God morning Pope

There are few crimes worse than sex with kids, let me think for a second, OK, let me amend that, there are no crimes worse than sexually abusing children. There, I said it. One would think that someone like the Pope would understand this.

As I am sure anyone who reads this blog, or reads anything, already knows, the Pope has been accused of turning a deaf ear to a huge ugly sex scandal involving celibate priests. I know, something serious is going down when celibate anything is having sex. I mean, come on, the very meaning of celibate is, well, no sex.

I was celibate for a few weeks in the 80's. It was hell. So I have an acute understanding of the pain and humiliation that priests must go through on a yearly basis. But then again, they made the lifestyle choice, I did not.

So, in short, here is the scandal. Priests, at least some of them, like to have sex with young boys. The Pope, back when he was still in the religious minor leagues, did not punish a priest who was sexing up young boys. There is the scandal. Sex, boys, priests and a blind pre-pope.

Again, like many sex scandals in this world, the right thing is obvious. The Pope should resign and admit he is scummy and disappear. I am not sure where disgraced popes go to hide their shame, hopefully somewhere far from young boys. Like politicians in America, the Pope will feel it is the right of him and his friends to do what they must because they have some sort of blessing. Now, I would imagine that God and Jesus are watching the news on a big screen somewhere in heaven and hopefully they are drinking a shit load of wine and are buzzed, because if they are watching the Pope dance around a priest on boy sex scandal without just coming out, admitting fault and walking away in shame, then my guess is the pope will not be visiting Jesus or God anytime soon.

Until then, let's all sing along.

Get out you blood sucking illegals

What to make of the dear sweet people of Arizona? I am all for deporting illegal aliens, I think we all are, I just don't think they are doing enough.

This just out, from some rally of some sort in California.

"Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) wants to start deporting American citizens. Not all American citizens, mind you. Just the natural-born American citizens that are the children of illegal immigrants.
At a tea party rally in Ramona in San Diego County over the weekend, Hunter fielded a question about the issue. "Would you support deportation of natural born American citizens that are the children of illegal aliens?" a man in the audience asked. "I would have to, yes," Hunter said."

Hmmm, the legal citizens of illegal aliens, deportable all of a sudden. Which gives me a great idea, one that I am certain to forward to my new best friend, Duncan Hunter, congressman and hero.

Dear Duncan Hunter, hero-

I have an idea. Lets deport all the children of illegal aliens, pronto. Wait, is pronto an American word? Quickly, deport those bastards quickly. Now, if you can not spot the illegals among us, I have some pointers. First, ask them, what is your mommys name, or something like that. If the child says Lupe, trust me Duncan, illegal written all over that deportation letter.
But Duncan, I do not think deporting the children of illegals will be enough. Americans are tired of the illegals taking our jobs, even the jobs we don't want. Here is my idea, deport ALL illegal immigrants. Now, this is going to be a little more expensive, but trust me, the country will forever be indebted to you for this. Now, first thing is get a list of all the people who came over on the Mayflower. Those bastards hit the shores with no documentation, no passports and they certainly we not Americans when the landed on our shores and tried to speak our language. It will not be hard to find the illegals, they always are bragging about their ancestors, damn them. So, Duncan, I am behind you a katrillion percent on this one, we start with the Mayflower illegals and work our way up.
We'll get to the Mexicans, but first those tards from Engalnd. Oh, and Duncan, one more thing, the African slaves? Totally illegal immigrants, might want to work on them too. Best to wait till the NBA playoffs are over, but do what you must.
Remember the Chinese who build the first railroad line? All illegals. Sure, they may have been promised citizenship, but that was a long time ago.
Go get 'em Duncan, all of them. Pretty soon, it will just be us real Americans left.

Illegal shoes

Oh my, the good people of Arizona plan to deport the illegals among them. Probably a good idea, since there is massive unemployment and I am almost sure that all those out of work real estate sales people and mortgage ponzi schemers would like nothing better than to learn to wash dishes, pick fruit and landscape McMansions.

What I love about this country is how happy and proud we are to bathe in our hypocrisy. It never ceases to bring a smile to my face when someone running for political office ends up coming clean about their cleaning woman/nanny and how they hired an illegal alien to raise their children, or clean their pool. These are often the same people demanding tax cuts to stimulate the economy. How about tax paying some back taxes you failed to pay for your illegal workers? Nah, why worry about it now?

Arizona is one of those states with an awful lot of Mexican American people living there, some probably came to this country illegally, some not. Personally, my family has lived in America for a very long time, I believe 6-7 generations at this point. The story goes that my great great grandfather crossed the plains in a covered wagon. Yikes. An interloper without proper legal papers, even back then. This country has a long history of accepting immigrants and allowing them to make something of themselves in the land of the free. Of course, my sense is that it is much easier for a white skinned immigrant to cross into our borders, but that could be my own prejudice.

A lot of old people retire to Arizona. I wonder who is mowing their respective laws and cleaning the bugs out of their respective pools. Certainly not the elderly. If there is one thing I know about the elderly, they do not do a lot of mowing.

The bottom line with the new Arizona "ship em back to where they came from" law is how hard it would be to be in law enforcement at a time when such a law has been enacted. Just how does one know if someone is illegal or not? Especially in a place where the sun shines so much that everyone is tanned, leather skinned and possibly armed? Well, look below, apparently there is a tried and true way to spot them illegals.

World Trade Center returns

The New York Times has the story, and it's good news for anyone who remembers 9-11 as anything more than a rallying call for right wing propaganda. The story, here.

Also, as a little gift, the artist who created the dramatic lights at the World Trade Center as a memorial to the loss of life. I did a short film on him, I am not sure that he even mentions the light memorial, but he did during the interview. Anyway, the film of him is here.

The war on white peoples drugs

Oh my. This week the most popular video in the world was some drunken loser at a music festival in California putting his flip flops on. It is hilarious.

Because competition is good and drunken (or drugged) white people are almost always funny, let us have a little show down. First off, drunken/drugged Seattle area music festival bozo and the dance of the never going to get laid sort. Next up, the kind of sexy, but incredibly drunk/high loser from the California music festival. You be the judge.



The drunk flip flop bozo is here, sorry no ability to embed.

Barney Frank? The end of gay week

Well, I once had a dream about the corrupt and corpulent congressman Barney Frank. Please, not a sex dream, and if memory serves me, it was not because I distinctly recall waking up and thinking, "Barney Frank dream, please lord, there was no sex, right?"

Imagine my surprise when, in the midst of editing a film on the great recession I tried numerous times to interview the prancing and lisping congressman from Massachusetts. Imagine my shock and surprise when I never heard from his office. Now, this is a politician who seemingly has never met a camera he could not smother. Turn on any channel that purports to have a news bureau and sooner or later Congressman Frank will traipse onto the set and begin his lisping monologue about the dangers of, fill in the blank. Barney never has positive things to blow on about, it is always some republican thing, or a terrible injustice here or there, possibly a misplaced hershey bar, something important.

For me though? No response. I wanted to ask dear Barney why it had taken so long to regulate banks and financial institutions after the government spent hundreds of billions bailing them out. I could actually ask that same question today, since Barney and his brethren have yet to offer up any serious regulations. When it comes to Wall Street, not only does Barney bend over, but he offers a cigar and naughty nighty.

So, after a week of gays in the news, and trust me, I am painfully aware that the ACLU has filed a new brief on behalf of that sweet sweet Oklahoma lesbian who only wanted to go to prom. Seems some bad parents put on a fake prom for the not so cool kids and a real prom for the inbred fundamentalists. Now, if the ACLU would bother to ask me, the sweet lesbian got off easy, which is something lesbians are apparently good at. My attitude would be, as it is in so many social functions, I would rather hang with the fun people and shun the retards.

Joe Biden is gay. Oh, I am sure he loves his wife and he only limits his fantasy life to women and Barrack Obama, but trust me, those nice shirts and the hair plugs scream closet case. Why do I bring this up? Because in another window I am searching for a clip of Barney Frank, because I am not done prancing all over his stained and soiled reputation.

Since Gay Week is almost over, at least here, because god knows the gay party scene is just revving up, I thought it would be good to preview what will be coming up. I am going in depth on my new career as the angel of death (trademark pending). It's true, over the past few months almost all the elderly people I have interviewed have died. What seems like some sort of strange system of bad odds and even worse luck, all will be made clear in what I imagine will be both humorless and heartless. Being the Angel of Death has been completely and terribly frustrating, because quite honestly, these people who keep dying have for the most part seemed like good citizens, soldiers, business leaders, grand parents and the like. On the other hand, evil and idiotic people continue to live, much to my chagrin.

Well, if you know me at all, you know I get all my liberal information from Fox News, and I can end this post with some real news, from a fair and balanced source, here then, Congressman Barney Frank, doing what he does best. Well, I take that back, because according to my sources on the Supreme Court and associated bathroom stalls in a variety of Airports, Congressman Frank is a remarkable Gilbert and Sullivan perform.

Gay like you

Oh my, you just have to wonder about all those religions. It seems to me that the more we try to repress people, the stranger they get. If it's not Ted Haggard and his meth boyfriend, it is some other public figure who gets all sexy and then has to confess, be degraded and finally come out.

Let me tell you something, the world really is getting to the point that they just don't care what adults do in their bedroom. Sure, some backwoods countries continue to deny gay people rights, like marriage and heathcare, but these are countries ruled by insane religion and inbred hicks. Of course I am talking about both Afghanistan and Texas, but that is beside the point.

Continuing on my week of gayness, here is a piece of a PBS documentary on the dancing boys of Afghanistan. Now, I don't know much, but I do know this, if you are a man who likes to watch other men dressed in dressed dance around and be all sexy, chances are you would either like to dress in dresses and be all sexy too, or you would like to kiss other men who do such things. It countries, like Afghanistan and most Southern States, people are so caught up in their religious bigotry they often loose sight that the people who perform and get performed are their neighbors, florists and doctors. There will come a time when we stop nosing into the private lives of others, but probably not today.

Supremely gay

It's funny how easy it is to spend a week posting stories on the gays. Gays heckle, they want rights, they argue in front of the supreme court and in Texas married gays can't legally divorce because they can not legally marry. Do the gays who fight for marriage realize that the hetro marriage percentage is around 50 percent ending in divorce? Oh gays, take it from someone who has been through the pain and joy of both marriage and divorce, do not put up too much of a fight for the right to marry, cause the right to divorce can be very depressing.

Anyway, here, now, from the New York Times, which may as well be re-named the Gay Paper of America, a story about the gayest of all courts, the supreme court, which has at least two gay members (Ginzberg and Thomas, tra la la la laaaa). All sorts of groups want to prance in front of the court to debate stuff, but the gays seem to be filling up the courts docket (sounds nasty, right?) with all sorts of equal rights lawsuits. I have an idea, lets just give the gays all the rights that everyone else has and let the court have a few months of rest.

The New York Times:

That sound in the distance at the Supreme Court these days is the debate over same-sex marriage.

It will be a couple of years until that central issue in the culture wars reaches the court. But two early skirmishes — if not proxy battles — arrived this month. Both are fights over the First Amendment ground rules for the debate.

On Monday, the justices considered the rights of a Christian student group to bar gay members from leadership positions. Next week, the court will hear arguments about whether the names of people who signed a petition to place an anti-gay-rights measure on the ballot in Washington State should be kept secret.

The student group, the Christian Legal Society, bars “unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle,” which it says includes “all acts of sexual conduct outside of God’s design for marriage between one man and one woman, which acts include fornication, adultery and homosexual conduct.”

A public law school, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, part of the University of California, withdrew official recognition from the group after it refused to comply with a school policy that forbids discrimination on various grounds, including religion and sexual orientation.

At Monday’s argument, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wondered what the group would have to say about a prospective member who said, “I don’t believe in sexual relationships before marriage, and that’s why I want to work for homosexual marriage.”

Michael W. McConnell, the group’s lawyer and a former federal judge, said taking that position would be enough to disqualify the student.

“If he does not agree with the organization on the point of marriage, then he can be excluded from leadership in the group,” Mr. McConnell said.

In an interview last week, Mr. McConnell said the issue in the case, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, No. 08-1371, was an instance of a larger problem of intolerance for disfavored views, one that sometimes affects gay groups and at other times religious ones.

“I have no doubt at all that different parts of the country at different times present different threats to free speech,” Mr. McConnell said. “What we’ve been doing is ostracizing large segments of the American public.”

Advocates of traditional marriage say their free speech rights are under assault, as a brief in Monday’s case put it, for holding views “contrary to the reigning zeitgeist.” Proponents of same-sex marriage say their adversaries mistake debate for harassment and have a lot of nerve to claim the mantle of victim.

The divide between the two sides is even starker in the case to be argued next week, Doe v. Reed, No. 09-559. The question there is whether Washington State’s open records law violates the free speech rights of people who signed ballot petitions by requiring their names to be made public. Some of those people say they fear retaliation and harassment from advocates of same-sex marriage.

A number of news organizations, including The New York Times Company, filed a brief in the case, arguing that the petitions should be treated as public records.

But a supporting brief filed by the American Civil Rights Union, a group that says it supports “all constitutional rights, not just those that might be politically correct,” warned that openness could have dire consequences and likened gay rights activists to Nazis.

“There must be no place in our democracy for Brownshirts seeking to force their way through thuggery and violent intimidation,” the brief said.

A supporting brief filed by gay rights groups accused the other side of using a “largely fictitious tale that those who seek to deprive lesbian and gay Americans of rights are the ones being victimized.” It added that the civil rights of gay men and lesbians had been put to a popular vote more than those of any other group and that hate crimes against them had risen while such initiatives were under consideration by voters.

Evan Wolfson, the executive director of Freedom to Marry, a group that supports same-sex marriage, said its opponents were using a sort of rhetorical jujitsu. “When they pour tens of millions of dollars to strip rights away in the Constitution, that’s just speech,” Mr. Wolfson said. “When people don’t like it, that’s harassment.”

A brief filed by four political scientists analyzed the evidence on harassment, drawing a distinction between financial supporters of Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that did away with same-sex marriage there, and people who merely signed petitions to place an issue on the ballot.

“More than a million names of signers of petitions for referenda and initiatives opposing gay marriage have been posted on the Internet,” the political scientists’ brief said. “Yet there is no evidence that any of these signers has faced any threat of retaliation or harassment by reason of that disclosure.”

The Supreme Court has, however, been receptive to arguments based on fear of retaliation. It shut down camera coverage of the same-sex marriage trial in San Francisco in January, partly on the theory that witnesses might be subject to harassment.

In Citizens United, the big campaign finance case, eight justices endorsed disclosure requirements for corporate election spending. But the court suggested that it would have a different answer in the context of same-sex marriage.

Laws requiring disclosure would be unconstitutional, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote, “if there were a reasonable probability that the group’s members would face threats, harassment or reprisals if their names were disclosed.”

That cannot be heartening for gay rights advocates. Mr. Wolfson said debate about free speech, anonymity and retaliation was a worrisome distraction from a direct discussion of the meaning of marriage.

In law school, Mr. Wolfson said, you learn three possible ways to win a case. You can argue the law. You can argue the facts. Or you can make a fuss.

He said opponents of same-sex marriage were down to the last tactic. “They’ve lost the argument on the facts and increasingly on the law,” Mr. Wolfson said. “What they’re doing now is pounding the table.”

About time

Looks like the gays are going to be the focus of all posts this week. Gay week, we will call it. First the gays love to wear super hero costumes, I think we can all get behind that, now they chant at the president. Is there nothing these gays can not do?

What I love about this is how nice it all sounds. Plus, nothing like watching the president get a bit flustered. You can almost see how he was not expecting the chanting, it's not like it was written on his teleprompter, "pause for chanting from the gays."

California, my home as a child, the place where I grew up, the place with beaches and marijuana and sexy tanned people. The home of some of my best friends to this day. California, I love you.

Once again, the gays try to ruin everything

This from the New York Times (of course)

DIM lighting. Rendezvous-friendly nooks. Muscled bartenders. Pulsating dance music. At first glance, it could be any Saturday night in any gay bar in New York.

But then you notice, off to one corner, Superman flirting with Green Lantern. And there, across the room, someone in the form-fitting outfit of Black Adam, Captain Marvel’s foe, determinedly working the floor. In fact, there seems to be an inordinate number of men here tonight who look as if they have all but jumped from the pages of a comic book. And in some way, they have.

This is Skin Tight U.S.A., the occasional costume-fetish party held at the Stonewall Inn in the West Village, which draws a regular group of men (and their admirers) who enjoy a special kind of dress-up. Some wear heroic outfits; some, wrestling gear. The crowd can range from 25 people on an average night to 250 on a spectacular one. The common thread is that the muscle-cuddling garb often leaves little to the imagination.

“I was always attracted to the superhero physique,” said Matthew Levine, 31, who helped found the party in 2005 with Andrew Owen, 44, and who was one of the few participants willing to be named. The two become friends as, respectively, the graphic designer and Webmaster for Hard Comixxx, a predecessor of Skin Tight, once held at the Eagle bar in Chelsea. Mr. Levine is a big fan of the X-Men (who have a handful of gay characters) and the Transformers (all of whom seem straight) and has been reading comics since he was 8. “As I got older,” he said, “I realized, ‘Oh, this is why I admire the Grecian ideal of manhood and musculature.’ ”

The Skin Tight party — in which the costumes range from the familiar (like Spider-Man) to ones that only a comics geek would recognize (like the 1993 version of Superboy) — is one way that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender comic book fans are expressing themselves today. They are coming out, loud and proud, in blogs, peer groups, Web comics and more, simultaneously pronouncing their sexual identity and their devotion to comic books. But it wasn’t that long ago that the environment was less than welcoming for those who wanted to make the two seemingly disparate worlds one.

“Growing up in the ’80s, I guess I didn’t even think gay super-heroes or supporting characters were a possibility,” Dan Avery, 37, an editor of Next, a guide to gay night life in New York City, wrote in an e-mail message. “I do remember feeling like I had two secrets I had to keep: being gay and being a comic-book fan. I’m not sure which I was more afraid of people discovering.” These days, Mr. Avery is a member of a group of gay men who meet regularly to discuss the latest comics.

