The great Scottish comic Stanley Baxter gives us his take on take away (take out in the US).
It’s pure gay camp full of sexual double entendres. “Ice Cream, All it takes is a lick,” he is determined to lose his cherry in the ice cream skit. Just for the record, Baxter is not gay but he sure can pull it off.
This choice of tonight’s camp is, of course, tied to today’s report on obesity in the United States.
Despite wide-ranging efforts to encourage Americans to lose weight, the number of U.S. adults who are obese increased almost 2 percent between 2005 and 2007, a new report found.
In 2007, 25.6 percent of adults reported being obese, compared to 23.9 percent in 2005, according to the finding in the July 18 issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’sMorbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
“The epidemic of adult obesity continues to rise in the United States, indicating that we need to step up our efforts at the national, state and local levels,” Dr. William Dietz, director of CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, said in a news release. “We need to encourage people to eat more fruits and vegetables, engage in more physical activity and reduce the consumption of high-calorie foods and sugar-sweetened beverages in order to maintain a healthy weight.”
The percentage of adults who are obese varies by state and region, according to the report. For example, in Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee, 30 percent of the residents reported being obese, compared with 18.7 percent in Colorado, which had the lowest prevalence of obesity.
Obesity was most prevalent in the South, with 27 percent of residents classified as obese. In the Midwest, the number was 25.3 percent; in the Northeast, 23.3 percent; and in the West, 22.1 percent, according to the report.
Some like it hot, but I don’t and it’s hotter than hell in San Francisco and so I thought these clips from one of my favourite movies, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot were perfect for gay camp on a hot Friday night. My favourite scene:
“Evolutionary biologists claim that sociality is what has made humans such a successful species. We are masters at what anthropologists and others call “social intelligence.” We recognize and keep track of hundreds of relationships, and we easily distinguish between enemies and friends.
More important, we run our lives by social calculation. A favor is mentally recorded and paid back, sometimes many years later. Likewise, insults are marked down on the mental score card in indelible ink. And we are constantly bickering and making up, even with people we love.
Sarcasm, then, is a verbal hammer that connects people in both a negative and positive way. We know that sense of humor is important to relationships; if someone doesn’t get your jokes, they aren’t likely to be your friend (or at least that’s my bottom line about friendship). Sarcasm is simply humor’s dark side, and it would be just as disconcerting if a friend didn’t get your snide remarks.
It’s also easy to imagine how sarcasm might be selected over time as evolutionarily crucial. Imagine two ancient humans running across the savannah with a hungry lion in pursuit. One guy says to the other, “Are we having fun yet?” and the other just looks blank and stops to figure out what in the world his pal meant by that remark. End of friendship, end of one guy’s contribution to the future of the human gene pool.”
So it’s more about the people who “get it”, who might then become part of one’s in-group versus the people who don’t, those who remain outside, the out-group. The stronger one’s in-group, of course, the stronger the evolutionary advantage as one can activate these links for survival.
Have you been swept up by Obamamania, or do you think he’s a false prophet? Perhaps you’re still struggling to make up your mind. Take this quiz and we’ll gauge your level of support for the Democratic presidential frontrunner.
Your score is 2 on a scale of 1 to 10. You’d never vote for Barack Obama. You think he’s an inexperienced, incompetent neophyte who’s never accomplished anything notable — with the possible exception of making a celebrity out of his nutty, America-bashing pastor, Jeremiah Wright. He has made you want to bitterly cling to your guns and/or religion, praying he doesn’t become president, but preparing for the worst.
Frankly, I’m disappointed. I thought I would have scored lower.
By The Fault turns two months old today and along the way we have made many new friends. The readership is now more than double from where it was a month ago. I am still trying to work a few kinks here and there. More than a few readers have had difficulty registering and providing comments. My understanding is that it is a Word Press issue and that an update will soon resolve the problem. However, you can email me and I’ll add you to the list of registered users.
I also want to thank Norm Jenson of OneGoodMove for his invaluable help in getting this blog started. Could not have done it without his help and guidance.
While the readership of By The Fault remains largely an American audience, the international audience is growing. I am amazed from where readers log on from. Other the past month, there have been visitors from Syria, Pakistan’s Northwest Territories, American Samoa, Moldova, the Turks and Caicos and Barbados. I have added two widgets that track visitors on a world map. One records the visitors in the past 24 hours and the other measures the density from where visitors are from. There’s also a widget on the price of gas in the United States that tracks in real time the average price of gas in the US.
I am now also contributing to No Quarter USA, Larry Johnson’s blog, on Obama and foreign policy mostly but a few other sundry topics. I had expected the traffic to die down with Senator Clinton’s departure from active campaigning but the opposite has happened. I get the feeling that there many disgruntled and disaffected Democrats out there. If so, consider yourself at home. Where there is a will, there’s a way. And this blog is part of a larger coalition of bloggers that take exception to the choice of Barack Obama as the Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. Moreover, we believe that some of the antics of the Democratic Party such as moving the DNC to Chicago and removing Debra Bartoshevich as a delegate from Wisconsin simply because she cannot in good conscience support Obama in the Fall represent a threat to long-term survival of the Democratic Party. They are digging their own grave. It’s also hypocritical for I do not see a movement by Senator Reid to kick Senator Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic caucus in the Senate. You might want to remind the DNC of that fact this week.
Kick up your heels and take a quick break. This week’s camp from the musical, Oliver! I’d Do Anything. And I’d do anything for Hilllary, except vote for Barack Obama, so perhaps it’s I’d do almost anything, anything for Hillary.
Fagin, played by Ron Moody, prancing and twirling at the end of this scene is priceless. The musical is by Lionel Bart and it’s a camp classic. Lionel Bart was born in East London in 1930, the youngest of seven children. His parents were Galician Jews who escaped the pogroms in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and split between Poland and the Ukraine. His real name was Lionel Begleiter. Amazingly, Lionel Bart never learned to read nor write musical notation. Oliver! was by far his biggest hit and at one point, it was earning Bart £16 a minute! He never married and was presumed to be gay though he was at one point romantically linked to Judy Garland, a gay match made in heaven.
I have often wondered why gay men just adore musicals. I think it affords us the opportunity to just be silly in public, something we can’t normally do. Oliver! is by far my favourite musical. The camp factor is high. I guess we also just love to tap our toes, and not just at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
