Next week. Get ready. Disgrace yourself. Tuesday. July 7. 9pm EST. CHAT ROOM. Hot sexy. You know you want to.

image via: topnews.in/

Remember when the U.S. Postal service was planning the Elvis Presley stamp, and asked the public to vote on which Elvis they wanted to appear on it – the “Thin Elvis” or the “Fat Elvis”?

Well, the USPS is undoubtedly planning a new Michael Jackson commemorative stamp now, and will soon face a similar dilemma: Should it depict the handsome black male of his earlier years, or the spectral Caucasian hermaphrodite of the later era?

I figure, hell, why wait for the USPS to ask us to decide? Why not a head start and vote on it now? So I’ve created a couple mock-up stamps to help make up our own minds.

Let’s hear it, gang: Black Michael Stamp or White Michael Stamp? Cast your vote in the comment section below!

Dateline, Salt Lake City.

In a stark contrast to Kleberg’s County official greeting snafu, Salt Lake City is in the throws of “Hell Week,” an annual pagan festival where the atheists, gays, democrats, liberals, punks, hippies, regular Christians (not the Mormon Christians), blues musicians, masons, bird watchers, Canadians, the entire population of South Salt Lake (it’s a good joke if you’ve been there), vegans and anyone with an evil, evil FaceBook page gather to witness the descent of demons upon downtown.

So I says to my friend today, I says, “How was the weekend?”

She said it was good. She had dinner here on Saturday night.

This got me thinking. While I have never had dinner at a “concept” before (unless that concept is the all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet down at the Boston Seafood Company–am I right or am I right?), I believe I may have engaged in various “guerilla style pop-up _______ events” in my day.

For instance, there was that one time I was living in San Francisco that I took my clothes down to the guerilla style pop-up laundromat event around the corner and came back the next day to find the whole joint boarded up and a Chinee by the name of Millie watching the door. She had a mohawk and her biker jacket was shantung silk with just a couple of small bloodstains. Millie wanted to know if I’d ever done Godot for scale.

“Not un-naked,” I said.

What about you?

The Supreme Court just ruled in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano, and it is now clear what was obvious from the moment the Court granted the appellant’s writ of certiorari: The Second Circuit panel on which David Souter replacement and Obama Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor sat and participated in a unanimous verdict has been overturned.

First, let’s talk facts. The decision the Supreme Court just overturned was a unanimous one of a three judge panel consisting of Second Circuit justices Rosemary S. Pooler, Robert D. Sack and Sotomayor. What this unanimous panel did was affirm a lower court’s ruling that the City of New Haven did not violate Title VII by refusing to certify a firefighter promotion test in which too few minority candidates qualified for promotion.

I hope you enjoyed that. Because I’d wager that you won’t hear anything about the procedural posture of (let alone the issues at stake in) Ricci v. DeStefano if you get your news from the mainstream media.

In the introduction to Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials, her rigorously rational critique of New Age spirituality, Wendy Kaminer confesses that she goes to a homeopath. She’s the first to admit that there is no scientific basis whatsoever to support homeopathy’s effectiveness; it simply makes her feel better. I have practiced various forms of qigong over the years. These are Chinese breathing and energy techniques predicated upon the existence of an invisible substance known as qi (or chi). But whether or not there exists a Governor Channel or a Microcosmic orbit, performing qigong makes me feel vital and centered.

What are the appropriate limits to rationality? To what degree is it healthy to pay heed to emotion over reason, to suspend disbelief? And, trickiest of all, how do we make decisions in the face of conflicting evidence concerning our health, the subject of several of today’s items?

Sorry for the absence of smokies last week.  As you might recall, the comments flew to Buenos Aires to visit their Argentinian mistress, and did not spend time on the Appalachian trail in attempt to clear the head and write.

The woman pictured at the left is not the mistress, nor the wife.  It is the living dead.  Zombie Lohan.  A real picture, from her real twitter.

It was topical, I guess.

Anyway, on with the awards. 

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Terrifying Image via dlisted

In the dawning of my political consciousness (I’d say oh, four or five years ago) my fevered intake of political media led me to one very clear conclusion: The United States sucks. I couldn’t read an article about legislation, political squabbling, or public policy without realizing this. My cheeks would burn as I shamefully remembered those heady days when during the election of ‘00* I would chant at my elementary school lunch tables “Bush! Bush! Bush!” Now, as much as I’d like to ferret that memory away or simply attribute it to the awakening of my lesbionic tendencies, that was not the case. I chanted that with no knowledge of his politics other than he was against abortion, and thus my two Catholic parents supported him.

