Architecture Wednesday: Bali In Malibu

I suppose if Bali is too far out to make it to work and back every day, this Balinese inspired pavilion house in Malibu, California would do.

And it’s not just the open airy house, or the massive pool and water features surrounding the house, the vaulted ceilings, the grand kitchen, the media room, that master bed and bath, it’s the over $1 million worth of palm trees and tropical vegetation that were brought to the site that make you feel a world away, when you’re really not.

It’s like a vacation … every day.

OneKindDesign

An Open Letter To America

I’ve heard it said that when times get tough, people tend to show their true colors and, America, if these are your true colors, I’m afraid; very afraid.

In the age of the pandemic we’re staying home, and we don’t like it, I get it. But, staying home keeps us all safe from the virus, safe from dying. But we’re so spoiled, so pampered, so used to getting our way, or our haircuts, or hamburgers, or church services, that a lot of us have lost our minds.

And I’m not just talking about the one storming the state capitols with guns and Nazi flags and their 2nd Amendment cries, because they are a special breed of ignorance. That is not a protest, that is terrorism and when someone gets shot, we’ll understand it as terrorism. But then there’s the ignorance of the people who buy into the rightwingnut rhetoric about this being China’s fault. And, because they believe, without knowing, reading, educating themselves, they attack the Chinese restaurant, or the Japanese store, or the Asian market because “those people”—who, by the way, are most likely Americans—are responsible for the virus.

Yes, America, some of us are that dumb.

Since January 2020, there has been a rise in the number of reports of Asian people being threatened and harassed on the street … being told to “Go back to China” … being blamed for “bringing the virus” to America … being called horrific names, spat on, or even physically assaulted. And it doesn’t help that the leaders of this country—who let’s be really clear, are the ones responsible for this mess—do nothing to stop this racial outrage but instead fan the flames by calling it the Chins Virus or say that it was invented in a lab and spread around the world even though they have no proof of that.

And so, this is America in 2020 …

Last month, in Albuquerque a Chinese American man, shopping at a supermarket, was told to “stay away”  while in Brooklyn, an Asian woman was verbally assaulted and called a “Fucking freak.” In Houston, a woman verbally harassed employees of a Vietnamese restaurant, telling them, “Get out of our country.”

In America; to Americans; by Americans.

In the Bronx, three teenage girls harassed and used an umbrella to attack an Asian woman, saying, “You caused coronavirus, bitch.” In Martinsville, Indiana, a man of Korean descent was denied entry into a gas station and told to “never come back.” The gas station attendants reportedly told police that "anyone of Chinese descent was not allowed in the store.”  In Woodbury, Minnesota a woman returned home to find this flier posted on her door: “We’re watching you fucking chinks take the chinese virus back to china. We don’t want you hear [sic] infecting us with your diseases!!!!!!!”

Freedumbers.

In Davie, Florida an Asian woman who works as a musician received harassing and racist text messages saying that she would not be hired anymore until she surrendered her Chinese passport and renounced her Chinese citizenship. In Midland, Texas a Burmese man and his two children were attacked and stabbed at a Sam’s Club by a 19-year-old man, who admitted to targeting the family because he believed they were Chinese and infecting people with coronavirus.

And this week, in Flint, Michigan, after Family Dollar store security guard, Calvin Munerlyn, told Sharmel Lashe Teague, that her child needed to wear a mask inside the store, Teague spit on the man and drove away. Twenty minutes later Teague’s husband and son, Larry Edward Teague and Ramonyea Travon Bishop, came into the store, found Calvin Munnerlyn and Bishop shot him.

In America. We’re shooting people who are trying to enforce standards to keep us all healthy. We’re spitting on people, harassing people, terrorizing people, killing people because we want to go outside and so if we need to push or shove or shoot our way outside, we’ll do it.

I get that we’re scared; none of us have ever been through any thing like this before. But why turn your fear into hate; why attack people … kill people … because you’re afraid. Listen to the doctors, the medical professionals, those people on the front lines trying to save lives, and turn off the politicians who preach that 80,000 dead Americans is a success; turn off the pundits who feed you lies about blame, lie about protection, about bleach.

Educate yourself or succumb to your freedumb.

