Blame the faggots (again)

As if 9/11, hurricane Katrina, global warming, the Discovery blast and Queering Eyes making for the Straight Guys were not enough, now rabbis are claiming that homosexuals are the cause of World War III (a.k.a. the Israeli-Hezbollah spat) now breaking out:

Are Israel's troubles in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon and the Hezbollah rockets slamming daily into major Israeli population centers here a result of the Jewish state's tacit support for a homosexual parade slated for next month in Jerusalem?
Some rabbis seem to think so, and they are attempting to block the event from taking place in Judaism's holiest city.
"Why does this war break out this week, all of sudden with little warning? Because this is the exact week the Jewish people are trying to decide whether the gay pride parade should take place in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv," Pinchas Winston, a noted author, rabbi and lecturer based in Jerusalem told WND.

Link via Billmon

Are you receiving me?

I went up to Waiatarua in West Auckland to have a look at our transmitter today. It's at BCL's transmission site, one of the biggest in the country. I probably got my annual dose of radiation standing near all that gear but it was impressive seeing all those huge transmitters lined up next to each other with massive cooling and cabling systems linking them to the mast.
Our transmitter is a dinky toy compared to those of the networks, but sometimes small and shapely does the job as good as brute force.
Sorry the poor quality of the pictures, they were taken via cellphone.
You can watch our station's live stream here (Windows Media 10 needed, sorry)

Sex on the island (at last)

We went to the grand opening last night of the first adult shop on our island. I've written about its trials and tribulations before and now after months and months of regulatory botch ups by city council officialdom and wrangling over resource consent and public consultation, the space finally got under way. It's a in little shed discreetly situated at the back of the meat shop on Tahi Road and they're selling lots of fetish gear - especially aimed at regulars of the annual "Hooker's Ball" next weekend - plus fairly standard adult toys, accessories, magazines, cards and DVDs. Not much for us man-loving boys yet but the owner assured us new stock will be coming in to cater for us soon.
I am going to rent "Deep Throat" and "Debbie Does Dallas" for sure!

Watching porn with Uncle Uroskin

I'm sure you've done it all before too: you find yourself of an evening in a warm and snug male bathhouse complex, escaping the winter outside, searching for some heat to while away the evening. And then you find yourself plonked in front of a TV set with non-stop fleshy tones and moans.

Welcome to our guide to porn watching. When the movie on offer fails to move any of your body parts it's always a good strategy to battle boredom in the face of all that relentless shaved Czech twink/fat hairy leather daddies/Brazilian muscle marys (or whatever is your favourite turn-off) to keep you awake and alert for any cruising punters. So how to keep your mind occupied but not too distracted from the business at hand? Here are some ideas:

1. Create your own storylines and dialogue: If you've seen "Hercules Returns" you'll know what I mean. Offscreen addition of dialogue and sound effects to basically create a whole new movie. I've seen the guys who made that movie do it live in a cinema recreating "The Corpse Grinders" and it had me wetting myself. Any Kristen Bjorn porn video, usually featuring buff Brazilians mumbling sweet nothings in Portuguese all through their routine, basically screams out for a makeover like that. If there is not much dialogue in the source material, add your own!

2. Concentrate on one peculiar non-sexual organ body part of all the actors and decide which one was the sexiest, most looking like your own, or is grossing you out the most. Such as the state of their fingernails (if you have a fetish for fingernails, don't worry, choose something else, the shape of their kneecaps, the number of hairs in their armpits, whatever): dirty, long, filed, painted (!), bitten, and give scores. Compare findings with your mates. Hours of good natured banter about obscure subjects! Sounds a bit like those fun theological arguments of days gone by about how many angels can sit on your prick.

3. Test the following hypothesis: the colour of an actor's nipple is the same as the colour of his arsehole. (Saint) Boyd McDonald has postulated this and I have been studying this for many years and I believe it's convincingly true. It's a game you can play whenever you watch a porn movie since a lot of footage is concentrated on those areas. It's of course easier to determine if the models are shaved but that makes the hirsute movies little more interesting and challenging, and concentrates your research skills.

4. Assign job descriptions to the actors when they're done performing: what do you think they do for a living? Argue your case using any clues you saw in the film: would any firemen/motor mechanics/soldiers/etc roles fit them in real life? Or were they just good/bad actors? What job would you hire them for? Perhaps due to the de-industrialisation (all those blue collar jobs gone to China) and the further erosion of services industries (all those call centre and geek jobs gone to India), one has to wonder what the future job prospects of surplus males are in the western world apart from sports and porno (some think there is even a tendency to merge those industry sectors into sporno). Hard-up young men with limited career prospects have, of course, always existed and in times past have either been used as crusaders, cannon fodder and Athletic Model Guild material, and those traditions are not going to die out soon. But I think the numbers are increasing, considering the popularity of straight-for-pay and gay-for-pay sites and movies these days. I bet the modelling prices have gone down too with all that competition from Eastern Europe and Brazil. Will Western European and American boys only be able to keep their wages up by having to expose themselves to dangerous (but apparently attractive for the punters) activities on film such as barebacking?

Let me know your own favourite activity while watching porn.

Time to criminalise heterosexuality?

You may have heard about the recent dreadful episode in New Zealand child abuse, the murder of newborn twins Cru and Chris Kahui at their family home, populated by a full assortment of family members close and distant. Only one of them had a paid job, the rest lived communally on welfare. Perhaps you have seen that classic New Zealand film "Once Were Warriors", so take that scenario and apply it as reality in this case. And then you still have to deal with sickening reports in your morning paper:

Detective Senior Sergeant John Tims gave details from a pathologist's report that indicated the twins' heads had been bashed with (or against) a blunt object. Their ribs were fractured and one had a broken thigh.

The Sensible Sentencing Trust (the local hang'em-and-flog'em-and-hang'em-again club) wants abusive parents to be spayed.
I'm just completely flummoxed by the behaviour of this family, which has been keeping a Cosa Nostra pact of muteness, stonewalling the police investigation under the excuse of the right to silence.
Don't these heterosexuals love their children? Is the twins' mother so browbeaten into submission she cannot/will not say who killed her babies? Where was the lioness in her that would fight for her kids? Has this family no pride so it can effectively cover up murder most foul by any of its members? Has the perpetrator no honour? Or was the babies' crying just too much for his hangover or P-induced paranoia? It just completely floors me.
And then you have the spectacle of local Christian fundamentalists standing tall and proud for the right of parents to beat their children in a campaign against Green MP Sue Bradford's Private Member's Bill to abolish section 59 of the Crimes Act. "Family Integrity" released a pamphlet [PDF file] (link via No Right Turn) on how to beat your kids for 10-15 minutes to drive out 'sinful manifestations'.
One shudders to think what sinfulness Chris and Cru Kahui manifested at age 29 weeks meriting them a fatal blow to the head with a blunt instrument. It would have taken the murderer less than 10 minutes.

Isn't wanking always for a good cause?

Charity begins at home, as the cliche goes, and now a charity has taken some British men by the balls and convinced them to wank in a masturbation marathon for a good cause. The news report (unfortunately in Dutch but there is a Guardian story about it here) doesn't name the charity in question, but similar activities in America always involved charities linked to promoting safe sex in some way. The Brits want to break the record and will have to wank for over 8 and a half hours! (Are your sessions any shorter?)
The event will be filmed for Channel Four TV and the press blurb includes:

"It's time to find out if the only things allowed to be stiff in Britain are upper lips"

I personally find watching masturbation, as in porn films, quite tedious and I doubt I'd be staying up till 11pm to watch it on TV. But hey, the more sex on TV, even if it is only the solitary kind, the better.
You can volunteer at the Centre for Sex & Culture.

The first cut is the cruellest

I heard this the other morning on the radio and I thought, what's wrong with this picture?:

Circumcision may offer Africa AIDS hope
Procedure linked to much lower rate of new HIV infections
French and South African AIDS researchers have called an early halt to a study of adult male circumcision to reduce HIV infection after initial results reportedly showed that men who had the procedure dramatically lowered their risk of contracting the virus. [...]
The hope is that, lacking a vaccine, the nearly 5 million new HIV infections occurring each year could be slowed by circumcision, the surgical removal of the foreskin -- a simple, low-cost and permanent medical intervention that is a common but controversial cultural practice in much of the world. [...]
Laboratory studies have found that the foreskin is rich in white blood cells, which are favored targets of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. So the theory is that men who are uncircumcised are much more likely to contract the virus during sex with an infected woman, and that the epidemic spreads when these newly infected men have sex with other women within their network of sexual partners.

From: SFGate.com

Male circumcision, just like its female counterpart, is child abuse and should only be carried out if there is risk of infection and a threat to the boys' health. In all other circumstances it should be a consensual decision by an adult man - and his alone. If you agree with all this, it must disturb you too that the medical fraternity is backing the cutters again (in earlier, unenlightened times, circumcision has always been linked to dodgy claims by medicalists and religionists, be it to identify your religion or to prevent masturbation, so no change there).
I have little quibble with the science involved, such as the susceptibility of the foreskin to HIV infection. But I think the policy responses they want to derive from it miss the point if this vulnerability is used to justify circumcision: it may give cut guys a false sense of protection against HIV knowing their knobs are less suspectible to HIV than uncut ones, and lead to less condom use which puts them and their partners at greater risk.
My point is that it really doesn't matter whether you are intact or cut if you want to avoid catching HIV. You just have to always practice safe sex.
Promoting the mutilation of males may thus even lead to the opposite of what you want to achieve in HIV prevention. And this would be criminally negligent.
I have never met an uncut guy who didn't like his foreskin, and have never met a cut guy who doesn't have some subconscious sense of loss.
The clue is that circumcision is always promoted by circumcised guys. Envy is a strong emotion.

The anti-circumcision campaign is here.

Is raping and killing genetic or learned behaviour

"A man has admitted abducting and raping several women in Auckland over a period of two months.
Frankie Edwards has admitted abducting six women, and raping three of them between April and June this year.
In delivering the case for sentencing, Judge Philip Recordan said he was disturbed to read of Edwards' use of methamphetamine while committing his crimes.
Detective Sergeant Megan Goldie says Edwards' early guilty plea will save the victims from having to re-live their ordeal by being put through a trial."

Via Radio New Zealand

Frankie (pictured right) is the brother of Phillip (picured left), the ageing rentboy who manslaughtered an ageing queen two years ago.
Death seems to run in that family. Is it in the genes? But thank godess brother Frankie is a red-blooded heterosexual (just like brother Phillip, who pleaded "homosexual panic" for his fatal lashing out), even though he needed speed to get it up and on with his unwilling girlfriends. Together both brothers have 120 convictions between them. And there are another 11 brothers and 3 sisters in their family. Which would constitute an argument for reducing their gene pool, no?
May they both rot in their cells with their backs glued to the wall and their fingers up their arses.

As an addendum, Tim Barnett MP is looking at how to scrap the "homosexual panic" defence in murder cases.

UPDATE: The Herald now reports that the family of the manslaughterer Phillip denies that rapist Frankie is his brother or even whanau at all. Imagine how that would look on some twisted reality TV or talk show. A ratings bonanza.

Sand in the lube is murder

Some good news from the South Pacific, for a change: (via Gaynz.com)

The Fijian High Commissioner says gay men will not be arrested for consensual sex in Fiji, allaying the fears of Labour’s Rainbow Caucus, which arose after the Out Takes Reel Queer Film Festival offered a prize of a trip for two to Fiji. The offer of the prize had come under fire by LGBT advocates, as a letter from the Fijian High Commission, published in ‘Express’ newspaper, had stated that gay sex was illegal and men could be arrested.
This was in spite of the ruling of Fiji’s High Court that found that the anti-gay laws were unconstitutional. Labour MP Maryan Street asked the Fijian High Commission for clarification on the issue, and has just received a reply.
However, Fiji maintains a ban on entry for HIV positive people.

We're off to Rarotonga soon. No gay nookie allowed there either, but nobody cares there what you do.

On a different battlefield

This was the entertainment highlight of New Zealand sports this weekend.

Are you glad it's over?

A wonderful new tradition should take root when your football team wins: wave your shorts in the air and jump/dive around like you just don't care.
And what could that Italian have said to Zidane to turn him from a mild-mannered non-practicing Muslim man into a clinically controlled headbutter within a few seconds? Possibly something to do with his mother, as in an Italian version of "y tu Mama tambien" - after all, these Italians know a thing or two about mother fixations. Or something about "terrorism", which indicates the Italians were actually dead scared of him.
But Zidane got his golden ball anyway and well-deserved too.

UPDATE: The taunts by the Italian included references to his mother, terrorism and cast aspersions on his whakapapa. I'm amazed and I admire Zidane's restraint in his reaction. Great headline in the Mirror: Why ZZ Blew His Top

Picture via Queer Beacon.
Oh La La Paris has some more fun pix of soccer players in underpants.

20 years of legal buggery

This weekend it's twenty years since the "homosexual law reform" happened in New Zealand, when it finally became legal as a man to sleep with a man. Of course 1986 was rather late in the piece, since other countries had abolished buggery as a crime much longer ago (or even have never considered it worthy of being a crime). Even the UK got into the act in 1967, two years before that other recently celebrated act of queer defiance, the Stonewall riot in New York (or commemorating Judy Garland's death, whatever floats your boat).
But the main difference and great thing about the New Zealand legalisation was the equalisation of the age of consent at 16 for both orientations - something which the UK has only recently managed to do.
And, of course, the removal of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in other Government policy areas such as immigration, resulting in me being here through my relationship rather than through dollops of cash or special skills (although I'm applying my special skills, don't you worry about that!)
So it's celebrations all around the country, with veterans of the campaign rekindling old memories. An events listing here.

Rome

"How many women have you had who didn't cry or you didn't have to pay?"

The HBO/BBC series "Rome" has just started screening here and hugely enjoyable it is. My only quibble is that they should have spoken Latin instead of English, because then I could have moaned about why I couldn't have a series like that to enliven my Latin lessons at high school.
Ewen noticed that the plants in Atia's atrium would not have been known to the Romans as philodendrons are native to rainforests, mostly in America. I guess they had to get something wrong to satisfy the armchair pedants like us.
I don't find the the language used, or the sex and violence shocking or inappropriate. I just wish they could do a similar series on ancient Greece, the Olympics and those Greek vices that even shocked and appalled the Romans.
The character with the most interesting name is Erastes Fulmen (or: Thunderbolt Male Arse Fucker).
The totty award so far is for Ray Stevenson (left in the picture) as Titus Pullo, who draws a mean cock picture on his cell wall - hopefully from life.

World cup irony

The ironic thing is that the second-rating English squad will now return to their millionaire premier division football, while the (possible) world champion Italians will go back to playing in the second division because their clubs will have been relegated due to corruption scandals.

Xlibris Releases A Fantastic Superhero Novel Written By A Long Time Comic Book Collector

Since the 1930s, tales about superheroes have been an essential component of comic books.. From Batman to the X-Men, superhero tales endure in popularity because of the relevance of their dramatic social and moral messages. The elements that make superheroes so exciting will again stir your imagination as Xlibris proudly releases The Superhero’s Closet, the compelling new superhero novel from author and veteran comic book collector H. Andrew Lynch.
Set in San Francisco, The Superhero’s Closet introduces us to four super humans – teenager Lain Grey (budding powers), young Kathleen (who channels dead philosophers through her dog), Vernon Hood (the most powerful man alive) and Geoffrey Gilman (the original superhero) -- each with dark secrets, who inexorably cross paths when the city is suddenly attacked by a mysterious woman called the Goshenite. As the crisis grows, the riddles of their past collide with the present. Will these super beings be able to unite for a common cause or will their past divide them? The Superhero’s Closet contains all the excitement and surprises that you find in today’s comic books. The novel’s special focus on the pain and joy of humanity will attract the attention of a wide audience of readers, especially adventure fans and comic book readers. Considering the popularity of super heroes in modern society (Hollywood’s X-Men: The Last Stand and Superman Returns are big theatrical successes), The Superhero’s Closet is a relevant and entertaining book that people cannot afford to miss. Be sure to order a copy of H. Andrew Lynch’s fantastic superhero book by visiting his website or by visiting your favorite bookstore today!

About the Author:
For the pure enjoyment of it, H. Andrew Lynch has read and collected superhero comics for 35 years. A frequently published horror and sci-fi short-story writer in the 90s, Lynch wrote three superhero manuscripts before discarding them all to write his big superhero tale, The Superhero’s Closet. Lynch lives in San Francisco with his Beagles, Woody and Darwin.

The Superhero's Closet * by H. Andrew Lynch Publication Date: May 9, 2006 Trade Paperback; $21.99; 212 pages; 1-4257-0567-7; Cloth Hardback; $31.99; 212 pages

Trivia detail: Andrew wrote large parts of his novel when staying at our place in 2000.

Where I have slept (sometimes with a local)

Create your own visited countries map

Weekend entertainment

A few days of entertainment highs and lows to while away the wintry days here. There is a lot of sunshine around but temperatures plummet to almost freezing at night, so indoor activities and fun are what was called for and that is what we got:

The world cup soccer quarter finals: the Brazilian show ponies beaten by "Les Vieux" was excellent breakfast time watching. Surely "Le Marseillaise" is the only national anthem that is sung by the crowds in the stands after kick-off - and thus the measure of a true battle hymn. The French don't need god to defend themselves, like New Zealand does, "les enfants" will do nicely.
I'm behind Portugal now, they got the best looking team left in the competition and I always back the smallest country. And also because of the really ugly incident involving Wayne Rooney who deliberately kicked Ricardo Carvalho viciously in the gonads. It was in a street brawling tradition best left to the back streets of Manchester, so that f***en ugly chav ("Nobby Stiles with teeth", as one wag called him) should crawl back to his hovel and be banned from the game for a good time. If only he handled the football as expertly as he can kick Portuguese boy balls his team might have gone a bit further. But he was obviously wanting to go home anyway.

Jericho (The Killing of Johnny Swann episode, sorry spoilers follow): now I always wanted to be cabin boy to Robert Lindsay's Captain Pellew aboard HMS Indefatigable in "Hornblower", but now Robert Lindsay is even more terrific in "Jericho", a marvellously atmospheric series set in 1950s Soho London. It only took till the second episode for the underground gay world being the story, complete with "speakeasy" type back street gay bars featuring tragic drag queens and effeminate stagehands. Having Mancunian athletic but pretty boy William Ash (from "Burn It") playing the closet queen was inspired casting despite the storyline being a bit cliche and dodgy: the closet queen is of course the murderer, he can't live a happy life and ultimately has to die too. How very "Celluloid Closet"!

Speedway Junky (1999): A Dickensian tale set in contemporary Las Vegas, with very spunky Jesse Bradford (also seen in all his naked torso glory in "Swimfan") trying to get his portion of the American dream, as in "rugged individualism and trampling on everybody gets you to the top" kind of ideology, but he is actually completely depending for survival on his newly adopted "family" of gay hustlers and former prostitutes. A sort of David Copperfield in the desert. Bleak and terribly tragic, but oh so slightly annoying by the cop out at the end. Terrific dialogue though (via About Gay Movies):

Steven: So, you completely straight or what?
Johnny: Of course, yeah aren't you?
Steven: Well, personally, I dig that but, but when it comes to work it is simply a matter of cashflow.
Eric: See, Steven is bisexual. Buy him something and have sex.
Steven: I'm a businessman, Johnny, the customer always 'comes' first

Recommended.
And tonight "Shameless" starts on UK TV. Bless the Gallagher family!