San Francisco's Castro December 2006

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Castro Photos, Late-Night-TV Zingers & Funny Pictures
by Strange de Jim

December 2006

Click here to design a seal such as the one above for yourself for free. This particular design is called a "blivet." I call it a tuning fork for going "om."

Bay Area Reporter "Out There" column, 11/30/06: Strange de Jim comments, "It's ironic that Kramer v. Kramer perfectly describes Michael Richards' attempts to explain his racist rant!" (For more of my quips from various columns, click here.)

A supermodel guest told Jay Leno she slipped on a wet floor and her arms and legs went in the air, so Jay threw the water from his cup on the floor.

On Craig Ferguson John Waters said he doesn't like being touched by strangers in a nonsexual way.

On The Daily Show Nathan Lane told Jon Stewart that the play he's in, Butley, "is not gay porn, like Shaving Ryan's Privates and A Fistful of Harold."

Jay Leno's "Headlines" had a grocery ad for "menacemeat pies" and a headline "Search and Rescue Dog Lost."

Jimmy Kimmel reported that Oprah was changing a boy baby on her show, and he peed in her eye: "You don't pee on a billionaire unless you're that baby or Melinda Gates." Jimmy also said Angelina Jolie is willing to sit down with Jennifer Aniston. "See, Middle East!"

The Daily Show reported on the Holocaust Denial Summit meeting in Iran. A group of Nazis was there, and while they didn't admit the Holocaust had happened, they did publish a book: If the Holocaust Had Happened, Here's How We'd Have Done It.

Dave Letterman said that in the new movie Rocky climbs into the ring and then can't remember what he came in there for. On Donald Trump's giving the disgraced Miss U.S.A. a second chance: "You can't overestimate the American male's compassion for a slutty drunk." Also, "Scientists have found the world's smallest vertebrate. It was honeymooning with Katie Holmes."

Jay Leno said the L.A. Diocese was paying $60,000,000 to 45 children who'd been molested. "It's their new policy of leaving the child's behind."

Craig Ferguson: "Women always say what they want in a man is a sense of humor. Yeah, rich guys must be hilarious."

For very peculiar reasons, Conan O'Brien now has a web site called HornyManatee.com that's getting millions of visitors.

This is the colorful new Indonesian shop on the corner of 18th and Hartford.

This house is on Castro near 14th Street.

The house at 218 Eureka Street won the Merchants of Upper Market and Castro Christmas design competition.

We're on Noe a few steps from 24th Street.

Sad news was the passing of Jessica Clark, a person of transgender who'd worked in the Castro for many years, most recently at Skin Zone until it closed.

The memorial was in the traditional spot at Castro and 18th Street.

The Cafe Flore Santa is lounging out front again.

The Grinch is reigning over things inside.

"I'm too pretty to work." One of the servers at the Flore shares my philosophy.

Here's an angel at the counter.

I love the sunglasses on the nearer soldier.

Someone left this dog on a tree stump outside the health center on 17th St.

Here's a side view.

I was just realizing what a cleaning nut I am. I bought this Christmas-tree-size bottle of Fabulous All-Purpose Cleaner for $1.99 when I moved into my present apartment in 1979, and it's already half gone.

These penguins are living outside MaxMuscle at Noe and Market. The sign asks us not to feed the birds_,or steal them.

These LaRouche followers want to impeach Bush and Cheney.

That's www.LaRouchePAC.com.

I greatly enjoyed Baby, Would I Lie? by Donald Westlake, Mysterious Press, 1994. Here are a few quotes.

Page 29 - He came in with a pair of girls all in dark leather, who had perfected the ability to giggle and sneer at the same time, so they were definitely from either a teenage magazine or MTV. Harry gave them to some boys and left.

31 - Massa, actual name Bruno DeMassi, was the creator and owner and publisher of the Weekly Galaxy, a man of many appetites, most of them gross.

32 - "The Chief is dead." And somebody said, "And we have a new Pope." And everybody started to laugh. Nobody could stop. It got everybody. There's Massa lying dead at his desk, and hundreds and hundreds of people laughing. It went all through the building, upstairs, downstairs, people holding their sides, people falling down on the floor, they were laughing so hard.

37 - (About the precipitous parking lot around the Ray Jones Country Theater in Branson, MO) - This steeply sloped blacktop parking lot, not uncommon along this narrow ridge, gave the fast-fooded families and the sedentary retirees a little more heart exercise than they'd bargained for, but so far there was no objective evidence that the parking lot had actually killed anybody... All those polyester-wrapped tons of tourist lugged themselves upward toward the entrance at the front of the building.

38 - One of the other nice things about Branson for the country stars is how clean it is—no mobsters, no scuzzy high rollers from Detroit of Kuwait, no hard-eyed hookers. You didn't have to go through life watching your back every damn minute. Mel Tillis once said Branson was a cross between Mayberry and Vegas, and that's what he meant. When Andy Williams opened his Moon River Theater, his special guest was Henry Mancini, who happened to have written "Moon River," and when Henry Mancini said onstage that Andy Williams had worked his ass off to get the theater ready on time, Andy Williams said to him, "We don't use words like that in Branson." To make the story better, he wasn't kidding. To make the story better than that, he wasn't wrong.

39 - Honey Franzen, who was as smart as she was good-looking, had by then long switched from singing backup and waving it all around onstage behind Ray to being his private secretary and steady private comfort, the place where, when he had to go there, she had to let him in.

75 - Narrow pasty people, young and skinny, in dark blue suits and narrow ties, with the pinched faces of creatures taken off the breast too early. Way too early.

86 - Elvis was a drugged-out porker with more sexual hang-ups than a nine hundred number.

