Pinko Magazine Hedonism + Activism

He’s 22 and managed to get a $300 million contract to supply ammunition to Afghanistan. I guess I like bad boys. I wouldn’t mind Efraim Diveroli every other Saturday from 3-4 in the prison trailer.

Being gay is not a choice. It is something you are born with, or for the unfortunate souls such as myself, not born with. Lord knows I have tried to choose gaynees. Oh, how I’ve tried! Unfortunatley, on the great bell curve that is human sexuality, I am far closer to Gene Simmons than I am to Richard Simmons.

Perhaps this explains my frustration with Make Me a Supermodel contestants Ben and Ronnie for refusing to suck it up and be a couple. Unfortunatley “Bronnie” as they are now known, is only half gay. And not in the bi-sexual sense. Ronnie is gay. Ben… not so much.

What don’t they get here? Haven’t they seen Brokeback Mountain and then conveniently neglected to watch the ending? Don’t they understand the care free joy that is being a gay couple in America?

And furthermore, if two chiseled, spray-tanned male models can’t be gay for each other, what hope do flabby, pasty faux-mosexuals like me have?

In China, pandas are watching panda porn to try and get revved up to make babies:

Clearly, we now know that pandas are actually human male teenagers. The evidence:

1. Pandas are loners, and usually only bang during a three day mating season (homecoming weekend) so breeders are facilitating familiarization exercises to acquaint them with the opposite sex (also known as getting in a hot tub and playing truth or dare). In addition, males are taunted with apples to strengthen their lovemaking muscles, much as cheerleaders ran laps around the football field as the team did squats.

2. In Northern Thailand, a panda was put on a low-carb diet when breeders became concerned his lady would think he was too fat to mate. What fat guy got laid in high school?

3. When pandas are sexually interested, they exhibit the same behavior as when they have anxiety. Teenage boys = pandas.

4. Unexperienced pandas get a live how-to from vetarens when they seem unsure of where goes what and what to do when it gets there. “We arrange lovemaking between two excellent pandas in front of inexperienced pandas which have never had sex. It does work,”said an official at the Chengdu Panda Breeding and Research Centre. When I was 15, Anthony Ferrari brought over Hot N’ Heavy 5 to my house and said “Wanna do it?”

5. When pandas FINALLY get laid, it gets serious news coverage. Bobby Rossi, the football team water-boy bragged at practice that he and his girlfriend shared an intimate moment that involved penis, vagina and peanut butter-it was on the morning announcements.

Finally: Pandas are one of the most endangered animals on the planet; and these teenagers in Tennessee are stepping up to help.

Highlight #1: Since I work for a somewhat outspoken liberal magazine, sometimes we get hate mail. I once was left a graphic, racially-tinged, 6-minute message about what “Bill” in San Antonio wanted to do to one of our columnists. Another time someone called to tell me that if my magazine was so sure the NAFTA Superhighway didn’t exist, he hoped when it did “roll through the countryside” the bulldozers would go right though my parents house and kill them. They don’t live in the countryside, but point taken. This week, though, we got the absolute best email e-ver:

Sender: LUCIFER@HELL.COM
Name: Darrell Sparks
Subject: UR A DIRTY RECTUM LICKING COMMIE
U/R A DIRTY RECTUM LICKING COMMIE MAGGOT, BORN FROM KARL MARX’S ROTTING FECES. I’M DOWN HERE WITH LUCIFER WAITING FOR U AND WHEN U ARRRIVE, FUN, FUN, FUN.

Charming! Our circulation manager pointed out the good news: our copies seem to be arriving to Hell on time. I was surprised that hell has a website, or that Lucifer is so supportive of the particular sexual maneuver referred to in the message.

Highlight #2: I’d never received porn spam in my work email before, but the reason I didn’t mind is because the organization that emailed me has the most amazing logo in the history of logos. Attached to the email was this JPEG ad (featuring James Lipton? You tell me…) for Beartrapping.com, a site so fierce that it’s own logo is literally ripping right through it’s own advertisement. Rawr!

EDITORS NOTE: I’m told by a source at Media Matters that mean emailer Darrell Sparks sent a similar email to them, as well as to Markos of DailyKos.com. All his emails involve Marx, feces and hell.

