mrpeenee's Cameo Appearance

Why is mrpeenee sort of AWOL these days? Because the web filter where I work blocks me from my own damn blog. The nerve!

Thanks to everyone's comments on my Design Star rant below, especially since you all had the good sense to agree and point out how insightful I am. I went looking for more pictures of the humpy Dan, but struck out (obviously his porn career steams along under an alias) but I did find a picture of his aunt, Vickie, from her blog. Honest.I adore her. I think I may have to adopt her. Even though she got the Crazy Eye.

So I've finally replied in the comment section of Tachika Must Go, since I can only access this when I'm not at work. It brings into clear light how a blog is like a time machine: you write your comments in your present, but I read them from the past and reply thinking that my comments are the future, which is the past by the time you see them and now I'm dizzy.

I've asked houseboy Saluterius Boniface to bring me a wet cloth for my forehead.

Tachika Must Go

My favorite line ever in Design Star? Candice Olsen asking the contestants “Have you ever seen Design Star? Nobody finishes tile.” Excellent point, on a number of levels, mostly that the contestants should be able to learn from the disasters of past seasons.
• Do not attempt tile back splashes when you don’t have time for it
• Do not bite off more carpentry than the skills of your team can handle
• Do not have your hunky eye candy keep his shirt on.
Duh.

This week was kitchens. I have to preface my remarks by saying I love to cook and I prefer galley kitchens. They work better. I understand moms might need that bigger space for their adorable tykes to be adorable in, but I say go smoke crack out on the patio and get out of my fucking kitchen. If you do need a big ass kitchen, why then do you stick an island in the middle so you constantly have a traffic block to navigate?

And when people are talking about decorating their kitchens, they now have only two phrases at their disposal: “Tuscan, Italian, Warm, blahblahblah” and “I want to entertain there” which apparently means you want your guests standing around in your way as you’re trying to defrost the shrimp rolls from Costco. Again, crack, patio, out of my fucking kitchen.

So the room that won:
Look, mahmah’s kitchen from the trailer park in Little Rock. This is what they FINISHED with? It looks like a before picture, and a mighty nasty one at that. Too cluttered, ugly colors, crappy finishes. A Buddha in the window, one of them Moroccan ones, no doubt. I now have doubts that tubby know-it-all is gay. No queer would go shopping for accessories and wind up this. Obviously straight trying to pass. So they are the first team in history to actually finish in the time allotted. Big deal. Isn’t it better to have an appealing design? Guess not.

The losers:Judging from the comments on HGTV’s site, I seem to be the only person in the universe who likes it. I know, I know, they didn’t finish the tile (gasp) the counter was fucked up (gasp), but it looks like what they owners asked for. It’s sleek, it’s modern, and I dig it. I agree, more dramatic color on the cabinets would have helped, but still, pretty cool. They couldn’t accessorize the room, but again, I’m ok with that. I don’t want knick-knacks and tchotckes on my counter; that’s where I’m working, bitches; get this fucking flower arrangement out of my way.

Also, my strongest disagreement with both was the cabinets. These kitchens are less than twenty years old, the cabinets are perfectly sturdy and fairly new, and yet both teams ripped them all out to replace them with new cabinets in exactly the same footprint. Have any of them heard about the environment? Yeah, baby, let’s stuff some more wasteful crap into the landfills, trash the resources and energy used to create the originals and wind up with no appreciable difference. Plus the winners, by using smaller cabinets flanking the sink so they could squeeze in some bibelot shelves actually decreased the amount of storage. Fabulous.

Lastly, Tachika (also universally known as the Fuck Up) didn’t do shit, contributed nothing and yet didn’t get booted. What’s with that? Her whole team condemns her and she gets to stay? Did you see the looks when she returned to the green room? A narrow range from stunned to pissed off. I would have been more sympathetic towards Amy getting shafted, but until the actual final line up, I didn’t even know who she was or that there were three blondes, I thought there was just two. That’s how much impact they’ve had on me.

One last thing. When are they going to show Dan with his shirt off? Isn’t that in the contract? I’m not looking for go-go dancing in a thong (although that would not be amiss,) just a couple of nipple shots. Is that asking too much?

Rub It In

What is truly one of the foods of the gods? Peanut butter sandwich with orange juice, of course, especially that rare alignment when all the components are at the freshest, most deliciousest.

