Perhaps in an effort to balance more liberal political comic strips the Chicago Tribune has added a conservative one, Prickly City, but on 7/21 P.C. got just plain nasty, conflating gay marriage with bestiality and pedophilia—it has a coyote saying it can marry a little girl because the Massachusetts Supreme Court said they could.
‘Latest Vatican Scandal of the Month’ file: the Chicago Tribune (7/15) reports the Catholic Church flustering around as if saying ‘O my! O my!’ about the Viennese seminarian orgy and porn photos circulating in European magazines. That particular seminary’s bishop, Kurt Krenn, says it’s all a ‘schoolboy prank,’ all 40,000 pix of seminarians (all male) engaging in sex games.
From the ‘Finally Got It Right’ file, The NY Times (7/28) reviews a new bio, Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of ‘The Secret Garden’ by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. Burnett, the Victorian equivalent of J.K. Rowling, also wrote A Little Princess, Little Lord Fauntleroy and some 50 other books. She had several unhappy marriages but then achieved happiness in a ‘romantic friendship’ with a much younger woman, Elizabeth Garver Jordan, an editor of Harper’s Bazaar.
A NY Times (7/29) reviewer of the hip-hop conglomerate D12 had a bit of fun with the group’s misogyny. D12, which Eminem is sometimes part of, sang the usual things about slapping women around but saved their more passionate words for other guys: ‘How come we don’t even talk no more, and you don’t even call no more/ we don’t barely keep in touch at all, and I don’t even feel the same love when we hug no more.’ (Words by Slim Shady himself.) Manly love indeed.
The Chicago Trib (7/29) reprinted a NY Times article of 7/21 about the difficult life of straight bachelors in Alaska (not enough women) but the Trib left out the Times’ addition to the guys’ problems: a fair number of the women who are there, are lesbians.
Steve Johnson, a columnist for the Chicago Trib (7/28), writes of his confusion about the metrosexual issue. If, he writes, one is somewhat careful of one’s appearance and is occasionally called the ‘M’ word is there ‘… a slipperly slope from avowed metrosexuality to being led around in a dog collar at the Mr. International Leather Contest’?