In the news: oh, brother

This is a picture of pro footballer Joe Montana's 18 y/o son for you to look at whenever the following news gets too depressing, which it will almost immediately. News:

-There's a club for gays and straights in Florida that can meet now. [ap]

-It's looking like gheys in Washington state will likely get full benefits under civil-unions, making them equitable to marriage, and ppl are pissed because they think marriage will be gunned for next. Look, people: you worship a book of fairy tales. Get the fuck over it. [seattle times]

-They're pushing for that Harvey Milk Day in California--from the article: "The Capitol Resource Institute has previously stated of the attempt to pass a Harvey Milk Day that, "This is yet another example of the campaign to normalize homosexual behavior not just in schools, but in our culture. We must continue to defend our traditional values despite the effort to demolish the very values that established and sustain our nation."" I hate god, like, 99% of the time, y'all. [shewired]

-Sweet, there's more of this shit: "San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer told the Most Holy Redeemer Church in the city's Castro neighborhood that an Atherton Catholic school's production of a play that details an adolescent's struggle with his homosexuality and his Christian faith was not to be performed. 

Students from Sacred Heart Preparatory, under the direction of drama instructor John Loschmann, have produced an adaption of Alex Sanchez's controversial novel The God Box entitled "Be Still and Know."" [msnbc]

-People who want to adopt kids (you know what kind of people) face off with Florida for the sake of that right. [miamiherald]

picture from here

Dec 26th is Boxing Day!!

You know, the famed day Beyonce made an album about (tastefully titled B'Day)? What this used to mean is buying gifts and giving them to the less fortunate (me); what it means now is returning gifts, cashing out gift cards, and taking advantage of post-christmas, recession-based apocalypse sales. If you're Colander/the Fishbelly, it means having to work, so I've always got that. Merry boxing day, world. [b'day on wiki]

HAPPY XMASSS

The 25th is my best friend's birthday. Maybe you've met? He is Jesus and I didn't get him a gift, because of the recession and being gay. Amen.

===

That's the dude from MGMT up there. I don't really listen to them because I'm trying to cut back on people telling me to put bands on my iPod or they won't like me, so I only listen to "Electric Feel" because I don't feel like spending cash pounds just to find out that I don't like their record (old argument, yea, we know). The picture is from Hipster Runoffz, and what I learn reading Carles is that it's okay to like Justice more than other musical band groups, because it's just okay to like things that make life fit into functional 4/4 time groupings with cool bass solos dubbed in the center of the mix, toward the end of the track. It's okay, because you say it is, and it's your life.

That said, I finally saw A Cross the Universe and it made me feel, in NPO:

-alone

-happy

-pumped

-excited for the future

-more interested in Justice

-that Kavinsky maybe doesnt have so many songs cuz maybe he parties too hard?

-that SebastiAn doesn't do interviews because he's shy, not cuz ppl don't ask

-scared

-jealous

-like being there for my friends

-sober

-like I'm wasting my life

Smiles are contagious.

In the news: World AIDS Day

Talk about the holiday season! No but seriously, go get checked out, for fun even:

*AIDS remains the world's No. 1 health threat and in the United States is a grave risk to black people in particular. As Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute, put it, "AIDS in America is a black disease . . . about half of the just over 1 million Americans living with HIV or AIDS are black." [washpost]

*Health authorities and the U.N. AIDS agency pledged Sunday to combat the stigmatization of people with the disease by unveiling a massive red ribbon, the symbol of AIDS awareness, at the Olympic Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing.
"Stigma and discrimination are major obstacles in an effective response to AIDS. We need to engage all sectors of society in China to combat these issues and work together to stop the disease," said Minister of Health Chen Zhu, according to a UNAIDS statement. [ap]

*A worldwide drive to test one million people for HIV in the week ahead of World AIDS Day on Monday has been highly successful, a U.S. AIDS group said.
"Our One Million Tests campaign has been met with a wildly enthusiastic response in all corners of the world," said Terri Ford, director of global advocacy for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. [cbc.ca]

*From the mouth of yr preznint bush: "I'm pleased to announce that we have exceeded that goal early," Bush said standing with first lady Laura Bush on the North Lawn of the White House decorated with a giant red ribbon to mark the occasion. "The American people through PEPFAR are supporting lifesaving treatment for more than 2 million people around the world." [usa today]

*The analysts developed a mathematical model to predict what would happen if most adults and adolescents were tested every year for the virus that causes AIDS and those who tested positive were immediately treated with antiretroviral drugs instead of waiting until their immune systems were depressed, as is now policy. ... The results, described last week in The Lancet, a British medical journal, were remarkable. Transmission of the virus from infected individuals to others could be driven so low as to be nearly eliminated within a decade, largely because the drugs would drastically reduce the amount of virus in their blood and genital secretions. [nyt]

Holiday overshare: Wrestling

I often feel really, really bad posting images on this site and making that be all there is to the post. But this is our first holiday together (this site is like 3 weeks old, you see) and since the holidays are about indulging in revenge fantasies against your parents for turning you into a hollow blob incapable of loving himself or others, from which children cower, why not also make it a time to indulge in some things that have been on your mind. For me, one of those things has been wrestling, and how smelly guys can be, yet how nobody ever has that complaint about wrestling. Spreading herpes, sure--but not being smelly. Go figure. Whatever, the point is, one of my friends used to wrestle in high school, and he still keeps tabs, and he's not totally h-phobic or anything (he is MY friend), I think he would be annoyed if I pointed out the inherent erotica of traditional wrestling (not that WWE shit).

In America: Thanksgiving

This week, your Fishbelly is spending less time in the office because it's a holiday. Thanksgiving is one of the undisputed American holidays, in that there is no real War on Thanksgiving, mostly because there are no Turkey Zealots out there to call it that. But there are people who like to keep it real in regards to the holiday, so in honor of this, SCCL is presenting, via the History Channel, the History of Thanksgiving, because what do you really know about the day, except that your relatives can be smug sometimes, and that pilgrims were inherently afraid of these peoples they didn't understand, and that their generational offspring isn't really all that much different. [History]