Last night the sky was clear, and I found a patch of darkness nearby from which to look at the stars. I saw Orion hovering, as he is wont to do, in the southern sky. And I noticed...Orion the Hunter has a big dangly cock.
Here is a photograph, a long exposure taken through a telescope. Have a good look. It's clear. Right there, beneath the belt, with the Great Nebula smack dab in the middle. Some may call it his sword. This is clearly a very laboured interpretation. It's plain to the meanest intellect that in point of fact Orion is baring to all the Earth his astral member, while spreadeagled and throbbing for action.
Go outside some clear night soon, and see for yourself. You'll thank me.
Today Canada voted! Again! And HogBlog is here once again to tell you what to think.
Not much, to tell the truth.
You can see fun little updating scorecards here and here and here and probably lots of other places too, if you like to keep track of these things. The writing's on the wall, and the Conservatives under Stephen Harper are going to get a minority government. Neither the Conservative win nor the Liberal loss are shaping up to be all that overwhelming. As far as vote shares and numbers of seats in Parliament go, to a first approximation they've just traded places.
It's been a boring election. Like, really boring. Even I can't get too excited about it. I was actually hoping the Liberals would lose more seats. Because, and let's be perfectly honest here, they were sort of lame. They made Paul Martin their leader, for god's sake. That's lamer than a one-legged duck made of cheese, which is very lame indeed, let me tell you. Paul Martin was disturbingly reminiscent of a US Democrat. (Not one of your Howard Deans, either.) Though he looked more like William Shatner. Only without Shatner's charisma and sincerity. If only he'd grabbed the microphone and shouted 'KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!', maybe he could've made it. But no. Hopefully, a Conservative victory means he'll quit, and maybe next time the Liberals can pick a leader who looks a little more like Leonard Nimoy.
The New Democratic Party, my personal favourite, has made gains. Their leader, Jack Layton, looks like Jack Nance, best known as Pete Martell on Twin Peaks. (There is no evidence yet that, after defeating his Liberal challenger, Layton phoned up Paul Martin to say 'She's dead. Wrapped in plastic.') They're the only vaguely interesting party up there. I was hoping Svend Robinson, their openly gay ex-MP who left Parliament after admitting to stealing a ring from an auction (which he blamed on a bipolar disorder), would win a seat again, but it looks like it wasn't meant to be. Winnipeg's elected a couple of NDPers. It's not such a bad place, Winnipeg. Some of the men are hot.
The Conservative leader, Stephen Harper, doesn't really look like anyone, so far as I can tell. Except for maybe some kind of oily golem-like creature made out of dough. It's not like he'll actually have the votes to do anything significant, though, so...who cares?
ADDENDUM (28/01/06): For real talk about real things and real people who aren't William Shatner, check out the comments to this post on Making Light.
I clicked on a blogad thingy for the first time today, just because it mentioned my motherland, Iowa. I ended up at Who is Benjamin Stove?, which is some kind of viral marketing ploy, or online puzzle game, or something. Whatever it is, it's harmless and fun to play along with. The blog is putatively that of someone who obtained a painting, done in 1913 of what appears to be a crop circle, at an estate sale in Newton, Iowa, and is now seeking to figure out what the heck the story is. It's sort of addictive. Someone spent money on this. I wonder where it's going...
Also, inept actor Tom Cruise has been threatening to sue over an episode of South Park which calls Scientology a big fat fraud (which it is) and involves various characters trying to coax Cruise into coming out of a closet, within which he is literally hiding. Hardly a triumph of Wildean wit, but now available online here and here, so you should watch it if for no other reason than to annoy the Church of Scientology and learn the awful truth about Xenu.
Here at HogBlog we have a proud tradition of saying things about stuff. Or, to be more precise, we had a proud tradition; so overheated was our rhetoric and so brightly did blaze the flames of our bloggish passion that HogBlog Headquarters, in fact, burnt right down. This came as something of a surprise.
...Perhaps that would be a catchy new tag-line: 'We're on FIRE!'
What with one thing and another, HogBlog fell almost silent. The fertile fields of blogdom have here lain fallow for far too long; just as a forest fire clears away the dead wood and ushers in a frantic burst of new growth, just as torching Iraq brought about a golden age of peace and enlightenment in the Middle East, so too shall this blog rise phoenix-like from its ashes and reclaim its rightful place as whatever the hell it used to be. Only better.
Speaking of the hot and flaming, how about that Brokeback Mountain?
You should see it. It's quite good. A couple of things...
It's the saddest movie I've seen in a long time. I'm not afraid to admit that I cried like a goddamn lawn sprinkler. I'm allowed to do that, because I'm a big homo. You should too. It's good for you. You need to emote during the film because the characters have such trouble emoting themselves. There must be balance. And it really just rips your heart right out to see them...So full of love and fear, so bound up in their steely-eyed Marlborough Man masculine identities that they can never let themselves grow, never accept what they feel, never allow themselves to be happy; they can hardly talk about it, let alone live with it. A bulbous fool of my acquaintance hated the movie, and complained that the characters never developed. That's the whole point. That's the tragedy. This unwillingness, this refusal, warps their lives and their souls. And then it's just too late, and Heath Ledger is left with a belly full of grief and can hardly talk about that either...
I've heard a lot of talk about how masculine the movie is. The men are very butch, the pick-ups very rusty, the chests very buff, the ass sex very forceful. All of this is true. There's very little indicative of any kind of gay identity or culture in the film, nothing camp or swishy. But masculinity does not come out of the movie looking good, since it's the root of all the cowboys' problems. It gets them lives of misery and isolation. They feel so much, but can say so little. Let this be a lesson to you, manly men. Being a little less Heath Ledger and a little more John Inman will serve you well in life.
It's a slow movie. Like the landscapes, the timeless rock and changeless dust, like the characters themselves who just can't get it...We cry out to the uncaring heavens at times as the movie, like the land, like the men, refuses to develop, changing coming so achingly slowly, in the end too little and too late...
The sex is hot, though. Like, wow. Really hot. Hot and rough and sweaty and asstastic. I don't want to hear any hetero males out there going all squeamish on me now. I've put up with hundreds and hundreds of movies in which people put things into vaginas, and you don't hear me complaining. You can damn well sit still with your eyes wide open and watch two men's chests as they hump. It's not like you can even see anything juicy. And if it gives you a woody well then that's just too fucking bad. You can whip yourself silly begging forgiveness from your cruel God later on if you want, but that won't make ass sex any less hot and deep down inside you know it.
Jake Gyllenhaal's moustache, however, is not hot. I wanted to reach out and rip the bastard right off his face. Moustaches are evil, and this is proof. Don't grow one.
It's a love story, and as such it is universal. It's about intimacy and enduring bonds. But it is also gay. This is a gay movie about gay people doing gay things, and that's important. It is at the heart of why they act the way they do and why things develop the way they do. Don't try to draw parallels with Romeos and Juliets and star-crossed breeders. It's not just parents or money or class or creed that keep these barebacking cowboys apart. It's something inside. They can barely conceptualise their love. They simply don't have the words to say it, or even to think it. They won't let themselves understand what it is they feel. They find their own souls alien, incomprehensible, other.
Cry.
A pirate walks into a bar with a ship's wheel bulging out of his trousers.
'Excuse me,' a bar patron says to him, 'did you know you have a giant wheel down your pants?'
'Arr,' affirms the pirate, 'and it's drivin' me nuts.'
This is a practical demonstration that the Lie group SO(n,R) has a fundamental group of order 2 for large n.
"You hold the coffee cup with your right hand underneath it, straight out in front of you. Now bring it left, under your underarm, awkwardly around front with your elbow straight up in the air. That's 360 degrees, and you're a pretzel. Keep going around counterclockwise, this time swinging your arm around over your head. At 720 degrees the coffee cup is back where it started, unspilled, and your arm is straight once more. Keep going round and round until you believe it."
Try it. It's blowing my mind, man.
The thing about police is...most of them are bastards.
Just after my birthday, I happened to stop by a notorious den of sodomites, limiting myself at all times of course to the behaviour one would expect from an impeccable gentleman such as myself. Following a drink or few and a certain amount of time "after hours" as they call it, an associate of mine and I took to the streets on a search for pizza, maintaining the utmost standards of verticality and steadiness. A police car happened past, as they sometimes do. My associate, being of a boisterous disposition, in passing flipped this car the bird.
Now, this is not a particularly friendly gesture, but I believe we can all agree it's also not quite on a par with flying airplanes into a tall building. The police officer, however, seemed to disagree. He pulled over and emerged onto the street, stopping us and demanding to see some ID. As (even now) there's no law on the books against being unfriendly, we declined to provide any. The officer summoned backup. Two or three additional cars arrived in time, and a cordon of officers emerged, fondling their nightsticks. The original officer continued to demand identification, hinting darkly of nights in jail for drunken troublemakers as he strutted (in so far as so fat a man is capable of strutting) pompously before us.
We weren't what you'd call a threatening pair. We didn't hurl insults or exhibit any signs of violence. We just...didn't offer up any ID. We hadn't done anything. We weren't even accused or suspected of having done anything: we even asked. (Well, I say "we", but the officer wasn't particularly interested in me and barely acknowledged that I was there at all.) The situation quickly became a farce: the officer would ask for ID over and over and over again without ever giving any particular reason, and we (or my associate) would refuse and cite civil rights and free countries and such. This went on for some time, perhaps ten minutes or more, before we just walked away. The police didn't try to stop us, as we still hadn't done anything illegal. I fear this was a great disappointment to them.
The officer was trying to intimidate us. He was a thin-skinned man with a badge and a gun, and these had somehow given him the impression that he was entitled to demand respect. It is a poisonous notion, that authority figures are automatically to be respected, and one that we ought to fight by giving the bird to as many authority figures are we can. It's undemocratic. Police or presidents or CEOs aren't our lords and masters, and we certainly don't owe them deference or even respect; they're just like us, just like little folk, only they have badges and guns and titles and money. And power, it's true, but only in a limited sphere. But they like to forget that. And often they want you to forget it too.
It's only to be expected that cops would try to hassle someone like this. That doesn't make it right.
The moral of the story is: fuck you, fatty.
