It used to be the either poor or unscrupulously cheap of us would buy pirated CDs or DVDs off the street (count me among them). But you got what you paid for – shitty sound quality, or camcorder fumbles and audience members ambling in front of the camera.

So there was an understandable price differential – less money for low quality, or more money (full price) for high quality.

Then came online sales of CDs and DVDs, on sites like Amazon & Buy.com. They fit nicely into this price scheme too – you’d get a discount on Amazon or Buy.com, but you’d lose the immediacy of the purchase. You’d have to wait several days for your CD or DVD to arrive.

So we had:

• High quality & immediate – Retail – Highest price
• High quality + delay – Buying online – Medium price
• Low quality + a little work – Bootleg – Lowest price

Makes sense, right?

Now, with the download of streamable media like music, TV shows and movies, this perfectly reasonable price:quality structure has been turned on its head.

Let’s see – I can download:

• a movie for $3.99 off iTunes; their assy format occupies 3GB for a 2hr movie, and it’s choppy/stilted when watching on my desktop; downloading a movie takes about 2 hrs on my DSL connection
  -OR-
• a movie for free off BitTorrent; the formats use (which, admittedly, typically involve downloading an esoteric codec or two) typically less than 1GB for a 2hr movie, and the quality is stupendous – high-quality with smooth playback; downloading time is typically less than half an hour

What happened to “you get what you pay for”?

Fuck that. I don’t care whose fault this is; iTunes is a horrible value proposition.

As far as I’m concerned, ABC.com is the only one that seems to get it right. They broadcast their popular shows in their full-episode versions using a player that somehow transmits an HD-quality image over our weak DSL line. They monetize by showing ads 3-4 times during the course of an hour-long broadcast. Fair? Sure!

My boyfriend has watched about 30 ABC show episodes over the past week, and watches the ads since they’re short (30 seconds) and impossible to skip over unlike with Tivo.

The other TV networks can continue to operate under a prehistoric mindset with respect to digital media and online transmission. I’ll continue to use BitTorrent, and so will tens of millions of others.

Mainstream Christianity is associated with hypocrisy, judgmentalism, and homophobia…according to a majority of young people, including Christians. The fact that today’s most prominent Christians are so, well, unChristian (you know, tossing to the wind any sense of charity, tolerance and love for your common man) is not lost on young people.

My faith in the future: restored.

So while Jesus spoke extensively about the sanctity of marriage (meaning: not getting divorced), helping the poor, and loving the unloved, why have public figures like James Dobson, Donald Wildmon, the late Jerry Falwell, and power bottom Ted Haggard more closely resembled the Pharisees Jesus also most famously talked about?

Simple answer: it’s easy to insist on condemning exactly those behaviors you know you’ll never commit. Hence the obsession among the Dobsons and Falwells of the world with abortion and homosexuality.

(Closet cases like Haggard are just misguided hangers-on.)

I mean, why is it that the only people protesting in front of abortion clinics seem to be men and postmenopausal women? How convenient.

Let’s ignore all those religious edicts that condemn divorce, infidelity, hell, even murder (gotta keep that option open for a rainy day) and make abortion and gay sex the lynchpin of your platform of ethics. A very easy way for the biggest, most evil sinners to give themselves the illusion that they’ve taken the moral high-ground — eliminate all mention of those sins you’re repeatedly guilty of!

Today’s teenagers, apparently, aren’t used to just listening to the loudest, fattest, oldest man on television and take his blathering to be the gospel. This generation grew up with The Real World and child celebrities divorcing themselves from their parents. Truthfully, blind obedience to arbitrary authority has never been this country’s youth’s strong suit.

And thank God for that (no pun intended!).

Yet another example of an industry involved in the distribution of protected content just doesn’t get it. Yes, like the music industry, which makes you pay more for less quality.

I wanted to buy the David Allen book, “Getting Things Done”. Here were my options:

• $15 for the eBook – a PDF file – for download
• $8.99 for the actual book – free 2-day shipping from Amazon (via Amazon Prime)

Hmm…..  to store a 3MB file (one of the easiest to prepare from just about any document format) and distribute it via http download costs almost double a hard copy of the book, printed on paper, bound, shipped to Amazon’s warehouses, and then to me.

Then, to read the ebook, you can sit in your chair, if you have a desktop, put it on a laptop (really easy to read as you stand on BART, clutching the handrail with one hand), or read it awkwardly on a PDA or smartphone. Or you can read it on a “paperlike” Sony ebook reader, a $230 gadget.

To read the regular book, well, you just read the “paper” wherever or however you want.

What did I do? Downloaded the ebook from some of my friends because I wanted the immediacy of the read, and I’m considering ordering the book on Amazon (will see if reading the ebook on my laptop on BART is too much of a pain in the ass).

Sounds like the folks at Penguin Publishing need to check their math.

Now, like just about every man on the planet, I wouldn’t complain if my equipment were bigger (even Long Dong Silver would–female readers, I’m not sure I can explain this, but, ask any man, it’s true). And it wouldn’t bother me if I could engage in day-long Kama Sutra marathons. Who wouldn’t? But I have to say for the most part I’ve been pretty happy with what Mother Nature has given me, and with how I can keep up my performance when it matters.

Well, until recently.

It seems plenty of people–easily hundreds a day–have taken it upon themselves to email me, discreetly, to tell me that I don’t have to suffer with a small dick any longer, and that they have a solution (something called MegaDik, or, alternatively, Magic Stick).

I mean, I’m getting these emails from complete strangers. They’re so concerned with my…shortcomings…that they’re sending unsolicited emails offering succor to someone they don’t even know. Respectable-sounding names, such as Enid Lawson, Jewel Sanchez, and Penelope Smith, have delicately suggested I seek the help of supplements, pumps and semi-surgical techniques. They’ve even sent links where I can get more information and order. At substantial discounts (“at discounted prsices”).

I guess they were picking up on a subconscious feeling of inadequacy that I wasn’t even aware of!

They’ve also suggested I look in Viagra and Levitra (or, rather, V!ag/Ra and L.e.v.1.T.R.8), popular erectile dysfunction medicines, pointing me in the direction of Cypriot pharmacies and Indian clearinghouses that offer these drugs, or bioidentical knockoffs, for 80% less than what I’d pay stateside.

What’s more, they’re persistent and they reach me at several email accounts. Even at work! In fact, I get most of these helpful tips at a customer-service email account that they must somehow know I monitor. Talk about some clever cybersleuthing.

One of the keys to successful marketing is pure repetition. If it weren’t, we really wouldn’t give a shit about where Paris Hilton took her last piss–the fact that Paris’s every move is monitored so intently by the media makes us wonder if there really is something important about her.

In addition to the magic of repetition, these spammers use a concept typically attributed to Microsoft: FUD. Make people scared or unsure about something, and they’ll respond. Anyone familiar with the 2004 Bush reelection campaign will understand the power of manufactured fear.

Repetition and FUD are things Enid, Jewel and Penelope are very good at. Now I stare downward in the shower and wonder if I really should be satisfied with what I see. And whether there would be any harm in wiring $200 to an offshore bank account. I mean, being King-Kong sized is beginning to sound like it could be the answer to those prayers. I. Was. Apparently. Making…unbeknownst to myself.

The Internet really is amazing. Not only can you use it to gather information on problems you need help with, it provides you with information you never asked for about problems you never knew you had!

Me. Today. Waiting for the next BART train.

Ugly anorexic shrew in front of me (normally I couldn’t care less how strangers look, but read on).

The train going in a different direction comes. Those who want to take the train board. The rest of us waiting for the next train move up and continue to wait.

The shrew is motionless.

I ask, “Are you…” (waiting for the next train) is what I was going to say but the shrew turns her head away from me as if I were a man apologizing to his wife for having an affair with one of her best friends.

I shrug and move past her. She remains motionless. Pouting at the world.

The next train arrives, and I swear somehow the sheer force of her lunging at the train defies her 75-pound frame. She jostles her bag of bones brusquely past all of us and stomps into the train.

What exactly is this? Indignation at the world that she can’t eat? Bipolar disorder? Just plain old bitchiness?

I was not offended so much as puzzled.

My partner and I went out of town this past weekend to celebrate our anniversary, heading this time to San Luis Obispo, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It’s the only major city on the coast between Northern & Southern California (Fresno’s inland, and doesn’t count anyway), and I think even has an airport.

Well, not so much an airport as a landing strip for crop dusters.

My point is that it’s a bit remote and relatively ignored by the trends that dictate changes in other metropolitan areas. This turned out to be a nice blessing when it came to finding an activity for Saturday night.

We went to a drive-in movie.

My partner had never been, and I hadn’t either since I was about 5 years old and fell asleep in the backseat of my parents’ car after watching the cartoon intro.

It was a great trip into an era that we rarely have a glimpse into anymore. Vintage Ts don’t count.

The Sunset Drive-In was showing a double feature on Saturday, and we didn’t care to see the first, so we arrived about 15 minutes before the second. We bought our tickets – a relative bargain at $6 per person, forwent the rental radio, and tuned our radio to 100.7. The sound quality was perfect, a lot better than the clunky speakers you used to hang on your window after cracking it down a bit.

You had to keep your headlights off, so we entered the theater very slowly….since we couldn’t see anything (it was dark). We crept around in our car for about 3 minutes until we found a free spot.

Around us were pickup trucks, vans, SUVs and station wagons parked turned around, so people could watch while hanging out of the tailgate. A few people planted some blankets on the ground and listened to the audio with boomboxes or wireless headphones.

We then headed to the snack bar and got nachos, popcorn, and the most vile looking piece of pizza imaginable. There were a couple of pinball games and an old-school video game inside, too.

When we got to the car, a 5 minute intermission had started. They showed a retro animation like this one to count down to the next movie:

When the movie started, we opened up the sunroof, reclined our seats a bit, dug into our crappy food and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. People ambling over to the bathrooms, cars turning on their brake lights and people giggling and laughing were all distractions we kind of found charming.

It sure beats watching a DVD at home.

I have a bidet on my toilet.

And I love it. I’m a true convert. I loathe toilet paper now. It’s like cleaning up with sandpaper. My boyfriend totally agrees with me.

Before you laugh, let me tell you a little story. My parents bought a bidet, and told my brother about it. He laughed at them. Then he tried it. And bought one for himself. Then my brother told me about it, and I laughed at him until I tried it. I bought one for myself. I then told a friend about it, who laughed at me for weeks. A couple of months later she asked where she could buy one.

Here’s why bidets are worth every penny they cost:

• they clean you up completely. When you pat dry afterwards (no rubbing necessary!), the paper is clean. You’re not smearing your own feces back into your skin.
• it’s refreshing. You either get warm water, which naturally feels nice, or cold water, which is not as jarring as you might imagine (provided you don’t turn it on full blast and give yourself an accidental enema).
• many have heated seats. Trust me, it’s worth it if your bathroom is even slightly cold.
• you take it easy on your ring. Even if you’re not prone to hemorrhoids, it’s nice not to have to scratch and scrape your asshole to get it clean. Even if you have the super-soft plush kind of toilet paper (which, because they usually have very, very small fibers, actually effectively gives your ass tissue millions of little splinters)

I’ve tried the standard $100 Go Bidet, which is great because you can control the pressure and get yourself lickety-split immaculate in about 10 seconds. However, now I have the Hometech 2000, which cost about $300 when I bought it three years ago. It’s still working great!

Note big manly-man Mark Cuban is an investor in SF-based Brondell Swash, and giants like Toto (worth visiting their site just for the intro) are selling high-end bidets with warm air-dry and deodorizing features.

Treat your ass right. Wash it, don’t wipe it. 

Just to set the record straight – gays & lesbians are not the same as transsexuals/transgender people. We understand them, we understand they are misunderstood, and we consider them part of our broader “community”, but they are not part of the same phenomenon.

If you are gay or lesbian, or bisexual, you are comfortable with the chromosomes and genitalia you were born with – you are simply sexually and emotionally attracted to the same sex. Yes, plenty of gay men are effeminate and plenty of lesbians are masculine, but they are not interested in swapping dicks for pussies or vice versa.

Before I contrast that with the trannies, let’s break them down:

• transvestite – simply likes to dress in the opposite sex’s clothing (has nothing to do with wanting to be the other sex, or attraction); remember -vest-; this has to do with clothing
• transgender – considers self as the opposite gender but doesn’t necessarily want to go through with the surgery; these are women who identify as “boi”, men who identify as “girl” or “lady”. SF has tons of transgender FTM (female-to-male)
• transsexual – genuinely feels like he/she was born in the wrong gender, and usually goes through surgery to correct the sex to what he/she feels is the right one; most transsexuals are attracted to the opposite sex, while some are attracted to the same sex.

As you can see, none of these three presumes what sex you’re attracted to. For example, if you were a MTF transsexual, that means you were born a male, but feel natural as a female, so you undergo surgery to become a female. You could be attracted to men (heterosexual) or women (homosexual). I have seen both. Really.

And, despite popular perception, an MTF transsexual is not a really, really gay guy (although it might seem that way sometimes). You don’t get progressively gayer until >poof!< you want to be the other sex. If that were true, I would want to be a woman just a little bit. I don’t. Again, I’m 100% happy with the sex I was born into.

But the reason that gays & lesbians, for the most part (well, the open-minded ones, at least – there are plenty of bigots of all types in our community!), sympathize with trans people of all types is because:

• we understand that what feels 100% natural to us may not be what the majority feels
• we understand it’s not “just a phase”
• we understand that if you’re not “normal”, then you can face hatred and even violence from bigots

This is why we support trans people’s protection under the hate crimes laws proposed to protect us.

Another thing: Drag queens are transvestites just for performance. Not the same as transvestites who do so for private pleasure. Not the same as transgenders or transsexuals.

(Just trying to set the record straight for the curious.)

I understand that the under-50 IQ crowd needs representation on The View, Barbara Walter’s morning talk show, but Sherri Shepherd is so insultingly idiotic that she brings down the level of the debate on the show. And it’s a shame, because the show can really be interesting to watch. I know people like to knock the show, but it is interesting to hear different viewpoints from people who are typically fairly well-informed and capable to rendering a reasonably intelligent viewpoint.

The exception is Sherri.

All I can say is that Elisabeth Hasselbeck must be thrilled to no longer be the dumbest woman on the panel. Even she sounds like Einstein compared to Ms Shepherd, who apparently is too busy taking care of her kids to realize our planet is round and not flat.

Yeah, all that parenting can really drain you to the point of not knowing what 99% of 2nd graders already understand.

I just looked her up in Wikipedia and it seems she was raised a Jehovah’s Witness but then converted to born-again Christianity. That’s like a moron becoming an idiot.

Barbara, please fire this dolt. Stop pandering to the absolute lowest common denominator among your viewership. She’s only useful to point out how appallingly bad our educational standards have fallen.

VIDEO: Whoopi Goldberg has to talk to Sherri like she is a 3 year old. Sherri proudly denies evolution like a good little Christian robot, and says she doesn’t know if the world is flat or not. “Is the world flat? I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it, Whoopi. I’ll tell you what I have thought about – how I’m going to feed my child.”

Apparently she thinks she needs $2 million to feed her child. Man, that kid has expensive tastes!

VIDEO: Sherri does not understand, literally or figuratively, what a chameleon is. “And it’s also hard for men to be a chameleon behind a woman, you know, people shoving them out of the way.”

If you have a sense of humor, a soul and a good eye for color, I strongly suggest you watch Ugly Betty.My boyfriend and I watched the entire first season on DVD this past week and fell in love. What looks at first glance like a prime-time telenovela made us laugh and even cry.

Twice.

Okay, three times, but stop bugging me about it.

Why is this show so great? Let me count the ways:

1. An UGLY main character! Okay, she’s not exactly hideous and America Ferrera, the actress who plays her so deftly, is actually kind of cute. But they give her bushy eyebrows, mismatched, ill-fitting clothes, hair that would make most of us shave it all off and start over, and the cheerful self-confidence to not give a shit when everyone keeps on telling her she looks awful. I will say this: the minute they give her a makeover, I stop watching the show.
2. Great acting. Vanessa Williams, America Ferrera, and Octavia Spencer (who plays Betty’s father’s immigration caseworker, Constance) were the easy standouts, but the entire cast is pretty damn talented as far as I’m concerned. Vanessa plays a cunt like nobody’s business! Well, a cunt with heart.
3. Color, color, color. I haven’t seen such vivid sets like this since The Incredible Shrinking Woman. It’s a 42 minute feast for the eyes (don’t worry – your retina gets a break during the commercials).
4. Camp. The show isn’t dripping with it like a John Waters movie, but there are clever, subtle instances of it for fans of the camp out there. Leslie Jordan (Beverley Leslie from Will & Grace) and the inimitable Alec Mapa make great cameos. And Gina Gershon as Fabia (a parody of Donatella Versace) is absolutely delicious.
5. It’s boundary-breaking. I love the fact that there are several interracial relationships that occur naturally and aren’t PC-ified to the point of making me vomit. I adore that one of the main characters is a transsexual (played by the gorgeous and surprisingly talented Rebecca Romijn). And I love that Betty’s 12-year-old nephew is a screaming sissy and no one in the family seems to give a shit.
6. Main characters who are Mexican. …who aren’t vilified for being Mexican. And they’re genuinely good people. If you’re sick to death of the racist overtones of the recent immigration “debate”, then this will be refreshing.
7. It’s set in New York. J’adore New York. Even if it’s filmed in LA and all the backdrops are greenscreened in, I don’t care. Scenes of New York put me in a damn good mood.
8. You get to love and hate the villains. Although the basic setup of goodies & baddies is as simplistic as you might imagine, you occasionally feel for the people who have a lot of fun at poor Betty’s expense. Partly because they succumb to the same human frailties that most of do. But also because plucky Betty brushes off their insults without a scratch.
9. Some hot Latin papis! Kevin Alejandro? Well, hello there! Cristian de la Fuente? Verrrrry pleased to make your acquaintance! Bailey Chase? Well, not technically Latin, but he still speaks Spanish in my fantasies. Durrrrty Spanish.
10. Those sweet tearjerkers. Three scenes made my boyfriend and me reach for the Kleenex. (SPOILERS) When Santos proposed to Hilda. When Ignacio said his final farewell to Constance, the deranged caseworker. And when Hilda’s fantasy came to an end (in the first episode of the 2nd season). If you didn’t cry during these scenes, I’d have to seriously question if you have a soul.

Bonus! If you’re a loser like me and don’t even have a television, you can watch full episodes at abc.com. The quality is excellent and you actually have fewer commercials to deal with than if you were to watch it on TV.

I do think the original Betty La Fea succeeded in making the lead character far more hideous-looking. I had a good chuckle at this picture: