Bobservations

The other day Carlos was meandering through the house muttering to himself, and I, as a concerned and loving husband asked:

“What the hell is the matter?”

All love. And he replies:

“Nothing. Just doing my chores to earn my keep.”

“Your ‘keep’?”

“Yes, I clean the bathroom and then I am entitled to a meal.”

“Oh, you get a meal, do you? Did you forget I’m going to be gone tonight for work, and you’d be cooking your own dinner?”

And the howler monkey appeared:

“WHAT??!!?? I have to clean the bathroom AND make my own dinner?”

“Yes, and then clean the kitchen when you’re done.”

The muttering continued until I left.

Clearly when a cat gets the idea of Separation of Church and State, people will understand it, too? Oh, who am I kidding.

On January 28, Fifty Bandz, a 21-year-old Black transgender woman, was shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her death is at least the fifth violent death of a transgender person in the first month of 2021.

When does this end; when do our trans brothers and sisters feel safe being themselves in America? When?

In the Are There NO New Ideas file comes the story that The Woodsman director Nicole Kassell is set direct a reboot of The Wizard of Oz for New Line cinema.

I guess that film classic that has been around for over eighty years isn’t good enough.

So, y’all know that Armie Hammer has been stripped of the very prestigious Husband-In-My-Head honor for his creepy cannibalism, skin carving, abusive sexual hijinks. But, as luck would have it, I found another Hammer. Matt Hammer.

Matt Hammer and his, well, they say she’s his wife, have a new home improvement show on HGTV called The Hammer Family, and I caught a glimpse of Matt’s smile, his beautiful bald melon, the guns in his tight T-shirt and an ass you could bounce a quarter off.

Yeah, I may be sending a new trophy out.

Congressman John Fillmore (Q-AZ) introduced a bill last week, which seeks to limit gender options on Arizona state identification documents to only male and female. In defending his Hate Bill, Fillmore spewed this nonsense:

“I don’t believe we, as a society, should have all of the different binaries identified. What’s going to happen when someday someone wakes up and they want to go to a far extreme and identify as a chicken or something, for crying out loud. Where do we draw the line?”

Smacks of that whole anti-marriage equality chestnut about  how, if we allow The Gays to marry, people will marry their cars or their children and …whatever. Same idiot nonsense, for a new idiot argument.

In other nonsense news, an ALLEGED literacy program in Utah’s Murry school district helps to bring in inclusive books into the classroom. While most of the books at the elementary level deal with race and ethnicity, a boy asked his teacher to read Call Me Max by trans author Kyle Lukoff, a book about a trans boy who wants to go by a name other than his birth name.

After the teacher read the book, bought from home by the student, parents began to complain and now the entire literacy program has come to a halt so the district can “reevaluate” each book in the program.

Again, the book the teacher read was not part of the program but brought in by a student.

I guess Utah only cares about cis literature.

GOP Senator Mitt Romney, coming off his vote to impeach the former president and being seen as a more moderate Republican, has taken a step back into the party.

This week Romney said he will oppose the Equality Act—which expands the prohibition on anti-LGBTQ discrimination—because he worries about its impact on people of faith.

Basically, he wants to keep the God Hates Fags contingent happy at the cost of equality for LGBTQ+ Americans.

Welcome back to the party of ignorance and hate Mittsy. Now …fuck all the way off.

Rush Limbaugh died yesterday and, well, since I was taught that if I can’t say anything nice about someone say nothing at all I will say this about Rush

 

 

 

But, since I also love a good bitchy quote, I will paraphrase what Bette Davis said about the death of Joan Crawford, to fit Limbaugh:

"You should never say bad things about the dead, only good… Rush Limbaugh is dead. Good.”

Thanks Bette.

I need some man now, and so I’ll stop and gawk at model Milan Petruska.

He is all kinds of dreamy, form the baby blues to the pillow lips to that lithe body.

I feel better now.

I Ain't One To Gossip But ...

After the original series, and at least nineteen reboots, Fox has finally decided that the six episodes of BH90210 were more than enough.

Goodbye. See you in about a year when another underling at Fox comes up with the brilliant idea of rebooting a show that has had more lives than a cat.

