I Love My Fans ...

Yes, like most places, it’s been very hot here in Camden. But I will say that we have not been unbearably hot, just a long stretch of hot days, and some amazing afternoon storms. Of course, add in the stupidity, er, humidity, and it’s Sweatin’ With The Oldies at Casa Bob y Carlos.

Which explains this post … up top is one of two fans we bought for the living room several years ago; we liked the simplicity of them, and the fact that they are solid wood, and that they know how to blow. And The Gays love being blown.

We had ceiling fans in all three bedrooms and one in the sunroom and a month ago the sunroom fan went kaput. Since that room is now Ozzo’s room, we wanted a new fan to keep it cool for him so we bought four more similar fans.

These have none of those dangling chains—they come with remotes—and you can set the lights to three different colors, depending on my mood, and there are six speed settings from Spring Breeze to Hurricane Katrina lights!

Best of all, they’re kinda swanky. And they keep us cool. Win, win.

The Funny Papers

Marc Murphy, Mike Luckovich, Mike Thompson, Ed Hall, Walt Handelsman, Christopher Weyant, Bill Bramhall, Darrin Bell, Pia Guerra, Monte Wolverton, Nick Anderson, Steve Benson, Rick McKee,  Adam Zyglis, Clay Bennett,

Why Is It ...

… that, out of the blue, for no good reason, I’ll say things like, “Who in the hell in their right mind would buy living room furniture with cup holders in it?” to the person who has living room furniture with cup holders in it?

… that the Barbie movie made more in one day than Ron DeSantis has fundraised in his entire political career?

… that Americans keep reelecting all the old white people to Congress? I mean, god love her, but Dianne Feinstein is no longer able to serve; and then there’s Mitch McConnell’s little freeze this week. Start voting out these in for life politicians and get some new blood into office.

… that people talk about their inner child? I don’t have one; I have an inner old lady that calls everyone a c*nt and wants to be in bed by 8:30.

… MAGAts want to impeach President Biden? Maybe cuz he’s creating jobs, infrastructure, manufacturing, 140 federal judges, and getting inflation down and all they have is fake outrage about laptops, gas stoves, M&Ms, and Barbies.

… that Michael Elizabeth Pence thinks he has a shot at the White House? Democrats hate him. Pro-choice Americans hate him. MAGAts hate him. The only one who appears to like him is Karen Pence and even she’s waffling.

… that the people shooting up Bud Light cans and burning Barbies call everyone else “easily triggered?”

… Rick Scott, Republican, keeps Tweeting that Joe Biden is a criminal when  he’s the one who defrauded millions from Medicare in a healthcare scam? Oh, yeah, GOP.

I Didn't Say It

Hozier, Irish singer-songwriter and longtime LGBTQ+ ally, taking a stand for the transgender community:

“If you believe in a free and open society, part of that is respecting and supporting your fellow citizens’ rights to be who they are. For me, it’s a question of decency and showing up. It’s a very simple question of human decency when you treat someone with respect, you treat them with respect whether that’s their pronoun, their name—it’s so simple. It really is. These things aren’t that complicated, you know? I think it’s grimly predictable at a time we’re in a cost-of-living crisis, this massive crisis of inequality, a rental crisis, housing crisis,” he said. “At a time where there are already huge, huge questions to be asked about how our society is functioning and what we want out of an economy that really isn’t working for everyday folks … there are media companies who love picking soft targets, and rather than having conversations about the actual, serious, difficult questions of our time and our collective predicament, will just take less than one percent of the population and decide the most pressing thing is to talk about them in an existential way. I don’t know who might need to hear this today but you are loved, you are seen and you deserve to be happy and respected for who you are and the God given life you live.”

This isn’t the first time Hozier has spoken out in support of the LGBTQ+ community; his Grammy-nominated 2013 debut single “Take Me to Church” blasted religious dogma and shame around sexuality. And after Tennessee became the first state to ban drag performances, Hozier performed with Sheryl Crow, Maren Morris, and others at the “Love Rising” concert benefiting Tennessee Equality Project, Inclusion Tennessee, and Out Memphis.

Bravo. But on the flip side …

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Jason Aldean, doubling down on his faux outrage and fake patriotism:

“So, all you weirdos out there who escaped your small town? I see you. I know what you went through. And I hope you have found a place where you feel at home and comfortable enough to be yourself. You were never a weirdo. There was never anything wrong with you. You are not depraved. Sometimes we’re just born where we don’t belong. And someone creating an idyllic and violent fantasy of “community” of the place you had to leave behind doesn’t change that one bit.”

Sometimes we’re born where we don’t belong? Fuck all the way off you asshat. In America anyone and everyone should belong where they choose to live and if you think your stance makes you patriotic you need to get a goddamned dictionary. Or just shut the fuck up.

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Chris Christie, on Ron DeSantis and Florida’s new Slavery Wasn’t So Bad education plan:

“First of all, ‘I didn’t do it and I’m not involved in it’ are not the words of leadership. You know, look, Governor DeSantis started this fire with the bill that he signed, and now he doesn’t want to take responsibility for whatever is done in the aftermath of it. And from listening and watching his comments, he’s obviously uncomfortable. The fact is that [he] starts these things for political advantage. I’m talking about governors micromanaging curriculum in schools. And the fact is that, you know, if this was such a big issue for Governor DeSantis, he had four years to do this. He only started to focus on this when he decided he wanted to run for president and tried to get to the right of [Thing 45]. So I think people see this as politically manipulative. We’re dividing our country into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces, and politicians are pitting them against each other to create conflict.”

What the hell is happening in the world where I agree with Chris Christie? But he’s right, DeSantis signed the bill but now acts like he had nothing to do with it, and that’s a chickenshit move. Which is what he is, and what he would be if he ever gets into the White House.

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Jesse Watters, taking over for Tucker Carlson as the most prolific POS on FOX, on Florida’s Slavery Wasn’t So Bad Laws:

“The curriculum includes how Black slaves were able to use their experience in some cases to make their brutally hard lives better. The course examines the various duties and trades performed by slaves like agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation. ‘Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.’ That’s the section everyone’s freaking out about. No one is arguing slaves benefited from slavery. No one is saying that. It’s not true. They’re teaching how Black people developed skills during slavery in some instances that could be applied for their own personal benefit. We can’t have an honest conversation with the likes of Kamala Harris or the likes of MSNBC. They don’t want an honest conversation. Why is Kamala Harris so dishonest about how Black history is taught? Is she ignorant and hasn’t read the curriculum? Is she just being handed talking points by staff? Or does she not want African-American history taught this way? Does she not want students to learn how resilient and capable Black Americans were during slavery and afterwards? What is Kamala Harris hiding?”

Let’s try this, Jesse. You live the life of a slave in the 1860s, okay?

We’ll start with you being chased by strangers and then captured and thrown onto a ship, chained in the bowels where you will spend months crossing an ocean lying in yours, and your fellow slaves,’ excrement; you will hardly be fed, and in fact many of you will die before you reach America. But you reach it, and you are poked and prodded and sold; your name is changed; you are separated from your family. You are put to work on a plantation where you toil from sunup to sundown seven days a week, every single day of the year. You are often starving; you are often beaten by the master for any reason while working in the fields. You sleep twenty or more in one room, often on a bare wooden floor. You cannot marry, you cannot learn to read, and any children you have are taken from you and sold off to who knows where. But then the Civil War happens and you’re suddenly freed and you can be a sharecropper on some white man’s land using the skills you learned on the plantation and you think that’s a positive thing?

Kindly fuck all the way off you self-entitled soulless fool.

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Brian Kilmeade, Fox News host, on Jason Aldean’s inflammatory, racist, hate-filled song:

“I looked at some of the lyrics, because in country music you can actually understand them. He’s taking it from the news. This is happening. This is so outrageous. There’s lawlessness everywhere. He’s trying to say, ‘In a small town—we’ve given up supporting the cops—we elect our own sheriffs, we take care of our own, and if you come in my house, you’re going to get shot.’ That’s called the American dream.”

I must have missed that dream of shooting people; just like I missed the dream where if you’re different from lily white faux-christian gun-toting conservatives then you don’t belong in their towns.

And you should be careful, Brian, because with the plucked eyebrows, and the tinge of blush on the cheeks, along with a hint of gloss on the lips, you’d be run out of Jason Aldean’s small town.

And don’t forget: small towns murdered Emmett Till and Matthew Shepard just for being different.

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Kamala Harris, Vice President, criticizing Florida “extremists” for backing educational guidelines to teach “revisionist history” about slavery being “good” for slave:

“Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of … depriving people of humanity in our world. How is it that anyone could suggest that, in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization? They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.”

It's insanity.

Racist, revisionist, insanity.

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Bobservations

The other day Carlos asked me to find a piece of music for him on the computer so he could buy it and play it on his trumpet. Well, we searched and searched and couldn’t find exactly what he was looking for and then he suggested we could try a music store where he has gotten oil for his trumpet. But then he remembered another music store he goes to and asked me if we could go there. I asked where that one was and he said:

“It’s by that restaurant where we eat.”

“That restaurant? We only eat at one restaurant?”

“You know the one. By that deli we like.”

When I told him I had no idea what he was talking about he asked me to look for it on Google. I searched and searched for “music store by that restaurant we like by the deli” and couldn’t find it.

Here are the late greats, MaxGoldberg and Tuxedo, BFFs for life … from October 2010

“Just For Giggles

I saw this:

And then I saw this:

Coinkydink?”

Those two boys were the best of friends from the first day they met.

Kevin Maxen, an associate strength coach with the Jacksonville Jaguars, os the first male coach in a major U.S.-based professional league to come out as gay:

"I don't want to feel like I have to think about it anymore. I don't want to feel like I have to lie about who I am seeing, or why I am living with someone else. I want to be vocal in support of people living how they want to live, but I also want to just live and not feel fear about how people will react. You have other coaches who have significant others, and they're talking about their significant others, and I felt guilty that I couldn't do the same thing, that I was letting myself down."

Not any longer, Kevin.

Welcome Out and please accept as our gift from HOMO HQ the Official Coming Out Toaster Oven™ and your own copy of The Gay Agenda.

Welcome out.

An all-male panel of anti-abortion religious leaders from around the country have met at an event hosted by Operation Save America—an anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ and anti-Muslim group—that wants Americans to follow “God’s law” and their interpretation of the Christian gospel. So, they decided that a woman who chooses abortion should be put to death.

They say they’re pro-life but don’t see the hypocrisy.

Elon Musk’s has rebranded Twitter as X because he thinks it’ll turn the site profitable again, when the reason it loses money is not because of the name but because of the asshat owner.

X marks the spot where Twitter died.

A man walks into a bar and there, perched atop the bar, is an antique oil lamp. And he asks the bartender:

“What’s this?”

“I dunno. Maybe the last guy left it?”

The man looks at the lamp, notices a couples of spots on it, and begins rubbing it with his shirt sleeve to clean it when … Poof! A cloud of smoke and a genie appears. And like all genies he offers the man Three Wishes. The man thinks for a moment and then says:

“Turn Texas Governor Greg Abbott into a pregnant woman living in a small house with no power and no air conditioning and no working fridge due to our power grid failing on a 104-degree day.”

The genie smiles and says:

“This one’s on me.”

My kinda genie.

Remember Senator Tommy Tuberville saying White Nationalists aren’t racists? Well, because he’s an ignorant twazcock, people began digging into his past and found that the stories Tommy tells about his father’s military service aren’t exactly truthful.

Tuberville claims that his daddy, Charles Tuberville Jr., lied about his age to join the army, that he was a tank commander, that he earned five Bronze Stars, and that he participated in the D-Day landing. But, an examination of army histories, newspaper reports and other materials show that Big Daddy Tuberville joined the army at 18, never got any Bronze Stars, and was never a tank commander but he might have been there on D-Day.

Let’s see, Republican who thinks White Nationalists aren’t racists is also a liar. Yeah, business as usual.

John Halls is six-foot-tall, 41-year-old former footballer turned model, and the question is: Would You Hit It?

Architecture Wednesday: Renovation of 1920s Loz Feliz Tudor

At the base of the Los Feliz Oaks and Bronson Canyon is this stunning renovation of a 1927 Tudor home. A front courtyard behind a tall privacy wall sets the tone as you enter the home; the main living room features an open-raftered ceiling and French doors connecting to both the front and rear courtyards.

Through the dining room is a spectacular revamped kitchen with soaring ceilings, skylights and an eat-in nook. The homeowners used custom tiles, cabinetry, floors and windows to give it a European feel. There are two bedrooms and two bathrooms also on the main floor as well as a second living room with fireplace. Upstairs are two more bedrooms and bathrooms, including the primary suite with high ceilings, en suite bath, and one of five fireplaces in the home.  Outside is a minimalist front courtyard while out back is a private patio with built-in seating and new landscaping.

The home has a bit of Hollywood history in that it  was once owned by burlesque queen Lili St. Cyr. It is conveniently located close to both Hollywood and the Los Feliz neighborhood.

I have a little quibble in that the front seems a little desolate and the fact that it sits at the bottom of a hill with several houses peering down onto it. Still, it’s California chic and tranquil and I could get my burlesque on.

As always, click to emBIGGERate …

Dwell