A kinda hero of mine

Lee Harris. A fine and clear-minded writer and thinker,
called by some "the philosopher of 9/11".

His 2007 interview with Dennis Prager here.
His website here.

"Effing impressive guy" Ayan Hirsi Ali
reviews and critiques his book The Suicide of Reason.

His doubts about changing the traditions of marriage
expressed at length here.

His upcoming book in May:
The Next American Civil War: The Populist Revolt
against the Liberal Elite.

Lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia
with Andy Fuson, his partner of more than twenty years.

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Meaty

LANCASTER-- A man was stabbed in the neck with a meat thermometer after asking a woman to silence her cell phone in a movie theater, a sheriff's department official said.

The stabbing occurred last Saturday at the Cinemark 22 theater at 2600 West Avenue I in Lancaster, according to Detective Richard Cartmill of the Lancaster sheriff's station.

Deputies say that while the movie was playing, a woman was talking on her phone and the victim asked her to turn it off.

The victim was attacked by the woman's boyfriend and another man. Deputies say he was stabbed in the neck with a meat thermometer.

The victim was hospitalized and is expected to survive. Two other people who attempted to help the victim were also injured in the altercation.

Sheriff's officials describe the suspects as black males. One man was wearing an orange hat with an orange jacket or jersey. The other man was dressed in a black hooded sweatshirt.

Anyone with information on the attack is asked to contact the Lancaster sheriff's station at (661) 948-8466.

PS. Original story reveals that the woman and two men left the theatre and then came back to do the stabbing.

HT to my moviegoing companion G, and the original story in the Free Republic. Lancaster, BTW, is in Los Angeles County.

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Vanity of vanities

All is vanity and a chasing after the wind, Saith the Preacher.

The Boyo has a workmate who would not go to see Avatar because it is too violent.

Got a jar of homemade marmalade composed mostly of the lemons from my backyard, along with blood oranges and ginger. Nice. Made by the partner of a friend and erotic partner of mine; I was best man at their gay wedding.

That's a true fact.

Who says all right-wingers are one-dimensional? Or consistent.

Long ago a mentor of mine pointed out that I hold lots of strong opinions about things and about groups of people, but if you put an individual person in front of me, it's a whole new ball game. Strikes me as a typical conservative attitude. And one I like.

Which punishment is more cruel? The fate of the Titan Prometheus, whose regrown liver is eaten out each day by an eagle or that of the half-human Tantalus, who is fixed forever in Hades, with cooling water and ripe fruit close but always out of reach?

Having to finish up my CE requirement for my license renewal. I really hate fulfilling tedious tasks for large organizations, especially when they cost me money and involve filling out forms. Like doing my taxes.

I am glad Howard Zinn is dead. Couldn't have happened soon enough. Ungrateful Jew. See Item Three here. (Does this put me in the same moral category of caring activist and Hugo Chavez adoring actor Sean Penn, who hopes people who criticize him die of rectal cancer? Although, mercifully, he only wants you jailed if you call His Excellency a dictator...)

I like waking up, now that in the mornings the sun is up before I am.

I miss my car.

I like American porn much better than Euro porn. The men are far better built and better looking. And they at least appear to be enjoying themselves or to be engaged with one another with some intensity. Most of the Euros look like homely skinny bored sleepwalkers doing housework to schmaltzy mall muzak.

Cajun music. Great stuff. Hard not to move. Can make an accordion sound like Mozart. In an alternative life, I wouldn't mind having some Cajun ancestry.

Why are so many of the women characters on television angry unhappy castrating bitches, right out of the gate? A lot of them need to be smacked, hard and fast and regular. All this unmotivated rage. That's supposed to be strength? A stellar exception is "Angela Montenegro" on Bones. She is smart, beautiful, playfully sensual, self-confident, talented but enjoys life and the people of both sexes around her. Her power does not rely on humiliating others.

That H1N1 really kicked the shit out of me in January. Back almost to normal levels of performance at the gym, but it's taken six weeks or more. Must be getting better; a hunky 45 year old seriously hit on me there the other day.

As a religion, I find Protestantism utterly boring, though they have some good music. But since there would have been no America without the Reformation, I am retroactively glad of it.

Speaking of music and America, even if you take a dim view of the Brits, past or present, it's hard not to be moved by "Jerusalem, Parry's transformation of Blake.

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

And even if you take a dim view of the Mormons, same thing for "Come, come, ye saints." Always brings tears. "All is well. All is well."

Come, come, ye saints, no toil nor labor fear;
But with joy wend your way.
Though hard to you this journey may appear,
Grace shall be as your day.

And this soul-trembling sound from the American South, Protestant and white, primitive and powerful harmonic chant, the Sacred Harp lament, Idumea:

And am I born to die?
And lay this body down?
And as my trembling spirits fly
Into a world unknown

I sometimes think that with age and experience you should find the world easier to take, since the unreal expectations of youth have been worn away and you can flow with less tension. Some days I do. But some days I am glad that we have limited life spans and that I will not have to live here forever as the place seems to get worse all the time. Curmudgeon, anyone?

My ex emailed me a YouTube video of a Japanese taiko musician waling away at a big drum.
He is shot from the back, dressed only in a fundoshi. God, the male animal is a miracle of form and function.

