I Cheated In Argentina

TransGriot Note: Y'all knew I couldn't resist whacking Republican hypocrite Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) with a song rewrite. This situation just practically begs for me to do it, so here goes. Enjoy it while Donna Summer sings the original lyrics.

I Cheated In Argentina
(Sung to the tune of 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina'



It won't be easy, you know it's strange
When I explain to South Carolina how I feel
That what I did was massively dumb

You won't believe me
Because I lied to you
You thought I went missing
But I went to be with my boo

I let it happen, I needed a change
This session wasn't particularly fun
I had to take the stimulus money and I'm bummed

So I needed a break
Running around on the Appalachian Trail
But was headed to the airport for fun
Didn't mean to scare everybody and never expected it to

(Chorus)
I cheated in Argentina
The truth is I up and left you
Flew to Buenos Aires
Straight to my mistress
Didn't keep my promise
Wife keeps her distance

And as for fortune, and as for love
I never invited them in
Though it's apparent to the world I want her skin

My affair was confusing
It's not the solution it promised to be
While my family was here all the time
I love you and hope you still love me

I cheated in Argentina
The truth is I up and left you
Flew to Buenos Aires
Straight to my mistress
Didn't keep my promise
Wife keeps her distance

Have I said too much?
There's nothing more I can think of to say to you.
But all you have to do is look at me to know
That every word is true

I cheated in Argentina
The truth is I up and left you
Flew to Buenos Aires
Straight to my mistress
Didn't keep my promise
Wife keeps her distance

I cheated in Argentina
The truth is I up and left you
Flew to Buenos Aires
Straight to my mistress
Didn't keep my promise
Wife keeps her distance

I cheated in Argentina

Whacked By Ike

This post is coming to you live from the Louisville Public Library. As you may have heard by now many of us in Da Ville, including the TransGriot haven't had power in our homes since Sunday.

The branch library here in my Crescent Hill hood just got its power back yesterday afternoon while I was at work.

Anyway, outside of waiting for the power to be hooked up at the crib, doing okay.

Saturday afternoon I did get in contact with my mom and sis in H-town and got the 411 on how they and my family members were doing. Outside of some minor damage to their various houses and dealing with no electricity, they were all doing okay. I advised Mom that we were going to get hit by the remnants of Ike during our phone conversation.

Boy did we ever.

Sunday morning I was jarred out of bed by the rattling of the storm windows a little after 11 AM EDT. I found out later those winds were gusting at up to 80-90 MPH, and a few minutes later the power was out in the house.

When the storm died down two hours later, Dawn and I took a quick look around the hood to discover that several neighbors had trees toppled either onto their homes or onto power lines. Truckers having the misfortune of driving through the area on I-64 or I-65 had their trucks blown over, and fallen tree and broken power lines played havoc with travel throughout the city.

I was also fortunate I listened to my instincts and filled up the car Saturday, since finding a gas station around here with power and without long lines attached to it has been a Sarah Palin. We've also been fortunate that the last two nights not only have been cool, we've had a full moon to provide nocturnal illumination as well.

The prognosis for us getting power back has been a week to two weeks. Ironically LG&E sent some crews to Houston to help with power restoration efforts there, and those units had to be recalled due to the situation we have here in the Ohio Valley. The areas surrounding Louisville also got whacked pretty hard by a disintegrating Ike's winds as well, and the help we normally would have gotten from nearby power companies isn't forthcoming because they're dealing with their own drama.

Even though I'm mildly pissed I lost my half gallon of Blue Bell I just bought, I'm counting my abundant blessings. Besides, it's on sale this week anyway.

My childhood home once again survived a Category 3 hurricane with minimal damage. My family members are well and doing fine. The house up here had a piece of a shingle loosened and has no other damage. We're doing okay outside of waiting for power to be hooked back up.

So yeah, it could have been a lot worse, but I'm surviving and thriving.

Clocks ticking on my time for this computer, so gotta wrap it up and check my e-mail. Got a long line of peeps behind me waiting for this computer to pop open as well.

My Podcast With Ethan Is Online

Last Sunday I sat down with Ethan St. Pierre and talked about a few issues in the transgender community on his podcast. He shot me an e-mail Friday informing me that the podcast is now online and up at TransFM and podomatic.com

If you wish to hear the TransGriot pontificating on a few issues, click on this link to listen to the show.

It can also be accessed by going to the TransFM website, click on my name and hear the show that way as well.

But since I already did the heavy Net lifting for you, just check it out.

Fracking Gas Prices!

I got paid Friday, so it was time to bite the bullet and pay for a fill up of my gas tank.

