Why there are no gays in Iran

An 19-year old Iranian who dared identify as gay nervously awaits a court ruling that he says could lead to his execution. “Mehdi” was studying English in Britain, when he says he learned his boyfriend back in Tehran had been arrested, charged with sodomy and hanged in 2006. But before the boyfriend was killed, Mehdi says, authorities forced his partner to name past lovers.

Days later, Mehdi’s family claims, Iranian police showed up at their Tehran family home with an arrest warrant. In an asylum claim submitted to Britain’s Home Office, Medhi said if he returns to Iran, he too would be executed.

Britain’s Home Office didn’t buy it. It turned him down – then Mehdi fled for Canada before British officials could deport him to Tehran. But he was stopped by border police in Germany and sent to the Netherlands.

He now sits in a Dutch detention center, where he waits for a judge to decide whether to grant him asylum, or carry out a British extradition request to send him to the U.K….

–more at CNN.com and CNN video

More from CNN

Hello there, Miss Kern!

We hope you like your new job,

whatever it is!

Governor Spitzer:

why would you rent a hooker?

You lost my number?

CNN: Haiku Edition

Girl in Clinton’s ad:
Relish these minutes of fame.
Really, no one cares.

Live in Virginia?
You can marry your cousin,
but please don’t kiss her.

Red-hatted granny
coming out of the closet–
but not in that way

* * *

Richard’s Kommentary Korner

Apple-cheeked stoner
working the deli counter
eats the store’s profits.

Apple-cheeked cashier
tells me he’s got the munchies–
but not for apples.

Apple-cheeked fucktard
forgets to give me my change.
Lose the bong, hippie!

Not to be a total nellybeast (yeah, right), but this chick freaks me out.

Full disclosure: I can’t stand Anne Rice. I mean, yes, on the handful of occasions I met her, she was a lovely and charming woman, but her writing…well, lovely and charming it ain’t. Even back in college, when I spent many a night dancing gloomily to Front 242 at the Blue Crystal–even then I thought she was a sloppy, slovenly hack. Her popularity completely mystified me.

But today I figured it out.* Today, in an interview in the Picayune, Ann Rice has inadvertently explained everything and made clear (at least to me) her intent to follow the American zeitgeist all the way to the bank–no matter the pit stops it may make along the way:

On leaving New Orleans: “My only beloved son was in Los Angeles, and I felt like moving out to California was a good thing to do.”

Did you catch the reference? Do you see where this is going?

On the success of The Da Vinci Code: “I’m so outraged by it,” she said…. There’s not a scrap of evidence to support any of those theories.”

Yeah, baby. Work the angle.

On the possibility of writing another Lestat novel: “That book will only be written if I can keep my commitment to the Lord,” she said. “If I can work out a book where Lestat is saved, yes, I’ll write it.

Bingo.

Having ridden the Gothic wave until it finally petered out at the threshold of a Claire’s Boutique somewhere in Missouri, Anne is now totally hot for Christian schlock and George W’s ballyhooed Base. She’s bid adieu to the slim-hipped young men, attracted by her daring views on homosexuality. She’s bid adieu to the plus-sized women, clad in crushed velvet, who often accompanied the slim-hipped men at book signings. She’s bid adieu to everyone drawn into her parallel universes of inverted but somehow totally right-on morality, and she’s gunning for Wal-Mart employees and the Songs of Praise demographic.

Which is not to say that vampire novels and biographies of Jesus Christ don’t bear similarities to one another: they’re both intriguing myths chock-full of blood-guzzling. In fact, if I were so inclined, I could give Ms. Rice the benefit of the doubt and presume she’s trying to modernize Christian ideology by working from the inside out. Sadly, I am not so inclined.

Nor is it to say that a person can’t appreciate these two divergent styles of Ms. Rice’s work (three, if you count the A. N. Roquelaure erotica). Such a person may well exist, but I wouldn’t wanna be his therapist.

Anyway, given Ms. Rice’s stated and unstated intentions, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess at her immediate goals:

1. Buy an abandoned church and start her own denomination (working title: International House of Ann-cakes).

2. Trample Dan Brown on the bestseller lists and leave behind those Left Behind guys.

3. Enshrine Christopher in the literary heavens (just below her), so that he’ll be wealthy and well-connected enough to care for her in style throughout her waning years.

* Her son’s popularity, however, continues to boggle my wee mind.

Thursday and Friday were hellacious. Today will be hellacious. Tomorrow, Monday, and Tuesday will all be–quel surprise–hellacious. Long days full of grant deadlines and meetings and producing shows and generally doing the whole “serving others” thing that I do so well. My body aches and I need a stiff drink, but it’s not even 7:00am, and even on Fat Tuesday that’s a little early for me, so this will have to suffice:

I’d rather not analyze it. All I know is that it made me smile a little, which was a nice way to begin an otherwise daunting 18-hour day.

Around 6:45 last night, I plopped down on the sofa and prepared to check my email one last time before the delivery guy from the Chinese place arrived and Gay Night officially began. (Gay Night, for you Normies–yeah, we call you Normies–is the night on which ANTM, Gossip Girl, and PR audiences turn off their cellies and watch fabulous train wrecks unfold on national television. They’re not especially different from the train wrecks you’d see on Rock of Love or Flavor of Love or whatever love show that mini-muncher Tequila is hosting now, but everything’s wrapped in gold lame. Or silk charmeuse. Always with the silk charmeuse.)

Anyway, I was sitting there with my laptop, and I happened to click open the New York Times, and there, splashed in the center of the page was the announcement that William F. Buckley is dead. And I thought to myself, “Holy! Freakin! Crap!” And then I thought, “Fiiiiinally!“

I let out a little squeal of delight, and I shouted the news to Jonno, which wasn’t really necessary since he was only about five feet away, but he was all, like, “Duh, it’s been up there all day.” And I know it’s grant season, and I know I’ve had my head down, cobbling together endless paragraphs of jargon–the kind that gets government panels absolutely soaking wet–but really, how did I miss news this big? Why didn’t my co-worker squeal with similar delight earlier in the day? (She’s free of grantwriting duties, and she totally hearts the Times and NPR all day long.) And for that matter, why didn’t any of you IM me to let me know? For shame.

I guess it’s not very nice to celebrate someone’s death, even when that someone was a complete freaking nightmare of ruination like la Buckley. And I know that soon–very soon–the death of mortal evil will be balanced by the death of mortal good. (Avoid ham sandwiches, Al Gore! Beware the Ides of March!) But for this brief shining moment, a part of me–perhaps a not-very-nice part of me–is happy that someone responsible for galvanizing a lot of hurtful ideology, someone with a pulpit who knew how to use it, someone admired by a worldwide audience of people who aren’t very fond of me or my ilk, is dead.

But why, oh why, couldn’t it have been Ann Coulter?

Maybe next year.

Continuing New Orleans’ long tradition of transsexual banditry (and there are more examples from before The Storm, if only Google would cooperate), we find this titbit in today’s Picayune:

St. John the Baptist Parish deputies are searching for a hammer-wielding man in a dress who smashed through the locked glass doors of a Reserve convenience store and stole money from a cashier…

The man, who wore rolled up blue jeans under the green dress, covered his face with white material and his head with a black hood, the report said…

—Times Picayune

He doesn’t sound as classy as the other thugettes–but of course, they were plundering Magazine Street.

On a practical note, I’d start rounding up the redheads. ‘Cause everyone knows that only a redhead could pull off a green dress.

Dear People:

Why is Ralph Nader still alive?

I’ve never been in the same room with the man, and even if I had, my hunting rifles are locked up at my dad’s house.

That’s my excuse. What’s yours?

Please do something now.

Your BFF Jill Richard

Random New Orleaniana

• Anthony Bourdain partially redeemed himself–at least in my eyes–by honoring Donald Link (for his ballsy opening of Cochon) and slamming Alan Richman (for his bitter, pointless rag on New Orleans) at the 2008 Golden Clog Awards, which he created with fellow chowderhead, Michael Ruhlman. That doesn’t completely make up for his New Orleans segment on No Reservations, but I can’t hold a grudge for very long anyway. Except where Chris Rose is concerned.

• For the three of you who haven’t read the government’s analysis of formaldehyde levels in the trailers that FEMA grudgingly provided to Gulf Coast residents, Slate was kind enough to publish the actual document from the CDC. My favorite comes on page three, when trailer denizens get unsolicited health advice: “Do not smoke, and especially do not smoke indoors.” Which is essentially saying, “If you must chase lung cancer, do so outside; FEMA trailers are reserved for headaches, dry eyes, nasal mucus, nausea, asthma, and another type of cancer entirely.”

• Apparently, part of the new Wolverine movie is set to film in New Orleans. Ladies, y’all can have Hugh Jackman–just break me off a piece of Liev Schreiber. Damn if I ain’t a sucker for scruffy, Jewish, ex-hippie voiceover artists.