I was always taught that belief in a creator God and acceptance of evolution were not incompatible. In principle, no reason why they should be. Evolution would then be the modality of God's creation. But if you pay attention to the process, you find unimaginable realms of time in which whole worlds are created and then destroyed. (The Kabbalists thought this, too, for other reasons.) To call the process savage, from the human viewpoint, is understatement defined. The God who is revealed in the higher religions, a (mostly!) purposeful, benevolent, wise and powerful intelligence, seems far removed from the vast theatre of eons in which struggle and eating dominate. A religion of principles must necessarily be a religion unable to address the world as it is and has been. That is why the messy narratives of the Old and New Testaments are better guides to reality than deracinated value statements. Perhaps the difference between "spirituality" and "religion" is the different emphasis they place on blood.

So, here I am: a product of more than six decades of living, of aeons of evolution, and the workings of divine grace on fallen nature. Stunning results, no?

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Prophecy

I saw an Oscar-nominated French film yesterday. That happens about once every two decades, that I see a French film at all, but I sorta fell into it with a friend of mine who couldn't get anyone else to go to it.

It is a much-awarded-in-France prison flic called "Un prophete", A Prophet. It was long, almost 3 hours. And it was grim and brutal, as you'd expect. The story seemed basically unoriginal to me, however: a relatively callow young guy gets imprisoned and thru the vicissitudes of it all, turns out to be a kingpin, bringing down the men who once controlled and used him. The difference is that he is an Arab and the downfall group are the Corsicans who once controlled the prison and him. The future of the prisoners' power clearly lies with the Arabs, the Muslim "brothers".

As the idiosyncratic and curmudgeonly Right website Taki's Mag points out, the only relatively decent people in the film are the imprisoned Muslims.

To me, of course, what lay in the background of the film is the impossibility of France continuing to exist in any recognizable way with a growing alien population like that.

I checked it out. France's population is anywhere from 6% to 10% Muslim at this point. Its prisoner population consists of anywhere from 50% to 70% Muslims.

Un prophete?

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A boy named Sue

And a dog named Molly.

My friend B has a dog named Molly. But Molly is a boy. B refers to Molly as "she" quite a lot. There's a specific history to this; nowhere else in his life does B confuse the genders of animals or humans.

I am sitting at the gym, where B works, and Molly sleeps by the desk. A guy comes to the desk on his way out, a regular gym member. This fella is one of those "impressive but not attractive" types. He is pretty un-handsome, with dark circles under his sunken eyes that, along with his shaved head, give him the look of a skull. He is big and broad and tattooed, if not aesthetically so. And having seen him in the showers, his gender is not at all in doubt. Not at all.

Anyway, he comes by on his way out and asks about the dog, whether it's a boy or a girl. B explains that he's a boy but that his name is Molly and I add that Bill has a strange habit of calling him "she." Skull guy says it makes no difference, since "she owns us all."

"You mean the dog?", I ask.

"No, she. The big she."

I apparently register some kind of discordant reaction on my face, because Skull guy asks, archly, "Oh, are you one of those 'masculine' guys?"

"Yup."

He then flicks his wrist and swirls his meaty hand my way, dismissive-drag-queen style, with this parting thought, "Well, you're all still just faggot cocksuckers."

Exit Skull-guy.

Gay liberation. Great stuff, eh?

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Why do you care?

A friend of mine who finds my political ideas tough to take likes to quiz me about my concerns over Islam by asking, "Why do you care? These are people far away on the other side of the world. It has nothing to do with you."

Guess what.

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Divas

My (accelerating) disenchantment with most things gay --the male-male sex/love part being extremely excepted-- has been noted here often at Ex Cathedra. But I do confess that both in my past and my present, there are a few things common to other gay men that I both admit and value. For instance, a trinity of divas:

Bette Midler. Tina Turner. And Cher.

Unlike a lot of gay men, I don't want to be them...a crucial difference...but I enjoy them immensely. They are female, clearly and to the max, and they are powerful, unshy, gifted and justly rewarded for it. And, sexuality aside, I have always had the impression that all of them liked men. Liked us.

Tina Turner is a class act with a huge intense talent; she manages to be steamy and bold, vulnerable and warm, without ever losing her dignity.

Cher is just fun, a lot of fun and she is clearly having fun doing what she does.


And, my sentimental favorite, The Divine Miss M --Confiteor: I saw that movie at least 7 times in the 80s*--has got brass and cheek, earth and bawdiness, burlesque and absurdity, always with a sense of play, humility, heart, and, well, joy.

Joy. That's what separates these three from some other kinds of so-called divas, who are too often just narcissistic and histrionic bitches with a mean streak. Not for this boy.

Whenever I watch them or hear them, Ms. Turner, Ms. Midler or Ms...Cher, I find myself smiling. That, I say, is talent. In this world, to create a smile out of joy, that is almost divine, which is what "diva" actually means.

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*I actually went to see her live in concert back then. And the next night went to the same venue to see my other favorite performer of the 80's: Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. Always trying to balance the opposites!

Ya wanna?

Good ole Trace Adkins, testosterone on a stick, manages to be totally alpha-male sexy and a sweet boyish guy at the same time. I am no fan of long hair on a man, but all he has to do is smile and I'm there.

Ya wanna?

Are you kidding?

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PS. And the linked song, "One Hot Mama", is a playful and steamy and actually pretty touching hymn to married love.

A US Male

This is country singer Aaron Tippin. But if it's a good day and you squint a little, we look a bit alike in this picture. You can see the differences here! Serious testosterone.

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Dirt thou art

Tag Purvis' 2000 film always irritates me and always draws me in and always moves me. Southern Gothic. Image and sound. Homoerotic. I am always sorry when it ends.

The mysterious drifter Lee Todd, played with real male fire and edgy containment of raw and tender feeling by Walton Goggins....


The blood-brother ceremony in the dark. Swimming in the river. The meeting in the cemetery.

"I don't want to live my life knowing I loved someone so dearly
but feared so much more."

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