But why was it cancelled? Jennie and Tori. It seems there were major “creative issues” because Tori Spelling and Jennie Garth, who both also produced on the series, wanted to be too involved in the creative process, and that because of their over-involvement thirteen writers quit the show throughout its run.

It’s six-episode run.

Let it go, Fox; it’s dead.

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And speaking of reboots, apparently ABC’S Revenge is being Revived.

But unlike 90210, the producers have a twist … it’s all about Latinx in the update, in which a Latinx character gets revenge on a big pharmaceutical family who caused an epidemic.

Au currant. This reboot is coming from the same creator and executive producer as the original, Mike Kelley, so you know it’ll be really good in seasons 1 and 3, but season 2 and the last season will be all WTF.

But with Latinx characters.

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Have you ever heard of Lisa Falcone? Me neither, but she’s über rich, über crazy, über dumb, and über racist.  Lisa is married to Philip Falcone, a billionaire hedge fund guy, and she once pissed off the elite of the Hamptons by letting her horses use the pristine beaches a s a litter box.

And now, well, she says she’s allowed to use the n-word with good reason.

The Falcones have been sued by their former personal chef Brian Villanueva for discrimination and violation of New York labor laws. According to the lawsuit, on July 13, Brian brought his girlfriend, who is black, to the Falcones’ Hamptons home to help him out at a party where Alicia Keys and her husband Swizz Beatz were in attendance. After the event, Lisa told Villanueva how “articulate” his girlfriend was and everyone knows what that means. But Lisa continued:

“Your girlfriend speaks very well. She seems educated. I would describe her as a chocolate-covered marshmallow.”

Black on the outside, white on the inside. Villanueva says he was visibly offended, and yet Lisa went on:

 “Do you use the word ‘n*gger’ at home with your girlfriend?”

Villanueva asked Lisa to explain what she meant, and she decided to bring up Alicia and Swizz saying they were not as well-spoken:

“I meant she speaks really eloquently. Alicia [Keys] doesn’t speak that way. She didn’t have an education and was just discovered by Clive Davis when she was fifteen years old. Swizz [Beatz] definitely doesn’t speak that way either.”

That day, Villanueva, for some reason, served the Falcones lunch, and then quit because of the racism, and says in his lawsuit:

“Rather than accepting Plaintiff’s resignation, Defendant Lisa Falcone asked Plaintiff not to resign and stated “talk to my black friends” (seemingly referring to Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz, both of whom were at the beach with the Falcones at that time), and emphasized “they will tell you that I am not racist.”“

Cuz she has black friends.

It’s like Countess LuAnn once famously sang:

♫ ♪ Money can’t by you claaaaaaaaas ♪ ♫

Or common decency.

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The divorce battle may be over but Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s court battles have lasted longer than their doomed-from-the-jump-street—see what I did there—marriage.

Depp is currently suing Heard for defamation—after she claimed he paid people to stay silent about witnessing his ALLEGED violent behavior—and for smearing his name after she filed for divorce.

And with the ball in her court, Heard recently filed a request for Deppy to submit to an IME [Independent Mental Evaluation] to confirm her ALLEGATIONS that Depp’s love affair with booze, drugs, and prescription medicines contributed to his violent behavior.

And since neither one of these fools can go a nanosecond without talking about the other, Depp’s attorney released a statement regarding Amber’s request for an IME:

“This is a defamation case in which Mr. Depp does not allege that he suffers from any mental disorder or condition. Thus, Mr. Depp’s mental condition is not ‘in controversy’ nor does good cause exist under the rule for an IME ... It is a preposterous notion that an IME now would shed light on Mr. Depp’s mental state at the time of Ms. Heard’s abuse hoax back in 2016. Ms. Heard’s effort treads a well-worn path of victim blaming using the pretext of mental health. ”

I’d like to suggest that they both undergo an IME and that, whatever the results, they are both told to go away, and be quiet.

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From the Height of High-larity file comes the tale of one Orenthal James Simpson, former football star and murderer, who is claiming that after a Las Vegas casino banned him for being ALLEGEDLY drunk and belligerent, he was defamed.