I was perched on fourthbranch of Appletree when I heard him, the groundling who whistles.

O, how I wished that infernal whistling would cease! “Stop your fucking whistling! Stop your fucking whistling!,” I yelled at least five times in repeated succession at the groundling, but to no avail. At this time, and for some unknown reason, the groundling began whistling even more loudly from behind his skyscreen, even though I had clearly told him to shut the fuck up.

Blackbeak and I are raising our four beautiful chicks under the northwestern eave of Whitehouse-under-Appletree. And believe me, we need all the quiet we can get. But the groundling kept whistling. “I’m trying to parent! I’m trying to parent!,” I yelled. But this only seemed to encourage the groundling further in his perverse aria.

And that’s the moment I snapped.

I’ve been chatting up a local bird this evening.

By bird, I mean literally either a Brown Creeper, a Loggerhead Shrike, or a Blackpoll Warbler. (I know for a fact it wasn’t that trashy Northern Cardinal who likes to sashay his scarlet red ass all up and down the railing on my deck, especially when I haven’t left half a bag of crumbled-up stale hot dog buns out there. Where were you when I needed you, Northern Cardinal!!11!/?)

Anyway. Just to clarify, by “chatting up” I mean whistling. At first I began whistling in my normal style, a series of increasingly shrill staccato notes in a variety of ear-piercing pitches that I thought approximated the language of our avian friends. When that produced less than desirable results, I decided to adopt the auditory guise of the noble Whippoorwill, whose majestic call sounds like “whip-poor-will,” at least when you whistle it.

Well what do you know, but my new friend, “Buddy,” the Brown Creeper, Loggerhead Shrike, or Blackpoll Warbler, came right up to my screen and began pecking at it with an urgent ferocity that I knew signaled that our status as BFFs–birds of a friendly feather–had been sealed! That’s so like Buddy.

This may be the last post you get from me in “human language.” From now on, I’m going to be submitting MP3 files for your enjoyment. It’ll just be me at first, with my manwhistles, but I’m sure Buddy will want to chime in from time to time!

The corpse of the icon is still warm and his death was somehow broken to the public by a hugely-popular blog that most folks don’t admit to reading and I’m guessing the Twitterati are in full-flow now and oh fuck it’s all over Facebook and some hate and some love and some RIP’s and some Likes! and so what if UrifuckingGeller is on the TV in the UK all day now forever.

Yes. Michael Jackson has died. He is dead.

In a hastily-arranged press conference early Friday morning at the Moshe Dayanland theme park just outside Tehran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told his audience that “Michael Jackson is alive, well, and in the middle of rehearsing for his upcoming London concerts.”

When pressed for more information he said:

“It is true what I say to the world. The pop-star Michael Jackson just phoned me ten minutes ago. Michael Jackson said he was fine, was in great health, was not dead whatsoever, and that he was flicking through a Pottery Barn catalogue for a vase or something. Regarding the vase – he was unclear about its purpose, or possible location. Michael Jackson loved vases, I know this. I could hear Michael Jackson breathing and talking. About the vase. He sounded quite knowledgeable about ceramics, which is a key sign – to me at least – of someone still being alive. Michael Jackson is fine.”

President Ahmadinejad answered a barrage of questions from the international press corps:

“Look – you must have trust in me. I speak truth to world always. Michael Jackson is as fit as the fiddle. Now I have to go leave you because I go to Dubai where I am playing in a celebrity golf tournament with my good non-Jewish friends Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett.”

President Ahmadinejad is 52.

Look, everyone knows that Michael Jackson was the first person perhaps in human history to elicit rapturous applause by walking backwards on a stage.

And believe me, I am just as saddened by his apparent suicide as every other Gen Y gay dude who took his first halting steps toward ridiculousness with a pair of aviator glasses, too-short pants and a heavily-sequined left-hand glove. (Oh, that was just me? Okay, whatevs.)

But honestly, American media, what the fuck? Are we or are we not fighting two wars right now?

Oh, and there’s also the small matter of the next Supreme Court justice, public health care, civil rights, and, well, I guess, Iran, just to round things out.

I like to tell my international friends that we’re not all a bunch of hysterical, celebrity-obsessed ever-children here in the States. That case got a lot harder to make as of tonight.

I trust you’ll pardon my Anglo Saxon when I tell you–and yes, I’m talking to you, Olbermann and Maddow–to fuck off. I will never again subject myself to humiliation by letting it slip in mixed or any other company that I watch your programs.

This is your friendly book club reminder. We will be discussing Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee on Tuesday July 7 at 9pm EST in the chat room.