When I was a kid, I was totally a sucker for those mysterious “grab bags” of candy (and who knows what else!) they would sell in candy stores and grocery stores. They were opaque bags around the size of a small bag of chips, and if you picked one up and shook it, their contents always had an intriguingly various and heavy feel to them, perfect for making a young me wonder “What could possibly be in there?”

The answer was invariably “a handful of random penny candy, a few weird foreign packaged candies, and a cheap plastic toy or two”, and as I grew older and more sophisticated, I realized that these things were cheaper if bought separately and I was never going to find something really amazing in there.

But for a while, I could not resist their allure. Why, just about anything could be in there!

And that’s what today’s entry is going to be. A mixed grab bag of ultimate mystery! Sure, it will likely have the same sorts of things that you normally find in my little missives.

But for right now, the bag is unopened and the possibilities are limitless.

There could be a big shiny golden coin in there!

Granted, it will probably be chocolate on the inside, but still! Mmmmm. Chocolate.

An Important Bulletin

First off, the local news : I will likely not be able to post on Saturday and Sunday, as I will be off at yet another convention. I will, in fact, be at VancouFur, the GVRD’s first ever furry convention, and so my access to a computer will be limited, plus, to be honest, and don’t take this the wrong way, my dear readers, but I plan on having too much fun to be bothered to sit down and write words for you people.

So sorry, I am taking a small vacation from posting. It still might happen, mind you. I will be lugging my ancient laptop with me, and I often have trouble sleeping at conventions so I might end up awake in the wee hours of the morning with nothing to do but make those word things happen.

But I just thought I should warn you nice folks beforehand that there might be a brief interruption in the regularity of my postings.

I am sure you are all devastated. But with faith, hope, and cuddles, the healing can begin.

Of course, this also means the cat (and the fox, and the wolf, and the bear, and the… ) is out of the bag regarding me being a Furry. Yes, one of those people, just like those freaks you saw in that one episode of CSI! Weird, huh?

Actually, we are nothing like that, and as a group, we generally hate that god damned CSI episodes. Us members of freaky little subcultures tend to prefer obscurity to that kind of erroneous and sensationalistic exposure, to be honest.

There is great freedom in being part of something that nobody from the outside world knows exist. You can just do your thing and there is nobody around to judge or interfere.

Of course, the tiny but highly visual minority of us who dress up in costume do tend to attract attention and make that whole “underground” thing more problematic.

But oh well. We can easily withstand being in the rapidly moving mainstream spotlight now and then. There are worse things than being the Freaks of the Week.

After all, it only lasts a week.

Bad Things Happening To Evil People, Part I

Moving on to the larger news-scape, we come to some truly wonderful, succulent schedenfreude, this time delivered by the self-proclaimed “Queen of Mean”, comedienne and Friar’s Club Roast stalwart.

Seems that because of Ms. Lampenelli vigorous and open pro-gay stance, those perennially petulant pricks at the notorious hate church the Westboro Baptist Church have been picketing her shows.

Because, you know, otherwise they would have to go get jobs or find something meaningful to do with their lives or even find a healthy, positive motivation for living instead of just hating the hell out of everything and anybody.

In response to their presence, Lisa Lampenelli came up with what I think is an absolutely brilliant counterstroke : she vowed to donate $1000 to a gay rights charity for every member of the Westboro Baptist Church who picketed her next performance.

She judges around 44 protestors were at said show, so she has donated $44,000 to Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an old and well-established anti-AIDS charity… and the best part is, she donates it in the Westboro Baptist Church’s name.

This, to my mind, instantly makes her the Queen of All Fag Hags. Way to go, Lisa!

Sure, not many of us could afford to do the same. But I bet we could do even better with a crowdsourced solution. Have enough people pledge to donate a dollar per protestor, and you could get some serious cash coming to the GMHC, and all courtesy of the WBC.

Wouldn’t that be grand? Heck…. wouldn’t that be many, many grands?

Bad Things Happening To Evil People, Part II

And finally, I would be sorely remiss if I failed to touch base with the continued complete and total destruction of Rush Limbaugh.

The link above is really one worth checking out, because it links to a marvelous list the nice folks at The Atlantic Wire are maintaining of all the advertisers who have yanked their ads from Rush’s shows due to his wildly evil and wrongheaded throwing around of two of the most emotionally loaded words in the English language, “slut” and “whore”.

Those are third rail words, you feculent formation of fulminating foam. You touch them and you die. People are saying “But he’s said all kinds of horribly foul, vile, and evil things before… what is so special about this time?”

Easy question. The answer is that “slut” and “whore” are, to women, the equivalent of “nigger” or “kike” to Blacks and Jews, times a million because of the incredibly deep psychosexual issues involved.

It doesn’t matter what other words were in that broadcast. It doesn’t matter what other words were in that sentence. Call any woman a slut, let alone a white, educated, completely and totally respectable thirty year old woman, and people will come down on you with the very kind of white hot unreasoning mob rage you right wing types have been exploiting for years.

And the best part of it is, this is a completely nonpartisan kind of rage. Even hard core right wingers will balk at calling some random woman a slut and a whore. There are some things you just do not do, and that is definitely one of them.

You finally did something too awful to ignore, Rush, and I could not be enjoying your public death any more. I blame you personally for starting the trend that completely destroyed American public discourse. You are the one who started the whole “war on liberals” meme, and it is decades beyond the time you faced a reckoning for that.

Roast in pieces, you sack of shit.