Seriously, he thinks his reputation suffered because someone called him a drunk? Most people call him a murderer and he’s fine with that.

Probably cuz it’s true.

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I saw a headline with the words ‘Cuba Gooding Jr.’ and ‘Nightclub’ in it and I just naturally assumed he’d groped another owman in a bar.

Color me surprised to learn that it wasn’t Cuba acting the fool but his girlfriend, Claudine De Niro, Robert De Niro’s ex daughter-in-law, who went over the edge at a Miami Nightclub called Mango’s Tropical Cafe.

Now, he was somehow involved because he was the one Claudine went after, by ALLEGEDLY shrieking at him and then hurling a shot glass at him, and then getting her ass kicked to the curb by security.

Ah, the couple that gets drunk and acts the fool together …

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Now we’ll end where we began … with the death of the 487th reboot if Beverly Hills 90210 and the so-desperate-for-a-job Jennie Garth saying the last reboot is not over. At a recent event, Us Weekly caught up with Garth who swears that BH90210 is not dead:

“I was very, very proud of the work we did in the first season … The show is very meta, so it’s good. The confusion is fine. Everybody’s like, “What is happening!?” We don’t even know. Nobody knows, but we are working it out. It was a very unique, creative vision and it was very specific, and it was hard to convey that to everyone.”

Wait. So she admits no one understood the show, not even the team behind it, but that it was so good, they’re going to bring it back in a different form?

Jennie? You’ve been hanging around broke-ass Tori Spelling too long now, and you’re acting just as delusional.

Go back to waitressing.

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Bobservations

Remember the story of the white woman in Oakland who used the police as her “racism valets” to remove a couple of black men from a park because they were :::gasp::: grilling?

Well, her name Dr. … seriously? … Jennifer Schulte from Stanford University so she is clearly not some stupid ass moron … she’s a doctor.

Well, apparently, a doctor of Racism and White Privilege.

Spread her shame. As I see it, if black people having a barbeque make you uncomfortable, or black people sitting in Starbucks causes you worry, or a black girl sleeping in the common room of her dorm is somehow scary, you have the problem, so maybe you should stay home and leave the world to the rest of us. You’ll be better off, we’ll be better off.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget:

Jennifer Schulte, Racist.

The other morning Carlos, who was in the office reconciling—he pronounces it ‘ree-conciling’ the bank accounts … so cute—came out and asked me:

“Did you make a payment to your AMEX account and forget to enter it into the balance sheet?”

“No. I don’t owe any money to American Express. I never use that card.”

He shows me the bank statement, where a payment was made to American Express in the amount of $230 and on the bank statement, it lists my name Naturally, we both think my account is hacked and I go access my AMEX account online and, yup, no transactions at all, payments or charges, since last fall. I ask Carlos to maybe call AMEX or the bank and see what the trouble might be, but, again, he asks if someone stole my identity and used my card …

“Wait. What? You think someone stole my identity, used my AMEX card to rack up two-hundred bucks in charges, and then paid off the card using our bank account?”

“Yes.”

"Why …. whyyyyyy … would anyone do that?”

But he isn’t listening because he’s spotted another AMEX payment, listed with my name, from the previous month. I look at it and … in the words of the immortal BritBrit, and to paraphrase her greatness …. Oops, he did it again.

The two AMEX payments were from his card, but he accessed the AMEX account on our Google account with was open under my name, you know, because of this here blog and so … the accounts were his, the payments were his.

Of course, I spent the rest of the day asking if he wanted to accuse me of making more nonexistent payments to my accounts. It was fun.

Seriously, there’s nothing going on here, and if you believe that …

Just a day after the Chinese government agreed to put $500,000,000 into an Indonesian project that will personally enrich _____, the Fat Bastard ordered a bailout for a Chinese-government-owned cellphone maker, ZTE:

“President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!”

So, he’s not creating jobs in America, but rather creating them in China, because China ponied up a half-billion dollars for a theme park resort outside of Jakarta at which _____’s business has a deal to license the _____ name to the resort, which includes a golf course and hotels.

Like I said, nothing to see here … right, Deplorables?

