: "What's a cure for a tight arse?...A night in Rome!" (Call my travel agent at once!) Here's a taste of her previously published autobiography, and she's working on a new one which covers her life from 1980 to the present. Hurry up, your ladyship!


MY ODYSSEY BY APRIL ASHLEY: CHAPTER ONE

Prince Max von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, fat and twinkling in his decorations, was sitting on my left at a gala dinner in the south of Spain. The room glittered with crystal and silver, pineapples, lobsters and champagne. People talked about mutual friends and parties in London, Paris and Rome. One side of the room was a semi-circle of colonnaded windows through which bejewelled figures slid out to the candlelit terrace and the music of the band. I gave up toying with a truffle omelette and let my gaze wander across the breathless midnight Mediterranean. Beyond, way beyond, were the lights of the coast of North Africa.

Prince Max leaned over, looked down my cleavage and whispered. ‘My dear, what colour are ….?’ The Princess Bismarck passed our table on her two walking sticks, click-swoosh, click-swoosh, on her way to the lavatory. The Prince managed to stand, sway, and bow. I laughed. She nodded from the crow's nest of her great height and proceeded fitfully through the wrong door into the Men’s bathroom. 'Darling, what colour are …?’ Max asked again. 'Max, do spit it out' I said. ‘Well, my dear, I was wondering what colour are your nipples. Brown or pink?'



I ran my fingers over my bosom, supported by a band of ice-pink shantung, and replied, 'The palest, Max, the palest pink.' He took out a Corona and began to tremble so violently that he set fire to one of his fingers which was wet with brandy. I had to light the cigar for him. 'Young cherries, sweet rosebuds. Ah! You see that woman over there?' He indicated an American acquaintance who had inherited a large piece of Ohio and fled with it to Europe. 'Hers are like dried figs! Chewed up ... but you, my dear, pink pips, my treasure, you are high born I think.'

Max had perfect manners. And he was quite wrong about my origins. An elderly friend, Don Pedro tapped me on the shoulder. 'May I have the pleasure?' he said. Don Pedro creaked at the waist when he danced. But he had a noble head. We went off to Watutsi on the terrace.

High born! How funny, I thought. I didn't know what a present was until my eleventh birthday. 'I've got a present for you,' Mother said. I gripped the table to steady myself and broke out in goose-pimples. 'But you can't have it until you get home from school.' When the afternoon school bell clanged, I ran out of the gates, making a quick sign of the cross as I flew past the church. I was deeply religious at that age. At home Mother was holding a brown-paper parcel. I took it breathing heavily. Out rolled a pair of grey socks.

Conceived one summer on the Isle of Man at the Fort Hotel where my mother was a chambermaid,I was born a boy in the Smithdown Road Hospital, Liverpool, on 29 April 1935. This birthday I share with the late Emperor Hirohito of Japan, which makes us Taureans like Fred Astaire, Catharine the Great, Shirley Temple and Hitler. Mother brought me home to a black dockland slum called Pitt Street and christened me George.

APRIL ASHLEY TODAY


Please vist her site for the rest of Chapter One ffrom MY ODYSSEY and tons of amazing pix of this stunner:

APRILASHLEY.COM



Don't forget to visit her LINKS page--they are all about her!

APRIL MODELS FOR DAVID BAILEY


You can even buy an APRIL ASHLEY t-shirt, tote bag, mug, stein, mousepad or clock on CAFEPRESS.COM on her merch page.

TIME FOR A SEX CHANGE!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

FROM HUFFINGTONPOST.COM

"The republican party has been hijacked by religious fanatics that, in my opinion, aren't a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden and a lot of other religious nuts around the world," said Paul Hackett, a recent Iraq-war combat veteran who is running for the U.S. Senate from Ohio. As you may have surmised, Hackett is a Democrat, and his statement, to the Columbus Dispatch, raised an immediate call by the Ohio G.O.P. for an apology. "I said it," Hackett replied. "I meant it. I stand by it." In fact, he has taken to repeating it at every stop along the campaign trail.

DEAD END FOR CUL-DE-SAC?

Pacified by the christian-themed NARNIA, four religious groups lifted their boycott against Disney. Now, Disney-owned channel ABC yanks, without clear reasons, a reality show where families, incluing a fag couple, compete for a house in a white republican neighborhood, against several other families including black, hispanic, Korean, Wiccan, tattooed, etc. Of course, the show brought up all sorts of "There goes the neighhborhood!" issues, but the gay couple dominated the show (work, you beeyotches!) and won the house, even experiencing some softening of their soon-to-be neighbors' attitudes towards them. Fascinating article. I would love to have been a fly on the wall of the boardroom where exec's crunch the numbers of BAREBACK's booming box office success ("Nah, it's just a one-off!") against possible losses from these influential christian groups. Balanced, of course, by some guaranteed "scandal press."


NYTIMES

I just have to throw this in. NARNIA was one of my fav childhood reads. I read it many times and never once made the connection, even if it was intended by the C.S. Lewis, between Jesus and Aslan. However, I often start things and don't finish the...

But doesn't it seem really desperate if christian groups are forgiving Disney because a big kid's movie parallel's christian teachings?

HOLLYWOO.COM

In other gay TV news, and speaking of desperate, Tom Cruise has reportedly squashed the South Park episode (about him being in the closet) from airing in England. Methinks the lady doth protest too much. The show's already aired here. This Cruise control just relights the controversy. If you haven't seen it, it is hysterical and ballsy. Try watching it here:

SCIENTOMOGY

"THE HOMOSEXUALIZING OF AMERICA"

Tuesday night, LARRY KING LIVE's intro asked "IS HOLLYWOOD HOMOSEXUALIZING AMERICA?", prompted no doubt, by the wins of CAPOTE, TRANSAMERICA and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN at the Golden Globes. Larry's guests included a Baptist minister, a religious talk show host, the gay former mayor from Wyoming (where gay-bashing fatality Matthew Shepard hailed from), and a religious, openly gay actor/talk show host. Though Larry can be a bit dull, he was really "on" last night and confronted the evangelists with lines like "Don't you think you might learn more by looking at it rather than looking away from it?" Neither of the evangelists had seen BROKEBACK and didn't intend to. Well, fuck you, conservative assholes! BROKEBACK is now the #1 movie in America. I have to give the American people credit for having more open minds to our open legs than I had previously imagined.

The conversation meandered to Matthew Shepard and gay marriage, and the guests never really focused on Hollywood's "homosexual agenda" which the show's title sought to investigate. But just by asking the question "IS HOLLYWOOD HOMOSEXUALIZING AMERICA?" is so ludicrous! I'd say the same even if I weren't a proud cocksucker. As a friend pointed out, if 1 in 10 people are gay, then around 1/10th of all movies, tv shows, books, etc. SHOULD be gay-themed, based simply on the laws of proportion. And Hollywood has always pushed conservatives' buttons with controversial themes like anti-government/establishment films, extra-violent films, films about abortion, religion--basically anything conservatives weren't ready to deal with openly yet. Today, religious freaks squawk about the HARRY POTTER films as occultish. There's really no end to their nerve, and they'd love to see us return to a Puritan era morality with, as both reli-goons expressed on Tuesday, NO sex, even heterosexual, permitted outside of marriage. Larry's christian guests also opposed divorce. Oh, and no dancing or playing cards on Sundays. My own mother was not even allowed to use scissors on Sundays as this might be construed as "work" on The Lord's Day--so this ye olde mindset is not that far behind us. (Please refrain from old age jokes about my mom--or me!) Is this really in synch with the way the country feels? The country which features bikini-clad babes in every video and "out-of-wedlock" dating show? Of course it's not! It's just that the tv news media, far from being part of the mythical "left-wing conspiracy"--which by the way consists of about 2 newspapers and one radio station-- gives these religious nuts the microphone to voice their concerns more often.

And if the truth be told, it's the CHRISTIANIZING OF AMERICA which is really taking place. Hey, there's $ in it. Three gay/transgendered movies winning awards are just a tiny back-step on this country's path to "righteousness", which includes a huge surge in Christian-themed movies, tv shows, cartoons, and even rock groups! Name a gay rock group, for chrissakes! (OK, besides, Scissor Sisters and Le Tigre, which didn't hit that big in the US anyway. And Clay Aiken and Ricky Martin aren't groups. Meow!) Have you ever heard such a ridiculous uproar as the one this past December over "holiday" versus "Christmas"? During the Terri Schiavo saga we even saw christian pharmacists ignore the law and their job's very serious responsibilities by refusing to prescribe "morning after" pills because they don't approve of abortion. They felt they answered to a higher power than any law made by man. What's next? Pharmacist's refusing to dole out AIDS meds because HIV is caused by sinful homosexual, promiscuous or IV drug use life-styles? Separation of church and state is officially a thing of the past: Bush even claims god told him to go to war. Ignore the facts and research (or just don't do any or alter what reseach you actually do to suit your needs) and follow the advice of god.

Well how about this, you fucking assholes? What if god doesn't exist? Then a fairy tale, as occultish as HARRY POTTER, complete with miracles and burning bushes and walking on water and Armageddon, yes a fairy tale is running the nation! INTO THE GROUND. And I'rmageddon sick of it! If god does exist and was speaking to Dubya, you'd think he could've given him better advice on not desecrating God's earth with global warming, killing people in a war that's based on a lie, and he might have even tipped him off about Katrina, the tsunami, Sago, the fires in Oklahoma--SOMETHING to indicate that Bush and God were indeed homies. God might also have reminded him about that biblical passage that states it is "harder for a rich man to get to heaven than for a camel to get through a needle in a haystack"--or whatever it was. At any rate, separation of church and state is one of the principles upon which this (once) great nation was founded--and it's under siege from the evangelicals' agenda. The gay agenda just wants marriage and AIDS meds. Well, and sterile gerbils. And leave those gloryholes open in bus stations, for chrissakes! (It's my best angle.)

One of my fondest memories of college--besides the time the basketball team molested me in the locker room--was of a bright gay student debating some religious types at a public library circa 1982. The reli-goons were quoting the anti-homo parts of the scriptures and this queen stood up and said "Do you speak ancient greek?". Everyone else in the room had to admit that they didn't. This queen then said something to the effect of "Well, I have a degree in it, and you are mutilating the original Bible's meaning." Gasping palpably, they had no retort for that fucking linguist queen. In fact, the Bible they were quoting from was commissioned by an openly gay faggot, King James I, who was referred to at court as Queen James! I came across this interesting article on line, called THANK A HOMOSEXUAL FOR YOUR BIBLE.

"QUEEN" JAMES, AUTHOR OF THE BIBLE


WWW.LIBCHRIST.COM

Among other things, it claims that:


The Hebrew Old Testament clearly documents a sexual relationship between the prophet Daniel and a man named Ashpenaz, and indicates that God put Daniel into that relationship.

Much to the embarrassment of the Vatican, the Catholic theologian Boswell has uncovered proof that, up until the fourteenth century, the church was routinely performing wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples.

The social tides in Europe began to turn against homosexuality around the thirteenth century. Up until that time, there was no organized opposition to homosexuality, either from society or from the church. 

The religious tide did not turn against homosexuals until after the social tides. The change in society's attitude toward homosexuals was the only reason the church stopped marrying them and began to persecute them. 

Boswell found that same-sex marriage continued in certain parts of eastern Europe until the nineteenth century, and that in a few villages, they still continue. 

There is absolutely no condemnation of homosexuality in the Hebrew Old Testament.

There is absolutely no condemnation of homosexuality in the Greek New Testament.

All English translations (one of the earliest being 1611 AD, more than 200 years after the social tide turned against homosexuals, and more than 100 years after the church stopped performing most homosexual weddings) have been deliberately mistranslated to make it appear that God condemned homosexuality.

The Hebrew and Greek scriptures never connected Soddom and Gomorrah with homosexuality. The idea that those cities were destroyed for homosexuality is a man-made notion and is unsupported by scriptures.


Fascinating! So there's actually a precedent for gay weddings within the christian tradition! But through twisting the translations, conveniently omitting some facts, and overlooking the many contradictions between the two testaments, contemporary christians have pieced together a patchwork doctrine which reflects what their narrower views. So that the same gays who were married by the church for centuries, are now declared sinful! Even if you believe in god or the Bible's teachings, this has nothing to do with either. Apparently, the original Bible had nothing against gays.The anti-gay bias in the english translation of the scriptures, if you buy these quotes, is man-made.

Though King James I's gayness is well-documented, I'm sure that these scriptures and their interpretations are hotly disputed. The Bible is translated, re-translated, edited, ad infinitum/nauseum. My real question is WHY? It's a dusty old book which often contradicts itself and needs to be shoved up evangelicals' crusty, self-righteous assholes--maybe then they'd discover the joys of being gay. This is 2006! Don't you dare attack me armed only with some book of myths by dozens of different authors, supposedly inspired by a god I don't even believe in, written long before there was any understanding of a fucking printing press, much less electricity or space travel or the world of enlightenment that's come to pass in the last couple thousand years! Yet perhaps the Bible's authors did understand sexuality, and from these quotes, gays were accepted and married when the book was written, on up to the 13th century! And why isn't god speaking through any more disciples to create new chapters of the Bible? The Pat Robertsons who claim to communicate with him today talk bullshit--calling for assassinations and gloating over "god-sent" hurricanes and heart attacks like Sharon's.

Ok. This is a hard one. Call it my Dr. Phil moment. And I'm preaching to myself now, too, because few of us are strong enough to be unaffected by the notion, ground into our heads as impressionable youngsters, that we should be ashamed of ourselves because homosexuality is "a sin." Hell, even straight women are often made to feel that overly sexual behavior is wrong, which is why many long-married women have never had one orgasm. Whether we get it from church or from society at large (which often gets it from church), gays are steeped in shame from the moment we become aware that we're different. To reveal the true "us", is to be despised, an outcast. This deep, early damage which corresponds with our development as sexual beings probably plays a big part in the self-destructive behaviors many glbt folk engage in like crystal abuse and bare-backing. (Excuse me, I lost my train of thought. Lemme do another bump.) Recently confronted with whether or not I needed to take an AIDS test, I had to confront the buried notion, that on some level I felt I was "bad" and deserved the disease. And I know I'm not alone: an english AIDS magazine just sent me a questionnaire and the first question was "Is AIDS God's revenge?" I was shocked that this question would come from a magazine about AIDS. Who's writing the questions--Donna Summer? (FYI: Donna shocked her huge gay audience by reportedly suggesting/stating/hinting/whatever that AIDS WAS god's revenge on gays. If true, now that infection rates of black females have surpassed those of gay men, I wonder who god's avenging now, BAD GIRL?) But here's an idea which might reverse some of that damage. I'm not religious myself, but let's assume that you are gay, religious, you know that you are a decent person, but you really can't reconcile yourself with the way that the mainstream church frowns on your sexual orientation.


DONNA SUMMER'S GAY STYLISTS GET REVENGE ON HER WITH THIS ROTTED LOOK!


WHAT ARE THE MAINSTREAM CHURCH'S NEGATIVE IDEAS ABOUT HOMOSEXUALS BASED ON?

According to the quotes from this article, which indicate that the church married gays freely until SOCIETY, not GOD, put pressure on the church to conform with SOCIETY's, not GOD's, changing values. Wow! Maybe god has approved of us all along! Maybe the scriptures indicate that god wants us to be joined in holy matrimony. But then centuries ago, society turned on us, re-translated the bible, and those in power pronounced us "sinful" and pulled the butt plug on same-sex marriage. Are you gonna buy it? Don't you feel that you are right within yourself, and that god made you the way he and his all-powerful self wanted you to be? And take a look at those in power today, who claim to serve god while serving their own greed. Is falsifying evidence to launch a war which has killed thousands christian in any way? Or does it deliberately ignore THOU SHALT NOT KILL? Why should the powers that were, who turned against homosexuals hundreds of years ago, be any less suspect than the powers that be, today? Bush does act like a king from the Midle Ages, who can lie, spy, torture or anything else he wants since he's annointed by god.

Larry's religious panelist's referred to one "absolute transcendent eternal truth" which "said don't engage in that (ie: gay) behavior." THERE IS NO ONE TRUTH! THERE IS NO ONE RELIGION! How can these freaks be so pompous? Well, it doesn't matter how. They are that pompous, and we've got to shout them down with the same righteous indignation they use to denounce us. We've got to be as organized as they are in our condemnation of their narrow-mindedness, since their disapproval is now a major policy-making force in our country, touching on everything from depriving us of the benefits of stem-cell research, to denying a woman's right to choose, to denying the accepted theory of evolution in favor of a system which better lines up with their fairy tale.

One of Larry's gay guests was a christian, who wrestled with the christian idea that homosexuality is a sin until he formulated his own way of talking to god which worked for him--a loving, forgiving god who embraces his sexuality. I think it's interesteing that this gay actor molds god to make him say what he wants to hear, just like the evangelicals, the suicide bombers, and Pat Robertson do. Remember, if you are a christian, you have certain BELIEFS--something you believe, but can't prove. No matter how strongly you FEEL that god is a part of your life, there is no fact that backs up the existence of a higher power. Oh, I know many will say "How could you explain the sunset, the planets, the seasons, the intricacies of a butterfly's wings, if there's no god?" I can't. But just because I'm mystified by the universe doesn't mean I have to invent an old man with a long white beard who lives in the sky to explain everything that's beyond my comprehension. So, I'm definitely not going to base my life or notions of right and wrong on an ancient, contradictory, mis-translated book of fairy tales inspired by "him." NEXT!

