Monday, February 18, 2008

k.d. lang - Halleluja

RELATED: Ariel Levy says k.d. lang plays coy about her own iconography:

Lang has gotten big. She is more panda bear than mink now, with her salt-and-pepper hair and her vaguely Inuit eyes (lang was raised in a small town on the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan, her is heritage Icelandic, Sioux, Dutch, English, Irish, Scottish, and German Jewish), but she still has the unmistakable appeal of the unreconstructed butch. Or at least it looks that way to me. “You mean like the actual physical appearance of my person?” she says. “Is that what butch is? How do you define butch?”

Which renders me speechless. k. d. lang, king of the bulldaggers, is asking me what butch means.

“Okay, well, yeah, I am butch, I guess. In my physical appearance. When I show up at the White House and George and Laura just about have a heart attack because they can’t figure out who the fuck I am-or what I am-because I’m in a tuxedo, yeah. Or when every single time I walk into the washroom in an airport, even being famous, people … think they’re in the wrong washroom, yeah. I think about it.”

That’s coy?

Brits, strippers, hookers & financial distress

So long as I’m on the topic of hustlers, I came across this from Credit Slips:

The UK Insolvency Helpline recently reported that a quarter of its users admitted to having paid money for sex/porn in getting into financial distress.  Here’s a British article on the report here. I’m just going to let that sink in on its own.  It does, however, make me wonder about the applicability of the adjective “sub-prime” in this context.

Largest Meat Recall in U.S. History

Under-reported and taken in stride, I’ll be interested to learn more. WaPo:

The Agriculture Department has ordered the largest meat recall in its history—143 million pounds of beef, a California meatpacker’s entire production for the past two years—because the company did not prevent ailing animals from entering the U.S. food supply, officials said yesterday.

Despite the breadth of the sanction, USDA officials underscored their belief that the meat, distributed by Westland Meat, poses little or no hazard to consumers, and that most of it was eaten long ago.

Uh, that’s good news???

The recall comes less than three weeks after the release of a videotape showing what the USDA later called “egregious violations” of federal animal care regulations by employees of a Westland partner, Hallmark Meat Packing in Chino.

For now I’ll say this…

I think we’ve come to understand that if a child is abusive to harmless animals it is indicative of problems likely to emerge in adulthood. It would not surprise us to learn later that the child grew into an abusive adult, say, or a criminal type.

What does it indicate of our modern civilization that we so wantonly treat the animals we eat with a callous and needless machine-like cruelty? I don’t think it says anything good. And I think that’s why the food industry does everything in its power to hide its practices from the American public.

If we knew what they did, we would not stand for it. We must open our eyes.

RELATED: Boston Herald story today, WaPo on the earlier violations, Humane Society video.

Charles Barkley Supports Obama, Gay Marriage

Andy @ Towleroad:

Former pro basketball star Charles Barkley appeared on CNN’s The Situation Room on Friday and talked about why he’s voting for Obama. He also excoriated members of the GOP who use the bigotry and hate of the religious right to move their agenda forward, calling them “fake” Christians. It’s not the first time Barkley has spoken out about gay marriage. He gave an interview in August 2006 to Chris Meyers on FOX sports in which he said, “I think if they want to get married, God bless them. Gay marriage is probably 1 percent of the population, so it’s not like it’s going to be an epidemic. Hey, trust me, I’m never going to kiss you and say, ‘Chris, you’re sexy.’”

Andy’s got the transcript & video.

Don’t Ask, They’ll Tell

DownWithTyrany looks at a piece in the March issue of Out Magazine on the “service” men for anti-gay Republican closet cases who have managed to trade in escort agencies for PR agencies.

Invited to White House press conferences, Ann Coulter cocktail parties, and guest host on Fox, Jeff Gannon, Matt Sanchez, and Mike Jones are male prostitutes whose momentary mainstream media fame comes from having sex with closeted Republicans.

[Be forewarned: Don’t click, they’ll show]