Brian Morris, from the small town of Clarendon Hills in Dupage County, Illinois, just won $125 million in the state lottery, quit his job and then …. Brian Morris purchased over 20,000 tons of manure, valued at $224,000, and had it delivered to, and dumped on, the home of his former employer.

Morris was standing across the street and laughing when the police arrived, and he rapidly came over to confess his responsibility and explain his motivations.

Lieutenant Frank Meyers, a spokesman of the Clarendon Hills Police Department, said:

“The accused told us he’d worked for the victim for 17 years and was treated like shit. He says he had to endure his mistreatment because he needed the money, but that now that he won $125 million it was time for revenge.”

Morris attracted a lot of media attention after winning $125 million Powerball and when he was asked by organizers what he would do with the money, he said:

“Just read the news, you’ll see.”

Morris was freed on bail about ManureGate and told reporters to “stay alert”, claiming he had “a few other pranks to pull over the next few weeks.”

I.Can’t.Wait.

Georgia Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate and Republican, because, of course, Brian Kemp is trying to show conservatives he’s a tough guy with a new ad that shows him pumping a shotgun, setting off an explosion, and promising to “round up illegals” in his pick-up truck if need be; in the ad he says:

“I’m so conservative, I blow up government spending. I own guns that no one’s taking away. My chainsaw is ready to rip up some regulations. I got a big truck, just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take ‘em home myself. Yep, I just said that. I’m Brian Kemp. If you want a politically incorrect conservative, that’s me.”

Kemp made headlines earlier this month by pointing a shotgun at a young man who wanted to date his daughter.

Yup, he’s a gun nut and he wants to be governor of Georgia.

Karma; love her. This week, after someone spilled the beans about _____ hack Kelly Sadler’s vile remarks about John McCain, White House Press Liar, Sarah Huckabee Sanders chastised the White House communications team for leaking those remarks. Now, she didn’t denounce the remarks themselves, just the leaking of the remarks to the press.

So, what does a White House staffer do after that meeting? Well, just what Sanders thought:

“I am sure this conversation is going to leak, too. And that’s just disgusting.”

Um, Sarah, you Melting Lump of Play-Doh, saying of someone who is terminally ill, he’s “dying anyway” is disgusting, but telling the story about someone who said that vile thing is not.

Get your priorities straight and … oh, forget it. Look who I’m talking to …

Remember when ____, while lying and campaigning, announced that he would be the most LGBT friendly president ever?

This week his administration rolled back rules that allowed transgender inmates to use facilities that match their gender identity, including cell blocks and bathrooms.It's just one more reversal of an Obama administration effort to protect transgender prisoners from sexual abuse and assault.

But, hey, if it gets rid of the progress set forth by a real president, and harms only trans folks, then who cares, right?

It’s plain to see that Donald and Melania don’t have that same loving type of marriage that the Obamas had, so who does _____ call on for those late-night chats, mid-morning gab fests, and late day gossip sessions?

Sean Hannity.

On some days, they speak multiple times, with one calling the other to inform him of the latest developments. White House staff know the calls happen, because _____ might enter a room and say:

“I just hung up with Hannity.”

He’s even called Hannity during meeting with staff.

It’s a bromance, and the ugliest one in history.

When Patricia O’Grady moved into the top floor of a Greenwich Village walk-up in 1955, she and her three roommates helped sweep the hallway in exchange for a discounted rent of $16 a month. The unit was bare, no more than floor and walls, so the girls installed a sink and other amenities. While her roommates moved on, O’Grady never left, and stayed in the rent-controlled apartment until she died this past March at the age of 84.

Her monthly rent was $28.43.

In addition to possibly being the cheapest unit in Greenwich Village, it also may have been New York City’s last cold-water flat since it had neither heat nor hot water., though it did have two working fireplaces.

O’Grady was so set in her ways, she fought with the landlord any time he tried to update the apartment; when he tried to install proper heat, she pleaded with him:

“What you’re doing to me is torturing me. Please leave the apartment as is. I’m at peace.”

The apartment had no bath or shower. There was only a single gas light bulb, and, thanks to her osteoporosis, O’Grady couldn’t replace it and so she used candlelight; a pull-chain toilet and cast-iron stove were updated only recently.

But, again, $28.43 a month.

With O’Grady gone, the landlord will do a renovation and rent Patricia O’Grady’s old apartment for at least $5,000 a month.

As they say on Project Runway …

“One day, you’re in. The next day you’re out.”

And then maybe you can go back in again?

It looks like Project Runway, formerly the darling of Bravo before all those housewives and realtors, is moving back to Bravo from Lifetime, and we can thank the Weinstein Scandal for it.

The PR moved to Lifetime back in 2008 when The Weinstein Company [TWC] decided to make some more coins from a sale of the show. But now, A + E Television Networks, which owns Lifetime, dropped TWC after all the accusations against Harvey Weinstein came out and Heidi and Co. were :::gasp::: homeless.

And that’s when Bravo opened its purse and rolled out the coins the bring the PR home where it all started, and where it belongs.

It was in, it was out, it’s in again.

I love Melissa McCarthy. I think she’s high-larious. Sadly, for me, she keeps making bad film choices that are one-note jokes and sight gags. Her latest film, Life of the Party, s the tale of a woman who after her husband divorces her, decides to go back to college …the same college where her daughter goes.

Apparently, hilarity ensues cuz Mom is at college with her daughter, but …

I liked it better when Rodney Dangerfield played a rich guy, who was worried that his son wouldn’t attend college to Dangerfield signs up as a student, too … at the same college … in Back to School.

And hilarity ensues because Dad is at college with his son.

Remember what I said Tuesday, about how we should let women run things in the country for a while since men have been f**king things up for a couple of centuries?

Well, Tuesday was a good day for women, and Democrats.

More than half of the winning Democratic candidates for House seats in Tuesday’s primary elections were women, and, in the four states that held primary elections — Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia — 22 out of 40 congressional districts picked women as their Democratic nominees, including eight women of color; women also won 17 of 20 Democratic primary races for open seats.

I’m liking this, a lot.

I have been watching Vida, still, the show on Starz about the two Latina sisters who return home to their mother’s funeral and find out Mama had a lesbian lover.

I’m guessing the show is written by women … or gay men … because there is a fair amount of male nudity in the show; week two gave us the second appearance of Carlos Miranda’s glorious ass, and also introduced us to neighborhood hottie, Tlaloc Medina, played by he-of-the-gorgeous hair, Ramses Jimenez. It also gave us some male frontal nudity from Jackson Davis, who plays Juniper. Jackson was in a scene with his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend where she was, um, well, she was down there and, well, it led to a line of dialogue I never thought I’d hear from a TV show, even a cable show, in which the ex-girlfriend says:

“You waited for me to eat your ass before you dumped me?”

I know. Cable, huh?

Random Musings

First and foremost ... boycott the inauguration tomorrow. I mean, we all know how much _____ likes to brag about TV ratings so wouldn’t it be great if this was the least watched inauguration ever? And, even if it isn’t, you’ll feel better for not having partaken in the glorification of a man endorsed by the KKK and the KGB.

‘nuff said ... oh, except .... #Resist.

Speaking of the inauguration ... one Scottish newspaper description of the event has gone viral.

In the TV description section of the Herald Scotland, “President _____: The Inauguration” is described as if it is an episode of The Twilight Zone.

“After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history. Sci-fi writers have dabbled often with alternative history stories – among the most common is the “What If The Nazis Had Won The Second World War” setting – but this huge interactive virtual reality project, which will unfold on TV, in the press, and on Twitter over the next four years, sets out to build an ongoing alternative present. The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president. It sounds far-fetched, and it is, but as it goes on it becomes more and more chillingly plausible. Today’s feature-length opener concentrates on the gaudy inauguration of President Trump, and the stirrings of protest and despair surrounding the ceremony, while pundits speculate gravely on what lies ahead. It’s a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into, if we’re not careful."

Scary sh*t indeed ... so, again ... #Resist. 

Marriage equality may soon be coming to the Land Down Under, but not if the Australian Christian Lobby has anything to say about it.

They have been fighting equality hard, but now they also have a new target ... a fashion campaign from the Volley Australia shoe label, which encourages people to “root” for change.

Volley’s new #grassroots ad campaign features gay and straight models frolicking in cars, in nature, and on the tennis court with the tagline:

“We’re sick of being socially engineered and we shun political correctness. We’re young and we’re rooting for change. We are children of the sun and are comfortable in our own skin, so don’t tell us who to love or how to be. Our campaign is all about the celebration of sexual expression whilst remembering to stay safe. For this reason we’ve joined arms with Ansell condoms in support of safe sex, as whilst we’re all about rooting, we believe in ‘safety first’. So stay safe this summer and root for us, root for change, root for VOLLEY.”

But Wendy Francis, a member of the Australian Christian Lobby, says Volley has something dirtier in mind ... The Sex! Or, as they say Down Under, “rooting”—which is “doing the sex” in Oz-talk.

Um, Wendy, you and your ilk think everything is about The Sex. It isn’t. It’s about equality, something Jesus tried to do but folks like you have ruined. And perhaps if you were doing a little “rooting” you’d be less uptight.

Just sayin’.

DisruptJ20, a series of mass actions supported by the activist collective DC Welcoming Committee, is planning protests around the inauguration, one of which is a Queer Dance Party at the Chevy Chase, Maryland home of VP-elect Mike Pence on Wednesday.

Yup, they held a Queer Dance party at Mike Pence’s house and you just know he ran away from that lest he be spotted in a window choking Little Mike as he watched the Boys dance.

Betsy DeVos, _____’s nominee for education secretary said during her Senate confirmation hearing that local authorities should decide whether guns should be barred from American schools — citing the case of a school in Wyoming where a special fence protects students from bears.

Yes. She did. When Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy—whose state saw the worst school shooting in history at Sandy Hook Elementary—asked DeVos to explain whether she thought guns belonged “in or around schools,” DeVos argued that some schools — like those in Wyoming — need weapons “to protect from potential grizzlies [bears].”

Yup. She did. Pray for us with loons like this in government.

As a gay man it is part of my obligation to be obsessed with The Wizard of Oz.

Naturally, I love the Judy Garland film, and I loved the Broadway show with Stephanie Mills, and the movie version of The Wiz starring Diana Ross. I also loved the Wicked books by Gregory Maguire and have seen the Broadway show Wicked and several touring companies of the show.

I have also watched every version of Oz that appeared on television, though there was one set in a men's prison, that didn’t include Dorothy or Toto but did have, um, merit.

Now, NBC is showing Emerald City, a  kind of Game of Thrones Oz. it’s quite beautiful to look at ... the Witch of the East’s costume alone was fabulous, but it also has two other things going for it ... Oliver Jackson-Cohen, left, a British actor, riffing on the Scarecrow, and Mido Hamada, right, a kind of Emerald City guard searching for Dorothy.

Two hot reasons to keep my fascination with all things Oz going.

Chris Christie is talking again, and is now saying that it was his wife, Mary Pat, who kept him from taking a position in the _____ administration because she refused to move from New Jersey to Washington, DC:

“He didn’t offer me a job that I thought was exciting enough for me to leave the governorship, and my family, because Mary Pat made really clear she wasn’t coming to D.C.”

In December, _____ transition sources said Christie was offered cabinet-level posts like secretary of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, as well as a slot as a top White House aide or as US ambassador to Italy.

Ambassador to Italy? It must be love if Christie turned down two years of Italian food.

Just sayin’.

So, recently Leslie Jordan, who played pint-sized homo Beverly Leslie on Will & Grace announced that the show would be returning to TV for ten new episodes next season and Debra Messing, the Grace of Will & instantly shot that down saying nothing had been confirmed.

Um, except now it has been confirmed ... NBC announced this week that a one-off season consisting of 10 episodes of Will & Grace  is coming  and pretty much everyone from the old show will be involved. Will & Grace creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan will act as showrunners and executive producers. James Burrows, who directed every episode of the show, will be back to direct the revival episodes as well as produce. 

It’s baaaaaack. And just in time ... I need a Karen fix.