Resolved

Be more outrageous.

Read 50 books.

Publish Lowereastcide, the novel I’ve been writing for years now. Finish the second book.

Watch 180 movies I’ve never seen before. Watch the Wire.

Learn more about the internets. And Photoshop.  Make this blog not look like crap.

Correct people when they refer to Elliott as my partner. I know it’s meant to be polite and every hetero-Californian wants you to know they’re cool and progressive, but he’s my boyfriend, damnit.  We’re not the fucking law firm of Breeden & Kane LLP.  Boyfriend is sexier.  And it doesn’t mask the fact that butt sex constitutes the core of our relationship.  Partner-in-sodomy is acceptable.

Strongly consider a second dog. Fight the housing prejudice against larger dogs.  What is that about, anyway?  They don’t yap.  Possible names: Roberta, Prudence, Mr. Woofers, Garland, Woofgang Amadoggus Mozarf, Pickles, Gerund.

Keep jumping rope and keep upping the number of jumps daily. Maybe crunches too?

Go to Alaska or to Hawaii. I have 800 days until I’m thirty and I will get to the remaining 7 states I haven’t been to yet by then (AK, HI, LA, MS, NM, NC, SC).

More pub quizzes. More karaoke.

Happy new year, internet.  Here is a great tit to ring your LaBelle.

Quizzes

I haven’t tried booking a flight with jetpunk yet (it merely aggregates expedia, kayak, priceline, etc.) but at least their internet-1.0 style format contains fun quizzes.

I am really bad at naming sports teams, even after doing it several times.

Who knew that Arlington, TX was the 50th biggest city in the US?  And St. Louis, which used to be the 4th biggest city at the time it hosted the Summer Olympics in 1904, is now merely #52, right behind Wichita.  What’s really strange is that 22 of the top 50 are in six southwestern states: CA, TX, AZ, NV,  NM and CO.  Mesa, AZ is in the list–probably the biggest suburb in the country, unless Long Beach, CA counts.

Either way, Mississauga, Ontario is the biggest suburb in North America, but I’d be surprised if 1 in 10 Americans have even heard of it.  It’s awesome that large Canadian suburbs have their own separate skylines, incidentally.  Surrey, British Columbia does…but I can’t find a picture to prove it.

Best of ’08

The funniest thing I remember reading all year.

Also, “LEGGS” was a down clue in yesterday’s NYT crossword.  My ’09 resolution is to have that retroactively refer to me.

Dumb. So Dumb.

I mean, what?

It feels gratuitous even to comment on this.  So I will restrict myself to stupefied rhetorical questions.  Why is such a bad pun commercially viable?  Who screens these things?  How can anyone who’s not stupid be unemployed if this is what someone does for their job?  Why would anyone want to associate a juicy berry with compost, which I kind of equate with turning everyday objects into manure?  Is this what happens when you have a urban area that’s a one-party state and the entire metropolis is the proverbial choir to whom this propaganda preaches and there’s no one to stop it?  Why is California like this?

I know it was never okay to call things retarded and it’s especially not so now, because even though retards don’t read blogs their siblings comb the interwebs on their behalf, but this was some retarded shit that I saw on 18th and Sanchez.

Some Irony

First, the Democrats lost a seriously weird election yesterday in New Orleans.  Corrupt douchebag William Jefferson, who hid bribes in his freezer, lost to Joseph Cao, who will be the first Vietnamese American in Congress.  Pretty surprising, because the district has a PVI of D+36–making it more Democratic than any district in the whole country is Republican, and Obama won it by better than 70-30.  This is the best kind of purge, because the Democratic majority is big enough that they don’t need odious people like him.

Secondly, the two most senior Republicans in the House, who have been serving since 1971 and 1973, respectively, both have the surname Young.

Don Young, born 1933, corrupt Alaskan icon.

Bill Young, born 1930, cranky old Floridian with only a High School diploma.

(Incidentally, the third-most senior Republican is named Jerry Lewis.  He’s not the comedian Jerry Lewis, but he looks like Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)

The party of the future!

More Fun With Conservapedia: The ‘Homosexual Agenda’

Is there anything more fascinating than prurience?  It’s profoundly amazing when moralizing folk want to educate everyone about something they officially want to restrict or prohibit on the grounds that it’s unhealthy, immoral, unsafe or harmful to “the children!”  You could spend five minutes on Conservapedia and discover that it is a site devoted to the propagation of myths about the nitty-gritty of anal sex between men.  Its encyclopedic veneer is entirely auxiliary; its hard-right conservatism is jock posturing.  It is all a beard.

So I am outing Conservapedia.  Its target demographic is people who feel that maleness is under attack and that a rising tide of not-quite-hatred (i.e., “tolerance”) threatens to overwhelm civilization with effeminacy in the face of terrorism and gross germs in the school cafeteria.

The links tell you a lot, and the taxonomic structure of the entire project tells you the rest.  The category of homosexuality is treated as a veritable phylum on par with “science,” “religion,” or “art.”  With near-infinite subcategories all linked together, each detailing a highly specific evil of teh gay.  It’s compulsive.  While it goes without saying that the entire thing is full of lies, distortions and a bias that could be characterized as hysterical hatred, it’s truly amazing reading material.  I wrote my masters thesis on Left Behind, and this is a lot like that.