The freedumb to impose your rights over those of others all the while saying they cannot do the same to you; the freedumb to murder a man for doing his job, following his boss’s orders, as well as state orders; the freedumb to target and terrorize others because they look different.

That’s not America; that’s not the America we all learned about in school; but clearly, as we watch the news and see the hate and the violence rise because people want to go to the beach or the park—and you may notice, very few say they want to go back to work—think their rights to walk around in a pandemic are more important than the rights of others to stay safe and healthy and alive.

If you want to believe this is a hoax, or no worse than the flu, instead of heading out to the playground, why not head to work, and don’t wear a mask. Pray you won’t get infected and bring the virus into your home where you might pass it along to your parents or your kids, or your friends.

Is that the freedumb you want? The freedumb to die? The freedumb to infect and possibly kill others? The freedumb to spit in the face of police officers who are simply doing their jobs?

Grow up, America, people are dying at the rate of nearly one person every minute, and if those new models are right, one American will be dying every forty-five seconds this summer.

Free?

Dumb.

Tuesday Thought #3

Tuesday Thought #2

Tuesday Thought #1

My Two Cents: Tara Reade

I believe the women, which is why this one bothers me.

More than a year ago … a year ago … Tara Reade accused Joe Biden, as other women have, of touching her shoulder and neck in a way that made her uncomfortable, when she worked for him in 1993. That makes sense; Joe admits he’s been known to do that. And then earlier this year, in March, she came out again with the same story, but it got little to no traction, so in April she came out again, though this time the story was different.

This time Reade claimed that in 1993 Joe Biden pushed her up against a wall, put this hand down her skirt and put his fingers in her vagina. But … how is that not the story the first time out? I mean, it feels like the touching of the hair didn’t meet some sort of objective, so she doubled down with fingers penetrating her.

As I said, I believe the women, but this one troubles me, and here’s why:

Although Reade waited 27 years to accuse Biden of sexual assault, that doesn’t bother me so much. I understand that it’s hard to step into the light and go up against a powerful man. And if I believe Christine Blasey Ford—and I do—waiting for many years before speaking up about Brett Kavanaugh, I’d have to believe Reade, except …

How do you tell the story of Biden touching your hair and neck, but forget to mention the penetration with his fingers? And why tell one story first, and then add more graphic details more than a year later?

Reade has an explanation for that. She claims that when she came forward with her allegations in March 2019, she wanted to speak to The Union newspaper in California, but says the reporter’s tone made her feel uncomfortable, so she “shut down” and didn't tell the whole story. She waited another year before finding someone else to tell her story.

That doesn’t ring true.

It also is strange that Reade says she complained about Biden's assault to Marianne Baker, Biden’s executive assistant, as well as to top aides Dennis Toner and Ted Kaufman, and yet all three say she made no such complaints. And these three did simply say they didn’t remember a nearly thirty-year-old complaint, they all completely deny ever being told the story by Tara Reade.

Still, Reade insists she told them, and insists she filed a written complaint against Biden with the Senate personnel office, and yet reporters and staff have never found that written complaint. Even Tara Reade doesn’t possess a copy of the complaint, though she has copies of all other relevant paperwork from that time, including a copy of her 1993 Senate employment records.

That strikes me odd.

Even more troubling is that Reade cannot remember the date, the time, or the exact location of the alleged assault, except that it occurred in a “semiprivate” hallway connecting Senate buildings. She expects us to believe a powerful well-known man assaulted her in the halls of Congress and yet she cannot remember. This is troubling because, with her lack of memory on this point, it’s next to impossible for Joe Biden to go through records and prove he could not have committed the assault, because he was somewhere else at the time. 

Also troublesome is that Tara Reade provides two different explanations for why she stopped working for Biden in 1993. She claimed once that she was fired because Biden wanted her to serve drinks at an event and she refused. Reade says she then felt "pushed out” of her job and so she quit.

However, Reade also claimed that after she filed a sexual harassment complaint—and now she says she never used the words ‘sexual harassment’ in that complaint—with the Senate personnel office, she faced retaliation for complaining and was fired by Biden’s chief of staff.

Quit or fired? It cannot be both.

It also cannot be both that Tara Reade was sexually assaulted by Joe Biden in 1993, but as recently as 2017 she would “Like” praise for Biden’s work combating sexual assault, to which she tweeted:

“My old boss speaks truth. Listen.” 

She was praising him for his work in trying to end the very thing she now claims that he did to her.

It doesn’t make sense. What happened?

Bernie Sanders? Not a stretch; in January of 2020, Reade came out in support of Sanders for president, saying Biden was “the blue version of Trump” and that the Democratic National Committee was trying to “shove” Biden “down Democrat voters throats.” 

And then Tara Reade suddenly began contradicting all she said before about Biden, saying her decision to finally come forward was due to “the hypocrisy that Biden is supposed to be the champion of women’s rights.”

Praise him? Accuse him.

Were her allegations against Biden a form of retaliation for Bernie not winning the nomination? For 27 years, Tara Reade did not publicly accuse Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her, but after his string of victories derailed Sanders from his path to the Democratic nomination, Reade went public with her claim.

And these not just her claims; there is an alleged phone call from her mother to a talk show; friends and family who’ve suddenly remembered, and then remembered more, have come forward.

In 1991 an anonymous woman—who Reade now claims was her mother, who is now deceased—called in to CNN's "Larry King Live" show and said:

"I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him." 

Her problems there? If we believe Tara Reade, and we believe this woman was her mother, then why talk “problems”? Why not say, anonymously, oddly enough, that your daughter was sexually assaulted by this “prominent senator”?

And then you have Reade’s brother, Collin Moulton, who, in an interview with The Post, says his sister told him Joe Biden inappropriately touched her neck and shoulders. He said not one word about sexual assault until a few days later, when he texted The Post that he suddenly remembered Reade saying Biden put his hand "under her clothes.” 

Again, a man touching your sister’s hair and neck is inappropriate, so why lead with that? If the man forced your sister up against a wall, kissed her, shoved his hand down her skirt and inside her, that would be the story.

Two of Reade’s friend, who requested anonymity, have differing stories, as well. One says Reade told her she was sexually assaulted by Biden, while the other said Reade told her that Biden touched her inappropriately.

Two friends, two different stories.

In addition, in prior interviews, Tara Reade gave an exhaustive list of people she told of the alleged assault, and yet neither one of these women were on that list.

A third friend, Lynda LaCasse, gave an interview to Business Insider, claiming Reade told her of the assault in 1995 or 1996. Insider called LaCasse the “first person to independently corroborate, in detail and on the record, that Reade had told others about her assault allegations contemporaneously.”

That word ‘contemporaneously’ is troubling, because in legalese it generally means ‘existing or occurring in the same period of time,’ but if Reade was sexually assaulted in 1993, telling a friend two or three years later is not contemporaneous at all. 

And one other thing I find disconcerting about Reade’s story. We know that several women claimed that Joe Biden made them uncomfortable with things like a shoulder touch or a hug, but there has never been one hint of sexual assault in all of Joe Biden’s life, except for Tara Reade.

Now, it could be possible that in his entire life Joe Biden committed just one sexual assault, against Reade, but generally speaking men who do these kinds of things don’t do them just once … just look at the twenty-five very similar allegations against the sitting president.

As I said earlier, I believe women, but that doesn’t mean all women are being truthful. It doesn’t mean all women shouldn’t be questioned about inaccuracies in their stories. It doesn’t mean I can’t support the #MeToo movement and question allegations of sexual assault that seem off.

Do I believe Tara Reade? I don’t know because I wasn’t there; only she and Biden know the truth. But I do know that her story doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Her lack of memory on vital parts of the story, like when and when, bother me.

Her changing the story from touching her hair to penetrating her with his fingers bothers me.

Her friends and family who remember one thing, but then suddenly remember more bothers me.

Her praise in the years after the alleged assault for Biden and her sudden attacks on him when she became a Sanders supporter bother me.

The whole thing bothers me.

The Funny Papers

Mike Konopacki, Kevin Siers, Jack Ohman, Randy Bish, Nick Anderson, Dave Whamond, Chris Britt, Michael de Adder, Ken Catalino, JD Crowe, Clay Bennett, Marc Murphy

I Ain't One To Gossip But ...

