Recently in politics Category

"You've heard about it?" I asked.

"That's where all the gays go! I saw it on TV once."

I think she watches too much Bravo. I'll have to get her a CD of The Pines' greatest hits of 2008 for Christmas. I won't tell her about the Meat Rack...

In other news back home, a semi carrying cheese burst into flames. Luckily, the refrigerated trailer was unharmed, and the precious cargo was intact.

Sean takes a ride on the Island Girl on the Mississippi near LaCrosse, Wisconsin. As a wee lad I used to jump off the bridge shown in the 4th photo down on that entry.

Tonight I went to a neighborhood 'SMD' (don't know what that means) meeting at Kennedy Rec Center featuring Kevin Chapple with a word from MPD 3rd District Commander George Kucik . Let me warn you that you should eat a big meal before one of these meetings and make sure you pick a comfy chair if you can find one. Anyway, it was good to hear about increased police efforts in Shaw and plans for more farmer's markets. I hadn't heard that the Giant was closing though. DC Chief of Police Cathy Lanier showed up too, which was promising.

Marc Fisher writes about the dumb idea to make all the bargain buses to NYC drop off and pick up passengers at L'Enfant Plaza. I'm glad that idea was scrapped. I love the prices and convenient locations of the various competing (and super-cheap!) buses that can whisk you off to the Big Apple.

Yesterday I trimmed some overhanging branches from the front garden area and sidewalk. Several of the boys from down the block gave me sincere and honest thank you's as they walked by, having never said a peep to me in the year I've been here. I guess that's how you get on their good side.

Pop quiz: how many bears are in this image?

It's Jimbo's Friday git 'er done edition, now with the right to own a handgun! I have mixed feelings about guns - they kill things, they're heavy, and they need lots of cleaning. On the other hand, there are moments here in Shaw where I'd feel more secure with one. And everyone here has one anyway.

Seriously though, without the opportunity to practice at a shooting range once in a while, I think I'd be more proficient with my +2 serrated gardening knife than a gun in a fix. Beware the wrath of the angry gardener!

For all you gay Narnia fans: hot Old Spice centaur commercial (SFW if you can hide your stiffy):

I finally caught the mid-season finale of Battlestar Galactica. I hear we must wait until spring 2009 for the final episodes!? Are they trying to kill me with the suspense?

OMG I was quoted in an article about the rugby trip to Ireland in MetroWeekly!

Pimpin' 'hos at the DuPont Circle MetroRail Station. Some cities have a red light district, we have the Red Line in The District.

I thought this article about the Gill Action Fund was very interesting. And long!

Today I went to my former workplace to have lunch with a few of my more beloved coworkers. Wishing to avoid certain coworkers who would cause me to feel discomfort, I was careful to take the stealth route to my friend's office. But as fate would have it, the fire alarm went off ('cuz I'm so hot) and everybody had to evacuate out the same door. When I came out of the building I was right smack dab in the middle of those former coworkers I wished to avoid and was forced to engage in civil small talk. Good times.

This weekend I'm staying at Rex and Xanthos' house to engage in NYC Pride, Blowoff and possibly SuperSnaxx if I can handle that much woof in one weekend. I'll take pictures - and hairball medicine in advance.

It's gay pride season again, with the requisite questioning of the holiday on blogs and in the gay press. Sure it's overcommercialized and hypermarketed, but I want my cotton candy and meat on a stick at least once a year, and DC doesn't have a county fair so I'll take it where I can get it.

Besides, at the Capital Pride Festival grounds I always catch up with friends I haven't seen in a while, and get to chill with my masc buds.

As always, please leave your dogs at home. While we love it that your dog supports your orientation, it gets exponentially hotter the closer you get to the asphalt, and dogs have a hard time keeping cool down there. I love dogs too, but leave Fido at home on a hot afternoon in June.

As for the hottie in the photo, I don't know who he is. I found the photo on Flickr and thought it was funny. But, like several hot guys who so proudly too their shirts off at a gay-related festival and were photographed, he will one day contact me and ask me to take the pic down (and I will). So there you have another reason to celebrate Pride - people aren't quite all the way Proud just yet.

I'm leaving for Ireland on Sunday, and between June 8-18th my posts may be scarce. Ireland is well-connected, but I don't know if I'll find the time to check, upload or approve, so keep your Facebook app invites to yerself!