Ever since the prices started spiraling up over the $3 a gallon mark my strategy to hold the costs down is to completely fill my tank up and not allow my car to get below 3/4 of a tank. That way I can put $5 to $10 in it and still keep my tank full while holding down my gas costs. I live only 15 minutes away from my job in downtown Louisville, so I don't have a long gas-guzzling drive from the 'burbs. The three consecutive 13 hour shifts I work allow me to cut my commuting days in the car down from five to three.

But since my cash was tight after the trip to Western Massachusetts last week, I basically had to drive on that tank for my work week. The last time I had to buy a full fill up I paid $3.35 a gallon for it. When I filled up Saturday it cost me $4.15 a gallon to fill up my Volvo's gas tank.

So yeah, I was pissed. But you gotta have it, so I pumped the gas and griped.

What I have done to cut down my gas consumption is make fewer trips. Fortunately the neighborhood I live in has a lot of things in walking distance of the house. Anything that's not in walking distance, I try to bundle the errands into one trip and do it in a logical, systematic fashion.

For example, I have a mall a few miles down the road from me. I pass my bank, cheaper gas, several strip shopping centers, a CVS and a Walgreen's and a few fast food places along the way. So if I to go to the bank, buy gas and grab something from Walgreen's I do it in one trip and not multiple ones. If I have time on my hands I'll ride a TARC bus since I do have one route that passes in front of my house and another one two blocks up the street that goes to Mall St. Matthews, Oxmoor Center and down Shelbyville Rd.

I'm hanging on for a while to my 1991 Volvo since I get great gas mileage out of it, but I really feel sorry for the folks that own SUV's. They are driving across the border to Indiana and the counties surrounding Louisville/Jefferson County to buy gas. Louisville/Jeff County has to sell reformulated gas due to the ozone problem we have here, but Shelby, Oldham, and Bullitt counties aren't under those restrictions, so the gas is cheaper there and across the river. I find it ironic though that Houston, which is under the same EPA restrictions, has cheaper gas prices than Louisville.

And I've already double checked my voter's registration card and voted in the primary election to make certain I can cast my ballot on November 4 for a straight Democratic ticket.

Thunder Over Louisville

Later on tonight I get to pull up a chair and watch Thunder Over Louisville.

Thunder is the kickoff event for the Kentucky Derby Festival here in Da Ville. For the next two and a half weeks we'll have a blizzard of derby parties fancy and not-so-fancy, pageants, 10-K runs, special events and parades all leading up to the 134th running of the Kentucky Derby on May 2. Even the local GLBT community gets into the spirit by aving several events including a party of Derby day.

Thunder itself is a massive choreographed fireworks show that's so huge from a distance, the fireworks going off sound like distant thunder, hence the name. The Clark Memorial Bridge has been shut down to set up for it.

Since I moved here I haven't yet braved the weather or the crowds to see it live. The cloudy and cold weather today is guaranteeing that I ave no desire to break that tradition this year either. I made sure that any errands I had to run involving travel through the downtown area were done this morning.

I live about two miles from the general aviation airport ere called Bowman Field. I'm hearing the noise off and on of all the military jets revving engines and ta0king off for the airshow that's going on as well along the riverfront. Speaking of the airshow, that's a contentious part of Thunder every year with the local peace activists.

On that note, let me go grab some wings and get ready to check out the show.

The Virginia Tech Tragedy

College is supposed to be an overall positive experience. You're finally getting to sort everything out in terms of what you want to do in life, where you're headed and learning and growing as a young adult while having some fun in the process.

For many peeps it's the first time you get to step out, live away from home and get your first taste of adulthood. It's the last time in your life when the only responsibilities you have are to get up, go to class and study your butt off unless you also have a job you're juggling to help pay your tuition.

I guess it's why I enjoy walking around on various college campuses when I do follow Dawn to various fencing tournaments. It takes me back to my own college days in that respect. It's hard for me to imagine what it would have been like to have that peace of mind shattered by a gunman suddenly popping up in one of my classes, firing shots at me and my classmates, then to discover a day or so later that he was a classsmate that peeps had been seeing disturbing behavior patterns about for two years leading up to that horrific incident.

Even the folks who weren't in those Norris Hall classrooms that morning are haunted by 'That could have been me' thoughts. I can only imagine what was going through people's minds as their buildings were on lockdown wondering if the incident was over of if their building was next on the shooter's target list.

What about the peeps who for some reason decided not to go to class that morning? I know they feel just as hurt as the gun shop owner who sold Cho the weapons he used.

How would I feel about that? How do you put that behind you and move on with llfe, if you ever do? It's also tough at that age to lose a classmate because up until you get past your college years and your ten-year high school reunion you have this false feeling of immortality. You walk around in your late teens and 20's with this attitude that you have plenty of time to accomplish the things you want to do or get your life together.


There are 32 people that have been tragically taken from us including Cho. But to the Virginia Tech students who may be reading this blog, life does go on. In 1966 The University of Texas suffered a similar tragedy. It took a while but people eventually forgot until Monday that a deadly shooting occurred on its campus. It brought back the flood of memories in Austin and on the UT campus of what Charles Whitman had done almost 41 years earlier.

It was interesting to read Nikki Giovanni's account of her 2005 encounter with Cho in her writing class she was teaching at Virginia Tech. I think what needs to happen in the wake of this tragedy is to strenghten the ability of college professors and administrators to compel folks with disturbing behavior patterns to undergo counseling once its verified.

Would that have prevented the shooting? That's a debatable question. As far as the gun issue I'm going to deal with that another time. In this post I want to continue focusing on the 32 people we lost, the folks at Virginia Tech and their families who are grieving and trying to make sense out of an irrational situation.

We will never know what types of contributions those fallen people would have made to our society and others around the world. We can only guess about that as we mourn them, memorialize them and sadly have to move on.

A Rebuttal to Kenneth Eng's 'Why I Hate Blacks' Column

By Kenneth Eng
published in AsianWeek February 23, 2007

TransGriot note: This is the text of the AsianWeek newspaper column written by Kenneth Eng that caused major controversy when it was published on February 23. After coming under fire from African-American and Asian groups, editor Ted Fang has apologized for it and announced that Eng is no longer a contributing writer. My comments will be boldfaced.

Here is a list of reasons why we should discriminate against blacks, starting from the most obvious down to the least obvious.

*Blacks hate us. Every Asian who has come across them knows that they take almost every opportunity to hurl racist remarks at us. In my experience I would say about 90 percent of blacks I have met regardless of age or environment, poke fun at the very sight of an Asian. Furthermore, their activity in the media proves their hatred. Rush Hour, Exit Wounds, Hot 97, et cetera.

For somebody that graduated from NYU, you are breathtakingly ignorant to paint an entire race of people with a stereotypical brush based on two movies and a rap radio station as you did in your recent February 23 column. (Personally I prefer classic R&B and jazz myself.)

*Contrary to media depictions I would argue that blacks are weak willed. They are the only race that has been enslaved for 300 years. It's unbelievable it took them that long to fight back. On the other hand we slaughtered the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War.

I guess you forgot about the story of Joseph Cinque and the Amistad revolt? That wasn't an isolated incident. Many slave ship voyages didn't get too far away from the African coastline before the rebellions started. There were far more successful slave rebellions and revolts than the 'happy darkie' pro-slavery revisionist forces care to elaborate on and the first one happened in 1733. They feared slave rebellions from 1792 onward. Haiti's slaves liberating themselves from French rule in 1803 made them even more 'scurred' of us replicating the feat on US shores.

I see you're also clueless about Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad and the various ingenious ways that African-Americans escaped from plantations. They fought for their freedom in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

While were on the war tip, ever heard of the Buffalo Soldiers? The 761st Tank Battalion AKA the Black Panthers? The Tuskegee Airmen? The 54th Massachusetts Regiment? You desperately need to hop the subway and spend some time at the Schomburg Institute.

*Blacks are easy to coerce. This is proven by the fact that so many of them, including Rev. Al Sharpton tend to be Christians. Yet at the same time they spend much of their time whining about how much they hate the 'whites that oppressed them.'
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Christianity the religion that whites forced upon them?

And in which one of your science-fiction universes did you come up with that asinine statement? I'm tired of peeps like you dismissing our very real historical experiences in this country as 'whining'. The Christianity that the slavemasters forced on us was infused with our own religious experiences and traditions we brought with us from Africa. From that Christianity came some of our greatest leaders in the late 19th and 20th century.

*Blacks don't get it. I know it's a blunt and crass assessment but it's true. When I was in high school, I recall a class debate in which one half of the class was chosen to defend black slavery and the other half was chosen to defend liberation. Disturbingly, blacks on the prior side viciously defended slavery as well as Christianity. They say if you don't study history you are condemned to repeat it. In high school I only remember one black student ever attending my honors and AP courses. And that student was caught cheating.

Kenneth, what I don't get is your disjointed rambling about some obscure high school debate and what connection it has with African-Americans in general. But then again racists were never known to have logical linear thinking processes.

If you didn't see any African-Americans in your honors or AP classes, then you must have attended school in the 'burbs or went to a private one. I was in gifted and talented classes in junior and senior high along with many of my friends. Education was stressed in mine and many other households in my neighborhood.