136 - Ray's cook had quit, being a decent patriotic Christian woman who couldn't wait to prejudge him.

261 - [When the house in Branson rented by the Weekly Galaxy was raided]: Whatever the deviltry would turn out to be, it had been clear from the instant of the arrival of these people that they were up to no good. They took all the parking spaces on the block, for one thing, including right in front of your own house. And there were so many of them, and they looked so strange, not like normal people at all, who, as everybody knows, are fish-belly white, drastically overweight, clad in pastel polyester, and shyly smiling unless your back is turned. These people weren't normal in any particular, weren't like us, and therefore must be up to no good.

As a result, the arrival of several platoons of state troopers at arrest hour—4:30 A.M.—was no surprise and no inconvenience to the neighborhood, but was, in fact, a source of gratification. Even more gratification was provided by those photographers, who, having been rousted from sleep under tables, chose to resist arrest for a while. It was a fine hullabaloo over there, well lit, intelligently cast, imaginatively costumed, with good production values all around and the kind of minimal script that works best in an action flick of this sort. Afterward, a lot of residents could kick themselves that they hadn't taped it.

(And much afterward, there was a moment of bewilderment when it was learned by some of the residents that those people had, in fact, been employees of their favorite newspaper. Ah well, not everything is understandable in this life. Think about something else.)

I also loved Smoke by Donald Westlake, 1995, The Mysterious Press
Freddie Noon, burglar, is accidentally turned invisible by two tobacco company doctors.

Page 13 - "I'll need your date of birth."
"Why?"
Peter looked at him. He sighed. He put down the pen and picked up the pistol and aimed it at Freddie's forehead. "Would you rather I know your date of death?" he asked.

38 - Mordon remarked their sexual proclivity without regard; he didn't dislike any human being more than any other human being.

63 - "Had a good enough night," Jack the Fourth wheezed. "Had a good enough shit this morning." His voice was like the wind in the upper reaches of a deconsecrated cathedral, possibly one where the nuns had all been raped and murdered and raped.

66 - "But you've got to factor in those damn animal-rights people, you know, they're much nastier than the human-rights people, human beings mean nothing to them."

69 - He was watching several children being burned alive in their tenement apartment on the local news (their mother had only left the place for a minute, to get milk, Cheerios, and crack).

73 - Short, heavyset, out of condition, with long lank gray hair and a deeply lined face the exact color of Egyptian mummies, Jersey Josh was not at the best of times easy to look at, and his best of times had been some decades ago.

87 - This place had rent-a-cops, three of them in brown uniforms and shoulder patches, with holsters containing walkie-talkies, and the seriously humorless faces of drunks who aren't drinking yet today.

137 - Mrs. Krutchfield, a buxom motherly woman rather beyond a certain age ...

272 - The initial proceedings took place in a Park Avenue church of so high and refined a tone their fax number was unlisted. Though of course Gentile, it was too genteel to admit to a specific denomination, and would certainly not have permitted itself to be named after any grubby sheet-wearing saint: The Church of Lenox Hill was good enough, thank you. A brownstone pile taking up half a really good Park Avenue block, surmounted by a few spires, it steered a delicate course between roman Catholic-cathedral ostentation and Methodist-chapel humility, managing to make itself and everyone connected with it seem utterly insincere from any angle.

308 - The body language alone was enough to set off seismographs in the neighborhood, if there were any. Mordon was watching two herbivores meet a carnivore on the herbivore's own ground, and the rolling of eyes and curling of lips and stamping of hooves was thunderous.

311 - Our goals are now in the area of genetic enhancement of tobacco safety. [He intended to abort all fetuses who would be harmed by smoking.]

356 - Much frolicking would take place in the pool, and frivolity here and there, and drinking generally. Dinner would be served, buffet-style, at eight, cleared at ten, and the staff gone away to their own country homes—mostly mobile—by eleven. A few of these stay-overs, to judge by the way they were knocking it back now, would be unconscious long before dinner, and a few of the party guests would find friends, or at the very least soft places to lie down, and would still be here in the morning. The summertime Friday parties at Robert and Martin's tended not to be over, not to be really over, until around seven Sunday evening, though Sunday afternoons did sometimes have about them something of the air of the roving bands of penitents in Europe during the plague, self-flagellating and doomed.

358 - Robert and Martin had been together forever, which was why they had the logo of entwined S's on the archway over the drive leading to their house. It was a family joke that Robert always answered the phone, "Skeat residence," while Martin always answered, "Snell residence," and it was also true that they had never declared themselves openly on the Street.

363 - "Pee-ter!" David cried, and waved his nondrink hand around to indicate the entire bright-eyed crowd. "We can't swear eleven people to secrecy!"
Martin, kindly, as ever, said, "David, you can when you think of the alternative."
David blinked at him. "Alternative? What alternative?"
"There is none," Martin said, and smiled in sympathy.

365 - ... and so Peter had to start from the very beginning, and explain what melanoma was, and what science was, and what research was, and even what tobacco public relations was, all before finally getting to Buffy and Muffy, which didn't even begin to get them to Freddie.

It is very tricky for a naked man to ride a bicycle.

389 - "Doctors!" Peg cried, curling her upper lip, a thing she rarely did because it didn't look good on her.

394 - The worst thing was knowing they'd never be invited back. ... and having to do the bidding of a monomaniac out of James Bond, who wanted to genetically alter the human race so he could sell cigarettes.

395 - But there was no hope for it. Even if the physical evidence hadn't been so extreme, there was the fact that the eleven people already present were absolutely bursting with the story, bubbling over with it, half-wanting to end the weekend now so they could go away and regale someone who hadn't been here. If gossip is the fuel of social interchange, this was rocket fuel, and no power on earth would keep it from going off.