While the big gay rugby tournament is on the 13th thru the 15th, I'll be touring Inis Mor in the Aran Isles beforehand to take in some culture and scenery. After the tournament I'll see what Dublin has to offer. The games should be fun but I hope I'm able to walk when I get back into town. Sadly, I'll miss the DC pride celebrations, but Dublin's follows the week after our tournament, and I hope to meet some wee ginger leprechauns along the way.

Speaking of wee folk, check out this video of Prince and Shiela E. on Sean's blog. They perform an electrified A Love Bizarre set, where you can see Wendy being badass on the guitar in the background. Prince starts making faces towards the end, because sometimes it hurts to keep so much funk inside. Check it out soon, as Prince is a vengeful leprechaun and doesn't like it when his stuff gets put up on YouTube.

A couple of hyper scruffy guys are travelling to Alaska in a van powered by vegetable oil. Matt has a nice beard.

Here's a timeline of fashion ferocity held by my level 40 sonic/kinetics defender, Kira of Xanadu, on the City of Heroes Freedom server. I win quite a few costume contests in that game.

Finally, here's a surreal photo taken by Patrick of a C-17 cargo plane landing on the airstrip near our rugby pitch at last Saturday's match against Quantico:

The photo almost looks doctored, but it was for real!

This just in: Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter finds body in Potomac.

Won't post much for a while, so I hope this long entry filled with A.D.D. candy keeps you busy.

Friday was '90s night at Town and I could not pass up an offer to go. The music did not disappoint, but why don't DC drag queens ever know the words to any song they try to lip synch to? My suggestion to the DC drag queen community is this: don't pick a song to perform if it's not your favorite. Or if you don't have the time to practice, do interpretive dance instead. However, I must note that DC drag queens are the tallest drag queens I've ever seen anywhere.

Fridays are 12 and under night there, which usually isn't my thing. I'm told people closer to my age go on Saturday night, but I've either been tuckered out from rugby earlier that day or have something else going on. People who haven't been to Town yet are asking me about it, and despite only having gone on rugrat night, I think it's a great nightclub and a mature evolution from Tracks to Nation to Town. You don't get the impression that the place is a converted warehouse - it has several spaces for different kinds of socializing, from dancing to reclining, and is a good experience in DC nightlife in my opinion.

The next day we had our last local match of the season down at the Quantico Marine Base. Both A and B sides lost to The Hooligans, and the heat and humidity made for a trying match, but at least we finished before the Saturday afternoon storms rolled in. As the match progressed we watched huge cargo planes land on the airstrip near the pitch, including a pair of V-22 Osprey aircraft, which was pretty cool.

This evening during our D&D session, Skwurl replayed an attempted mugging against he and a friend that happened a mere block away using Homies™ figurines that he collects. The assailants were not local - they apparently stole a taxi van in Virginia and drove it into DC to conduct drive-by muggings. A few of the assailants came out of the van while the vehicle idled nearby. The assailants asked for the time, then said a magic word and jumped the pair. Both of the victims reacted well, considering the circumstances. One yelled "fire!" and "help!" while the other got a few punches in. The assailants didn't shake anything off either of them and the bad guys got away in the stolen taxi van. Meanwhile, the group of darlings that is always hanging around outside down the block just stared from across the street - they contribute absolutely nothing to society or to a fellow man as far as I'm concerned, but I don't expect much except 24-7 loitering from them anyway.

That attack and the rise in general mayhem here in the 'hood has me fairly down on DC "living". The cops and even the local press is aware of what is going on, but in the year I've lived at this address it's only gotten worse. And after ten years of living in marginal neighborhoods, I'm tired of it, even though I've witnessed former neighborhoods changing for the better. I simply don't want to live in a "transitional" neighborhood anymore, or whatever you like to call it. The neighbors who lived in other half of this duplex moved to Takoma Park for the same reasons. While I expect my salary to go up with the next job, it still always seems to be behind the curve when rent goes up at the same rate. And it seems stupid to piss away half my salary to live in "marginal" neighborhoods for so long. Yeah, I've bitched a lot about it over the years. Job transitions are often an opportunity for life transitions too, and perhaps it's time for a bigger move. I no longer see any romance in city living at this point.

In other news, I have a job interview on Tuesday. I won't disclose the details of the position, but it's an interesting one, so we'll see what develops.

