matthearn.com

Here’s a fun little secret you probably would have been able to guess on your own: I like to curse. I am a curser. There is nothing quite as cathartic as stringing together a remarkable series of expletives and animal sounds, and I have to tell you, some of my improvisations are truly memorable. Like the time I called my computer a “cockserpent,” which is kinda redundant, but somehow not. Or the time I dropped my sunglasses in Wawa bathroom and yelled “Son of a f***-wh*** s***-c***!!!”

Obviously around my kids, grandparents, in-laws, etc., I go into what radio professionals call “FCC” mode, in which I cut out anything stronger than “dang” and “heck” and avoid telling jokes like the one about why the hooker had a runny nose. But if I’m alone, or just hanging out with friends my own age, it gets all Andrew Dice Clay up in this piece, but without all the class that the Diceman brings to his act.

What made me think of this was the random recollection of the time in college when I was advised by an older female student that I might have better luck meeting ladies if I cursed less. At the time this seemed like pretty good advice, and so for a period of time I tried curtailing my profanity. Looking back, however, it was completely ridiculous. It’s like telling someone, “You know, you might have better luck meeting ladies if you weren’t so heterosexual.” Changing a core value (specifically, “Bad words are awesome”) to try and attract mates leads to poor communication, failed marriages, and colon cancer. Look it up.

In the end my future wife (who curses like a pirate) and I ended our ill-advised “break-up,” married, and have produced two children, the elder of which chastises me if I say the word “stupid” in his presence. In fact, he’ll object to any word that sounds roughly similar to “stupid,” such as the other day when he protested my use of the word “stupendous” and later in the week when Sarah said “striped” and got called out for it.

When he turns 16 I’ll teach him real curse words. I’m sure he won’t have picked up any on his own.

The Prop 8 decision (Judge Walker declared that Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage in the state of California, is illegal) has been covered rather extensively in the blogosphurr, but here’s a quick round-up of things I’ve seen and liked. From Jason Kuznicki:

I asked myself — couldn’t they have gotten Maggie Gallagher to testify? She comes across as reasonable most of the time. She might have offered one of her frequent catch phrases, that societies that “lose the marriage idea” die out. As a sound bite, it’s frightening and often convincing. But at trial, she’d have been asked the obvious follow-up question — name just one such society — and a moment of hilarity would have ensued, because there aren’t any.

Or she might have said that kids need a mom and a dad. Then she’d have been confronted with the deep dishonesty of many of the studies that are used to disparage gay and lesbian parents. These studies all either extrapolate from single-parent homes to two-parent homes or else fail to control for divorce. Thus they draw conclusions that are pretty obviously doubtful. Comparing two-parent same-sex families with two-parent opposite-sex families and controlling for divorce demonstrates little difference in childrearing outcomes — a point Gallagher commonly avoids at all costs.

A commenter quoted on Andrew Sullivan’s site:

I really, really hate – as in, this is extra special slimy, even for them – the fact that only now, since the Prop 8 proponents have lost, is the whole “he’s gay, should he have recused himself” meme starting to take hold. Folks, if you think your judge should recuse himself, you put on your big boy or girl pants and you file the damn motion. 22 years ago I did a jury trial for a client who was charged with molesting his kid. The judge originally assigned had handled the civil restraining order, and I felt that created bias, so I filed a motion to recuse, which he granted. (By the way, with a different judge, the jury acquitted in 55 minutes.) About a week later, I ran into that judge and started to apologize for the motion. He cut me off before I could finish and he said, “You should never, ever apologize for doing your job. Ever.” The point is this: if you are a good lawyer, and you’ve got grounds, you file that motion. And if you don’t file it, either a) you’re not a good lawyer, or b) you got no grounds in the first place, and you know it.

And the Prop 8 proponents knew it. And didn’t file it. Because there was nothing to file. It’s no more bias to be gay in this case than it would to be African American, Latino, Jewish or female in a discrimination case. This is a smear. And a cowardly smear at that. Nothing less.

I love “put on your big boy or girl pants and you file the damn motion.” I wish I’d gone to law school. Now the right wing has lathered itself up to the point where they believe they can get Judge Walker impeached.

Judge Walker is an open homosexual, and should have recused himself from this case due to his obvious conflict of interest.

What can be done?

Fortunately, the Founders provided checks and balances for every branch of government, including the judicial branch. Federal judges hold office only “during good Behaviour,” and if they violate that standard can be removed from the bench.

Judge Walker’s ruling is not “good Behaviour.” He has exceeded his constitutional authority and engaged in judicial tyranny.

I’m not entirely sure how judging the facts of a case and rendering a decision is not “good Behaviour.” Perhaps they think that being an open homosexual is not “good Behaviour?” You stay classy, American “Family” Association.

I have a cat named Pete. You may have met him. He has had many, many nicknames (like all my cats, wives, and children):

• Furdis


• Festus


• Petey Petey Punkin Eatey


• Chubbs


• Tubbs (thereby occasionally making his sister Poly “Crockett”)


• Kreplach


• Kreppis


• Kreps

It is this last that has led, oddly, to me calling him “DJ Kreps-a-lot,” in the vein of Sir Mix-a-Lot. Stranger yet, I have found myself lately singing “He’s DJ Kreps-a-lot” to the tune of “On The Good Ship Lollipop“:

He’s DJ Kreps-a-lot

Brings the hot phat beats, makes your undies drop

His fuzzy face

Won’t permit the dance floor go to waste

That is all.

This is quite lovely.

When gay marriage became legal in the District, Henry set his sights on a wedding. Bob wanted no part of it. “We’re accepted as two human beings, always as a couple. I said, ‘I don’t see any reason for it,’ ” he recalls. “Besides that, Vera Wang will never make a gown for me to wear.”

Henry reminded Bob of the reaction to the Helen Hayes Awards speech. Their shared life is the contribution they’ve made to the gay rights movement, he argued, and marriage solidifies that. “We’ve been an example,” he says.

So on June 20, at 5 p.m., the white-haired men walked out onto the balcony of the presidential suite of the J.W. Marriott and faced each other under an arch of billowing silk and saffron-colored flowers. Sixty-two years — to the hour — after they got together in that Baltimore bar, Bob and Henry were wed.

Here’s an interesting tidbit:

“We’re not only friends, we’re lovers, we’re brothers and, incidentally, along the way, in 1990, I legally adopted Bob.”

True story. When Henry was 69, he legally adopted Bob, who was 70. It gave them legal protections, offered an advantageous inheritance tax rate and made the pair into a family.

Moral of the story:

These six decades together have gone “like that!” Henry says, snapping his fingers. “It’s like life goes. My advice to anybody is, ‘For God’s sakes, enjoy your life.’ “

I really do intend to get this thing alive again. I really do. But, let’s face it, I have two bloody children. It’s frequently 9pm before all the offspring are abed, which gives me roughly 90 minutes for myself before I have to start considering getting my beauty sleep. Last night I spent those 90 minutes installing a new toilet seat upstairs because my obese ass cracked the old one. So you can see where finding time for updates is, well, non-existent. I will try and do better.

I do have plans to discuss the Triathlon I did 2 weeks ago, and in fact started a post on that subject, which I’ve not had time to work on since, well, the day after the Triathlon. So, you know, don’t hold your breath too long. Although, frankly, the fact that a 257-pound human successfully completed a triathlon might be a tidbit that would cause you to expire from surprise anyway.

In lieu of coming up with something hilarious and original, I can offer a particularly foul-mouthed quote or two from a story on the feelings of elite soldiers on DADT by Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic:

As one former member of a special missions unit put it to me recently, “It’s really about competence. If you’re competent, it doesn’t matter who you are.” And then, switching instantly from an analytical posture to a machismo mode, he said, “If a guy saves my ass, he sure as hell can look at it.”

Damn right. To folks who are afraid of gays in the military, what exactly is the issue? Are you afraid of getting propositioned? I can count the number of times I’ve been hit on, in 32 odd years, on one hand, so I’m afraid you’re not getting any sympathy from me. I’d relish the thought of a gay guy finding me attractive, with the exception of the freaky gentleman that kept cruising me at a gay club in London in 2003, and the problem there was not his homosexuality but the fact that he was at least as old and doughy as my father, and wearing a white T-shirt and black pants that were at least 3 sizes too small.

How, exactly, is being hit on by a gay guy any different than being hit on by a particularly ugly woman? Either way, you just have to say “no thanks,” and usually that puts a stop to it.

The next quote has some particularly naughty language:

One soldier — call him Ben — checks his e-mail. “Fuck,” he says. He opens his cell phone and makes a call. … A beat. … “Heeeey cock breath, how are you?” … “Yeah, that sucks.” “Yeah, why is he doing this to us again?” “No, he told me his partner was in town for the weekend and he really needed to see him.” … “Dude, why can’t he break way for one weekend!”

The conversation continues.

“Yeah, well, you know I’m just going to come over and [perform an obscene act involving testicles — this IS The Atlantic, after all, and I already typed ‘cock breath’].”

He hangs up.

What was that about, I asked?

“Oh, this guy we haven’t seen for a while is in town, a really good buddy, but his partner is also in town and he wants to see him. So we were just complaining that he wanted to see his partner rather than hang with us.”

The soldier reminds me a bit of myself (minus the part where he’s undoubtedly in pristine physical condition and well-trained in the art of combat, and I’m filled with clotted cream and frequently walk into doorframes). For kids of my generation, you grew up insulting your friends by calling them either “gay” (or one of its many derivatives, such as “gaywad” or “gayon”) or “retarded,” sometimes combining the two into particularly biting forms such as “gaytarded.” It’s something I struggle with even now, because my first instinct upon hearing moderately poor news (such as “turns out that John won’t be coming, he’s got to work” or “I don’t like eggplant, it’s gross”) is to think, and possibly say if I’ve been overserved, “That’s gay” or “You’re a retard.” And yet you will be hard pressed to find a greater advocate for the rights of LGBT men and women that isn’t actually LGBT than I.

The fact that the soldiers use words like “cock-breath” and (I’m assuming) “tea-bagging” is not the salient point. The fact that the soldier used those words and clearly has no problem with homosexuality is. I think it’s a perfect reminder that political incorrectness is by no means an indicator of someone’s actual feelings on a subject.

3 minutes my DIMPLED PINK ASS.

The Big Picture has a rage-inducing set of photographs of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The most depressing:

A young heron sits dying amidst oil splattering underneath mangrove on an island impacted by oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in Barataria Bay, along the the coast of Louisiana on Sunday, May 23, 2010. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Sure would have been nice to have that $500,000 remote turn-off device that BP didn’t bother with, huh? I hard that so far, this has cost BP $760,000,000. That’s about 1% of the fine that should be levied on them.

The Tell-Tale Heart was the first story I ever remember reading that actually scared me. At some point I got into some crazy Lovecraftian stuff, like all extra-literate teenagers, but I remember reading The Tell-Tale Heart in about the 5th grade, in class in the middle of the day, and shivering. Ol’ Edgar Allen was a messed up individual.

Of course, so is Randall Munroe.

(What? I disappeared for almost 2 months and then suddenly 2 posts in two days? I have no earthly idea what you are talking about, crazy person.)

A bigger update later. Meanwhile: