Tracey Thorn, specifically, being interviewed:
I had a great holiday in Mykonos with a recently divorced girlfriend. We looked across the sea to the little island of Delos, and not a cloud appeared for a week, and the men at the hotel were all gay, so it was perfect, not a care in the world.
That made me think: where would a gay man in similar situation go? Somewhere full of straight men? Hmmm. Like where? Vatican? (HOHOHO SEE WHAT I DID THERE)
the point im takin so long to make is that 90s mary j blige was *awesome.* im talkin biggie smalls hook sangin, k-ci from jodeci lovin, bubble coat wearin, grand puba co-rhymin mary. like i mean, im glad that she?s happy. really. im just gettin tired of hearin about it. it?s what i call the india(dot)aire effect. india has an awesome voice (mary, not so much though, id argue), and the stuff she sang about on her first album was really, really important. and it wasnt less important on the second album.. it was just like an unneccessary exclamation point to the first. and by the third it was just fucking annoying. OKAY. WE GET IT. YOU?RE NOT YOUR HAIR AND YOU LOVE YOURSELF. STFU. i see mary travelling the saaaaaaaaaaaaame worn path.
now u may be askin urself, ?self, how come it doesnt get annoying when folk only sing about pain and trials and hardships?? because, man, that?s the stuff that makes *good* music. great pain breeds great art. ain?t that how the sayin goes? is that even a saying at all? if not, it is now, cite me when u use it. but really. more people know drama better than sublime, uninterrupted happiness, i think. plus happy people are just grating after awhile, no? i dunno. maybe its just me.
Thing is, I am also traveling that worn path, and what can I say, it makes me happy, and I guess that’s why this blog has maybe a third of the readership that followed my old blog that was all about self-deprecating dark stories from the dating hell. Maybe I should be glad I am not a professional songwriter after all!
By the way, I wrote a shit long diatribe about beauty, botox, steroids and Susan Boyle not being nominated for a Brit award, then I looked at it and realised it sums down to “I am old and those yoof of today don’t get shit”. Hmmm.
Daily Kos: “I’m heterosexual, and it’s just freakin fantastic!” (via Joe. My. God.)
I have more rights, less expenses, less chance of being beaten, less chance of being disowned by family, and tons of other benefits, rights and advantages. Because I fell in love with, and desire a person of the opposite sex. For this, my life is clearly better than anyone who is gay or lesbian.
The United States has made it clear – I am heterosexual and my life is better than the lives of gays and lesbians because of it. And, in the end, isn’t that what being American and living in the land of the free all about?
RH Reality Check: AIDS rate among gay/bi men 50 times higher than among straight men and women (!!)
As incidence estimates released by CDC last year revealed, MSM [men having sex with men] constitute more than half of all new cases of HIV and are the group in which the number of new cases each continues to slowly increase. What’s new today is that the CDC has calculated *rates* of HIV/AIDS prevalence among MSM, not just raw numbers. Lansky says the CDC estimates that there were 692.2 new HIV cases in 2007 per 100,000 MSM. Having a rate as well as the raw numbers allows comparisons for the first time to other population groups at risk, such as women and heterosexual men.
And in lighter matters: Hannah’s Negative Nancy takes over
I like to keep things positive around here. I believe in good karma. In happy thoughts. In sending out the kind of energy I want to take in. I promote optimism and hope and all those warm, wrap-your-arms-around-the-world feelings. But please excuse this slight slip into Negative Nancy territory. Because when you practice Bikram yoga long enough?hell, when you do anything long enough?some things are prone to just, well, aggrevate you a little…
DVD and book purchases fall into two main categories: the ones you buy because you really want to watch them, and the ones you buy because you vaguely think you should. Two years ago I bought Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, partly because I’d heard it was a good book and an easy read, but mainly because I figured reading it would make me cleverer ? or at the very least, make me seem a bit cleverer to anyone sitting opposite me on the tube. I never read it. A few months ago, having forgotten I already owned a copy, I bought it again. This means I haven’t read it twice. [...]
Last week I watched the first part of Electric Dreams, the 1900 House-style TV show where a family lives with old technology for several weeks. For episode one, they were stranded in the 1970s, with no internet, no DVDs or videos, and only three channels on the TV. It’s fair to say the kids weren’t massively impressed. It was all a bit Guantánamo for their liking. But to me the limited options looked blissful. [...]
Here’s what I want: I want to be told what to read, watch and listen to. I want my hands tied. I want a cultural diet. I want a government employee to turn up on my doorstep once a month, carrying a single book for me to read. I want all my TV channels removed and replaced by a single electro-pipe delivering one programme or movie a day. If I don’t watch it, it gets replaced by the following day’s selection. I want all my MP3s deleted and replaced with one unskippable radio station playing one song after the other. And every time I think about complaining, I want a minotaur to punch me in the kidneys and remind me how it was before.
In short: I’ve tried more. It’s awful. I want less, and I want it now.
I thought I was among the selected few who felt like this. I have way too much choice, way too many DVDs and books I bought because I sort of thought that perhaps one day I will have time to read/watch them, and my attention span is about half a Youtube video long. Glad to see there are others, especially when they are as eloquent about it as Mr Brooker.
(Thanks to Dennis.)
“Before Salt n? Peppa were pushin? it and Lil? Kim was blowing your mind with her dirty bird lyrics, Roxanne Shante was blowing up the airwaves with her single, ?Roxanne?s Revenge.? She was just 14 at the time (it was 1984), and even though the song was a hit and her future looked promising, she didn?t achieve the same fame and fortune as the female hip-hoppers that followed in her footsteps. After some shady business (lying, stealing her royalties, the usual) with her record label, Warner Brothers, she realized that they were slippery bastards. By 19, she was a bitter has-been?a broke teenage mother living in the projects. But Roxanne decided to truly get revenge when she found a life-saving clause in her contract, which stated that the record label would fund her education for life.
Guess they thought a young, poor mother would never want an education? Wrong! Roxanne not only went to college, she went on to get her PhD in Psychology from Cornell, and sent the $217,000 bill to Warner Brothers.“
The best story of the decade, possibly! Congratulations to Roxanne Shante, and one more proof (because we totally needed another) that record labels, as far as legit businesses go, are up there with the mafia.
Restaurant Refugee posted something very, very strong and touching, quoting the story of Professor Henry Gates, who got arrested at his own doorstep because a neighbour called the police — what else could the poor soul has done seeing a black man trying to get into a posh house? (A posh house the man happens to own.) Apparently Professor Gates has shouted at the police officer. Which is of course a very unreasonable behaviour for someone being arrested for breaking and entering into their own house, right?
Refugee had a similar experience… more than once:
I was fourteen the first time that I found myself on the thoroughly correct side of the law but the wrong side of a police officer who took me to the station in handcuffs because I had the ?wrong attitude? and the temerity to be ?uppity? when I was right.
[...] I was seventeen the first time I was stopped for driving a car in neighborhood where most people who drove there didn?t look like me. ?Failure to come to a complete stop? was the reason.
[...] I was twenty eight when a false alarm at my home led to the arrival of a couple of police cars, me being handcuffed in front of my then wife and neighbors, before I received an apology for the ?misunderstanding.?
In a way, I can relate to this, having been openly gay in Poland; in practice, if I didn’t want someone to know I am gay, I just didn’t share that information. A person who happens to be of a different race hasn’t got that kind of choice. Read RR’s post to see more examples of almost unbelievable racism, perfectly well and alive in many imaginative ways. 
I have never had an eating disorder, but I used to have a twisted image of my own body; I saw it very differently to what other people saw. Nowadays when I look at pictures from 6-7 years ago, I can’t imagine that this person was actually me. Not because there was something wrong with me; just because I never realised that, when my friends told me “you are so thin!” they were actually right. I thought I was average. I wasn’t.
This makes me understand how people develop eating disorders; it is the same thing that I felt about myself, just intensified. While I found myself average, many people who see the same picture as I did see in the mirror think of themselves as obese. The pictures of muscular hunks and skeletal thin models in the media don’t exactly help develop self-esteem and a healthy attitude to our own bodies, and this is why it is so important that people like Jaime Filer of bodybuilding.com share their experiences:
It all started way back in 1998, when I was 11, and didn’t think I was good enough for my parents, so I just wanted to disappear. Isn’t that sad? My first diet was when I was 11. Anyway, long-story short, 8 years, 3 hospitalizations, and about 25 pounds later, I was 19 and a skeletal 95 pounds with 4.9% body fat (according to a DEXA scan). [...]
Long-story short again, 2 years after I decided to get better, I got up to 165 pounds, and dieted back down to 138 for a competition in November of 2008. It was thrilling to be able to see my abs, striations and veins again. What a feeling! (Those of you who are competitors know what I’m talking about).
However, with the post-contest period came the post-contest binge. It started with 24 hours; I enjoyed myself with friends and family. 24 hours turned into a week. A week turned into a month. I was still binging by December 20. I was sick to my stomach, and didn’t know how to make the bloat go away. So I walked to the nearest CVS, and bought a pharmaceutical laxative. I won’t go into details, but I’ll just say that I felt better. But not only that, I felt purged physically and emotionally from the binge that had just occurred. I didn’t feel it in my stomach anymore, and I didn’t feel the guilty of going ‘off my diet’ because my stomach was empty again…
Read more at bodybuilding.com.