When I hear the phrase "carbon footprint" thrown around on The Today Show and start seeing compost for sale at Whole Foods, I start to cringe and think, "Oh dear, here we go again." You can poop in a bucket and add some grass clippings, and that's compost too. But I suppose paying for compost makes people feel better.

I saw this renewed interest in a "green movement" coming a few years ago, and stand by the comparisons to the environmental movements of the 70s and 90s, and points I made back then.

"Together, we can make an unbelievably negligible difference."

Seriously though, it's important not to make Chicken Little claims or people will throw their hands up in the air and give up. Don't ovewhelm the public with too many things they MUST do to save the environment. It's important to try to make changes, but they must be achievable as well. And scaring the public with unrealistic claims that the earth is going to blow up tomorrow will reduce the impact of the importance of trying to do something at all. And people will always have a greater interest in trying to fix local problems over problems they can't directly experience. But with the media as sensationalistic as it is today, declaring our doom on the news almost every day for a variety of reasons, I'm afraid this decade's environmental movement will merely be another blip on the radar.

If you start telling people to stop travelling by plane, they'll start to buck the idea of trying to change their lifestyle to improve the environment. Granted, we can now telecommute easier, and telecommuting is a wonderful idea in many ways. I'm guessing there's a lot of people who could travel less and work more from home or a home office. But there are a lot of people who won't want to stop flying, and making no-fly demands on these people will only result in a backlash.

This issue reminds me of a Star Trek: Next Generation episode where the crew of the Enterprise came across a group of aliens who claimed warp travel through the same area of space in their system over prolonged periods was creating a weakening of space-time continuum. This "warp pollution" was causing dangerous rifts in time and space to open up, sucking in unwary space travellers. The Enterprise crew found the aliens' claim to be valid, and for a short time the Federation banned warp travel above warp 5 unless it was absolutely necessary in an emergency. However, the development of a safer variable geometry engine allowed space travel beyond warp 5 to be safer to time and space.

In Battlestar Galactica, can also assign multiple uses for a sewage treatment ship, like re-using it to find Earth. But my question here is, if the poop ship is off looking for Earth, is untreated sewage being jettisoned into space instead of being reused on the food processing ship? I love it that the fleet's (no pun intended) poop ship is a major part of the storyline.

This is interesting: Green Porno, staring Isalbella Rossellini.

Anyway, things can be fixed, and behavior can change, but usually only gradually. With focus, a more positive outlook, doing what you can and birth control, things can get better. I'm doing my part by being a nonbreeding homo, for starters.

Yellow hanky bong hits for the Pope! The biggest drag queen in the world is here in DC for the week. I hope to avoid any traffic congestion associated with his visit, but that is my extent of my passion for the man. As far as I'm concerned, Sunday mornings are for establishing rapport with higher powers through the dream state. And Sunday mornings are for brunch and Bloody Marys too.

This Passover Saturday, Renegades alumni and friends of the 'gades are encouraged to come to our only home match of the season at 1pm on April 19 at Cardozo High School field, 1300 Clifton St. NW, Washington, DC. Field entrance is at 13th St. and Florida Ave. NW. The match will be vs. our friends the Philadelphia Gryphons. Social to follow at Stoney's, 1433 P St. NW, between 14th and 15th St. We'll be upstairs.

And the excitement won't stop there - all weekend it's the big 'ol Cherry Weekend celebration, with venues all over town, including Saturday night at the 9:30 Club. I'd expect to see the Pope trying to sneak in through the back door, or at least a couple of his underlings here and there. Judging by the state of my body last Saturday after a rugby match, it is highly unlikely Grampaw Jimbo will be able to make any of the events. My body is just too beat up to boogie this time of the year.

A cautionary note to the indie 'mos and angertwinks who are too cool for school: you probably won't find that new gay at a Cherry event, but it shouldn't preclude you from having some fun once in a while. Wipe that grumpy sourpuss off your face, take your shirt off and have at it. No cherry-colored letter will be permanently branded to your soul if you cut loose and have some fun once in a while. Jeez...kids are so frikkin' serious these days!

Margaret Cho last Friday was good for a few belly laughs and she definitely has the green stamp of approval for recycling - her old material, that is. And perhaps Kelly's best venue is the Internet, because 'Shoes' live just didn't really have the charm that it does on YouTube.

I heard somewhere that Ace of Base has reunited and are on tour? Unless it was somebody's cruel joke on me...I'd go see them if they came through DC, even though they're Swedish and not Norwegian. I'm not racist.