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REALITY SHOW
“Beyond the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel.” — Oscar Levant.
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YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT?
So, Ellen Degeneres and her lovely bride, Amanda Rogers — oops, I mean Portia de Rossi — have become business moguls, peddling vegetarian foods to the rest of us who haven’t changed our names for professional purposes.
In fact, the two have gone so far as to be considering introducing a line of vegan grub for your pet dogs and cats.
I bet Steve the Dog doesn’t know he shouldn’t me eating meat or, for that matter, anything that has animal products in it. I hesitate to tell him so because he might go into a funk. He’s a rather sensitive pooch and he doesn’t like to disappoint people.
“Aw, Man, I didn’t Know.”
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Funny thing is, he seems to be reasonably healthy despite eating food processed in concentration camps and including hunks of pig, bovine, horse, and other brothers and sisters of ours.
Also, he loves to eat…, well, brace yourself — and if you’re lunching don’t read any further — he loves to eat deer shit. And the fewmets of quiet a few other critters. He even sometimes dines on his own day-old bombs.
Steve the Dog is not unusual in this regard. Alexandra Horowitz, animal cognition professor at Barnard College and author of the very cool book “Inside of a Dog,” says all dogs are coprophages (shit-eaters.) She suggests they do this because they’re so desperate to sniff things and their olfactory mechanism is so constructed that eating things brings their aroma that much closer to home.
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Degeneres has been quoted as saying, “… [I]f you love your animal, then you should feed them something that’s not dangerous for them. There’s a lot of poisonous stuff that they’re putting in [pet] food, those by-products.”
Now I’m no animal cognition expert. Nor am I terribly well-versed on vegetarianism and veganism. But I do know this: any creature that eats shit doesn’t, well, give a shit about whether or not he’s eating a trace amount of preservatives.
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LESBIAN VIOLENCE
When people think domestic violence, they generally flash to the image of a man walloping a woman.
That’s the usual scenario but host Helen Harrell and producer Carol Fischer presented another side of the problem during this week’s bloomingOUT on WFHB.
Fischer & Harrell
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Harrell and co-host Abigail Sewell interviewed Shani Robbins of Middle Way House about physical abuse in lesbian relationships.
One great thing about bloomingOUT is it doesn’t try to run and hide from unflattering topics within the queer community.
BTW: Helen and Abigail remind us that PRIDE 2012, the Bloomington LGBTQ film festival is coming up in January. Some 10 features and numerous shorts will run at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater from the 18th through the 29th with countless related events also scheduled.
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O-O-H CHILD
Nina Simone died in 2003 but her voice is forever. The disc, “Nina Simone Remixed & Reimagined,” illustrates how timeless her stylings were and are. Listen:
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