Someone who understands the past reluctance to come out is Andy Mangels, 43, who since 1988 has moderated the “Gays in Comics” panel at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. That same year, he wrote “Out of the Closet and Into the Comics,” an article for Amazing Heroes, a magazine that covered the comic book industry. The article included a handful of anonymous quotes from gay and lesbian creators. “They were all scared of how the industry would treat them,” Mr. Mangels said in a recent telephone interview.

Though the comic book industry has moved beyond the hysteria caused by “Seduction of the Innocent” — the 1954 book by the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham that suggested a link between reading comics and juvenile delinquency, saw Batman and Robin as a homosexual couple, and posited Wonder Woman as a fan of sadomasochism — true gay and lesbian characters have been slow to emerge.

Mr. Mangels cited issue No. 23 of The Hulk Magazine, from 1980, as the first mainstream comic to include gays or lesbians, though the depiction was hardly positive. In the story, Bruce Banner, the Hulk’s alter ego, is at a Y.M.C.A. where two gay men try to rape him. Jim Shooter, the writer, justified the scene by saying it was based on incidents that happened to a friend and himself.

Gay and lesbian characters fared better in the underground comic movement with pioneers (and gay creators) like Howard Cruse and Roberta Gregory. The representation was also generally more positive in what was known in the 1980s as “independent comics,” which was shorthand for those books not published by DC Comics or Marvel Entertainment. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Chabon, chronicled both the paranoia about comics in the 1950s and Sam Clay’s struggle with his gay identity. “Life — my life — is rich with gay ‘characters’; how can any fiction that hopes to pass itself off as plausible neglect to be the same?” Mr. Chabon said in a 2007 interview with washingtonpost.com.

In interviews with several gay fans, the reasons given for gravitating toward comics were as varied as the heroes’ costumes: everything from escapism to “hot men in tights” to embodying the X-Men’s message, “seeking acceptance from a world that hates and fears them purely for who they are.”

There’s also a power fantasy. “I think that some young gay boys and men are more attracted to that than the average kid because they have one extra fight to fight than just being the wimpy kid in school,” said Bob Schreck, a bisexual comic book editor who worked on Green Lantern, which included a gay-bashing storyline. “The straight wimpy kid is a straight wimpy kid. The gay wimpy kid is in real trouble.”

This one time...

So I was in Philadelphia for most of the week, on a job, but also with a ton of free time. A beautiful week, the weather was amazing, the city is much more beautiful than I remember and I visited with a long lost friend. It's kind of funny how the mind works, or better, my mind works.

So, Philadelphia is one of those cities that is historically important. There is always a sense when you walk down a street that something important happened on, you can feel the history. Maybe you can't, but you can sense something, that history happened here. For so many people, we read about these events, but we do not imagine real people doing real things.

There is power in superstition. I am never quite sure if places hold memories, or we just give them that power. When I first saw the site of the World Trade Center a few months after 9-11, I could feel something. I wanted to feel something. I do believe that in places of great tragedy, where life has ended, there remains a residue of that moment.

Philadelphia has a lot of ghosts, although I am not one to give much thought to ghosts. You can, however, read into events that happened on those streets, and notice the buildings that still stand today, that stood then, and wonder if those doorways were the ones where conversations led to unrest, which led to talk of a new country.

I also think of these sacred icons that litter the city. My personal favorite is the liberty bell, and not for any obvious reasons. I have children, I have had them for almost two decades, but quite a few years ago, when I was still encumbered by marriage, we all ventured to Philadelphia and my two youngest crawled under the ropes that block most responsible people from getting too close the the actual bell. They slithered under it, like rascals checking under an old womans dress. It was both frightening and kind of inspiring.

There they were, under the bell, looking up at the ringer, or whatever it is that hangs under a bell. I thought they would get arrested, in fact, I kind of hoped they would. But as fast as they crawled under, they crawled back. There are pictures of this event somewhere, but not somewhere that I know of. It is adorable.

So, one day, when I was free this week, I walked around the city. I did not see the Bell, or Betsy Ross's house. I did not see any of the sights. I mostly just walked. Old cities have a certain charm, like some older people, worldly and lived in.

I am starting to appreciate survival. I like old buildings that remain where they belong. Some cities are so quick to remake themselves that all their collected architectural history disappears in favor of box-like condo projects.

I once interviewed the artist Mark diSuvero and he railed against the boxes people call home, with no style and four simple walls. He did not mention old buildings, with their strange angles and off kilter floors. These old cities are a lot like many of the old people I have been interviewing lately, aging, fragile and in so many ways, beautiful.

Flash mobs

I have just returned from a week of work in Philadelphia and I will add more about that soon enough, but first I have to wonder about the whole Flash Mob thing.

First, I was having dinner with a friend and her family and at one point the subject of flash mobs came up, probably because I am always worried about my own security when walking around a major city.

Oh, first, I walked from my hotel to their house, which brought me around some kind of sketchy areas, but I did not register anything scarier than my own neighborhood in Pittsburgh. So I was fearless, until dinner. Then the subject of Flash Mobs was brought up and how scary they are and dangerous and scary and weird. Did I mention scary? Because what stuck with me was the scariness of these mobs. Apparently teens text one another and get together with all their teenage energy and create a mob of some sort, generally a lot of scream, yelling and that much feared Teenage Energy thing. Sooner or later someone gets punched, generally an elderly woman if my friends are to be believed.

So, imagine my surprise when just a few seconds ago I ran across video of a flash mob in Seattle. Keep in mind the danger and how lucky we all are that there were numerous cameras to capture the insanity.

That dumb guy

Remember a long time ago when we had that clown-like president, the one who would snicker at some internal joke and never share what it was that was funny?

Friends and I used to get together and think, the world is watching. This was a president of our country who appeared to be somewhat retarded, and that was the best option. I think the thing that made it all acceptable was that we were still a powerful and respected nation and we all figured that no other world leaders knew our president was stupid.

Then the Russian president sat down for an interview and everything all of a sudden got kind of sad.

Music AM

I was driving home last night and happened upon the NPR story on these musicians and I liked them so much I came home and found some of their YouTube stuff. I thought it would be a good way to start my week and maybe you too.

The spokesman

Why should we laugh at the Tea Bagging movement? Well, if you have not heard Sarah Palin speak out in favor of this group of midle aged, stupid white people, it is always nice to hear actual people who tea bag and talk in public.

A rally was held in Yakima Washington this weekend and this is one of the spokesman.

Best Birthday gift ever

I suppose these things happen to everyone. I can not say that Dixie Carter was a friend, but I had met her, back in the 80's, just as her TV show was in rehearsals. It is a very long story, it involves a long lost love, a strange yacht that I called home and a box of cereal that I gave to Dixie for her birthday.

Dixie was married to Hal Holbrook, who at the time was one of the finest character actors in the country. She was just cast as the lead in a new TV show, Designing Women. A friend was working on the show, invited me to some rehearsals, one thing led to another and one night, Dixies car would not start. I believe it was a Jaguar, which apparently had a reputation for breaking down. So my friend and I gave her a ride home.

During the ride, which was one of those Hollywood moments that almost anyone outside of Southern California would not believe, she was gracious and funny. We got along wonderfully. We laughed almost all the way to her Beverly Hills home and she invited both of us over for her birthday party the next night.

This was a time in my life where I was living on a yacht and writing scripts for a living.

The next night my friend picked me up, he had a huge box of chocolates and an elaborate card. I had not picked up anything. At the time I had a reputation as being something of a bohemian clown, so I could almost get away with anything. We stopped at a grocery store, I bought a box of cereal, Lucky Charms sounds right, but I forget the exact brand. I did not wrap it, but I signed it, To Dixie, love you always, Matt.

We got the her house, she welcomed us. Her beautiful daughters were there, as we Mr. Holbrook, "call me Hal" he growled in that familiar voice. The house was beautiful and refined. I did stumble across a room with a lot of awards, emmys and such, from Holbrooks long and distinguished career. The rest of the night is a blur, not just alcohol, but a vast variety of other things have clouded my memory. What is quite clear is that when Dixie saw the cereal, and that I had autographed it, she laughed that wonderful true beautiful laugh. She hugged me, the world stood still, all was right.

I can not say I will miss Dixie. We never stayed in touch. Soon after meeting, I escaped Los Angeles, never to return. I never watched the episodes I saw rehearsed, never paid much attention to the show, for deeply personal and professional reasons. For me, Dixie will always be a woman who was profoundly real, very sweet and could laugh and make you forget anything else was important.

Palin 24/7

Prepping for Glee

Yes, I know, it's just not cool to like Glee, so instead, I like shows that do a knock off of Glee.

Delete this

Have you ever gone back through time and reviewed emails that are just sitting somewhere in digital land? It's kind of a healthy exercise to look back, years on some cases, and decide that now would be a good time to begin to remove these little bits of memory.

I have had email addresses for over a decade. In that time friends have come and gone, jobs have flourished and crashed, businesses have been developed and almost as quickly been devalued by the financial abuse of partners. What to do with emails? What to do with notes from people who claimed to be interested in this or that?

What is healthy is to go back and see how things develop. In my own email stockpile I found the slithering snake-like paths that some people used to befriend, and the innocent and lovely path that some people used to become friends. Strange how that works. In one instance, a person Imet started sending me emails complimenting me on my paintings, the emails soon began to invite me to dinners, a stop over for a glass of wine, art openings, parties and soon friendship.

What is fascinating is how things change. When you go through divorce you get all sorts of strange emails. First there are the ones from the person you are divorcing. Lucky for me, at the time I was living in an upscale area where plenty of people had been divorced, so there were scads of emails describing in detail the process and more than one friend said to never delete any emails that related to my former partner, our children and how communication had become less than friendly.

I just deleted those emails, most from over 10 years ago. Even though the children still live with me, they are all old enough that they could now go to court and tell a judge who they would rather live with. I think that was the purpose, at the time, of saving emails. Just in case your former partner wants to go to court to seek custody, you need to have evidence that they are, you know, unfit, insane, untrustworthy and the list truly is endless. I no longer need any proof, so out with the old emails.

As for the fake friends, their emails had to go to. It is not just fake friends, but actual friends emails can be purged as well. The people who are friends, well, I don't need old emails from a decade ago to remind me that we know and love one another. Those emails were delated. Fake friends? In some cases I thought it would be wise to keep incriminating emails that show what a two faces, or three faced, people could be. I am not sure why. So they got deleted.

Business relationships? Well, everyone has told me that I should keep those sorts of letters forever, or something like that. For me, I just can not stand to view these sorts of things. Luckily you can create files and throw all of one persons letters and notes and lies into the file, close it and put it somewhere that is hard to find.

What is kind of amazing about doing this is that you release the pent up anxiety associated with these sorts of relationships. Every now and I then I have had to search my email for something, so I would type in a search word and more often than not, a letter or note or something from long forgotten idiot would surface. Yikes I would think, why is that there? Removing the angry or insane email from possible extraction is kind of uplifting. Never again will I stumble upon one of these little tidbits of my own history.

So the message is, it is probably time for many people to delete the emails. Lift the burden. Remove the stigma. Take away any of the power these emails and their history have over you. The do what I did, celebrate the fact they no longer influence your life in any form.

Questions answered

Every now and then I get an email, or a phone call, asking me some sort of question related to something on this blog. Every now and then I answer them.

Yesterday a friend of mine called, a friend who, over the past 10 years or so, has put on a fairly decent amount of weight. He called to ask if he was the fat friend I had written about. I find it weird that I have a few friends who consider themselves fat.

Question 1- (via phone) so am I your "fat friend"?

no.

Question B - Why so many videos posted instead of words.

Lazy.

Question 5 - Are cell phones killing off bees?

Yes.

Question - Married? Seriously?

Yes.

Question (final) - Which is better, the Pirates or the Mariners?

I keep telling people that Pittsburgh reminds me a lot of Seattle, the Seattle that was around when I first moved there. First, my wife and I purchased our first home for something like 45 thousand dollars. Second, when you take the ferry into Seattle, the city can sometimes magically appear our of the fog, or just leaving the dock at night, the city can seem almost alive. When you take the tunnel into Pittsburgh and you are dumped out into downtown, it can be inspiring and beautiful. What was the question? Oh, well, again, when I first moved to Seattle the Mariners played indoors, and the sucked. They may have sucked more, I am just not sure what the term is. We could always get free tickets to games, always. I had a loft near the stadium and for every game some Boeing employee would be standing on the street corner, giving away tickets that no one wanted.

Pittsburghs baseball team is as bad, possibly worse, than those Mariners. Here is the great news, the Mariners got lucky with some players, had some winning seasons and the city embraced the team, and a new stadium was built. The Pirates already have a great new stadium, right down town. Nothing better than an afternoon game, cheap seats, a cold beer and a view of a city.

Jose can you see?

Ipad usage

Ipad fatties

I just happened to walk into an Apple store yesterday and there it was, this delicious new computing device, the Apple Ipad, or something.

I like Apple products. Recently my fat friend called to chide me on the Ipad. He is a friend and he is fat, so I call him my fat friend. Do I call him that to his face? No, mostly because he has a name, and secondly, I am pretty sure he knows he is my friend and I am certain he knows he is fat.

So fatty mcfatso calls to, I know really I should stop making fun of him. So my rotund friend calls and starts in about the Ipad. I could care less about the Ipad I say, I just recently purchased a brand spanking new MacBook pro, with a huge hard drive that I will never been able to fill up in my lifetime. Pigman had to keep going. I am never quite sure of his fat attitude and what makes him such a loud mouth, but there he was, asking if I was going to sleep out at an Apple store, or was I ordering online.

Hey Mr. Round-Ball, here is the thing, I am not going to buy one. Simple.

Well, I will buy one, because as I stated earlier, I accidentally walked into an Apple store yesterday and got my hands on an Ipad. Now, I would never tell fatty mcangry that I liked it, but I did. It's very cool, fund to play with and will someday offer useful stuff. That day was not yesterday. The losers and assorted Mac followers who had to have an Ipad yesterday are, well, losers and followers. Anyone who purchased an Iphone knows the Apple strategy, make a cool looking product and get it out to the sheep, but in the meantime, refine said product so in about a year it will actually be useful.

My new Iphone is great.

My new Ipad has not even been designed yet. I am patient. Unlike my fat friend, who has issues with control, issues with diet and issues with jealousy.

Why do we remain friends you might ask? I like him, it has nothing to do with his giant gut, still wears pants that are about 10 sizes too small and hardly ever gets my jokes. He is on the verge of not seeing his penis, or at least, that's my guess. I worry about fat people who can not see their sex organs. I like to know whats going on down there and can not imagine having to guess.

Anyway, no Ipad.

Making the world safe for pedophiles

Ahh the Catholic church has finally come up with the perfect Easter gift. You know, I always worry about what to give my catholic friends around this time of the year. It's so hard when you run out of bunny related items. A chocolate bunny is so passe, and eggs, in any form seem so silly. Really, not a lot of people even eat eggs, and those that do are not proclaiming any religious superiority.

So, the New York Times has been digging into the dirty laundry of the Pope and his friends. Seems like for a long time the "church" has been allowing priests to score some boy action and the worst that could happen is the offending priests would be shuffled off to a new parish, where young boys would be plentiful and the cycle could continue until, well, until the offending priest was sent to hell for eternity, right?

So apparently the pope turn the other cheek, or something, and pretended that all these pedophiles in white collars were just, you know, doing gods work. I mean, the pope has a pretty busy schedule, what with dressing in robes and wearing all these gay jewels and sometimes getting totally high and watching priests abuse boys.

Now we are all wondering what we can get our friends this easter without making fun of the pope and his herd of pedophile priests. I have no suggestions. Oh, wait, a t-shirt, people love to get t-shirts. How about, "my priest abused all my friends and all I got was this lousy t-shirt?"

Great generation

I have never been a big believer that the generation that won World War 2 was anything super special. They did what they had to do and when I have come in contact with these people, more often than not, they downplayed their role in keeping the world safe from Nazi insanity.

Lately I have had the joy of meeting a couple of men from that generation, men who served and went to war, men who came back, worked, saved, raised families and are now ailing. There is something profoundly different from these men. I am not quite sure what it is, but hearing how they came home, got married and often times worked for 30-40 years sounds strangely unfamiliar.

My first question is how we got here, where we are today? I know a lot of men who are just wimpy, and not wimpy like running from bar fights, but just no serious backbone, no dedication to the country, the world, making a better life for themselves and families. No, the more modern man seems focused more on themselves. Now, here is the tricky part, because I do not think that the generation from World War 2 actually sat down and plotted how to be considered the greatest generation, no I believe they just did what was expected.

Expectations are a funny thing. I was talking to a co-worker about this yesterday and she said how strange it would be to have a single job with a single company for 30 years. Strange because we all figure we can shop our services around and go to the company that suits our fancy. When that company does not work out, we move on. She said she expected to have about 20 jobs in the next 30 years, and looking back over my life, that seems about right.

It is not the job stability that is different. There is a fundamental attitude in modern man/woman. First, our generation, those from the Greatest Generation, are way more selfish and expect more perks just because we are, I am not sure, Americans, educated, spoiled?

I listen to these older men, talking about their lives, and in some ways they are kind of boring. Spending 30 years working in a factory, never moving past a fairly menial position, just does not seem like a life well lived to me. Here is the twist, so much of this was done to dedicate one life to make the lives of their children better. Imagine that, looking back at your working life and seeing that you may not have made the money you would have liked, or the vacations you wanted, or fill in the blank. What you do get to see is how better your childrens life is in the long run. Dedicating your life for the betterment of your childrens life? That is also seemingly unheard of in many of my compatriots.

That to me is the difference. The greatest generation came home and went to work. My generation and those around mine, are spoiled, selfish and unfocused, but mostly we did not grow up, we did not dedicate our lives to anything more important that ourselves. Our focus on our needs, our wants and our own future may have seemed smart for a while, but looking at the people who really paved the way for our economy and our country, I am left feeling like many of us have wasted out lives. Ironic, because when I hear about people spending 30-40 years toiling at jobs that seem boring, I thought they had wasted their lives.

Crackers

Obama