Well, even marriages continue to fall apart during a lockdown, and this week it’s ‘reality star’ Kristin Cavallari and her soon-to-be-ex-husband Jay Cutler’s divorce announcement.

Kristin broke the news on Instagram—because, where else—with a picture of herself and Jay and explained that they have come to the “loving conclusion” to get a divorce.

“With great sadness, after 10 years together we have come to a loving conclusion to get a divorce. We have nothing but love and respect for one another and are deeply grateful for the years shared, memories made, and the children we are so proud of. This is just the situation of two people growing apart. We ask everyone to respect our privacy as we navigate this difficult time within our family.”

How Paltrow of you; but is it … the fact that Kristin made a point of saying they were getting a divorce, and weren’t just separating, is one thing, but she ratcheted things up by heading back to social media and removing the word ‘wife’ from all her sites.

Not so lovingly, I imagine, especially since, in the most recent season of Kristin’s E! reality series, Very Cavallari, Jay got pulled into a storyline that involved ALLEGATIONS of him cheating with Kristin’s former best friend, Kelly Henderson. Jay denied it happened; Kristin swore she didn’t believe it.

But then the rumor mills got hold of Kristin’s response to Jay’s divorce filing in which she ALLEGES “misconduct” on the part of Jay and says Jay “is guilty of such inappropriate marital conduct as renders further cohabitation unsafe and improper.”

Not so loving.

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I live for catfights, and a catfight between fashion guru André Leon Talley and Anna Wintour warms my cold, cold heart. Talley has apparently written a memoir and in it he puts Anna on blast as “not capable of human kindness”. Okay, so that’s not new, or even news, but when the passages were leaked, Talley, with a wry wink on an eye, took to social media—again, because, where else—to say:

“Did I miss anything this weekend?”

Apparently, in his book The Chiffon Trenches, Talley says his decades long friend, Wintour, is “ruthless” and says she has stopped speaking to him after she said he was “too old, too overweight, too uncool.” He says there is an 'endless' list of writers, stylists and models whom she has cast onto a 'frayed and tattered heap during her powerful rule'.

In an extended rant, Talley writes:

“Today, I would love for her to say something human and sincere to me. I have huge emotional and psychological scars from my relationship with this towering and influential woman.”

And then ends with a dig:

“'I wonder, when she goes home alone at night, is she miserable? Does she feel alone?”

Talley worked for Vogue on and off from the 1980s until 2018, when he was replaced as the magazine’s red-carpet reporter for the Met Gala.

Hmmm, maybe that spurred him to write his little book?

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You think Little Tommy Cruise became a diva once he became a big star, but you’d be wrong. And Rob Lowe is here to spill the tea.

Rob was feeling a wee bit shady when he appeared on Armchair Expert with Dax Shepherd and praised Tom Cruise’s “wherewithal” for always knowing he’d be a star by telling a story about Tommy going “ballistic” at the thought of sharing a hotel room with Lowe during the audition process for The Outsiders:

“All of the L.A. people survived the L.A. auditions, and then the hand-picked people had to go to New York to face the New York version/ So it was me and Tom Cruise and Emilio [Estevez] and C. Thomas Howell. [It was the] first time I ever stayed at The Plaza Hotel, and we check-in and Tom finds out that we’re sharing a room and just goes ballistic.”

Perhaps Little Tommy was worried about trying to control himself while locked in a  luxury hotel room with Pretty Boy Lowe?

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We’ve talked about celebrities self-isolating and then either whining about how hard it is to stay in the manse, or how blessed they are to be able to afford a mansion, or whine about how their kids are getting in their way because the mansion is just not big enough.

Well, Elizabeth and Philip Windsor have also taken themselves home for the foreseeable future and have self-isolated at Windsor Castle, just the two of them … and 22 members of their closest staff. We all know that the staff serves at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, so finding out that it takes 22 people to pleasure her, at age 94, is astonishing.

A memo to the staff written by Master of the Household—a title which I have just given myself, and Carlos has no say—Tony Johnstone-Burt reveals that since Britain went into quarantine, Windsor Castle has been dubbed “HMS Bubble”, and that the 22 members of the royal household staff are isolated there, away from their families, for the duration. Johnstone-Burt, a 40-year navy veteran, likened the situation to “a long deployment at sea where sailors are separated from their ­families for several months.”

