March 14th, 2010
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Author: Boy George and George Michael are on speaking terms again after 25 years of silence, the UK's Daily Star tabloid reports:
"The Culture Club singer slammed the Wham star for failing to come out as a homosexual at the height of their groups’ fame in the 1980s.
The attack prompted Michael to label George a 'bitch' – and the pair refused to speak to each other for more than a quarter-of-a-century.
But the Karma Chameleon singer revealed yesterday: 'We have exchanged emails and things are pretty good between us. We’ve ‘spoken’ a couple of times and he seems to be doing OK.' … It’s a far cry from the 1980s when George, whose openly gay personality had helped Culture Club score No1s including 'Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?' was furious at Michael, now 46, for attracting millions of female fans to
Wham! by promoting himself as a ladies’ man.
'People saw me as the benchmark queer while George Michael was passing himself off as a straight stud,' George fumed in 2005. 'In fact, he was loitering in public loos like some pre-war homosexual. It’s one thing to keep quiet. It’s another to pretend you’re someone you’re not.'"
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SALEM — Family and friends described Lance Cpl. Nigel K. Olsen as humble, loyal, kind, loving and someone who had always wanted to serve his country.
“He knew at 3 what he wanted to do,” recalled one of Olsen’s nine siblings, Stacy Hansen, at her brother’s funeral Saturday.
Olsen, 21, died in Helmond Province, Afghanistan, March 4 after stepping on an improvised explosive device. If he had been one foot to the left or to the right when he was bringing a prisoner to the armored vehicle that day, he wouldn’t have died, said his mother, Kim Olsen.
But she was assured it was his time to go and said she could feel her son beside her while she talked to the hundreds of people who came to the Salem LDS Stake Center to pay respects to her Marine.
“He was doing what he loved,” Kim Olsen said through tears. “It was the Lord’s time.”
She recalled a story her neighbor had told her of the first time she met her son. The neighbor had just moved in and was sitting on the front porch when she looked over in front of her house and saw 9-year-old Nigel Olsen, with a camouflage-painted face, wearing Army fatigues, sliding a toy rifle beside him and crawling in the ditch.
His older brother, Quinn Hess, said Olsen’s eyes would light up and the tone of his voice would change whenever he talked about guns, tanks or military history.
Hess said his brother’s favorite movie growing up was “Top Gun,” and he remembers hiding the movie from his brother after he had watched it for the 100th time.
Olsen was a mix between a stripling warrior and Captain Moroni from the Book of Mormon, said Olsen’s old scoutmaster, Terry Lewis, who said Olsen was a joy to be around.
In line with his dream, Olsen joined the Marines one week after graduating from Mountain View High School in 2007. He was assigned to the 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 4th Marine Division, Marine Forces Reserve, based out of Camp Pendleton, Calif., and was deployed to Afghanistan in October. This was the same battalion Lance Cpl. Carlos A. Aragon, 19, was in. Aragon was killed three days before Olsen, also by an IED.
Olsen’s sister, Sarah Anthony, said she remembers the last time she saw her brother before he was deployed.
“I told him I loved him and that we would miss him and to stay safe,” Anthony recalls, but she also said she had this gut-wrenching feeling that would be the last time she would see him again.
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PROVO — The names of two of the most sacred ordinances in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have no adequate equivalents in the Japanese language, an illustration of the problems sometimes inherent in teaching religion across cultures, a BYU professor said Friday.
Van C. Gessel, a professor of Japanese, spoke during the BYU Studies 50th anniversary symposium about the challenge of creating a Christian vocabulary in a non-Christian culture.
In Japan, members of the LDS faith use the created words, “baputesma” and “endaumento” for the ordinances of baptism and endowment, along with the words “sute-ku” and “wa-do” for stake and ward, respectively.
Missionaries and priests have struggled for centuries to teach Christian concepts to a polytheistic society that has no underlying concept of Jesus Christ, Gessel said.
Despite having no direct translation for the word “God,” Gessel said, Japanese members of the LDS Church use the commonly accepted term “Kami sama,” which means “the honorable Mr. Spirit, essence that resides in the trees, the streams and our deceased ancestors.”
Translation problems are not unique to the Japanese language. Gessel quoted Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset regarding the Basque language’s lack of a word for deity.
“Lacking a name for God made it very difficult for the Basques to think about God,” according to Ortega. Consequently, the Basque people were very slow to be converted to Christianity.
In Japan, missionaries either tried to borrow existing Japanese words and redefine them, or introduce words from their own languages.
Both created problems, as Gessel pointed out that some Japanese Christians proudly proclaim that their God is the greatest of all the gods, and that when they talk about faith, the word they use can also refer to the Buddhist law.
Translations are also easily misinterpreted, he said, referencing Mosiah 3:19 in the Book of Mormon and the “natural man.”
That could be read in Japanese to mean “natural man,” or “a man who is in the condition in which he was born,” rendering that scripture to imply that man, in the condition in which he was born, is an enemy to God.
“Can we say ‘original sin?’ ” Gessel said, cringing.
And using terms foreign to the listener to describe something as personal and intimate as religion imposes barriers to greater teaching, Gessel said.
“Christianity is to many Japanese what raw fish is to many Americans,” he said. “Alien, slippery, a bit hard to swallow and not something they want to make a part of their daily diet.”
