live long enough to find the good one. protect yourself.

(click image to play – 03:00)
Everyone I’ve shown Wilfrid Brimo’s French public service cartoon on STD protection who has taken time to respond has done so with enthusiasm and usually with warmth. No French is required to enjoy it: the tagline is “Live long enough to find the good one. Protect yourself,” bracketing the name of the ad’s producer, AIDES (not AIDS in French, but “helpers”; they claim to be the oldest French organization devoted to combating HIV/AIDS). Here’s an English-end-titled version. The same production team also made a similarly structured predecessor to this film, aimed at young women.

credits (pdf)

on choosing between the presumptions of the professionally religious (east vs. west)

You may have read or heard about Buddhist monks in Cambodia being forbidden to watch the World Cup, or if they did, to maintain detachment and show no enthusiasm, on pain of expulsion from their monasteries; a somewhat more tolerant pronouncement was made in Thailand.

Well, gosh darn it if that didn’t get me to thinking, and what follows from thinking but a limerick, right? *clears throat*

Whether watching football like a stick
in the mud, or believing a dick,
if unused, is an odd
sort of pipeline to God,
I believe I would rather not pick.

Yeah, yeah, I know, celibacy is practiced and valued in both traditions, but I think it’s only in Roman Catholicism that male professional (if corrupt) celibacy is regarded as a prerequisite for passing on divinity to the unenlightened, not to mention dictating (of all things!) their sexual behavior.

By the way, recent attention on the part of Buddhist heirarchs to the behavior of their charges during the World Cup may have been prompted in part by the warm reception given Khyentse Norbu’s film The Cup.

check the local domestic dress code before making pancakes for your boyfriend’s son

Caren MacDonald testifies at her trial on felony charges of interfering with custody and a misdemeanor charge of violating a restraining order, following her abduction of her son from the custody of his father:

[T]he mother charged with snatching her 11-year-old son and fleeing the country told a judge Monday that she feared her gay ex-husband was trying to ”turn” their son gay….

[Caren] MacDonald…described for the jury how her son told her about a man in his father’s home cooking pancakes for breakfast while wearing pajamas.

At first, her son liked [his] father’s lover, Carlos Diaz, MacDonald testified. But she said that later, her son told her that he hated Diaz and that Diaz had massaged him on his buttocks several times…

[A] courtroom guardian for the boy in 2001 recommended that Diaz not have contact with the boy — but also suggested that the the boy spend more time with his father than with his mother.

Investigators could not substantiate her allegations, and…[c]ustody decisions continued to go in the boy’s father’s favor. A court-appointed psychologist described Caren MacDonald as ”mentally undone, delusional, bipolar, just about every mental illness in the book,” she said skeptically on the stand.

Ultimately, the judge ordered her to have no physical contact with her son….

The boy…testified last week that his mother forced him to lie about being molested because she felt it was unfair that he lived with his dad. He said the only touching involved a shoulder rub he asked for from his dad’s partner.

reported by Amy Sherman in the Miami Herald

jackboots in Jacksonville? it can’t happen here! teacher’s assistant manhandled by Homeland Security

News4Jax, a Jacksonville, FL, television station, reports:

Leander Pickett, a teacher’s assistant at Englewood Elementary, said he was manhandled and handcuffed by two plain clothed Homeland Security officers in front of the school Tuesday for no reason at all….[A]s Pickett was directing bus traffic, he said he was handcuffed and roughed up and humiliated…

“I walked up to him and said, ‘Sir, you need to move.’ That’s when he said ‘I’m a police officer. I’m with Homeland Security … I’ll move it when I want to.’ That’s when he started grabbing me on my arm,” Pickett said….

Several people were outside of the school, watching the incident take place, and those witnesses agree with Pickett’s story.

OK, the graphic is a bit of a stretch, but I couldn’t resist. The only attribution I have for it is hackthissite.org. If you have a better one, please let me know.

video report, News4Jax.com

gay and black history books burned – well, at least scorched – in Chicago

The Chicago Tribune reports on library arson:

Chicago police are investigating a fire in a Chicago Public Library branch on the North Side that damaged about 100 books, most of them in the gay and lesbian collection….[Library spokeswoman Maggie] Killackey said fire damaged about 10 books in the branch’s African-American history collection and 90 books in the gay and lesbian collection.

The Wikipedia article on book burning includes Heinrich Heine’s 1821 observation that “Where they burn books, they will end in burning human beings”, and a photo from the infamous Nazi book burning of May 10, 1933 – which another article reminds us was fueled primarily (and I’m afraid we must say not coincidentally) by the library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Research on Sexuality.

Bill Frist sends out a semiotically suspect invitation

He’s a Senator. He’s an MD. He’s a demagogue. He’s a medical missionary and a hospital profiteer. And he always has his intrusive fingers on the pulse of America. See what happens when Bill Frist ventures into the wild and wacky world of gay semiotics.

Al Kamen reports in The Washington Post:

It was with some trepidation that we opened a most interesting card, which announced on a blue-jeaned cowboy’s belt buckle something called the “5th Annual VOLPAC ‘06 Weekend” in Nashville on April 21-23.

Problem was you had to unbuckle the cowboy’s pants and look inside to see what this was all about. Seemed a bit too “Brokeback Mountain.”

Imagine our relief to find only that we were “cordially invited” to the event honoring Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and “Mrs. Bill Frist, M.D.” This is Frist’s political action committee to raise money for other senators, making friends and positioning him nicely for his 2008 presidential bid.
….
The back of the card shows the cowboy from behind with a red flowered handkerchief sticking out of his right pocket. Wait a minute — wasn’t there something about how this used to be some kind of code in the gay community years ago? A way to signal each other in crowded, noisy bars?

So we checked the GayCityUSA.com’s Hanky Codes. Sure enough, there it was in the chart explaining what they mean: red hanky in right pocket. Oh, dear.

Keith Boykin: Mary [Cheney] had a little scam, a letter to mom, black clergy for prejudice

At the risk of giving Mary Cheney more attention than she deserves, I pass along Keith Boykin’s comments on her memoir and her career. Boykin’s perceptive and eclectic site covers books, movies, music, pop culture, sexuality, spirituality/religion, sports, and theater. He writes and publishes effectively and affectingly on the dilemmas facing queer African Americans.

Incidentally, the source links for the “Black Clergy for Prejudice” cartoon by Don Asmussen that Boykin excerpts take you to the current strip. The excerpted one is archived here.

World Bank accused of cooking the books, using wrong drugs in fight against malaria

A Lancet paper claims the bank faked figures, boosting the success of its malaria projects, and reneged on a pledge to invest $300-500m in Africa.It also claims the bank funded obsolete treatments – against expert advice.
….
The claims against the bank, made by 13 international public health experts headed by Amir Attaran, of Canada’s University of Ottawa, centre on the financial pledges the fund made to fight malaria on the African continent and a programme in India.
….
The study also claims: “The bank’s secrecy and technical errors combine dangerously when we look at malaria treatment.”Our investigations suggest that the bank wasted money and lives on ineffective medicines.”

source: BBC News