Category: edward snowden

Male Full Frontals on Reddit; Channing Tatum and Penis Enlargement Pills; The Pope, Again: Quotations Within Quotations

Male Full Frontals on Reddit

According to this article, men are now posting their full frontal nude photos on Reddit in sort of a retaliation to the government for snooping around on social media. This information comes from Edward Snowden in an interview with John Oliver.

“The good news is that there’s no program named the ‘dick pic’ program,” Snowden said. “The bad news… they are still collecting everybody’s information, including your dick pics.”

(Nosy bitches!)

“If you have your email somewhere like Gmail hosted on a server overseas or transferred overseas or anytime it crosses outside the borders of the United States, your junk ends up in the database,” he continued.

It’s kind of scary when you think about it, and makes you long for the good old days of ten years ago when all we had to worry about was using up our weekend minutes.


You can read the rest here. There’s a link to Reddit where over 100 guys have posted their erect penises. But there’s no mention of Snowden showing his erection.

Channing Tatum and Penis Enlargement Pills

I’m sure this is sarcasm.

Channing Tatum spoke about the sequel to Magic Mike and he mentioned the cast was taking penis enlargement pills, in an offhanded way…no pun intended.

No plot. Just a bunch of naked dudes sitting around doing dude stuff. We read all the message boards, and people were like, ‘Less story. Less plot. Just dudes’ things.’ And we listened to that. Basically, we all were taking penis-enlargement pills since the last one, so we weren’t worried about what temperature the room was when we came out to do our dances. That’s what XXL means.

Unfortunately, I think some people in the comments missed the sarcasm. 

You can read it all here.  

The Pope, Again

It’s getting harder and harder to take this Pope seriously when it comes to anything LGBT related. Now they’re saying he’s gone silent on the matter of an openly gay man, Laurent Stefanini, becoming the French Ambassador to the Vatican. 

Stefanini was nominated in early January, and credentials are typically accepted within six weeks. Now some thirteen weeks later, Francis has yet to accept him. The Vatican does not expressly deny credentials, so the silence is being interpreted as a rejection.

The rest is here.

More mixed messages from the Pope.  I might not agree with Mike Huckabee, but at least I know where he stands.

Quotations Within Quotations

I’m usually the first to agree that common usage in fiction is fine as long as you don’t push things too far. The grammar police gets on my nerves all the time. However, there are a few set rules that aren’t there for the grammar police alone. These basic rules of writing a novel (and reading a novel) are there so people don’t get confused.

The other night while scrolling through Facebook I saw a self-published author promoting her new romance novel. It was basically what you would expect, however, as I read a sample from the book I didn’t “get” it at first. And that’s because this author screwed up the quotations within the quotations. In other words, in dialogue when a character is speaking it’s in quotes. That’s a given. But when the character who is speaking quotes something, or someone, you have to show this to the reader. 

Here’s a link that makes it about as simple as it gets. 

Almost all of us have found ourselves confused with double and single quotation marks. When do we use single quotation marks? Where does the punctuation go with single quotation marks? With just a few rules and examples, you will feel surer about your decisions.

Rule: Use single quotation marks inside double quotation marks when you have a quotation within a quotation.

Example: Bobbi told me, “Delia said, ‘This will never work.’ ”

It’s a mistake that can be avoided.





RIP Maya Angelou; Edward Snowden Interview; Gay Batman Interpretation

RIP Maya Angelou

When I reviewed Maya Angelou’s most recent book in April of 2013, Mom & Me & Mom, I thought we still had more time with her. She still had so much to say. Unfortunately, Angelou passed away at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina today. (I did a check in several places and I don’t think this is an Internet hoax.)

Angelou will be remembered for many great things because she did many great things. But for most I think her literary works will live on forever. I have a short list of books I have read in my lifetime and will continue to re-read over and over again, and her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is at the top of that short list.

She gained acclaim for her first book, her autobiography “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” making her one of the first African-American women to write a best-seller. More Here.

The intensity of that book is impossible to describe. Unless you actually read it you’ll never fully understand what I’m talking about.

CNN has listed most of her accomplishments in an abbreviated form.

In 1958, Angelou become a part of the Harlem Writers Guild in New York and also played a queen in “The Blacks,” an off-Broadway production by French dramatist Jean Genet.
 
Affectionately referred to as Dr. Angelou, the professor never went to college. She has more than 30 honorary degrees and taught American studies for years at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.
 
“I created myself,” she has said. “I have taught myself so much.”
 
Even though I was already a dedicated reader of Angelou’s work, I gained a whole new respect for her in 2008 during the Democratic primary when she offered her support to Hillary Clinton instead of Barack Obama. This was at a time when everyone began to endorse Obama and it seemed like what all the cool kids on the proverbial block were doing. I admired Angelou’s honesty and tenacity. And it wasn’t just because I was supporting Hillary Clinton myself in that hugely contentious race. I liked what Angelou said about why she was supporting Clinton.
 
This article dates back to 2008.
 

She is supporting Clinton despite her close friendship with television personality and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey, a prominent backer of rival Democrat Barack Obama, the first black presidential hopeful with a real chance of reaching the White House.

Angelou is steadfast in her loyalty to Clinton. She said recently: ‘I made up my mind 15 years ago that if she ever ran for office I’d be on her wagon. My only difficulty with Senator Obama is that I believe in going out with who I went in with.’

 
Maya Angelou left a long list of inspiring quotes. This is one of my favorites.
 
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/mayaangelo383371.html#QworOkrGcwpKbim1.99
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/mayaangelo383371.html#QworOkrGcwpKbim1.99
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/mayaangelo383371.html#QworOkrGcwpKbim1.99
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
 
Here’s an article The Wall Street Journal did on Angelou’s personal life in her later years, including a few photos of where she lived. This is what she said when she moved to North Carolina:
 
 “I thought I was going to buy a nice little house,” she says. “I’d wrap it around me in a poetic way, and I’d live a poetic existence. But then I thought, ‘Wait a minute. If I moved from a 10-room house [in California] and into a three- or four-room house, then what am I telling myself? That I’ve been reduced?’ I couldn’t do that.”
 
Now that’s the kind of logic I understand, especially when Tony talks about “scaling back.” Maya Angelou always seemed to be moving forward, not backward.
 
Edward Snowden Interview
 
Edward Snowden is talking now in the first interview he’s done with a US TV network. One of the things he’s saying is that he was a trained spy.
 
EDWARD SNOWDEN: “I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover overseas – pretending to work in a job that I’m not.” (Via NBC)


Evidently, NBC has spent months working on this interview in secret. The full one hour interview airs tonight on NBC.

You can read more here.

Gay Batman Interpretation

Batman is turning 75 years old and there’s a highly entertaining gay interpretation out to celebrate what many have considered the gayest superhero of all time.

The ‘gay’ interpretation goes all the way back to 1954, when a psychiatrist claimed that the comic books were ‘homosexual fantasies’.

 The 1995 feature film Batman Forever, and especially its 1997 sequel Batman & Robin, both helmed by openly gay director Joel Schumacher, attracted attention for the homoerotic innuendos.

There is a list of comic photos and examples, and as far as I know all are real and this isn’t actually a parody.

More here.

They’re all funny, but I like this one the most.

Robin talking to Batman:

This is the first chance we’ve had to finish cataloguing these trophies since you returned! Gosh, Batman — remember this leather thong?  It still has your teeth marks in it!

I wonder how Ben Affleck feels about this. Here’s an interesting piece titled, Ben Affleck’s Batman is so sad, it’s sad.

With the recent photo release of the new Batsuit and Batmobile, a superhero fan frenzy has exploded across the web in anticipation of the new Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice film. But extreme fans, like those of the Dave & Buster’s Virginia Beach Instagram page (@dnbvabeach), noticed that Batman was looking a little sad. We think he was just having a bad day.

With the link above you can check out some photos that I think are, indeed, parody. I just don’t get what they all have against Ben playing Batman.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Edward Snowden, Internet Sex Symbols, Jeffrey Toobin

Though I haven’t been following the story of Edward Snowden, former CIA employee, and I probably won’t because I’m tired of politics altogether at this point unless it involves LGBT issues or equality, I did think this article about Snowden becoming an overnight sex symbol was interesting.

My first thought when I saw Snowden’s photo on one of those Huff Po teasers on AOL was that he certainly wasn’t bad looking at all.

Then I read this:

“I know this is far beyond the point and making light of the situation, but Edward Snowden can blow my whistle,” one particularly ribald Twitter user proclaimed. (#ifyouknowwhatimean)

I don’t mean to make light of the situation either. I do understand the magnitude of it. But the man is nice-looking, and some are calling him a hero and others are calling him a traitor. Either way he can’t lose, because the only thing we love more than a hero is a notorious bad boy.

And being smart doesn’t hurt either.

Of course, it’s not just Snowden’s chiseled features that have the Internet lusting after him as though he were Mick Jagger. After listening to Snowden wax eloquent about a government granting itself “power it is not entitled to” and why that inspires people like himself “to go further than they are allowed to,” one Twitter user elevated her opinion of him from hot to “super hot” and “y’know, righteous and intelligent.” Clearly, the latter figures largely into his “super hot” status.

It’s also interesting to note that Jeffrey Toobin, of CNN and The New Yorker, isn’t a huge fan of Snowden. He thinks he’s a traitor, which you can read more about here.

But what many don’t know is that Toobin is a senior legal analyst at CNN and he’s been involved in a few scandals that made headlines of his own, which you can read about here in a piece dated from 2010.

One of the media elite’s most whispered-about scandals went public Wednesday when married CNN correspondent Jeffrey Toobin squared off with a woman who says he’s the father of her baby.
My only comment on this is that Jeffrey Toobin is one of the reasons I haven’t watched anything on CNN since the 2008 Democratic primaries (I’m a registered Democrat). And if you do a simple search and check out the ratings at CNN, you’ll see that I’m not the only one who’s stopped watching.

The other morning I was watching a segment on TV on my local news station where a big black bear was spotted in a cookie cutter housing development not far from where I live, in Buckingham, PA. The frantic mom who spotted the bear playing on her kids’ swings out back ran to close the gate of a four feet tall fence that surrounded her property so she could contain the bear until the authorities came. And then, as an added bonus, the rest of the cul-de-sac came out to watch the bear in her backyard on the swings as if they were at the public zoo. Some walked right up to the fence. And when the bear jumped the short fence that probably couldn’t even contain a large dog, they all ran screaming to their houses in shock. The local news never mentioned that part. They just reported the story with great big smiles. So you never have to ask why.

Photo here