travel tips with Alan Cumming

Alan Cumming is Naughty Santa

As the dreaded holiday season approacheth, more and more of us will be taking to the skies in a desperate attempt to put in brownie point-garnering facetime with relatives whose very existence is the bane of ours. Just die already and leave me the pearls and the cottage, dammit!

Naturally, airplanes stuffed with hundreds of passengers with nothing in their future but a potentially-fatal planeride and said facetime with relatives are going to be tense environments, places where we should all be a little more considerate and take a little extra care not to offend. Especially the rentacops.

Rakish Hollywood idol Alan Cumming offers a handy tip to ensure your trip is as smooth and un-cringifying as humanly possible; as a recovering Englishman, Cumming is somewhat of an expert on the subject of embarrassment, so his wisdom is to be treasured and passed on from generation to generation, at least until men start wearing kilts again.

from AgentBedhead:

“I always think the pressure on planes gives you a hard-on,” he mused. “My friend I was just working with said that when he goes to sleep, he always puts the table out in case he gets a hard-on whilst he’s asleep. That’s a very good tip for your readers if they want to avoid embarrassment on a plane.” 

Natalie Portman wants you to marry your boyfriend (updated)

Natalie Portman, homophobeUPDATED: now that’ I’ve drunk my coffee, I see I completely misinterpreted things. All corrected!)

If Natalie Portman has ever put so much as a pinkie toe wrong since she began her career at, what, 12? I certainly never heard about it.

The accent in V for Vendetta notwithstanding.

And she doesn’t even come from some fringe Yahoos For Jesus cult: she’s a good, old-fashioned Jewish girl.

So it is with relief that we read the following quote attributed to Miss P:

“I’m not convinced about marriage. Divorce is so easy, and that fact that gay people are not allowed to marry takes much of the meaning out of it. … Committing yourself to one person is sacred.”

And the future Natalie Portman Broadway musical gets moved to the fast track!

Optimus Prime is gay, too!

Dumbledore is gay

Now that Albus Dumbledore has been thrust out of the closet, brutally outed live onstage at Carnegie Hall (surely every closety fellow’s worst nightmare, especially if the ghost of Judy is watching) it seems the ripple effect is rocking not a few boats in the world of children’s entertainment.

One that’s particularly rocky is the Transformer di Tutti Transformers, Optimus Prime. A word of warning: the following video contains cringe-inducing self-doubt, blindingly obvious truths unacknowledged, and a narcissistic self-absorption entirely at odds with a typical childhood perception of the hitherto entirely macho Opti. Click at own risk…to your own childhood dreams, and the thinnest closet door in the whole flimsy Dream Factory.

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Larry Craig and the Village People present: I Am Not Gay!

Rumour has it that Michael Jackson is developing it into a full-length musical, just as soon as he can sign the cast from Kid Nation for the chorus!

via Disembedded

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Mystery pedophile suspect on the run

Canadian Christopher Paul Neil, a 32-year-old English teacher who has taught in South Korea and Vietnam, is being sought in the infamous case of a serial pedophile who extensively photographed himself raping Thai boys as young as six, uploading the 200 + pictures to the Internet, but digitally altering the photographs to hide his own identity (although not those of the victims).

Christopher Paul Neil digitized

His whereabouts are currently unknown, and it is believed that he is attempting to evade capture.

German experts attempted to uncover an identifiable picture of the suspect by undoing the manipulations, giving the above final image. This was enough to get an ID on a suspect, Christopher Paul Neil, who has posted on the Korean Job Discussion Board using the name Peter Jackson.

Christopher Paul Neil

a current picture of Christopher Paul Neil at Bangkok Airport

Among other things, his posts mentioned how he got around the mandatory criminal records check for English teachers.

Police checks are NOT needed to get a visa. Public schools will want one but you should be able to stall them. Often they want teachers SO quickly that they will “wait” for some things. I never gave a police check for my last public school job. I was in Vietnam at the time and getting one wasn’t easy. I delayed and never heard about it again.

and how to hide things from inspectors:

[I]’ve never heard of porn been a problem in Korea. On my first trip there in 2000 I remember reading the customs declaration form while on the plane. I was SO nervous for the remaining hours on the plane because I happened to have a couple Penthouse magazines in my bag. I ended up tossing them in the bin at the airport washroom, only to find out that no one would have found them anyway.

In terms of computers, if you’re worried about any “content” there are several ways to encrypt your drive. A friend has highly recommended Truecrypt, which you can download.

If you want to get rid of old files so no one will see, then simply deleting them will not work. You’ll have to get a program like Jetico’s BC Wipe and “delete with wiping”.

He worked in Wonsam (near Yongin) and then Gwangju in Jeollanamdo, and wasn’t beloved by co-workers, it appears:

I knew him as a pretty normal guy, as far as ESL teachers go. I didn’t work with him (his former school has been informed, and if they know anything, they’re not telling at this point.) To be perfectly honest, I perceived him as the kind of guy who didn’t have much luck with girls and would be comfortable purchasing sex (just based on his overall presentation and some comments he made regarding working girls in Thailand.) I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had had a fake degree or passport– but I would never ever have guessed that he was sexually into children. We didn’t discuss it, and I never saw him around children.

A standard Zeta male.

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