Rockers who are so straight they're gay

Rumors of homosexual experimentation by rock stars like Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, and David Bowie have circulated for years. Even if there were truth to these rumors, does this alleged "experimentation" mean these chaps truly have gay tendencies?

Think about the sheer quantity of women they've had - thousands. Among regular people, a guy with numbers in the high twenties (not counting prostitutes) is considered a major success. Think of the quality of women they've had - actresses, models (both famous and unknown, and let's face it, even Joe Six Pack models are pretty hot), and the top "girls next door" in every town in the world. Think of the kind of extreme sex they've had: massive orgies, twins, mother-daughter; depravity that makes Nero look like Mary Poppins. People talk about "exploring" their sexuality; these guys have explored their sexuality and all its multiverses.*

Rock stars have a bucket list longer than the Golden Gate Bridge, and they still manage to check every box. And when you have truly had all there is to have of women, eventually boredom creeps in, and suddenly having every fantasy fulfilled feels tired and bland. Penelope Cruz is throwing herself at you and you're like "Ugh, meat loaf again?"

After hitting that kind of saturation point, all that's left are men, so perhaps it's not surprising that some rockers would venture a few blocks into the gay part of town. In fact, they might be the only people for whom homosexuality truly is an experiment! To them, starting over with men is like a wacky form of born again virginity.

Makes you wonder if Liberace ever tried similar experiments with women.



*Obviously, other kinds of celebrities get around too, but the kind of devotion musicians cull from their fans seems to lead to far more epic kinkiness.


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Pigs on the Wing

We're at the point where people are so casual about their neuroses they use them as small talk. You're next to someone on a bus, and to make conversation, she starts telling you that when she leaves the house, she has to lock and unlock the door sixteen times because her mother once told her she had fat hands.

There are more support groups than there are Starbucks, and everyone acts as amateur psychologist to himself and his friends. With so many "experts" on the loose, it is not surprising that every layer of every quirk is now assigned an elaborate nomenclature.

Despite all this, there is still one fear that collects no sympathy: fear of flying. When people aren't outright mocking you for having it, they are giving you advice that demonstrates how little consideration they've given it:

"Oh you get scared on planes? Just watch a movie."

No one would ever give this advice to quell other fears. If someone afraid of dogs had to spend several hours at the local pound, you wouldn't say, "Oh, you're going to be surrounded by pit bulls for seven hours? No problem: just watch a few episodes of 'Dexter'."

If you're deathly afraid of something, no amount of booze, comfort food, or cinematic distraction can
relieve it. The greatest film ever can't make a terrified flyer forget the turbulence.

I sometimes wonder if the reason people are so cavalier about flying is because the concept of going 600 miles an hour at 30,000 feet is so incomprehensible that reciting "A plane is safer that a car. A plane is safer than a car." is the closest they can come to processing it.

Fear of flying is truly in its own category. No one lets you blame it on your parents. No one tells you they read a great book on how to deal with it. They just repeat a statistic* they couldn't calculate with Einstein's help and order you to get over it. That kind of callousness is a blast from the past. I'd find it refreshing if I wasn't so afraid of flying. 


*If statistics superseded emotion, the poor odds of your marriage succeeding would prevent couples from getting married. I haven't noticed a lot of wedding planners going out of business.

Twitter Life is "The Gong Show" Without the Gong

Much has been made of how narcissistic and coarse social media users are. People who normally seem thoughtful use Facebook to show pictures of their hand in a Ritz box. And when they're done wiping the Ritz grease off their finger and thumb (opposable?), they spray their Twitter feed with nonstop tweets about the subsequent digestive process. It is difficult not to have a meltdown as you witness the most breathtaking communicating devices yet devised by man squandered on bodily functions and half eaten lunches. Oh, and the occasional rebellious feline...

But we shouldn't forget how quickly all this technology matured. It happened before any kind of decorum could develop. And what helps make Facebook and Twitter such founts of narcissism is that they create the illusion that the world is listening to you. Now everyone feels famous. Better yet, everyone is an overnight success, so we shouldn't be surprised when social media junkies behave as crassly as the suddenly famous so often do.

