Tiger Wasteland

I wonder what is in his mind at this moment!

I wanna play too!

It's time to pay homage to the year that was 2005:

It started off with an Auburn victory over Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl to finish #2 behind BoiFromTroy's Trojans of USC.

Then later we had to watch while the Chimperor in Chief was inaugurated again to give us four more years of misAdministration.

We found out the identity of "Deep Throat" who brought down the Nixon presidency

Michael Jackson was not guilty of anything but being a freak.

Catholics got a new Pope with a shady German past.

There was a political and media circus over a brain dead Florida woman who just wanted a peaceful eternal sleep.

The London subways became the target of terrorists.

This bitch Katrina almost destroyed the Big Easy but spared the French Quarter which was it's heart and soul. And nobody knew what the f**k they were doing in its aftermath to help the people.

We lost the latenight King (Carson), a civil rights pioneer (Ms. Parks), the grand Dame of the silver screen (Bancroft), and a funnyman (Pryor) along with a host of others.

The Auburn tigers finished 9-2 against everyone's expectations and came a field goal short from finishing with only 1 loss. They reloaded instead of rebuilding after losing 4 first round draftees from last year's undefeated squad.

Another cute picture of Rusty Joiner. He is all that and more!

So tonight I go over to Sis's for dinner and I end up watching the annual Capital One Bowl Week on ESPN. The first one on was the Champs Sports Bowl (a.k.a. Tangerine Bowl) where we pulled for the Clemson Tigers to win against the Buffs of Colorado. (We have Clemson family connections and they are also Tigers. We get along because we rarely play.)

Next up is the Insight Bowl from Phoenix featuring the Sun Devils from Arizona State against Rutgers. Rutgers? Really. Rutgers always sucks. But not this year. It is their first bowl game since 1978. Trust me I know. I had to read about their lousy football teams in the paper because it was all the college football news I could find at the time.

In 1997 I moved from Birmingham, AL to Mahwah, NJ because of a new job for 4 years. So being the college fan I regularly got my sports fix via reading the paper while eating lunch. I still do this when out for lunch. Even with the internet I still like to read while I am eating lunch. When I lived in Birmingham during football season I would get to read all Auburn all the time. Guess what? They don't write about Auburn in New Jersey, they write about Rutgers.

So I became a geographic fan because I lived there.

So tonight I watched the Insight Bowl and rooted for Rutgers to win. Besides, Tony Soprano was there before kickoff and was the talk of the game. I hear he went to Rutgers. Sshh!

(Editor's note: Sis inspired the title of this post.)

So tonight we had the perfect ending to the holidaze (I think I may need to italicize "daze" at the end of that word for literary effect in future posts. Hmmm!)

Anyway, there I go again, about to take a tangent. It runs in the family! Trust me.

(Land the plane, dammit!)

So we end up at a Second Birthday Bash for our favorite Aubie Jr. (His hair is Auburn and his father has the diploma.) They fit right in!

Yep, he was born the day after Christmas and his parents are part of the "family". (Not blood related but could have been in a past life kind of related hence the quotes around the word family.)

(Also different from the "family" that is multi-colored and has a rainbow flag who sometimes are referred to as FOD: Friends of Dorothy.)

It was a blast !

And then we end up at Sis's for the last game of ABC's version of Monday Night Football. It was very surreal. Almost like a funeral for a dear departed friend. They showed retro flashbacks of all the games.

And then the holi"daze" came to a full circle. I came into the room and heard John Madden say "the offensive line has got to keep the penetration out of the Jets' backfield".

And then I thought about Dr. Feelgood (the evil twin of The Good Doctor) only because his mind is always in the gutter. And thanks to his blog whoring yesterday, he finally makes it to another post. It could get interesting. I may have created a monster.

PS: Sis, we DID indeed survive Christmas and we will again!

PSS: We usually rent a Christmas movie (pictured) to watch Christmas Eve and due to technical and self-inflicted difficulties, I have to return it to Blockbuster without having seen it. I don't need to. I have lived it and my version has to be better than the movie. Just sayin'.

(Editor's Note: It was not my fault for saying that the daze on the end of holidaze was supposed to be italicized and not in quotation marks in the next to the last paragraph. That was how the author wrote it. Unfortunately, he has final approval.)

