Holy Mackerel, The Reverend is Right

With all the perpetual hullaballoo about queers in the Anglican Church this year (and every year since 2003 when what's his name, Gene Robinson got made Bishop of New Hampshire), I complete missed how the Right Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori became the presiding bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church, the first woman ever to lead a branch of the Anglican Church.

Which is particularly interesting, since some Anglicans still don't acknowledge the ordination of women, much less their possible role as "primate," unless you mean the strictly chimp, subhuman sense.

So the U.S. - World rift grows.

James Brown: Long Live the King

The king is dead, long live the king of soul, the hardest working man in showbiz, and the super bad godfather of everything good in pop music today.

I'd do a tribute if I could, but for that you need extravagance, excess, and joy.

The best way to remember James Brown is listen to his music.

Jump back! Kiss yourself!

"I got soul and I'm super bad
ha

I love, I love to do my thing,
ha.. and I, and I don't need, no one else
Sometimes I feels so nice, good god
I jump back, I wanna kiss myself."

It's Christmas

Faustina's off to visit Marina's brother, and she and I are alone in the house for a change, which certainly isn't a source of complaints, just strange after so many months together and everything still up in the air, mortgages and airplane tickets and the apartment swap.

A minute ago, I heard a sax out on the street playing "As Time Goes By," at least I think so. Better than Jingle Bells as a soundtrack for the day, or year, really.

Instead of acting, I feel time slipping away. I'm having trouble settling in again like the house is rejecting me, like one more agent too daft to take a chance. If I muster up some energy, it'll be to finish making the potato salad. Somebody else can do the New Year's taking stock.

Class War

Back to cleaning toilets, and I can barely walk upright, much less blog. I have a thought. It wriggles uncomfortably somewhere behind my eyelids, then dies there with one last shudder.

It's why revolutionary types -- think Karl Marx, annoyingChe Guevara, all those anti-globalizers -- are almost always middle-class with Daddy somewhere footing the bill for their alternative leisure time activity.

I wonder sometimes what shape class revolutions would take if hadn't been the son of a factory owner writing the seminal work, but somebody on the assembly line, or a maid.

The Smart Money Says...

I have to think it was a joke, The Guardian headline, Iraq was terrible mistake, thinktank says because the only response to that is "duh."

Perhaps it should have been a quote from the drunktank, or the fishtank, or gas tank but thinktank, no way. The only use of a thinktank at the moment would be how to get the hell out. And as to that, a whole lot of nuthin'.

A ditto "duh" for the observation that "The bilateral relationship with the United States may be 'special' to Britain, but the US has never described it as more than 'close' ... Tony Blair has learnt the hard way that loyalty in international politics counts for very little."

Double duh. Are you listening, Monsieur Sarkozy?

Crisis in Scottish Army

Forget about Iraq, Afghanistan, and all those Africans that drowned when their boat capsized on their way to seek refuge in the Canary Islands.

It's the lack of dress kilts for the Scottish army that has me gasping in horror.

Who is responsible and why? Will they be brought to justice? Tried? Perhaps force-fed haggis until it comes out their ears and they get those looms up and working? Tell us. I've got to know.

Diagnosing the US

"In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance." Eric Ambler, "A Coffin for Dimitrios"

Anybody got any nails handy?

Flanders Secedes From Belgium

That's what reporters said anyway in an public television broadcast yesterday.

Modeled on the Orson Wells "War of the Worlds" hoax, the program was designed to call attention to the question of culturally divided Belgium and whether independence would help matters.

The station enlisted their own journalists to convincingly "break" the news, and offer reports in the studio and on the ground, including a few confusing moments when a train stopped at the new border.

The way I heard it, the "panic" and "alarm" reported by the BBC over Flanders' ostensible bid for independence looked more like moderate annoyance in the TV footage, or a mild case of dyspepsia after too much of Belgium's glorious beer.

Try something like that in France, the fur would fly, or at least the glass. I watched French protesters shatter everything vitreous in a five mile radius last year because of minor changes in employment laws.

In Belgium they made phone calls and crashed websites. Ye gads.

