Ok... I added a nifty translation thingie over on the side there... and soon, I promise to blog...

Ah.. I've been forgetting... I need to thank Jonno and Richard for their perfect birthday present of A Mighty Wind.

As for the rest of you... Wha' Happened??? :P

So... this summer, I will get my official gay card... I'll be seeing Madonna on her just announced tour... I was already planning a San Francisco vacation and it looks like she's gonna be there about the same time... and one of my best friends is a member of her fanclub and can get us presale tickets... so...

How incredibly lame... emoboy05 has been stealing an image from my friend PJ's site. He probably just learned an important lesson tho... if you're gonna steal an image, you don't wanna link it from the other person's server... cuz... he just might replace the image with hardcore gay porn...

It's nice that a self professed Xian whose likes include "going to church and praising the almighty one, and being the one who cares" has no problem with stealing someone else's bandwidth. I'm sure all of his little emo Xian friends are enjoying their new education into watersports images tho....

My dear friends at Running With Scissors have a new play starting tonight here in New Orleans. Everything they've done has been belly-achin' funny, so I'm sure that this won't be an exception.

U.S. cuts may limit local HIV services. Yet another reason to make sure that you get off your ass this year and do everything you can to remove Bush and his evil people from office this year...

Oh my... you simply MUST watch WONDERFALLS, Friday nights on Fox... last night's premiere was one of the funniest oddest shows I've seen in a really long time...

I expect Happy Birthday emails in my inbox today...

Jason West, the Mayor of New Paltz, NY was
charged with 19 criminal counts earlier this week for marrying gay couples. If you want want to support him, head over to origin comics and make a donation of five bucks or more. The site is run by Damon Hurd, a straight comic book writer who's a resident of New Paltz. He'll even give you one of his comics for making a donation.

Ok... to try to get you Poppy people to come back again... the moment in a Poppy story that relates to me is in "A Season in Heck", which is in The Devil You Know. Here's what actually happened to me the first time I drank absinthe. A character in the story related a similar instance in his past...

Yikes... a big welcome to the sudden influx of visitors that have suddenly appeared at my doorstep on their way out of Poppy's journal...

Dig through my archives... there's a good story or two in there somewhere...

And, if you're cute and gay, I'm single! Drop me a line... or buy me a birthday present from my Wish List... cuz my birthday's Tuesday. *wink*

Ok... so I can tell now... my cool invitation was to go to dinner at my favorite New Orleans restaurant, Marisol, with Poppy Z, another friend of hers and a writer for Entertainment Weekly, who was in town doing an article on her for an upcoming issue. I've been dying to eat there recently, but I've been way too broke, so the invitation to dine on someone else's expense account was splendid.

I was a bit nervous going into the dinner, cuz I'm not generally big on social situations where I don't know people very well and I was going to be dining with two people I didn't know and another who I've had a very casual friendship with (more on that in a bit). But, it turned out great. Poppy did an excellent job of putting together a good party for conversation. Troy, the reporter, was a handsome shy intellectual New Yorker and he reports on books, so we had ready built conversation. And Laura, Poppy's other friend, was a quintessential New Orleans girl who I loved from the second I met her.

So, dinner basically rocked along. We all ate rather hedonistic fare... well, I did anyway... You can read what everyone had over at Poppy's journal. My meal consisted of foie gras en bocal for an appetizer and sesame crusted hebi on red cooked porkbelly and haricots vert (sp?) with a citrus sauce. Poppy blogged that it was a soy-sesame sauce... but I'm pretty sure I remember it being citrus... The foie gras was insanely decadent, flavored with black truffles and cognac, with coarse sea salt and fresh cracked black pepper. We also were served oysters on the half shell, but I don't remember exactly what was special about them... but they were quite special.. oh yeah... and the amuse bouche had really yummy caviar in it...

After dinner, we headed down the street to the Spotted Cat for a while for more drinks and jazz. It was just the right amount of crowded with a pretty eclectic crowd. One of my favorite parts of the night was a brief conversation I had with an elderly gent who turned out to be the former curator of the Jazz Museum. Poppy and Troy headed out after a bit, due to his early flight today, but Laura and I stayed and yakked it up for quite a bit. We totally bonded and discovered we knew a couple of people in common. She owns a groovy little shop in the Quarter called Little Shop of Fantasy that sells masks and such.

Anyways, I'm totally indebted to Poppy for a great nite. And a nice upshot from the evening is that I'm finally comfortable referring to her as my friend. I've known her to varying degrees for several years now and it's been a strange progression from fan to internet interaction to a professional relationship. We've communicated and run into each other for quite a while. A moment from my life turned into a minor event in one of her short stories. She gave me her phone number a couple of years ago. She let me read her new novel months before it was published. But, when her name has come up and anyone has asked me, "oh... you're friends with her?", I've always replied, "well, um... sort of."

Fame is an odd beast. I can't quite imagine what it must be to have it. But it sure must complicate things sometimes.

Anyways, I think last nite I finally passed a point where I don't think of this adorable goofy little woman as "Poppy Z. Brite" anymore... now she's Poppy. And yes, damn it, she's my friend. Also, she doesn't know it yet, but Laura and I have plotted more nights of drinking with her in the near future...

Ugh... I'm so weirded out about posting this on some level even... that 'fame' thing...

Well, this was a shock. I downloaded the first episode of Kingdom Hospital and just started watching it. I dunno if it's gonna be good or not, but they get HUGE points for using Ivy for their theme...

I've been having a complete nervous breakdown the last couple of days because I haven't been able to access Suprnova.org to download new torrents. I am SUCH a geek, b/c downloading is how I watch tv now.

Anyways, I browsed their forums this morning and discovered that the site has moved to a new IP address and the DNS hasn't updated yet. (God... I am a geek...) So, if like me, you're hungry for new torrents... use SuprNova.org to get them...

HURRAH!

I'll admit that I never thought much of Firefly, when it originally aired on Fox. But, that was mainly because the network stupidly interfered with the show's creators and showed the episodes out of order. Based on my faith on Joss Whedon's other work, I picked up the DVD set right after Christmas and I found a much more complex show than I expected.

The idea of a western in space isn't new and sounds a little odd, but when you think about it, the early years of space colonization will probably very much be like the old West. It will after all be a new frontier.

Anyways, the rumors have been flying for a while and now's it definite! There's gonna be a movie.

Behold the power of the DVD set. Firefly gets a movie. Family Guy gets new life. Life is good.

I never blogged Mardi Gras... um, ok...

Drinking
Drugs
Sex
Parades
Parties
Sex
Jason from L.A.
Jonno
More Parades
Lorna, my upstairs neighbor
did i mention Sex?
More drinking...
Ex-Sex

Speaking of books... Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton is out in the US tomorrow! I haven't read it yet, never got around to buying the UK version, but the reviews on it have been splendidly positive. I firmly utterly totally completely believe current space opera is best currently written by Brits. I expect this book to further make my case.

Shit... which means I need to get to reading on Codex...

I'm a little over 50 pages into Codex by Lev Grossman and I'm quite involved. There's a certain type of book that's few and far between... literary thrillers involving arcane texts, mysterious messengers and an immersion into diabolical goings-on that spin the main characters down mad pathways.

Past examples would be Eight by Katherine Neville, Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco and The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Dan Brown attempts to write these types of books, but despite his best efforts and recent popularity, doesn't quite succeed.

Anyways, I'm really digging Codex so far. I'll let ya know how it turns out...