It's Just Zack! For real! PS: His girlfriend took the pic and not me!











UPDATE: Just for the record, Just Zack is over 18 so you can continue to comment freely and legally. Just sayin!

So here we are all together on Christmas Eve! We are the kind of family that tries during the holidaze to maintain some type of normalcy! We are NOT normal during the rest of the year!

Here is the usual timeline on Christmas Eve:

Everyone does their last minute Christmas shopping.

Jackie D and Marilyn Merlot come over even though Jackie is Jewish and Miss Merlot is not. They are the twin's godparents so they are part of the family.

We have early evening cocktails and appetizers and everyone socializes.

And then we sit down to a nice Christmas Eve dinner. (The menu included a nice London Broil and an Orange Cranberry glazed pork roast and salad and vegetables and twice baked potatoes.)
It was yummy!

The Good Doctor and his wife were there. Just Zack, Sis, Bro-in-law, the twins, and me!

We eat and then we open table presents. Yep, everyone gets a cool present to open while eating dinner. Tonight I got a cool Auburn Tiger ornament made of Georgia marble that is a limited edition. That's the best table present ever!

So the conversation starts to revolve around one of the twins table presents. He got skateboard wax. (Who knew they made such?) So he comes up and say's something like, "Will this wax work on my wood?"

I busted a gut and so did The Good Doctor and then he looked at me and said, "This is so going into your blog, isn't it?"

He's heard about the popularity of my blog but has not personally checked it out.

And after dinner we start the usual traditions. We all get new dated Hallmark Christmas ornaments to open and hang on the tree and we get new Christmas pajamas (Sis calls them the new crimmus peebajaybas) to open. I got the best box of everone to open. It had a drag queen fuck me pump on the front. This picture is the actual pic of the box. I loved it! Sis accidently found this box in the middle of a pack that was damn ugly, according to her. She chuckled when she was wrapping them and thought of me. I love my Sis.

And then we watched a movie, "The Christmas Story" (we have the leg lamp that comes out every Christmas just like the movie). It's a family tradition.

This is my idea of the perfect man!

Rights Groups Criticize Chinese Crackdown on Gay Festival

Human rights groups are protesting a recent crackdown on China's gay and lesbian community, which has been slowly moving into the open.

According to this article there are approximately 30 million gays in China. That's alot of queens. Boy when they do allow it, that's gonna be one helluva queer parade.

Yummy!

Elton John ties knot with longtime partner

WINDSOR, England — By Elton John standards, it was a rather subdued "wedding." The groom wore black. And so did the groom.

Those crazy Brits! They don't care if gays get married as it is now legal to do so there. How progressive of them. If we could tone down the wingnuts a bit here at home, we too may someday be able to get hitched mano a mano.

I am sure that the end of marriage as we know it would still survive in spite of the divorce rate we currently have. IMHO!

Happy Hump Day!

Thanks to my good friend, Jen, who gives me access to the Select portion of the New York Times op ed columnists. Here's a great review/editorial of "Brokeback Mountain":

Two Gay Cowboys Hit a Home Run
By FRANK RICH
December 18, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

WHAT if they held a culture war and no one fired a shot? That's the compelling tale of "Brokeback Mountain." Here is a heavily promoted American movie depicting two men having sex - the precise sex act that was still a crime in some states until the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws just two and a half years ago - but there is no controversy, no Fox News tar and feathering, no roar from the religious right. "Brokeback Mountain" has instead become the unlikely Oscar favorite, propelled by its bicoastal sweep of critics' awards, by its unexpected dominance of the far less highfalutin Golden Globes and, perhaps most of all, by the lure of a gold rush. Last weekend it opened to the highest per-screen average of any movie this year.

Those screens were in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco - hardly national bellwethers. But I'll rashly predict that the big Hollywood question posed on the front page of The Los Angeles Times after those stunning weekend grosses - "Can 'Brokeback Mountain' Move the Heartland?" - will be answered with a resounding yes. All the signs of a runaway phenomenon are present, from an instant parody on "Saturday Night Live" to the report that a multiplex in Plano, Tex., sold more advance tickets for the so-called "gay cowboy picture" than for "King Kong." "The culture is finding us," James Schamus, the "Brokeback Mountain" producer, told USA Today. "Grown-up movies have never had that kind of per-screen average. You only get those numbers when you're vacuuming up enormous interest from all walks of life."

