Blues, nothing to win or to lose, it's getting me down, Who's escaped those weary twentieth century blues?

This is my favorite Elton John record...and it's not insignificant that he didn't write it. (Sorry to any fans, I'll admit he writes good bubblegum pop music, but the lyrics are idiotic.)

Way to make with the clever headlines...

HitFix:

'Sex and the CIty 2' comes early with $14.2 million Thursday

The '80s man's lullaby

Wait a minute...

What I want to talk about is something I heard Cliff Kincaid quoted as saying on the Keith Olbermann show just now.

"A vote to repeal the homosexual exclusion policy would inevitably mean more disease and death for members of our Armed Forces," stated Cliff Kincaid, the veteran journalist who runs ASI. "It is unconscionable to add this danger to the risks they already face in fighting for our freedom around the world."

No, not that. I'm assuming most if not all of the people who read this blog already share my belief that the homophobes screeching such about DADT being repealed are sick in the head. So I'm not going to get into this that way. I just wanted to give you an idea of where he was coming from.

This is what got me:

"If Congress repeals the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' homosexual exclusion policy," declared Kincaid, "Corporal Klinger could become a reality in the Armed Forces." Klinger was the bizarre character on the MASH comedy show that dressed up as a woman so that he could be kicked out of the service.

"Klinger may now give way to the Pentagon actually permitting transgendered male soldiers that look like Klinger to openly wear women's clothing," noted the ASI president.

Sigh...never mind that this implies homosexual=transvestite, which isn't true. Never mind that it also confuses transgender with homosexual, which isn’t true either. Here's my thing:

Corporal Klinger was not a homosexual. It's why his character was funny. The street kid from Toledo wearing dresses, worrying about the latest fashions in hem length and so on, while still remaining, emphatically, that street kid (and straight kid) from Toledo.

So the story goes, when Klinger was first introduced, the director had Jamie Farr play his one scene very effeminate/gay. Fortunately, the producers, including my man Larry Gelbart (who created the character) got to the scene and had it redone. And what was written as a one-shot became a regular who lasted to the end of the series.

I'm not surprised anymore that homophobes like Kincaid are sick in the head. I am surprised that he apparently never watched a single episode of what was arguably the most successful television series of all time...

Some days, a man just needs 10 minutes of '80s "new wave."

This man does, anyway.

Don't read this if you're at all affected by the ways in which we've lain waste to animals

Apart from that...I really don't know what to say.

This is so on...

I wonder how that's going to go over

About 180 county employees in suburban Atlanta are being asked to return thousands of dollars the county says they were overpaid 16 years ago.

How about "Demands to see under threat that if they don't, we'll draft each and every one of their of-age children into military service?"

WH asks BP to share more information on spill

The White House is asking BP PLC to publicly disclose more information about the Gulf oil spill including measurements of the size of the leak 5,000 feet under the sea and air quality.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday that the White House is writing to BP asking the company to put that information on its website and be more transparent about its response.

"Asks to share?"

It's things like this that make me want to call for a violent overthrow of the United States government

ATMs a mystery to senator

The Nebraska Democrat [Sen. Ben Nelson] pleaded ignorance when asked this week whether Congress should cap ATM fees. Nelson said that while he's no fan of unnecessary fees, he's unfamiliar with the charges.

“I've never used an ATM, so I don't know what the fees are,” Nelson said, adding that he gets his cash from bank tellers, just not automatic ones.

Wait, it gets better.

“But I could learn how to do it just like I've . . . I swipe to get my own gas, buy groceries. I know about the holograms.”

Holograms?

By “holograms,” Nelson clarified that he meant the bar codes on products read by automatic scanners in the checkout lanes at stores such as Lowe's and Menard's.

Oh, sure, I can see how--what?

However, lest you think Nelson leads a completely pampered life inside a bubble, he insists:

“I go and get my own seating assignment on an airplane,” Nelson said.

Well! Aren't you a big boy?

This could ruin women for me altogether

Hollywood conjures images of the past New world needs spirituality That will last I've seen the future and it will be

Actual headlines on Yahoo! Homepage:

How America is creating an underclass

Experts say the country is in danger of turning into a two-class society

"Creating?" "In danger of turning into?"

Sigh.

Take it, Marvin...

Early signs that your child may in fact be the buddda

I love this (edited w/addition...I love these.)

Doctor's Girls Wallpaper by *mimi-na on deviantART

(I highly recommend checking out her d-Tart page...this woman is extraordinarily talented and I think I want to marry her)

Seriously. Cutest thing I've ever seen.

PS: Oh! And I just noticed that the girls from the black-and-white years are, indeed, drawn in B & W. This is great work.

ETA: Along these same lines...this made me laugh like a child.

(click on this, you need to see it full-size)


Doctor Hoo by ~pu-sama on deviantART

(and she ain't bad, either)

"Kristen Lopez Eastlick?"

It seems a local paper in racist/tea party Tennessee is managed by either idiots or liars. Or of course, you know, there's always the possibility they could be both.

Per Southern Beale:

Oh, Tennessean. Your gullibility would be laughable were it not so very appalling. Seriously, what does this say about your reputation that a D.C. lobbyist has managed to fool you not once, not twice, but three times in one six month period? Somewhere on K street a corporate lobbyist is laughing his ass off at you.

In December 2009, The Tennessean ran an anti-minimum wage op-ed by “Kristen Lopez Eastlick,” identified as “senior economic analyst at the Employment Policies Institute.”

"Kristen Lopez Eastlick?"

"Kristen Lopez Eastlick?"

And they weren't the least bit suspicious this was a phony name?

I must admit, I have a real curiosity about this movie

Wall Street 2, that is.

Well, I see no reason not to take their word for it, do you?

BP is claiming to have had some success in closing up the oil leak.

(And as someone notes in the comments, yeah...and the mission was accomplished.)

Okay, the "Kagan gay" thing (or, If I'm a fair judge...)

Sigh.

Today on ABC/Washington Post’s “Top Line,” Richard Socarides – a prominent Democratic gay-rights advocate who worked alongside Kagan in the Clinton White House – said the White House appeared “flat-footed” at the beginning, but appears to have gotten its messaging under control.

“I think the whole conversation now is probably more silly than anything else, and is probably mostly about bloggers trying to drive traffic to their blogs,”

That's preposterous. I remember I was talking about this just last year. Let me set the scene for you.

I was attending the Golden Globes, my date was Scarlett Johansson.

(To be honest, first I called Jennifer Lopez.)

(But try getting that girl's ass out of a hot bath.)

We walked past Gwyneth Paltrow and Leslie Bibb on the way into the auditorium.

Gwyneth and Scarlett took turns giving each other feeling looks (Gwyneth never has liked sharing); Leslie busied herself by making sure all her right places were seen in all the right places.

But her naked desire to look as cute or cuter as America Ferrera...


--had in Maxim, was apparent to all.

After watching Tina Fey win, we decided to slip out for a bite to eat.

On the way, we came on Rooney Mara

We asked her to join us and make this a threesome. She said yes, and the three of us decided to go down to a diner I knew with kick-ass hamburgers on delectable buns.

As we walked into the diner, Rooney whispered to me that she couldn't wait to suck down an ice-cold Coke.

To our surprise, who should be there but Kristen Wiig! She was playing with a doggie; styled like a trucker-chick, and eating a pickle.

However, I digress.

My point is I remember, while all that was going on, turning to Kristen and saying that this blogger, for one, would never go so low as to write provocative things into his blog, merely in hopes of driving his traffic up.

And I never will.

Oh, and Connie Britton is having an affair.

Now that I've gotten that out of my system, back to the story at hand.

Socarides said Kagan will be able to fairly judge all issues that come before the court. That includes those touching on the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy banning gay and lesbian service-members from being open about their sexuality – a policy Kagan spoke out against as dean of Harvard Law School.

All jokes aside...this is what really made me want to talk about this. The argument some are making that Kagan's sexuality is a real issue in whether or not she should be confirmed. Or that if she is, and indeed also a lesbian, she should recuse herself from any issues involving gay people.

The answer to that seems so obvious. What about all the issues involving straight people the rest of the court rules on all the time? Why would one think they can judge issues involving their sexuality fairly, but Kagan--again, if she is indeed gay--cannot?

Roger Ebert's writing a memoir

And I can't wait to read it.

Don't worry, be oily

I don't sleep well. I know this mostly because every night I make my bed, and every morning the sheet has been pushed off. I can only assume that if I were subject to one of those sleep studies where they film you during the night, you'd see a great deal of tossing and turning. I also usually have pretty vivid dreams.

I'm mentioning all this, because I have a terrible sick certainty that all the people who ought to be held to account for the oil spill, from the oil companies to the white house, sleep just fine.

Case in point:

Don't worry about that pesky oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP CEO Tony Hayward says: It's "relatively tiny" compared to the "very big ocean."

Hayward launched this novel defense of the worst spill in U.S. history during an interview with the Guardian that deserves a full read, especially with BP fighting the Obama administration's push to make the company pay the full tab for cleanup costs. The BP chief executive acknowledged for the first time that he expects his future with the company to be "judged by the nature of the response" to the current crisis; this may help explain his stream of delaying tactics and excuses.

"We will fix it. I guarantee it. The only question is we do not know when," Hayward told the Guardian. "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."

To paraphrase Jon Stewart: You're not helping your case!