The Malcontent

I've A Corpse And A Surge Protector

Yes, yes I do want to blog again (quitting World of Warcraft helps).

Unfortunately, there is little more off-putting about returning to blogging than finding yourself sifting through several years of comment spam (and accidentally deleting the last 20 nonspam comments because you're watching Maury Povich while maneuvering through typepad and cannot possibly pay attention to what you're doing while wondering who is the father).

Spam clean up, then template repair is the order of the day. Then blogging projects. Because I'll be living somewhere very liberal in the near future, and that should be interesting.

An older, wiser, somewhat sleeker and more attractive Malcontent doing battle in the heart of the Gay Left universe. Fun? Fun.

But first, comment spam. Lord.

Malcontent.biz Update

If you've followed us to the new site, please bear with us during this outage.  I received this from Dreamhost at about 5:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time:

We currently are experiencing wide-spread site outages do to some DNS troubles.  We're working on the fix as quickly as we can, but unfortunately it could be several more hours before all sites are updated.

So if you're getting connection refused errors, this is most likely the cause.  Bear with us while we get things fixed up.

Hello, Typepad Fans

Malcontent.biz is currently experiencing some sort of outage.

It doesn't appear to be server-related (i.e., I can still connect via FTP).  I hope to figure it out soon!

WordPress Outage

If you're looking for our new WordPress site at Malcontent.biz and don't see anything, join the club.

Our ISP, DreamHost, is reporting massive DDOS attacks.

I was uploading some admin files when it all went down, and I thought it was my fault!

Thanks to everyone for sticking with us during this transition, though.  I still feel like it will be for the best.

Flipping the Bird and Taking the Plunge

OK, it's time.

I have made no secret of my disdain for Typepad.  (Of course, it is my fault for having chosen them in the first place.)  But at long last, the new Malcontent is ready to rock 'n' roll.  So please reset your bookmarks accordingly.

I missed my self-imposed deadline of migrating by June 1 by about 20 minutes, due to an 11th-hour database meltdown mostly of my own causing.  But hopefully it will be worth the wait.

Malcontent.biz offers many improvements over our churlish Typepad overlords, including:

• Malco-Forums
• A dynamic menubar
• Gravatar support in comments
• Numbered comments
• One-click comment emoticons
• RSS feeds for individual comment threads
• Automatic parsing of URLs in comments
• One-click translation into eight languages
• A weighted "category cloud"
• And a "shoutbox" powered by Ajax technology (doesn't require browser refresh)

And more will be coming soon!

But again, please reset your bookmarks, and please bear with whatever glitches we have at the outset.  (If you encounter any problems, please email me.)

Soon I will rejigger things here to automatically redirect you to the new site.  But for now, you're on your own.

Burning Obstinancy

With the long (eternal) weekend at a close and Mal consumed with putting the finishing touches on Malcontent 2.0, why not jog back into blogging momentum with a little political correctness run amok.

A plan to require English translations on foreign-language signs on stores, bakeries and other businesses has caused an outcry in Sterling Heights that could put the city in the midst of a national debate. Councilwoman Barbara Ziarko recently asked the city's legal staff to prepare an ordinance requiring the translations on exterior signs. "This is for the safety of our residents as well as our police and fire (personnel)," Ziarko said. "If emergency crews can properly identify a location, they can know if there are chemicals or dangerous substances (on the premises)." But in one of Metro Detroit's most diverse communities, critics say the idea is ill-timed at best and racist at worst.

I propose a new law for Sterling Heights. If during the time it takes fire and police to run various store names in the area through a google translator, your business burns to the ground, you're not allowed to sue anyone.

It's win-win-win. Ethnic communities living around Detroit won't be tainted by our filthy language, municipal workers won't be endangered, and the rest of the neighborhood is granted delightfully random pyrotechnic displays throughout the year. What's not to love?

Ctrl-Alt-Del, Let There Be Light

Slate's deputy editor, David Plotz, has taken on a curious task:

He is going to blog the Bible.  The entire thing.

Or as much as he gets through before his wife kills him.

Plotz describes himself as a "not terribly observant" Jew, one who read the stories of the Torah long ago and wanted to approach them with a fresh and critical eye. 

My goal is not to find contradictions, mock impossible events, or scoff at hypocrisy. [...] I want to find out what happens when an ignorant person actually reads the book on which his religion is based. I think I'm in the same position as many other lazy but faithful people (Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus).

With two posts so far, he is already through Genesis 19 and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Despite his stated goals, he is already unearthing some curious contradictions and little-known nuggets. For example:

• Did you know there was not one, but two versions of Creation?  Among other differences, the two stories place gender roles on very disparate footing.


• God does not always follow through on promises, like the one about killing Adam and Eve as soon as they eat the Forbidden Fruit.


• God hates vegetarians.


• The great flood seems like it was little more than a "fit of pique."


• Abraham was far less apt to kill the innocent than God is.

I'm not sure what to gather so far from two blog entries, but Plotz's fresh take is fascinating.  And it does tend to further undermine biblical literalists (as if such a task were that difficult).

Perhaps a few of them should also give the Good Book a good re-reading, as Plotz is doing.

Bigger Boards With Bigger Nails: A Bleg

An anti-spam company thought that it had come up with an ingenious way to combat unsolicited commercial emails:

(Eran) Reshef's Silicon Valley company, Blue Security Inc., simply asked the spammers to stop sending junk e-mail to his clients. But because those sort of requests tend to be ignored, Blue Security took them to a new level: it bombarded the spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its customers at the same time.

But the spammers retaliated.  Using tens of thousands of hijacked computers, they launched a furious counter-attack against Blue Security that was so severe, it also affected a number of other sites, including TypePad, the engine behind The Malcontent and many other blogs.  (Which would explain the latest behind-the-scenes frustrations experienced by Robbie and me.)

The spammers told Blue Security to cease operations, or it would turn viruses loose on the company's clients.  Rather than risk an all-out war, today Blue Security is unilaterally disarming.

Which leads me to the real topic of this post, a "bleg":

A few months ago, I bought an additional 60GB of server space and 1.8TB of monthly bandwidth at DreamHost to handle our video demands.  But recently, I have also been preparing to ditch TypePad for a WordPress blog.

DreamHost has "one-click" set-up of WordPress, but of course, it takes a lot more than that, and DreamHost doesn't offer a lot of support in exchange for their cheap rates.

So, if there are any talented Web types out there who enjoy this site and would be willing to donate a little time (or at very low cost), in exchange for whatever publicity of kudos I could give you, I could use help to get up and running.  Some of my challenges include exporting our massive archives (and ensuring that all the links work), template and theme design, etc.

I have already put a lot of money into this blog, and what I have gotten in return from TypePad is a lot of downtime, degraded performance of our administrative interface, and a complete lack of support for any sort of innovative features.

So whether you have nuts-and-bolts coding talent or artistic/Web design capability, I would be grateful for any affordable assistance.

Some Readers Frighten Us

Stop that. Stop that right now.

That there is a similar search for Kevin Covais is demoralizing.

Unreasonable Searches and Teasers

There is a lot of entertainment to be had in periodically checking out the facts that can be known about readers from their "cookie" crumbs, so to speak.  I never get to know much about you all personally from your monitor settings, your operating system, or the city where your ISP is.

But the keyword searches that get you here speak volumes.

For instance, at this moment, more than one-fifth of you who used a search engine to get here wanted to know variations on a single topic:

Someone looking for a sugar pop?

Then there is this, which I hope speaks more about the readers than Robbie and me:

And nearly as vile, this:

And puzzlingly, this:

Finally — and perhaps most disturbingly of all — there is this:

OK, people, now that's just sick.

Idol Results Show Warm-Up

Worth Repeating has, as usual, the three gayest moments from last night's "American Idol."  Predictably, they all involve Chris Daughtry.

Meanwhile, Dialidol still has Katharine and Chris duking it out for last place, with the latter slightly more likely to be sent packing tonight.  Sir Tics-a-Lot continues to lead the pack.

America, suck my balls.

Cruise Gets Bruised

Poor Tom Cruise.  His movie made only a paltry $48 million at the box office this weekend.

That might sound like a lot, but for a film that cost more than three times that much to make, and which had been predicted to earn much more, everybody's favorite vitamin-taking cult member might want to threaten to eat a few less placentas.  ("Placentii"?)

NBC's "Dateline" show decided to take a far less ass-sucking route than Diane Sawyer on the publicity parade, opting for plenty of Scientology hijinks rather than Cruise's boyhood sob story.

