Since I'm a gay, lefty, Jewish Canadian, I suppose I'm obligated to mention yesterday's Canadian election. Here goes. This is my comment on the yesterday's Canadian election. I did not eat my ballot.

It had never occurred to me before that eating my ballot was a possible course of action once behind the voting piece of cardboard. According to Elections Canada's Frequently Asked Questions, a question voters frequently ask is, "Is someone allowed to eat a ballot?" I had no idea Canadian voters would think to ask this - and frequently even - although it does go a long way towards explaining why the Conservatives won. Many Canadians are kind of stupid.

The answer by the way is, "No. It is an act of fraud to eat your ballot." Phew! Good thing I didn't eat it then! I would have been in some trouble!

Normally I have to restrain myself from scribbling, "They're all fucking crooks who should be forced to watch their own campaign speeches over and over and over again!" Either that or I feel the urge to madly draw little happy faces in the circles where we're supposed to mark our "X". However, I believe that voting is a privilege and one not to be squandered, so even though every single politician in the world remind me of that guy from high school who tried very, very hard to be popular, was treasurer of the student council, but went alone to the graduation dance - even the female politicians - I still plug my nose, avert my eyes from what I'm about to do, and vote strategically so that the worst of the bunch can't get elected.

Until this election, that is. This time, I voted with my brain instead of with my fear. I voted for a candidate I didn't think had a hope in hell of winning and for a party I would like to see in official opposition one day. Official opposition standing is a wish I used to wish for the lefty NDPs until they formed a bizarre alliance with the Conservatives to force this election in a cynical power grab. Good thing it paid off for them, eh.

In any case, I don't agree with everything on the Green's platform, but I do agree with most of it. Besides the perfect Blample Sog party - which would make it illegal not to offer me publishing contracts, by the way - does not exist. If I hadn't voted this party, I would have been sorely tempted to eat my ballot. By voting and not voting strategically, I voted for an idealistic party not corrupted by political cynicism (bye-bye NDP!), I didn't have to go home and wash off the slime immediately after voting, and I wasn't arrested after committing an apparent act of fraud.

The Liberals have been chastised, Paul Martin has stepped down as Liberal leader, and the Conservatives have a much smaller minority than expected (translation for those American lefties who pronounce doom and gloom without having the slightest inkling how Canadian politics work: they won the most seats in our House of Commons but they don't have to most seats overall meaning that they are powerless to get anything done without the help of the other parties, which isn't too likely. Therefore, fix your own gutless Democrats and then we'll chat about the downfall of the North American left). They may try to take away same-sex marriage rights, for example, and they may actually be able to shove it through the House, but it'll never get through the Senate and the courts will knock it down. They won't be able to get anything done without the other parties and the Government will fall the second one of the crazies brings up Intelligent Design. I give them twelve months max.

So it may be the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine. I'm quite happy about it all, in fact. But I can't help wondering if ballot goes better with white wine or with red?

"You haven't seen 'Brokeback Mountain'?" It's the same reaction of shock and lightly simmered outrage I get when I tell people that I - a real live, fully-out-of-the-closet, multiple-hair-product-buying gay man do not swoon for Martha Stewart. Not do I wish I could talk and do dismissive hand movement and finger snaps like Ru Paul. I may have procured myself copy of Madonna's newest, but I still don't think either Bette or Babs have lovely, moving singing voices. I guess that last one makes me a bad Jew, too.

And it's not just other fags (which is, by the way, a word that only we are allowed to use) who give this attitude over the movie. Straight people are taken aback too. Their world view appears to rest on the assumption that different people act the way they had been told that different people act, and this includes what movie you want to spend a week's wages to see: All Jews love "Schindler's List" and anything by Mel Brooks; all Blacks love "Waiting to Exhale" and "Barbershop"; all women love "My Big, Fat Greek, Wedding" and "Sleepless in Seattle"; and all gays like watching two sexy guys have hot, wild, passionate sex in a tent.

OK, so I guess like watching sexy guys have hot, wild, passionate sex in a tent (more than two is fine, even), especially two hot guys like Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Heath's broad, round features are slightly model perfect for my taste, but the sexy Ozzie accent certainly raises up what his thin lips bring down. And Jake! Now there's a nice, Jewish boy I could take home to my mother! But I still don't plan to see the movie anytime soon, just like I never plan to buy a Céline Dion album anytime soon (Ooop! Now I'm a bad Canadian too!). This does not make me a bad fag.

A bad fag claims masculinity and the ability to act straight (whatever that means, since both Don Knotts and Dame Edna are straight) as his highest virtues while ridiculing those ones who are firmly in touch with their feminine side.

A bad queer waits until they are famous to come out (Elton John, Rosie O'Donnell, Ellen Degeneres). They turn their coming-out into such a glitzy media event that the struggle - something the rest of us mortals go through - coming out to our families, friends, and co-workers without the piles of money the stars have to fall back on should something go wrong are about as important as mosquito bites.

