Homer'sWorld

My skin is salty from Richard's pool. I made 4-bean salad and went over and grabbed Patrick and we went up to play volleyball.


Forrest and Homer.

There were 12 of us and we played really well. The Phoenix team cancelled their scheduled appearance, but Roger and his friend Toogie finally showed up. We had a most excellent time.


Juan.

Among the topics of conversation was circumcision and I think everyone agreed that it is pretty nasty to cut parts of little boys penises off.


Roger.

I came back home so tired that I climbed right into bed and fell asleep.


Sunset.

So my soap opera was a detective show yesterday but today it was all home improvement and nature. I'm out at the ruins of a military fort, with the county obtaining the last portion. Watching as the backhoe scraped drainage areas and workers removed fallen debris. I get to sort through the mess to collect architectural elements and weird things like big concrete blocks with newspapers from 1920 stuck to their underside.


Fort ruins.

Suddenly the backhoe operator gets off his hoe and comes over and announces that a bee swarm had just shown up.


Africanized bees.

The bees gathered underneath the decrepit roof of a porch. If you click on the picture it gets bigger. The bees on the outside were busy fanning their wings, attempting to cool off the queen. Probably by tomorrow they will have moved on to some other location.

Besides this I saw three types of lizard, cottontail rabbits, and a very long green and yellow snake that freaked me out.

It's strange how many animals manage to live in urban Tucson.

Let's cut through the bullshit. Why should I care that a certain blogger is a fake? Maybe because he decided to involve real people in his adventure.

On July 17th, "Steve" announced that he had been mugged and that the muggers then went on to attack other people, one of whom was an 11-year-old epileptic girl who was shot after having a seizure. Two days later, on July 19th, he claimed to have attended the girl's viewing: "Additionally, I went to that girl’s viewing (apparently she had an epileptic seizure, which freaked the robbers out; and that’s why they shot her). I had to go. It was difficult. The family was extremely poor, and the mother was in hysterics. One couldn’t help, but cry; in reaction to the mom. I ’looked very rich‘ compared to the other mourners (I, and my friends, were the only ones wearing suits). I was afraid to tell them who I was.". On August 21st, he claimed the first of two trials was starting and in the comments for that day stated: "But my eye did catch the faces of the murdered girl’s parents. They recognized me from being at her viewing. So I walked over, introduced myself; and treated them to lunch. I feel so bad for them."

So back on July 17th I read this entry and then the girl's obituary. Something made me pause and Google the girl's name. No newspaper or television station accounts of her being shot. Not a whisper. To this day, nothing. No news about the "trial" starting. Nada. How likely would it be that the murder of an 11-year-old epileptic girl would not make the news? No police report. Nothing. And by the way, the father of the girl is a building contractor, the mother is a registered nurse, somehow it seems unlikely they are "extremely poor."

Apparently, I wasn't the only person who wondered about this. Yesterday a commenter, Bailey, raised the issue (see comment 27). Within minutes the link to the little girl's obituary disappeared from the original July 17th entry. Bailey was then attacked by "Steve" in a lengthy diatribe and accusations made that Bailey had left comments under multiple names. How likely is that?

So let's look at the facts. "Steve" used the obituary of a girl who may or may not have died from epilepsy to spice up his blog. This girl has a family who are grieving for her death, and he converts her death into a murder. If you were the father or mother of this child, how would you have felt if you came across the July 17th blog entry?

Last night I had a talk with a friend (a real person whose picture has appeared several times on my blog). He is a public defender for major crimes (homicide, attempted murder, etc) for Pima County. I asked him how long it takes for a trial to begin after a serious crime. He told me that it is on average 6 to 8 months and is often much longer. I then asked him whether it was possible for a trial to begin 25 working days after the crime was committed. He laughed and said, "That's totally bogus."

He then went on to list some of the steps needed for a trial to take place, including:

1). the detectives must complete their reports
2). evidence must be processed. DNA and fingerprint evidence has to go to the relevant laboratories and reports prepared.
3). all witneses have to be interviewed, typically on camera, and these interviews have to be transcribed.
4). the defendants lawyers have to receive copies of all of the evidence.
5). a jury has to be selected.
6). and so on.

Anybody who believes that a trial can begin on the 25th day after a serious crime, hey, I've got some swampland to sell you too.

Again, why does this piss me off? Because "Steve" used the identity of a deceased little girl to spice up his blog. Not once, but three different times. How would each of you feel if someone did that to one of your close family members?

So no, "Steve" I'm not jealous of your popularity. I have a strong aversion to liars. I'm also very curious how come no one named Marc (or Mark or Marcus), born in 1975 died on 20 August 2006. That's another very curious and bizarre story, apparently.

And by the way, Jimbo inside's are perfectly lovely.

Trash talk. I'm in the dumps. Literally.

Fake Bloggers.

Every once in while another fake blogger pops up. There was that Bent Collective thing (which, I've just discovered, is still stringing along folks). The guy in Australia that was supposedly bashed and in a coma. Some other guy who supposedly died- some chick did that one. Have I forgotten any? Oh look, there's a new one!

Here are some handy hints to figure out if a blog is fake or not.

1). Pictures. Fake bloggers typically have few, if any,photographs of themselves on their blog. And if they do have photos, often you could swear they weren't the same person. Often they claim they don't own a digital camera. Ask yourself how many people do you know, aged between 20 and 50, who don't have access to a digital camera. My Amish brother is, of course, one of those people. But he is the exception. He doesn't have a computer. Or electricity. I did convince him to take a picture with mine when I visited him in April. So he's real.

2). Extraordinary circumstances. If Blogger X seems to have a series of amazing, unbelievable things happen to them, then it is likely that these events are fictional. Examples can include frequent, bizarre accidents and the resulting trips to the emergency room, immunity from fatal or deadly diseases, organ transplants, surviving a criminal attack and then being asked to help in the investigation, and so on. If it smells fishy, it probably is. I once had a pathological liar for a roommate and he would slowly feed us amazing stories. Individually they were believable. But if you lined them all up, it became obvious that there were too many extra special events happening to the same fellow.

3). Inability to meet other bloggers. Sometimes the extra special events coincide with a planned meeting with another blogger. "Sorry, Blogger X, Blogger Y couldn't make it because he is on life support with a potentially lethal virus!" That actually happened to a fake blogger a couple years back. If a blogger refuses to meet you, despite living around the corner, what's up with that?

4). People dying. Lots of people die every day. Fake bloggers seem to revel in death. They have extremely elderly relatives (103!) who pass away. Those are the best kind of relatives to have. Or a mother who died in a terrible car accident and they found out in some particularly tragic way. That usually gets lots of sympathetic comments. And sometimes they die themselves. Alright, here in the United States everyone is required to have a Social Security number to do basic things. Like have a job or a disability check. When you die, this is reported to the Social Security Administration and it gets listed on the Social Security Death Index. So if you are a fake blogger, and you say someone dies, it is relatively easy to check their name (even using just their first name or a part of their first name) and date of death to determine if someone actually died or not. Similarly, if someone gets murdered, it is relatively easy to get on the internet and locate newspaper articles or police files on the event. Except when someone is not really murdered.

5). The Power of Google. It is really hard to create a fake person and then get all the facts right. Annoying things like how old one should be at a certain time. Police procedures. Healthcare protocols. What majors are offered at certain universities. Membership in a certain group. Thanks to the internet, it is super easy to snoop on people/places/events/facts and find out things. When I Google my own name, I get 1,470 hits. So people who write fake blogs should make sure they
never write about anything specific, because it is way easy to determine what is the truth and what is not.

Moral of this entry. If you want to write a fake blog and convince people you are a living, breathing person instead of a chunk of computer memory, do so. But don't get all upset when we find out and expose you for being a fraud.

Moby is coming to Tucson this weekend and I'm having a pizza party on Sunday night. What kind of cake should I make?

A). Coconut with coconut cream cheese frosting.
B). German chocolate.
C). White cake with whipped cream and fruit
D). Pineapple upside-down cake.

Satan.



If I believed in Satan he would look like Karl Rove (or perhaps Dick Cheney). What a sorry result of an orgasm. I'm sure if his father had known what kind of nastiness he was he'd have slapped a rubber on. Or two.

So he's off to "spend more time with his family." I wonder if he bothered to ask them whether they wanted to spend more time with him?

The new glasses.

Regular ones.


Reading glasses.

I decided to skip bifocals for now, I'm not that old yet,

Thanks to other people's shitty mortgages, my 401K is worth 89.71 percent of what it was a month ago, despite the profit sharing and my own contributions (currently I'm putting away 11 percent in that account). It's all magic money anyways and the likelihood that I'll ever be able to retire and take up painting nudes or becoming an opera queen is pretty minimal.

For my fifth birthday my Mama took me to the Ace Hardware on Front Street in Traverse City and I got to pick out a present with the five dollars that she gave me.

I remember walking down the aisle of toys they had there, past the Breyer horses, and there was a beautiful light blue house trailer.


Nylint house trailer.

You could lift off the white roof and look down into the two rooms. It was filled with furniture and pots and pans. I still have the piano and a frypan with tiny fried eggs inside.

My father thought it was terrible that I loved that toy. I had PeeWee dolls and I would place them inside and pull the house trailer around. Sometimes (often) there were tragic accidents and the trailer would roll over and the furniture would fly about. It was very exciting.

Mummy has the trailer at her house and I think next time I'm at home, I'll bring it back to Arizona. (the picture is from one selling on ebay, where it is over $200 at the moment)

I was going to have a pool party nipple identification quiz, but then the whole stress of figuring out which nipple to include and which ones to exclude was just too much. Plus I had too much sun yesterday and only just now am I recovered enough to enjoy life in the slightest.

So instead, why don't you watch this lovely Dirty Vegas video instead?

Pool Volleyball, part 1. As always, splashing around in Richard's pool was an excellent way to spend a hot Sunday afternoon. I made salsa and a cake and took them along.


Pico de Gallo Salsa.


Yellow cake with raspberry filling and bittersweet chocolate frosting.

Most of the pictures I took of people in the pool didn't turn out so well or had stray penises in them, so you'll have to look at these two.

Jeffrey.


Patrick.

I was so tired out afterwards I came home and went to bed early.

Post 1348. I broke two weed whackers trying to whack my weeds. My Ipod is defunct. I think I have a cavity. I broke a drinking glass recently. The mirror in my dining room fell suddenly from the wall and the fancy frame broke. My new glasses cost $700 when all was said and done.

I'm hoping this string of bad luck ends, like yesterday.

Totally unrelated: I had drink and dinner with Ray and Cobban last night.


Ray.


Cobban.

Middle Eastern food! The waiter was beautiful and a Jimbo-like butt.

Oh lord, Brian turned 29 today. Again. For the ninth time. I swear I don't know how he manages to remain so young and nubile. I suppose it is the "selling my soul to satan" thing.


Homer with the birthday man.

Why don't you go over to his blog and wish him "Happy Anniversary of his Departure from His Mama's Womb."

Conservative Christians spend an awful lot of time fretting about male sexuality. Back in the 19th century it was all about those damned polygamous Mormon men, fucking their multitude of wives. In the 20th century it was about controlling woman as a way to control men. The 21st century is about finding ways to demonize the gays. Yawn.

To me this is what the fuss about the San Diego firemen is all about. They are suing the City of San Diego because they were asked to drive a firetruck in the Pride Parade. Some spectators did inappropriate things, they say, like kiss each other, touch their niblets, or yell out phrases such as "give me mouth to mouth." I read through their affadavits of complaint filed to the Department of Fair Housing and Employment and several things struck me.

The first was that all four had been coached in their statements. Each statement is very similar, in the order of how they described the events and the exact wording of several offending phrases. Could the fact that they are being represented by a conservative Christian law firm have anything to do with this?

The second is that this is just the first of these sorts of complaints gay people will be seeing. Sexual harassment laws are very vague and broad. Basically, anyone can claim to be sexually harassed if one witnesses something one considers offensive. Know the route of the annual gay pride parade? If you are a fundamentalist Christian you could get yourself hired at a business along the route, and once the parade passed, you could claim harassment because you witnessed men kissing, dancing, groping, or doing anything that heterosexuals routinely do, but because gay people do them, they are somehow more lewd and disgusting. How soon before parade permits are denied because cities don't want the legal expenses involved.

Clever way to work the system. And those firemen, ask me if I believe they are telling the truth.

So many things to learn about. Every day I acquire many useless facts. This morning I spent precious moments watching music videos including several by a seemingly Charo-esque woman called La Tigresa, one of which had been watched over two million times. I'd never heard of her before, my loss.


La Tigresa del Oriente- "La Anaconda"

In my almost daily chats with Brian, I relate to him some of these obscure facts and observations. Yesterday it was the fact that not all gay men have superior grooming habits. At a recent pool party I was horrified to see someone with long, untrimmed toe nails. And I mean long.

Now Mollie, the elderly dog, freaks when I attempt to trim her toe nails. One time she pooped while I was doing so. I suspect there is some toe nail trauma in her past. But there is no reason, and less likelihood of a poop incident, for an adult gay male to not trim their toe nails. As Brian would say, "I'm just saying."

And as Mizzbird states in her blog (she's just moved to Tucson!), this is perhaps the best video of the mid-1980s. So full of energy and I always thought the guy with the moustache was hot (and he probably had trimmed toe nails):


Relax.

The pesto pizza went over well. So easy to make and everyone thinks it is hard. I know some bloggers like that.


Jigsaw.

Jigsaw was a littole doggie vacuum, looking for food everywhere.


Panchesco.

The pool was too cold for me, I have delicate parts.


Hot tub!

The hot tub was too hot for me, I have delicate parts.


Ken and Hiram.

The birthday boys blew their candles out twice for the camera. A good time had.

How I spent the rest of the day on Friday.

Nothing interesting happened to my penis in the last 24 hours. Or to my left eyeball or my right glenoid fossa. Did you know that the little bone between your nostrils rhymes with my name. It is called the vomer.

The computers at work have been down for three (count 'em!) three days. It is really hard to do anything at work when you can't do anything. So I'm sitting at home waiting to hear whether the computers get fixed and thinking about how humid it is (all of my kitchen cupboard doors have swollen shut).

I have a secret internet blog crush. If I told you who it was then you would know, so it is my little secret. I've seen a revealing picture. Damn!

Oops, the computers at work aren't working. Maybe I'll make a cake instead of working.

This weekend I'm attending a birthday party for someone named Hiram. That was my great-great-great grandfather's name. I'm very excited about meeting someone with that name. I'm taking along a pesto pizza, because I can.

Nothing exciting has happened to my penis since I started writing this post. That is probably for the best.

You can learn many important lessons while watching re-runs of America's Top Model while lazing about on the couch. Last night's episodes taught me to never sass handsome British fashion photographers because they are so important, serious, and full of themselves, that they can't understand something called a "joke." I also learned that modeling involved a lot of passion and hard work, and that sometimes one's body above the waist wants to model while the portion below doesn't. Who knew? I certainly didn't! I also learned that should I ever become decide to become a flamboyant runway walk coach, I could also get a job tearing young women apart because their cheekbones make them look some certain way that lots of computer manipulation can't fix.

This is the problem of not having fancy cable and it will only get worse once NBC drops Passions in September. My daily dose of trash tv will only get trashier. Goodness, whatever will I do. There are only so many hours you can stare at the hot guys on BMB or Seancody!