But hey, if Liz needs a martini or Philip needs a backrub, you gotta have a staff, no? And staff can’t be goin’ home and then coming back to the castle the next day carrying some filthy virus.

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Just this past week we learned that Christopher Reeve’s son, Will, was reporting for GMA in a suit and tie and what looked to be his underwear. That caused a bit of a ruckus, a mild-mannered reporter kind of ruckus—see what I did there? Christopher Reeve? His son? Clark Kent? Mild-mannered? I’ll stop—but not near as much a ruckus as what happened when Spanish news anchor Alfonso Merlos reported from home.

While doing a live video chat from his house for the Spanish YouTube Channel Estado de Alarma, a half-naked woman showed up in the background, and people realized that the woman was not Marta Lopez, his long-time girlfriend. But Alonso ... Hey Player! ... didn't even notice the nekkid woman and kept going on with his report, long enough for eagle-eyed viewers to figure out the nude woman was his new side-piece Alexia Rivas … one of his colleagues.

After ignoring the escándalo at first, Alfonso did go back to TV to apologize, in a sort of, So I have a side-piece kind of way:

“If you think that my attitude has not been correct or that there are things that I have not done well, I have no problem asking for forgiveness, although my goal was not to harm someone else.”

And then he explained that he wasn’t a cheater because he and Marta had broken up, though Marta played the Ross-n-Rachel card and said they just had a spat and were on a break, until nekkid Alexia wandered onscreen.

And here we thought lockdown would be boring!

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And now some good news … Anderson Cooper is a Daddy, just not the kind of daddy I wanted. He’s a  literal father, and made the announcement last night on his CNN show, Anderson Cooper 360° this week:

"On Monday I became a father. I've never said that out loud and it astonishes me. I have a son. Wyatt Morgan Cooper was born on Monday weighing 7 pounds 2 ounces.”

Anderson said his son is named Wyatt, after his late father Wyatt Cooper, and that Morgan was on a list of potential baby names his late mom, Gloria Vanderbilt, and dad made when they were trying to pick a name for Anderson 52 years ago.

“I do wish my mom and my dad and my brother Carter were alive to meet Wyatt, but I like to believe they can see him. I imagine them all together, arms around each other, smiling and laughing, happy to know that their love is alive in me and in Wyatt, and that our family continues.”

Damn, Andy, why you gotta make me cry?

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I Didn't Say It ...

Jim Parsons, talking with ‘jailed’ Ellen DeGeneres about his part in the gay-centric Ryan Murphy Netflix series Hollywood:

“I’ve gone to a lot of gay clubs in my time and I’ve never seen that many naked people [on a film set] at once—ever. It was really awkward and shocking at first. We were surrounded by so many naked people. And I just kept trying not to look. It was hours we were doing this. I stopped not trying to look at some point. I was just like, you know what, what I really feel is admiration. To have that kind of relationship with your body that you’re able to just walk around naked in front of a huge crew, and all these other actors, in and out of the swimming people. I am in awe. That is the healthiest, I think … there wasn’t a bad looking one in the bunch. They worked for that confidence, or were born with it, I don’t know.”

I would’a looked, taken pictures, gotten phone numbers, planned a lunch orgy …too much?

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Jake Tapper, CNN anchor, calling out new  White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany for claiming the media took POTUS out of context about the Drink Bleach Movement:

“Which is not remotely what happened. Simply put, it’s a bald-faced lie. The president wasn’t even talking, posing the bizarre question about disinfectants to journalists, he was talking to an official of the Department of Homeland Security who had been talking about how sunlight and disinfectants helped to kill the coronavirus when it was in the air and on nonporous surfaces, not when it was in the human body.”

_____ said it; it wasn’t taken out of context because we all heard it; and it wasn’t sarcastic, because while he’s laughable as president he’s not funny.