PS: Thanks for listening. My psychiatrist took the week off to try to get her license back after a malpractice suit.

REGROW FORESKIN TODAY!!

Regretful of your circumcision and the reduced sensitivity and cheese-producing you've experienced as a result of it? Well, fret no more cuz now there's the TLC Tugger, and this nifty demonstration video, complete with "cheesy" theme song, shows you how easy it can be!

TLCTUGGER

GO GOOGLE!

For being the only search engine to stand up to the feds! This great blog by Russell Shaw from The Huffington Post breaks it down with a finger-snap!

For a government that - as proven by Osama's latest threats - can't penetrate Al-Queda, and can't penetrate international methamphetamine smuggling rings that are tearing your town apart with their poison - well, this government seems to care quite a bit about another kind of well, "penetration."

The news hit today that Federal prosecutors defending the 1998 Child Online Protection Act have asked Google,Yahoo!, Microsoft and America Online to each hand over the results of one million recent "random" search queries as well as one million "random" Internet addresses accessible through each company's Internet search site.

Prosecutors say this is being done to prove that the Act- being challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union- is "more effective than filtering software in protecting minors from exposure to harmful materials on the Internet." These prosecutors hope to learn from these records how frequently Web users of all ages encouter pornography, and whether pornographic websites found in these searches could be blocked by filtering software.
To their credit, Google has said they would fight the motion. The others have given in.

I don't think it is a very noble moment when an 11-year-old girl, perhaps feeling her first sexual urges, decides to find something on the Internet that would enable her to indulge herself. Yet I have to ask myself, if she goes to Google and types in, say, "boys" and "hard" (choose your own word here), and is able to get to websites that literally show her what she is looking for, then who am I to make that decision if I am not her parent or legal guardian?

I should have equipped her to not want to make that decision, not employ electronic surveillance to thwart her if she does, even out of nothing but natural curiousity.

Or if a 9 year-old boy goes to Yahoo! and types in, say, "dirty babes" into a search engine, and then plays with himself to a display of a picture of a skanky 'ho doing the nasty with a dildo, then what is so wrong with that it requires the Feds to step in?


READ THE REST: HUFFINGTONPOST

PETE "LEPORE" BURNS

Dead or Alive singer Pete Burns is still spinning heads right round with his drastically surgerized mug. He definitely doesn't look 46! Or male, for that matter! Says Pete-tricia, "If you own a car, you change that every few years and that's just what I'm doing with my appearance." Along with sometime tranny-chaser Dennis Rod-man, s(h)e's a contestant on UK's hit show BIG BROTHER, and recently wore a gorilla coat which drew protests from viewers when (s)he bragged that it was made from an endangered species.

From the ever-respourceful popbitch.com:

Pete Burns claims that his remarkable lips
are made from foetus penises. "It's a thing
called Alloderm, which is the foreskins
off unborn babies," he told Bent magazine.

Mystery solved? Not quite. Popbitch's medical
expert says Alloderm is a filler made from
cadaver skin or skin taken from another
site on the patient's body, usually used on
burns victims. Dr Dawny says "It is impossible
for Pete's lips to be made of harvested
foreskins as they would be rejected by his
immune system."

A friend of Burns tells us that the tissue
used in the lips was in fact taken from
Pete's stomach...



For more on the show visit: CHANNEL4

CHOCOLATE-MANIA

All this talk about chocolate has made me frightfully hungry. You guessed it! For a great big mouthful of rich, creamy CHOCOLATE! Why chocolate's not just a proven mood elevator, it's also a potent aphrodisiac, as evidenced by these "art" shots from a site dedicated to lusty ladies and gents driven cuckoo for cocoa! Enjoy, my sweets!

ITSJUSTCHOCOLATE

CNN, I'M SORRY!

I know that watching 24/7 for four years would one day pay off. Lou Dobbs just said that "despite the government's efforts, after four years Osama bin Laden remains at large." What? Could they possibly FINALLY be hinting at Bush's incompetence???

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

FEAR FACTOR

From a viewer's letter read on CNN today by Wolf Blitzer:

"It seems that every time the president gets in trouble, another tape appears from Bin Laden. Is it possible that he' s working out of the White House?"

What Makes Americans Susceptible to Manipulation? by Andrew Bard Schmookler

One question has been especially troubling me: Why will so many Americans buy images of national leaders that are so at odds with so much evidence?

This question is crucial because the American democracy was founded on the notion that the truth will out in the deliberations of a free people.

Fear is surely a factor, especially so since our country came under attack three years ago. When we’re afraid, we lose our tolerance for ambiguity. Black-and-white thinking is in: you’re either for us or against us. When in the grip of fear, we crave certainty, because uncertainty magnifies the feeling of vulnerability. So a leader who shows no doubt, who doesn’t even entertain second thoughts, is comforting for the fearful. The more afraid we are, the more we shift into a part of the brain where rational analysis does not govern.

It is when people do not think critically that they are most manipulable, and fear is but one force that’s eroded America’s capacity for critical thought. Over recent generations, the most mighty of our educational institutions –advertising—has systematically worked to teach us to mistake appealing image for the reality, the sizzle for the steak. Those taught to buy cigarettes to make themselves glamorous can be persuaded to buy incompetent leadership to make them safe.

FULL ARTICLE: NONESOBLIND

HE WHO LAUGHS LAST

from Ananova.com

A Swiss joker had his last wish fulfilled when his obituary was published as a change of address notice.

The obituary published in the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper read: "Change of address for Roland Jacob.

"My new address is the Rehalp cemetery, plot number 4276. I look forward to your visit."

USA: OUT OF BUSINESS SALE

from The Onion:

WASHINGTON, DC—In an address broadcast on late-night television Tuesday, President Bush announced that the federal government will liquidate its holdings in a going-out-of-business sale scheduled to begin Friday.

Enlarge Image
After 200-plus years of service, the U.S. government is closing its doors.

"The U.S. government, America's place for law and order since 1776, has lost its lease, and everything must go, go, go," Bush said. "But our loss is your gain, and make no mistake: You, the people, would be crazy to miss out on these amazing closeout bargains."

READ THE REST: THEONION

TED VS GEORGE

IN CASE YOU CAN'T READ IT, TED'S BUTTON SAYS "I'VE KILLED MORE PEOPLE IN MY CAR THAN GEORGE DID IN THE NATIONAL GUARD."

CHOCOLATE-GATE

CNN has really been laying heavy on the anti-democrat propaganda recently. ("Recently?", you ask? "Sheesh!") I was outraged by the questions posed for days during and after the Alito hearings. "Alito's wife left the hearing in tears. Have the democrats gone too far?" Well, it wasn't clarfiied until Sunday, when Suzanne Malveaux finally admitted the truth. The dem's may have been asking some tough questions, but the Martha-Ann started sobbing after a republican Senator Lindsey Graham, not a democrat, asked Alito if he was a "closet bigot."

Chicago Tribune:

Her eyes full of tears and pain, her left hand with the wedding ring covering her trembling mouth, a woman weeping for a husband who was being condemned by politicians on national television as a bigot.

"Are you really a closet bigot?" asked a sympathetic Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Wednesday, apologizing to Alito for the way he'd been treated by Democratic colleagues.

"I'm not any kind of bigot," Alito said, as his wife, who was seated behind him, started crying and then left the room, a tissue crumpled in her hand.

What I think was odd is that she started crying during her hubby's response, not during the pointed question. This almost indicates that Alito's negative response was what upset her. As if the truth was that she and Alito sat around making evil racist, anti-semitic and homophobic comments all day, and Alito's lying that he didn't made her confront the truth about their lives together under the gigantic microscope of the press. Ok, so I'm not so inhuman as to suggest that the gruelling grilling of her husband couldn't have had a cumulative effect on her nerves, especially since it was her first national exposure and she desperately needed lip-liner to plump up those razor-sharp, snapping turtle lips, typically associated with a mean, tight-lipped personality. But was this planned to make dem's look mean-spirited? Were the tears fake? Find that kerchief and test it for DNA tears! Certainly there was no emotion emanating from Alito. The effect of repeating "Did democrats go too far in upsetting Martha-Ann?" all week long outweighs the one time that Suzanne set 'em straight on Sunday, when of course anyone who's anyone is in a church, not watching TV! So a misleading statement which makes dems look mean-spirited, because of the frequency of it's repetition a la Orwell's ANIMAL FARM, becomes fact in most people's minds.

I fully understand those whose eyes gloss over during these long Supreme Court hearings in legalese. At a younger age, mine probably would have too. But just remember, if elected, Alito will put a conservative spin on every ruling from abortion to gay marriage to stem cell research for thirty or more years. So it is worth sifting through at least the report summaries. You don't have to sift too hard to find blatant misrepresentations like this one from CNN, the supposedly "liberal cable news channel."

Well, CNN "liberally" covered New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's foolish remarks at a Martin Luther King gathering. More ridiculous than claiming that god was mad at the US because of the false pretenses of our Iraq-attack, Nagin also claimed that N'Awlin's would become a "chocolate city." Asked that meant, Nagin first offered an explanation of chocolate being white milk mixed with dark chocolate and the two subsist together. (One resident thought that Neapolitan would be a better descrip of N.O.'s colorful racial mix.) But he also noted that New Orleans was 67% black before Katrina, and was probably playing to the blacks in his audience, since there's a perception among blacks that they aren't being welcomed back by the new developers. I would also imagine some timidity among blacks and whites who were forced out by Katrina. If their poverty prevented them from getting out in time to avert Katrina and her aftermath, why would they return now, with less money and no home or job? And with only half a year to repair the levees before the next hurricane season? I'm not sure that I even understand the rebuliding efforts? Are they getting the global warming memos about record ice break-ups in the Arctic and the unpredictable currents it may cause? Including this year's record-breaking hurricanes? Oh, that's right. Bush won't acknowledge global warming because it's too expensive for his financial backers to cut back on greenhouse gases.

At any rate, Nagin's comments, by day 2, were inexplicably dubbed Chocolate-Gate by CNN. Uhm, Watergate was a high level White House scandal that rocked the nation for years. Are Nagin's unfortunate comments, which seemed to annoy both blacks and whites, of similar significance to the fiasco which unseated a president? Hardly. But Ray is awfully sexy. Unfortunately, he was a republican before becoming a democrat in 2002 before his election, known during one campaign as Ray "Reagan." So I may have to pass on blowing him. Throw in an airline ticket and some beignets and I'll consider it.

Gore was on the campaign trail, too, claiming that the president was repeatedly breaking the law with a his new forceful voice and body language. Perhaps he got a good response, because Hillary, who'd been siding with repubs like McCain and Newt Gingrich, spoke harshly at a Harlem church on MLK day. She claimed that Bush was the worst president ever--I'm with ya there, girl!--and that the House was being run "like a plantation, and you know what I'm talkin' about." Immediately, the press growled that her comments were "out of bounds"--in other words, "true", and "over the top"--read "accurate." I found it was more telling that she was trying to rev up her dem base with strong words, and using a little slang to appeal to her black audience: "and you know what I'm talkin' about." She has been hanging with Oprah, but I dout she'd say "talkin'" on Capitol Hill. As far as the use of "plantation" reference, in the past she's used "fiefdom" to describe the corrupt corralling of the House by repubs, but I don't think the medival term "fiefdom" is a word that rings much of a bell to any race today, though Lypsinka recalls it's use from her childhood. Plantations abused slaves, and there's an obvious connection between black's civil rights, MLK and a plantation reference. But I don't think it's inappropriate. With the republican-dominated House, repubs are abusing their power to squash the rights of the minority dems.

I think filling the airwaves with manufactured outrage over what democrats are saying is one method with which the conservative TV media elevates mispeaks into mini-scandals not only to discredit dems, but also to distract us from what's really going on, like the real scandal brewing over Bush's spying and the fact that many republicans are scrambling to distance themselves from the far-reaching Abramoff scandal. You know the republicans are doing some serious damage control when they haul out Lady Laura, the sweeter side of the assholes, twice in one week!

HUFFINGTON POST blogger John Leo calls it the manufactured outrage "Synthetic Shock Syndrome."

Click here to read his take on Hillary using the P-word:

HUFFPO

INDIAN VS IRISH YOGA

GREAT PIECE!

The Latest Bush Mega-Catastrophe Is ...By Harvey Wasserman

The Free Press
Monday 16 January 2006

No matter what you think of George W. Bush, he is staking out his claim as a bona fide Horseman of the Apocalypse.

With his Hand of Hell in Iraq already yielding countless dead, $200 billion wasted and a global war again Islam well on its way to Armageddon, Bush has definitively established his ability to wreck unparalleled disaster on a global scale with zero positive outcome.

By drowning New Orleans and turning its alleged rebuilding plan into a sinkhole of corruption and disarray, he has shown he can lay waste to an entire American city.

And now he is visiting disease and death on tens of millions of our elderly and ill with a botched Medicare/Medicaid drug plan that has plunged the nation's pharmacies into total chaos while driving the states even closer to bankruptcy. As you read this, millions of Americans are without medications that may be life-sustaining because of what Bush has done to "improve" their pharmaceutical plan.

One can only shudder at what might come next.

There have, of course, been lesser catastrophes, or ones whose long-term devastation is primarily political.

Bush's No Child Left Behind program has utterly poisoned our national educational system and gutted state budgets.

Bush's economic programs have taken a national surplus and turned it into a gargantuan debt, almost incalculable in its devastating implications for our future.

Bush's "War on Terror" has in fact been a war on civil rights and liberties, stripping the US of its basic democracy while leaving us more vulnerable than ever to terror attacks on nuclear plants, chemical facilities, our ports and air lanes.

Bush's "Homeland Security" agency is by all accounts a fetid swamp of corruption, mismanagement and ineptitude.

Bush's Patriot Acts I & II have shredded our most sacred document, the Bill of Rights, and opened the door to full-scale dictatorship while defiling everything the men and women who founded this country stood for.

Bush's embrace of torture has cast the US in the role of a sordid, sadistic demon wallowing in the very "cruel and unusual punishment" forbidden by its own Constitution.

Bush's universal spy program has turned a nation founded on reverence for privacy, free speech and due process into a cynical Big Brother with utter contempt for individual rights or liberties.

Bush's theft of two consecutive presidential elections has turned the right to vote into a tragic joke. Team Bush-Rove has gutted the ideal of free and fair elections while giving the GOP a death grip on the nation's electronic voting machines, creating a permanent one-party franchise.

There is, of course, much much more.

This new pharmaceutical crisis has yet again an administration that is amazingly incompetent by any and all non-partisan measures of basic management skills.

One can have an opinion about the war in Iraq. But no one on any side of the issue can argue that the effort has been run with anything but complete arrogance, idiocy and incompetence.

One can have an opinion about New Orleans. But even an administration overtly intent on killing the city could hardly have done a more thorough job.

And now we watch Bush lay utter waste to a Medicaid/Medicare program defined by red tape and inequity, but which has at least delivered pharmaceuticals to people who rely on them.

Bush's "reform" is a gratuitous, greed-based scheme to pour still more billions into drug company coffers. And now millions of poor, sick Americans are being turned away from pharmacies because Bush's plan is incomprehensible, unworkable, and has left them unable to pay for the medicines that are keeping them alive.

To their credit, many states are trying to pick up the slack. But some are not, or cannot.

One could say that this relentless injection of chaos and confusion into the body politic fits a conspiratorial pattern for utterly demoralizing the nation. One could argue that it's a conscious shot at total social deconstruction, provoking the End Times so fervently embraced by the fundamentalist fringe of Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson, the most unChristian men in America.

But at this point, even conservative Republicans are scrambling to distance themselves from the utter, astonishing incompetence of a national leader so obviously unfit to handle the job on the most basic administrative levels.

Nothing could be more indicative of the utter contempt Team Bush harbors for average Americans than the concept, design and execution of this latest catastrophe.

Except for the one that will come next….

BEATING AROUND THE BUSH

The White House is refusing to cooperate with the investigation of someone who has pleaded guilty, and who attended Hanukah celebrations and raised $100,000 for Bush in '04. Is it just me, or is this impossibly shady? Maybe there is another reason for impeachment lurking about? If we aren't able to DEMAND cooperation fromm the White House in an investigation of a crook who by all accounts had far-reaching ties to top-level republicans, two of which have already stepped down, then our checks and balances system is already busted. Someone needs to hold this rogue accountable. But did you hear about this on the news yesterday? Nope, but you got all day coverage of Hillary and New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin's "mis-quotes."

WASHINGTON - The White House is refusing to reveal details of tainted lobbyist Jack Abramoff's visits with President Bush's staff.

Abramoff had "a few staff-level meetings" at the Bush White House, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan said Tuesday. But he would not say with whom Abramoff met, which interests he was representing or how he got access to the White House.

YAHOONEWS

MOTHER OF THE YEAR

BUSH CONDOM

THE GOD WHO WASN'T THERE

Bowling for Columbine did it to the gun culture.

Super Size Me did it to fast food.

Now The God Who Wasn't There does it to religion.

Holding modern Christianity up to a bright spotlight, this bold and often hilarious new film asks the questions few dare to ask.

"Irreverently lays out the case that Jesus Christ never existed" -Newsweek

The movie that has been astounding audiences in theaters around the world is now available on a high-quality, feature-packed DVD.

In this provocative, critically acclaimed documentary, you will discover:

The early founders of Christianity seem wholly unaware of the idea of a human Jesus

The Jesus of the Gospels bears a striking resemblance to other ancient heroes and the figureheads of pagan savior cults

Contemporary Christians are largely ignorant of the origins of their religion

Fundamentalism is as strong today as it ever has been, with an alarming 44% of Americans believing Jesus will return to earth in their lifetimes.

FOR MORE INFO OR tO BUY: THEGODMOVIE

MORE SHELLY!

SHELLY WINTERS IN THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE


Some inside poop from a friend who recently worked with Debbie Reynolds, who co-starred with Shellsters in WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN and in DO IT DEBBIE'S WAY--an aerobics video!


DEBBIE- "I called her "the killer" on the set of HELEN . We did not get along. I cussed at her so much. In the part we're best of friends, and she played piano for the kiddies. I wanted Shelley for the part , but I didn't know she was bananas. She kills me in the movie. For the prop, we had a rubber knife that had a retractable blade. But I had a dream something weird was going to happen, so i go to my brother, who was our make-up man, and say I want you to check about that knife. Well she had switched the rubber knife with a real one, so my brother thank god switched the knives back. And when she stabbed me, and really expected me for me to kick it, she said "oh SHIT. I tell her all these stories and she says "no I didn't do that Debbie I would never kill you. Well that works for me. "

"I used to pick her up every morning to get her to work on time, and I was wealthy at the time (I thought). But let me tell you Shelley is rich as shit. She owned a whole block, so she didn't like to come to work, she'd like to party. She'd stay up really late, and she used to put marijuana in the cookies. So some mornings I pick her up on Santa Monica Blvd and the only ones that would be up are the gay boys. She'd still be in her nightgown, And there was always a different guy visiting. She told me she had insomnia, and I said "I didn't catch his last name.' "

"I survived Shelly. She is brilliant but she is completely cuckoo...On the set, she played Nazi war records from the 30's in between scenes so she could get in the mood. Drove me crazy."

"In the 80's, she wanted to be in my aerobics video. So on the set I'd say, 'now we're gonna do this exercise' and she's complain 'I don't want to do that.' So i said , 'Well just shut up and lie there and we'll call it a day.' And then she kept saying," I don't know why I'm here" and I'd say "I don't want you here, get the hell out."

"Well still she's a little cuckoo, but it takes all kinds to make the world go round. Really I don't mean to criticize her, cuz honest to God I love her. She wishes everybody to have a good time.
Shelly was scary, but she's really fun if you meet her at a party, and don't sit near the utensils.
But I'm happy she's still with us, because in a way I admire her guts. Her daughter sued her and tried to
put her in the nuthouse, but Shelley went to court and fought. She's a fighter"

R.I.P. SHELLY WINTERS

Sensing my interest in show biz from an early age, my parents once brought me back an autographed program from a play they'd seen Shelly in. I've never really cared about autographs (though I do have a tambourine signed by Charo hanging on my wall), but my parents had said that Shelly was amazing in the MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN. I can't even remember how I'd have known about Shelly to ask them to get an autograph, but it must have been 1971's WHO SLEW AUNTIE ROO?, a TV movie which blew me away at--uh--age one. I never really connected with her big hit THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, although I'm obsessed with Carol Lynley--please see her 1965 psycho-thriller BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING--and with Stella Stevens, who was like a horsier version of Barbara Eden, my idol.

Back to Shelley. I know there are many higher-ranked classics like LOLITA, but I highly recommend WHO SLEW AUNTIE ROO?, which is a Hansel and Gretel tale with Shelly as a nervous house mother at an english home for orphans. The crazy scenes of her chopping vegetables for the feast while singing a haunting, folksy melody are unforgettable. This is one of those psycho flicks which is in the same twisted style of Tallulah Bankhead's DIE, DIE, MY DARLING and WHATEVER HAPPENED TO AUNT ALICE? with demented geniuses Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon. ROO's tagline was "The hand that rocks the cradle had no flesh on it." It's also a great title to reuse for a snuff film starring RuPaul--kidding!

Not quite as cheesy, but equally genius was Shelly's NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, which I've rented over 7 times and everyone who I've turned on to it has thanked me. She wasn't yet heavy in 1955, and plays a foolish mother who allows herself to be charmed by a jailhouse preacher/murderer/psycho (Robert Mitchum) who then terrorizes her whole family. Shelly is excellent, but Robert, the kids and Lillian Gish (!) are the dominant forces behind this incredible b/w film, which even has a trippy moment as the kids float down the river to escape Mitchum. The little girl's named Pearl which she pronounces Peaw--if you are anything like Miss Guy and I, you'll be mimicking her adorable lisp for years after viewing it.

Also noteworthy, Shelly as Ma Barker in BLOODY MAMA ("The family that slays together stays together!") and CLEOPATRA JONES. In fact, if you click on IMDB.COM you'll find a comprehensive list of her films. Some sickies I'd forgotten, like WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN?, in which she stars with Debbie Reynolds. Plot Outline: Two women whose sons are both convicted murderers move to Hollywood and open up a dance studio. (!) One of the sisters, Helen, falls under the spell of a strange evangelist, and begins to go slowly insane. And I'd never heard of DIAMONDS (1975), an Israeli/US crime drama with Barbara Hershey. Or THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER, a ROSEMARY'S BABY-inspired TV movie with Shell and Abe Vigoda!

I do worship Kathy Bates in DOLORES CLAIBORNE, but are they really any other heavy, popular actresses around with Shelly's acting chops? I don't think old fat broads get too many starring vehicles today. But I'll keep going to castings anyway.

SHELLY AND RIP TAYLOR


My biggest Shelly regret? Apparently, Shelly and Rip Taylor--what a pair--used to tipple almost nightly at a slightly upscale diner in WeHo. I went twice, but never caught either of their "acts." Here's ta you, Shell! They don't make 'em like you anymore, kiddo!

REAL MURTHA FOR YA

I missed him on 60 MINUTES tonight, but this ex-military democrat representative/decorated war hero is really shaking things up and seems to have truly had enough of this war. Despite a smear campaign by Bush and co., this feisty Murtha-fucker has come up with an exit strategy that seems plausible to me.

On President Bush: “He Said Before There’s WMD. He Said There’s An Al Qaeda Connection. There’s Many Things He Said Turned Out Not To Be True. So Why Would I Believe Him?”…

READ THE REST: CBSNEWS

ON BUSH'S SMEAR CAMPAIGN: HUFFINGTONPOST.COM

WHITNEY'S COMEBACK

To the five and dime (bags). Well, her teeth look good.

PLUCKING HELL

An excerpt from a fantastic article from The Guardian about women's obsession with depilatory procedures, which might also be of interest to a few hairy shemales I know!

How has it come to this point? Why are women increasingly aspiring towards the Posh Spice archetype on body hair: loads and loads on the top of your head (augmented, if necessary, with costly extensions); reasonable amounts of well-tended hair in the eyebrow region (conversely, the days of the pencil-fine eyebrow line are far behind us); super-luxuriant eyelashes (amplified with two-coat mascara systems); and then nothing - not even a stray wisp - from the lower lash, down (give or take an evenly pruned landing strip in the pubic region). When was the entirely arbitrary model on acceptable body hair decided upon? And by whom? And more significantly yet, 35 years after Germaine Greer condemned the removal of body hair in The Female Eunuch, writing: 'Men cultivate it... women suppress it, just as they suppress all aspects of their vigour and libido... ' How is it that we - enlightened, intelligent, liberated us - have become more squeamish about our excess body hair, rather than less? Cultural commentators believe that, as male and female roles become more and more interchangeable, so the desire to distinguish between the genders in other ways becomes more pronounced. For women, removing vast quantities of body hair is a straightforward way to do this. It's true that depilatory demands have risen in step with women's position in society.

FULL ARTICLE: GUARDIAN


And, slightly related:

ARETHA ROCKIN' STEADY

On Soul Train. They also have DAYDREAMING and a few other by Re Re.



YOUTUBE

WARNING! NEW VIRUS!

If you receive an email entitled "Bedtimes" delete
it IMMEDIATELY. Do not open it. Apparently this
one is pretty nasty. It will not only erase
everything on your hard drive, but it will also
delete anything on disks within 20 feet of your
computer. It demagnetizes the stripes on ALL of your
credit cards. It reprograms your ATM access code,
screws up the tracking on your VCR, and uses
subspace field harmonics to scratch any CD's you
attempt to play. It will program your phone auto
dial to call only 0898 numbers. This virus will mix
antifreeze into your fish tank.
IT WILL CAUSE YOUR TOILET TO FLUSH WHILE YOU ARE
SHOWERING. It will drink ALL your beer. FOR GOD'S
SAKE, ARE YOU LISTENING?? It will leave dirty
underwear on the coffee table when you are expecting
company. It will replace your shampoo with Nair
and your Nair with Rogaine. If the "Bedtimes"
message opened in a Windows 95/98 environment, it
will leave the toilet seat up and leave your hair
dryer plugged in dangerously close to a full
bathtub. It will not only remove the forbidden tags
from your mattresses and pillows, it will also
refill your skim milk with whole milk.

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA--MAD TV

Hilarious!

YOUTUBE

IMPEACHMENT MUST READ!

Long, but worth it!

from The Nation by Elizabeth Holtzman:

The Impeachment of George W. Bush

Finally, it has started. People have begun to speak of impeaching President George W. Bush--not in hushed whispers but openly, in newspapers, on the Internet, in ordinary conversations and even in Congress. As a former member of Congress who sat on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon, I believe they are right to do so.

FULL ARTICLE: THENATION

YOUNG HEARTS RUN AWAY

I never really understood the lyrics to Candi Staton's YOUNG HEARTS RUN FREE. About to re-release her decade old club smash U GOT THE LOVE on Positiva, Skruff News unearthed an interview with some background on the diva and those lyrics.

Growing up in the 50s picking cotton and dodging the local Ku Klux Klan fanatics who were based near her home, she escaped her grinding poverty singing gospel alongside the likes of Aretha Franklin later becoming a regular at Studio 54. Achieving a massive worldwide hit with her disco anthem Young Hearts Run Free she became a huge pop star, despite the fact the song was inspired by an horrific incident in a high-rise skyscraper in Vegas, when her then husband attacked her.

“He was already possessive and jealous, we’d been rowing and the argument escalated on this particular night until he put his gun to my head threatening to blow me away, then he decided to hang me from the balcony instead, saying that if I coughed he would have dropped me,” she recalled.

“I was thinking of ways to get out of this predicament when I said to him ‘You know, this is a mafia owned club and I’m here for them, you gotta’ get outta’ here or they will find you’. That’s what made him come back to his senses. He then pulled me up, in a big sweat. I walked back into the living room and went to lie down on the bed with him still pointing the gun to my head, he lay down next to me and you know what? I went to sleep,” she said.

FULL ARTICLE: TRUSTTHEDJ

If you aren't familiar with Candi, ya oughta be. Her biggest hits were YOUNG HEARTS, I'M A VICTIM, and U GOT THE LOVE, but also VERY worth checking out are the rarer but equally brilliant WHEN YOU WAKE UP TOMORROW, WHY NOT ROCK?, and ONE MORE TRY--all classics at the Pyramid's smash Sunday night fagfest known as Whispers, with Sister Dimension on the heels of steel. Candi was once known as The Queen of Southern Soul and she also covered Tammy Wynette's STAND BY YOUR MAN, Elvis's SUSPICIOUS MINDS and The Bee Gees' NIGHTS ON BROADWAY. She overcame a drug problem and now sings for Jesus on TV. I think I saw her on Jan Crouch's (aka Bo Peep--that thing who's always breaking down on the air with the mauve wig) show, looking and sounding fantastic.

OK, I have to include a picture of Jan's incredible wig because I am SO JEALOUS! She has the adorable face of a pekingese!



And then of course I had to start googling her (because I'm so popular that I have no performing engagements or gentleman callers on a Friday night!) and found one site which occuses her of dabbling in the occult and even uses the word "occultic", which is either archaic, obsolete or they made it up like I made up "occuses!" It seems Jan mentioned in a newsletter that she levitated. This concerned the writer of this next piece. A friend on gospel circuit told me that prescription medications cause her frequent, teary melt-downs which do make for great tv and but could make her seem a little possessed. Doncha just love unsubstantiated gossip from people who you don't care about and who weren't even the original subject of this post? I'm off! Possessedeth!

CULTLINK

Oppenheimer noted that if she was being lifted off the bed "this is certainly not God doing this, this is a demonic manifestation." Pastor G. Richard Fisher of New Jersey who writes for the highly regarded Personal Freedom Outreach Journal, agreed. "This is very, very occult. If she is not lying, she is a witch. They [TBN] are shameless with their being bizarre - but that is what the fans want."

Could it be that Mrs. Crouch's use of guided imagery, an occultic form of meditation, could have opened her up to demonic influence? It would seem so. "When she says ‘I saw Jesus everywhere - in faces, on the walls, in hearts,’ this too is occultic manifestations," noted Oppenheimer. "To see Jesus in hearts is nebulous and nonetheless unbiblical. It seems as if this woman has been introduced to a spirit guide named Jesus."

"’Breathe in His love. Breathe in His peace. Breathe in His joy. Put your sweet hands over your tummy and breathe and lift. ‘Jesus, Oh Sweet, Precious Jesus, FILL that emptiness,’ -- this too is occultic. There are a number of songs running through the church singing you are the air I breathe, (your holy presence). We do not breathe in the spirit or anything else of God. We have the Holy Spirit in us. This seems to be a lot of soulish me-stuff in her message," Oppenheimer concluded.

MUSLIM BARBIE

BBC

Her extensive wardrobe has been modernised for the Egyptian market to include jeans and the type of colourful headscarves worn by many young women.

Tarek Mohammed, chief salesman at Toys'r'Us in Cairo, said: "Fulla sells better because she is closer to our Arab values - she never reveals a leg or an arm."

OR BOMB!

KLAN SKAM

Even Fifty Cent admired Dave Chapelle's creativity for inventing the skit, which aired last night on Comedy Central's Best of Chapelle Show, in which Dave played a blind, black Ku Klux Klan leader who had never been told he was black. Hilarity ensued after Chapelle's hood was removed at a Klan meeting and the confused white trash present heard their leader railing against niggers. After realizing his true race, Chapelle's character divorced his white wife for being "a nigger-lover". Pretty genius!

Now this:

By Deborah Bulkeley
Deseret Morning News

About 25 years ago, Ron Stallworth was asked to lead the Ku Klux Klan chapter in Colorado Springs.

Problem was, the outgoing Klan leader didn't know that Stallworth is black.
"He asked me to take over the lead because I was a good, loyal Klansman," said Stallworth, who had been in constant phone contact with the Klan leader while leading a yearlong Colorado Springs police investigation into the Klan.

Stallworth later moved to Utah, where he recently retired after nearly 20 years as an investigator for the Utah Department of Public Safety. He says he's amazed that no one ever caught on to the investigation he led starting in 1979. After he was offered Klan leadership, he quietly disappeared

As a memento Stallworth still carries his Klan membership card — signed by David Duke. "It was one of the most fun" investigations, he said. "Everybody said it couldn't be done." Stallworth communicated with Klan leaders using the telephone. A white officer posing as Stallworth went to the meetings.

READ THE REST: DESERETNEWS

FRIDAY 13TH

MINNEAPOLIS (Jan. 13) - Minnesota voters, who eight years ago elected a former professional wrestler as their governor, may find a self-proclaimed vampire on the ballot for the office this year.
"Politics is a cut-throat business," said Jonathon "The Impaler" Sharkey, who said he plans to announce his bid for governor Friday on the ticket of the Vampyres, Witches and Pagans Party.
Like Jesse "The Body" Ventura, who was elected governor as an independent in 1998, the 41-year-old Sharkey once was a wrestler. He went by the nickname "The Unholiest of Kings: Tarantula" on obscure professional circuits.
"I'm a satanist who doesn't hate Jesus," Sharkey told Reuters. "I just hate God the Father."
However, he claims to respect all religions and if elected, will post "everything from the Ten Commandments to the Wicca Reed" in government buildings.
Sharkey also pledged to execute convicted murders and child molesters personally by impaling them on a wooden pole outside the state capitol.
Sharkey told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he's a vampire "just like you see in the movies and TV."
"I sink my fangs into the neck of my donor ... and drink their blood," he said, adding that his donor is his wife, Julie.
The field for the governor's race in Minnesota is far from complete. Republican incumbent Tim Pawlenty is widely expected to seek another term in November and his Democratic opponent has not been determined.
Sharkey said he planned to announce his candidacy Friday -- the 13th -- because that was "my lucky number."

TAKE THIS TEST IF YOU DARE!

MEATSPIN

BEAUTIES, BEASTS, BIZ

Great NY Observer cover story on the dearth of female starpower in Hollywood:

OBSERVER

UNCLEAN SWEEP

From the Seattle Weekly by Steve Wiecking

I knew Harry Potter was a cheeky bastard; it's the quiet ones that always try to pull the wool over your eyes. Charming little whimsical child, you say? Crafty little British deviant, I say.

Exhibit A: The Harry Potter Nimbus 2000 Broom, an "innocent" toy you can find quietly lurking on Amazon.com, accompanied by a photo of a young boy astride the broom in a manner which he will regret the rest of his life. The toy, supposedly meant to suggest little Harry's magical mode of transportation, features sound effects and a "grooved stick and handle for easy riding." And it vibrates when you squeeze it between your legs.

Strange how many of the parents contributing customer reviews to the site mention that their daughters keep taking the damn thing away from the boys; several Christians have alerted me that Potter was practicing witchcraft, but I had no idea just how dangerous and sinful he was.

Now, yes, there are plenty of cheeky little bastards who work at Amazon.com—hell, it's run by a cheeky little bastard—so I wouldn't put it past any of them to have furtively constructed this threat for their pagan amusement. But don't bet on it. It's a widely known fact that Amazon's customer reviews are stranger than fiction.

Witness the excitement from Ashley in Texas: "My 12-year-old daughter is a big Harry Potter fan . . . so I decided to buy her this toy. I was afraid she would think it was too babyish, but she LOVES this toy. Even my daughter's friends enjoy playing with this fun toy. I was surprised at how long they can just sit in her room and play with this magic broomstick!" Methinks Ashley Jr. will soon be the most popular girl in fifth grade.

Twelve is, apparently, that "growing" age. Here's rapturous astonishment from Ohio: "When my 12-year-old daughter asked for this for her birthday, I kind of wondered if she was too old for it, but she seems to LOVE it. Her friends love it, too! They play for hours in her bedroom with this great toy. They really seem to like the special effects it offers. My oldest daughter (17) really likes it too!" Big sis, no doubt, is not too old to appreciate special effects.

A woman from that den of iniquity, New Orleans, writes to say that, at 32, she's enjoying "riding the broom" as much as her two kids ("The vibrations, along with the swooshing sounds, make for a very magical journey!").

Also according to most reviews, the batteries run out so very soon. I bet they do; we all know the reputations of bunnies, but even Duracell can't keep going and going when the demand is this feverish.

At least one adult seems to have caught on: A "toy enthusiast" from New Jersey complains, "The broomstick has cute sound effects and ***VIBRATES*** when they put it between their legs to fly. Come on—what were [they] thinking? She'll keep playing with the Nimbus 2000, but with the batteries removed." Sensible woman.


And from SFGATE.COM:

Magical Broom's Vibrating Appeal

Thursday, October 17, 2002


Harry Potter's Nimbus 2000 broom by Mattel might seem the perfect Halloween gift for a child.

Kids love to play with it. Boy, do they love it.


From parents' Web site "reviews" quoted last month in the New York Post and Toronto Star:

-- "I was surprised at how long (my daughter and her friends) can just sit in her room and play with this magic broomstick."

--The "only problem I see with the toy is the batteries drain too fast and (my son's) sister fights him over it, so now I need to buy her one. "



-- An Ohio mom wondered if her 12-year-old daughter wasn't too old for for the toy, "but she seems to LOVE it ... My oldest daughter (17) really likes it too!"



--A New Jersey mother, sensing a problem, said her daughter could keep playing with it, "but with the batteries removed."



--Still another mother, age 32, said she enjoyed it as much as her daughter.

Amazon.com's reviewer describes the toy thusly:


"A replica of Harry's broom from the movie 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,' the Nimbus 2000 lets kids 'fly' just like the members of their favorite Quidditch team. It features magical swooping and whooshing sounds and nice detailing. Requires three AA batteries (included)."


It's the battery-powered "magical swooping" that bothers some parents.

Amazon apparently deleted or edited all controversial customer reviews after the toy's autoerotic attributes gained publicity.

HAIL MARY!

Well, we share a love of ridiculous, flowing gowns and outlandish headresses, but I usually don't find myself agreeing with too many catholic priests--until now. (Well, I guess we could also compare notes on cocksucking.)

Declaring that the United States was at a crossroads in Iraq, the nation's Roman Catholic bishops said Thursday the time had come to withdraw U.S. troops as fast as responsibly possible and to hand control of the country to Iraqis.

"Our nation's military forces should remain in Iraq only as long as it takes for a responsible transition, leaving sooner than later," said Bishop Thomas G. Wenski of Orlando, Fla., speaking for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

WHOLE ARTICLE: LATIMES

KICKBACK MOUNTAIN

THE PUSSY SNORKEL

LOVE EATING PUSSY BUT CAN'T STAND THE SMELL? THEN TRY THIS NIFTY INVENTION!

ANOTHER REASON TO HATE THE FRENCH

PROCEEDATYOUROWNRISK

CONSIDERING LASIK?

KATHY GRIFFIN AFTER A BOTCHED LASIK SURGERY


from Kathy's site:

Here’s the deal. I’ve had severe complications from lasik surgery.
My doctor WAS Dr. Robert Maloney of the Maloney Vision Institute
in Los Angeles and “Extreme Makeover”. I will not be going to him again.
I’ve had FIVE surgeries on my right eye. Three were lasik surgeries and
one was an attempt at corrective surgery by Maloney. Most recently,
I had another corrective surgery by another doctor and let me tell you,
once my complications began in 2003, it was a bitch! My last "procedure"
was a 90 minute surgery, and I had 17 stitches in my eye for three weeks!
Read on for the details, especially if you’re considering getting lasik,
or you’ve had lasik and you’re considering getting a “new, improved”
version of lasik.

READ THE REST: KATHYGRIFFIN.COM

MICHAELECONOMY.NET

Check out uber-illustrator Michael Economy's re-vamped site with some incredible images you've seen (like Deee-Lite's GROOVE IS IN THE HEART record cover) and some y'ain't!

MICHAELECONOMY.NET

NEW BUSH SCANDAL!

Per my source in Washington.

A scandal is about to break in Washington.

All of the evidence is not in, but it appears that Secretary of State
Rice may have slept with President Bush . I will post details when they
become available. All I have now is this photograph.

GIVE 'EM HILL!

Jan. 10, 2006 — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton called the Bush administration "incompetent" when it came to protecting the troops in combat and called the lack of adequate body armor for soldiers and Marines "unforgivable."

WHOLE STORY: ABCNEWS

Jan. 11, 2006--A whore named Lady Bunny called Hillary's hairdresser "incompetent" when it came to taming her mop for public appearances and called the messy, butch comb-over featured in the above photo "unforgiveable."

GERMAN CANNIBAL FINDS FILM DISTASTEFUL

German Cannibal Finds Film About Him Distasteful

By Scott Roxborough/Reuters

COLOGNE, Germany (Jan. 10) - A German cannibal is taking legal action to stop the release of the horror film "Butterfly: A Grimm Love Story," which he claims is based on his life.

Keri Russell ("Felicity") stars as a graduate student researching imprisoned cannibal Simon Grobeck (Thomas Kretschmann). Russell is drawn into Grobeck's world and becomes obsessed with the Internet cannibal community. "Butterfly" is scheduled for a March 9 release in Germany.

But not if Armin Meiwes, who was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for eating a man he met over the Internet, has his way. In a statement Monday, Meiwes's lawyer, Harald Ermel, said the film is a "slavish re-enactment" of the real-life events and his client did not give permission to producer Atlantic Streamline to fictionalize his story.

"I feel used," said Meiwes, who filmed the killing and confessed to the crime but denied it was murder since his victim volunteered to be eaten.

Berlin-based distributor Senator Film said it had no plans to pull "Butterfly," which was directed by Martin Weisz.

Meiwes goes before court again Thursday in the second stage of his trial. He faces life imprisonment. His lawyer said Meiwes wanted to prevent "Butterfly" from depicting a "false and stigmatized" version of cannibalism that could adversely affect the trial's outcome.

Meiwes also is suing German rock band Rammstein, claiming its song "Mein Teil" (My Piece) refers to his case.

Meiwes has given Hamburg production company Stampfwerk the rights to his story. Stampfwerk is producing a 90-minute documentary on Meiwes and his trial.

WIGSTOCK.NU

SISTER DIMENSION AT WIGSTOCK 2000



SUGGA PIE KOKO AT WIGSTOCK 2004


The official Wigstock site has been revamped with new photos and testimonials like this one:

VAGINAL DAVIS (AKA Vagi-mule, cross-dressing performance artist, fool):

When I told grand dame Gomorrah Wednesday of Louisville, Kentucky that the beautiful Lady Bunny invited me to perform at Wigstock this year, she dipped some snuff, rolled her thyroid condition eyes and snorted, "That Lady Bunny has 100% pure in-bred beauty."

Stunning t-shirts available, too. (Warning! They are sized a little small--don't ask me how I know!)




WIGSTOCK.NU

TAKES SECONDS TO DO

Today's the Last Day of the January 6-9 People's Lobby for Impeachment. 623,361 have already signed--let's make it a million!

Send a Letter Today and Use Our Tell-a-Friend System. It's Easy!

Dear ImpeachBush member,
Three days ago we launched the People's Lobby for Impeachment. Tens of thousands of people used the ImpeachBush.org/VoteToImpeach.org web site to send an email or fax to their elected official demanding that Bush and Cheney be impeached for High Crimes and Misdemeanors. More than one thousand people per hour sent letters in the first twelve hours alone.
If you haven't yet sent your letter, do so now. We must make our voices heard. Click here to send your letter.

IMPEACHBUSH

JEHOVAH'S WITNESS KNOCKER-BLOCKER

FUCK THE NY TIMES!

Another bitter, brilliant rant from whoever created www.fuckchristmas.org.

Goddamn it. Fuck the New York Times. Those assholes have known for over a year that Bush has been taping our phone calls and we’re just finding out about it now? Good thing we weren’t making any important decisions fourteen months ago. The next person who starts bitching about how hard the so-called “liberal media” is on the President is gonna get a jackboot upside the head. And don’t get all excited that the Times finally did get around to telling us about this little caper. They only printed it because they found out they were about to get scooped by their own reporter. All the news that’s fit to print. . . on my ass.

READ THE REST--IT'S A GREAT READ: FUCKTHENEWYORKTIMES

BUNNY ON QUEERTY.COM

Click here for the interview:

QUEERTY.COM


And check out Queerty's home page, where movie critic Gene Shalit's gay son defends his dad's negative review of BROKEBACK. In truth, I didn't find Shalit's description of Jake as a "sexual predator" as offensive as everyone else. I am a sexual predator and enjoy it thoroughly, so I don't consider that term an insult and I've voluntarily stopped cruising playgrounds. Well, after being given the evil eye by several priests who were clearly marking their turf.



What's more offensive about Shalit is that bizarre gypsy/clown/Castro leatherman look he's been working for decades! But GLAAD chooses odd targets for criticism and for praise. Don't get me wrong, this watchdog organization does lotsa valuable work, but I sat in amazement at a GLAAD ceremony a couple years ago honoring career closeteer Liz Smith.

DELAY'S SUB

Now that Abramoff's spilled the beans, Tom Delay has officially relinquished his post on the hill. Unfortunately, the 2 leading candidates to replace him, both red state republicans, are probably crooks, too! This is too fuckin' sweet! Is there not one honest republican to be found in the land?

BLOOMBERG

THE CONSTIPATION OF MIMI

I'm sorry that my limited computer skills won't allow me to enlarge this masterpiece, but I can type in some of the hilarious print so you can read it.


"A delectable see" --The Food Network
"The heavyweight dvd release of the year" --Glamazon.com
"Approved" --The Food and Drug Administration

Track Listing

SEATBREAKER
SHAKE IT OFF (THAT LARD REMIX)
VISION OF LOIN
(SOY) I NEED YOU
BRINGIN' ON THE HEART ATTACK
CREAMLOVER
ENDLESS LOAF
ONE SWEET DATE
DON'T FORGET ASPARAGUS
DIDN'Y MEAN TO TURN YOUR COOKER ON
NEVER TOO FAT
ALWAYS BE MY BAGEL
ANYTIME YOU NEED A FLAN

WE WANT CHEAPER DRUGS!

from my friend Zhana:

COSTCO! read this... Let's hear it for Costco!! (This is just mind-boggling!) Make sure you read all the way past the list of the drugs. The woman that signed below is a Budget Analyst out of federal Washington, DC offices.



Did you ever wonder how much it costs a drug company for the active ingredient in prescription medications? Some people think it must cost a lot, since many drugs sell for more than $2.00 per tablet. We did a search of offshore chemical synthesizers that supply the active ingredients found in drugs approved by the FDA. As we have revealed in past issues of Life Extension, a significant percentage of drugs sold in the United States contain active ingredients made in other countries. In our independent investigation of how much profit drug companies really make,
we obtained the actual price of active ingredients used in some of the most popular drugs sold in America

The data below speaks for itself.


Celebrex: 100 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $130.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.60
Percent markup: 21,712%


Claritin: 10 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $215.17
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.7! 1
Percent markup: 30,306%


Keflex: 250 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $157.39
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.88!
Percent markup: 8,372%


Lipitor: 20 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $272.37
Cost of general active ingredients: $5.80!
Percent markup: 4,696%

Norvasc: 10 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $188.29
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.14!
Percent markup: 134,493%


Paxil: 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $220.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $7.60
Percent markup: 2,898%


Prevacid: 30 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $44.77
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.01!
Percent markup: 34,136%


Prilosec: 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $360.97
Cost of general active ingredients ! $0.52
Percent markup: 69,417%


Prozac: 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) : $247.47
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.11!
Percent markup: 224,973%


Tenormin: 50 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $104.47
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.1! 3
Percent markup: 80,362%


Vasotec: 10 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $102.37
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.20!
Percent markup: 51,185%


Xanax: 1 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) : $136.79
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.024
Percent markup: 569,958%


Zestril: 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) $89.89
Cost of general active ingredients $3.20
Percent markup: 2,809


Zithromax: 600 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $1,482.19
Cost of general active ingredients: ! $18.78
Percent markup: 7,892%


Zocor: 40 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $350.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $8.63
Percent markup: 4,059%

Zoloft: 50 mg
Consumer price: $206.87
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.75
Percent markup: 11,821%


Since the cost of prescription drugs is so outrageous, I thought everyone should know about this. Please read the following and pass it on. It pays to shop around. This helps to solve the mystery as to why they can afford to put a Walgreen's on every corner. On Monday night, Steve Wilson, an investigative reporter for Channel 7 News in Detroit, did a story on generic drug price gouging by pharmacies. He found in his investigation, that some of these generic drugs were marked up as much as 3,000% or more. Yes, that's not a typo... three thousand percent! So often, we blame the drug companies for the high cost of
drugs, and usually rightfully so. But in this case, the fault clearly lies with the pharmacies themselves. For example, if you had to buy a prescription drug, and bought the name brand, you might pay $100 for 100 pills.& nbsp; The pharmacist might tell you that if you get the generic equivalent, they would only cost $80, making you think you are "saving" $20. What the pharmacist is not telling you is that those 100 generic pills may have only cost him $10!

At the end of the report, one of the anchors asked Mr. Wilson whether or not there were any pharmacies that did not adhere to this practice, and he said that Costco consistently charged little over their cost for the generic drugs.


I went to the Costco site, where you can look up any drug, and get its online price. It says that the in-store prices are consistent with the online prices. I was appalled. Just to give you one example from my own experience, I had to use the drug, Compazine, which helps prevent nausea in chemo patients.

I used the generic equivalent, which cost $54.99 for
60 pills at CVS. I checked the price at Costco, and I could
have bought 100 pills for $19.89. For 145 of my pain pills, I paid $72.57. I could have got 150 at Costco for $28.08.

I would like to mention, that although Costco is a "membership" type store, you do NOT have to be a member to buy prescriptions there,as it is a federally regulated substance. You just tell them at the door that you wish to use the pharmacy, and they will let you in.

JUST WRONG

ANYONE SEEN THIS?

REMINDER

Don't ever say I ain't helpful!

22 days from today, all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sale calls..... YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS....To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone:
1-888-382-1222. It is the National "DO NOT CALL list.
It will only take a minute of your time. It blocks your number for five (5) years.

HELP OTHERS BY PASSING THIS ON TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS OR GO TO:

DONOTCALL.GOV

HAPPYNOOYEAR!

RESOLUTIONS MADE EASIER

from Jan:

I DON'T KNOW WHAT DOCTOR WROTE THIS, BUT I LIKE HIM!

HEALTH QUESTION &ANSWER SESSION

Q: I've heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life; is this true? !

A: Your heart is only good for so many beats, and that's it... don't waste them on exercise. Everything wears out eventually. Speeding up your heart will not make you live longer; that's like saying you can extend the life of your car by driving it faster. Want to live longer? Take a nap.


Q: Should I cut down on meat and eat more fruits and vegetables?

A: You must grasp logistical efficiencies. What does a cow eat? Hay and corn. And what are these? Vegetables. So a steak is nothing more than an efficient mechanism of delivering vegetables to your system. Need grain? Eat chicken. Beef is also a good source of field grass (green leafy vegetable). And a pork chop can give you 100% of your recommended daily allowance of vegetable products.


Q: Should I reduce my alcohol intake?

A: No, not at all. Wine is made from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine, that means they take the water out of the fruity bit so you get even more of the goodness that way. Beer is also made out of grain. Bottoms up!


Q: How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?

A: Well, if you have a body and you have fat, your ratio is one to one. If you have two bodies, your ratio is two to one, etc.


Q: What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular exercise program?

A: Can't think of a single one, sorry. My philosophy is: No Pain...Good!


Q: Aren't fried foods bad for you?

