It's That Time ...

Well, I am back to work today, for at least a few hours each week. I’ve been doing some things from home, but there are things that cannot be accomplished that way, and clients who need to be updated on what’s happening an, just stuff that has to be done in-house; not my house, that house.

They are slowly opening things up here in Smallville, and we—even while being the epicenter of COVID-19 back in early March when the first South Carolina case appeared here—have flattened our curve. So, we reopen some things, slowly, still with precautions and masks and social distancing in place.

This won't be a daily thing, but it'll be done just to keep us up on what's happening, what needs to be done as we get into Summer and Fall, and how we're gonna continue to work during this mess.

One upside? My racist co-worker ... whose name, ironically, is Karen ... and who has been posting conspiracy theories all over Facebook about the death numbers being exaggerated and the virus being created in a lab in China and _____being the greatest leader of all time, has chosen not to leave her home. That’s right, this is all a lie, but she’s not leaving her house.

Hypocrite racist, say what?

Anyhoo, I’m off for a few hours to see what can be done, make a few calls blibbety blah blay blue work.

Take care. Stay safe.

In The Age of _____, Angela Diers Thinks She Can Collect Unemployment For Being A Racist

The good news?

Angela Diers, an Iowa woman was fired for Dexter Laundry for being a racist pig to her Mexican co-workers … she made it clear that she hates “f**king Mexicans” … cannot collect unemployment.

The bad news?

In the Age of _____, Angela Diers thinks that what she said shouldn’t keep her from collecting unemployment because she’s heard other employees make derogatory comments about "blacks and foreigners" since _____ became president.

And so that should make being a racist okay?

Luckily the good folks at Iowa's Employment Appeals Board Basically said, “Not today, Satan,” and ruled that Diers' statements clearly met the definition of misconduct and disqualified her from collecting unemployment benefits.

Their ruling reversed Administrative Law Judge Beth Scheetz, who said Diers deserved unemployment benefits because "since President _____’s election, it was common for workers" at the plant to talk of hating African Americans and foreigners.

So, because we have a racist in the White House, who spews racists rhetoric against every single person of color, Beth Scheetz and Angela Diers think that behavior does not qualify as misconduct at work.

Racism … open hostility for people of color … does not qualify as misconduct.

And before anyone cries “Freedom of Speech,” the First Amendment, while it does protect people from ­government-imposed restrictions on their speech, it does not apply to speech in the context of working for a private company.

So, sorry Angela. Maybe you will now think twice about being a hate-filled racist thug.

And, sorry Beth, maybe you’ll understand that Freedom of Speech does not mean you can say whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want.

Des Moines Register

Bobservations

Well, the bedroom has been painted and we have moved back to the king-sized bed, with two grown queens and three cats. Of course, now we need new lamps, drapes shapes, a ceiling fan and more, so there’s that.

But, while we were in the midst of painting and sleeping in the guest room, I had gone to bed early one night. Dozing a while, I heard Carlos go into our bedroom to use the bathroom, and then he came to bed. After dozing some more, I woke to hear a cat clawing the carpet; Consuelo has a nasty habit of that, but if you startle her with a loud noise, she stops.

I clapped my hands; she didn’t stop. I tried again; it didn’t work. I got out of the bed and went into the hallway where I heard a feeble little mew coming from the other side of the door into the master bedroom; clearly, she’d followed Carlos inside and found herself trapped.

The next morning, I told Carlos about it and he said:

“It’s her own fault, she should learn how to get out.”

Yes, he thinks a cat should learn how to open a bedroom door.

Joseph Segal, a London-based musician and performer, applied to a talent agency to represented him, but he was refused because …

“‘We already have a gay actor on our books and also an actor/musician of the same age. So we feel there would be a clash … I’m unable to consider you at the moment.”

Segal posted a screenshot of the email on his Twitter account, slamming the homophobic talent agency:

“I am hurt and frustrated. Are all gay actors the same? Do we not get cast? Are there not enough roles for us?”