Wear a Sweater, Save the World

It's December. There's no shame in putting on an extra layer.

I tell Marina's Mom that all the time. She runs around the house in a tee shirt exclaiming how cold she is, "Que frío" as if I'm gonna jack up the thermostat to 90 because she's got a grudge against winter.

"Put on a sweater," I say, and she looks at me with the same disgust she would have shown if I'd suggested she parade down the street stark naked. Go figure.

Pinochet's Dead

It would have been nice if Augusto Pinochet had stood trial, but before him, most dictators got clean away, if they even lived to retirement.

Since his 1998 arrest in London on a Spanish warrant detailing the murder, torture, and kidnapping that marked his military regime in Chile, Pinochet was held first in England, then in Chile where he was stripped of parliamentary immunity, and kept under house arrest while legal proceedings began.

Assertions of ill health delayed trial after trial, but his victims' families were at least spared more sights of him roaming the golf courses and shopping malls of the world.

Ding dong, the bastard's dead. Who's next?

Götterdämmerung, Again

Yesterday I got an email to The Gully saying God hates negroes, today, an email that God likes queers, or at least is okay with gay Jewish commitment ceremonies. How nice to have the permission of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly.

In Iraq, gay men are taken by death squads. Who cares if they're Sunni or Shiite. Screw both.

It's so Valhalla out there, a different god for every day of the week, all the little bastards squabbling, sniping, justifying everything under the sun.

Here's hoping the twilight comes soon. Even when they're on my side, I'm scared. They're temperamental. The worm turns.

Excluding Rats

Finally, New York City is joining the battle against rats. To be honest, I have mixed feelings about the vile little creatures. On the one hand, they terrify me with their squirmy little bodies and vicious squeaks. On the other, I'm always hopeful they'll bite one of the yuppies infesting my neighborhood, or at least scare the crap out of them.

They're especially active in the summer. You can see one or two scurrying around at all times of day, and at night you sometimes get swarms of several dozen going from a garden two buildings over to a pile of compost in a small garden across the street.

I've learned to run past piles of garbage, and not walk too close to parked cars. They often pause underneath when they're crossing the street.

For a while, they nested in one of our planters and we had to rip the thing out to get rid of them. Poison wasn't enough. They're picky. Won't even eat it if the container's not sufficiently clean. Which is funny, considering they eat swill from garbage cans.

But this is the East Village. Even the rats have attitude.

Rejecting Cuba

So Raul Castro extends his hand to the U.S. with the proverbial olive branch, or if you prefer, a mojito, but instead of taking a sip, the Bush administration would rather bite off a finger.

Typical. Remember all the rhetoric about bringing democracy to Iraq? Which I guess was supposed to be accomplished with a couple of decrees, twenty billion dollars worth of bombs, and a weekend war.

Now, with Castro dying, Cuba's on the cusp of real change, and we turn our backs. All Raul wants to do is talk. What would it cost us? No American dead, no looting the American budget.

Bush is the anti-Midas. Everything he touches turns to crap.

Video: Dog Days In Cuba

A typical Saturday in Havana, Cuba. The regime may change, but this won't any time soon.

Girls Rule in Ségo Campaign

Ségolene Royal, the Socialist candidate for French prez, unveiled her campaign's top team earlier this week.

Small and select, even what the press is calling "commando," Sego continued to dump the Socialist old, white elephants in favor of new blood and diversity including a fifty-fifty gender split and four women under thirty-five:

Born in Somalia, Safia Otokoré, will share responsibility for spearheading the grassroots campaign "Désirs d'Avenir" Hope for the Future. She's a rising PS politician in Burgundy and national PS secretary of sports. She identifies herself as black, Muslim and 'républicaine.'

New Chief of Staff Camille Putois, was poached from Sarkozy's stomping ground, the Ministry of the Interior, where she was in charge of the "bureau des élections et des études politiques" office of elections and political research.

The chargés de mission include Ouarda Karaï, of North African descent, an elections expert--just this year elected to the PS national council.

The writer Aurélie Filippetti, another chargé de mission, isn't even a Socialist, but cut her political teeth with the Green party.

You go girlzzz.