Isle of Lesbos Residents Suing Lesbians

What a perfect way to highlight one of my favorite Golden Girls clips!

ATHENS, Greece - A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world’s gay women.

Three islanders from Lesbos — home of the ancient poet Sappho, who praised love between women — have taken a gay rights group to court for using the word lesbian in its name.

One of the plaintiffs said Wednesday that the name of the association, Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, “insults the identity” of the people of Lesbos, who are also known as Lesbians.

“My sister can’t say she is a Lesbian,” said Dimitris Lambrou. “Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos,” he said.

The three plaintiffs are seeking to have the group barred from using “lesbian” in its name and filed a lawsuit on April 10. The other two plaintiffs are women.

Also called Mytilene, after its capital, Lesbos is famed as the birthplace of Sappho. The island is a favored holiday destination for gay women, particularly the lyric poet’s reputed home town of Eressos.

“This is not an aggressive act against gay women,” Lambrou said. “Let them visit Lesbos and get married and whatever they like. We just want (the group) to remove the word lesbian from their title.”

He said the plaintiffs targeted the group because it is the only officially registered gay group in Greece to use the word lesbian in its name. The case will be heard in an Athens court on June 10.

Sappho lived from the late 7th to the early 6th century B.C. and is considered one of the greatest poets of antiquity. Many of her poems, written in the first person and intended to be accompanied by music, contain passionate references to love for other women.

Lambrou said the word lesbian has only been linked with gay women in the past few decades. “But we have been Lesbians for thousands of years,” said Lambrou, who publishes a small magazine on ancient Greek religion and technology that frequently criticizes the Christian Church.

Very little is known of Sappho’s life. According to some ancient accounts, she was an aristocrat who married a rich merchant and had a daughter with him. One tradition says that she killed herself by jumping off a cliff over an unhappy love affair.

Lambrou says Sappho was not gay. “But even if we assume she was, how can 250,000 people of Lesbian descent — including women — be considered homosexual?”

The Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece could not be reached for comment.

People will sue over anything, won’t they?? I hear the residents of Karpetmunchia, a small Russian town, are poised to sue as well…

 

Strange Things I’ve Done to my Penis

Let me start out saying that if you know me in real life, stop now. You probably don’t want to read further. But if you already stomached my narrative on the horrors of being a man at the doctors office, you’ll be fine.

If you made it this far, I’ll continue by saying that I could just as easily write about “Strange things Ive done to my finger” or “weird happenings with my feet” but that would be boring, which is something I try not to be.

From time to time, I have visited tanning beds. I did it in high school to have a nice color for prom. Throughout college and my early career years, I would get a few sessions in before taking a beach trip to get a nice base tan in an attempt to save myself from a sunburn while on vacation. And this month, I’m taking advantage of a month of tanning that was offered by my new gym. Typically speaking, though, I gave up tanning a long time ago. Having the Vinyl Village pool means that I usually get a little sun before any trips, and having the roof open on the car keeps me slightly tanned year round.

I never was, and never will be, one of those people who tans so much that they turn orange. I saw such a creature this past weekend at a fundraiser. The poor thing must have slept in a sunbed every night…she was literally the color of a basketball, and had almost the same texture. I have also never been one for naked tanning, or clever little “press on tattoos” that leave a pasty white image of a Playboy bunny or something equally tacky on the netherregions. I simply hop into the tanning bed with whatever underwear I have on and leave it at that.

Now, before I learned the supportive benefits of boxer briefs, a nice trunk, or a classic tighty whitie, I pretty much stuck to boxers. And that’s what I had on one day when I got into the tanning bed. I’d already had several sessions, so had a good base, and was up to the point where I tanned for about 10 or 12 minutes a session.  So I got down to my boxers, slapped on those goofy looking glasses, and got in.

All seemed well until later that night. My penis was very tender…the slightest bit of friction from walking or moving about was terribly uncomfortable. And it itched slightly. When I got into the shower I noticed the cause–I’d sunburned my dick! The baggy boxers I had been wearing had apparently gaped open at the fly just enough to expose a lemon-shaped wedge of pasty white shaft skin. Well, at least it had been pasty white. Now it was bright red. The shower water hitting me burned. Rubbing against clothes caused almost nauseating pain for at least two days. And then it itched like crazy. A week later, it peeled! And for weeks I had what appeared to be a lemon-shaped liver spot midway up my wang.

But that isn’t all my poor weiner has had to endure. Skip ahead a few years. My roommate in college got a new computer and for the first time, we had the internet in our home. She and I were surfing ebay one night, trying to find something that we actually needed, though I can’t recall what it was.

We came across an auction for one of those penis enlarging “pumps”. The current price was around $2. Jokingly, J, the roomie, put a bid in on it. Now, since she and I were both new to eBay, we had no idea that what we had just bid on was a dutch auction. (Meaning that there are several of the item up for bids, and there’s a good chance all who bid will end up with one.) But that’s what we had done. Bid two dollars on an instrument guaranteed to add inches to your manhood. A few days later, we got the dreaded email :”Congratulations! The auction has ended and you are the winner of the Long Dong Vacuum Schlong” (or whatever it was called). Not wanting to harm our fresh eBay reputation, we ponied up the two dollars and just paid for the damned thing. Within a week, the pump arrived at our door step. It looked like a combination between a test tube on steroids and a blood pressure cuff. We had a laugh, and it got tossed into my closet.

A few weeks later, I went to bed, and for whatever reason, my mind turned to the device in the closet.

“What the heck?” I figured, “Let’s see if this thing works.” So I squeezed through the rubber gasket at the end, and pumped up the little valve. A few moments later, I was the proud owner of a penis that, while not appreciably larger, was a bit more girthy. But it looked like someone was choking it. It was reddish purple, and the pump was not at all comfortable. Fun over, I released the valve and pulled at the pump.

Only, it wouldn’t move. A few painful yanks, and it hadn’t budged. I walked around my room, giant plastic object hanging from my johnson, and found some lotion–hoping that would provide just enough lubricant to extract myself from the pump.

Half a bottle later, I was still stuck and starting to panic. My mind raced. I thought of ugly lesbians, naked old women, and read a passage or two from the Bible, all in an attempt to wither my weinie. None of it worked.

“I could find a hammer to break the plastic!” I thought. It didn’t occur to me that I would also break my wang. The only thing that swayed me from that solution was the realization that the hammer was in the kitchen, two floors beneath me, and I would have to walk past J to get to it. There was no way in hell I was going to explain the predicament to her.

I wrapped myself, and the giant mass  of plastic and rubber at my groin, in a robe and waddled down the hall to my study. Finding a pair of scissors, I reasoned that I could cut the rubber gasket away to free myself. Then I realized there was nothing but skin on the other side and one false move and I’d have to join a support group founded by John Wayne Bobbitt.

By this point, some amount of time had passed and I was having a major panic attack. I was beginning to think the only way I was getting out of that pump was to go to the hospital and have it removed.

“How will I explain that bill to my parents when they get it?”

“What if I get pulled over by the police on the way to the hospital?”

“How can I even face them at the hospital? This is some urban legend shit right here!”

Too mortified to even think of having to share what I was going through with anyone, I decided to try once more to get it off. The throbbing had subsided some, and I figured that either my dick had fallen asleep or it had shrank a bit and the pressure had relieved itself somewhat. I put on a slathering of lotion and pulled hard at the base of the pump. Miraculously, it flew off and landed on the carpet a few feet away.

My unit was dark red, veins bulging as if they might burst any moment. I was so relieved that a visit to the hospital had been averted that I didn’t even care. Over the next few days, a nasty bruise developed at the base of my penis. Dark purple, then fading away over the next few weeks to varying shades of green and yellow. I guess that’s what I got for wondering if the pump worked…

 

I’ve Been Tagged!

Well I have been tagged by TrailerParkBarbie

Here are the rules: 1) Link back to the person who tagged you (that= me!). 2) Post the rules on your blog. 3) Write six things about yourself. 4) Tag six people at the end of your post by posting links to their blog sites. 5) Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their site. 6) And let your tagger know when your entry is up.

Six things about me:

1. I’m not afraid of much, but I can’t even stand the site of a cockroach. Down in the South, they call ‘em “Palmetto Bugs”  You can call them Strawberry Shortcake for all I care, it’s a damned roach and if I even see one across the street I’m likely to scream like a six year old little girl.

2. I once, many years ago,  had an unfortunate incident with  a sex toy from eBay. I’ll make a blog entry on that soon.

3.  I would really like to be a dad. I don’t know if I would be any good at it, since I think pets are too much trouble, but I’d like a kid or two.

4. I used to think if I won the lottery, I would keep working. That was stupid. If I won the lottery, I think I could find enough things to keep me busy without having to show up at an office everyday. me winning=me retiring.

5. Speaking of the lottery, when I was in junior high or high school I had a very realistic dream that I bought 50 lottery tickets and won the very specific amount of $152 million. Once in college, the Powerball hit exactly that number (a record at the time I think) and I was so sure it was my destiny to win it that I wrote a check for 50 lottery tickets that I couldn’t even cover. I beat the odds, all right, I didn’t even win one dollar off any of my 50 tickets.

6. And speaking of bad checks, about four years ago I was writing out bills and balancing my check book as I went along. What I intended to do was write a check for $50 and record my balance as $879. Instead, I wrote the check for $879 and mailed it off. I bounced like 12 things because of that snafu. And I never balanced my checkbook again.

So, I tag the following random assortment of visitors to the Vinyl Village:

Finn

The Reverend

Dr. Murray Trillionaire

Little Miss Sew and Sew

Jodi

and Jennifer

 

Internet Idiot for April 24, 2008

From a discussion regarding the recent study that a woman’s diet may influence the sex of her child:

“Sex of an child is not deturmend by diet it’s the feetises chooses the sex off of it’s invirment around the mother an father it’s not controlable or chooseable but the featise’s chooses it’s sex it’s self or the doctor’s could cause birth defect’s or sex drive defect’s altering the grouth of the fetises causes defect’s from fake or outside sorces of hormons!!!”

I wonder if this poster CHOSE to be this damned stupid as a fetus, or if he decided it later in life…

My Mom Drives Me Nuts

This is as serious a post as I ever hope to make here. I’ll preface it by saying that I don’t mean any deliberate disprespect…but I just call it like I see it.

My mom drives me nuts. It’s really as simple as that. Other than the job market, there is one reason I live 5 hours from where I grew up, and she is it.

Someone once told my mother that the secret to living the good life was to marry often and marry well. Given that she only listens to half, if that, of what anyone says, she only got the “marry often” part down. I think technically she has only been down the aisle three times, but she has been engaged at least a dozen, and rarely goes more than a few weeks without a live-in. She married my father when she was nineteen, and he was her third fiancee. She remarried about a year after her 4-year marriage to my father ended in divorce. She wisely held on to the second husband for ten years–the magic number at which she could be fully vested in his pension and social security benefits. A slew of long-term boyfriends ensued throughout my teen and college years, and at some point after my own career began, she married husband number three (a homeless looking man whose previous marriage had ended suddenly after he found his first wife in bed with another man and shot them both). I’m pretty sure that she met husband number three after the live-in that preceded him hired him to cut mom’s grass–but, frankly, I can’t always keep up.

As a child and teenager, Mom’s wild and crazy ways could be, at least somewhat, enjoyed. What teenager doesn’t want to go shopping every weekend for new clothes? Who wouldn’t like to get up for school only to be told “Pack your bags! The plane will be here at nine!” (one of the almost-stepfathers actually lived in Florida and his company had a plane that would sometimes spirit us away for a week at the beach). And what teen would really mind that his mother was gone for weeks at a time with whatever gentleman had her fancy that year…particularly if it was a gentleman who (like another almost-stepfather) gave her carte-blanche to spend money on his credit cards and thought that giving her children piles of gifts was just one of many paths to her heart?

At some point after I left for college, her taste in men went decidedly downhill. Prior to that, she had at least dated men who had careers, homes, and their own cars. But after them came a string of lowlifes, all “looking for work” or “drawing disability” or any of the other excuses that such ne’er do wells offer when asked how they spend their days. These were men you’d be embarassed to be seen with at a nice restaurant, who likely had taken much more from society than they contributed, and who carried on conversation with the same vocabulary and mature thought processes as one might expect from a parrot or a two year old.

 But, luckily, I’m five hours removed from most of her drama, and when her phone calls get to be too taxing, I can always make the other phone ring to give myself a convenient excuse to get her off the line.  And they always become too taxing. Mostly because it’s not so much a conversation as it is her speaking into dead air about how she is the victim, disrespected and used by whomever she is dating at the moment, always “sick” “tired” and in need of “a break”. A break from what, I’ve never understood, as she has never worked a day in her life.

Let me take a little detour here. Despite being raised by this flake, I managed to graduate high school and college at the top of my classes. She couldn’t be bothered to attend my college graduation. I went on to have a fairly good career, but she still doesn’t know exactly what I do.  The people I choose to  have in my life are everything the people she chooses to have in her life are not–educated, trustworthy, hardworking, and honest–but rather than be proud that her son has been blessed with true friends, she mostly just seems to see them as other people who might somehow be able to help her out. (”Do you think she could give me a ride?”) While I am far from rich, before I was 30 I managed to own a home that, while normal by most people’s standards, is still larger and more expensive than any home she ever lived in. I travel a good bit, eat out a lot, pay someone to wash my cars and cut my grass, and while I might grumble about rising prices I still buy a gallon of milk whenever I need one and fill my tank when it’s empty. For Average Joe American, I’m just living a normal life. But to her, I’m rich. Better still, I’m her rich son, and therefore an untapped resource when her bills are late, her roots need done, her car breaks, or she sees a set of new sheets she wants. Make no mistake, I rarely send her any money. It’s not a habit I want her getting into. But it doesn’t stop her from not-so-subtly hinting that she wants some almost everytime we talk.  But despite all of this, the only time I can ever recall her being visibly proud of anything I have ever done was last year when I bought myself a convertible for my birthday. I had to drive her past the homes of two ex boyfriends, apparently for no reason other than so they could see her sitting in a nice looking expensive automobile. In the few hours she and I drove around in it, I became more and more embarassed. “It is just a car” I reminded her as she made a show for each stop light, convenience store, and passing neighbor. “I’m just so proud of you!” she exclaimed. Whoopty do. I might buy myself a used and raggedy Geo Metro just to use the next time I have to take her anywhere.

A month or more ago, I invited mom to come here for the weekend of Mother’s Day. I would normally just send a card or some flowers, but you see, my younger sister was killed in a car accident a few months ago, and this will be mom’s first mother’s day without her. Add to it that my sister’s birthday is that same week, and I thought I would do a good deed and get mom to a new place for a few days to take her mind off of things.  Immediately, I sort of regretted making the invitation.

“I can’t smoke in your house can I?” she asked.

“No, but you can smoke on the porch or the patio.”

“What about the garage?”

“No. What’s wrong with smoking outside?”

“I might get cold.”

“It will be 80 degrees outside!”

“You mean you wouldn’t let me smoke in the garage?”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Well what kind of clothes would I bring?”

“The kind you don’t need two hairdo’s to wear.”

“Dresses? or jeans?”

“There’s no dress code at my house, just wear what you want.”

I doubt I’ll ever attempt to be nice again.

When I made the invitation, mom and her live-in of the moment were going to come together. As of this week, he is out of the house and the picture. (Although it’s been a few hours since I spoke to her, so that may have changed.) So, apparently, her coming here is now MY problem. My grandmother called last night and said mom told her I was going to come and get her. Because that makes sense? That I would drive five hours, turn around, drive five hours back, then do it all again two days later?

I called mom this morning and explained that, while I was not going to make a total of four trips up and down the interstate in a weekend, I’d happily make two and come home for Mother’s Day.

“But I need to get away from here!” she plead. Well, I’m sorry. It’s not my damned fault that you don’t have a reliable car, money for a plane ticket, or any friends to con into coming with you.

“I could stay a week or two so you wouldn’t have to drive all that way in one weekend. If you could stand me that long.”

Nervous laughter from me. Of course I couldn’t stand you that long. I’d need a prescription of Valium to get through one weekend. After two weeks I’d need to be committed to a hospital.

“Im usually at work 12 hours a day, and two night that week I have after work functions. You’d be bored out of your mind.”

“I don’t mind being alone.”  Then be alone at your own damn house!!

The way I feel right now, she’s getting a card and some flowers as usual because my whole invitation has turned into a microchasm of her whole life–nothing is ever enough, whatever you give her she will always try to get more, and she is the only one and only thing that matters, and the rest of the world is just here for her use and entertainment.

 

Congo Residents Fear Penis Thefts

You just can’t make up news this weird…

“KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

“You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We’ve had a number of attempted lynchings. … You see them covered in marks after being beaten,” Kinshasa’s police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

“I’m tempted to say it’s one huge joke,” Oleko said.

“But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent. To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said. 

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

“It’s real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny,” said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.”

A simple touch can make a penis shrink or disappear? I hear Clay Aiken has that same effect on men…

 

The upside I suppose is that guys who weren’t exactly blessed now have an excuse…”Sorry honey,it used to be huge, but then that damned Congo sorcerer shook hands with me…”

Man Stuck in an Elevator for Over 40 Hours

 

The above is time lapse footage of a man who was stuck in a New York Elevator for nearly two days. I can’t even imagine. I go nuts with boredom if I have to sit still for 40 minutes! The accompanying story says he was working late and went out for a smoke. He should have lit up in the elevator…maybe help would have arrived then! And what’s the point of the cameras if no one is watching them for days at a time?? 

What would you do if you were trapped like that for a weekend? I’m thinking I might get a man purse and fill it with essentials just in case this ever happens to me. You know, a fifth of vodka, a deck of cards, a flare gun.

There’s a Conspiracy Afoot!

I was talking to a friend of mine earlier this week. She had a car accident some time back. (The accident itself could make for an interesting blog post–but I’ll just say that her parked car was caught amidst a lesbian cat fight that involved drunk driving and a toilet plunger and leave it to you to fill in the rest.) Now, this friend has a nice car–a brand new Acura. She took it to the Acura dealership for repairs, and the lesbian’s insurance company provided a rental. This is where the conspiracy theory comes in. The rental they gave her was a PT Cruiser. Now, I’ll admit that when the PT Cruiser came out I thought it was a cool car. But when you’re used to a luxurious ride and they give you a stripped down Chrysler that has spent it’s life as a rental ashtray  car, you have to wonder what’s up.

And I’ve decided it is a conspiracy forged between insurance companies, car rental places, and auto manufacturers. Take your car in for collision repair, warranty work, or the like and they will give you some piece of crap that is so below what you are used to that you don’t care if your own car comes back three different colors or with worse problems than you took it in for.

I can back this with my own experience. Two cars live in my garage…a big ole SUV that could carry the whole Brady Bunch (if Alice caught a ride with Sam the butcher) and a sportier coupe that really only seats two comfortably (actually, I seem to replace that coupe every few months–but that, too, is a tale for another time).

My last coupe had a whole laundry list of warranty related work that needed to be done over the time I owned it. One of the visits to the shop required that the car stay for five days (because parts were ordered the wrong color, then came in broken, a one day repair turned into a week). The dealership “kindly” gave me a rental. And this was it:

That’s right, the replacement for my sporty little coupe was a giant grocery-getting mom-mobile.

But, when I took the SUV in (again, a one day repair turned into an all-week adventure when they couldn’t figure out why the all wheel drive was malfunctioniong), what do you think they gave me? (shown actual size below):

A roller skate on wheels replaced the SUV. It didn’t even have a CD player, and if you got it up to highway speeds (a task that took about 16 minutes), it shimmied like it was going down the line on Soul Train.

In both of these instances, they replaced the car I took in with something as far removed as possible. All in a twisted scheme to make me so grateful to have my real car back that I never dared take them in for repairs again.

And I think it worked. A few months later, when the little wooden door on the “not an ashtray” fell off, I just traded the car in.

 

 

They’ve Run Out of Movies to Make

How else can you explain this upcoming “blockbuster” from Walt Disney Pictures. I thought it was a joke, but apparently not:

I can only hope this was written during the writer’s strike…

Thoughts for Today

The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.

Birds of a feather flock together and crap on your car. 

When I’m feeling down, I like to whistle. It makes the neighbor’s dog run to the end of his chain and gag himself. 

A penny saved is a government oversight.

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right time, but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. 

The older you get, the tougher it is to lose weight, because by then your body and your fat have gotten to be really good friends. 

The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement   .

He who hesitates is probably right.

Did you ever notice: The Roman Numerals for f orty (40) are ‘ XL.’

If you think there is good in everybody, you haven’t met everybody. 

If you can smile when things go wrong , you have someone in mind to blame. 

The sole purpose of a child’s middle name is so he can tell when he’s really in trouble.

There’s always a lot to be thankful for if you take time to look for it. For example I am sitting here thinking how nice it is that wrinkles don’t hurt   .

Did you ever notice: When you put the 2 words ‘The’ and ‘IRS’ together it spells ‘Theirs.’ 

Aging: Eventually you will reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.

The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.

Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know ‘why’ I look this way.  I’ve traveled a long way and some of the roads weren’t paved.

When you are dissatisfied and would like to go back to youth, think of Algebra.

You know you are getting old when everything either dries up or leaks.

One of the many things no one tells you about aging is that it is such a nice change from being young.

Ah, being young is beautiful, but being old is comfortable.

First you forget names, then you forget faces. Then you forget to pull up your zipper.  It’s worse when you forget to pull it down.

Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft - Today, it’s called golf