Saturday, May 13, 2006

Karl Rove Indictment News Imminent

Judging by Technorati, the blogosphere is blowing up today with the news that White House Chief Of Staff Karl Rove has been indicted for perjury and lying to investigators and has tendered his resignation to President Bush. The buzz appears to primarily spring from Jason Leopold's reporting on Truth Out. - (via God Of Biscuits)

HomoQuotable - Rex Wockner

"We can lament that Mary (Cheney) is not everything we wish she could have been or could be -- or we can reflect on just how mindblowing it is that the daughter of the U.S. vice president, in the most overtly antigay administration in U.S. history, is an open lesbian and is on national TV talking about it." - Rex Wockner, columnist. (via 365gay.com)

Friday, May 12, 2006

Mailbag Addendum

Hey Joe, I think I saw you on the 6 train this morning, downtown bound around 830. I gotta ask, what's up with the sunglasses on the subway, dude? You going rock star on us? What's up with that?

Barry the BXCub

This is what's up with that. I'm wearing the sunglasses to spare my fellow riders the horror of looking into my swollen slit-lidded bloody eyes. OK, it's not that bad at the moment, since I've been using this for the last few days. It's all been a little embarrasing, this 3rd-grader situation. At least I'm back at my desk, presumably no longer contagious. Although my admin did just toss me my mail from ten feet away. Nice.

Friday Mailbag, May 12th, 2006

Joe, I don't know if you watch Bravo TV's "Top Chef" but I was watching the reunion show and one of the lines made me think of you because it was one of those inadvertent things that was funny as hell and the guy didn't even realize what he was saying and sometimes you have things like that on your blog. Stephen was explaining how fortunate he has been in his life to have had so many people educate him about business and food and this is basically what he said:

"I've been very lucky to have had so many teachers, professors and mentors dump loads in me".

My boyfriend and I could not stop laughing!


-Chuck, the cute, horse hung guy from Michigan

JMG-When I asked him how he'd like to be identified, and Chuck gave me that tagline, I said, "You know that the readers are going to be all over that." Chuck's response: "If anybody wants a pic, they have to write directly and ask nicely." Therefore: Chazzie@aol.com.

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Hi Joe, I’ve been reading your blog for about 9 months now and I enjoy your writing. I’m a straight guy here in Baltimore and your posts give me some perspective that I wouldn’t otherwise have. Thanks for that.

I read recently in one of the Parliament House posts that “Smalltown Boy” had a profound effect on you. I was wondering if you would consider this a topic for a future post. I’ve always loved that song too and I was only a kid when it was on the radio. Something about that heavily sequenced synth intro gets me every time. Thanks.

-Drew
In Baltimore

JMG- Starting next week, I'll be reviving the old Instant Disco History series of posts, which haven't been seen on JMG in a long time. Smalltown Boy will be included in one of those posts.

HomoQuotable - Matt Foreman

"Governor Dean's record on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues since becoming DNC chair has been sorely and sadly lacking. " - Matt Foreman, Executive Director, National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, after Howard Dean misrepresented the Democratic Party's gay platform on Pat Robertson's nationally televised show, The 700 Club. The NGLTF then returned Dean's $5000 donation in protest, as scientists rushed to examine the NGLTF's freshly grown pair.

How Low Can We Go?

The latest Harris / Wall Street Journal opinion poll shows GWB's approval rating has dropped to 29%, putting Dubya within one or two warrantless wiretaps of breaking Richard Nixon's Watergate-era approval rating of 25%, the worst ever recorded for a U.S. president, according to some pollsters. (Harry Truman once hit 23% in a Gallup poll.)

So many of us have been saying for so long that George W. Bush is the worst president in American history, it will feel anti-climatic when a national opinion poll bears finally us out, as will surely happen once the shitstorm from yesterday's USA Today reportage over the illegal gathering of Americans' phone records has settled.

But when GWB does bottom out with the worst opinion poll results in American history, I'm going to try to resist any impulse to celebrate. Things are worse than they've ever been and they are getting worserer.

UPDATE: It's worth mentioning that among Democrats, Bush II's approval rating is 8%. My question: Who ARE these people?

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Diverting The H8RS

Yesterday, from reading Kenneth Hill's giggler on Worth Repeating, I learned that one must be careful when disparaging specific contestants on American Idol, lest your blog's comments be overtaken by quasi-literate irate teenage girls who write all caps, screaming things like "OMG!!! IF YOU LIKE TAYLOR YOU MUST BE TRUE FAGG! OMG!!! CONSTANTINE 4EVR!!!"

And today my pal Scott, author of Palochi.com, emailed me this sentence, complaining about last night's American Idol results: "First GWB, now this. The experiment of democracy is officially a complete failure." Go read, as Scott riffs on that failure theme, hilariously, in this post.
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HomoQuotable - Mary Cheney

"Go fuck yourself." - Mary Cheney to 2004 vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, mouthing the comment from the studio audience after he mentioned her sexual orientation during a debate. In an interview, Cheney also calls Edwards "a total slime" and John Kerry "a son of a bitch". Poor deluded Mary also thinks that GWB is a "very good man" who just hasn't "caught up on" the gay issues. Of course, the previously elusive and silent lesbian daughter of the Vice President is only now spilling her guts because.... (say it with me!)..... she has a book to sell! - (via AMERICAblog.)

UPDATE: The book reviewers are having a field day on Amazon. "In a day and age when William Hung is offered a recording contract, it shouldn't surprise anyone that one of the most despised lesbians in the country gets a book deal. The only question is who is going to buy it? Her father's friends would rather embrace white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan than associate themselves with homosexuals while the gay community knows that Miss Cheney sold her soul to the devil to keep her father in power. I will wage a bet that this book challenges the Guiness record for the most rapid descent into the book store bargain bins."

UPDATE II: Just the first few of the numerous keyword tags that Amazon's reviewers have added to Now It's My Turn: hypocrite (8), sellout (6), self-loathing (4), amoral (3), disgraceful (3), greed (3), aunt thomasina (2), children of monsters (2), conservative puppet (2), denial (2), invertebrate (2), narcissistic (2), stockholm syndrome (2), a million little pieces (1), a pound of flesh (1)
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The Bigger Apple

The Mac-heads in my office are positively wetting themselves over the new midtown Apple megastore, which opens on May 19th. The new store is located in the underground concourse beneath the former Trump, now General Motors Building, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, and will be Apple's first ever store to operate 24/7, answering the city's dire need to address its 4AM Nano emergencies. The store's entry is a 32-foot street level glass cube, which I suppose Apple is hoping will become another Big Apple icon. Despite the near-manic glee of my coworkers, I'm having my usual Apple-related reaction, a big yawn that stretches into a much, much bigger yawn that stretches to infinity, checks its mirrors, turns left, and heads on out to eternity.

GB:NYC3

The 3rd Annual Gay Blogger Invasion of New York City is coming up. Spawned from the sick mind of Dallas blogger Mark, author of Zeitzeuge, this entire event is nothing more than bunch of trampy alcoholic gay bloggers staggering from one sleazy bar to another, occasionally falling on each other in hotel rooms. And thank Zod for that. No meetings, no speakers, no host hotel. (Oh, but there IS an official t-shirt.) So if you are in the NYC area or can manage a weekend visit, please check in with Mark for details. As I noted after last year's fete at Barrage, if you fill a bar with homobloggers, things can get quite festive.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

HomoQuotable - Armin Meiwes

"If you are between 18 and 25 years old, you are my boy. Come to me and I eat your horny flesh." - from the personal ad of Armin Meiwes, "the gay cannibal", yesterday sentenced to life in prison in Germany. (via 365gay.com)
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NY Press, Now With Added JMG

If you are in the New York City area, I have a short story published in this week's issue of the NY Press, which comes out today. The story, The Guy With The Bike, appeared on JMG last fall, and appears today in a new feature in the NY Press called New York Stories. I'll update this post later today with the story's link. I know a lot of you have already read the story here, but indulge me in this brag, 'K?

UPDATE: The NY Press has updated their site. Enter here, I'm listed under News & Columns, or go directly to the story, here. And now y'all know my full name, if you didn't already.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman With DSL

Don't Date Him Girl is "the internet's largest database of lying and cheating men". As I clicked around the site, reading some of the thousands of testimonials posted by cheated upon women, I wondered how a similar website for gay men might work. Then, on a hunch, I typed "gay" into the Don't Date Him Girl keyword search. Sure enough, dozens of women have posted pics and profiles of their exes, claiming them to be gay or bisexual cheaters, including one woman who thoughtfully provided the link revealing her boyfriend to be a gay porn actor (NSFW!).

So what would we call the gay version of this concept? How about Don't Date Him, Queen!

In truth, I don't know how I feel about this sort of net revenge. These women are posting the photos, full names, nicknames, dates of birth, screen names, hometowns, and in some cases, the STDs of their cheating partners. What do you think?
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Monday, May 08, 2006

HomoQuotable - Andrew Holleran

"The demonic paradox of writing: when you put something down that happened, people often don't believe it; whereas, you can make up anything, and people assume it must have happened to you." - Andrew Holleran. Holleran's latest book, Grief: A Novel, will be released on June 6th. Pre-order it here. And if you don't already own his seminal Dancer From The Dance, well, shame on you.