A: YOU'RE NOT LISTENING!!!... Foods are fried these days in vegetable oil. In fact, they're permeated in it. How could getting more vegetables be bad for you?


Q: Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?

A: Definitely not! When you exercise a muscle, it gets bigger. You should only be doing sit-ups if you want a bigger stomach.


Q: Is chocolate bad for me?

A: Are you crazy? HELLO . Cocoa beans! Another vegetable!!! It's the best feel-good food around!


Q: Is swimming good for your figure?

A: If swimming is good for your figure, explain whales to me.


Q: Is getting in-shape important for my lifestyle?

A: Hey! 'Round' is a shape!


Well, I hope this has cleared up any misconceptions you may have had about food and diets.

And remember:

"Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways - Chardonnay in one hand - chocolate in the other - body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming Whoo what a ride".

THE JOY OF HUMILIATION

GRAYSON PERRY WINS THE 2003 PERRY PRIZE

I met this kook in London recently at a celebrity-studded charity auction and could not figure him out. As a queen who favors lotsa make-up, it's sometimes tough to comprehend his type of drag look. And he's heterosexual! Sometimes the hetero queens don't have the drag queen's faggy flair for styling or even walking so they seem really odd. But Grayson breaks it down with humor in this fascinating excerpt from his book PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG GIRL which appeared in today's Guardian.



Grayson Perry made his first pot around the same time he discovered the thrill of girls' clothes - at primary school. That was just the start. Here he describes how transgression, potential disaster and a liking for the down-to-earth have been abiding features of his life.


In the autumn of 1964 my mother was a housewife, I was four and my sister was two. My father was working for an engineering factory in Chelmsford and had a part-time job as a wine waiter in a local dinner-dance restaurant. One night my father came home early and saw the milkman's car - a powder-blue E-type Jag - parked outside. He waited, then came home after the milkman had gone. Next morning he confronted my mother. She put her hands in the air, proclaiming, "Yes, I love him, and I want to live with him."

My father upped sticks but returned a few weeks later for the sake of my sister and me. Then he discovered my mother was pregnant by the milkman, and that was it - he was gone. Some time afterwards my sister and I went for a day trip with our dad to Dungeness power station; he wanted to show us where he was working. He asked, "Do you want to live with your mother or your father?" I remember not knowing what to say. I mumbled, "Iwanttostaywithmymum."
The milkman left his wife and moved in. My mother miscarried, but then she got pregnant again and my half-brother Neil was born. The milkman was 27, four years younger than my mother; maybe she wanted to be with him because of his patina of glamour. He was attractive in a brutal, brooding way. He was dangerous, he drove a flash car - a poor man's Tom Jones.

My father kept in touch sporadically for a few years, but then he did what many men did: he lost contact with his children. When parents say it's too upsetting for the children to maintain contact, I think they mean it's too upsetting for the parents. When he left, the rug was pulled out from under me. As far as I'm aware, it is the event that has had the largest impact on me in my life.

My stepfather was soon showing his real colours. My first and only nosebleed was from being whacked round the back of the head by him when I was six. I didn't know why he hit me. In subsequent violence my mother would implore, "Not the head! Not the head!"

When I was eight we moved into my stepfather's house in Bicknacre, in a flat, inconsequential part of the Essex countryside. There was something bright and go-aheadish about the architecture around me. When I think of my father I imagine plough horses, traction engines, thatched cottages and vicars on bicycles, whereas my stepfather is bleak flats and the tinny modernity of that time.

I was enrolled in Woodham Ferrers C of E, a tiny local school with only 60 pupils in three classes. The second year I was there, the Christmas play was an updated Nativity in which I was Gabriel. One of my earliest stirrings around clothes was over the costume I wore, a robe made from a white bed sheet with ribbon ties, silver cardboard wings and a halo. One morning I saw all the costumes hanging on a line in the school hall and I got a little feeling I still get now when I look inside a woman's wardrobe or think about women's clothes - a little flutter of excitement with fear around it.

My first pottery lesson must have been when I was eight, maybe nine. The vicar's wife came in and told us we were going to make a coil pot. I went through the motions; I don't think I particularly liked it, nor did I see it as a significant experience. I made my very first piece of pottery for my mum, a sad little yellow ashtray. She didn't use it.

We had to wear light-blue smocks. They were made of heavy, rubberised material, fastened at the back with snappers. In my first lesson I had last pick of the smocks, so the one I got was tight. The classroom helper, Miss Maple, who looked like Dusty Springfield, snapped me into it. The combination of this and the squeaky, smooth, restrictive smock turned me on. I was being dressed like a small child; it felt very humiliating. Humiliation is one of the most powerful turn-ons for me.

Some transvestites search out the recognition a grown woman attracts; I search out the attention a girl would receive. Dressing up as a young girl shifts the process from authentic to symbolic - it is almost impossible for a man to look convincingly like a little girl. I've only ever seen one or two cross-dressers who could pass for a girl under 16. I have to acknowledge that it is a ludicrous fantasy when I dress up as a little girl; but people are more comfortable with me dressed as a child because it is much less ambiguous. I am a bloke in a ridiculous frock. If a man puts on a little girl's dress, he wants to be treated as a little girl and handled with care. Little girls don't have to do anything, or take any responsibility - they can just be and are worshipped for being. I love it if a woman treats me like a little girl, if she coos, "Ah! What a lovely dress! Don't you look cute?"

In my first year at secondary school, a boy came round to play and I suggested, "Would you like to put on some dresses? It's really good fun, we can dress up as ladies." "No!" he scoffed and I realised it wasn't something everybody did. When I was 12. I surreptitiously cadged dresses from my sister's cupboard, although they were always too small, and then acted out detailed bondage fantasies.

My stepfather did house clearances and the garage was full of all the stuff he had cleared. One day I chanced upon a prim, demure dress in Crimplene. I loved the repulsiveness of it - my body was responding to the ghastly strangeness of the texture. It felt very feminine, like being furnished. Another afternoon I discovered a box of 15 polyester dresses, and tried them all on at once until I was like a fat woman. My sister came home; I panicked and hid in the stair cupboard until I had taken them off.

Part of the thrill was coming close to being found out. One afternoon I donned underwear, tights and a yellow dress, put my boy's gear over the top, then sneaked to the fields behind the woods where I knew I wouldn't meet anybody. I pulled off my boy's clothes, stuffed them under a hedge, and set off for a walk as a girl. It was the first time I had dressed up and gone out of doors.

My stepfather's hobby was wrestling. He was a member of Chelmsford Wrestling Club, practising through the week and wrestling in shows at the weekend. He would also launch into wrestling matches with my mother, and I would be frightened because she used to implore me to help. He would grab my mother or me and shake, throttle and throw. I once asked my mother, "Did he hurt you last night?" to which she drawled, "Ow, yes!" in a suggestive, Kenneth Williams way.

My mother was always open; she wouldn't mind me seeing her nude in the bath. When my friends visited, she would get her tummy out and slap it on the kitchen table: "Look at that - you don't get many of them to the pound." When she was showing one of my girlfriends around the house, she'd say, "This is the room where Grayson does all his wanking."

She was staunchly working class, almost aggressively so, whereas my stepfather aspired to middle-class values. The day Mrs Thatcher came to power was the first time I voted. My mother and I pulled up in front of the polling station in her clapped-out old Mini and the bootlid fell off with a clang. My mother shouted to the policeman, "Here come the Labour voters!" My stepfather was Conservative.

Although we lived in the same house for 15 years, I never had a conversation with my stepfather, certainly no more than an exchange of a few sentences. The commonest was, "Do the washing-up or your mother will get upset." Often he talked to me in the third person, or via a third person: "Tell that long streak of piss to get off the sofa", or "Could that Herbert do something to help his mother?"

In the autumn of 1975, when I was 15 and had just decided to become an army officer, I stumbled across an article in the News Of The World about transvestites and sex changes, with a photograph of April Ashley, the model, socialite and transsexual. I knew now that transvestism was a recognised phenomenon, and I developed typical transvestite fantasies of waking up in the morning to discover I had become a girl. If only I could wake up and be Anna Ford, or Sue Lawley from Nationwide with her neat hair and trendy dresses. (At the same time, I knew I was wholly heterosexual and was fantasising about girls.) I began experimenting with my mum's make-up. I paraded around the house dressed up and gazed at myself in the mirror. I was padding out a bra with socks and borrowing a pair of tights; I could just about squeeze into my mother's shoes.

In the back pages of the Daily Mail there were adverts for cut-price wigs. I ordered an auburn wig in a bob hairstyle for £1. I told my best friend, Tom Edwards, that I was buying a Christmas present for my mum but wanted it to be a surprise, addressed the wig to his house, and one week later Tom gave me a parcel at the bus stop. Finally, I had a complete outfit.

On November 5 1975, what I now call my alter ego Claire's birthday, I put on the full rig and stepped out of the front door. There I stood in my lipstick, blue chiffon headscarf over my auburn wig, wearing a brown polyester blouse and black-and-white dog-tooth check skirt, tan tights, black court shoes and a beige mac - a middle-aged look. She had no name: she wasn't yet Claire. Taking enormous risks, I walked down our lane, round the village, then back home. It was thrilling. It was icily cold, and the cold still has an erotic charge for me because of that day. For some silly reason Transvestite Day is August 4, when it should be something like January 27. Winter is the trannie season because it's chilly, you're wearing a wig and lots of padding; it's also dark so you can sneak out without the neighbours seeing, and you can cover up with a coat.

The perfect transvestite experience would be traipsing along the street with someone holding a gigantic mirror in front of me so that I could see myself the whole time. As I can't, wearing crippling shoes or being a tad cold reminds me I'm in the wrong clothes.

One day a school friend asked me, "Is your dad Derek Perry?" When I said he was, he went on, "I'm going out with his adopted daughter."

I was intrigued. I didn't know anything about my father, not even where he was living; I hadn't seen him since I was seven, and now I was 15. I arranged to meet my father's adopted daughter, Belinda, and one lunchtime I went with her to my father's house. There I met his second wife, Maureen-Ann, and told her, "I'd like to meet my father again."

The following Saturday I arrived at his home in Chelmsford, a skinny, shaven-headed teenager in Doc Martens and a combat jacket. We spent the day together tinkering around with his old Bedford van; he was always tinkering around with cars.

I arranged to stay for a weekend with my father, thinking, "Here's a lifeboat - I'm going to leap into it." I took my army bag with my uniform, pretending to my mother that I was going away with the Cadet Force - I was getting quite deceitful. That weekend my father took me for an Indian, the first time I had eaten in a proper restaurant, and got me drunk on Irish coffees.

One evening I casually mentioned to my mother that I'd seen my father. She was incredibly angry and shrieked, "And I suppose you want to go and live with him?" I floundered: "Well, yeah. I would." Within half an hour she was driving me to my father's. She left me at the top of the street where he lived and drove away. I was put into the lodger's room; I can't imagine he was very happy. But although there were a few tearful phone calls, my mother didn't ask me to come back.

As soon as I moved in I became utterly obsessed with getting hold of some women's clothes. I began scoping for discreet public toilets. The best ones I found were behind Chelmsford museum - 1930s public conveniences, underused and covered with bushes. I would shove all my women's stuff into my Adidas bag, then cycle to Central Park in Chelmsford after school, sneak into the women's lavatory, dress up and totter round the park. My first inkling of how I looked came when I was walking down Moulsham Street in Chelmsford and a bloke in a Jag shouted at me, "Helloooooooo darling!"

One day my dad announced, "I want to have a little chat with you." He sat me down and said, "I've found out about your little game." At first I thought he meant some kind of petty criminal activity I'd been up to with my friends. He added, "You're dressing up."

I went completely numb and depressed. What had happened was that Belinda had found my diary. Maureen-Ann was incensed that I had used her clothes and that I'd been doing what she imagined young transvestites do in women's clothes (and she was probably right): wanking. My mother came to visit, demanding to know, "What's this about you dressing up?" My stepfather said, "That's it! You're never seeing your brothers again." He thought that I was some sort of pervert. In a way, I was, but not the sort of pervert he thought.

My father and Maureen-Ann discovered my suitcase of women's clothes under the bed and confiscated them. They sent me to the GP, who examined me physically. The GP thought dressing up was to do with being gay, asking me if anyone else was involved. My dad booked me an appointment with the psychiatrist in Chelmsford hospital but I refused to go. And then that was it - I got away with it.

Later that year, after a row with my stepmother, I moved back in with my mother and stepfather. "We don't want any more of that cross-dressing thing," he grunted.

I often fell asleep at school, but never in art. I once did an intricate pen drawing of a giant woman in Victorian dress towering over a row of houses, which Mr Shash, the art teacher, liked. He asked if I'd thought of going to art college, and a light bulb popped. I made my decision, wrote it on a piece of paper in my mind, put it under a mental mattress, slept on it and never needed to look at it again. I went home and announced, "I'm going to go to art college." I think my mum was disappointed: art wasn't thought of as a proper career and until then I'd been intending to go to Sandhurst.

I started a foundation course at Braintree College of Further Education; suddenly I was on a 40-hour art-making week. The course was about pulling us away from doing very detailed pictures of cars, bombers, or girls' tits, which was what I drew. At school my art teacher had said, "Sex has been an inspiration to artists throughout the ages, Grayson, but it can get in the way." At art school our tutor was battling against students being overly neat, worried about "doing the right thing"; instead he offered us the template of the roaring wine, women and song, Augustus John-type artist, who drew with his dick.

After foundation, I went to Portsmouth Poly; it was well regarded and a long way from Essex. I knew I was able as an artist but I had no sense that I was especially gifted. Contemporary art demands a voice, and few artists have found their voice at 19. My work was still very derivative: I wanted to please my lecturers, and made pastiches of their work.

The head of department was a Francophile who led an annual student trip to Paris. I hadn't been abroad before. While crossing the Channel I copped off with Jen Mortimer, an art student in the year above me. We started snogging as soon as we boarded the ferry and became a couple during the trip.

Very soon into our relationship I was lying in bed when I announced, "Jen ... Jen ... I've. Got. Something. To. Tell. You. I... AM... A... TRANSVESTITE." She burst out laughing at my formality. Jen and her flatmate Veronica helped me piece together a haphazard wardrobe from Oxfam, advised me on make-up, and I began having surreptitious dressing-up sessions in my room. My college lecturers had said a camera was an essential tool for an artist, so I bought an extremely cheap, third-rate SLR, which enabled me to take my first photograph of Claire - an important moment for me as a trannie. Claire was me in a bad frock looking nervously into the lens.

I wrote requesting to join the Beaumont Society, which is as staid as it's possible for a transvestite society to be. I received a letter saying, "You must be vetted." Jen and I biked to a restaurant in Southampton to meet the local organisers for my interview. I was expecting to meet glamorous, fully garbed T-girls, but instead two elderly gents hobbled in, wearing blue polyester trouser suits, eye shadow and wigs, looking like little old ladies. They'd been on a yacht en femme all day on the Solent. I breezed through; all they wanted to know was if I was an authentic trannie and not a journalist, or insane.

For my first society meeting in Southampton I wore a vintage art deco dress in grey silk. Jen came with me. There were a dozen men, one of whom was in his 90s and had been a pilot in the first world war. Suddenly I was confronted with the realisation, "I'm one of them. I look as gawky, awkward and funny as these men." When I was alone it was easier to maintain the fantasy that I was a glamorous woman, but there was a touch of the self-help group about the Beaumont Society. Not one was fully passable as a woman. The most passable transvestites are small, old and need hardly any make-up. If I could change one aspect of my appearance, I would be shorter.

Trannies are usually too dressy, walking around on a weekday in clothes most women would wear to a wedding. There's a tug between needing to look realistic but wanting to wear exhibitionist clothes - the frillies and the sexies. I've succumbed to the frillies and the sexies now because I'm no longer concerned about looking authentic.

When I'm dressed as a woman, I would never speak in a squeaky voice and defer to boorish men. I was once at a trannie do in a pub function room in Twickenham. After the pub closed a few select punters were let in for a drink, and there was one bloke, a rugger-bugger type, who was boring on. After a while he said to us, "I think you're brilliant because I find myself treating you like real women."

I replied, "Yeah, you've monopolised the conversation and ignored us. That's pretty realistic."

I'll definitely be a transvestite for the rest of my life, although it was a long time before I was able to embrace my sexuality and publicly celebrate Claire - not until I went into therapy at the age of 38. I appeared as Claire when I won the Turner Prize; the only issue for me then was whether or not I blushed because I thought I looked stupid. If I think I look ridiculous, it's horrible, although simultaneously the disgrace is fantastic.

At the start of my second year at Portsmouth I was stuck. My lecturer told me to go away and write 10 pages about myself, then make that into an artwork. Transvestite Jet Pilots was my formative work, the first movement towards the art I make now. It was a dressing table carved into a jet cockpit. On top were a brush, comb and mirror moulded from clay alongside dinky pots decorated with penises, and in the bottom drawer were five photographs of me transforming from Michelangelo's David into a trannie. It was a mishmash but it had an energy to it that none of my previous work had had. Art was no longer something I did for the lecturers, nine to five. Now I wanted to make art about me.

The Death Of Macho was the piece for my degree show that took the longest, was the least successful and brought my marks down. It was a figure of a classical god with a great big hard-on being crucified on a Harley-Davidson. Although it took many weeks of work to cast it in bronze, it was nevertheless twee. I graduated with a 2:1, a representative mark because I had potential but, in the end, I didn't show it. I blame taking LSD.

Jen and I moved to London, and in September 1983 I had my first proper pottery lesson. Jen's sister Fiona went to evening classes at the Central Institute, and said, "The teacher's really nice. You should come along, Grayson."

I wanted to be an artist, to get a gallery and an exhibition. I had been working hard at making small sculptures on our kitchen table, building pieces from junk I'd found on the pavements or in skips. Every day I was working on the elaborate collages in my sketchbook; their obsessive detail, busyness and horror set the tone for the work I make now. I find it difficult to leave empty space; I'm a detail freak.

It was the first time I had been exposed to pottery skills and traditional techniques like coiling, glazing and stencilling, all of which I now use. The first thing I made was a devil giving birth. I'd embedded fragments of glass in it, which melted in the kiln. That got stolen.

To start with I was being provocative. I was using the rudest images I could think of: women being shagged by wolves, handicapped fascists, Thalidomide girls, lots of swastikas, S&M hospitals. Apparently, some students led a delegation to the head of the college to complain about me. To his credit he said, "Oh, leave him alone. Let him get on with it."

Some of the things I made in that first year were bad. Often they would literally fall apart; some of the early pots were irredeemably ugly. I didn't really think pottery was my métier. It took me a long time, between 10 to 15 years, to realise that pottery was my prime medium. Pottery wasn't and isn't a glamorous proposition. It's very British: it was never going to be a flashy, gay, window-dressing art; it was always going to be humpy, heterosexual and earthy. However trite and dilettante the images I put on the clay, the material would bring it, literally, down to earth. I thought, "I can be as outrageous as I like here because the vice squad is never going to raid a pottery exhibition."

· This is an edited extract from Grayson Perry: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl, by Wendy Jones. The book will be published by Chatto & Windus on January 12, at £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 (inc UK mainland p&p), call 0870 836 0875, (guardian.co.uk/bookshop).

DICKS OF THE WORLD

NEW BOOK ON "THE MERM"

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Merman: A big voice and a persona to match

By David Patrick Stearns

No show-business figure left as bizarre a secondary legacy as Ethel Merman. The brassy, song-belting Valkyrie who dominated Broadway for decades and introduced numerous now-classic songs seems nowadays like a wondrous but unimaginably gargantuan personality.

Entire chapters of urban mythology are occupied by speculation - usually by drag artists - as to what progeny might have arisen from loud-mouthed Merman's momentary marriage to rough-hewn actor Ernest Borgnine. San Francisco was assaulted a few years ago by a marauding band of carolers known as The Ethels, whose repertoire was Merman's. Then there are the cryptobiographies. In Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, for one, the hard-boiled Helen Lawson character was supposedly the Merm.

Queens-born Merman grew from the same sexually suggestive soil as Brooklyn-born Mae West, but entered the world trumpeting rather than purring. Hers is a near-extinct personality type that threatens to grow as obscure as that of W.C. Fields, so we can be grateful that actor/comedian/radio personality Geoffrey Mark has taken it upon himself to write Ethel Merman: The Biggest Star on Broadway (Barricade Books Inc., $24.95) while she's still in living memory. Even better, he confirms that she was as strange as we always suspected.

Merman, who died in 1984 of a brain tumor, liked to characterize herself as an everyday girl, eating chopped steak and volunteering every Tuesday at New York's Roosevelt Hospital. Yet in Mark's book, she's such a singular creature that, were she around today, she would be considered hopelessly eccentric and probably crazy.

In the late '90s, when the New York postal department held a Merman impersonation contest connected with a commemorative stamp in her honor, even showbiz veteran and Merman buddy Benay Venuta (one of the judges) concluded that impersonating Ethel "is not a very wholesome activity."

Consider three morsels:

One of the Merm's buddies was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. She was aware of his homosexuality as well as his appetite for cross-dressing. According to Mark, Merman "even helped him go shopping for ladies' apparel at the finest stores." Picture that.

When she was signed to 20th Century Fox in the late 1930s, the studio forced her into a trumped-up romance with Cesar Romero, whom she disliked immensely. In a series of pranks, she sent him a dozen pizzas, sent him a hearse asking to pick up a corpse, and had Lucille Ball, her voice disguised, phone his housekeeper to say that the water was being shut off, so that Romero came home to find all of his pots and bowls full of emergency water.

And the Borgnine marriage? In her 1978 Merman: An Autobiography, she famously titled one chapter "My Marriage to Ernest Borgnine," and left it blank. The account Mark pieced together is fairly simple: They got drunk at their wedding, Borgnine failed to perform, Merman upbraided his masculinity, and they came to blows. That was it.

The book is not the work of a seasoned pro. There are no footnotes, and in a lot of places he says, in so many words, "Just trust me." Some parts are sketchy, and at times Mark's engaging voice is so prominent as to steal focus from his subject. By no means is he immune to hagiography. However, he has the dish that we want and more - did anybody know that Merman dated Walter Annenberg briefly? Mark knew her over many years, well enough to enter the psyche of someone with a spectacular lack of self-awareness.

In other words, Merman requires a biographer who knows her better than she knew herself in order to find cohesion amid the anecdotes. Mark may be as close as anyone will get to that.

In discussing one of her marriage failures, he offers perspective: "Those that make it to the top in an impossible industry become their own warriors by necessity. By the time they are stars, no man can take care of them as well as they can take care of themselves."

Surely, Merman had little impetus for introspection. She was the doted-upon only child of a middle-class family and, with minimal struggle, arrived on Broadway in 1930's Girl Crazy. From there, the book follows her through her near-infallible luck on Broadway with a succession of now-classic shows - Annie Get Your Gun, Call Me Madam, and Gypsy.

On most other fronts, her life was iffy. Though hugely sexual, she had a strange habit of not getting to know her prospective husbands (there were four) very well. She'd fall in love, explore the sex, go do career stuff, and then get married. Husbands misrepresented themselves and sometimes took her money. One ex committed suicide in the years following their divorce; so did their daughter, called Little Ethel.

Merman's film appearances were patchy; the only Broadway role she took to Hollywood was Call Me Madam. She appeared in a ridiculous series of multicolored wigs in the Dick van Dyke film The Art of Love, and in Airplane played a delusional mental patient who thinks he's Ethel Merman.

Her recording career had more misfires than not, ending with the egregiously campy Ethel Merman Disco Album. As author Mark puts it, "It is not true that this album killed disco. Wounded it, perhaps... . "

You have to wonder if Merman was in on the joke. Of course, nobody of her generation can be held up to the standards of self-irony set by Dolly Parton. Consider, though, that Lucille Ball's hard-boiled private persona was probably not much different from Merman's public one, though Ball knew how much or how little of that the public should see.

Then again, would Merman with impulse control still be Merman? The ultra-confident, unembarrassable qualities that allowed her to enter the deep theatrical waters of Gypsy are the same that let her stride into a guest appearance on TV's Batman not realizing how silly she'd look.

Why do we care at all? That's easy. The sheer scale of Merman was so Mount Rushmore - and her manner so lacking calculation, pretension and premeditation - that the bad is nearly as interesting as the good.

REMEMBER MOM'S ADVICE ABOUT HITCH-HIKERS?

UGLY SOFAS AND POETRY

If you like those, you'll LOVE Startha Mewart's new site:

REVOLTINGSOFAS

SOME GOOD NEWS IN W. VA

The U.S. Mint is recalling 120 million new State Quarters issued commemorating the State of West Virginia. Apparently the unique design of two dimes and a nickel held together with duct tape was jamming vending machines and parking meters.
Officials say a new quarter will be issued in the standard format, using the second place finalist from the design competition. The new coin will have the familiar view of a pickup truck on cinder blocks on the front lawn of the state capital building. And the flip side will be modified to have the eagle with a bandage on its wing under the motto "WARNING: IF YOU SEE THIS BIRD, DO NOT SHOOT IT!"

In response, a southern reader who must not realize that I, myself, hail from Chattaboogie, Tennessee, sent in this

REDNECK CHALLENGE

We are sick and tired of hearing about how dumb people are in the South, and we challenge any so-called "smart" Yankee to take this exam:

1. Calculate the smallest limb diameter on a persimmon tree that will support a 10 pound possum.

2. Which of these cars will rust out the quickest when placed on blocks in your front yard?
(A) '65 Ford Fairlane
( B) '69 Chevrolet Chevelle
(C) '64 Pontiac GTO.

3. If your uncle builds a still which operates at a capacity of 20 gallons of shine produced per hour, how many car radiators are required to condense the product?

4. A woodcutter has a chainsaw which operates at 2700 RPM. The density of the pine trees in the plot to be harvested is 470 per acre. The plot is 2.3 acres in size. The average tree diameter is 14 inches. How many Budweisers will be drunk before the trees are cut down?

5. A front porch is constructed of 2x8 pine on 24-inch centers with a field rock foundation. The span is 8 feet and the porch length is
16 feet. The porch floor is 1-inch rough sawn pine. When the porch collapses, how many dogs will be killed?

6. A man owns a Georgia house and 3.7 acres of land in a hollow with an average slope of 15%. The man has five children. Can each of his grown children place a mobile home on the man's land and still have enough property for their electric appliances to sit out front?

7. A 2-ton truck is overloaded and proceeding 900 yards down a steep slope on a secondary road at 45 MPH. The brakes fail. Given average traffic conditions on secondary roads, what is the probability that it will strike a vehicle with a muffler?

8. With a gene pool reduction of 7.5% per generation, how long will it take a town which has been bypassed by the Interstate to breed a country-western singer?

I betcha thought that there test was gonna be an easy one, didn't ya? It's okay if'n ya didn't do all that well. Just goes to show ya.... There's a hole heap of things that big city book-learning don't prepare ya for in this life.

As an added bonus for taking the "REDNECK CHALLENGE", here's some southerly advice that may come in handy down the road a piece....

Next time you are too drunk to drive, walk to the nearest pizza shop and place an order. When they go to deliver it, catch a ride home with them.

WALMART PREPARES FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH

from the Daily News:

Wal-Mart monkey biz
By TRACY CONNOR
Friday, January 6th, 2006

Wal-Mart stirred outrage yesterday when its Web site suggested that shoppers who wanted to buy a "Planet of the Apes" DVD would be interested in biopics of famous black Americans like Martin Luther King Jr.
The giant retailer blamed a computer glitch for the "offensive" recommendations - and said it was overhauling its online operations until a fix could be made.

"We are heartsick that this happened and are currently doing everything possible to correct the problem," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams said. "We are deeply sorry that this happened."

When visitors to Walmart.com plug in the name of a movie they want, the site also pulls up the name of several other "similar items" they might like.

For instance, a shopper who enters "Million Dollar Baby" is offered other 2004 hits like "The Aviator" and "Ray."

But in the case of "Planet of the Apes," consumers who clicked on the DVD of the original TV series - a cult classic in which the Earth is ruled by gorillas - were routed to four movies about King, actress Dorothy Dandridge, boxer Jack Johnson and singer Tina Turner.

New Yorkers were disturbed.

"They are making a statement relating apes to black movies?" wondered Denise Brown, 36, of East New York, Brooklyn. "'Planet of the Apes' was a science fiction movie. What does Martin Luther King have to do with that?"

"It's outrageous. I've never heard of anything like that," the Rev. Al Sharpton said when he was told of the pairings.

"They need to straighten it out, and if they do not clarify what happened, we need to take some action."

Wal-Mart said it began investigating as soon as it heard of the problem.

The culprit is a "mapping" program that selects alternate recommendations for each of the thousands of movies it sells online.

The process "does not work correctly and at this point is mapping seemingly random combinations of titles," Williams said.

"We were horrified to discover that some hurtful and offensive combinations are being mapped together."

As evidence that the "Planet of the Apes" recommendations were not intended as a slur, Wal-Mart pointed out that the film "Home Alone" yielded the same suggestions.

The company planned to remove the questionable combos from its Web site last night and suspend its entire "cross-selling" program until the snafu is corrected.

MORE CANDY

The ever resourceful WOW Report on www.worldofwonder.net has posted a video of recently departed ex-stripper Candy Barr, Mistress Mini was kind enough to share. You can watch the legend at work in this short video clip, and she's got that slightly a-rhythmic psycho thing going on which I imagine must drive men wild. (This explains my frequent psychotic, a-rhythmic behavior, which drives men wild in a different manner, as they run away screaming.)

CLICK TO WATCH: WOW

THUS SPAKE PAT

Pat Robertson is at it again! The televangelist has been on quite a roll. He blamed 9/11 on abortion and gay rights activists. He blamed Katrina on Ellen Degeneres being selected as the Emmys' host. (N'Awlins is Ellen's hometown.) He called fot the assassination of Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez. And yesterday he gave god credit for Sharon's paralyzing stroke, since the prime minister was "dividing god's land."

Well, Robertson knows just what Israel needs: a christian theme park!

from The Guardian:

Plans for Holy Land theme park on Galilee shore where Jesus fed the 5,000

· Evangelical groups and Israel on brink of deal
· Some Israelis fear motives of US Christian right

Conal Urquhart in Tel Aviv


The Israeli government is planning to give up a large slice of land to American Christian evangelicals to build a biblical theme park by the Sea of Galilee where Jesus is said to have walked on water and fed 5,000 with five loaves and two fish.
A consortium of Christian groups, led by the television evangelist Pat Robertson, is in negotiation with the Israeli ministry of tourism and a deal is expected in the coming months. The project is expected to bring up to 1 million extra tourists a year but an undeclared benefit will be the cementing of a political alliance between the Israeli rightwing and the American Christian right.

However, the alliance has not been welcomed by all Israelis, including some who fear the ultimate aim of the evangelicals is the conversion of the Jews to Christianity rather than support for Israel.

WHOLE ARTICLE: GUARDIAN


I can only imagine what rides the Galilee World Heritage theme park might offer. I guess 2 obvious choices would be a water ride which enabled one to walk on water "just like Jesus did" and a bottomless wine--better make that Koolaid!--jug and a magical loaf of Wonder bread from which a kicky Jesus clown pulls out slice after slice after slice to feed the multitudes of idiots! What fun! There could be a Pin the Nail on The Savior for the little ones and a Terrorist Dunking Booth. Wait! What's that strapped to the terrorist's abdomen? A confetti bomb! Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!

RUPAUL'S NEW MOVIE!

Ru is working on an independent movie which he'll release himself via his website when it's fully edited. The director, Mike Ruiz, shot Ru's fantastic recent videos of LOOKIN' GOOD, FEELIN' GORGEOUS and WORK OUT. It's untitled as yet, but it's subject matter tips it's hat to Pam Grier's blaxsploitation flicks of the 1970's, and Ru's own mid-eighties low-budget camp-fests from his Atlanta days in which I made some very unmemorable, drunken appearances. I make a cameo in this as well, as a lipstick lesbian named Tasha who hires Ru (who is undercover as a hooker named Cupcake) to eat me out. If you look closely, you can see the crab in my "pubic hair" and my own darker blonde hair sticking out the side of my wig! Whoops!

I interview Ru, my "drag mother", in the next issue of GENRE magazine. She really let her wig down so don't miss it! Some great Diana Ross tales!

MOVIE REVIEWS

I rarely see movies. At $10.75, I normally don't think they're worth it. Miss Guy, my movie buddy, sees whatever comes out and I've often left the theater cursing her. So after seeing HACKERS with her several years ago, I tend to do a little research now. If you are doing yours, here's what I think about a few new buzzworthy releases which are actually worth $10.75.


BAREBACK MOUNTAIN

Constantly railing against out politics, I forgot how beautiful this country is. I've never been to Wyoming, but Ang Lee's sweeping shots of the landscape and the sheep were breath-takingly majestic. Perhaps it's because I've seen so few films over the last few years that the cinematic experience is still fresh, but those sweeping shots of mountains really impressed me! (Doesn't take much to please a simpleton!) But I don't think there is much denying that BROKEBACK is stunningly shot, directed, art-directed, acted and cast. Even the extras were fantastic, like the chatty blonde gal towards the end--you know, the one whose husband suggested that Jake visit him at his cabin.

Personally, I'm not keen on Westerns. Call me an old drag queen, but I like a gown or two. Saloon scenes with Miss Kitty's non-stop be-girdled and be-wigged fashion parade was the only thing that kept me going through GUNSMOKE. Or was that BIG VALLEY? But I'm not immune to the charms of hot, naked, virile males romping in the wild, and some of those sheep were SO sexy! I just love it when turds coagulate on their butt hairs. But Jake and Heath are sexy, too. I'm not too keen on blonds, but Jake with them huge blue eyes (especially in those dark blue shirts) was strikingly handsome.

So it's got the masterful cinematography and the sex appeal going. But the stately, grand life-long-love-affair pace left me a little bored at times. I got my cry on at the end, so I was absorbed in the characters and plot, I just wanted it to move a little faster. Sometimes I get jittery when I smoke crack before entering the theater. But I was fresh out of angel dust.