In the packed theater where I caught "Brokeback Mountain," the trailers included a National Guard recruitment spiel, and the audience was demographically all over the map. The culture is seeking out this movie not just because it is a powerful, four-hankie account of a doomed love affair and is beautifully acted by everyone, starting with the riveting Heath Ledger. The X factor is that the film delivers a story previously untold by A-list Hollywood. It's a story America may be more than ready to hear a year after its president cynically flogged a legally superfluous (and unpassable) constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage for the sole purpose of whipping up the basest hostilities of his electoral base.

By coincidence, "Brokeback Mountain," a movie that is all the more subversive for having no overt politics, is a rebuke and antidote to that sordid episode. Whether it proves a movie for the ages or as transient as "Love Story," it is a landmark in the troubled history of America's relationship to homosexuality. It brings something different to the pop culture marketplace at just the pivotal moment to catch a wave.

Heaven knows there has been no shortage of gay-themed entertainment in recent years. To the tedious point of ubiquity, gay characters, many of them updated reincarnations of the stereotypical fops and fussbudgets of 1930's studio comedies, are at least as well represented as other minorities in prime-time television. Entertainment Weekly has tallied nine movies, including "Capote" and "Rent," with major gay characters this year. But "Brokeback Mountain," besides being more sexually candid than the norm, is not set in urban America, is not comic or camp, and, unlike the breakout dramas "Philadelphia" and "Angels in America," is pre-AIDS.

Its heroes are neither midnight cowboys, drugstore cowboys nor Village People cowboys. As Annie Proulx writes in the brilliant short story from which the movie has been adapted, the two ranch hands, Ennis Del Mar (Mr. Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), are instead simply "high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life."

They meet and fall in love while tending sheep in the Wyoming wilderness in 1963. That was the year of Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Washington and Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique," but gay Americans, and not just in Wyoming, were stranded, still waiting for the world to start spinning forward. Over the next two decades of sporadic reunions and long separations, both Ennis and Jack get married and have children; it barely occurs to them to do otherwise. In their place and time, there is no vocabulary to articulate their internal conflicts, no path to steer their story to a happily-ever-after Hollywood ending. Before they know it, they are, in Ms. Proulx's words, "no longer young men with all of it before them."

Ennis's and Jack's acute emotions - yearning, loneliness, disappointment, loss, love and, yes, lust - are affecting because they are universal. But while the screenplay, by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, adheres closely to the Proulx original, it even more vividly roots the movie in the rural all-American milieu, with its forlorn honky-tonks and small-town Fourth of July picnics, familiar from elegiac McMurtry works like "The Last Picture Show." More crucially, the script adds detail to Ennis's and Jack's wives (as do Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway, who play them) so that we can implicitly, and without any on-screen moralizing, see the cost inflicted on entire families, not just on Ennis and Jack, when gay people must live a lie.

Though "Brokeback Mountain" is not a western, it's been directed by Ang Lee with the austerity and languorous gait of a John Ford epic. These aesthetics couldn't be more country miles removed from "The Birdcage" or "Will & Grace." The audience is forced to recognize that gay people were fixtures in the red state of Wyoming (and every other corner of the country, too) long before Matthew Shepard and Mary Cheney were born. Without a single polemical speech, this laconic film dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective "agenda" concocted by conspiratorial "elites" in Chelsea, the Castro and South Beach, as anti-gay proselytizers would have it. Ennis and Jack long for a life together, not for what gay baiters pejoratively label a "lifestyle."

But in truth the audience doesn't have to be coerced to get it. This is where the country has been steadily moving of late. "Brokeback Mountain," a Hollywood product after all, is not leading a revolution but ratifying one, fleshing out - quite literally - what most Americans now believe. It's not for nothing that the proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage vanished as soon as the election was over. Polls show that a large American majority support equal rights for gay couples as long as the unions aren't labeled "marriage" - and given the current swift pace of change, that reservation, too, will probably fade in the next 5 to 10 years.

The history of "Brokeback Mountain" as a film project in itself crystallizes how fast the climate has shifted. Mr. McMurtry and Ms. Ossana bought the screen rights to the Proulx story after it was published in The New Yorker in 1997. That was the same year the religious right declared a fatwa on Disney because Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet in her ABC prime-time sitcom. In the eight years it took "Brokeback Mountain" to overcome Hollywood's shilly-shallying and at last be made, the Disney boycott collapsed and Ms. DeGeneres's star rose. She's now a mainstream daytime talk-show host competing with Oprah. No one has forgotten she's a lesbian. No one cares.

ANOTHER startling snapshot of this progress can be found in a culture-war skirmish that unfolded just as "Brokeback Mountain" was arriving at the multiplex. The American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., a leader in the 1997 anti-"Ellen" crusade, claimed this month that its threat of a boycott had led Ford to stop advertising its Jaguar and Land Rover lines in glossy gay magazines. Last week Ford, under fire from gay civil-rights organizations and no doubt many other mainstream customers, essentially told the would-be boycotters to get lost by publicly announcing that it would not only resume its Jaguar and Land Rover ads in gay publications, but advertise other brands in them as well.

As far as I can tell, the only blowhard in the country to turn up on television to declare culture war on "Brokeback Mountain" also has an affiliation with the American Family Association. By contrast, as Salon reported last week, other family-values ayatollahs have made a conscious decision to ignore the movie, lest they drum up ticket sales by turning it into a SpongeBob SquarePants cause célèbre. Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America imagined that the film might just go away if he and his peers stayed mum. Audiences "don't want to see two guys going at it," he told Salon. "It's that simple."

So he might wish. The truth is that the millions of moviegoers soon to swoon over the star-crossed gay cowboys of "Brokeback Mountain" can probably put up with the sight of "two guys going at it." It's the all too American tragedy of what happens to these men afterward that neither our hearts nor consciences can so easily shake.

Dr. Feelgood's office Christmas party is quite the social event. I rank it right up there with the Super Bowl party from last year. 'Cept there was a completely different set of supporting characters in the mix.

Shots were flowing. (That's why Blondie had a slight stomach disorder)

(to be continued)

Okay, due to popular demand, the Dr Feelgood Christmas party post is going to come to everyone in chapters. Yep! It's true. I may soon become the local Rome, GA version of the gay Stephen King. Yep, it's gonna be scary and GAY!

Go and check out the comments from Just Zack and Blondie and Sis in the last post. They are determined to provide my loyal readers with their version of events:

(this is my version of their versions)

Just Zack: I had to hold the hair while Blondie was regurgitating over the deck rail and later I got locked out in my Tom Cruise outfit (see picture) for about an hour at 4am (PS: I can't wait to hear my take on my ultimate transition from being a boy to a man who starts thinking like a man and forgetting things like making sure when I leave a warm house to go outside, I DAMN sure make SURE that I have a way back in the warm house.)

Story to follow, ask Just Zack to fill in the blanks.

Blondie: I was having so much fun hanging with my new cute boyfriend and hanging around fun people that I work with. (PS: My cute boyfriend Just Zack has a cool gay uncle. He's so much fun. We were drinking lotsa shotz from Dr. Feelgood and then I threw up.)

She will provide her version of the story for everybody and we will compare notes.

And then we got in the hot tub. Me, Just Zack and Blondie!.

And then we were done. It was a cold night and we were in the warm water and it made us all have to pee.

(to be continued)

So last night we find ourselves at Dr. Feelgood's Christmas party for their office employees. I got to go with Sis, who fills in part time at the office sometimes. Just Zack and Blondie were there too.

(By the way it has just come to my attention that some readers are confused by The Good Doctor and Dr. Feelgood, they are one in the Same!)

Blondie is a new member of our extended family. We have known Blondie since the summer when she was semi-dating our favorite 16-year-old poolboy Rael (only to make Just Zack jealous). Oops, I almost had to take a tangent with my story. (More about Rael in a later post!)

So I don't know everyone as well as everybody else, and I end up hanging with Just Zack and Blondie. Dr. Feelgood insisted that we have an assemply line of shots and it starts to become a fun party. So Just Zack and I start chit-chatting and come to find out something about each other that we didn't know about each other.

