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The Public Blogging of Pomosexuality, Homotextuality, Homophobiaphilia, and Drear Theory (aka Career Theory) [aka Gay4Pay]. We also read the Corner and OpJournal so the right buttock will be punished as well.
All comments subject to publication. Or dismissal. Or Both.
Edmund White's dust-cover quote for Alan Helms' excellent 1995 memoir, Young Man From The Provinces, is the best example of that art I know. It certainly closed the deal for me:
Alan Helms was the most famous piece of ass of my generation. We called him 'Scandal Boy' and constructed endless gossip around him. What Denham Fouts was to Truman Capote and Christopher Isherwood, Alan Helms was to us. When Casanova was too old to pursue his amorous career, he became a librarian and wrote his memoir; Alan became a professor and has written his autobiography, every bit as riveting as Casanova's.
Poor Denham couldn't turn the excess around, so we are robbed of his memories of being a beautiful, international pet and the baby-held-apple of every eye. Now that would have been a book. And that book would have had such a cover.
Ian Young gives an illustrated overview of the techniques of front-cover-deal-closing in gay lit. And here expands upon that theme and on the birth of the gaypulp mass market.
One of my 14 year old nieces (the brown haired one) noted something surprising and important tonight. The acronyms for Pirates of the Caribbean and Passion of the Christ are the same, POTC. The obvious mash-ups are Passion of the Caribbean and Pirates of the Christ.
Pilates of the Caribbean has some cross-platform appeal, too. I see a Haitian setting for that one.
Or maybe just remake Billy Budd under that title.
It's good Mad Mel released his POTC independently. Might have been a bookkeeping fiasco if Disney had picked it up.
Instapundit, who lives in a city and state that has no Howard Stern radio affiliates, links Lileks, who lives in a city that does get Stern, but who possesses a brain that doesn't. He appears to have heard Howard approximately once, in a "hired car", but the sandhogs gave their lives to save Lileks from having to hear too much:
We lost him in the tunnel. I’ve never been so grateful to be confined in a tiled tube under a river.
And me with ya.
His soul scorching moment of familiarity with Stern allows Lileks to construct imaginary radio exchanges that further make his point--I am James Lileks, father of Gnat, husband of Gnat's mother, this is me typing, my Sarc Lock key is engaged, and very possibly broken:
I’m tired of people who think that it’s the role of large media chains to hit the panic button when a caller to Stern’s show calls him a f--ing k-ke, and bleeps Howard when he says the caller a sh-head ch-nk. People! Come on! What is this country coming to when people can’t call other people sh-thead ch-nks on the public airwaves?
Har. Maybe we're coming to a place (Minneapolis? St Paul?) where the cluephobic exhibit their untalent for fantasy invective.
Instapundit, the law professor, offers this insight:
It's hard for me to get too exercised about this. I'm opposed to censorship, but Stern was "censored" by his employer. I'm capable of getting exercised about such things, sometimes, but not this time. And if Rush Limbaugh had been canned over the kind of racial comments Stern made, and allowed on the air, nobody would be crying "censorship." Instead they'd be saying that it showed the inherent racism of his show and his audience.
Well?
Well, a law professor who puts censored in quotes in the aftermath of a broadcaster losing more than one tenth of his affiliate stations while an FCC indecency panic raged should put law professor in quotes on his resume, too.
Jails "Not Country Clubs", More Like Victoria's Secret Boutiques
I picked up the Larouche paper, some Moorish mystical rag and the People's Weekly World at the library. Larouche and the Moors did not repay the time spent flipping the pages, but the PWW delivered. First I got excited by the small article headlined Free the Cuban 5! I can never remember which left faction the PWW channels, but I thought this marked a surprising turn. Cuban-rev deviationism, leftbots calling out Fidel C. for his most recent crackdown on democratic dissent. Ooops, my mistake, what could I have been thinking:
Free the Cuban 5!
The incarceration of Gerardo Hernández, René González, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, the “Cuban Five,” since Sept. 12, 1998, is a gross miscarriage of justice, a violation of U.S. and international law. It is a glaring episode in the decades-long vendetta by the far right and successive U.S. administrations against the Cuban people and their right to self-determination. We believe their convictions must be overturned and the Five freed at once to return to their homes and families.
...The Five have stated they were defending the Cuban revolution by gathering information on activities of terrorist groups operating from U.S. territory to launch violent attacks on Cuba. U.S. authorities have presented no evidence that the Five intended to damage the U.S.
Better yet was this profile of the Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. The PWW has convinced me the sheriff is a sun-dried sonofabitch, but I'm ready to believe that about most sheriffs on sight. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a sumbitch of a different color, though, and a detail man of such refinement as one seldom encounters in Arizona law-enforcement:
The sheriff who issues pink underwear
...No coddling of criminals in Maricopa. After all, he says, jails are not country clubs. Smoking is forbidden as are coffee, salt, pepper and ketchup; reading material is monitored; there are no movies nor is any recreation provided; unrestricted television is banned. Should a prisoner need to see a nurse he or she must pay $10 for the privilege.
Apparently because, by his own testimony, he is slightly overweight and on a restricted diet, Arpaio does his prisoners the service of restricting theirs as well: he recently cut the daily caloric intake from 3,000 to 2,500. He boasts the average prisoner meal costs the state but 20 cents; prisoners get only two of them a day. The food is often reported to be old and rotten. Small wonder: it is often surplus food. By contrast, food for the department’s dogs costs $1.15 a day per dog.
...And one final humiliation: the sheriff requires all prisoners to wear pink underwear.
Of course, anyone paying any attention at all to the contemporary underwear choices of bad dudes would know that pink underwear is not quite as stigmatizing and mind-fucking as the sheriff doubtless wishes and the PWW correspondent assumes.
This story made me smile a few times more than projected universal death-date stories usually do. Starting with the headline:
Universe Has At Least 30 Billion Years Left
...While scientists are not ready to close the case, they said today that dark energy, which is thought to permeate the cosmos and work in opposition to gravity, does appear to be a constant presence as predicted
..."We still have almost no clue what it is," said study leader Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute...
..."Right now we're about twice as confident than before that Einstein's cosmological constant is real"...Riess said.
...The new findings support Einstein's cosmological constant, which modern cosmologists say implies that dark energy should not characteristically change over time. If that's right, the universe will continue to expand at an accelerating forever.
...Gravity is losing some unknown battle, cosmologists admit.
...The universe is presently 13.7 billion years old.
I propose a new unit to measure confidence: The Riess.
An Accelerating Forvever, the legendary lost Mahavishnu Orchestra Record
Me and gravity, always losing some unknown battle. I admit it, the cosmologists admit it. Sure, there were billions of years of denial, but you reach a point when that all seems, oh, I dunno, so big bangish. So first 10 to neg 12 second.
Me and the universe, presently 13.7 billion years old.