About the gay thing, it's been analyzed and re-analyzed. Is it accurately portraying gay relationships? Blah, blah, blah. Well, even though it was set in the past, a few things are still true today. Society doesn't make it easy to come out and express your true feelings for someone of the same sex. And gays get killed by straights. My impression was that Jake was the gayer of the two. Even though Heath fucked is wife in the butt (once), he obviously fucked her in the cunt at least twice cuz they had brats. (Where else except ladybunny.net could you get such a classy, incisive review?) Jake seemed the gayer of the two, consorting with a gigolo in Mexico as if he knew the ropes, flirting with the guy outside the restaurant while waiting on their wives, etc. I got the impression that Heath may not have sought out sex with men had he not been lonely and isolated with Jake in the woods. Two horny young guys needing to get off which blossomed into something more--hemorrhoids! (Sorry, couldn't resist!) And the conventions of society made it harder for Heath to accept his gayness so he tried to do the wife and girlfriend thing. But a friend argued that maybe Heath was too spooked by the fag he saw as a kid getting a "complimentary sex change" to even come to grips with his own faggotry. (Free sex changes? What was the name of town Heath was from again?) But against all odds, in a less forgiving time and place, they found true love. That's more than I can say for myself! So horse-hung hispanic drug dealers take note: I'm available and cheap, and I like gowns and sheep. Let's go see a movie!

Beautiful. Sexy. Masterful performances on both sides of the camera. Grand tragedy. A little slow is my only gripe. But this movie actually says something and says it very powerfully. It's like Gone With The Wind for faggots--unfortuantely without the gowns! Couldn't Heath at least gotten Jake to fashion a cute rope-belted mini out of a burlap sack and a wig made of reeds to priss around and tantalize him? It worked for me that time I was hitch-hiking on acid.


THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA

The movies I usually end up seeing are kid's films. I have a darling niece and nephew who adore their Aunt Bunny's company at the cinema. Can't wait until they are out of diapers and old enough for porn! But C.S. Lewis's book was one of my childhood favorites, which I must have read 10 times the year it was published. Uh, I mean in it's 13th printing. The idea of a closet (gag!) which you went INTO--never failed to fascinate me. From the Oz series to Bewitched, I loved anything magickal, but was especially thrilled with the idea of an escape hatch which could free me from the doldrums of Chattanooga, Tennessee where I was "reared". The film totally does the fantastic book justice.

I've never seen such adorable children in my life. And the littlest, Lucy--that wide-eyed precious little ham could act her face off! Again, great acting, art direction, shot well with amazing special effects. I was mesmerized with the realistic way Aslan's fur moved in the breeze. Either this is a real milestone in special effects or I don't get out much. A real winner. and talk about gowns! That hunchback couture worn by Tilda Swinton with a massive dreadlock sculpture and a touch of clear, crystal mascara on her haughty, bony face would have delighted designer Leigh Bowery. She only threw on some arty eyeliner for battle--her war-paint, I guess.

I guess I'm so demonic that through all my reading and re-reading of the book, I never once made the connection between Aslan and Christ. But of course, I may have never read through to the resurrection scene because I do have a touch of ADD and I never finish anythi...


SYRIANA

Don't smoke a joint befor this flick. You'll never follow it's intricate plot. But I'd see it again in a heartbeat. I'm no expert, but I'd say this is cutting edge film-making. There's a newish (I'm guessing) type of shot which is heavily featured where the camera is handheld and jiggling ever so slightly. It makes the footage very dynamic and it really sucks you in to the suspense. You feel like you have to keep watching or you'll miss something. Of course, in this complicated thriller, you'll likelily miss something anyway. But it's worth a try.

Even if you can't fully digest the plot, the images on the screen paint haunting pictures of things which are actually happening today, but which are a little hard to imagine actually existing. You follow a disenfranchised Pakistani teen on a hard-knock path which leads him from discussing Spiderman on a playground to muslim extremism and on to become a suicide bomber, You get an (I'll bet) pretty accurate image of oil corruption and how it entertwines with politicians and a ruthless government who'll sacrifice it's own employees to save it's image when oil billions are at stake and it's dirty dealings are close to surfacing . In this case it's George Clooney. In real life, it's Valerie Plame, though she wasn't beaten as savagely as George is. God Bless America for giving us the freedom to show a tale which casts a fictional adminstration in such a bad light which mirrors the current administration's deep, tangled ethical quagmire.

Thrilling. Political. Heavy. Gory. Artful. Some subtitles. Not for the lovers of fluff.

GOD STILL MAD AT OK

Tulsa Pastor Arrested In OKC On Lewdness Charge


OKLAHOMA CITY -- An executive committee member of the Southern Baptist Convention was arrested on a lewdness charge for propositioning a plainclothes policeman outside a hotel, police said.

Lonnie Latham, senior pastor at South Tulsa Baptist Church, was booked into Oklahoma County Jail Tuesday night on a misdemeanor charge of offering to engage in an act of lewdness, police Capt. Jeffrey Becker said. Latham was released on $500 bail Wednesday afternoon.
Latham, who has spoken out against homosexuality, asked the officer to join him in his hotel room for oral sex. Latham was
arrested and his 2005 Mercedes automobile was impounded, Becker said.

Calls to Latham at his church were not immediately returned Wednesday.

When he left jail, he said:
"I was set up. I was in the area pastoring to police."

(BUNNY NOTE: Pastoring to the police? You may be on your knees but I don't think that's called "pastoring"! That's almost as good as Eddie Murphy's claim, when caught with a trannie street-hooker a few years ago, that he saw a brother in need of help so he offered a ride. She ended up "jumping" off her roof.

The arrest took place in the parking lot of the Habana Inn, which is in an area where the public has complained about male prostitutes flagging down cars, Becker said. The plainclothes officers was investigating these complaints.
The lewdness charge carries a penalty of up to one year in jail and a $2,500 fine.
Latham is one of four Southern Baptist Convention executive committee members from Oklahoma.
He spoke out last year against a measure, ultimately approved by voters, to expand tribal gaming.
He has also spoken out against same-sex marriage and in support of a Southern Baptist Convention directive urging its 42,000 churches to befriend gays and lesbians and try to convince them that they can become heterosexual "if they accept Jesus Christ as their savior and reject their 'sinful, destructive lifestyle."'

(BUNNY NOTE: DON'T WORRY, PASTOR. you'll get plenty in jail!)

The Southern Baptist Convention is the nation's largest Protestant denomination.

BUSH ON DRUGS?

I know there have been reports that he's been hitting the bottle again. Randi Rhodes on Air America played a clip of his speech at some function where he definitely sounded slurred. (Of course, she HAD slowed the clip down considerably. Tee hee!) And even though AA'ers are supposed to be anonymous, word has it in "the rooms" that Bush fell off and one AA'er suggested that Bush drop his pride and join them. I doubt if we'll ever see his arrogance humbled in AA, but wouldn't it be fantastic?

However, booze may not be this bozo's only problem. One journalist is calling for a drug test to account for his unusual behaviour during Katrina.


from www.skrufff.com:

Top US columnist Paul Andersen called for George W Bush to be drug tested following Hurricane Katrina after the US president persistently smirked at inopportune moments and hugged random strangers at a Baton Rouge disaster shelter.


“Bush seems to be heavily narcotized given his lackadaisical role in this volatile, often tragic, world,” Mr Anderson suggested in the Aspen Times, “His recent speech about the devastation of Katrina was almost glib, and there's got to be a chemical rationale for the "What, me worry?"

SAGO: KATRINA FOR WHITES?

Turns out that George W. Bush was the largest recipient of contributions from the mining industry in the last election. Why? Well, maybe it has something to do that he payed them back by easing restrictions on the industry which made it easier to operate unsafe mines like the one which collapsed in Sago, killing 12. As a result of this "easing", which compromises the safety of miners in exchange for making it more profitable for their bosses, there hasn't been a congressional hearing on mine safety in 4 years, according to CNN. And, Bush passed measures which made it more difficult to access the safety inspection records of the mines. Now why would anyone possibly want to do that unless they were hiding something?

Look, I know that George W. Bush isn't personally responsible for summoning the hurricane and he wasn't stamping on top of the mine to collapse it. But the basic message is, the saftey of the little people isn't important. And warnings like the many ignored reports about the levees of New Orleans or the hundreds of safety citations given to this particular mine--273 in the last 2 years--clearly indicate that this administration puts $ above people's lives. Kanye, Bush doesn't care about white people either if they're poor. If you think of the unheeded warnings and botched intelligence which led to 9/11, he doesn't care too much about ANYONE.

So what the fuck is he doing in the White House?

West Virginians who voted for him please discuss.

MOUTHWASH?

Study toasts free drinks for homeless alcoholics

Free drinks may improve the health and lives of homeless alcoholics and reduce their run-ins with police, according to a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Seventeen chronic alcoholics who drank upwards of 46 glasses a day over the past 35 years, including cheap substitutes such as mouthwash that often led to unconsciousness, were offered a glass of wine or sherry each hour, from 7:00 am to 10:00 pm at an Ottawa shelter over five to 24 months.

Most of the fifteen men and two women, with an average age of 51 years, had tried detox programs and abstention, but were unable to maintain sobriety.

"These are people you and I would pass on the street totally inebriated, who had drunk huge amounts," said Jeff Turnbull, one of the authors of the study.

Three quit, three died of alcohol-related disease before the end of the study, but 11 others reported "a markedly decreased consumption of beverage and non-beverage alcohol, and most reported improved sleep, hygiene, nutrition and health," according to the authors of the study.

More than half of the capital city's 1,000 homeless people abuse alcohol. They typically suffer increased health problems, require emergency services and have frequent contact with police.

The likelihood of their rehabilitation is low because of psychiatric illness, poor social support, lack of stable housing, years of addiction or they simply refuse treatment.

Participants in this study, however, reported fewer hospital visits, down from an average 13.5 to eight per month, while encounters with police fell from 18.1 to 8.8. The related savings per person for these services was 445 Canadian dollars (387 US) per month.

The average cost to administer the program per person was 771 Canadian dollars (670 US) per month.

"Once the craziness of their alcoholism is under control, their wasted lives on the street turned around, they're interesting people and all that destructive behavior is behind them," Turnbull said.

"They'll never be fully integrated into society, but they'll be less of a drain and even contributors."

Critics said the study lacked a comparison group, such as an abstinence program. Others lamented that offering a drunk a drink is contrary to common sense.

"We've been accused of facilitating alcohol abuse, but we feel this is a very useful tool in combating a serious societal problem. Just because someone has failed an abstinence-based program doesn't mean they should have to die in the street," Turnbull said.

"We agree that abstinence is the best approach to alcohol addiction; however, when abstinence programs have failed, we still have to care for the individuals," he said.

"By giving them alcohol in modest and controlled amounts, we've been able to minimize the harm they do to themselves and work on their bad behavior."

The program will soon be expanded to 24 beds and healthcare providers in other Canadian provinces and the United States
have expressed interest in setting up their own.

DUCK ME!

OH, CHRIST!

Europe


The Times January 03, 2006

Prove Christ exists, judge orders priest

From Richard Owen in Rome

AN ITALIAN judge has ordered a priest to appear in court this month to prove that Jesus Christ existed.

The case against Father Enrico Righi has been brought in the town of Viterbo, north of Rome, by Luigi Cascioli, a retired agronomist who once studied for the priesthood but later became a militant atheist.

Signor Cascioli, author of a book called The Fable of Christ, began legal proceedings against Father Righi three years ago after the priest denounced Signor Cascioli in the parish newsletter for questioning Christ’s historical existence.

Yesterday Gaetano Mautone, a judge in Viterbo, set a preliminary hearing for the end of this month and ordered Father Righi to appear. The judge had earlier refused to take up the case, but was overruled last month by the Court of Appeal, which agreed that Signor Cascioli had a reasonable case for his accusation that Father Righi was “abusing popular credulity”.

Signor Cascioli’s contention — echoed in numerous atheist books and internet sites — is that there was no reliable evidence that Jesus lived and died in 1st-century Palestine apart from the Gospel accounts, which Christians took on faith. There is therefore no basis for Christianity, he claims.

READ THE REST: TIMESONLINE

GAY TV CRITIQUE

I don't get any of the gay channels, but I am curious to hear what those of you who do think of this biting critique. Seems to me that straight tv is crap too, so what else should we expect? Crap has been "in" for half a decade. (But wait! Aren't we supposed to "creative" types? ) It is alarming that, as this article mentions, the gay channels offer very few issue-oriented shows and not even any safe-sex commercials to counter-act the failing AIDS education which has transmission rates up. Some very good points in this article: WHAT DO YOU THINK???


A 'VASTE WASTELAND' -- WHY IS GAY TV SO MEDIOCRE?

It’s a measure of how enlarged the open cultural space available to gays has
become—as a result of three decades of struggle, coming out, and the
subsequent recognition of the gay consumer market—that 2005 marked the debut
of three national gay television networks in America. Canada, France, and
Italy were ahead of us on this score. There are now two full-blown national
networks on U.S. cable—Logo and QTN—and a third, Here, on pay-per-view. But
the programming offered by these gay networks is quite disappointing, when
it’s not downright appalling—especially when one imagines what it could be
like. To read this detailed critique of the three new gay networks, click
on:

DIRELAND.COM

R.I.P. CANDY BARR

OK, I admit I'd never heard of her, but she looks and sounds amazing!



'50s Stripper Candy Barr Dies at 70
--------------------

By Myrna Oliver

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 3, 2006, 9:54 AM EST

Candy Barr, infamous 1950s stripper and stag film star once romantically linked to mobster Mickey Cohen and associated with Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, has died. She was 70.

Barr died Friday of pneumonia in an Abilene, Texas, hospital. She had lived quietly in her native south Texas for several years.

Born Juanita Dale Slusher in Edna, Texas, on July 6, 1935, Barr forged a life exotic enough in the mid-20th century to inspire a biopic. (One was contemplated but never produced in the late 1980s, with Farrah Fawcett portraying Barr.)

Before the dancer's career was derailed in 1960 by a prison term for marijuana, she was earning $2,000 a week in Los Angeles and Las Vegas clubs.

It was Barr who trained actress Joan Collins for her role as an exotic dancer in the 1960 movie "Seven Thieves," earning her a credit as technical advisor.

"She taught me more about sensuality than I had learned in all my years under contract," Collins wrote in her autobiography, "Past Imperfect." Collins went on to describe Barr as "a down-to-earth girl with an incredibly gorgeous body and an angelic face."

Barr became a landmark in the sexual liberation of Texas men in the 1950s, Gary Cartwright wrote in a 1976 Texas Monthly magazine article, the same year the 41-year-old but still shapely Barr posed nude for Oui men's magazine.

Cartwright wrote that in her early career, Barr had epitomized "the conflict between sex as joy and sex as danger. The body was perfect, but it was the innocence of the face that lured you on."

In 1984, Texas Monthly listed Barr among such luminaries as Lady Bird Johnson as one of history's "perfect Texans."

"Of all the small-town bad girls," the magazine said, Barr "was the baddest."

And Barr earned her place in the exhaustive 2004 volume published by Oxford University, "Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show."

Barr said she began life as "poor white trash." After her mother died when she was 9, she was ignored by her stepmother and sexually abused by a neighbor and a baby-sitter.

She fled to Dallas at the age of 13, married a safecracker at 14 and soon fell into exotic dancing and prostitution. Later claiming that she was drugged and forced to perform, she was featured in a 1951 blue movie "Smart Alec."

She befriended Ruby, owner of Dallas' Carousel Club, who was subsequently convicted of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy. Federal agents questioned Barr after Oswald's killing, but she insisted she knew nothing about Ruby's involvement in any conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination.

In the early 1950s, Barr got a job as cigarette girl at Barney Weinstein's Theater Lounge in downtown Dallas. Impressed with her startling beauty, Weinstein's brother, Abe, gave her her stage name, had her bleach her hair and showcased her as a bump-and-grind burlesque queen in his Colony Club.

Barr developed her trademark costume — 10-gallon hat, pasties, "scanty panties," a pair of six-shooters and cowboy boots — and quickly became a favorite with fraternity boys, Dallas crime figures, businessmen and political leaders, who booked her for stag parties.

Conservative Dallas residents, however, were less impressed and began pressuring police and prosecutors to shut down Barr's act.

In 1957, she was arrested for having less than four-fifths of an ounce of marijuana concealed in her bra. She maintained that she was framed by police and was only holding the drug for a friend.

"We think we can convince a jury that a woman with her reputation, a woman who has done the things she has done, should go to prison," Assistant Dallas County Dist. Atty. Bill Alexander told the Dallas Morning News after Barr's arrest.

"She may be cute," Alexander, who would prosecute Ruby six years later, told the jury in his closing argument, "but under the evidence, she's soiled and dirty."

Barr was convicted and, under tough state laws for what would now be a misdemeanor, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The trial garnered national publicity and only enhanced her fame. The judge even asked to be photographed with her in his chambers.

Awaiting appeal, Barr was hired to perform in Las Vegas' El Rancho Vegas Hotel and Los Angeles' Club Largo on Sunset Boulevard, drawing $2,000 fees.

It was during this period that Barr met and dated Cohen for two months. They publicly said they were engaged, and he crisscrossed the country with her, consulting lawyers in the appeal of her sentence.

But neither the romance nor the appeal could go on forever.

"It's all over," the dapper ex-bookie told The Times in May 1959. "We're just two different kinds of people. No, we didn't have no fight. It was more like what you might call a discussion."

Two years later, Barr revealed Cohen's answer to her drug sentence when she was returned to Los Angeles to testify against him in his trial for income tax invasion, in which he was convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Barr testified that although Cohen paid her lawyers $15,000, he also gave her cash and phony identification documents, had her dye her hair and flee to Mexico. She said she got bored and returned to the U.S. shortly before her appeal was denied.

