drag race makes national news

The Annual 17th Street High Heel Race made national news. I even saw a clip on the Keith Olberman show, and some friends from Madison mentioned they saw a clip of it on their local news. It's gotten to be a very big event. This year I just wasn't in the mood for the crowds. Sometimes I totally skip holidays, and I guess this year is my skip year. I will be wearing my UPS costume (old pic at left) to the rugby party on Saturday, but it seems I've grown out of my tight chocolate brown shorts. What evil closet gnome shrunk my shorts?

Let me frame the California Proposition 8 issue this way: how much does hate cost? The combined campaigns both for and against Proposition 8 is over a record $60 million dollars. $60,000,000.00. It's both amazing and ridiculous. Imagine all the other things that money could go to: rebuilding New Orleans, renovating deteriorating national park infrastructures, building greenspace recreation areas, and the list of the better things I can think of go on and on. One day we're gonna look back on this crap and shake our heads. If there was a shred of respect I had for the church of Latter-Day Saints, it's gone now. The same for most organized religions. I think it's all a buncha crap.

Fraggle Rock—Underground hippie commune or dangerous Muppet terror cell?

As a long-time blogger I need to get something off my chest. To you readers who are marketers, promoters, or campaigners, listen up because I'm going to give you some important advice about unpaid bloggers and the etiquette involved in asking a blogger to pimp a product, person or event for you for free. I don't get paid for this shit. When you ask me to promote a goddamn Ben Cohen hottie calendar and I do, you send me a fucking calendar, you got it?

I'm not asking for compensation in the hundreds of dollars, I'm asking for a gesture of thanks and consideration. People get paid lots of money to market and promote, and if you think bloggers don't know this you are mistaken. We are not hypertext drones just dying to blabber about the release of your new whatever. One example of a polite gesture of thanks and consideration was when I made mention of a particular DJs theme night at a local club. In return I got a great promo CD, which is one of my favorite CDs to this day. When this person doesn't have any schwag like that, I at least get a thank you message from this polite and considerate promoter.

Last week I endorsed several local candidates. The post was at the top of this blog for four days, and I checked the server logs and that particular entry was visited over 10,000 times. Ten thousand people read that they should vote for _______ _______ . And then you have the cojones ask me to donate to your campaign? Pumpkin, your candidate got a lot of free exposure from that entry, and the words I typed and cute thumbnail image I took the time to crop nicely has value. Just ask the bloggers who do put advertisements on their blog. They get paid by the thousands of page hits and click-throughs to the ads. I don't have ads on this blog, but I do occasionally pimp a person, product or event. And when I do, I think it's polite that I get a little something back - or at the very least please have the sense not to ask me for more. If I pimp your bar, can I get a fucking beer on the house for once? Just one beer for all that exposure? And to the Ben Cohen team, y'all can suck my dick (please?).