I hope you all had a happy and joyful holiday season and didn’t spend too much time soaking up the alcohol on New Year’s Eve.

2012 is going to be a big year with the presidential election campaign moving in full force, the Iowa caucuses now a couple of days behind us and the New Hampshire primary a few days in front of us.

Also this year we are supposed to experience once version of the apocalypse or another depending on what superstitions and myths you subscribe to. Personally I expect that I’ll be filling out a 2012 tax return come this time 2013 and going about my daily routine as normal.

Come August 13th of 2012 I will turn the big 4-0. I haven’t made any real plans yet for my birthday, it is some 8 months away right now; but I’ll most likely take my usual week of vacation from work. Other than that, who knows at this point.

HT: Anne Rice

Sometimes life throws you curve balls to test you, and sometimes you get a nice even clean pitch that you just can’t pass up. Back in late 2001 I closed The Chaos Bazaar, a game shop that I had been running for a couple of years in partnership with an old friend from high school. At the time I was working a full time job and running the shop and the two things just didn’t mesh very well together. Running a game shop however was a dream I just couldn’t let go.

Back in April of this year someone beat me to it when Multiverse Comics amp; Games opened on the square here in Grinnell. Over the past several months I have gotten to know the owner, Kyle, very well and have become a fairly permanent fixture at the store.

About a month ago Kyle, Myself, and another friend, Alex, began discussing he possibility of making the store a three person partnership. Today I’m happy to announce that last week it became official. We have a great selection of comics and games. We run Magic the Gathering and Yu-gi-oh tournaments weekly on Friday and Saturdays respectively. On Wednesday nights you can find me running D&D Encounters and on Thursdays we run Lair Assault for those that love the thrill of some serious hack and slash D&D. We have space to play and great selection of demo games available.

So if you happen to be in the Grinnell Iowa area stop in and check us out.
815 1/2 5th Avenue, Grinnell, IA 50112
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According to “Pastor” Mark Driscoll, writing in a booklet called “Porn-again Christian”, all men need to stop masturbating because it’s a form of homosexuality.

First, masturbation can be a form of homosexuality because it is a sexual act that does not involve a woman. If a man were to masturbate while engaged in other forms of sexual intimacy with his wife then he would not be doing so in a homosexual way. However, any man who does so without his wife in the room is bordering on homosexual activity, particularly if he’s watching himself in a mirror and being turned on by his own male body.

Now, just like almost every post-pubescent male on the planet I occasionally have a date with Rosie Palm. She’s Sweat, gentle, knows exactly what it takes to make me feel good, and doesn’t bitch about why I haven’t finished putting together the shelves in the living room or cleaned out all the junk under the deck that’s been there since 2003. She’s good to me and keeps me happy.

Often when I see remarks such as those of this “Pastor” the first thing that comes to my mind is that he must be feeling guilty about something. My advise to Mr. Driscoll is to get some lotion to sooth the motion and stop beating yourself up over something that’s as natural as waking up in the morning with that tent pole under the covers.

The end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is quickly approaching. On September 20th the repeal and certification process officially is complete and the sexuality that a person is born will no longer be grounds for discharge. As we approach this historic day that marks the end of seventeen years of institutionalized discrimination former and active duty service members are telling their stories of how they made it through and what it was like to endure.

GQ magazine has collected some of these stories and presents them here.

Like the story of Eric Alva, the first American injured in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

When Alva signed up, before "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," he had to lie on his paperwork. "I knew I was lying," he says. "But I loved what I did, I loved my job, and I didn’t want to tell anyone. I said, ‘It’s going to be my secret.’ I knew I was not going to be happy in a way, but I knew this was what I wanted." In 2003 he was deployed to the Middle East, and on March 21 he crossed the border from Kuwait. His unit was part of a huge convoy that stopped outside Basra. Alva got out of his Humvee and went to fetch something from the back of the vehicle. "That’s when I triggered the IED. I was awake, my hearing was sort of gone. My hand was covered in blood and part of my index finger was gone. The chaplain was holding my head and I was telling him I didn’t want to die. I was taken off a helicopter in Kuwait—it was estimated that I was only in Iraq about three hours—and carried into surgery. I woke up later and when I looked down I saw that the right side of my sheet was flat. I cried myself asleep, only to wake up hours later and see that it’s true: My leg is gone."

DADT not only affected the lives of those who risked their lives on the battlefield. It also took a toll on those they loved.

"The relationship lasted for about four years, but I always felt like I was disrespecting him, to have to pretend he didn’t exist when I went to work. When I got deployed, he was there with my family when I left. It kind of sucked—to shake his hand and a little pat on the back and ‘I’ll see you when I see you’ kind of thing. And when you’re getting ready to come back, the spouses were getting classes—here’s how you welcome your Marine back into the family—and my boyfriend didn’t get any of that. I had a really hard time adjusting to being home. We tried to make it work for a year but he was getting more and more paranoid about people finding out about us. It killed me that he felt that way because of me. I don’t think we ever really had a chance, ultimately."

For some DADT became the weapon used by haters.

The harassment grew worse. Of a number of escalating events—Rocha was also force-fed dog food and locked into a shit-filled dog kennel—the most abusive and explicitly homophobic was when he was ordered by his commander to act in a dog-training scenario, repeated over and over so that every dog in the unit could be run through it. "The scenarios were supposed to be relevant to what the dogs or the handlers would experience. Like a domestic dispute, or an armed individual who has been spotted on the base, or someone strapped with explosives. This day he chose that the scenario would be that I would be getting caught giving another service member a blow job and, once the dogs came in, I was supposed to jump up from having been in between this guy’s legs. He would coach as to how exactly he wanted it played out, which was the sickest part of it." Rocha says he had to act this out between half a dozen and a dozen times, about fifteen to twenty minutes each time. As they repeated it, his commander ordered Rocha to make the scenario more extreme. "He wanted me to be very queer and flamboyant. He wanted me to pretend like there was stuff on my face. Loving it so much that each scenario was gayer and more disgusting—the introduction of fake semen, that I would have to wipe my face, or that I would have to make slurping noises. The level of humiliation I experienced that day, that’s when I knew I wasn’t safe in the military."

I highly recommend heading over there and reading more http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201109/dont-ask-dont-tell-gay-soldiers-military#ixzz1WAXDJMrl

photo credit: DVIDSHUB