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Rachel Maddow, MSNBC host, on the lockdown protest, organized by the Center for Popular Democracy Action:

“That was a little bit of what it looked like today in the rain, in downtown Washington, D.C., as a long line of cars processed pretty slowly, from the White House, down through the streets of DC, slowly, all in a line, with their hazards flashing. But this was different for a couple of reasons. Number one, they were honking for the most part. And number two, they were not going to a cemetery. They were going to President _____’s downtown Washington, D.C. hotel. You can see the signs on some of the cars: ‘_____ lies, people die.’ And then you can see the body bags. People got out of those vehicles, and laid body bags at the threshold of President _____’s hotel. The U.S. death toll from coronavirus, as of today, is staggering. As of today [this is from last week, the death toll is higher] 48,902 Americans have been killed. And that’s just over the course of about a month. … But I don’t know if the president knows that. And so the people who are mad at the president about this response, people are starting to pile up body bags in front of his hotel, because maybe that at least might capture his attention, maybe that will let him know that the real body count is.”

I think, as Blobby pointed out weeks ago on his blog … HERE … that they should pile up body bags in front of the White House.

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Justin Rohrwasser, Patriots rookie kicker , saying he would have a tattoo of the ‘3 Percenters’, a right-wing militia group linked with the white supremacy movement, removed after it went viral on social media:

“The first time I found out what it was linked to was on Saturday. That’s why it was so surprising. … When I was 18, I got it. [3 Percenters were] described to me as the percentage of colonists that rose up against the authoritarian government of the British, and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s such an American sentiment. A patriotic sentiment. And coming from a military family, I thought that really spoke to me and I always was proud to be an American. I’m very proud to be an American. As soon as I saw what it was linked to on Saturday, it’s exactly that time I knew I had to get it totally taken off my body. I said cover it up, but I want to get it removed from my body. It’s shameful that I had it on there ignorantly. I’m sorry for all my family that have to defend me.”

I’ll take this one with a grain of salt, because he’s had the tattoo for a few years now and he just found out what it means?

Or is he just saying that to save his job. Asking for cynics everywhere.

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Don Lemon, CNN anchor , on Michael Elizabeth Pence refusing to wear a mask when visiting the Mayo Clinic because he wanted to look people in the eye:

“What about the fact that it is their policy? It is the policy that you created. What about the fact that they offered one upon your arrival? What about the fact it’s possible for a coronavirus test to be inaccurate? And it’s possible for you to contract and spread the virus after you’ve tested negative. … Remember, he’s the head of the task force. The head of the task force. The advice is to wear a mask for the protection of other people, but the vice president chose not to.  Come on … It’s not an eye mask we’re talking about. This is ridiculous. We all know that you can look somebody in the eye while wearing a mask. Millions of Americans have been wearing masks during this pandemic? Guess what? They can still see!”

Here’s the deal, Michael Elizabeth  Pence was not wearing a mask because he didn’t want to piss off _____, who said he chose not to wear a mask because it would look undignified in the Oval Office.

Like, right, now, the Oval could look more undignified.

Fuck off, Michael Elizabeth pence, you pandering fuck.

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Matthew Lynch, Division I men’s college basketball coach and director of basketball operations at the UNC Wilmington, coming out as gay:

“This is a scary time for everyone and the unknown is always difficult to deal with. But I have made a decision to use this time to become completely open and honest with myself and the people around me. I’m gay. Those are two words that 10 years ago I wasn’t sure I was ever going to admit, let alone say out loud. I always thought I would ‘die with the lie.’ That is how I approached so much of my life, to keep it a secret, to never let anyone know that side of me, to hide and bury all those feelings. I think it’s important for me to be publicly out. Not only for me and my mental health, but for anyone else out there like me. The goal isn’t to come out of the closet, it’s to eliminate the closet. I am probably a little crazy to decide to make this so public with everything else that is going on … like being unemployed, or a worldwide pandemic or a hiring freeze throughout the coaching profession … but I wanted to try and find a way use a negative time for something positive. I don’t know if I will be able to get another college basketball job as an openly gay coach, but I refuse to take any job where I am not my authentic self. I refuse to die with the lie.”

Being gay isn’t a huge part of your life, but just a piece of it. And yet people often take that piece and use it against you, punish you, beat you, kill you, deny you rights.

Thank you, Matthew for standing up to say that you won’t take it anymore, and, of course, please accept The Official Coming Out Toaster Oven™ and copy of The Gay Agenda.

Stand proud.

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