Painting the town pink

Since absolutely no one else seems to have picked up on this, I figured I'd give it a mention.

San Diego, the quaint little Enron-by-the-Sea that gave me to the world, has been mired over the last few years in a series of scandals involving its esteemed elected officials. One involves the systematic underfunding of the city pension plan, which has led to the city being accorded junk-bond status by Wall Street and thus effectively crippled the city's ability to borrow money; the other involves corruption case brought by the FBI in which two city counselmen were accused of taking bribes from a mobbed-up strip club owner who wanted them to relax the laws on touching dancers.

The former led to the resignation of Mayor Dick Murphy, who was narrowly reelected last year in a shades-of-hanging-chads decision that involved the fact that a few thousand supporters of the write-in candidate, Donna Frye, didn't bubble in the bubble next to the line where they wrote her name, thus putting Murphy ever-so-slightly ahead. Murphy resigned last Friday, and he was replaced for the interim by Michael Zucchet, one of the councilmen accused in Tittygate. Zucchet and his fellow accusee, Ralph Inzunza, were convicted on Monday, and they resigned on Tuesday. Aside from the farcical fact that Zucchet's tenure as mayor is a possible candidate for the Guinness Book of World Records, this turn of events has a layer of even greater interest: Toni Atkins, the councilwoman who represents the neighborhood I grew up in, as well as San Diego's hoppin' homo hood, Hillcrest, is now acting mayor. That's right, the little Navy town that could is now governed by a card-carrying, bouffanted dyke. At least until next week, when the special election is scheduled to take place, after which - since the two whiteboy Republicans seem likely to cancel each other out - it is entirely possible that ex-stoner surfer-dudette Donna Frye will take the reigns. It would be so, so sweet.

Bleary Potter

I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on Saturday. It was a vast improvement over Order of the Phoenix, which I found long-winded and rather pointless, and it features a great deal of exposition that serves as ample payoff for reading this far into J.K. Rowling's epic. Without descending to spoilers, I found the climax to be rather unsurprising, and I was not as broken up about it as I might have been were I in the sixth grade, or if I wrote for the LA Times.

One thing that I found particularly fascinating about this installment was the fact that the main characters - some of whom are reaching the Wizarding world's age of maturity, 17 - are now drinking. In fact, one of the main plot points hinges on Harry's manipulating one of his teachers into getting blind on the sauce. As though the Christian Right didn't have enough to quarrel with in these books, Ms. Rowling is now showing America's youngsters that their counterparts across the pond (the descendents of the thoughtful, practical people who showed the Puritans the door) aren't subject to a nanny-state Prohibitionary culture when it comes to alcohol. Granted, the fact that the legal drinking age in America is 21 doesn't seem to stop many high schoolers, but imagine what's going to happen when all the six year olds who are reading this book are 16: "But mom, Harry Potter drinks!" "Harry Potter also flies around on a broom and slays dragons, hand over that six pack."

Audiences hate dogs, or, Why Hollywood is tanking

As a faggot, I love romantic comedies. I also love John Cusack, and given his track record in off-beat romantic comedies ("Say Anything," "High Fidelity," and most importantly "Grosse Pointe Blank") I should be wetting my pants for his new one. But the poster for his latest film makes it so numbingly obvious that the movie will be a load of treacly dogshit that I can't wait for it to do a big fantastic box-office nose-dive because maybe it will inspire him to make some less disastrously safe decisions.

I mean: "Must Love Dogs"? "The hardest trick is making them stay"? These marketing meetings weren't punctuated by legions of ad account executives barfing up their dignity how? No wonder the box-office is heading for the pit, if they can't even get formulaic pablum right.

Holy talking genitals, Batman!

I realize that I have been absent from blogland for quite some time, and for that I apologize. I have only myself to blame. Well, myself and the fact that Safari, my new favorite browser, seems incompatible with the Blogger editor. But yeah, mostly myself.

Anyway, this video featuring the most charmingly detailed animated likenesses of hoo-hoos and ha-has since ever was awesome enough to jar me out of silence.

P.S. - Please note that the dude's name is the ever-so-not-suggestive Peter, while Ms. Pissin-off-PETA on the left has been given the much less humorous moniker Mina. Why not Kitty? The world may never know.