Suddenly, Segal began receiving support from other working actors, like Sherlock actor Mark Gattis—"‘Christ. This is scary. Reprehensible”—and Game of Thrones actor Tom Hopper—“Joseph, it is a disgrace that this agent has brought your sexuality in to the equation as a reason not to take you on. I’ve worked with many gay actors and they very often are playing a straight character and vice versa. So your sexuality is irrelevant to your casting eligibility”—and Matthew Lewis, Neville in Harry Potter—“This is mental. Do you wear a sign? Who gives a shit! How many straight actors they got? Any clashes? I heard Schwarzenegger wasn’t actually a cyborg from the future but they gave him the part anyway. Christ, [acting is literally pretending to be somebody you’re not. Sorry pal.”

Just as suddenly the agency apologized:

“We offer our sincerest of apologies to you and anyone else who may have taken offense. We feel ashamed about it, so ashamed we feel unable to defend it. ‘When choosing clients we look at all aspects the artist brings to the table and at no point should we have commented on your sexuality.”

Even more suddenly, the talent agency closed:

“The agency will close after a number of its clients leaving. This was an inexperienced agency, who I now know, was not a member of the necessary associations.”

Seriously; in this day and age.

Now, I am not exactly happy about this news, but it appears that Husband-In-My-Head, Anderson Cooper, has broken up with his longtime boyfriend, Benjamin Maisani:

“Benjamin and I separated as boyfriends some time ago. We are still family to each other, and love each other very much, we remain the best of friends, and will continue to share much of our lives together.”

Um, Andy? If you need a shoulder to cry on …or, you know, whatever, I’m here for you …

Just sayin’.

Speaking of gay men, this week Vice President Mike Pence ... see what I did there ...  had breakfast with the new Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar—an openly gay man—and the meeting was closed to all media at the request of the vice president.

Huh. Mike Pence dines with a gay man behind locked doors?

Come out, come out, wherever you are, Mike.

Oh, I love Karma … for the first time in nearly twenty years, the American people turned against the National Rifle Association, with some 40% of those polled in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll having a negative view of the NRA, while 37% had a positive view.

Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a significant drop from April 2017, when the same poll found a 45% positive to 33% negative divide.

Looks like the NRA will have to shell out more coins to buy their favorite politicians.

And they’ll still lose.

Just sayin’, but … there are some folks on the interwebz who think this dog looks like Ivanka _____.

In case you weren’t sure, Ivanka’s photo is on the bottom.

Last year, I posted about Racist Coworker and was pleased as punch when she left our employ to move back to whatever redneck, cousin’ fucking, toothless, corn cob pipe smoking hamlet she was from.

Sadly, she has returned to Smallville and to the same job.

Her first day back, I told myself, “Be nice. Be professional. Keep it professional.”

So, as she asked me a procedural question, I politely explained the answer to her, at which point she gave me that Pennywise Clown smile and asked how I was doing and how Carlos was—

I put up my hand and said, “No. We’re not doing this. If you have a work question or issue, I’m here to help. Anything outside the scope of that I don’t want to hear from you, m’kay?”

I thought I handled it well, because I really wanted to take my hands and smash her racist head in.

So, How to Get away with Murder ended without a murder mystery for the first time ever. 

Sure, someone died, but we found out right away who the murderer was, but … in a surprising twist, it appears that the baby Annalise Keating thought had died during childbirth, actually lived and now he’s arrived at college … looking hot.

Rome Flynn plays the far too young for me because I have shoes older than him hottie.

Random Musings

Looks like the suspension is over because … Billy Bush has been fired by NBC over #PussyGate. It appears that NBC will announce in the next few days that this Bush is out of a job, and apparently he has no one but himself to blame.

See, ALLEGEDLY, Billy was bragging about the tape to other NBC staff while in Rio for the Olympics and if he knew about the tape, and if he remembered all of what was said on the tape — with a presidential candidate — and didn’t that to NBC News, well, Buh bye Billy.

I used think Ivanka was the smart one but since Daddy Donald has been running for the White House it’s become clear that, either she’s been drowning herself in the Kool-Aid or she was hoping Daddy would win and she’d be Queen of the Empire because, let’s face it, her other siblings are complete morons.

But … the day before the last debate she posted a picture on Instagram and then favorited a Huffington Post tweet about her father giving the go-ahead for folks to call her a “piece of ass.”

She really did! She’s just like Daddy.

An email from a rep with Ivanka Trump states, “A simple mistake was made by a staff member.”

The story has since been “unfaved”.

From the He Apparently Doesn’t Follow The News Or Supreme Court Decision … former failed GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson says that opposition to same-sex marriage is the only thing preventing the U.S. from descending into “utter chaos” and that marriage equality will lead to “mass killings.”

Um, Ben? You ignorant brainless brain surgeon? Marriage equality has been the law of the land for well over a year now and there hasn’t been chaos and mass killings.

You can stop pandering to be base now and have a sit down.

So, after Hurricane Matthew blew through Camden and the trees came down, one of our neighbors called to say that her cat was missing and that he sued to love to sun himself in our yard.

Well, we looked and didn’t see him, but now the neighbor called back to say that she saw the cat — Gray is his name — going under our house and that he seemed to have been injured.

So, I went under the house — not at all a favorite thing of mine to do and that is not a picture of Gray because he won't come close to me — and saw Gray, but he wouldn’t come to me. The neighbor, whose name is Kitty — seriously — came by and set food out for him and we’re hoping he’ll come to his senses and come out now that the storm has passed but ….

That may prove difficult because starting tomorrow, our other neighbors will be in our yard removing their tree and the tress their tree took down, from our back yard. They will have a team of chainsaws and friends out there to take away the thirty foot tree that toppled, and also take away the three of four trees of ours that were hit by the “faller.”

The good news is that we have several Crepe Myrtles around the yard that get very little sun and don’t bloom as they should, so we’ll be able to move those to this new spot where they’ll get some sun.

Last year we watched a sudsy nighttime soap opera about Montana oil fields; it was dumb. But it co-starred the delicious Aiden Canto until the show was cancelled. So, cut to this year and Canto is back on Designated Survivor playing what may be a bad guy … a hot sultry bad guy.

And Daveed Diggs, late of the Broadway smash Hamilton, is appearing on Black-ish for a few episodes and so, yeah, there’s that, too.

Hotties everywhere …

The Washington Post endorses Hillary:

“In the gloom and ugliness of this political season, one encouraging truth is often overlooked: There is a well-qualified, well-prepared candidate on the ballot. Hillary Clinton has the potential to be an excellent president of the United States, and we endorse her without hesitation [and] … No, we are not making this endorsement simply because Ms. Clinton’s chief opponent is dreadful.”

Bam!

And what’s all this talk about Climate Change?

Ten days ago, in October, we were running the air conditioner because of the heat, and then we had a hurricane roll through and now we’re running the heater.

I went from shirts and flip-flops to sweats and socks in  the space of  a weekend.

We still have the racist Donald supporter at work, and this week she stood up for him after saying he wanted to f#k a married woman or grab a woman by the pussy because, wait for it, 33,000 emails.

I quietly said, “But you have no problem with the Bush Cheney White House deleting 22 million emails?”

She said “Hillary’s a criminal.”

I replied, “Huh, on the one hand, 33,000 emails vanished and on the other, a sexual predator, racist, bigoted, tax-dodging, homophobic, anti-Muslim, anti-women, adulterer for a candidate. Yeah, good choice.”

Some people.

And second-to-lastly, from the I Love Randy Andy Cooper [My-Husband-In-My-Head] … I saw him interview that delusional pandering moron of a Donald campaign manager Kellyanne Conway who declared that because Bill Clinton settled a lawsuit with Paula Jones without going to court, that means he was guilty of sexual assault or cheating or whatever.

Anderson tried to explain that people often settle lawsuits for all sorts of reasons and that doesn’t always mean guilt and Kellyanne, not knowing he was leading her along like an idiot, said it did.

Then, Anderson wondered what about the hundreds of lawsuits Donald settled over the years with former employees and vendors that he screwed out of paychecks? Wouldn’t that make him guilty, by Kellyanne “standards”?

:::crickets::::

Poor Kellyanne …

Random Musings

Big surprise, I don’t follow sports; well some sports. I do surprise Carlos with my sports trivia knowledge when we watch Jeopardy. I answer a question right—or is it Question an answer right?—and I get a look from him like he doesn’t know me. But I digress …

I don’t follow sports, especially professional skateboarding, but apparently one of its biggest draws, Brian Anderson, has just come out as gay. Anderson, who won the Skater of the Year award and a World Cup of Skateboarding title back in 1999, and founded 3D Skateboarders, is now forty and says he is now being asked why he waited until now, and not come out earlier where he might have been an inspiration to others; Anderson replied:

“Hearing ‘faggot’ all the time, it made me think at a young age, it was really dangerous to talk about it. I figured it out how to balance it to where nobody questioned it and I was a big tough skateboarder, of course they’re not going to question that. Nobody thought anything. … I was really scared,” he said. “People would have perceived it differently if I’d said it 15 years ago.”

Anderson says his family and friends knew he was gay, but he never publicly talked about it until now:

“I think of how I felt when I was younger, totally scared. A lot of these kids who don’t have hope are really scared to death. To hear what I went through, and that everything got better for me, and I got a lot happier and felt more free and didn’t have all this shame buried in my body, you become a happier person. So to convey that message is really important to me. I consider myself a skateboarder first, gay second. I’m a skater, that’s all I know.”

And now an inspiration to others, and the recipient of The Gay Agenda and The Coming Out Toaster Oven from HOMO HQ.

Welcome out, Brian; however you do it, and whenever you do it, just do it.

Again, for those of you thinking Pope Francis is an LGBT-friendly Pope, he has once against proven that he is not.

This past week, Pope “Who am I to judge?” Frankie voiced his support for an anti-gay protest in Mexico which was attended by up to 80,000 people.

And, despite saying in 2013 that LGBT people should not be “marginalized” and in 2015 saying the church should apologize to gay people for how they have been treated by the institution, in April he said there are “no grounds” for comparing same-sex marriages with “traditional marriages” and last month he spoke out against transgender children, saying “Today in schools, they are teaching this to children — to children! — that everyone can choose their own gender” and now he has given his blessing to a Mexican protest against same-sex marriage and is “in favor of family and life, which in these times require special pastoral and cultural attention around the world.”

Who am I to judge? Well, it’s pretty easy when his actions are decidedly anti-LGBT to know that he’s full of … well you know.

Despite the video, and the fact that nearly 100 million people saw it, _____ denies he had sniffles at Monday night’s debate:

“No, no sniffles. You know, the mic was very bad, but maybe it was good enough to hear breathing. But no sniffles. No cold.”

[t]Rump also blamed the mic for the fact that future President Hillary Clinton mopped the floor with that dead rat on his head:

“My mic was defective within the room. No, no — I wonder. Was that on purpose? Was that on purpose? But I had a mic that wasn’t worked — working properly. But overall, I thought it was great. And if you look at the polls, they’re though the roof.”

Yeah, for Hillary.

Last week little Prince George met Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who tried to high-five the child who was not having it and who then said:

“A high five? I don’t think so, sir. Protocol calls for a bow from the waist.”

Now, bow!

So, I heard there was a new TV show based on The Exorcist film of the 1970s and I wasn’t really interested. But, I does likes to be scared, so I DVR’d it and Carlos and I watched it over the weekend.

It’s creepy, and ooky, and icky, and, well, Carlos might have had nightmares—the man cannot handle scary — but it also had one thing going for it: Alfonso Herrera as father Tomas, or, as I said when he first appeared onscreen:

Hellooooooooo Padre!

Carlos was not amused.

So, it looks like Disney wants to buy Twitter, on the market for some $20 billion dollars.

No changes planned; you’ll still be limited to just 140 characters, but now they’ll all have to be animated.

Back to the debate … remember when future President Hillary Clinton brought up the architect of a _____ golf course clubhouse, who was stiffed by the “billionaire”?

That architect, Andrew Tesoro, whom _____ still owes over $100, 000 — roughly half Melania’s Botox Budget — spoke to MSNBC about ______, and addressed _____’s claim that “maybe he didn’t do a good job” and that’s why he was stiffed, by showing a letter of recommendation that _____ wrote for him in 2006 when the job was done. In the letter, _____ praised Tesoro as being a “top-notch architect” and yet he stiffed him on the bill:

“[_____] paid partially along the way and the project snowballed over a four year period … We became very much involved in interior design and construction stage work. We made many supplemental agreements as we went along and in the end those agreements were not honored … [_____]  had his chance to pay his bill ten years ago. It was a considerable sum of money, probably in excess of $100,000 that we were left short at the end of the project.”

Tesoro says _____ assured him that much more work and recommendations would come if he’d just let the outstanding debt slide.

Huh, he cannot even afford $100,000? He ain’t no billionaire, he’s just another con man.

Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf may not lose his job over the phony account scandal that has cost his bank its reputation but he’s gonna lose his bonus and then some.

Last week, the Wells Fargo board announced that it is forcing Stumpf to forfeit his $45 million dollar bonus.

Yes, that’ll hurt, because a man who has a job where his bonus is forty-five million is very clearly making much more than that annually. Plus, he’ll probably get a double bonus next year.

Greedy fothermucker.

Too bad so sad, but _____’s children [of the corn] are said to be very unhappy with the new management of his campaign, led by Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.

Oh kids, they are the third team he’s chosen this year so maybe it’s isn’t them, it’s him?

Former House Speaker, and fellow serial adulterer, Newt Gingrich, has gone to the mud with that other GOP pig Donald [t]rump and his body shaming of, Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe by winner, telling an audience of Trumplodytes, AKA Log Cabin Republicans:

“You’re not supposed to gain 60 pounds during the year that you’re Miss Universe. Not fair. Even my act of saying that is sexist and proves I’m not being sensitive.”

Funny, right? Of course, when you consider this comes from a man who cheated on two of his three wives and who supports a man who has cheated on two of his three wives, well, this is the GOP.

So, a Florida woman has paid some $50, 000 for the right to punch pharmaceutical-douchebag Martin Shkreli in the face.

After recently learning his friend’s 6-year-old son was battling cancer, Shkreli decided to auction off a chance for someone to punch him in the face to raise money for the boy’s treatment.

Sadly, before the first punch was even thrown it has become evident that Shkreli — judging by that photo below — has already been pummeled in the face and in that empty spot where his heart ought to be.

So, we have a new employee at work and I made the mistake of discussing politics with her; she’s a _____ supporter and literally believes every word the man says. So, I remained calm — I did! — and told her that it might be best if we didn’t talk politics … because she’s a loon. As I said, I maintained my calm, and left out that last part.

But then another co-worker and I began discussing the shooting in Charlotte of Keith Lamont Scott and this new person inserted herself into the discussion saying that the Black Lives Matter movement was created by Obama and funded by the DNC.

Yes.She.Did.

I replied that I wasn’t sure about that but that I was disgusted by the fact that so many black men — this was the morning we learned about the black man in San Diego shot by police — were being  gunned down, and that you never hear of white men being killed by police. She said, and I quote:

“That’s because white people don’t act like that.”

I again retained my calm, and simply held up my hands and said:

“I’m out. This conversation is over.”

I’m still shocked that this is, or at least appeared to be, a rational woman. And I work with her … pray for me. Pray for her.