We have become party buds as well as the uncle-nephew relationship that we have always shared. Then it hit us both! He is living vicariously through me to know what's it like to be gay and forty something and I am living vicariously through him to find out all the things I missed if I had not been gay and a recent high school graduate. So far I am enjoying the ride and I think he's having fun too.

And he is dressed in his Auburn colors just for me!

There's something about being wet!

This one reminds me of vintage photos of old movie stars.

Contrary to the information that our lame duck (mis)administration spouts from their perches in Washington, comes this:

2005 is warmest year on record for Northern Hemisphere, scientists say

"Some scientists said the world temperature reading is more evidence that global warming, heating of the atmosphere aggravated by the burning of fossil fuels, is growing worse. "Could these changes arise from natural climate fluctuations alone? The answer is no," said physicist Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory."

Even Letterman is paying attention to the Brokeback Mountain buzz:

Top Ten Signs You're A Gay Cowboy

10. "Your saddle is Versace"
9. "Instead of 'Home On The Range', you sing 'It's Raining Men'"
8. "You enjoy ridin', ropin', and redecoratin'"
7. "Sold your livestock to buy tickets to 'Mamma Mia'"
6. "After watching reruns of 'Gunsmoke', you have to take a cold shower"
5. "Native Americans refer to you as 'Dances With Men'"
4. "You've been lassoed more times than most steers"
3. "You're wearing chaps, yet your 'ranch' is in Chelsea"
2. "Instead of a saloon you prefer a salon"
1. "You love riding, but you don't have a horse"

Today's Candy is actor Matt Cedeno.

I tried today. I really did! I attempted to try and finally get into the Christmas spirit. I even went shopping. And it just wasn't happening. I did find a cute gift for Sis. I usually get her a number of cute and practical things for Christmas, instead of just one gift. I end up spending roughly the same amount on everybody. So to me it's more fun giving lots of things instead of one big gift. Anyway, the more I shopped the more annoyed I became with the long lines and the rude employees. And that's when I came home and wrote this rant. So yeah, Bah Humbug. For today anyway. I will try again tomorrow.

This weekend may help. Bro In Law and the twins are leaving Friday to go to Vermont skiing and snowboarding with the Grand Parents so it will be Sis and I and Just Zack to go to another Christmas party at Dr. Feelgood's house on Saturday night. So I should have some stories to tell this Sunday. Everyone stay tuned!

I sure would like to hang out at the beach with him.

And the accolades just keep on coming for our favorite movies this winter. Brokeback Mountain just received 7 Golden Globe nominations including Best Drama motion picture and acting nods for Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams.

Our favorite Desperate Housewife, Felicity Huffman received two nominations: Best Drama Actress for a movie for the upcoming Transamerica and Best Comedy actress for the TV juggernaut comedy series. I was also glad that all four of the housewives received acting noms this year including last year's left out one Eva Longoria. Cudos to those ladies.


Related: 'Brokeback' builds Oscar buzz with N.Y. award

This guy looks like someone I went to high school with. I think it is the smile that made me think of him.

Wow! Brokeback Mountain was a huge success this weekend! It opened in only 5 theatres nationwide and took in a whopping $545,000 dollars for a per average of $109,000 which is a new record for a live-action movie.

"Director Ang Lee's cowboy love story rambled into three locations in New York City, one in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco and rustled up the highest per theater average on record for a live action movie. "

RuPaul got her start here in HotLanta so it's only apropriate that she uses a fellow Atlantan Rusty Joiner in this video. We love Rusty and so does the rest of the gay blogosphere!

Update: I wish the play button was not right on top of RuPaul's nose. It does make for a disturbing link. Ha - Ha!

Another nice set of abs and those GI Joe lines too!

If I had a boyfriend, he better be Gay! Otherwise I would be in trouble. Click to play my theme song! LOL!

I want a large print of this one to hang on my bathroom wall.

'Brokeback' opens new vistas

Modest in scale but with an epic feel, this 2¼ hour portrayal of star-crossed sheep tenders casts Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two ill-educated drifters you sense at once will not be ending their days collecting corporate pensions. Ledger is halfway between inarticulate and taciturn but perhaps wiser than he initially seems. His more outgoing friend-turned-lover is a Texas rodeo cowboy with slightly more worldly experience.

I saw this list posted on Out.com and thought I would share. It's pretty funny.

