It just wouldn’t be Christmas in America without some bad celebrity news, now would it?

HTTabloid.com:

Former Baywatch babe Carmen Electra is planning a raunchy Christmas Day full of stripper poles and lesbians.

The actress has asked her rocker husband Dave Navarro for a stripper pole this Christmas (05), so she can work-out at home and turn him on at the same time.

“The stripper pole will go into the living room and I figure for the holidays, after eating Christmas dinner, I can do a few laps around the pole and work off the weight that I’ve gained. He’s (Navarro) very excited… He may get up there too,” she was quoted by Contactmusic, as saying.

Meanwhile, the couple are planning a Christmas Day feast, courtesy of their friendly, neighbourhood lesbians.

“We have these two lesbian friends that come over and they cook ever year… They cook really well and we love to have them over,” she added.

Really, I just love the tags for these stories.

Have a wonderful holiday! See you tomorrow.

Shrimp Stuffed Potatoes. Don’t they look yummy?

You can get the recipe here. I didn’t pour the shrimp and cheeses into the mixture of potatoes, butter, sour cream, salt, and pepper. I left the shrimp whole, placed them on top of the mixture (four shrimp on each potato), and then covered them with the cheeses and added paprika about ten minutes before taking them out of the oven.

The Postsecret Art Show runs from December 15th to January 8th at 3307 M Street, NW in Washington, DC. Get more info here.

The 2006 Sundance Film Festival, happening January 19th - 29th in Park City, Utah, will include:

The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, a comedy, is an entry from the Philippines, about the first love of a 12-year-old gay boy, living in the slums with his father and two brothers who are involved in petty crimes, encounters a handsome policeman who he falls in love with.

Songbirds, a documentary from the United Kingdom, comes from director Brian Hill who interviewed women prisoners of Downview Prison in Surrey, England. Their stories are turned into a musical performance.

Small Town Gay Bar, produced by Kevin Smith, is a documentary about the proverbial local gay watering hole (something all too many gays from the rural and geographically-isolated environments are familiar) throughout the American South. From the barstool to beyond, the film documents the struggle to build a meaningful gay and lesbian community within hostile surroundings.

From director of The Fluffer comes Quinceanera, the second feature film by Richard Glatzer, is about disaffected Latino teenagers who come of age in a gentrifying community in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles.

Director Peter Richardson will introduce Clear Cut: The Story of Philomath, Oregon. A local lumber baron, Rex Clemens, becomes wealthy and generous enough to pay for the college tuition for every high school graduate in the tiny town of Philomath, Oregon. But once a transplanted superintendent arrives from Chicago, concerns are raised over the increasingly “liberal” direction of the school. A conflict ensues between the locals, the superintendent, the philanthropist and the future of the town’s next generation’s future.

Director Byron Hurt in his documentary, Beyond Beats and Rhymes: A Hip-Hop Head Weighs in on Manhood in Hip-Hop Culture, (later to be aired on PBS), dissects the structures of violence, hyper-aggression, homophobia and misogyny present in much of today’s hip-hop world.

Forgiving the Franklins, a comedy, is another entry from the United States, that centers on a conservative, God fearing Southern family who is spiritually changed by an auto accident, but who they become puts them at odds with the highly conservative values around them.

Sundance’s John Cooper has described director Jay Floyd’s feature as one of the festival’s more unusual films in that it “juxtaposes Christianity and sexuality in ways you’ve never seen before.”

Puccini for Beginners will have its world premiere at Sundance. The film, starring Justin Kirk, Gretchen Mol and Elizabeth Reaser, is about a lesbian on the rebound from her latest lesbian relationship. A New York writer, she ironically finds herself in two surprising complicated love affairs in this only-in New York screwball comedy.

First Date is a short film from a Kansas City filmmaker that traces, with a comedic approach, a parolee’s disastrous first date with a man he met in an Internet chat room.

The Tribe, a documentary short, is already being described as “an unorthodox, unauthorized history of the Jewish people and the Barbie doll in about 15 minutes.” Director Tiffany Shlain focuses on a surprising fact about Barbie was the creation of a Jewish-American woman. This fact becomes a powerful metaphor about assimilation and Jewish identity in the 21st Century through Shlain’s eyes.

True North is a short audiovisual film installation by British artist Isaac Julien. The cinematic experience for the audience will be meditative and comprise reflective images of the sublime.

Bugcrush is a short film directed by Carter Smith and is based on Scott Treleaven’s award-winning short story of the same name about a small-town high school loner, whose fascination with a dangerously seductive new kid leads him into something much more sinister than he could ever have imagined.

The short film, Hello, Thanks, captures filmmaker Andy Blubaugh’s year in the personal ads, looking for love but having his true love affair with the words themselves.

At the Quinte Hotel, an entry from Canada, is an incredible animated version of the Al Purdy poem, a man waxes on about beer and flowers in a small-town basement tavern.

Another short film, Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf, centers on an Arab-American girl who must come to terms with her sexuality while balancing the mores of two different cultures.

I hate you if you’re going. Unless you take me with you.

I really can’t believe I got a Festivus present (the Festivus book) today.

Georgetown’s Office of Communications announces Dana Luciano’s upcoming presentation of her paper “Femininity’s Queer Time, or, Far From Heaven” at the 2005 Modern Language Association Convention in Washington, D.C.:

Georgetown University professor Dana Luciano presents her paper “Femininity’s Queer Time, or, Far From Heaven” at the 2005 Modern Language Association Convention in Washington, D.C., December 27-30. Luciano’s presentation is part of a larger discussion on queer perspectives on heterosexuality.

Luciano examines the concept of time as it relates to femininity in Todd Haynes’ 2002 melodrama Far From Heaven, which centers on the life of Cathy Whittaker, a 1950s housewife, and her relationships with both her closeted gay husband and their black gardener. She argues that Haynes’ film subtly undermines the idealization of the self-sacrificing mother in the classic melodrama. Highlighting Whittaker’s inability to adhere to the traditional role of a 1950s wife and mother, Luciano traces the film’s queerest traits not to Whittaker’s husband but to the protagonist herself.

Luciano teaches sexuality and gender studies in the Department of English at the university. Her work on the temporality of affect has been published in Arizona Quarterly, The Henry James Review, American Literature, The Western Humanities Review, and the collection Loss: The Politics of Mourning, edited by David Eng and David Kazanjian, and she has recently completed a manuscript titled Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America.

(I exaggerate. There are probably only thousands.)

Her shoe collection is a feature of her body.

What is your favorite/least favorite feature of your body?

Fave: my shoe collection

Two former students of Cal Lutheran High and their parents have filed suit against the California Lutheran High School Association claiming discrimination, invasion of privacy and unfair business practices after the students, who were suspected of having a lesbian relationship with each other, were interrogated by Cal Lutheran High’s principal, Gregory Bork, and expelled because, quoting this North County Times article, “the school has a spiritual and moral obligation to keep its students from sin.”

At the start of this school year, the faculty suspected that the two students may have had homosexual ideas or might have been intimate with each other, court documents state. The lawsuit does not name the students or parents to protect their privacy, it states.

On Sept. 7, the students were called into a meeting with the principal, the lawsuit states.

“Bork individually and separately interrogated the (students) in a closed room, without the parents’ knowledge or consent … and asked (them) inappropriate and personal questions such as whether they loved one another and were lesbians,” court documents state. “In such a manner, Bork coerced one of the (students) to admit that she ‘loves’ the other.”

The next day, Bork allegedly called the students’ parents and said the school’s board had met and decided the students were not to come back to the school, the lawsuit states. The day after that, the parents confronted Bork in person and by phone, and he responded that the two girls could not stay at Cal Lutheran “with those feelings,” according to the lawsuit.

In a Sept. 15 letter to the students’ parents, Bork wrote that “while there is no open physical contact between the two girls, there is still a bond of intimacy … characteristic of a lesbian (relationship). … Such a relationship is unchristian. To allow the girls to attend (Cal Lutheran) … would send a message to students and parents that we either condone this situation and/or will not do anything about it. That message would not reflect our beliefs and principles.”

Christopher Hayes, the attorney representing the two girls, believes that Cal Lutheran High’s actions violate California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits businesses from discriminating based on sexual orientation. He claims anti-discrimination rights override the school’s constitutional rights of freedom of association and freedom of religion.

The following is meant to help those who really do mean well. If you’re just a careless shopper, you deserve anything giving duplicate gifts might bring you, including, but not limited to, having a gift thrown at you and listening to the “you don’t think I’m special” speech. With that said…

Someone asked me today if it was okay that they got the same present for both their girlfriend and their sister for Christmas. Now, this person didn’t do this because they’re lazy. They really did think the item they found would be a great gift for both their girlfriend and sister - and that they would both love it. And they both might.

However, the answer to this question is still NO. It’s not okay to get your girlfriend and sister the same thing for Christmas. Because even if they do both love it, when one of them realizes that the item was not picked for her alone, love will most likely turn to something else.

Why? Because I’m thinking one of two thoughts occurred when the item was found:

Would you want to be the “too” person? (I assure you that it will be your girlfriend, not your sister, who will accuse you of thinking of her “too”)

-The fact that all three people are Jewish isn’t really relevant to the point I am trying to make here, but I just can’t skip over it.-