"I always wanted a brick house of my own, and it looks like I am going to have one," Barr told an assembled crowd and news media when she finally walked into Goree Farm for Women in Huntsville, Texas, in December 1959.

Then-Texas Gov. John B. Connally paroled her in 1963 and pardoned her four years later.

During her imprisonment, she took high school courses, worked as a seamstress, sang in the prison choir and played in its band.

Barr also wrote a book of poetry, which she published in 1972, titled "A Gentle Mind ... Confused." Its title poem stated:

Hate the world that strikes you down,

A warped lesson quickly learned,

Rebellion, a universal sound,

Nobody cares ... No one's concerned.

Fatigued by unyielding strife

Self-pity consoles the abused,

And the bludgeoning of daily life

Leaves a gentle mind ... confused."

Barr was arrested a second time for possession of marijuana in a 1969 raid on her home, but charges were dropped for lack of evidence.

She tried briefly to restart her career as a dancer in 1967 at the age of 32, again at Hollywood's Largo club, performing before a backdrop of prison bars.

"Time has been kind to Miss Barr. The onetime fiancee of Mickey Cohen is in good, if slightly gaunt, form and is still an energetic dancer," wrote Times critic Kevin Thomas. "From the audience, she seems a young woman with an aura of sadness and sorrow who is doing the thing she knows best."

Barr largely retired to a reclusive life in Texas, surrounded by her pets.

"Let the world find someone else to talk about," she told Texas Monthly in 2001. "I like being left alone."

Barr married and divorced four husbands. She had a daughter and became a grandmother, but information on survivors was not immediately available.

GO LETTERMAN!

Zing!!! Tuesday night, Letterman lit up Fox "News"-caster Bill O'Reilly. David is on fire and really let's Bill have it! If you don't care much about the political issues, this is an entertaining short clip to start with. The video clip's original host used up their band-width immediately cuz at least half the nation wants to see this jerk put in his place! Huffingtonpost.com reposted it on their site.

WATCH CLIP: HUFFINGTONPOST

DIRTY DIANA

Sunglasses, honey!

SCAR JONES

I don't know what's worse: the down-turned fire-this-make-up artist-yesterday" false eyelashes, the forced "I'm having such a great time!" smile, or the pendant which is s'posed to be covering the keloided scar on her droopy decolletage.

BAREBACK MOUNTAIN

Watch the spoof here and watch out for that horse-cock!

IFILM.COM

or also available on youtube.com and psychicbunny.com: do a search for BAREBACK MOUNTAIN

100% CORN

Miss Debbie, the church organist, was in her eighties
She was admired
for
her sweetness and kindness to all.
One afternoon the pastor came to call on her and she
showed him into
her
quaint sitting room. She invited him to have a seat
while she prepared
tea.

As he sat facing her old pump organ, the young
minister noticed a
cut-glass bowl sitting on top of it. The bowl was
filled with water. In
the water floated, of all things, a condom!

When she returned with tea and scones, they began to
chat. The pastor
tried to stifle his curiosity about the bowl of water
and its strange
floater, but soon it got the better of him and he
could no longer
resist.

"Miss Debbie", he said. "I wonder if you would tell me
about this?"
pointing to the bowl.

"Oh, yes" she replied, "isn't it wonderful?" I was
walking through the
park a few months ago and I found this little package
on the ground.
The directions said to place it on the organ, keep it
wet and that it
would prevent the spread of disease. Do you know I
haven't had the
flu all winter!"

MY 2006 RESOLUTION

To read my New Year's resolution, along with Isaac Mizrahi's, Wendy Williams', Patricia Field's and more,


CLICK HERE: VILLAGEVOICE


Bush's resolution was "To work for peace abroad and prosperity at home." I'm thrilled that he's prepared to admit the need for a complete reversal of his policies thus far.

ABRAMOFF PLEADS GUILTY

This snake pleaded guilty to all charges today. (Actually, this snake is not Abramoff, but a rare two-header being sold on Ebay.) If you want to know who's actually influencing the government, it's not We The People, it's We The Kickbacks. Click on the link to find out what this scum was actually up to. It includes wire fraud, mail fraud, bilking American Indians out of $20 million, accepting $50,000 from a cell-phone company to urge a Republican congressman to use their cellular services in the House of Representatives, engaged in "corruption of public officials." One of whom, I pray, is TOM FUCKIN' DELAY!

YAHOONEWS

Or you can play THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT at JACKINTHEHOUSE and simply click on each politician to and get a run down of who and how he influenced.

MUSIC SALES DOWN AGAIN

Wow! Movie tickets are down, too. Maybe we are sick of shit being crammed down our throats?

LOS ANGELES (Jan. 3) - Music retailers suffered their steepest sales decline in three years during 2005.

Compared with 2004 -- which, in a tic of the calendar, had a 53-week retail year -- the market for CDs plunged more than 10%. Based on a 52-week year, sales were down nearly 8%.

This crash -- the worst since 2002, which witnessed a plummet of 10.7% -- was all the more dizzying for retailers because the business appeared to be rebounding in 2004, when sales rose a modest but encouraging 3.8%.

Sadly, the writing was on the wall throughout the fourth quarter this year. In what is traditionally the critical period for stores, a parade of new titles experienced immediate and sharp sales spikes. Album sales were buoyed at year's end by some long-running titles, greatest-hits compilations and a new entry in the perennially best-selling "Now" series.


READ THE REST: AOLNEWS

A LIFE, WASTED

from the Washington Post

Let's Stop This War Before More Heroes Are Killed

By Paul E. Schroeder
Tuesday, January 3, 2006

Early on Aug. 3, 2005, we heard that 14 Marines had been killed in Haditha, Iraq. Our son, Lance Cpl. Edward "Augie" Schroeder II, was stationed there. At 10:45 a.m. two Marines showed up at our door. After collecting himself for what was clearly painful duty, the lieutenant colonel said, "Your son is a true American hero."

Since then, two reactions to Augie's death have compounded the sadness.

At times like this, people say, "He died a hero." I know this is meant with great sincerity. We appreciate the many condolences we have received and how helpful they have been. But when heard repeatedly, the phrases "he died a hero" or "he died a patriot" or "he died for his country" rub raw.

"People think that if they say that, somehow it makes it okay that he died," our daughter, Amanda, has said. "He was a hero before he died, not just because he went to Iraq. I was proud of him before, and being a patriot doesn't make his death okay. I'm glad he got so much respect at his funeral, but that didn't make it okay either."

The words "hero" and "patriot" focus on the death, not the life. They are a flag-draped mask covering the truth that few want to acknowledge openly: Death in battle is tragic no matter what the reasons for the war. The tragedy is the life that was lost, not the manner of death. Families of dead soldiers on both sides of the battle line know this. Those without family in the war don't appreciate the difference.

This leads to the second reaction. Since August we have witnessed growing opposition to the Iraq war, but it is often whispered, hands covering mouths, as if it is dangerous to speak too loudly. Others discuss the never-ending cycle of death in places such as Haditha in academic and sometimes clinical fashion, as in "the increasing lethality of improvised explosive devices."

Listen to the kinds of things that most Americans don't have to experience: The day Augie's unit returned from Iraq to Camp Lejeune, we received a box with his notebooks, DVDs and clothes from his locker in Iraq. The day his unit returned home to waiting families, we received the second urn of ashes. This lad of promise, of easy charm and readiness to help, whose highest high was saving someone using CPR as a first aid squad volunteer, came home in one coffin and two urns. We buried him in three places that he loved, a fitting irony, I suppose, but just as rough each time.

I am outraged at what I see as the cause of his death. For nearly three years, the Bush administration has pursued a policy that makes our troops sitting ducks. While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that our policy is to "clear, hold and build" Iraqi towns, there aren't enough troops to do that.

In our last conversation, Augie complained that the cost in lives to clear insurgents was "less and less worth it," because Marines have to keep coming back to clear the same places. Marine commanders in the field say the same thing. Without sufficient troops, they can't hold the towns. Augie was killed on his fifth mission to clear Haditha.

At Augie's grave, the lieutenant colonel knelt in front of my wife and, with tears in his eyes, handed her the folded flag. He said the only thing he could say openly: "Your son was a true American hero." Perhaps. But I felt no glory, no honor. Doing your duty when you don't know whether you will see the end of the day is certainly heroic. But even more, being a hero comes from respecting your parents and all others, from helping your neighbors and strangers, from loving your spouse, your children, your neighbors and your enemies, from honesty and integrity, from knowing when to fight and when to walk away, and from understanding and respecting the differences among the people of the world.

Two painful questions remain for all of us. Are the lives of Americans being killed in Iraq wasted? Are they dying in vain? President Bush says those who criticize staying the course are not honoring the dead. That is twisted logic: honor the fallen by killing another 2,000 troops in a broken policy?

I choose to honor our fallen hero by remembering who he was in life, not how he died. A picture of a smiling Augie in Iraq, sunglasses turned upside down, shows his essence -- a joyous kid who could use any prop to make others feel the same way.

Though it hurts, I believe that his death -- and that of the other Americans who have died in Iraq -- was a waste. They were wasted in a belief that democracy would grow simply by removing a dictator -- a careless misunderstanding of what democracy requires. They were wasted by not sending enough troops to do the job needed in the resulting occupation -- a careless disregard for professional military counsel.

But their deaths will not be in vain if Americans stop hiding behind flag-draped hero masks and stop whispering their opposition to this war. Until then, the lives of other sons, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers and mothers may be wasted as well.

This is very painful to acknowledge, and I have to live with it. So does President Bush.

The writer is managing director of a trade development firm in Cleveland.

GRANNY LEARNS EMAIL

Dear Kids,

I am very happy in the new residence you have put me in. This week we actually got to go outside for an hour.



I haven't been feeling very good this week - the friend I shared a room with died yesterday. I am coping pretty well with my sorrows. It's been six months since you've visited me last, I guess you're all pretty busy. It's OK, I've learned to use the Internet to pass the time. And the computer in the rec room has a pretty decent web cam.



So you can remember what I look like, I have attached a recent picture of myself. You all take care, and write to me soon.



With all of my heart.



Love, Grandma

HOORAY FOR BARBIE!

Barbie.com offers kids a choice of 3 genders in an online poll. Children may choose I am a girl, I am a boy, or I don't know. I'm pleasantly surprised that Mattel would be so forward-thinking. For many kids who may later develop into transgendered people, this poll question might serve as a ray of hope that and let the child feel that someone understands me. Even the gay community doesn't always understand transsexuals, so for some transgendered youngin' growing up in a conservative area with parents who have little to no experience with gender dysphoria other than The Crying Game, this might be their ONLY hint that what they are feeling about their bodies isn't necessarily wrong. If you feel strongly that you are either male or female--though we know what kind of male will be cruising Barbie.com, don't we?--then just click either one. But if a child is gender-confused, I think giving them a 3rd choice is fantastic. It's not like Barbie or Mattel are cramming sex-change operations down kids throats or anything.

But that's not the way Concerned Women of America sees it. What follows is an excerpt from a soundfile on their website, CWA , where the radio "personalities" discuss how shocked they are by the 3rd option on the poll.


This transgender movement is very dangerous, because they're taking girls in particular, who are confused about who they really are. And some of them even have surgery workshops at some of these transgender conferences--there was one here in Washington a couple of years ago. And they actually had surgeons discussing how the girls how they could come back and have their breasts removed. To have that happen, that kind of surgical mutilation occur before the child even knows who she really is, is just, it's criminal, is what it is. And there ought to be a law.

Well Bob, obviously things could get a lot worse, but we wanted to alert our listeners to the fact that the Barbie.com website might not be safe for surfing for young girls. Moms might need to, you know, watch over the shoulder no matter where the child is on the internet, even something that should be fairly innocuous.


Obviously, this is full of lies.

Lie 1. The transgender movement is not "taking girls in particular". If anything, there are more male-to-female changes to my knowledge.

Lie 2. I sincerely doubt that children are being taken to these transgender conferences as candidates for sex changes or for any other reason. No one is trying to force sex changes on children.

Lie 3. Even if one or two underage girls have attended, no surgeon is going to remove a girl's breasts "before the child even knows who she really is". Because if she's that fucking young and impressionable, she hasn't yet developed breasts which can be lopped off! Unfortunately, to the simple-minded religious mother, this reads as, "I'd better heed the CWA's advice, otherwise they gays will chop little Lindsay's tits off--and probably sew them onto some man!"


Bob goes on to comment that even before this poll Barbie was a scandal, because she's so materialistic and has to have the right dress and car and tropical locations (Go ahead and say it, Bob! LIKE ARUBA!) which is a far cry from the christian's view of a woman, which includes marrying, having children, and making a home. I didn't hear anything about work in there, Bob. Are you so narrow-minded (need I ask?) that your traditional view doesn't even condone a career girl, a spinster, a not transgendered lesbian (oh, what's the difference?) or any other variation of girl which your misinterpretaion of a thousands-of-years-old book doesn't allow for?

Barbie IS materialistic. Her whole life is spent having shit bought for her. She herself is for sale. Ohmigod! A prostitute for children! To turn girls into dykes and boys into fags! And she's impossibly pretty and thin (hear my jealousy creeping in?) and like the air-brushed 20 year-olds on the covers of magazines, she creates an unattainable image of glamor for any child who is homely, stocky, non-blonde, non-white, etc. There I'll agree with you, Bob. I'll also agree that parents SHOULD be watching over their children's shoulders as they surf the web. And jacking off. (Sorry, I'm southern!) And if the brat hesitates or picks "I don't know" when it comes to the gender question, if you really care about your child's healthy development as outlined by modern medicine/psychiatry which accepts some people as transgendered, not some dusty book of fairy tales written before the birth of modern medicine or psychiatry, you'll pay very close attention to this child's telling selection. Not shun the kid's natural development into something which you might need to explore if you're a responsible parent.


I realize that there are more important issues, but I also know that there are transsexuals, drag queens and people who support the notion of the thir sex who visit this site. If you feel strongly about this, you can put in a call to Mattel to say thanks for making that an option on the poll and that you respect their forward-thinking. Otherwise , the only voices that Mattel hear will be negative ones like the CWA. While the issue's still a bit sensitive right now, you may want to wait a little before suggesting the transgendered Barbies with huge tits and cocks or the F-M Ken dolls with facial hair and soft breasts that can be bandaged to appear flatter.

Here's the troll-free contact info:

Mattel products, including Hot Wheels and Barbie:
In the US and Canada: 800-524-8697

or you can try the corporate office at:

Mattel, Inc.
333 Continental Boulevard
El Segundo, CA 90245-5012
310-252-2000 tel
310- 252-2180 fax

TEATIME

DEAR LORD

I know that you are all-knowing and all-powerful, and I would never question your almighty judgement. But I struggle to find the reason that thou hast sent the plague of fire upon Oklahoma this weekend. For a moment, I thought it might be your own version of a celestial Christmas light show to mark the birthday of your holy son. But why didst you have to pick Oklahoma, Lord? It's a red state, oh sir of sirs. In what way did the suburban community outside Oklahoma City incur your almighty wrath, to be scorched thusly?

Or hath thou simply struck at random, the way thou hast on 9/11, where you smited the whole world's economy with 9/11 because, as Pat Robertson hath preachedeth, you wanted revenge 'gainst the gay and abortion rights activists? But then again, thou didst pick a more specific target when thou whirled up Katrina to afflict Ellen Degeneres' hometown of New Orleans after Hollywood liberals picked her to host the Emmys, according to Pat Robertson. On Pat's site, the right reverend implied that perhaps that the butch bull-dyke anti-christ Ellen might be acceptable as an emcee for the Tonys, since we all know that Broadway is full of those sickening NY fags. Christ, Lord, thou hast already sent the pox of AIDS upon them, but that crafty Satan keeps brewing up cures for the disease. Thankfully, you were able to mutate the devil's victory so that the AIDS medicines cost a lot and don't really work well. And then you cursed them with the musical WICKED. In their wanton ignorance, they lap up it's bedevilment and demonstrate the blackness of their poisoned hearts. Were the fires you sent a hidden message about a possible revival of OKLAHOMA the musical?

Still, Lordeth, I wrestled with the reasoning behind location of your latest thunderbolt from the heavens. I even googled Olkahoma, and the shocking truth unveiled itself to me, right upon the official site of the state itself, www.OK.gov. At first glance, everything seemed in order in this quiet, old-fashioned state. But Beelzebub strikes where you least expect him, doesn't he, Lord? That's why we must never let our guard down against such demonic sorcery as that featured in the HARRY POTTER series, which masquerades as imaginative children's books and films.

The "Events and Festival" caught my eye--with a jolt. A puff of hell's own smoke seemed to trail from betwixt the letters on my keyboard. Trembling, I discovered the culprit of God's vengeance: not one, but two popular Renaissance Faires in the state! Like the godless gypsies and carnie freaks of olde, the Faires circle near the edge of towne, attracting outcastes of all varieties. Especially the homosexuals, who use the Faires as a way to flaunt, outside the city centres of civilization, their lewd behaviour and flair for costuming. And with their gaudy glad rags and magick trickes, attempt to lead astray the innocents!

HERE 'TIS! PREPARE! THIS MIGHT SHOCKETH YOU!



BEHOLD THE SKIN-TIGHT TROUSERS OF THIS DEVIL-FAG