Pimp My Wry.

Super Bowl To Feature Only Some Kinds Of Man-On-Man Action

This Sunday, CBS will broadcast a lengthy event featuring lots of strong, sweaty men grappling and wrestling each other to the ground, all in an effort to grab balls and plow through the other guys' back field. Meanwhile, large-breasted women in skimpy skirts and low-cut shirts will jump up and down enthusiastically in an effort to make the whole affair seem less homoerotic so that the majority of men watching will not wonder if they should be questioning their sexuality.

This year's Super Bowl will continue a long tradition of pitting millionaire athletes against one another in their quest to make more money and win some jewelry (a big sparkly ring, to be exact). It will also help the Department of Education meet its quota for exposing hillbillies to Roman numerals once per year.

And that's not all.

Pro-Life (Anti-Choice) Superbowl Ad Straddles Offensive Line

Many times it's been said that we're a lot like the Romans of old.  And it's true, really.  They had their bread and circus; we have Doritos and Bud Light.  They sometimes had corrupt Senates and demented, reckless leaders; ditto here.  And as they loved to blow their money watching gladiators butcher each other, we get our kicks watching guys in helmets and pads wrestle and grope each other on account of an oddly-shaped ball.

Only I don't think that the businessmen of the Old World spent staggering sums so that they could disrupt the combat with ads for their latest sport-utility chariot.  One of the big consequences of being part of a large, consumer-driven economy is that, as a general rule, the more you want to see something, the more advertising you'll have to suffer through.  In the case of a sports event, you can often watch ten minutes of ads with occasional cuts back to the "action," where action is composed largely of a series of timeouts, false starts, and coaches arguing with referees as if it's going to serve any purpose other than to further stall the game.

So ... Why the fuck do people watch sports?

It's just another of those great mysteries of life, like where all those missing socks go or how babies are made (no one has been able to give me a serious, non-sexual explanation of that one yet).  But mysterious or not, the influence of sporting events on daily life cannot be denied.  So great is the potential of those gaps in the "action" that the television network can carve them up into thirty-second increments and try to sell each one for between 2-3Million dollars.  The real crazy part is that people actually buy this time.  Companies producing all sorts of stuff turn into ravenous beasts, gobbling up ad spots in hopes of getting us to gobble up their beer, cola, cars, and stock investment strategies.

(For those of you wondering when I'll get to my point, I'm just now arriving at it.)

Rob Reiner And Prop 8: Meet The New Boss — Not The Same As The Old Boss

You've probably heard that Rob Reiner's been in San Francisco federal court to watch the unfolding of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, otherwise known as the Prop 8 trial. What's he doing there?

Contemplating a movie? Maybe. I mean, I hope so. And I hope it stars Jodie Foster and John Lithgow — you know, the guy who played the latest serial killer beside Dexter. He'd say, "Hate the sin, love the sinner!" like nobody's business!

Here's to hoping.

But let's forget about that for now. According to the CBS News report below, Reiner is "financing much of the legal defense on the gay side."

And that's not all.

Pat Robertson: Haitians Made A Pact With Me Hundreds Of Years Ago (Video)

Right now, members of the media are abuzz over Pat Robertson's claim that the earthquake in Haiti is the latest evidence that that nation is cursed.  As quoted at thinkprogress.org, Robertson states:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you get us free from the prince.' True story. And so the devil said, 'OK, it’s a deal.' They kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free.

But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other ...

Cool story, bro. 

Robertson's particularly eloquent when he says things like "Napoleon the Third and whatever." But I especially love how every time he says, "True story," it becomes more apparent that the "Jerry Springer Show" show saves more American souls than "The 700 Club."

Joy Behar wonders just how Pat Robertson knows that the Haitians made that pact with Satan. But I don't wonder. I've known for many years that Pat Robertson is, in fact, the Prince of Darkness. That's right. Pat Robertson (not Ozzy Osbourne) is the Devil. So, if Haiti made that pact, he'd be the one to know about it.

Allow me to explain.

Man With World's Largest Penis Scoffs Destiny, Can't Find Job (Video)

Imagine for a moment a world in which a boy named Albert Einstein declared, "Fuck science!  I'm going to be a famous athlete.  Nerds don't get taken seriously.  But athletes? They're the ones swimming in poon!"

Seems wrong, doesn't it?  A brilliant mind, destined for academic greatness, denied its ultimate purpose because its possessor would rather pursue his own whims than embrace the magnificent destiny that was laid at his feet by Providence (and I don't mean the one in Rhode Island).

That would be outrageous!

(For those of you who jumped on this article because you saw the word "penis" in the title, don't worry — I'm getting to that.)

Well, if the image of Albert Einstein as a linebacker for, let's say, the Oakland Raiders seems absurd to you, so should the curious case of Jonah Falcon.

Falcon is five feet, nine inches tall.  By all accounts, he's physically an average 39-year-old, except for one not-so-tiny detail — he's packing 13.5 inches of meaty man torpedo.

Neither Snow Nor Rain Nor Bullshit Spending Can Stop This Monopoly

The recession has taken a lot of heat over the past year.  It's been blamed for rising unemployment, tightening credit, falling profits, rising losses, and just about every other problem we've got right now.  The recession, in turn, has been blamed on greedy corporations, villainous executives, conservatives lifting regulations, liberals taxing and spending, American unionized labor, Chinese slave labor — the list goes on and on. 

Enough! If you're going to play the blame game, you may as well point your finger at the real cause. Riddle me this: What do partisan politics, corporate negligence, and excessive government spending all have in common?

If you guessed "stupidity," you're close.  The answer is, unforgivably mind-boggling levels of gross incompetence and carelessness coupled with bucketfuls of shit for brains!

Can you blame a single person or entity for the massive problems dragging down our society?  Of course not.  But certain individuals and organizations make prime examples of the kind of careless, moronic activity that I'm talking about.

Take the United States Postal Service.  It's got a sweet ass deal, doesn't it?  Imagine being a private organization with a total monopoly, only it's completely fucking legal.  Anti-trust laws?  Fuck 'em.  You're the USPS and you don't take shit from nobody.  You've been given free license to handle all postal correspondence for one of the most populous countries in the world, and as long as you don't turn a profit (or at least, if no one notices you doing so), you can do it however you'd like. 

Great opportunity, right?  Sure, if you define "opportunity" as a chance to take the biggest possible market advantage and completely fuck it up.

As CNN reported in an article just a few weeks ago, the USPS's inspector general revealed that the agency managed to blow an entirely-unnecessary $792,022 in five months.  It should then come as no surprise that it lost $3.8 billion dollars in the last year.  If you don't feel like caring because that spending pales in comparison to the organization's overall loss, consider these two points:

The High Cost Of Cheap Journalism

I woke up this morning with one goal: De-gay my resume.

It's now 5 p.m. and I haven't gotten anywhere.

One problem is, I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to do that since I've spent the bulk of my career writing about gay and lesbian issues. ( I've penned 2 long-running gay columns, 175 episodes of a gay soap opera, the pilot episode of a gay sitcom, the pilot episode of a gay dramedy, this blog, and I have a book of humorous essays that are all based on my —you guessed it — gay life. I also went to a pretty gay college, live on the gayer coast — a little over 30 miles from the Golden Gay Bridge, I'm married to a woman, for fuck's sake, and ... ding! ding! ding! ...we have two cats.)

Have I done anything that isn't gay, you might ask? Yes! I currently edit a one-nipple-shot-shy-of-porn sex site, and a few years back I edited teacher's guides and materials for ... wait for it ... children in grades K-8.

Oil, meet water.

Now, you might think that living on the west coast, so close to San Francisco, would be an advantage for a lesbian writer, and you'd win a toaster. I can definitely get a job writing for a gay Web site or magazine. But, here's the catch: Gay mags and Web sites are notoriously poor. I make more money working three hours a day editing stories about an over-sexed and very straight superhero than I would if I worked full time for my own peeps. And, perhaps needless to say, the man behind the superhero mask doesn't give a rat's ass that I'm a lesbian.

So, here I sit, prepared to re-write a resume that's neither boring nor ugly, too thin nor even too long. It's just, well, not bringing results. In 2009, I sent out approximately 537 of those suckers, and I received four responses. Yeah, four. And of those four, only one offered a (barely) decent wage. That's the bad news. But here's the good news: That's one more than I received in 2008.

For the record, I've showed my resume to friends ... and friends of friends, including HR professionals and owners of companies. I've even shown it to other writers and people with six-figure salaries who haven't written a complete sentence since the invention of the Blackberry, and everyone agrees that it's a darn good resume. "Impressive!" they say. "Big words!" ... "You wrote a book? A WHOLE book?" ... "If I needed a writer, I'd hire you, even if you are gay!" Etc., etc., and I think they meant every word.

So, if there's nothing wrong with the content, length, font, grammar, color, feel or smell of my resume, if my resume is otherwise resumetastic, it must be too gay. Right?

Not necessarily.