>North and South

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This just in, from Round The Way Gay, and ISBL Smallville correspondent, Neal:
The difference between the North and the South–at last, clearly explained:

• The North has Bloomingdale’s , the South has Dollar General .
• The North has coffee houses, the South has Waffle Houses.
• The North has dating services, the South has family reunions.
• The North has switchblade knives; the South has .45’s
• The North has double last names; the South has double first names.
• The North has Indy car races; The South has stock car races.
• The North has Cream of Wheat , the South has grits.
• The North has green salads, the South has collard greens .
• The North has lobsters, the South has crawfish.
• The North has the rust belt; the South has the Bible Belt.

And, for Northerners moving South:

• In the South: If you run your car into a ditch, don’t panic. Four men in a four-wheel drive pickup truck with a tow chain will be along shortly. Don’t try to help them, just stay out of their way. This is what they live for.
• Don’t be surprised to find movie rentals and bait in the same store…. Do not buy food at this store.
• Remember, ‘Y’all’ is singular, ‘all y’all’ is plural, and ‘all y’all’s’ is plural possessive.
• Get used to hearing ‘You ain’t from round here, are ya?’
• Save all manner of bacon grease. You will be instructed later on how to use it.
• Don’t be worried at not understanding what people are saying. They can’t understand you either.
• The first Southern statement to creep into a transplanted Northerner’s vocabulary is the adjective ‘big’ol,’ truck or ‘big’ol’ boy. Most Northerners begin their Southern-influenced dialect this way. All of them are in denial about it.
• The proper pronunciation you learned in school is no longer proper .
• Be advised that ‘He needed killin..’ is a valid defense here.
• If you hear a Southerner exclaim, ‘Hey, y’all watch this,’ you should stay out of the way. These are likely to be the last words he’ll ever say.
• If there is the prediction of the slightest chance of even the smallest accumulation of snow, your presence is required at the local grocery store.. It doesn’t matter whether you need anything or not. You just have to go there.
• Do not be surprised to find that 10-year olds own their own shotguns, they are proficient marksmen, and their Grandmas! taught them how to aim.
• In the South, we have found that the best way to grow a lush green lawn is to pour gravel on it and call it a driveway.

And last of all: If you do settle in the South and bear children, don’t think that we will accept them as Southerners. After all, if the cat had kittens in the oven, we ain’t gonna call ’em biscuits.

>I Heart Cole Goforth

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These days you can buy T-shirts that say anything; they endorse political candidates; they tell you which beer tastes great. You have concert T’s and Broadway show T’s, and sports T’s. It seems anything goes on the T-shirt front, or, on the front of a T-shirt.

Unless you live in Tennessee and it’s a three letter word: gay.

Cole Goforth is gay; and he doesn’t care who knows it. He’s out, he’s proud, he loved his new shirt that said “I Heart Lady Gay Gay.”

But that shirt earned him a trip home.

His mother says the school is violating Cole’s freedom of speech and expression rights because it allows kids who wear religious shirts and rebel flag shirts to wear those in school. The school said his shirt was a disruption.

Trouble is, Cole Goforth has worn gay shirts to school before. And I don’t mean figuratively gay, I mean, literally, shirts that say G-A-Y. And those were okay.

The Robertson County School Board dress code does not specifically ban shirts with the word “gay” on them, but it does say that each principal can interpret the dress code and take action if a student’s dress causes a disruption. Administrators at the school say they chose to send Cole home because there had been fights in recent weeks and they didn’t want another disruption. But even they don’t say that the altercations had anything to do with Cole, or his shirt.

So……………What the hell?

What the hell is wrong with our schools? Kids can’t go to prom because they’re gay? They can’t wear “gay” clothes? They can’t have the word gay on their clothes?

These are the perfect times to teach lessons of understanding; that differences shouldn’t be treated as less than, but celebrated. These are times when people need to stand up and say this is ridiculous.

A gay student will not destroy the prom.

And a shirt with the word gay on it will not cause a fight.

>More Cases Of The Pope’s Inaction

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First there was a case in Germany, when then Cardinal Ratzinger, shipped a pedophile off to therapy and the reassigned him to another parish so he might molest again.

Then came the news that the same thing happened in Wisconsin. The Reverend Lawrence Murphy spent years molesting children at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, but when the case came to the attention of the Vatican, Cardinal Ratzinger, before he became pope, declined to take action.

Now comes word that he knew of two more priests molesting children in Arizona and, oh yes, he did nothing.

The Associated Press has learned, through documents in their possession, that as a Vatican cardinal, the future pope took over the abuse case of the Reverend Michael Teta of Tucson and then let it sit idle at the Vatican for years despite repeated pleas from the bishop for the man to be removed from the priesthood.

And then we have Monsignor Robert Trupia, also in Arizona. In writing to then-Cardinal Ratzinger–the man who would be pope–Bishop Manuel Moreno called Trupia “a major risk factor to the children, adolescents and adults that he many have contact with.”

Apparently Cardinal Ratzinger simply decided not to respond to the bishop’s letter.

Of course, the Vatican has called these new allegations “absolutely groundless” and states that the delay in defrocking Teta was caused by a hold on appeals while the Vatican changed regulations over its handling of sex abuse cases.

So, they let a pedophile continue to work with children while they restructured their process? How does this make them look like anything more than accomplices in the case? The fact is that, from the time Cardinal Ratzinger was informed of Reverend Michael Teta’s activities with young boys, it took the church twelve years to act.

Twelve more years of pedophile priests.

This pope has been aiding and abetting child molesters for years. He either blatantly helps them out with trip to therapy and new assignments, or he simply ignores new cases because the rules are being rewritten. Either way, he needs to step down.

How can anyone continue to support this church, knowing what they have done? I can understand keeping the faith, but not keeping the pope and his cronies.

>A Dreamgirl Take On Twilight

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Gus Van Sant wants to do it. My Own Private Twilight?

So does Sofia Coppola. Lost In Transfusion?

Now comes news that Bill Condon looks to have taken the lead in directing the last two installments of those Twilight movies.

Condon directed Gods and Monsters and Dreamgirls.

Effie White is a vampire?

And I Am Blood Sucking You……

We’re Your Vampires, Boys We’ll Make You Immortal…..

Got Me A Cadillac Hearse……..

Might be interesting.

>The Cake Baby

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It’s been quite a week [though I think it’s longer] here at Casa Smallville. Carlos has been in a deep funk and wouldn’t tell me why. One morning, I smelled something burning and my first thought was, I’m having as stroke.

Luckily that wasn’t it. I walked into the kitchen and asked Carlos what was burning, and he said, It’s just the fire in my soul going out.

I wished it was my stroke.

I asked what was wrong and he couldn’t-wouldn’t elaborate. Several days went by and there were more snide asides about pitiful existences and days being numbered and so on.

Then it hit me.

His birthday.

Carlos.Does.Not.Like.Birthdays.

He doesn’t like the idea of getting older, although, it’s really only one of two options, and the only one that doesn’t require mortuary visits and crematorium trips. I tried to get him to snap out of it. I suggested he select a restaurant for us to have dinner on Saturday. He suggested Chili’s and I hit him in the head with a cartoon frying pan.

Someplace nice, I said.

I dunno, was his response.

So, I opted to choose a place for dinner this Saturday, and he stayed silent, except for the I don’t like birthday mutterings. I do wonder if it didn’t help that i kept telling people he would be sixty-five. Especially since he many many years from that mark.

Just sayin’.

Then, on Tuesday, the day before his birthday, mind you, he calls me and asks if he’s going to have a cake for his birthday! He didn’t even want a birthday and now he’s hopped up like a buttercream junkie looking to score.

You said you didn’t want any cake, that you don’t like birthdays.

But I like cakie-cakie.

So, having yesterday off from work, I looked in the cookbook for a simple recipe. I don’t bake. At Casa Smallvile, Carlos is the MasterBaker; say it fast, and try not to laugh. I’ll demonstrate: Carlos loves to MasterBake. If he could earn a living as a MasterBaker he’d be MasterBaking morning, noon, and night.

I’m done.

I bake him a cake. A simple Carrot Cake. I think it turns out good; Martha would hate it, but then she hates everything since she got out of the slammer. He calls several times during the day to ask about the alleged cake and I repeatedly told him there would be no cake because he never said, until the last minute, that he even wanted a freakin’ cake.

I’m beginning to shout like Regis Philbin, and that ain’t good.

So, I hid the cake.

He comes home and looks around the kitchen, sniffing like a bloodhound on a pound cake run, and then casts his eyes down. I tell him again, You said no cake! All at once he’s ten-years-old and pouting down the hallway, dropping his briefcase, moaning something in Spanish. I try not to laugh.

We eat dinner, and as I’m in the kitchen getting him some more salad, I hear him whistling a melancholy version of, wait for it, For He’s Jolly Good Fellow. I almost burst out laughing. Instead I told him he was pathetic and came back with more salad.

After dinner, I cleared the table, and in the kitchen, I took his gifts from atop the refrigerator, and removed the cake from inside it. I had a plan to get him in the kitchen. I would drop something on the floor, shout Damn! and he’d come running…Surprise!

I drop something.

Nothing.

I drop it again.

What’s going on in there?

I dropped something.

Oh.

He.Does.Not.Come.In.

I pick up a plastic mug and hold it above my head and toss it to the floor.

Now, he comes in.

To cake and gifts.

That cute lower lip of his shot out faster than you could say, Happy Freaking Birthday You Big Baby!!

>I Don’t Need No Cure

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Wow.
Just wow.
Apparently, in the land of Prop H8 known as California, there is a law that requires mental health officials to seek a cure for homosexuality, aka The Gay. The law was originally written in 1950 and re-enacted in 1967, the year gay men protested police brutality and harassment at the Black Cat Tavern in Silverlake. Minor amendments were made to the law as late as 1977, but the basic language–calling for a cure for homosexuality–remains in state law.
Yes. I Know!
Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal said “it’s time to strip that vestige of institutional bigotry from California’s code books,” and has introduced a bill to repeal Section 8050 of the Welfare and Institutions Code, which declares the State Department of Mental Health “shall plan, conduct and cause to be conducted scientific research into the causes and cures of sexual deviation, including deviations conducive to sex crimes against children, and the causes and cures of homosexuality…”
I think Miss Ross said it best:

>Calls For Help Still Go Unanswered

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In an effort to save what little face they have left, the Catholic Church in Germany set up an abuse hotline for people calling in to seek advice and report abuses. Nice try. Except that on the first day the hotline was so overwhelmed with calls that it had to be shut down.

Apparently, over 4,000 alleged victims of physical and sexual abuse by Catholic priests called for help; far more than the handful of therapists assigned to deal with them could answer. In the end, just 162 out of 4,459 callers were heard before the system was shut down. The head of the project, Andreas Zimmer, admitted that he wasn’t prepared for “that kind of an onslaught’.

And the scandal continues to grow.

Earlier in the week stories surfaced that Bishop Mixa, an ally of the Pope, was accused of beating children, though the allegations have been denied. Still, several children have come forth to say he beat them with fists and a carpet beater while screaming; ‘The devil is in you and I will drive him out!’

Bishop Stephan Ackermann, who was appointed the bishopric of Trier last year, reported that 20 priests are suspected of having sexually abused children between the 1950s and 1990s, and that three of the cases had been passed on to public prosecutors, with two more soon to follow.

And there is still anothe rcase of pedophilia that Pope Benedict allegedly knew about, this time in the U.S. The Reverend Lawrence Murphy spent years molesting children at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, but when the case came to the attention of the Vatican, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then led by Cardinal Ratzinger before he became pope, declined to take action.

When the problems of the Catholic Church and it’s abuses, from sexual to physical to emotional, reach all the way to the highest peaks of the churcvh, then the people deserve to hear the Pope respond.

But he stays silent.

Unlike the victims.

>John McCain: An Asshat For All Seasons

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I remember that scene in the movie well.

The scary creature, hidden by cloth and shadow, chased through the streets by a mob of angry citizens with badly spelled signage, until he was cornered and cowering and afraid. He ripped the fabric from around his face and shouted those words I will never soon forget:

I am NOT a Maverick.

Oh, but Grampa, you once sang a different tune.

Sidenote: when will people, and by people, I mean politicians, and by politicians, I mean, asshats and wingnuts, realize that they cannot simply rewrite history because they say so. We have this thing called the Internet now, and Google searches, and YouTube.

Grampa John McCain to Newsweek:
“I never considered myself a maverick. I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities.”

You can lie, Grampa, but you cannot hide!

>Happy Birthday Baby

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Yup. It’s today.
Carlos’ birthday, and, as he would tell it, like Vera Charles, he is somewhere between forty…..and death. But, he doesn’t get to tell it. I do, because it’s my blog and I’ll write if I want to….
I am amazed by Carlos. I learn something new about him, from him, every day. His hasn’t always been the easiest path; he’s had more ups and downs than a power top at an all-night orgy, but he moves on with a smile. He’s endured things and overcome things that would break a lesser man, but he does it a laugh and , perhaps, a little sashay that would make RuPaul green with envy.
He has a smirk that makes me swoon.
He has a way with words that makes me feel like a dizzy redhead.
He has a heart and passion for life that is unmatched.
So, here we are, celebrating his birthday for the tenth time together, and I am looking forward to ten more, and ten more, and ten more.
I love you, Carlos, for who you were and who you are and who you will be.
Happy Birthday, Baby, and if they ask, I won’t tell.

And, rather than singing that old tired birthday tune, I’ll end with a little John Barrowman, and I Am What I Am because Carlos is what he is, and it’s the only way he’ll have it.

>DWTS Gets Politcal!???!?

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Huh? What?

Niecy Nash and Louis van Amstel dance “The Struggle”many of us have had to face.