And so are most Tuesdays and Wednesdays, come to think of it. Thursdays are different. Thursday is the most perfect of all the days of the week because it means Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday are over, but you still have Friday and Saturday and Sunday to look forward to. What’s not to like about that?
Looking forward to the weekend is, at least in my experience, sometimes better than the weekend itself. I blame this in part on The Cure, who carried on about Fridays with such unbridled enthusiasm that it makes my own Fridays seem anticlimactic in comparison, and on Jean-Luc Godard, who made me associate weekends with being captured by cannibalistic guerrillas in hippie garb.
In any case, I am now plunged headlong into three days of existential despair (and high melodrama, judging from my theatrics in this post) as I wait for Thursday, the Barack Obama of weekdays, to arrive, bringing with it the hope of a weekend that will probably suck anyway. If only I were an alcoholic or abused drugs, perhaps I’d be happier right now.
I received a piece of spam this morning with the subject line “Hot lesbian slut gets punished by her girlfriend for fucking another boy!”
(The exclamation point was theirs, by the way, and I commend whoever put the spam together for using it instead of a more anti-gay frowny-face emoticon. In the wake of three states passing gay marriage bans on Tuesday, it makes me happy to know that spammers are so enthusiastic about homosexuality.)
As far as the substance of the subject line goes, I’m O.K. with hot lesbian sluts. I approve of them in much the same way that I approve of the progressive tax system and Velvet Underground records. And if this particular lesbian or, for that matter, any lesbian — hot or not, promiscuous or monogamous, or partly monogamous with a 30% chance of infidelity — likes getting punished by her girlfriend, I’m completely supportive of that.
It’s the “for fucking another boy” part that I’m having trouble with. Doesn’t “another” imply something that “lesbian” and “girlfriend” don’t? I guess what I’m getting at is, I don’t know, I’m not so convinced this hot slut is really a lesbian.
No, they’re not talking about Anderson Cooper — he isn’t a pundit, silly. And the “liberal” rules out FOX’s Shep Smith, which leaves us with the brilliant Rachel Maddow, whose new MSNBC show has garnered impressive ratings for the network since premiering earlier this month. It also has the distinction of being the only show on TV that my teenage sister and middle-aged father watch together, which I think could form the basis of an inspiring ad campaign.
You could start off with a family sitting in awkward silence at the dinner table. When they do speak, their comments are terse and accusatory. The teens are surly, the dad seems exasperated, the mother defeated. But later that night, as Maddow’s show is about to start — she can stand in front of a standard-issue network promo backdrop and smile benevolently with her arms crossed as this happens — the parents put down their copies of Nixonland or What’s the Matter with Kansas? and the teens silence their cell phones and lower their laptop screens for the first time all day.
They watch the show as a family, wearing similar expressions of slack-jawed disbelief as a torrent of clips showing John McCain referring to himself as a maverick plays (or maybe it should be a clip of Sarah Palin talking about Alaska’s participation in the Russian civil war and how they bravely rode into St. Petersburg on dinosaurback to fight on the side of Union because slavery was taking jobs away from Americans — I’m sure CBS has something like that on the cutting room floor).
Then Maddow would offer some kind of wry commentary and the family would relax and find themselves united in laughter. At which point one of those deep-voiced announcers who tries to make everything sound heartwarming would say: “Rachel Maddow, bringing families together in living rooms across America.” Accompanied, perhaps, by a small picture of Rachel at the bottom of the screen and a quickie voice-over: “I’m Rachel Maddow, and I approved this ad.”
Can you tell I’ve had too much time on my hands today?
When Andy Roddick and Novak Djokovic meet tonight at Arthur Ashe, will they be clad in neon spandex and trailed by an entourage of menacing, mullet-sporting goons as WWE music plays in the background? We’ll find out soon enough, but in the meantime I just wasted a good five minutes looking for a picture of a wrestler holding a tennis racket. Didn’t turn up anything useful, FYI, and I wasn’t even directed to a bunch of adult-oriented websites featuring “straight” college jocks experimenting with each other. It’s like the Internet is broken today.
Rich Uncle Pennybags was good friends with Merv Griffin
Seemingly unperturbed by our crumbling national economy, gays will continue to buy their daily Starbucks and keep their Internet porn subscriptions current, in addition to purchasing luxury items like televisions the size of small countries, according to a new study conducted by MergeMedia Group. The group surveyed 500 Judy Garland-loving gay men and lesbians online (which means at least 30 of the respondents were mentally unbalanced heterosexuals or tech-savvy prison inmates) and found that a mere five percent felt “more vulnerable to a recession” than heterosexuals.