The drama is heightened, of course, by the presence of a British news anchor:

That’s crazy shit. I still feel bad that the world is ending but I “laughed out loud” etc. when I read the first commenter: “That is completely false. Global warming is false. So are glaciers. So is ice. I get so angry when people spread false rumors about fake ice shelves!! Grrrrr!!”

A new poll finds that 28% of Hillary supporters and 19% of Obama supporters would vote for McCain in the general election if their candidate isn’t the nominee. Are you fucking kidding me? Has anyone read McCain’s fucking positions on the issues? My guess is no.

For some unknown reason people see John McCain as some kind of liberal maverick who is a hard sneeze away from being a total bra-burning commie pinko. I’m sure if he hadn’t been a POW, he probably would have been getting high with Arlo Guthrie at Alice’s Resturant, right? Hardly. The reality is that John McCain is a right wing hawk whose only liberal credentials are occasionally being a prick to fellow republicans (He’s always a prick!) and that he was once in a movie with boobies.

But “Wedding Crasher Republicans” beware! This man’s positions are far more right of center than his choice in acting jobs might indicate.

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From The Washington Post:

A chunk of Antarctic ice about seven times the size of Manhattan suddenly collapsed, putting an even larger portion of glacial ice at risk, scientists said yesterday … the event is a result of global warming.

Well fuck. That was quick. These things really test the limits our ability to care and really react. What do we do now? Vote for Barack Obama? (Yes, but …) Give money to this random organization fighting global warming? Or this one? Or this one?

[Scientists] had predicted in 1993 that the Wilkins shelf would collapse in 30 years. It collapsed in 15.

The point of Pinko was to be a little … fun and sometimes inspiring about how socially responsible living, etc. is awesome, but this one has me stumped looking for a solution or a silver lining. This is where I would call Al Gore, but he’s already in the article. “Since it’s not on live TV,” he said, “it doesn’t command as much attention as it should.”

ugh. throw me some hope, solutions, drinking invites or distractions in the comments.

6:50 PM, Monday. 4/5 subway platform at Atlantic Avenue. I just heard the worst music ever. It was electric guitar and it sounded like Steely Dan, but much worse, and it echoed. There were no words. Times like these challenge our political resolve, and raise the question of whether or not the city should be managing and legislating good taste.

There is yet another article, today in The Washington Post, about how hard it will be for black women to choose between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton because, you know, they have to vote for him because they’re black and for her because they’re women because that’s how democracy should be — monolithic — and everyone in any particular bloc needs to vote for whatever candidate is also from that bloc, and now black women are totally fucked because they can’t monolothically support one and only bloc. Will they kill themselves? Will they vote for Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney because she’s BOTH, and that’s the only answer? Clearly. You heard it here first. Cynthia McKinney in a landslide among black women in Philadelphia.

Or maybe … they will decide who to vote for based on the issues. Or maybe they’ll read up, listen up, study up, and make an informed decision. Nah. It has to be Cynthia.

Editor’s Note: ‘Commie Tots’ is a new series highlighting the products and trends for little subversives and their rabble-rousing parents. Up first: gDiapers.

We always try to be an environmentally conscious family. We recycle. We buy organic. We live in an apartment and believe that words like “lawn” and “car” should never be used in polite company. When we had our daughter, we wanted to avoid the waste associated with disposable diapers and use cloth diapers instead. This was a good idea in theory. Reality was a different matter.

For starters, three people in a one bedroom apartment can create a startling amount of laundry. This is especially true when one of them throws up on the sheets every night. (You’d be surprised which one! Or maybe not …) That being said, we still never could get around to doing our laundry. The idea of regularly washing cloth diapers (or more likely storing soiled diapers between laundry days) was a little more than we could handle. Ultimately we relented and ended up using chlorine-free diapers from Seventh Generation. The idea of cloth diapers was tabled indefinitely.

As our daughter got older, we became more and more overwhelmed by the amount of trash we where producing. Some days we would go through as many as ten disposable diapers. It was a ton of trash. It was chlorine-free, all natural trash, but it was still ending up in a plastic bag, in a landfill.

We needed a better solution. We wanted the reduced waste of a cloth diaper, but we could also legitamitley appreciate the ease of a disposable.

Enter … gDiapers.

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