Joined the Pity Party

My rejection is vaguely famous.

I guess I have some idea what the dolts on American Idol feel like when Simon tells them they're too ugly to sing.

Random beauty

I just couldn't let the week slip by without showing some of the art this pro did for the cover of the latest Stranger. If you live outside the Seattle area and don't get the Stranger, that's a bummer. Because Jon McNair is super cool.

It's like Maurice Sendak meets Carl Jung meets Robert Smith when he's extra depressed. It's just screaming cool.

Rapture time?

I always wondered if one of Roland Emmerich's over-the-top disaster flicks was gonna come true in real life.



Personally, I was a bigger fan of "The Day After Tomorrow". I liked the idea of tornadoes eating Los Angeles in revenge for the billions of tons of air pollution that city has dumped on us all.



But lately, I'm starting to wonder: what if the end of the world is a double-feature?

Chilean earthquake photos.

No thank you, really.

The hits just keep on coming over at AlterNet News:

Many women are happy without kids. They'd be even happier if they weren’t reminded all the time how unhappy they should be.



Ummm, didn't Ally (I-Never-Eat) McBeal ... adopt???

Gee, why doesn't this suprise me?

Pancreatic Cancer Linked to Sodas
Study Says 2 Sodas Per Week Raises Pancreatic Cancer Risk
By Kathleen Doheny, WebMD Health News

Feb. 8, 2010 -- Drinking as little as two soft drinks a week appears to nearly double the risk of getting pancreatic cancer, according to a new study.

"People who drank two or more soft drinks a week had an 87% increased risk -- or nearly twice the risk -- of pancreatic cancer compared to individuals consuming no soft drinks," says study lead author Noel T. Mueller, MPH, a research associate at the Cancer Control Program at Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, D.C. The study is published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers& Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Cancer of the pancreas was diagnosed in about 42,000 people in the U.S. in 2009, according to American Cancer Society estimates, and about 35,240 deaths from the disease were expected. The pancreas lies behind the stomach. It makes hormones such as insulin to balance sugar in the blood and produces juices with enzymes to help break down fats and protein in foods.


Whole story here


* * *

Let's see what did my vegetarian friend, Richard, tell me way back in 1991? "HFCS fries your pancreas."

And what'd my holistic doctor tell me in the same year? "Eating a lot of sugar causes your pancreas to 'mis-fire' which causes the liver to dump too much insulin into the blood which creates hypoglycemic symptoms, which then leads to eating more sugar."

And soda pop containing HFCS is THE biggest culprit because HFCS is in liquid form so it reaches your stomach lining and then your blood stream in a fraction of the time it takes, say a cookie, to reach your blood stream. And HFCS inhibits the body's ability to produce leptin, a hormone that 'tells' your brain you are full. Essentially, your body can't tell the difference between consuming a half can of Coke, Pepsi or 7-Up and drinking an entire 6-pack. It feels the same.

I have been a lobbyist

Where's my expensive car, paid dinners, etc? Oh yeah, that'd be the pharm/gun/oil/death lobby in Washington, D.C.



But we did get free sandwiches. And buttons! And I now know who at least one of my state legislators are. And his office was really, really small.

Little Anderson

I've always been a little behind the curve on social trends and gadgets which is why I am just now (pregnant pause) discovering the marvel that is Anderson Cooper!

If you haven't read this guy's Wikipedia profile, please drop everything and go immediately to that site and look him up. I'm 90% sure Danielle Steele herself wrote the first five paragraphs of this silver-spooned queer's bio. It's To Die For!!!


Anderson and "friend"

Mum was THE Gloria Vanderbilt. Daddy died when Lil' Andy was a pup. And his older brother jumped off the terrace of the Vanderbilt penthouse apartment due to ... a drug allergy?! In an early attempt to "deal" with the losses in his life, Lil' Andy went to Africa and caught malaria. OMFG, this guy is the DEFINITION of drama.

Andy wandered woefully between the dizzying world of being a male model (gay) and going to Yale where he joined a secret society ala George Bush (SCREAMING GAY). Later he once again hit the rock bottom of despair and self-doubt (or was it loathing) when he took pictures of dead people in Rwanda during the genocide for his "own personal album."

If John Waters and Ed Wood mated and produced a genius drama-writer child? That child could not have dreamed up this super freak. Cooper's celebrity freakiness crushes all other celebrity freaks COMBINED. Couch-jumping Tom Cruise has NOTHING on this queen. All the former-child-star-turned-liquor-store robbers combined can't touch this freak's freakiness.

And what's a closeted, uber-rich gay boy's life without, yes, a stint in the Company aka the CIA.

AND, (there's always an AND with Anderson) while visiting Vietnam in the 1990s, he claims he learned Vietnamese and snuck into Myanmar/Burma to film interviews with locals.

I have to pause now because I'm having a celebrity freak-out orgasm.

(PAUSE)

I'm just wondering: when will the alien abduction stories emerge?

Fun with flea abatement

Greetings fans (all three of you),

So the wonderful, needy, overly affectionate kitty went back the Seattle Humane Society today looking a hell of a lot better than he did when I picked him up. They were about to foist another kitty-in-need on me for another 14-day "fostering" session but I begged off saying I had to do something about the fleas which were now happily residing in the shabby old carpet in my tiny apartment.

I mentioned that I'd been using baking soda and diatomaceous earth and that the fleas just sorta laughed that stuff off and I asked if there was something between baking soda and a RAID flea bomb which I didn't want to do as you have to like go check into a motel for a few days until the Sarin gas wears off. Somebody said something about 'boric acid' which you can get in powder form some where and it's only mildly toxic to people-n-pets but apparently way more irritating to fleas, the Star Trek Borg of the parasite world ('resistance is futile!').



So off I went to the vast, depressingly empty Factoria mall and at Petco I let a cashier talk me into "Zodiac Carpet and Upholstery Flea Powder". Remember that name, folks, because it should have had A GIANT BLACK SKULL on the front of the can and they should have called it "Ode 'de Love Canal" or "Essence of Linfen" (Linfen is supposedly the most toxic city in China).

The truly witty part in this purchase? The effing can said something like "may treat a 200-400sq ft area". Fuck me running. It should have said: "To kill everyone at Safeco Field during a game, open can, and run away very fast."

This shit was so bad, I'm pretty sure if Keith Richards snorted a line, he really would die ... or at least have a bad cold for a week.

I put a small half-circle of the crap around the bottom of my bed frame as that was Valencio's favorite napping//lurking area. I then began the 4-hr task of washing every piece of linen I own including all the towels the cat had bedded down on and all my sheets, duvet, etc.

I came back upstairs and about then I noticed the paint-peeling vapors from this small line of powder in the carpet. I had already opened all my bay windows, cranked the fan, etc. The directions said "allow to sit for 60 minutes or over night". If I had actually let it sit over night, I'd be dead right now and the powder would have burned a crescent-shaped hole thru my floor!

Instead, I immediately vacuumed the shit up and desperately started sprinkling baking soda everywhere the nuclear waste had been. There were multiple sessions downstairs cleaning my vacuum, knocking crap out of the now pretty trashed HEPA filter, wiping every part of the vacuum down with Orange Clean and water, etc.

Finally, after five hours of living inside a freezing wind tunnel, the vapors seem to have eased off. I took a long shower and will have to wash the Agent Orange out of my clothes tomorrow and dust every single freaking surface in my apartment.

A quick look at the can, which is bagged up and going in the trash tomorrow says:

Linalool 2.5%
piperonyl butoxide .5%
pyrethrins .075%
Nylar pyradine .020%
"other" 96.9%

Yummy!

I'm sure this stuff wouldn't fly with the cocaine crowd but if you like a good gas huffing or glue sniffing high, this stuff will do the trick. I'm still dizzy and confused.

And if even one flea egg hatches and I get one more bite after this AND I grow gills or a hand-shaped tumor in the middle of my forehead, I am so suing "Zodiac".