Thai Cookout?

As a fourteen-year-old in 1970, I made the first step in the slow process of revealing my true self to friends and then to family.
I have never regretted that first step or the many others that have followed. It wasn’t so much a desire for exclusively gay rights as basic human rights for myself and all other human beings. We were compelled not just to know ourselves but also to give voice to that knowledge.
We have.
I have, jokingly said, over the many years since I first read of the Stonewall Riots in the basement of downtown Cincinnati’s old Kidd’s Bookstore, that these first few years of “liberation” won’t be as much fun as the last 2000 of “repression”.
I studied “homosexuality” long before I ever spoke aloud. An odd child, I bounced from Tom Swift, Jr. to Jean Genet.
It was as though I had been born having already read the brochure. History, Art and Literature, to my young understanding, described homosexuals as having traveled along with the rest of humanity from the earliest of times and through the grimiest of historical eras.
As a Convention-watching 12 year-old in 1968, I sat amazed as William F. Buckley, Jr. called my hero Gore Vidal “a fag” live on the ABC television network.
Repression came rather late as Rome fell to a new God and ended, after 2000 years with a delightfully absurd police/drag queen standoff on a Greenwich Village street corner. A secret club as old as the cantankerously sinful Catholic Church is finally, unbelievably giving way to freedom and acceptance within society.
I have no fears of the escalating ugliness spewing from the right’s repressed sexual hyperventilating and moral pronouncements from immoral men. No law can truly bind men’s hands. We are everywhere and in every family and neighborhood. We are not going away. This next year’s battle is not going away. The President made that clear in one of his few coherent moments during yesterday’s alleged press conference.
Any regular viewer of the new television program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy would realize, us queers know how to rummage through a closet. As huge money is spent on division and ugliness, thousands of angry queens will be rummaging through the dry-cleaner bags of sin hanging in the closets of the powerful.
Do you think Arianna’s ex will be dragging the boyfriend to fundraisers or Neil inviting one of the $5 Thai prostitutes to a family cookout? Start your engines…

Photo: Tour Egypt Monthly
- posted by Sean @ 7:02 PM  

 

Why do I hear the echo of "I'm not a crook!" in the above statement?
I actually felt sympathetic shame for the White House Press Corps, this morning. Throughout the Rose Garden event, the President read from a scripted list of reporter names. On several occasions it was clear that the President was also consulting a "crib sheet". During this aborted exchange with a CBS White House correspondent intent upon refocusing a rambling President on the hyped Iraq WMD imminence, Mr. Bush's eyes feverishly scanned the cheat sheet and seemed to directly sight read several spoken phrases:

Let me finish for a minute, please. Just getting warmed up.

(LAUGHTER)

I'm, kind of, finding my feet.
(SIGHT READING, in my opinion) Saddam Hussein was a threat. The United Nations viewed him as a threat. That's why they passed 12 resolutions. Predecessors of mine viewed him as a threat.
We gathered a lot of intelligence. That intelligence was good, sound intelligence on which I made a decision.

In transcript form it all seems so chummy, however, the scripted questions, "jokes" and on cue laughter serve only to give the President space to cruise the cheat sheet.
An embarrassing performance for Bush and the press that cries for the flavor enhancement of fresh raw spin.

Photo: Charles Dharapak, AP



- posted by Sean @ 6:22 PM  

 
Oh, Poindexter!

Can you imagine if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in…and bet on the assassination of an American political figure or the overthrow of this institution or that institution?
--Senator Byron Dorgan, D North Dakota to CBS.com

Cartoon: The Phrase Finder
- posted by Sean @ 11:18 PM  

 
Abracabdullah!

I've been suffering a slight aversion to the computer since Friday and have not posted.
[ _________________________________ ] but decided these actions would be unproductive and could reveal the sources and methods of my relationship with [ ___________________________________ ].

As the President has seemingly disappeared from public view, soldiers are still leaking discontent with the Iraq shooting gallery while the Spin and Disinformational Athlete Sideshows have accelerated to a frenetic pace on the Toob.
The President when he does make his brief heavily orchestrated appearances continues to demonstrate signs of functional articulation disorder.
Patients with FAD:

If they are able to talk, usually make very variable articulation errors, their speech is slow, it seems very effortful to an onlooker, and there is a lot of 'trial and error' involved in trying to make particular sounds. The rhythm of speech usually seems wrong to the listener... Some give the impression of struggling to talk, exhibiting trial and error attempts to say words, accompanied by great frustration.

An explosion of summer produce has arrived at Farmer's Markets and stall vendors across the Ohio River Valley. Tomatoes, white corn and eggplant have been excellent thus far this season.
Here's a delicious and zero fat Salsa that is very similar to the previously posted Crab Salad.

Silver Queen Salsa

4 Tomatoes
3 ears White Corn, parboiled for :30, cooled and cut from cob
1/2 Yellow Pepper, seeded and diced
1/2 Red Pepper, seeded and diced
5 Green Onions, chopped
2 Celery Stalks, chopped
Parsley, fresh and chopped
Basil, fresh and torn
1/2 Tsp Seasalt
1/4 Tsp Black Pepper
1 Tbsp Sugar
1/4-1/2 cup unseasoned Rice Vinegar

Mix, chill, serve. Yum!
Of course, the dessert that will end this healthy meal is a most unhealthy Cocoanut Cream Pie...a little thin yin and a bit of fat yang!
And, no, I don't mean the two in the above photo!

Photo: Reuter's



- posted by Sean @ 8:48 PM