Just because there are now several gay TV channels clamoring for your eyeballs, offering everything from queer reality shows to Golden Girls reruns, that doesn’t mean that every homo with an idea for a series is going to make it to the airwaves soon. Here are some ideas for shows that you won’t see on your gay TV.

The Anita Bryant/Pat Robertson News Report

The k.d. lang Makeover Show

Elton John’s Interior Design on a Budget

Sewing with Nancy: Who Needs Expensive Designer Clothes When You Can Make Your Own?

Jay McCarroll’s Etiquette Hour

Fred Phelps Sermonette

Gay on $10 a Day

Ask Dr. Laura

Best of The 700 Club

Some of them I got immediately and some I didn't. Who is Jay McCarroll? Must go google that one. LOL!

Last night there really wasn't anything interesting on the tube, so I started surfing. This season I have not really maintained any interest in "Lost". I know I am only one of a handful of people who can say this (it's a top 5 show every week).

So I stumbled over to the WB and caught an episode of the new show, "Related". I had actually caught an earlier episode over at Sis's that they had Tivoed. It's a pretty cute show about four sisters who are part of a quirky family. It is also executive produced by the "Friends" diva, Marta Kaufman so the writing is fresh and intelligent. I really like this show and I intend to become a regular viewer.

Besides, last night's episode featured one of my all time favorite Soap Hunks Victor Webster, who played Marco who worked in the family deli as the featured sausage maker (pun intended). I have posted him on the blog earlier. Anne (Kiele Sanchez) had a little fling with Marco in last night's episode so we did get to see him sans shirt. I hope he becomes a regular character! Here ya go, Stolie! Another dark haired cutie for you and I!

For my Stolie: Days of Our Lives actor Rhassan Orange! I too am partial to the dark brooding type and this fits the bill quite nicely! Mwah!

PS: His arms are just the right size, aren't they?

Wal-Mart Unit Hears Gay Wedding Bells

across the pond, anyway...


LONDON, Dec. 6 - Asda, Wal-Mart's British subsidiary, has introduced a line of wedding cards and "commitment rings" this week - just in time for the country's legalization of gay civil partnerships.

A Wal-Mart subsidiary in Britain is selling wedding cards and matching rings for same-sex couples, who can soon enter into civil unions there.

"Wedding day wishes, Mrs. & Mrs.," reads a pink-toned greeting card. A blue card decorated with two top hats says, "Congratulations, Mr. & Mr." The company will also sell a line of matching gold rings with diamond insets starting at £60 each ($104).

Critics of Wal-Mart, however, accused the company of hypocrisy, contrasting its marketing of gay wedding cards in Britain with its stricter controls in the United States. Wal-Mart has pulled some mainstream magazines from its shelves and refuses to carry some popular books because of their content, among them "America (The Book)" by Jon Stewart and "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?" by George Carlin.

"They want to be all things to all people anywhere but in the United States," said Tracy Sefl, research director for Wal-Mart Watch, an advocacy group based in Washington. "In the United States, they have a conservative, right-leaning business model."

Former Auburn football coach, Pat Dye was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame last night in New York City.

We will forever remember you Coach and what great things you did for the Auburn Tigers.

So tonight I settle in after having dinner at Sis's house and watching "Earl". (That is worth a future post, I promise!)

I am hooked on Nip/Tuck! I catch it regularly so I turned it on. It was not the usual episode. Usuallly I can count on it being just cheesy and sleazy enough to count as one of my weekly guilty pleasures (I limit myself to 5 per week!). We will count down that list in a later post as well.

But tonight, OMG! There was a plane crash and Julia's mom was on the plane. So the Plastic Surgeons went to the M.A.S.H. unit on the tarmac to help out. It was very disturbing and serious and emotional. I was not ready for that! I'm whining now!

I remember thinking that the acting was top notch because I felt their pain. I guess they may have a chance for an emmy? If the TV Academy has balls enough to nominate Nip/Tuck?

Anyway, just in time for the last scene, it returned to it's slimy, sleazy, cheeesy self and I remembered why I watched in the first place. It's definitely not for the emotions!