George Santayana was right. If you don't study the past you are condemned to repeat it. That's why we just spent 28 days commemorating our history. African-Americans are painfully familiar with that statement more than anyone else in this country because we've seen the effects of neglected or ignored history disproportionately impact our community. For example, our experiences during Reconstruction in the late 19th century have eerily replicated themselves in the late 20th-early 21st century.

It is rather troubling that they are treated as heroes, but then again whites will do anything to defend them.

And it is rather troubling that this kind of virulent racism is alive and well in the early 21st century, especially in someone who is a 21 year old college graduate. I'm even more angered over the fact that you chose Black History Month to write such disgusting tripe.

We are heroes, Kenneth. I'm descended from peeps that survived The Middle Passage. Despite violent opposition, nattering naysayers and countless obstacles placed in our paths over the last 400 years that would have broken less sturdy peoples, to quote Maya Angelou, 'and still we rise.'

If Anna Nicole Smith Were Black, Would She Be Getting Such A Glorified Post Mortem? No

photo-Anna leaving the Supreme Court


Wednesday, February 21, 2007
By: Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com

Maybe it's out of respect for the dead that Rush Limbaugh hasn't called ex-stripper and Playboy centerfold Anna Nicole Smith a "ho," the insult he leveled at the black stripper who accused three Duke University lacrosse players of raping her in a bathroom.

But I suspect that when people like Limbaugh see white women who behave like Smith, they see her through the prism of quirkiness and outrageousness. With black women, they're quicker to turn the morality lens on us.

And when they look at us with that lens, they tend to freeze us in it.

First of all, let me say that it is always a sad thing to hear of anyone dying before their time, whether that person is a 19-year-old black guy who gets gunned down by gang bullets or a 39-year-old blonde bombshell like Smith, whose excesses finally caught up with her. Sadder still is that Smith leaves behind a five-month-old daughter, Dannielynn, who will never know her mother.

But when you strip away the spin and apply the morality standards to her life that black women, and especially poor black women, are lambasted for not living up to, you find someone who fell far short of those standards.

Yet in spite of that, she's being iconized.

Let's see. Smith began her climb to fame as a stripper. She posed naked in Playboy, and achieved her greatest fame as a Guess? Jeans model. She had no great artistic talent to dwarf those superficial beginnings, so she built her life on trying to find bizarre ways to stay in the spotlight.

By the end of her life, she had become a drug abuser and had given birth to a daughter out-of-wedlock. Three men are claiming to have fathered her daughter -- one of which includes a married man, Prince Frederick von Anhalt -- who claims they had an affair since the 1990s.

While no one will know, at least for a while, who Dannielynn's real daddy is, what is clear is that Smith was a tad promiscuous. She did triple the things that got Janet Jackson vilified for exposing a nipple ring at the 2004 Super Bowl, but even her death won't make her go away.

The headlines and newscasts have been dominated by her. Journalists are combing her old stomping ground in Mexia, Texas to uncover clues about her childhood. She's being dubbed as a "tragic beauty," and, laughably, being compared to Marilyn Monroe -- even though her closest brush with movie fame came in a "Naked Gun" spoof.

Yet when I think about how Smith lived her life, and all the empathetic airings of the circumstances surrounding her death, I have to wonder: If she were black, would there have been a rush to euphemize her? Would writers be struggling to find meaning in her life, a life that was basically driven by her need to be in spotlight?

The answer I keep coming up with is no.

Even a black woman as talented as Jackson wasn't able to make outrageousness work for her. Her wardrobe malfunction, for example, sent America into a tizzy for months. No one saw it as gutsy, or even accepted it as a mistake as much as they saw it as immoral, as all that was wrong with America.

She couldn't apologize enough for it. And people wouldn't let it go.

Some pundits even blamed her and "Nipplegate" for galvanizing morals voters and causing John Kerry to lose the 2004 presidential election.
Anytime she visited a new place, few media smart-alecks could resist admonishing her to keep her clothes on.

I wonder what those so-called morals voters are saying now, as the tawdry details of Smith's daughter's paternity continue to eat up much more air time than the 2004 Super Bowl did.

Now, none of this is to say that black women ought to be out there fighting to get famous for being loose or promiscuous. But as I constantly am bombarded with the details of Smith's life, I can't help but to think about how race and wealth is lived in this country. I think about how Smith receives adulation and empathy in spite of the way that she lived her life, and black women like Jackson, as well as the Duke stripper, receive only contempt and are held up as examples of black immorality if they take off their clothes in public or have babies out of wedlock. And while I'm all for black women holding themselves to high behavioral standards, I still don't like it when we're held to a double one.

One that makes the lower standards fine as long as they come in creamy blond packaging.