A bad fag - who is certainly welcome to his political beliefs - sides with the most extreme members of his side of the political spectrum, such as Jeff Gannon, to the detriment of the rights of all queers and by extension, of his own.

A bad fag gets married and has kids, disappears on the weekend and comes home to give his wife all sorts of enchanting infections because he's not, like, gay n'stuff so he doesn't have to worry about protecting himself from, like, AIDS n'shit.

A bad fag never comes out.

I just don't want to go see an ol' love story. That's all. I'm glad everyone and their eighty-year-old grandmother realise it's an important film and want to see it, and that they seem to like it too. I'm all for that. This flick's for them, not for me. I'm glad they like it. That makes me a happy fag. I'm off to see "TransAmerica".

This is the kind of crap North American Jews have to put up with a lot.

Cartoon by Bill Schorr.

LOL! And,like, all the bubbles in my head keep totally popping and stuff! LOL! ;)
Via Mr V

Almost half of Europe's Jews are descended from just four women, according to a new study. [...] The four women are thought to have lived in the Middle East about 1,000 years ago but they may not have lived anywhere near other, according to the study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. However, they bequeathed genetic signatures to their descendents, which do not appear in non-Jews and are rare in Jews not of Ashkenazi origin.

I'm sure that close friend and main nemesis AlefAlef - who is Sephardi whereas I am Ashkenazi - is simply heartbroken that he and I are not more closely related.

I set a deadline for myself so of course I didn't meet it. One thousand measly words were all I needed to write. One thousand tiny, insignificant words in a pretty blurby picture that will dazzle a potential publisher - a biggee in the Canadian market, no less - who had already expressed interest on a book I'm pretending to write.

My self-imposed deadline, conceived on Friday, was today. Therefore, I spent the weekend making out with a cute guy, fighting with close friend and nemesis AlefAlef, making up with close friend and nemesis AlefAlef, playing an atrociously addictive computer game called Civilization (I just defeated both the Aztecs and the English; not even the Spanish can claim that!), singing along with Fiona Apple 'cause she, like, totally gets my soul, man (If there was a If there was a better way to go then it would find me / I can't help it, the road just rolls out behind me / Be kind to me or treat me mean / I'll make the most of it, I'm an extraordinary machine), and reading up on American politics as a distraction from Canada's upcoming election in which the party, whose main platform is to tell me that I may not, in fact, get married after all, seems slated to win.

With the world falling apart and all, why should waste my time writing a novel about young, bilingual, Jews from Montreal trying to understand their murky ties to Quebec, Canada, and Israel when there are kooky American ultra-right-wing sites to both amuse and nauseate me? Why should I flesh out the details of a short story - an adaptation of the story of Job - when there are cities to take over and slaves to capture? Indeed, why should I try and find a way to scrounge up February rent when Fiona warbles at me with her sweet, gravely voice (If you don't have a date, celebrate / Go out and sit on the lawn and do nothing).

The solution is to find myself a good agent and a good editor to make complete nudniks of themselves until I relent and meet my deadlines. I have always been the an acolyte of the procrastinatory branch of the religion of Western work ethic, but if I succeed in turning this publisher away I'll more than likely have to take my vows and become a high priest in the field. No vows of celibacy for me. Non-celibacy is one of the finest manners of procrastination.

When I was in high school I literally tied myself to my desk when it came time to write papers so that I would stay seated. It did restrain me physically but it couldn't keep my brain from taking me travelling through time and space to anywhere but wherever I was supposed to be writing from. And this - get this! - was in the days before home computers took over the Western hemisphere. There was no such thing as email (imagine!). No such thing as Internet, the biggest distraction of them all. Thanks a lot, Al Gore!

Hey look - I've spent almost 500 hundred words in writing this. Time well wasted.

Winter and cabin fever do bizarre things to one's sense of propriety. I woke up this morning and was amused to no end to realise that with my bedhead, I look like a Dr Seuss character.



When I was a teenager I had hair similar to this, but on purpose ... it was the 80s.

Courtesy of Mr V

A conversation with Dr DG during a commercial break in "Family Guy":

DG: How many guys have you dated in the past couple of months?

Me: Define "dating".

DG: Um ... been on more than three dates with.

Me: Dunno ... four, I guess. No. Five. No. Four. The one with bad breath only got two dates.

DG: God! What do you do to them?

Me: [shrug] Guess I'm not meeting the right guys.

DG: Hmmmmmph ... [takes a sip of beer and quickly squeezes this in just before Peter Stewie says something droll] I think you just keep dumping them so you don't have to clean your apartment.

Am I that shallow? I drink espresso and like classical music. How could I possibly be that shallow?

I have date #4 with a guy who looks like a tall Anderson Cooper with dark hair. I wonder how long I can hold out before I have to clean my dump and invite him over.

(pillaged from Americablog)

Almost as much fun as watching Jake Gylenhaal bottom for Heath Ledger!