You know when bloggers like Jessica Coen and Perez are featured in the piece that the claws are bound to come out.

By the way, who's the guy next to Cruise in the picture, anyway?  Is it, you know — "him"?

[Watch video – 11:30, WMV format, high bandwidth]

[Watch video – 11:30, WMV format, low bandwidth]

Wasting a Lott

GayPatriotWest points out the crucial distinctions between Trent Lott's problem and gays' "problem."

A Piece of Hot Apple Guy

Gay Cowboy Bob sends along this image from the Apple Store's website:

Yes, if I weren't already gay, I'd imagine you could.

Friends Don't Let Friends Cook Drunk

Those of you with RSS readers, or with so much time on your hands that you're always hitting "refresh" on this site, might already have seen this headline.  I accidentally managed to send a mangled, incomplete version of this post last night, which I'll blame on the Lunesta.

It's probably a bit ironic, then, because the story I had intended to tell was a cautionary tale about why another harmful chemical, vodka, should be outlawed.

Or, at least, the too-yummy vodka at my favorite new Manhattan gay bar, Vlada.

Hubbie and I met up there with a number of friends after dinner and proceeded to take a tour through their home-brewed infused vodkas.  Among those I can recommend personally: cranberry, pineapple, peach, apple-cinnamon, and ginger.  I am sure there were others too, but for some odd reason, they're not coming to me at the moment.

After a few more hours and another stop on the way home, something gooey and fattening was sounding very good to us.  We're in a bit of a mac-n-cheese rut these days, so we decided to pull out all the stops: a box of Kraft Deluxe Macaroni and Cheese.

A little after 3 a.m., I brought some water to a boil, then threw the noodles into the pot.  I carefully set the timer for 10 minutes.

We parked it in front of the TV.  But unfortunately, we were on The Cloud.  You see, The Cloud has this strange, deeply narcotic effect whenever you lie down on it.  No matter how alert you might be, it has the power to drag your body effortlessly off to sleep.

Knowing this, Hubbie prodded me a couple of times and asked if I had set the timer.  Of course I had.  I'm not all irresponsible-like.

About an hour later, we awoke to the shrill squeal of the smoke detector.  I leapt from the sofa to the kitchen in a single bound.  The water had completely evaporated from the pot, leaving a half-scorched, congealed mass of macaroni behind, belching putrid smoke.

I hit the reset button on the smoke alarm and took the pot from the burner.  Eh, it didn't look all that bad.  Besides, when I eat lasagna, I love the crusty, overcooked corner pieces best.  I drunkenly devoured my half; Hubbie politely declined.

* * *

Yesterday we were lolling in bed into the early afternoon when I heard what I could have sworn was the beeping of the timer on the stove.  I went to the kitchen to investigate.  Sure enough, the timer had gone off and now displayed "END" on its LCD screen.

I did some quick math in my head.  The 10 minutes that I had so carefully entered into the timer the night before had actually been 10 hours.  Maybe I thought I was cooking mac-n-cheese the Crockpot way?

Beware, Toby: This could be your life in 12 years!

Arjan Simmers

Blog pal ArjanWrites had an unbelievable view of Scissor Sisters and Madonna at the Coachella Arts & Music Festival.

It was 96 degrees there yesterday, which means that he probably got sweat on by Jake.  A lot.

We're not jealous.  Nope, not at all.  [Punts dog through plate-glass window]

Brawl Under the Big Tent

As if the conformity mafiosi weren't bad enough with their "gay Republicans are an oxymoron" trope, there has also been a spirited battle raging in the past couple of years – mostly under the radar – within the ranks of gay conservatives, libertarians and Republicans themselves.

At the center of the big shitstorm is Log Cabin Republicans, a storm that only intensified when LCR announced in 2004 that they wouldn't endorse George Bush for President and would instead spend $1 million toward his defeat to "educate" voters on why the Federal Marriage Amendment was such a bad thing.  (For the record, I feel those decisions were fairly sensible, despite the internecine warfare and identity crisis that they were bound to precipitate.)

Perhaps as if to reinforce the sensitivity involved, LCR's press release announcing those ads is buried on their website.  Their press-release archive page begins only after that announcement was made.

The debate centers on whether Log Cabin should be primarily a gay group or a Republican one.  The head of LCR, Patrick Guerriero, planted his flag squarely in the latter camp in a December interview with The Advocate: “Are we first and foremost a Republican organization, or are we first and foremost a gay organization with a role to play inside the Republican Party? The board and I made a conscious decision on the second, and that has affected everything we have to do and continue to do.”

It's against this backdrop that LCR reached out to bloggists to cover their 2006 national convention, which is underway in Washington, D.C.  (Disclosure: I was invited to attend but am unable to travel this weekend.)  Blog-pal BoiFromTroy is filing reports, as is MeetJustin.

The convention's agenda, true to the Guerriero interview, is heavy on gay advocacy and light on issues related to ways to support and elect Republicans who are more friendly to gay causes.  This has prompted Bruce at GayPatriot, one of the most vociferous critics of Log Cabin, to issue a challenge to BoiFromTroy:

[I]f you find any actual Republicans at the Log Cabin “convention”.. please notify the media!! I’m sure you will trip over the Gay Rights Pro-Abortion Lobbyist and the Neo-Liberal-Neo-Conservative-Neo-Confused Speaker many times, though.

BFT essentially concedes the point:

While the speakers have not been Republicans (sorry Bruce) they see a potential strong ally with Gay Republicans who can certainly do some educating among the members of our party.

As usual, I think I come down somewhere in the middle on this one.

I think advocacy is extremely important: Winning hearts and minds, whether among the public or among elected officials, is indispensable.  But unlike groups such as HRC, which are at least supposed to be bipartisan and advocacy-oriented, LCR was established as a partisan, political entity supporting Republicans.  If it ceases to function as such, it might as well merge with any of the other sundry gay-rights groups out there.  (In fact, the Liberty Education Forum was established parallel to LCR to function as a non-political, 501(c)3, advocacy arm, putting LCR at risk of becoming doubly redundant.)

I do not expect Log Cabin to rush in to support people like Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum or Marilyn Musgrave, nor should they.  But as a gay man who is deeply disillusioned with the current direction of Republicans, I would feel better if Log Cabin spent more of its time and resources at helping build a better GOP: recruiting and supporting more gay and gay-friendly candidates, working harder to build bridges on Capitol Hill, and influencing the legislative process.

Log Cabin Republicans was originally established to say, "We are going to play a unique role in the gay political landscape."  Today, what they are more often saying is, "Ditto!"

Quote of the Morning

"Poor bastard took it better than a gay porn star. ... Wait, he did take it from a gay porn star." — Rep. Linda Sanchez, (D-CA) on Scott McClellan (from "DC's Funniest Celebrity" contest, as quoted by The Hotline, sub. req.)

Mal's Space

I have been reading some articles lately and have learned that, in the future, we will all be judged not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our page on MySpace.com.

I went and designed me one of them-there things (although I use "design" in the loosest possible sense), but it wasn't until I read The PEN15 Club today that it even occurred to me to go grubbing for "friends."

So I'm grubbing away.  Validate me.  Love me.  If not me, then love Bubbles.  Or Robbie.  They're both cuter than me anyway.

Then someone please explain to me what all the fuss is about.

[Mal's MySpace page]

How High's the Water, Mama?

I missed my flight yesterday to Andorra (via Barcelona with a three-hour drive), mainly because of the big rain storm yesterday that slowed traffic to a crawl, and the closure of the FDR for construction, which further locked the gridlock.

After finding a non-nonstop through Madrid and arriving five hours late, I thought a nice shower would be a good pick-me-up.

My hotel room's bathroom is pictured at right.  See anything wrong?  That's right, there is no barrier to keep the water in.  The hotel was so booked that I got the last room, which was specially made for disabled people.  By "specially," I mean "sadistic in a way that would make Dr. Mengele proud."

As I showered, the water began creeping farther and farther toward the bathroom door.  I was so afraid that it was going to spill out onto the hardwood floor and flood the people below me that my shower consisted roughly half of getting clean, and the other half of running back and forth to the "high-water line" (marked in red) and dragging the water with my foot, squeegee-like, back toward the drain.

All I could think of was some poor schmuck trying to do the same thing in a wheelchair.  Surely the Europeans are smart enough to have figured out how to be both handicapped-accessible while also not requiring, you know, flood insurance.

Back home tomorrow night.  I'm physically and emotionally spent for many reasons, some of which I'll go into soon enough, so I'll do the lame blogger cop-out and apologize for the "light posting."