So this past weekend we made the traditional autumn to winter handoff here in the South. The final leaves have fallen off the trees after a wonderful late November burst of vibrant color. And then the final weekend of college football until the Holiday Bowl games begin. Now we will continue the festivities and the only thing different will be the color schemes. We will go from Burnt Orange and Navy Blue to Red and Green. The next few weekends will be festive and you all know what that means. I will have lots of stories to tell after all of the Christmas parties with the Cast of the "The Island of Misfit Toys"! Stay tuned for frequent updates.

There's just something about the stark gray clapboards that make this picture interesting. Oh yeah, the six-pack helps, too!

The Georgia teen, Kerry Pacer, who bucked all the odds and founded a Gay-Straight Alliance club in her rural high school in the redneck Georgia mountains has earned the prestigious honor of being selected as "Advocate" magazine's youngest "Person of the Year"! You GO girl!

Another cutie in tight jeans!

It has come to my attention that some regular readers of the blog may be a bit confused about the cast of kooky characters that I find myself attracted too and therefore find myself always in the company of! So let's review:

The Main Characters -
Me (no explanation necessary, it's MY blog!). I have NO boyfriend!
Sis (One of my best friends) She is missing her fortune!
Bro-in-Law (my hero!) He is missing his family jewels! (there's an inside story there!)
Just Zack (my live vicariously through youth partner/nephew) He's missing something, we just don't know what, yet.

The Players--
The Good Doctor and his lovely wife (just because) We quite have not figured out yet what they are missing!
Miss Cinnamon and Mr. Bent (a spicy couple that we will learn more about soon). Missing something, but what?

Give me a few more weeks and more characters will become involved. Trust Me!

The 9-2 Auburn Tiger football team now knows where we will be spending the holidays. Yep, tonight the official bowl selection show on ESPN announced that the Tigers will be playing the nasty Badgers of Wisconsin in the Capital One Bowl to be played on New Year's Day (actually January 2nd because the first is a Sunday and is reserved for the pros).

Spider, if the offer of free room and board still stands, I may be coming for a visit!

Today's Candy is French Rugby player, Frederic Deltour - Mr. France & Judo Champion. He is the total package.

Go here to see more of Mr. Deltour!

First you have to meet Mom! Actually she's my nephew's Mom (and my sister)! Regular readers will know her affectionately as "SIS" here on the blog. She is beautiful and a beautiful person who can sometimes let everyone know who is ultimately in charge. You cannot be a Mom and NOT have this quality! She is my best friend and I love our special relationship.

She's also my girlfriend and her girlfriends are MY girlfriends, too.

Next you have to meet Dad! Actually he's my Sis's husband and the father(stepfather) of my nephews. Regular readers of the blog will know him affectionately as "Bro-in-Law". He's even thought enough of my space here that he has left comments and for that I am grateful. He's my hero for keeping my Sister happy and being a great father to his kids. And being a good friend to his gay brother-in-law.

Oh my! That headline is not X-Rated, I swear! But the two do seem to be a perfect "fit" together. Actually it's the South Carolina Gamecocks and Southern California Trojans that we are referring to and they are not playing nice at the moment. Seems they are in a legal struggle over the "SC" logo. Both claim the rights to it for their prospective sports teams. Should be interesting the way this one shakes out. I would have to be partial to the SEC's Gamecocks winning this battle. Stay tuned!

Brute strength exudes from this one!

Guess where we ended up again tonight? Yep, The Alley where the cute bartender was wearing the "Spooning Leads to Forking" shirt last week. And he was there again tonight! I was glad when we walked in the door and I saw him behind the bar.

Our good friend, Miss Cinnamon invited us to join her and Mr. Bent there tonight. She loves the band and it was good to venture out on a school night.

Only tonight the band didn't SUCK! It was the Velcro Pygmies! And they were awesome!

And The Good Doctor and his lovely wife were there, too!

So, I can honestly say that I had fun (for a brief time) on a school night (slash work night) in downtown Rome. But who am I kidding? I can have fun in the grocery store at 2am all by myself! I guess anyone can claim the same thing, but how many can really enjoy the moment as much as ME?

(PS: I think Sis and Bro-in-Law had fun, too!)

Now that's a six-pack!

Today is World AIDS Day!

More baby steps:

Gay couple wins S. Africa ruling

It seems that the rest of the world is alot more progressive than the good ole' US of A with the religious right wing fanatics currently in power.