The entry on Teh Homosexual Agenda opens:

The homosexual agenda, or homosexual ideology, consists of a set of beliefs and objectives. The ideology and goals, as explained further below, include restricting free speech, obtaining special treatment, distorting science, and interfering with freedom of association. Like slavery before it, the homosexual agenda threatens basic freedoms, including the First Amendment.

ZOMG!  They got it so wrong.  Today, my agendum, and the agendum of sixty-five thousand other gays here in the World Capital of Tomorrow’s Non-Reproductive Empire, was to have sodomy and brunch.  Although actually, I would have preferred that the music at Lime be quieter and less clubbish, so I guess I don’t like freedom of speech for other people, particularly when that speech is sung through a vocoder.  I would also like a better table next time, which could be construed as special treatment.  I admit to distorting science because I question the necessity of watering down unlimited mimosas with excessive OJ-from concentrate, and I concede there should be limits on freedom of association because I totally wish the gross frat group (undoubtedly drawn to the unlimited mimosas) would stay the fuck away from me in the future.  Lastly, the waiter was hot and his accent sounded kind of French and I would love him to be my slave, so okay, Conservapedia totally busted me.

But the rest is complete bullshit.  Hilarious, amazing bullshit.  For example, under Goals, we have

5. Promote Homosexuality in Schools. in places like Massachusetts and California — where the gay lobby is the strongest — it starts as early as pre-school. They tell seven- or eight-year-old boys — “If you only like boys, there’s a chance you may be homosexual.” Or — “If you only like girls, maybe you are lesbian.” Well, at that age, all members of the opposite sex “have cooties.”

…

10. Force others to become homosexual, or at least try it once.

I’m going to diarrhea in my mouth.  Cooties?  Who thinks children are that suggestible?  If telling kids in jest that they’re gay makes gay kids, we’re fucked.  Do conservatives know what a school is, and how everyone who doesn’t catch a ball a single time is a faggot?   Honestly, though, would it be so wrong to have a little gay history in schools?  I mean, how many people under 18 knew who Harvey Milk was before, like, October?  Although I know it’s the kind of that that to mention is to endorse, because teachers can’t teach facts (e.g., “There was such a person as Harvey Milk, who did x”) without automatically propagandizing our children, little promises of tomorrow that they are.

And as for number 10, Guilty As Motherfucking Charged.  But coincidentally for conservatives, I’ve generally noticed that the hotter and more liberal a given straight guy is, the less homophobic he is too.

So, James Dobson?  You’re off the hook.

The World’s Ugliest Dog?  Probably homophobic.

As for Ryan Gosling, he’s in deep shit.

Seriously, Conservapedia, I’d tell you to go suck the rainbow if you weren’t already deep-throating it down to, like, indigo already.

The Penny Saver Inn

This was the last night on our three week road trip before reaching San Francisco.  It’s Crescent City, CA, which I thought would be bigger, although the houses have a sort of Bermuda feel to them.  They’re small, neat, close together and pastel.  (I only took pictures during golden hour, when pastels don’t always shine through.)

Crescent City, not too cute that it’s got bed and breakfasts littering everything, has a spectacular coastline but the only thing to eat at 8pm was a $5 Subway foot-long, the existence of which prevented us from eating burgers every night for 3 weeks.

Interestingly, Crescent City is the seat of Del Norte County along the Oregon border, the “Northern Gate to the Golden State,” which was the only coastal California county besides Orange County to prefer McCain to Obama.  (The three SW-most counties on the Pacific in Oregon were also red; from there north, it’s a line of blue straight up to Canada).  Of course, it only has a population of 27,000, making it the least populous coastal county in the state.

Seems to me that the relevant political dichotomy of California (with the exception of Orange County) should be Coastal vs. Inland, rather than North vs. South.  But what do I know–I just moved here.

In any case, it’s way pretty and shit.

Gmail Briefs Jam

I like the Gmail’s new options. I never thought about it before, but this was long overdue. Most of them are totally gross and stupid, but I think I chose the best one (sampled here with an appropriate email from Stuff White People Like):

I picked it because it looks like a pair of underwears that I own which has drawn attention at fun gay bars in the past.

Greatest Hit of the Interwebs

This is totally nothing new, but it’s totally my fave thing evah and nothing could better represent who I am and what I like.

Welcome to my home:

Welcome to my parody:

Magical.

The Fuck-You’s are Starting Up

Aside from a Justice Department that tortures people because they believe the president is some kind of Sun King, there’s probably nothing worse than an EPA that actively works with Big Coal to destroy the environment.

I can see two trends.  One, Bush uses his remaining month and a half to issue fuck-you’s with varying consequences that will at the very least serve as annoying distractions for the Obama team.

And two, whenever anyone brings this up, people will shout, “Marc Rich!  Clinton pardoned Marc Rich because he wanted money for his library!”  Which was transparently corrupt.  But Eric Holder was a force behind it and he’s now going to be the Attorney General, so while hundreds of miles of streams are buried under slurry forever, the moral of the story will be “Bush Shady, Clinton and Obama Shady Too.”  Greaaat.