Overnight we all became like rookie starting quarterbacks for a big market team. We're suddenly "famous" and being scrutinized by strangers without tools to handle any of it. Athletes sometimes take classes on dealing with the press, and even if they don't, they have the advantage of being around teammates - seasoned famous people - they can use as a reference for their own maturation. There were no seasoned Facebook users when it exploded, and the breakneck pace of its spreading meant everyone was doing it before a common code of manners could take root (which might have happened had its dissemination been more gradual).

We all became "famous" without the baby steps, and it shows. Le faux pas we should have used as opportunities for improvement instead became the standard conduct of social media. We are a world of fame parvenus.

Remember when Rolling Stone Mattered? Hopefully you don't

By putting Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover of Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone has reminded us it still exists. I'm not so irate about the cover. What I'm irate about is being forced to recall all the reasons I started ignoring the musical press in the first place.

Music journalists seem to get a pinch more respect than their counterparts in film and television journalism. They don't deserve it. I have previously mentioned Rolling Stone's shameless coverage of trends like hair metal:

When hair metal died in the early 90's, they began speaking of it in the kind of somber, unbelieving tones you'd expect from a medical journal discussing the days of leech treatments. Never mind that RS had spent the 80's hyping bands like Cinderella. They now wanted it understood that the days of hair metal were dark and unenlightened. Never forget.

But the second hair metal returned, what did this pillar of integrity have to say about it? "Dust off those mullets, kids! REAL ROCK is back!!!"

Another spree of dishonesty from the musical press came at the dawn of the rap-rock era. Starting around 1999, music journalists began writing with straight faces about this wild and crazy new trick of blending rock and rap. They panted with affected surprise as they discussed how artists like Kid Rock and Fred Durst liked both rock and rap...just like, oh I don't know, every single kid in the '90s. Even more desperate was their pretending that blending rock and rap was sparkling new. Just two years earlier, these same mannequins had been covering rap-rock artist Beck. And Beck's work wasn't exactly hidden: in 1997 Beck was on every cover of every magazine. He won two Grammies and an MTV Music Video Award. But you wouldn't have gotten that from reading the press's take on rock-rap "trailblazer" Kid Rock.

Not only was Kid Rock's interest in rap and rock not a revelation; neither was the compound of rap and rock. I'm not just talking about self-conscious novelty crossovers like Aerosmith-Run DMC and Public Enemy-Anthrax. In addition to non-novel Beck, you had 311 releasing huge rap-rock hits in 1996 and 97. Faith No More had a top ten rap-rock hit with "Epic" all the way back in 1990.

I have to think some of the journalists who pretended Kid Rock's music and musical taste was unique knew better. MTV "personalities" certainly couldn't claim to be unaware of kids' dual interest in rap and rock: their channel had been showing rap and rock videos back-to-back for years. Did they actually think half their audience turned the channel when Tribe Called Quest was followed by Guns N' Roses? If so, I hope they informed their advertisers.

If I tried listing all the other examples of the music press contriving angles about artists and trends - Kid Rock listened to Johnny Cash and Grandmaster Flash! Can you believe it?! Uh, yeah, actually I and all other Earthlings born post-Watergate can -, I'd be here until Russ Columbo's music came back in fashion. Thankfully, the demise of traditional media means anyone can get whatever musical info. they want without having to trudge through all that intellectual dishonesty. At least I hope it was intentional. I'd hate to think those reporters were truly that thick...

To this reporter, it appears that entertainment journalists are no different from political journalists. They can't help sucking up to the status quo.

I Heart New York Tourists

Here's a sentiment you never hear: I like tourists. I work in an area crowded with them, and I don't get tired of their presence.

New Yorkers make a show of gibing tourists, I think partly because so many of the people who live here are transplants themselves; not so removed from those tourists they're bashing. New Yorkers still love crowning themselves "real New Yorkers," and evidently one of the keys to differentiating yourself as a real New Yorker is to ridicule the less real as they stroll these mean streets.

Ironically, New Yorkers spend a lot of time bragging about their city, so you'd think they'd interpret the unending desire of tourists to experience New York as a validation of their boasts. That Chinese vacationer who stepped on your shoe six times in the three minutes he was on the subway? He and the millions of others who visit each year are telling you you're right to be living here! No one in Baltimore has to worry about dodging tourists.

Another irony: Manhattanites frequently crow about how many countries they've visited. On the dating site OkCupid, under the category "Six Things I Could Never Do Without" (surprisingly, I am never on these lists), every New York woman lists 'passport" as one her six things. You'd think people who are so often tourists themselves would have more sympathy for the travelers who are checking NYC off their list.

I'm a real New Yorker, and I'm about to let you in on a little secret: It isn't the foreign tourists that chafe New Yorkers; it is the American tourists from the South and Midwest. They are the unwashed menace New Yorkers view as reprobatic, cultural Luddites. Doesn't matter how green their money is; their states are red, and that makes them the enemy. The current New York mentality is an inversion of the film Death Wish, with people fleeing TO New York to escape the threat of suburbs and small towns. The difference is that while Death Wish is largely fantasy, the danger present in that New York was fact. The danger posed to New Yorkers by Southerners and Midwesterners is entirely fantasy.

Why more reporters need to be punched out

After a celebrity explodes on a reporter, the news coverage that celebrity enjoys is about identical to the coverage they give escaped zoo animals. It isn't hard to undress the reason; fellow reporters are doing the covering.

But why do the rest of us buy into it? Because we've swallowed this notion about the sanctity of the press.

Even if you subscribe to the theorem that an energetic press is a "public good," I don't see how the entertainment press fits this criterion. Psychos with cameras do not enhance the national discourse, nor do they keep us free from the potential tyranny of overdressed eye candy on red carpets. A lack of Kim Kardashian stretch mark pics will not trigger another Watergate.

Let's remember how reporters cover celebrities: they swarm around them, doing all they can to catch them in an embarrassing moment. If they don't catch such a moment, they try to catalyze one. They will crowd the celeb and pelt him with unbelievably insulting questions. Sometimes they will push him.

When they say "shove a microphone in his face," they mean it.

Celebrities, or anyone with a camera in his face, remain humans, and humans don't care if someone is a reporter when they're being crowded and insulted. For those who think celebrities should just "get over it," picture how you would react if you were doing your morning jog and a stranger jumped in your face and said, "Talk to me about that time you fucked up so I can spread the word about it to other people."

It is unlikely you would offer him half your Cliff Bar.

You might rejoin that society makes exceptions in the social code for certain professions; e.g., a doctor being able to touch you in ways others cannot. True, but if a doctor goes too far with the groping, retaliation in the form of lawsuits (at the very least) is in order. If a doctor shoved you to try to get an answer about your health, no one would say the doctor was just "doing his job."

I want see more athletes giving 110% to attacking journalists:

I want to see more actors doing some method research on what it feels like to swat a camera-wielding oaf:

If reporters are going to cover celebrities who fight back like they're escaped zoo animals, it is only fair we should occasionally see a reporter mauled like a slow-witted lion tamer.

Homegirls in Outer Space

If you can get through the following excerpt without laughing, you are a stronger man than I:

Major Milestone: 50 Years of Women in Space

Sunday (June 16) marks the 50th anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova's landmark 1963 flight, which launched her into history as the first woman to fly to space — only two years after Yuri Gagarin performed the first spaceflight ever in 1961.

As the author points out, the first woman in space was just two years behind the first man--the first HUMAN--in space. That's right: the first female entered space after suffering through a Godot-like two birthdays between her spaceflight and the spaceflight of the first person to ever have a spaceflight. After surviving that phallocentric delay I sure hope she received some reparation payments!

It is estimated that more than 100,000,000,000 humans have come into existence. Of that 100,000,000,000+ humans, only 534 have ever been in space, which means that EVERY TIME A HUMAN MAKES IT INTO SPACE IT IS A MILESTONE. No need to put an ethnic/gender cherry on top.

Because we live under a PC theocracy, every article is either a rumination on alleged victimization or a victory lap about the overcoming of an alleged victimization. And unless Twitter sparks a Maturity Spring, the PC Ayatollahs will continue to flog us with their inexhaustible inanity.

Space is the final frontier for political correctness, so expect a lot more of this. In the near future NASA will probably hold a symposium on renaming black holes. After all, associating the word black with something that traps light could reinforce negative stereotypes. Look for black holes to be renamed REALLY off-white holes.

My hunch is that the next big STOP EVERYTHING space moment will come when the first transgender person makes it into space. And when Sputnik/Sputnikole enters orbit, we'll be treated to the following line: "That's one small step for used to be a man..."


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