Near-retiree Washington Post editor Henry Allen punched writer Manuel Roig-Franzia in the face after Roig-Franzia called him a "cocksucker." Hank Steuver, a WaPo colleague whose editor is Allen, thinks the man may have some issues:

What made Henry snap was that a writer called him a naughty word, an epithet that rhymes with "coughstucker" and is playfully or spitefully reserved as a way to insult a man, by implying he's gay.

Being an enthusiastic coughstucker myself, I would someday like to ask Henry if it was the insulting delivery of the word, or the subtext of gayness that the word implies that angered him most?...Was it about the person who said it? The way he said it? Or that it was said at all? If another person in Style called me a coughstucker, I'd just have to shrug and use the Popeye retort: I am what I am.

You're totally missing the point, Hank. Imagine how you would feel if someone called you a vagina sucker! It's a slur because it was meant to be a slur. Why not ask Manuel why in the world he would use "cocksucker" as anything less than a term of endearment? Outrageous! A slur is not rendered moot to the average testosterone-filled male simply because it's true. I may be ugly, but I don't want it pointed out to me.

[And be sure to watch that dramatic re-enactment video of the fight, performed by Washington City Paper employees. A+. It does make Henry Allen appear somewhat unstable though! Via Romenesko]

Christopher Kimball, the publisher of Cook's Illustrated, has a eulogy to Gourmet in the NYT that pronounces what you knew, in your very bones, was coming: the internet killed the Conde mags. You bastards.

The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades.

Well. Not quite. The internet loves experts. And it loves thoughtful, considered editorial. If it's presented correctly. Of course, Conde Nast had a famously dismal internet strategy, which couldn't have helped Gourmet a bit. Kimball's solution:

To survive, those of us who believe that inexperience rarely leads to wisdom need to swim against the tide, better define our brands, prove our worth, ask to be paid for what we do, and refuse to climb aboard this ship of fools, the one where everyone has an equal voice.

Perez Hilton notwithstanding, there's no reason why smart things can't thrive on the internet. The democratic aspect of the internet that's so terrifying to the old guard is not one that means that every opinion is equal; it just means that every opinion can be equally heard. The good stuff can still rise to the top. Conde Nast is not currently in a budget crisis because of an imaginary virtual "ship of fools" that smashed up the noble magazine industry like drunk savage hordes rampaging across an enlightened village. Conde Nast's problems stem from the fact that its entire business model was based on a sort of quasi-monopolistic sham sold to advertisers—a model that's now crumbling. (Kimball himself acknowledges how shitty and undemocratic the magazine business used to be in the first half of this piece).

Gourmet may have been a great magazine, but it had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: Conde Nast, 2009. Don't blame Twittering idiots. Blame Conde Nast.

Just as an example to illustrate this economic principle, we're going to use Japan, as I hinted in the last sentence. Handily there is a story about them in the newspaper today that applies to just what we're discussing here. "Once Slave to Luxury, Japan Catches Thrift Bug." From slavery to buggery. They just can't win!

Why is it that they can't win over there, in Japan? It all has to do with economics, as I mentioned, if you were paying attention. Instead of going Up from Slavery, a la Booker T., the Japanesans went—where?—down from slavery! Down, to thriftiness! Wrong way, kids!

Here is where we roll out the principle itself, or "economic way to be": You have to spend money to make money. Sounds counterintuitive, right? Then you must be Japanese, or just not a rich person at this moment in time, due to economic ignorance. All you have to do is read the LA Times, a popular newspaper in America, where it says very clearly that if all you "savers" out there don't turn into "spenders" right quick, we're going to be going right down the same path as Japan, economically, which is not a good one in case you haven't picked up on that particular fact.

"But hey," I hear you whining hypothetically while motivated by economic ignorance, "isn't saving money good, since spending all our money and not saving is what got us into this mess?" You might think so as a layperson. Well here's another thing an economic layperson might think is "cool": a broken coffee maker that busts a water line and next thing you know it one community college is out $150k in repair bills thanks to a god damn coffee maker some asshole left on.

Funny? Sure. But not economic. This illustrates what's know as "The Fallacy of the Layperson." You don't know what's good for the economy. You're the type of person who would lose the "opportunity cost" of a shitload of repair bills in order to "Laugh" at a whole school getting busted up because of a stupid coffee maker. This is why we have scientists, and, thankfully, economists around. Spend your money, people. Japan is our enemy.
[Pic via]

Gladwell being Gladwell, he arrives at his conclusion using thousands of words, large portions of which are devoted to riffs on card games and British invasions of Turkish islands, among other things, but his main point is this:

Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there have been two principal explanations for why so many banks made such disastrous decisions. The first is structural. Regulators did not regulate. Institutions failed to function as they should. Rules and guidelines were either inadequate or ignored. The second explanation is that Wall Street was incompetent, that the traders and investors didn't know enough, that they made extravagant bets without understanding the consequences. But the first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that the roots of Wall Street's crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological.

Now, I read Gladwell's piece and do think that his argument has some merit. However, I have a fundamental disagreement with something, and it is this: I believe that the psychological roots of the Wall Street crisis, the same roots that Gladwell is saying were the driving force behind everything that went wrong, would not have existed if it were not for the massive cracks in the structural and cognitive foundation of the banking industry. In other words, the incompetence of regulators combined with the blissful ignorance of the players involved joined to create a perfect storm of ego-tripping. You follow?

Now, surely a strong argument can be made that if the human psyche weren't so Goddamned flawed, then the other factors wouldn't have affected it in the first place, thus all of the blame falls squarely at the feet of humanity's vast psychological faults, but then you're just getting into a great big "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" argument, and honestly it's 5:40 in the damn morning right now and I'm only confusing myself the more I write about this, so just go and read the thing yourself and make up your own damn mind, okay?!

Cocksure [New Yorker]

The press conference was called suddenly and without warning, and the line leading up to the press conference was simply that she wasn't going to run for her office again.

First, the bizarre, kinda teary announcement: The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Even Politico got hosed, sending out a breaking email alert before the conference started about Palin not running for her next term as Alaska's governor. Palin then went ahead with the resignation and didn't let on anything about the presidential run. "I know when it's time to pass the ball. Some are going to question the timing of this. This decision has been in the works for a while," she noted.

Says Gawker's John Cook:

"They clearly deliberately leaked that she wasn't going to run for re-election an hour or two before the announcement in order to muddy the waters and get the "setting up for a presidential run" line out to blunt the obvious conclusion that a shoe is about to drop...."

So people are convinced: some shit went down, and someone's definitely got something. Any ideas? To the Twitteratti!

Gawker's Nightman to Gabriel Snyder's Dayman, The Cajun Boy, hears something pretty substantial:

Original Defamer editor and blogger Mark Lisanti is going with the Jimmy Hoffa school of thought:

Sarah Palin doesn't know she just resigned!

Jason Calicanis is trying to start a meme. Lisanti has yet another theory!

CNN's Rick Sanchez thinks she might be pregnant again! The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Mark Drapeau at True/Slant thinks she should be working on her personal brand, looking towards the future: "Get your voice out there - start writing for True/Slant or The Daily Beast, put up 5 minute videos with your raw opinions about news or issues on YouTube, and start experimenting more with things like Twitter, Seesmic, and 12 Seconds when you're mobile."

Every young man's favorite book from 1951-2001, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is about the pre-Snark Era snarkster Holden Caulfield, a teen who finds nothing interesting about the world except how uninteresting it is. The sequel, horribly titled 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye (have you ever come through your rye? It burns), was written by Swedish-American first time writer John David California. Which has got to be a made-up name. If it's not, he's probably a secret superhero. The supposed California says of the book:

Just like the first novel, he leaves, but this time he's not at a prep school, he's at a retirement home in upstate New York. It's pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past. He's still Holden Caulfield, and has a particular view on things. He can be tired, and he's disappointed in the goddamn world. He's older and wiser in a sense, but in another sense he doesn't have all the answers.

And, actually, we might be onto something with the whole fake name theory. Galleycat thinks that the entire thing is a joke, in the vein of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies or something. The book's publisher, Nicotext, claims that they publish works to "make you giggle."

Though a faux Catcher in the Rye hoax isn't really something we'd giggle about. Maybe an amused, annoyed chuckle. Maybe a snort. But really, probably nothing.

Or is he? She also mentions that the actor—who lost ground with fans because of a) getting older b) becoming crazy and c) lashing out against people who don't cotton to his wacky Scientology cult—may be on the delusional side when it comes to realizing his slipping position in the ol' Q score department.

A source close to Cruise acknowledged then that he was "teetering on the brink of a certain kind of trouble that no star like him has ever been in before." But this knowledgeable source said Cruise still hadn't gotten the word. "You've got to be very careful in conversations with him," he explained. "Tom is not ever going to face facts."

And the facts seem to be that no one is willing to pay him as much money as they used to. Though he still demands his elite "20 against 20" salary, no one will give him Mission: Impossible or Minority Report money anymore. Fox is reportedly considering him for Wichita, an action-comedy maybe costarring Cameron Diaz (so it must be good!), and payment negotiations are stalling.

The studio is apparently willing to promise Cruise $20 million but it wants him to hold off on his gross participation until its costs are recouped. So far, Cruise's representatives have responded that the star won't do that. And that's left some at Fox fuming that Cruise still hasn't gotten the memo.

This is all to say that Cruise's Please Still Love Me Tour, with its Tropic Thunder and Jimmy Kimmel appearances and soft-touch sit downs with Oprah to explain that wacky couch jumping, has been calculated since day one, even if Cruise himself doesn't really understand what's going on. And though Masters' equivocating gets a bit irksome—he's rehabbed! Or not. He's back on top! Or maybe not—she does have a point that maybe Cruise hasn't been such a disaster of late. Valkyrie, though panned by critics and easily mockable because of the crazy eye patch, did respectable business and really, even though he's a lunatic ringleader of a batshit cult, we still kinda like him in movies, don't we? I mean, I kinda do, at least.

Freddie Mac's HR chief reportedly told Kellerman to take a break because he was spending too much time at work. He never gave himself the chance, though.

Mr. Kellermann, who was 41 years old, had recently looked gaunt and tired, according to one person familiar with the situation, who added that colleagues believed he was spending too much time in the office. Other people who knew Mr. Kellermann say he was normally a jovial person who handled stress well.

Again: all theories, few facts so far. [WSJ]

John D. Mayer is, as we mentioned, an actual psychologist, with a Ph.D. He's also technically a BLOGGER with Psychology Today, but we won't hold that against him. Yet. His post is basically a throwaway, ill-researched review of Denby's crappy book (that's our job!), which we also won't hold against him, because he does provide this actual psychological opinion:

To me, snark often depends on an "I'm better than you" perspective: The purveyor of snark, and his or her amused audience, temporarily overlook any of their own human faults, while identifying and magnifying others' all-too-human foibles. At least for the moment, the snarker highlights what is unworthy about others, blaming them for their human deficits, and exploiting the entertainment of seeing others as less than ourselves. Perhaps some of today's snarking may even be a reflection of the apparent rise of narcissism in our society.

Hey everybody, get a load of this guy, John D. Mayer, Ph.D—hey Poindexter, don't be mad you're not as cool as us! Few people are, because we are what it's all about. Go hang out with Denby at the nerd table! [Psychology Today]

Mostly it was the canny-meets-annoying way that ABC kept teasing new changes and surprises to the flagging awards ceremony. What would they beeee, people wondered! Robots? Actual corpses trotted out for the 'In Memoriam' reel?? Turned out it was just a bunch of actors and actresses doing a four-part production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle for the acting awards and everything else getting lumped together hastily. They basically added even more silly pomp to the popular categories, and gave even shorter shrift to the ones no one cares about. Brilliant! But no matter how the changes and surprises (Eva Marie Saint is still alive!) turned out, the follow-through didn't really matter. It was the anticipation that brought the evening its successes.

Anticipation commingled with, yes, some curiosity about the gayness of Milk (including the Sean/Mickey love/hate fest) and Hugh Jackman, but also with the inevitable Heath Ledger death gawpers and those eager to see their beloved Titanic princess finally get her golden Heart of the Ocean. There was something more urgent and swoony about this year's Oscars, and the positive reception for the new, gayish stuff bodes well for the next go around. Hopefully the films will match, or surpass, this year's. And hopefully a movie star will die again!

Though, actually, the evening may owe the biggest debt of thanks the hideous recession. Terrified of the sound of the distant, gnawing, money-eating Langoliers outside, in recent months people have decided to stay at home and cower in front of the television more than ever before. So basically the Academy and ABC should say thank you to some very unusual suspects: The Gays, The Brits, Dead People, and The Banks.

Only in Hollywood!

In his most recent interview today, with Vulture, PB says (via email):

Henry Matyjewicz was arrested Friday night at 7:30pm. Sent to central booking. Then sent to Rikers. He was bailed on Sunday night and was released Monday 2am. The police showed up to the "Friends We Love" event in Soho and arrested Henry for partaking in a Poster Boy installation. From the beginning it was stated that Poster Boy is not about one person. What the NYPD did do is arrest an individual who volunteered to legally collage some prints at the show...Arresting Henry for being Poster Boy is like plucking a strand of Medusa's hair.

Okay, sure, maybe it is a movement by now, but Poster Boy is one guy, as far as we can tell. He sent us this photo(shop) of himself in October:

Same guy photographed for the NY Mag story that month:

Same guy as in the video last month? Maybe. Looks similar:

But if being a movement rather than one guy will get him out of his charges, then we'll go with that.

[Odds: The probability that this was the primary reason she pulled out.]

Here's what you've missed if you've had better things to do for the last 24 hours than keep up with the by-the-minute changes in the Caroline Kennedy story. We know she isn't going to be the next junior Senator from New York. We have no idea, however, why not. She announced last night that she didn't want the seat anyway, but in such an incompetent manner that all anyone in political circles has been doing today is collecting the various theories of why she dropped out. These are the five being most discussed.

1. She was incompetent, and pulled out to avoid the embarrassment of not being picked: This is really the most likely scenario. Her push to start at the top was a bad idea from the beginning. She didn't embody the HOPE of the Obama era. At least all her connections and money landed her some political consultants who were smart enough to tell her to get out while she was—if not ahead—at least not totally destroyed.
Odds: Even


2. She had tax and nanny issues: Well, sure, it's quite likely, if you believe the up-to-the-minute prevarications, that she did have issues with taxes and/ or an illegal nanny. So that stands in favor of this explanation. But calling this the primary reason she dropped out presupposes that had she not had these issues, she would have been the pick. And we still want to give Gov. Paterson more credit than than.
Odds: 2-1


3. Her marriage is a sham: One of the unfortunate things about going into politics is everybody wants to pry into your sex life. That's stupid America! So the Enquirer was floating the idea that CK's marriage to Ed Schlossberg was a big fake, and that they've been amiably separated for a while, and who knows what various tabloid-worthy stories might lie behind that? Just scandalous enough to kill her bid? In a state that still loves Giuliani, it's doubtful, but you never know.
Odds: 5-1


4. She had an affair with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.:The supposed love interest between CK and the NYT publisher remains totally unverified dinner party gossip material. But the Times' close—too close—coverage of CK's campaign didn't do anything to help kill the rumor. At most, this probably added up to one more thing on the negative side of the scale for Kennedy, rather than being the main thing that did her in.
Odds: 8-1


5. She was worried about her sick uncle Teddy: Since Uncle Teddy's own people were pissed when she floated this explanation, and because he was just as sick when she started her bid for the Senate, nah.
Odds: 25-1

Just hours ago, the word was the Caroline Kennedy dropped out because of some secret, undisclosed "personal" reason. Now the Post cites an anonymous source "close to Gov. David Paterson" as saying the gov "had no intention" of picking CK, anyhow.

"She has a tax problem that came up in the vetting and a potential nanny issue," the soruce said. "And reporters are starting to look at her marriage more closely," the soruce continued, refusing to provide any specifics.

Gossip columns have reported for more than a year that Kennedy's marriage to Ed Schlossberg is essentially over, and the gossip site Gawker.com has reported rumors that she's been linked to New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger.

Kennedy denied any issue over her marriage in an interview with The Post last month. Aides to Kennedy and a Times spokesperson couldn't immediately be reached.

The Times is currently going with the nanny and the tax issues as the true reason for CK's downfall. They leave out the other part. Close enough.

It's not like we hadn't given Caroline Kennedy plenty of warnings with our raving coverage:

• We were writing about her special friendship with NYT publisher Pinch Sulzberger before she ever dreamed of being in the Senate!
• The NYT, coincidentally, got the scoop on her Senate bid.
• We warned her this whole Senate thing was a bad idea.
• We pointed out that all she had to say was 'You know.'
• And did so again.
• Finally we were forced to un-endorse her.

The only thing we can't figure out is that politicians normally take their name out of contention to prevent skeletons from tumbling out of the closet (see: Bill Richardson), not to cause an avalanche of rumors and speculation.

This is more than just the average, economic meltdown-induced spate of magazine cutbacks. Because New York magazine lives in its own, aspirational economy. Its readers are upwardly mobile, upper-middle class city types who feel like they could make it over the hump into official "Rich" territory if they could jussssst furnish their apartment with the proper designer doorknobs and boutique comforters and dine at the proper, overpriced new foodie establishments and occasionally foray into Bushwick for an avante-garde art show which would make for a scintillating story at their next dinner party, populated by others like them, who they hope to make jealous, thereby spurring an ever-escalating cycle of tasteful capitalist one-upmanship. The reason that New York is so quietly infuriating was best put into words by John Cook in a masterful 2007 hit piece in Radar. The magazine is just as bloodless as the audience it leads:

New York's most egregious sin is that it's aimed at such a narrow sliver of the city. It's become the bible of the ultra-entitled New Yorker, the kind of person who would actually spend $200 on a doorknob described in the magazine as a bargain. The Plate-U coffee table featured in the Strategist a few weeks ago, described with words "thriftiness can be elegant," can be had for $1,800, or the balance of a month's salary after taxes for a family that earns New York's median household income of $43,393. There's nothing wrong, of course, with pitching a magazine at ludicrously wealthy people desperately trying to fill the holes in their lives with grapefruit-and-vodka-pedicures. But New York is, after all, a city and not a colony of hedge-fund managers.

In 2007, this was just an observational lament. Today, it's a fun look at just how screwed New York's entire philosophy is. All that disposable income that fueled the magazine's most dedicated fans—not the truly rich, but those who felt that they could buy their way into that category through PRECISELY TARGETED PURCHASING. Always buying into the Cultural Moment was the key, and nobody could guide them down that treacherous commercial road better than New York. In the years between the start of the post-tech bubble resurgence and last fall's collapse of everything, Adam Moss and New York were the road signs leading a certain set of New Yorkers from juvenile Sex and the City lifestyle fantasies to a promised land of a tastefully wealthy playpen called Manhattan.

That's all dead, of course, and now New York has to figure out what to do. The magazine is privately held, and has been extraordinarily quiet about the cuts it's had to make so far. We hear the newest pay cuts were as much as 15%—higher cuts for those who were higher paid. No more 401k contributions either, we hear. New York can't continue on preaching the path to true wealth if it can't even get its own staffers there.

And the actually rich? They'll be fine. $450 meals at Masa are still selling at a healthy clip. It's just the upwardly mobile that need to worry. Say hello to a place you never wanted to find yourself: the middle class.

MODERN DAY: Homeboy Sandman, "Lighting Bolt"
UNDERLYING MESSAGE: With a nation in financial crisis, this is no time to spend wantonly on fancy special effects. Let's just celebrate the fact that we're all here, together, on the subway, and elsewhere.

1997: Biggie, Puffy, Mase, "Mo Money Mo Problems"
UNDERLYING MESSAGE: Money ain't a thing. There is so much of it to go around, our problems are concerned with how much of it we have, rather than our lack of it. America will rule the world forever.

1993: YZ, "The Return of the Holy One"
UNDERLYING MESSAGE: Times are hard. I spend most of my time standing on piles of urban rubble, in simple clothing, sometimes holding a handgun. Nevertheless, I believe we must all unite to overcome this horrific, post-apocalyptic crack-ridden hellscape.

1990: YZ (same dude!), "Thinking of a Master Plan"
UNDERLYING MESSAGE: Reagan is gone, and now it's all about consciousness, togetherness, and the struggle for freedom. Makes me want to dance! Sure, George Bush #1 sucks, but Mandela, worldwide freedom fighters, etc. Holding a handgun and standing amidst piles of rubble couldn't be further from my mind. [Note: YZ is off the hook regardless].

[Note #2: Homeboy Sandman is my main man]

Clay Shirky—a professional smart man—tells CJR that hey, it's all reading. Why not embrace the internet?

It seems to me, in fact, from the historical record, that the idea of literary reading as a sort of broad and normal activity was done in by television, and it was done in forty years ago...

What the Internet has actually done is not decimate literary reading; that was really a done deal by 1970. What it has done, instead, is brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people.

For real! Has everyone forgotten about the television menace? That's what originally turned Americans to zombies. At least on the internet you have to read and write a little bit, even if it's in idiot AOL commenter-style. We are the new vanguard of the literary revolution! Everyone can still feel good about themselves. [Including the aforementioned Victoria Blake, who also called us her favorite site in the whole world pretty much, shout out to you, Victoria!] Reading!

“In the age of spamming, the profile picture gives you credibility,” said Whitney Hess, a user-experience designer who often blogs about social media’s impact on the human experience on her blog, Pleasure and Pain, in a phone interview with The Observer last week. “It shows people that you’re real.”

You see, your own corporeal existence hardly qualifies you as "real" in our modern age. It's all about choosing between the drunk pic or the sexy pic or the I'm-so-mysterious pic.

The British edition of Cosmopolitan recently asked social psychologist Dr. Asi Sharabi to interpret a selection of Facebook profile pictures. In the article, he concluded that pouting “indicates someone who wishes to be acknowledged in a sexual way.” Your friend holding their cat in the photo? They’re “capable of caring and nurturing.” If you’re a woman and you post up a picture of yourself with a mysterious male friend who is not your boyfriend, you’re a gossip.

A picture of a monkey indicates you are a monkey. [NY Observer]

Duh! No One Can Get Haircuts!
You know how gay men are always styling people? Usually it's sad ladies with sad problems like a case of Fatsy or chronic No-Boyfrienditis. They swoop up their hair and call everyone "honey" and then voila! The lady emerges a big fat single dynamo in some J. Jill threads with a sassy, spiky new bob hairdid. So if the gays (and their lady stylist supporters) were to take a day off from fritzing around with scissors while Amanda Ghost blares on the speakers above them, what would happen? People would all feel sad and weighed down by a fairyless world. It would be like when Tink almost dies in Peter Pan. Only instead of clapping you have to overturn hideous institutionalized bigotry. Come on! Everyone now! Overturn!!!

There Would Be No Celebrity Gossip
It's true! Certain gay people write showbiz secrets for a living—like Perez Hilton and the guy from Dlisted and A.J. Hammer (probably). Without these noble souls, for one whole day, the internet would be a barren landscape of sports reporting and financial news. And gross straight pornography. And, actually, you wouldn't be able to read Lifehacker, even! The internet is full of gays and run by gays so I guess everyone would just have to, gulp, do work. And no one wants that. Ask yourself this: What's more important, Tim and Tom not desecrating the holy tradition of marriage, or you not having to sit idly at your desk for eight hours while the cursor on that spreadsheet blinks mercilessly at you, like the telltale heart? I think you know the right answer.

Your Children Will Not Be Having Gym Class Today
So many lesbian gym teachers these days, what with the sports and all. This means that your children will be lazier and fatter than usual, right before Christmas break, when they will be laziest and fattest for a whole week. This is not a good thing. Also, do you like looking at the sleek lines of Subaru automobiles when you drive down the street? Well you can say goodbye to that, they'll be gone. There will be no more landscape architects or cello teachers or comediennes! They will all cease to exist for one overgrown, atonal, mirthless day. Oh and did I mention mullets with flannel? That will be scarce. And Northampton, MA will just wink out of existence entirely. Goodbye, Seven Sisters!

All Of These Dumb Stereotypes Will Be Proven False
Or, you know, people will see that nice gay and lesbian folk are everywhere around them. Stopping traffic for their kids, delivering mail, folding t-shirts, baking bread, teaching maths, governing cities, practicing medicine, hilariously defending your civil rights in courts of law, fighting impossible wars so you don't have to, and so and so on, forever and ever. It probably won't come to as full fruition as everyone would like (these things never do), but if it did! For some come-together reason, if people really did. Well my oh my, that would probably be a staggering something. And then the next day Ricky could wave goodbye to his husband Donald and go cut some motherfuckin' hair. And Donald would sit down at the home office and whisper sweetly in your ear about Jessica Simpson, while her publicist (they are gay too!) denies it. And Darlene would score a goal during field hockey while Ms. Clemson watches and nods and smiles and claps her hands, and the streets are pleasantly choked with greeny Outbacks and Foresters and the world spins on like it always has, except now for some reason, it feels just a little bit rounder.

[Image via LolGay]