These surveys always strike me as kind of ridiculous because gays lie the way everyone lies: frequently, and especially about money. And especially on the Internet, as almost anyone who regularly scours Gay.com and Craiglist for their M4M hookups could tell you. (How much do you want to bet that at least half of the guys who aren’t worried about their financial futures are also “straight-acting” and packing eight inches?) Still, I found this part of the “Hurray for Gays and Their Gobs and Gobs of Money” press release interesting:
Industry estimates put the total buying power of American gays and lesbians at $780 billion for 2008, and a recent report by economist Lee Badgett and the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation and the Law at UCLA says gay buying power may reach $835 billion by 2011.
And that’s not even counting the personal fortunes of Oprah Winfrey and Barry Diller. Put all of our money together and American gays are rich, filthy rich, yet our own government, which taxes us the same as they tax everyone else, still treats us like second-class citizens. Oh, well. At least we have high-definition TVs.
In happier news…
You know how sometimes when oafish actors are asked stupid questions about playing gay characters, it’s a recipe for disaster that results in defensive answers like “Do you have to be a murderer to play a murderer?” Gael Garcia Bernal has already demonstrated that he’s not one of those jackasses, having observed with some bewilderment that he’s more likely to be asked whether it’s hard to play gay than if it’s hard to play a murderer (he also vocally supported the legalization of same-sex civil unions in Mexico), and now he’s at it again, making waves in the blogosphere for referring to his gay roles as “cool” and elaborating:
“I don’t see what all the fuss is about playing gay characters. When I did Y Tu Mama Tambien, I was asked, ‘Don’t you worry about what people will say to you in the street?’ It seemed like it was such a huge deal.
“Why would it be an issue for me? I think it is a very American thing. In Mexico, no one has given me any shit for playing gay roles, for playing a transvestite, whatever. They don’t confuse the actor with the role. I mean, they don’t think Al Pacino’s a cop!”
Finally, someone equates us with a character who is on the right side of the law.
And in granola news…
Actresses Emily Deschanel, Daniela Sea and Jorja Fox (guess she wasn’t in Japan after all) want you to stop feasting on animal carcasses and go green. I suggest they band together and present some kind of eco-friendly workshop at this summer’s Michfest, because massive hilarity would almost certainly ensue.
We here at Cranky Lesbian, LLC have nothing to say on the subject of Mariah Carey’s sexuality. In fact, we have little to say on the subject of Mariah Carey at all, other than we were recently shocked to learn that the title of her upcoming album has nothing to do with butterflies or rainbows.
We weren’t even going to take time out of our incredibly busy (if by busy you mean we’ve been listening to The Magnetic Fields and playing computer solitaire all day) schedule to mention that the notoriously inaccurate and more-than-occasionally homophobic-sounding gossip site MediaTakeOut is reporting that Mariah Carey and Da Brat were spotted canoodling in L.A. this weekend. Reporteth one of their spies:
I just wanted to tell you guys that Mariah Carey and Da Brat are definitely dating [each other]. They were at [Villa] last night and for almost the whole night Mariah was sitting on Da Brat’s lap. And they were both sharing the same drink – FROM THE SAME GLASS!!!
The way those two were carrying on, I thought they would start kissing right there in front of everyone. BTW Da Brat was looking kinda hot … No Homo.
It’s not that we find it so hard to believe that Carey and Da Brat, who’ve collaborated in the past and are known to be friends, might get their L Word on in private. We know that female sexuality is complex, like a Beach Boys vocal arrangement or doing your taxes with nothing more than a pencil and a calculator.
There are, in fact, only a handful of women on the face of the earth we simply wouldn’t believe lesbian rumors about. (Dr. Laura, Laura Bush, and my grandma come to mind. Well, my paternal grandma. The maternal one’s a bit of a free spirit.) It’s more that we don’t give much credence to reports that contain lines like: “BTW Da Brat was looking kinda hot … No Homo.”
“Yeah, my Subaru’s in the shop, so I’ll be driving this for a while.”
When she isn’t dallying heterosexually with fourth-rate rockers in Europe, part-time actress and full-time tabloid fodder Lindsay Lohan is caught in a lesbian love triangle with DJ Samantha Ronson and professional rich kid Courtenay Semel.
I’m on Team Ronson (hey, her brother’s talented), and so far it appears she is winning, because Star magazine reports that Lohan and Semel are no longer roommates and England’s The Sun has pointed out that Lohan was recently photographed wearing a ring with Ronson’s initials on her ring finger.
Of course, Star is basically The Weekly World News with a focus on Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie instead of Bigfoot, and The Sun is, well, The Sun, so this is all completely meaningless and only merited space here today because I’m bored at work.