I was in the mood for a little god snack (and please, without jelly tainting the peanut butter. Aren’t we all adults here?) after yet another fabulous massage at the Kabuki Springs Spa. I know combining my sluttish reputation and massage just leads to an inevitable oohlalala reaction, but, in fact, I don’t like sex with my massage, much like jelly with peanut butter. Too distracting, I think. I want to pay attention to having a thumb dig into my shoulder and not worry about if we’re both going to fit on that little bitty table. The only Happy Endings I’ve had have been neither good massage nor good booty. And twice, they came as a surprise. I was there for a massage and suddenly there was friskiness. Unfortunate friskiness.

So tonight’s round at Kabuki with the talented Eban was just what I wanted. NO misbehaving, just serious shiatsu. And then peanut butter. Heaven.

Our New Favorite Saying

Urban Street Pirate reports that the mother of a friend of his once answered the door and exclaimed:

"Don't look at my hair. It looks like a chicken slept in it."

Friends, in the future, before you leave the house,ask yourself "Does my hair look like a chicken slept in it?" You'll be glad you did.

I wanted to find a picture of a reasonably attractive naked man with a chicken (and when you google "naked guy with chicken" you come up with some pretty astonishing results, let me tell you) but all I could find was this naked man beating egg whites.An allusion, no doubt, to the famous quip "My pubes look like a an unbaked souffle slept in them."

Design Star: It's Back.

We’re all watching HGTV’s Design Star are we not? As a showcase of these poor schlub’s design capabilities, it is to laugh, but as a game show, oh my. It falls only short of Hollywood Squares in terms of the queer amusement factor.

I mentioned last year that the contestants seem to regularly fall into immediately recognizable clichés, the easier for the audience to pick out who to root for without wasting precious time on getting to know the characters. There’s the vaguely artsy chick (this year with a kind of biker/punky thang going on,) the obnoxious, overconfident nell, the token black woman, the straight guy to prove not all decorators are poofs, the bleach blonde prom queen with good jewelry, and the humpy eye candy guy. The rest are just fodder thrown in there in order to be voted out. Nobody has cried about how they miss their family yet, and no obvious catfights, but it’s still early.

You may remember last year’s eye candy turned out to have a wee little porn star past. This year’s humpy boy, Dan, LOOKS like a porn star. And I don’t mean that in a generic way. Mrpeenee’s encyclopedic knowledge of porn points out that he bears an uncanny resemblance to Alex Wilcox, one of our faves from days gone by. Proof provided below:


The big change this year is that the judges are much better than in the past, particularly Candice Olson, who I think has the single best decorator show going. I bow before her.

So, episode 1. I love the big Hollywood house, who could go wrong with that? Turns out a couple of these guys could, and did. But overall, they all seem better than past years with no obvious losers. Yay for that.

Since I can’t remember any of their names (except for my new imaginary boyfriend Dan) I’ll just run through the rooms.

Bunk Bedroom . Eesh. I understand they wanted to be sassy, but it was all so random. And those fake animal heads. Honey, if something was ironic five years ago, chances are you should pass on it now.

The bedroom that wasn’t a hot mess. Dull, fussy and it sort of irritates me to agree with that Genevieve Whatshername judge, but she was right, why shove everything over on one wall? And all three bedrooms had those fabulous huge corner windows that they all ignored. Doofuses. Or Doofai. Whatever.

The bedroom that was a hot mess. I actually think the design and color and scale was the best of all three bedrooms. It could have been really pretty if it was finished. This is where the problem with the show being a game show and not being really about decorating ability comes in. So they couldn’t paint the floor? You think on a real show the talent is doing the grunt work? That’s what stage hands are for. Still, the Lady Who Cried got on my nerves, so ok, shove off.

The living room. Jeebus, what a stunning room to start with and then they wound up just sort of OK. Not bad. Ho hum. Thanks, here’s your cookie. Prom Queen lady announces that since it’s so big they need to break it up into conversational areas. Right on, girl. So what happened with that idea? Pissed away while she squabbles with tattoo biker boy about how to put up wallpaper. Look honey, if you want to do it, take the damn brush out his hands and go to it while he does something productive.

And the hot pink geese? Big deal.

The dining room. Yowzah. Everybody liked the big free-hand mural on the wall down onto the floor, including me. I assume the nerdy little queen who actually did it and designed the room while eye candy put together the table and shopped is the sleeper real talent of the show. I’m also pretty sure he volunteered for the dining room to further his lust for Dan. Who can blame him?

Next week: kitchens. Oh boy, because they’re the greatest potential for true disaster, the Poseidon Adventure of decorating shows. My money is on one of the blondes going, mostly because I can’t tell them apart.

Flkjdsahfy.

Did I have some little stroke over the weekend and just not notice it? My typing, which is shaky at the best of times has degenerated into seemingly random keystrokes. For instance, I just wrote “typoivn” instead of “typing.” And for that matter, I just inserted an accidental return and wrote “insteaqqd”. I cannot type three words in a row without a mistake. Spell check is wonderful and I thank the goddess for it, but when one is displaying the typing skills of a retarded monkey, I’m not sure if even that can save me.

So today I have to proofread a medium sized publication, catch up on all the emails I missed on Friday and untangle the mess that is the October through December training room schedule, all without the control over my fingers’ motor skills.

Maybe I will just stare at houseboy pictures instead. I just typed “housebouy.” Typo or wishful thinking?

Heat Wave

Before I even start, let me assure those readers sweating it out in New Orleans, Austin, Mobile, lesser Florida, O-myfuckinggod-man, and other hot-ass environs that I understand my complaint about the heat here will let loose a snark storm. I am prepared for that. To those of you who would belittle my suffering, I say bring it, bitch.

I had to go make an award presentation in San Jose yesterday. The farther away one gets from civilization and the Golden Gate, the hotter it gets. San Jose, 60 miles south of here, was in the high 80s. Omigod, I was dying. Cue snark storm. I know plenty of you will not see 80 degrees again until a cold snap blows through in the autumn; I was once one of you. As I was trudging along (in a sport coat, mind you,) I kept reminding myself of my Gulf Coast youth and how I would have laughed at the idea that this was even warm.

But my life here has softened me and by the time I got to the presentation, I was sweaty, sticky and probably smelly. You know how fair-skinned older men have a distinctive aroma? I keep wondering, Is that me? Don’t answer that.

Plus the award was one we were making mostly because we needed to present it, not because someone particularly deserved to receive it. Sometimes in a political world the existence of the award is much more important that who actually gets it. Thus, I wound up trying to make a speech that did not expose the fact the criteria for the honor was mostly that the recipient was breathing and frequently wore shoes.

Fortunately, I was able to flee back here where nature keeps the airconditioning blasting outside. A little fog, a little cool ocean breeze and I am once again a happy poof. It’s important to occasionally be reminded why life here is so expensive. We’re paying for the climate.

Gay SF

When I was a wee little pansy boy in the swamps of Texas, I would read anything, but my favorite genre was science fiction. The public library in the unimportant burg where I grew up had a smallish s.f. section of about four shelves and although I never set myself the goal of reading all of it, in the end I think I did. Everything from the florid wasteland of Lovecraft to the thinly veiled anticommunist gibberish of the 1950s through the post-apocalyptic grinds that popped up during the Vietnam war. I love Asimov, le Guinn, Clarke, but I was perfectly willing to plow though the tons of mediocre tripe that traveled with them.

Somewhere along the line, I decided I was too sophisticated for scifi and let it slide off my radar. Maybe the level of tripe just overwhelmed me. I returned to it a few years ago and now I’m back to reading almost nothing else. Escapism! Yay!

The biggest change has been around the edges; wild ideas that seeped in from actual science are now a given, things like parallel universes and wormholes allow authors more and more complicated plots, but underneath them all, they’re still mostly cowboys in space. The best, obviously, are the rare birds who rise above that. You know who’s great? China Mieville, even though I don’t know hot to pronounce his last name. His style is grim and dark, but filled with sometimes beautiful writing. He tends to a little to much excrescence, but I’m willing to hold my nose, so to speak, and revel in his mastery.

Also, Lois McMaster Bujold who wrote the Hugo winning Paladin of Souls which is peopled with charming, vivid characters and presents a fully developed world.

Anyway, the point is, I’ve run across a gay men’s science fiction and fantasy book club and I’m joining it. I’m nervous since I don’t really like groups and “gay sci fi” sounds like the members (unlike me) will be something out of a John Waters’ movie, but I’m going anyway. What I’d really like is a Gay Brazilian Porn Stars Who Put Out Sci Fi Club, but I can’t find one. Imagine my disappointment.

Cause What's Funnier than Dinosaurs?

I ran across this over at Dinosaur comics . Have I mentioned how much I love Dinosaur Comics? They are frequently the high point of my day. Ryan North, the brilliant, brilliant writer of D.C. included this in today's entry:

Leonard Richardson's short story, Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs.


"Why would a dinosaur need a gun?" asked the shop owner.

"Self-defense."

The owner's gaze dropped to the three-inch claw that had chipped his display case.

"These are killing claws," said the dinosaur, whose name was Tark. "For sheep, or cows. I merely want to disable an attacker with a precision shot to the leg or other uh, limbal region."

"Uh-huh," the owner said. "Or maybe you figure humans shoot each other all the time, but if someone turns up ripped in half the cops are gonna start lookin' for dinosaurs."

Tark carefully pounded the counter. "There used to be a time," he said, "when gun dealers would actually sell people guns! A time . . . called America. I miss that time."

Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs.

Palmmy

I’ve been thinking about this shot I swiped from over to Miss Janey’s for a couple of reasons. First, it’s always hard to take a picture of tall palm trees without some stupid power line getting in the picture, so congrats to the Janey for pulling this off.

Plus, it reminds me that in the common American parlance, palm trees are a symbol of exoticness. And yet, I have never lived any where that they didn’t thrive as a part of the landscape. Houston, New Orleans, San Francisco, they all got ‘em littering the joints. It’s like feral parrots and a complete lack of snow: it’s the norm for half of the country, but in the popular imagination, it’s like they’ve never been seen.

And don’t get me started on tamales.

Stop the Madness

O dear god, is there no end to it? First Farrah, then what’s-his-name, then Mrs. Slocombe, and now this:

OSCAR MEYER, the wienie king, is dead. The man who made the world safe for bologna has passed. A giant who walked among us, who gave his all to the processed meat universe, is no more.

I don’t know what I’m going to do if anybody else dies, my mourning veil is getting all tatty as it is.

Overload

I had promised myself not to mention a thing about that Jackson person since there certainly seemed to be plenty everywhere else.

But then I ran across this notice from our computer guys:

"Shortly after noon EST today—Tuesday, July 7 2009—the capacity of SBA’s computing infrastructure was drastically reduced due to the overload of employee viewing of video footage related to the funeral of Michael Jackson. This overload compromised SBA’s ability to deliver business services to staff and citizens.
To alleviate this overload, OCIO has temporarily blocked video streaming. If you are using YouTube or other video streaming websites, you will be unable to view content for the duration of this business day.
Videostreaming access will resume on Wednesday, July 8 2009 accompanied by OCIO technical monitoring.
Thanks for your patience while we work to assure appropriate use of the SBA network infrastructure."

The federal government brouight low not by terrorists, but by pop fanatics. The mind reels.

To calm myself down, I had to go look at houseboy Gordea Zathustrus's nipples.

Full of Gin and Will & Grace

While R man was off being all lawerly in DC, I spent an amusing evening at the theater, enjoying Leslie Jordan’s show “Full of Gin and Regret.” Jordan played Beverly Leslie on Will and Grace, the guest star whom Karen would regularly dismiss as “that Keebler elf queen…”

The show was a raconteur’s tour de force. Jordan came out, launched into a string of memoirs (up to and including briefly sharing a jail cell with Robert Downey Jr.,) frequently interrupted himself to wander off track, and did it all in a thick Southern accent. It was, in short, very much like spending the evening in a bar in New Orleans, albeit a very nice one, and with a very funny Big Mess.

There is a common element in Southern life of telling long, involved stories, and doing so in as self-deprecatory and funny way as possible. I’ve got it, all my friends have it, Jason over at Night is Half Gone has it in spades, and so does Leslie Jordan.

Of course it’s important to tell these rambling vignettes in as thick a Southern accent as you can muster. It’s just funnier that way. Leslie Jordan hit the stage sounding like Aunt Pitty Pat from Gone with the Wind and never wavered. Naturally, my own accent, long moribund, rebounded. I cain’t hep it, as soon as I hear those twanging vowels, my own match them drawl for drawl. All I have to do is step off the plane in the Houston airport and suddenly I’m the lead in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Also, because I am Not a Nice Person, I took some pleasure when Miss Jordan (repeatedly) assured the audience he was 54 years old, exactly the same age as me, but looked easily like he had 15 years on me. Just shows you, that fast, glam life is rough.

Cat Bed

R man returns tonight from his conference in DC, and I say yay, big time, because I've missed him terribly much. I've also missed having my own bed. Saki, the adorable and evil cat, always sleeps with R man and while he's been out of town, it's become obvious that I am the back-up sleeping location. How can such a small cat take up so much bed real estate?

I am a very restless sleeper, it's one of the main reasons R man and I have separate rooms, that and the wholly ridiculous myth he maintains that I snore. While I'm sleeping quietly (AND NOT SNORING) I tend to toss and turn like a Black Flag mosh pit. I have woken up with the bed linens twisted completely sideways. Some people go into REM, I seem to enter a spin cycle. All this irritates both Saki and me; him because he just wants to lie there, goddamit, and me because I'm pinned down by a nine pound lump 'o cat.

We're both looking forward to having R man back where he belongs.