A truck load of mysterious items falls into the highway outside of Oklahoma City and no one wants to call it by its name… See “Clean Up on Lane Four”
LIFE IS SHORT
I may have mentioned this before, but have you noticed the headline links that tell you to bring a bread clip to the airport or put plastic bags over your passenger side mirror? When you click on them, you find yourself in a strange labyrinth of oddball pieces of information mixed with Captain Obvious level tips, but you never find out why you need the damned bread clip or the plastic bag. It’s very irritating and it has bothered me for some time which is why I thought I might be repeating an old complaint. If so, forgive me.
Meanwhile, a quite few of us were annoyed with the Queen’s funeral coverage, even though we all loved the Queen and wish her the best in the afterlife. That said, did we really need to focus on the spider that landed on her coffin or the bishop who dropped a piece of paper during some ceremony? Did we really need to drill down on why members of the royal family seem sad?
Moving right along, simply because, in principle, we do not have time nor space for these diversions, I was just reading an article about mayflies (the world’s oldest winged insect!) and I was reminded of one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons.
Picture a couple of mayflies standing on a rock in the distance waving goodbye at two other mayflies who are flying away. One of the flies in flight is saying to the other one:
“We’re only alive for one day, and you had to schedule dinner with the Hamiltons.”
I have this taped to the inside of my pantry door, along with a bunch of recipes, some other cartoons and a full page newspaper ad for some kind of tequila that my mother had affixed in one of her own collections that reads: “Save gas. Stay home and drink.” Beats dinner with the Hamiltons, right?
SLOPPY FILINGS COST YESHIVA
So Yeshiva University and their rightwing lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court for an emergency stay that would allow them to reject a GLBT student club while a lawsuit was underway to determine whether the club must be recognized. Yeshiva is a secular college, operating in the middle of New York City where there are laws against antigay discrimination. By rights, that should be enough to entitle the gay club to whatever perks are enjoyed by the other student clubs, but Yeshiva has continued to turn down their requests by playing the religious card.
Given the astonishingly warm welcome we’ve seen extended to religious plaintiffs by this Supreme Court, it was a pleasant shock when Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh joined our three liberals to deny Yeshiva its stay. It seemed Yeshiva didn’t bother to file correct appellate papers before the high court of New York state, which should have been its next stop. Instead, the college tried to take a shortcut to the U.S. Supreme Court, which was frowned upon.
After losing this motion, Yeshiva childishly announced they would not recognize any student club for the duration of future litigation. But the gay club graciously said that they would withdraw their claims on any particular status while the lawsuit continued in order for the other students to keep their clubs in good standing.
THE RESPECT FOR REPUBLICAN SENATORS ACT
It seems we will wait until after the midterms before Chuck Schumer will send the Respect for Marriage Act to his Senate colleagues. According to sponsor Tammy Baldwin, it will be easier to corral the ten GOP votes necessary for passage if the bill is not tied to politics.
What. Ever. Much has been made of the fact that some 45 Republicans voted for this bill in the House, suggesting that it could actually get though Congress as a bipartisan law. Given that Congress rarely does anything nice for our deserving community, everyone has been filled with enthusiasm, even though the bill would do nothing more than put a Congressional stamp of approval on the settled law of the land. News Flash: same-sex marriage has been legal since June, 2015, and despite some bloviating from Justice Thomas, that is not going to change.
Still, we have seen the impossible become reality, both in law and politics over the last decade, so perhaps the Respect for Marriage Act isn’t all for show. It can’t hurt, unless some of our Republican friends believe that since they voted for this bill, they don’t have to join us in voting for the much stronger and much more necessary Equality Act.
CLEAN UP ON LANE FOUR
Have any of you been following the chess player who is accused of using vibrating anal beads linked to wifi in order to receive computerized moves? The player, Hans Neimann, allegedly beat the world’s champion player, Magnus Carlsen, using this device. When questioned, Neimann, who is 19, admitted cheating to his younger days, but disavowed the anal bead idea. Carlsen, however, now refuses to play Neimann, and the chess world is going berserk over the whole thing.
What has this to do with our colorful GLBT community? Um, it’s a stretch, but I’ll wager that if you isolated one hundred people who were familiar with anal beads, that the percentage of GLBT people would be higher in that population than it would be in a random group.
Using this “kink link” if you will, I will also tell you about the truck load of sex toys that fell into the highway outside of Oklahoma City the other day. No one on the news desk felt like discussing the details on TV even though hundreds of packages of dildos were visible for all to see.
“This is a semi that overturned and lost its load here,” helicopter pilot Jim Gardner told the local anchor. “There is a lot of stuff to clean up.”
“Jim, can you tell what he’s carrying there? What’s all over the road?” asked the anchor,
“Not really. Maybe you can tell—I can’t tell,” Jim replied. “There’s a lot of stuff laying on the road—whatever it is it’s going to take a while to clean up.”
Oh, please. There’s no way Jim was sent into the air to cover the dildo spill on Interstate 40 without getting the nitty gritty. He knows exactly what’s all over the road and so does the rest of the news crew!
