Lakers: 2-0 Your Favorite Team: Scared

Well, unless you favorite team happens to be the Celtics. But until we get that to that Finals rematch, the rest of the league is shaking, I'm sure.

BTW, I never realized how fun it'd be to be the only Lakers fan in a rival city's sports bar as the hometown team is getting nuked and their center goes out scoreless with yet another injury after missing the entirety of what was supposed to be his rookie season. This being Portland, no one got in my face.

Who in Ventura hates gays the most? The answer may surprise you...

As per the L.A. Times' Proposition 8 donor tracker, the city's biggest homophobe is: Lassen's Health Food! Apparently, the proceeds from all those free-range cantaloupes and all-natural wood chips (or whatever the hell they sell there) have gone toward making sure no queers threaten the sanctity of Mr. Lassen's marriage -- $27,500 of it, anyway.

Hope your clean colons were worth it, hippies.

Other big-time pro-Prop 8 contributors in my beloved ex-hometown, where even the organic grocers draw the line at gays tying the knot:

- CHERYL WILDE (WIFE OF COMMUNITY MEMORIAL HEALTH SYSTEM CEO GARY WILDE), $27,500
- BOHL, NIXON & SCHONEMAN, $2,000
- KARL HARER (HARER & MORTENSEN CHIROPRACTIC), $1,500
- LORI HOOKE, $1,200
- BRYCE JOHNSON, $1,000
- JOAN BEEM, $1,000
- JOHN JONES DDS, $1,000
- MARTHA SUTTNER, $1,000
- MARY HUXLEY, $1,000
- RIDGWAY POPE, $1,000
- TED COOK, $1,000
- TERRI KUMP, $1,000
- VENTURA PEST CONTROL, $1,000

Where are my leggings?!

Couple seeks live-in girlfriend to share everything (Gresham (near MHCC))
Reply to: hous-893351326@craigslist.org [?]
Date: 2008-10-25, 1:42PM PDT


We are a young, attractive, straight, professional, childless couple with a nice new 3-bedroom house in Gresham, and we are seeking a young and attractive girl to come live with us on "girlfriend" type basis. Expectation from you would be for cooking, cleaning, shopping, sexual relations, and also just having fun with us doing everyday things and some weekend travel too. Like a 3-way couple kind of thing. In return we can offer fun, laughter, companionship, safety, security, comfort, room and board and comfort in our clean, newer, 3-bedroom 1500 sq ft house near Mt Hood Community College. No money will be exchanged since this will be a lifestyle relationship. Probably have questions, right? Contact us! Let's discuss.

Considering that I do not, as of yet, have a permanent place to stay here in Portland -- as I expected to by this time -- I may soon have to consider pulling some shenanigans to get into a place like this. I smell a wacky sitcom premise -- Three's Company meets Tootsie in a bathhouse.

A Douchey Halloween

In the cumulative 16 hour drive between Oxnard and Portland, I had a lot of time to ponder my Halloween costume. It's been a while since I've dressed up for the holiday (which, fun fact, was supposed to be my birthday; I popped out two days late, unfortunately) -- the last time I recall was either my senior or junior year of high school, in which I combined a blue thrift store snow suit, a ripped Hulk Hogan T-shirt, multiple ties and a stylishly mussed hairdo into a costume I deemed "New Millennium Sex Symbol." Since this'll be my first Halloween away from home and in a major city, it sounds like a decent idea to get back into the spirit. I considered being a "hipster," but figured it'd be too much work, and I don't think I have enough time to find the "Vote" McCain shirt from The Colbert Report, which was my initial inspiration.

So I decided to leap to the opposite end of the cultural spectrum: douchebag.

Now, as with so-called "hipsters," there are several different species of douche out there: frat douches, club douches, rocker douches, even hipster douches. But I think I'm going to go with the prototypical douche: the guido douche. Being 50 percent guido myself, I feel like I can get away with it. All I need is hair product, a striped shirt, some kind of stupid-ass gold chain, designer jeans and, of course, bronzer.

In scouring the Internet for a quintessential douche to model my costume after, there were a lot to choose from. I sort of had Joey from the last season of The Real World in my head, but I'm afraid I'll give myself a stroke if I go around trying to act like him all night. Of course I studied the Web's definite douchebag archive, hotchickswithdouchebags.com, but the choices there are too overwhelming. A quick Google Image search brought up this pic, and I think this gives the general idea of what I'm going for:



This could turn into an interesting sociological experiment, too. I anticipate a bunch of actual douchebags -- dressed as pimps, most likely -- coming up to me asking, "Aye, where's your costume, boss?"

Of course, I'm hoping there's a party or something worth going to on Halloween. Otherwise, I'll just end up sitting around at home like a douchebag.

The Passion of the Neocons

I'll tell you one thing I admire about Republicans: for a party that doesn't care much about the poor, gay and/or melanized, they sure are good at playing the role of an oppressed minority group. And other than FOX News -- who've somehow managed to convince their viewers that they are not part of the mainstream media while simultaneously being "the most watched cable news network" and the only one with a direct line to the Bush White House -- no subsection of the GOP does "oppressed" better than Hollywood conservatives.

http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2008/oct/24/liberals-have-the-edge-in-tv-land/?partner=RSS

HOLLYWOOD — At a recent event for Republicans in Hollywood, an actress was asked whether she had ever worn her pro-Sarah Palin pin to an audition.

"You must be joking!" she said with a laugh, adding, "But I see Obama stuff all the time."

It's no secret that the entertainment industry is overwhelmingly liberal — political donations this presidential cycle from the movie, TV and music industries recently were running about 86 percent Democrat versus 14 percent Republican.

But being outnumbered is one thing, being bullied by your liberal co-workers into keeping your opinions to yourself is quite another.

Is that what's going on? Yes, say many of the industry's conservatives. That's why secret organizations with such names as "SpeakEasy" and "The Sunday Night Club" spring up every so often. They're not conservative per se, they just let it be known that attendees of their gatherings may freely discuss politics without being chastised for not toeing the liberal line.

"Are you kidding me? Of course it's true," Kelsey Grammer said when asked whether the town is hostile to conservatives. "I wish Hollywood was a two-party town, but it's not."

Grammer said he knows of a makeup trailer that sported a sign warning Republicans to keep out and of U.S. war veterans who keep their backgrounds a secret from their Hollywood co-workers because they hear them belittle the military.

He even said that, earlier in his career, his job was threatened by a prominent sitcom director who demanded he donate money to Barbara Boxer's U.S. Senate campaign. To keep his job, he gave $10,000 to Boxer and the Democrats.

Nowadays, Grammer is a bankable actor who is unafraid to speak his mind. His advice to less established industry players, though, is to shut up about politics — "unless you think the way you are supposed to think," and that means liberal.

However, there are many who are trying to make Hollywood more accommodating to political diversity. Andrew Breitbart is one. At Breitbart.com, he's launching a "Big Hollywood" blog with 40 industry conservatives tasked with — among other things — highlighting liberal intolerance.

"There's an undeniably vicious attitude against those who dissent," Breitbart said. "Hollywood is the most predictable place on the planet, not exclusively because of politics but because of narrow-mindedness."

Breitbart maintains that liberals have pushed conservatives too hard in Hollywood and that Americans have noticed. His intent is "to stop the bullying."

One "Big Hollywood" blogger is Andrew Klavan, an accomplished novelist-screenwriter who made a splash with a Wall Street Journal article comparing Batman and the "The Dark Knight" to President Bush and the war on terror.

"It's not easy being different," he said. "The liberals aren't all that liberal. We think they're wrong, but they think we're evil, and they behave like it."

If you lean right, pitch to those who are sympathetic, or at least tolerant of conservative viewpoints, Klavan said. Mel Gibson, Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Surnow come to mind.

Klavan also said liberalism seeps into too much Hollywood content nowadays and offers as proof the several anti-Iraq war movies that have been box office bombs.

"These aren't even movies about the war on terror," he said. "They're Vietnam War movies, made by people who sit around at Skybar discussing their pacifist worldview."

TV also is too one-sided, he said. "They don't even make fun of Barack Obama," he noted. "How is that possible? The guy's hilarious."

Where were all the social justice advocates when Kelsey Grammer was being bullied into donating money to the California Democratic Party, huh? I didn't see the ACLU taking to the streets for the unnamed actress who was too scared to wear her pro-Palin pin to an audition. Won't somebody speak for the conservatives -- somebody other than the president who has been in charge for the last eight years?

BTW, this article must've been written a few weeks ago, since it fails to mention that while recent anti-Iraq War films have indeed sunk at the box office, the far more recent "An American Carol," David Zucker's so-called "conservative comedy" starring, yes, Kelsey Grammer, flopped harder than Rush Limbaugh getting pushed down a flight of stairs (I couldn't think of a better joke there, but I enjoy the image).

Barack O'BadBrains (oh, and I moved to Portland)

Obviously, it has been a while since I have updated this blog. A lot and nothing has happened in that time -- quite the existential paradox, I know -- but the first thing I feel compelled to mention is this: a totally fucking awesome Barack Obama shirt based on the cover of Bad Brains' debut album. I noticed someone wearing it this weekend at a soap box derby in San Francisco's Dolores Park (about the most noteworthy thing of that event). Apparently some dude in Oakland makes them. I figured I'd wait until after the election to pick up an Obama shirt, when thrift stores are likely to be flooded with them, but I might just have to order away for this one.

Other than that, I relocated to Portland two days ago -- quit the job I had for six years, left the city where I've been for 26 years, and now I'm here, reviving this blog from my room at the Sixth Avenue Motel just outside downtown, because I assume there will be a lot more to ramble into a vacuum about than there was in Ventura. It hasn't totally sunk in yet that I finally live in a biggish city, probably because until I've nailed down a permanent place to stay, I don't technically "live" in Portland. It still feels like I'm going to be leaving at some point -- I mean, I still might, given that I don't have a job (that's goal #2) and am surviving off savings which will soon begin to dwindle. But I have to keep reminding myself that I'm going to be here for at least the next few months. Otherwise, it feels like a vacation, the minutes counting down to when I begin my return to my stagnant life in Southern California. I drove out to North Portland to look at some rooms, and on my way back got this amazing view of the city at night from the freeway, the kind of image that used to make me wish I lived somewhere other than Oxnard. Now I'm actually living in that place, but it doesn't exactly seem real yet.

Seriously, I never thought this kind of luxury could be mine: