Oh, reader,
I have been so caught up in my new romance that I have neglected you. 
I feel terrible about it.
Really.
I do.
But what I feel even worse about is the fact that thousands of women in this country are being killed by Breast Cancer.
God knows, I have had this weight on my heart for more than 10 years now, but finally I have met a man strong enough to do what I cannot, and fight like I cannot. 
My boyfriend is walking in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.  He is talking the talk, walking the walk, and needs to put YOUR money where his mouth is.
Please take a moment to contemplate the amount of money you spend entertaining yourself and your friends in an average year, how much cash you invest in new shoes and wigs, how you otherwise dispose of all that GAY income, and then think about the number of women you know with breasts, and how each and every one of them is at risk for this killer affliction.
Please give money to this cause.
Please help fight this killer.  Of Mothers, Sisters, Aunts and Cousins.
My baby has to raise $1800 before he can don his track shoes and make moves, but before you click the link below and pledge your ONE-WEEKS-WORTH-OF-THURSDAY-NIGHT-DRINK-MONEY to the cause, understand that $1800 is just the minimum, and every single tax-deductible dollar helps.  Helps a mother who can't afford her treatment, helps an aunt get an annual mamogram, helps a sister learn how to give a self-examination, and may help a daughter or granddaughter get an innocuation against Breast Cancer in the next few years.
Please please please PLEDGE HERE.
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV0RL7vK44E

adorable!

Impossible "Double Bird-Strike" or Corporate Cover-up?
Dear Reader,
You are probably aware by now that I strive to provide information you can use in your everyday life via this Blog.  This vital information often takes the form of testimonies from my own everyday life, but sometmes it is presented in the form of links and/or clips from outside sources.
Warning: the following information has already been forwarded to many of you (and my Washington Post connection), so please bear with this re-hash of an old anecdote.
Rewind: ten years (or so) ago, my father was the Regional Aircraft Maintenance Supervisor for a major national airline at a major international hub somewhere in the midwest.  After 35 years of service to that airline (with perfect attendance!), he was contemplating exercising his option on Early Retirement, and the primary factor in that consideration would prove to be the biggest Industrial Secret I was privy to until the Ikea Scandal.
At the time, his employer was updating its fleet from a combination of Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas jets and turboprops for new AirBus jets.
What dear-old-dad shared with me is relevant today more than ever.  Dad told me that the biggest problem facing his hangar crews was the fact that the wear-and-tear-prone parts of the new AirBus jets were made of Composite Materials and required near-Advanced Degrees to service.
Dad was a graduate of NYC's High School of Aviation, and had worked his way up the Aircraft Maintenance ladder from wrench-wielding greasemonkey to Management every single day for more than 30 years.  He missed my Elementary School Graduation (it happeed on a Thursday) and my Carnegie Hall Debut (on a Tuesday) so that he could be given a Gold Watch for his devotion to the company.  In fact, his 35-year career was divided into two eras; he had perfect attendance for 30 years, suffered a minor Cardiac Event in the hangar, was out of work for 1 day, then went on to achieve another 5 years of perfect attendance at his job.  The shitty Airline wouldn't forgive the ONE SICK DAY he took in 35 years and reward him with anything more than that damned 30-year watch.
But I digress...
What dad was faced with was a staff that had to abandon its wrench-and-screwdriver trainig in favor for the crash course in Ceramics being taught by the engineers sent from France to the Midwest in order to educate those poor greasemonkeys on proper AirBus aircraft maintenance. 
Yes, reader, the aircraft components that see the most wear-and-tear (wing flaps, tails and engines) are CHEMICALLY BONDED to the fuselage of AirBus jets.
But why does this matter?  What does this mean?  Think back to November of 2001 when that AirBus jet bound for the Dominican Republic crashed in Belle Harbor, Queens shortly after take-off from JFK.  The jet crashed in one part of the neighborhood, its engines in another and its tail somewhere else.
And yesterday another AirBus (leaving from LGA) crash-landed in the Hudson river.
Today, the NTSB held a press conference and announced that it was using SONAR to locate the engines of the A320.
The fuselage drifted more than a mile down river, completly engine-less.  This is because the engines did not suffer a doubly-catastrophic ingestion of a flock of south-bound Canadian Geese, but rather was the victim of a harried (LGA is one of the most-delayed airports in the world!) hangar crew poorly trained in the delicate balance of chemistry and ceramics; incapable of the finesse necessary to chemically fuse engines to a fuselage made of composite materials under heat-lamps.
Instead of reporting that AirBus jets require a degree in Chemistry in order to maintain their working parts, the media is reporting that the crash-landing of flight 1549 is a "miracle."  What it really is, tho, is a plane (like any other) designed to GLIDE to a safe emergency landing (like every other plane), actually doing what it was MADE TO DO.  With the exception that this jet's engines fell off because of the European knack for saving time.
In European hands, the service-to-fuel-to-flight turnover period is whiddled down to minutes because of the use of ceramics.  In the hands of American greasemonkeys, when the wrench is replaced by the kiln in one of the busiest air-travel corridors in the world, the service-to-fuel-to-flight turnover period can be Corporately sound yet fatally rushed.
Its time for US airlines, OUR media, and the NTSB to stop shielding AirBus (a foreign company!) from the scrutiny it deserves (and the accountability OUR COMMERCIAL PASSENGERS deserve!) and start an inquest into the process, training offered and maintenace practices of ALL jets/airports in the US.

Reader, you are probably familiar with my writing style and how I tend to use the term "Amerikkka" when discussing a particularly contemptible aspect of our daily lives here in the USA.  I am writing this to announce that after the historic turn of events that occurred in this great country on Tuesday past, I will cease to use this term unless I am talking about Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Fred Phelps or any of the other talking-heads that represent the Olde Amerikkkan ways.

Yes, from now on, when I write about politics or culture or life or the bovine-lead conspiracy to enslave mankind, I will use the more traditional term "America..." where the 'c' stands for Colored.

It was by happy coincidence that I found myself at Rockefeller Center on election day.  I was showing an out-of-towner the view from the Top of the Rock and when we got back down to street level, we were confronted with cheers from all sides and people running through the streets alongside cars with honking horns.

The energy of the massive crowd (of locals, tourists and foreigners alike) that had assembled at NBC's "Election Plaza" was like nothing I had ever experienced.  The screams and frantic sights I heard and saw a block away almost put me back into the terrorist attack/massive blackout-mode of awareness we NYers have learned to use over the past few years, but once I turned that corner and saw the hugging, smiling, crying and singing masses, it was as if I had finally awakened from a nightmare that was all too real.

Having been a part of this city for all my life, I am acutely aware of the fact that it is a true Kosmopolis (City-as-World), and a microcosm of all of humanity in this post-modern globality.  It has weighed heavily on my heart knowing that the pain, anguish, loss and rage we NYers have felt is merely a glossed-over, sanitized version of the suffering of all of our fellow humans during the last seven years -while we may have felt the first and deepest cut, we are always aware of the pain and hunger of our brothers and sisters the world over.

And on Tuesday night, at 11pm, in mid-town Manhattan, a soothing balm was finally spread over our collective wounds.

The effect of the relief was instat, and radiated out from the Rock to Times Square, to Harlem, to Brooklyn, to Chicago, to South-Central LA, to Kenya, to Indonesia, to London, to Sydney, to Paris, to Buenos Aires, to Toronto -from where I stood to where you were- and into the history books.

I am so proud of what WE THE PEOPLE achieved on Tuesday, so proud of what the people of this city experienced.  For the first time in human history, as a nation, a community, a true globality, we have seen a momentous transition: gone is that September day when the earth stood still, and arrived has the November night when we all took a step forward.  Together.

 

If you're like me, you've been stoned one too many times and watched way too many obscure sci-fi movies during your adolescence.

I once spent a weekend watching the entire "Planet of the Apes" saga.  That's all five original movies and then the 2001 remake.

Even people who haven't seen the movies are probably familiar with the line "Get your filthy paws off me, you damn dirty apes," as growled by Charlton Heston, the greatest teeth-grinding Amerikkkan actor of the 20th century.  However, it takes at least one viewing of the entire series to understand the nuanced Whos, Whats, Wheres, Whys and Hows of the Ape's ascent to domination of humanity.

Essentially, after a plague wipes out the dogs and cats of the world, humanity starts to keep apes as pets.  Soon after, the role of the apes evolves -pun!- from that of pet to the role of servants.  After a couple decades, the face of the earth is changed when self-contained citystates replace nations, all built by ape-slave labor.

As with humans, the ape slaves soon get fed up with being slaves and rise up, overthrowing their masters and asserting their dominion over the Planet of the Apes.

Fortunately, our domesticated canines and felines haven't succumbed to a plague.  Yet.  But the first step toward the ape revolt has already been taken by our friends in Japan:



While the Japanese Macaque was not a part of the social hierarchy in the Planet of the Apes movies, Wikipedia has this to say about them:
"The Japanese Macaque is very smart. It is the only animal other than humans and raccoons that is known to wash its food before eating it. Researchers studying this species left sweet potatoes out on the beach for them to feed on, then witnessed one female taking the food down to the sea to wash the sand off it. After a while, others started to copy her behavior. This trait was then passed on from generation to generation, until eventually, all except the very oldest members of the troop were washing their food in the sea."

Pretty fabulous, eh?  Maybe one day (probably soon) we can all have our own food-washing, sake-pouring slave monkey!

Hysterical...

No comments on my last post?  Really?!  That's the last time i share anything deep and meaningful with such an insensitive, callous, self-absorbed person (Hi Sis!).

Anyway, back to superficiality.  And there is no better topic for the lies, shamelessly pandering, egomaniac than The 2008 Presidential Race!

So here goes:

Wow!  That was long.  I hope all of my compatriots here in the US of ADD can get thru the whole thing.
Hi-lite: "[John McCain] would be on the cover of Popular Mechanics, if they asked him to!" -Joy "Why Michael Watches The View" Behar

And then this happened:

Remember when you were a child and you told your mom that you had changed your major for the third time just because you wanted to spend more time with your peeps, and she responded with "If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?!"

Ironically, NYC's remarkable bridges occupy a significant place in the world's collective heart: there's the Brooklyn Bridge -on that day in 2001 both the National Guard and Air National Guard were mobilized to protect it- and the George Washington Bridge -our only double-decked direct link to the "Amerikkkan Heartland" (New Jersey)- and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which was the world's longest suspension bridge until the Japanese concocted to connect something to something else.  All bridges considered, NYC's commuter spans offer the suicidal sycophant his choice of Height, History and Hauteur.

All the better for driving your Bandwagon across.

Reader, you know I like a good metaphysical simile, a nicely rounded metaphor.  But I like getting right to the point a bit more, so here it is.

I met a boy.  Actually I met a young, attractive, intelligent and intellectually stimulating man.  We speak the same language (Geek), share the same indulgences (Video Games), laugh (at the same things), cry (wholeheartedly) and share (Delicious Sex) together.  He is the bridge that connects the old Me to the new Us.  He delights me by smiling.  He arouses me by talking.  He amazes me by being himself.  He confounds me by understanding.

And I love him.

A couple of years ago, my Best Friend found his life-partner, and shortly thereafter, they were married.  Just a few days ago, my Best Friend proposed to her Bride (bridge)-to-be, and they will soon be wed.  So if there's a Bridge anywhere in the world that is known for it's connection between the heartbroken sceptic and love; the lonely boy and his mate; the documented past with the unknowable future, let me know where to line up for my jump.

He did it.  She's gonna do it.  And in the next year I will be jumping off of the one and only bridge my friends did.

    Well reader, last week was a remarkable moment in the history of globetrotting.  Kids were on Spring Break, the Pope came to NYC and I went to Toronto to warm Sis-and-Hubby's new house.
    My sojourn to the great north began at 530 AM, when I rolled out of bed, got on the E train and transfered for the Maple Leaf Express at Penn Station.  10 hours into my 12-hour ride up the asscrack of western NY, I was asked by a Candian border man if I had ever been "denied entry into Canada before."  I looked down at my hippie tee-shirt, torn jeans, stocking feet and remembered my unshaven face and replied "Not yet, is there a dress code?"
    14 hours into my 12-hour ride, I was in Toronto.
    Sis and I played catch-up on the balcony-swing, and struggled to contain our emotions.
    The next day, the kids went off to work and I was left home alone with the Jack-beast.  After an hours-long search for waterballoons (unsuccessful!) I had a dance party with Jack, followed by a photoshoot.  Ain't we cute?



It wasn't until hours later that someone told me that the Man-Bear-Pig was not alowed on the couch.  But look at us!



That night, Sis and I had a Grrrls night out, and got all blubbery.  Crying on the dancefloor is a sign of over sentimentality.  Getting shitfaced and collapsing in your own bed at 1AM is a sign of getting old.  We did both.

The next morning, Hubby ripped open the blinds in my (their living) room and we were off to the supermarket to buy supplies for the party.  2 hours and $200 later, we nibbled some sandwiches and awaited the arrival of the Perpetually-late J-Nice and her Beau.  Once those kids arrived, the pre-party began. 



    5 Smirnoff Ices, 3 cocktails and 2 hours later, I was saying hello to Sis's first guest.  Branflake was a cute twink of indeterminate age and undisclosed interests who left just before becoming possibly interesting, vacating a spot on the balcony that was soon filled with very interesting young ladies.
   
    When the sun went down, the dress came on.  Sis de-throned Betsy as Prom Queen and gave us his best Patsy Face.




Maybe she should've shaved her pits...



Or taken it off before getting this drunk...



J-Nice manned (monopolized) the iPod station to keep the Spic-o-rama groove going.



Hubby groped Betsy...



And made at leat one funny comment...



While I socialized...



Got drunk...



...Drunker...



And still drunkerer...



    The next morning I got back on the Maple Leaf Express and 2 hours into my 16-hour return trip I was asked the reason for my visit to Toronto by a US Border man.  When I answered I had gone to attend a party, Agent Bitterman (his real name!) flagged my suitcase with a post-it, and moments later I was being "inspected" in the border control post.

    I had a blast, and only wish I had taken more pictures because I really don't remember much.  Oh well, there's always next time.

    An oft-repeated toll plaza along the Path to a Gayer Life is THE QUESTION.

    I have been asked in and out of mixed company, by heterosexual men and women both individually and in the middle of passing the dutchy to my left-hand-side.  It's a question that speaks to the very difference betweens queers and breeders, a question that members of Gay Couples are constantly asked, and Gay Men ask a potential couple-mate only after the third drink:

    "So, who's the woman?"

    Here's a link to David Sedaris' brilliant meditation on the subject.  Enjoy.  And if you don't know who DS is, pull the rock back over your home, draw your curtains and take a nap.