He said the difficulty for translators and scholars is coming up with a palatable vocabulary that can be “delicious unto them.”
Thankfully, he said, an imperfect language system is not the only teaching tool available.
“It is by the grace of God,” Gessel said, “and the convincing power of his Spirit that the teaching process can and will succeed.”
For more information about the symposium’s Saturday schedule, visit byustudies.byu.edu on the Web.
e-mail: sisraelsen@desnews.com
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The Oscars. Not as gay as the Tonys… but they try.
NATHANIEL ROGERS
…dreams of naked gold men with swords this time of year. He blogs daily at the Film Experience.
OSCAR AFTERMATH.
You may have already shaken off Hollywood's big night already (such an awkward show this year) but those of us who struggle with Oscar-Mania… it takes about a week to work its way through the system. We'll get back to regular columns next week. For now, lingering Oscar questions like…
Will the statues convince people to check out the smaller movies? The Hurt Locker, Precious are Up in the Air are now out on DVD. The Hurt Locker's sales are booming post-Oscar.
Gerard Butler. Would you hit that?
One of the BEST ACTRESS nominees would! Find out who, AFTER THE JUMP…
Precious Gabby Sidibe has had Hollywood smiling and crying for months now with her giddy personality and uncensored enthusiasm. I love how she makes Gerard Butler and Billy Butler squirm even after they've retreated into bromantic shtick for safety "Sexy. I like where this is going. Maybe we should get a bottle of champagne and see where the night takes us"
Sidibe's next project The C Word is a series pilot for Showtime starring Laura Linney. If she sticks with TV comedy we see a million Emmy Awards coming her way.
How busy is Supporting Actor winner Christoph Waltz? Very very busy. The Austrian born actor is weighing plenty of offers after his evil Nazi breakthrough in Inglourious Basterds. He's now vacated Talking Cure, a David Cronenberg project about legendary psycho-analysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. If the offers are so good you're willing to give up a Cronenberg picture, your career must be hot. The film will now star Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen so it isn't hurting for awesome potential with his absence.
Oh look, it's George Takei and his husband (pictured left) attending the Oscars! Living the a gay dream. That wasn't a question but aren't they adorable?
When will an out gay actor win an Oscar? Each year at the Oscars, there seems to be a new 'first!'. This year's
breakthroughs included the first African American screenwriting winner
(Geoffrey Fletcher for Precious) and the first female director (Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker).
Which makes you wonder when they'll finally give an Oscar to an out gay
man or lesbian. They've given Jodie Foster two statues in the past but
she wasn't really out. The closest they ever come was probably Sir Ian
McKellen for Gods and Monsters (1998… he lost to Roberto Benigni) or, well, Sir Ian McKellen for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001… he lost to Jim Broadbent in Iris). But generally they prefer actors who are only playing gay. It's easy to imagine, for example, that Colin Firth would have won this year for A Single Man, had Jeff Bridges Crazy Heart stuck with its originally scheduled 2010 release.
How long until Jeremy Renner's people issue some sort of "statement"? I'm not trying to egg on Cuddlegate 2010 but you know how Hollywood panics about these 'so and so is gay!' viral gossip things. I personally love that Renner is so affectionate with peers. Out director Lee Daniels got a kiss from Jeremy when he won at the Spirit Awards last Friday, Jeremy's co-presenter Jodie Foster offered a pat on the back
Will last year's screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk) be back at the Oscars in no time? None other than Clint Eastwood has now signed on to direct Black's next screenplay, a biopic about J Edgar Hoover. They seem like odd bedfellows to me but who knows.
Don't you wish Maggie & Jake would make another movie together? Seeing them together on the red carpet again reignited my Gyllenhaalism.
Too early to start thinking about next year's Oscars? There's already Best Actress buzz for gay favorites Anne Hathaway (co-starring with Jake Gyllenhaal in Love & Other Drugs) and Julianne Moore (co-starring with Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right… already reviewed here at Towleroad).
Did you like Neil Patrick Harris' opening song? We're guessing that that 'why did the prisoner drop his soap' lyric broke the record for 'fastest an Oscar ceremony ever got to a gay sex joke.' Two minutes and four seconds! That whole number was so extraneous. Not that we don't like seeing NPH in sparkly clothing.
We like seeing NPH in anything.
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SALT LAKE CITY — Melissa Manning is sick and tired of being sick and tired.
“Just once I’d like to say ‘fine’ and mean it when someone asks, ‘How are you?’ ” The last time Manning, 31, felt fine, really felt good, was in June 2001, two months into her LDS mission in Portugal.
“We were just walking down the street, and all of a sudden I was just hit with pain, like I’d been hit by a car,” she said Wednesday while waiting for an appointment at the University Health Care clinic on Redwood Road. “It was like my bones were breaking and my body was turning inside out.”
The event turned the Bountiful resident’s life upside down. The 4-foot-11 chronic go-getter whose ringing laugh has etched hallways from Woods Cross High School to the base camp of Mount Everest now gives all she’s got most days just to climb out of bed.
“An invalid whose dreams got invalidated,” she says, briefly allowing a twinge of sadness to blunt the corners of her smile.
What’s really getting her down lately, and why she’s at the doctor, is a bigger headache than her regular migraines — no insurance coverage. Her only option is to get on Medicaid by getting enrolled in the federal Social Security Disability Insurance, which she was turned down for in December. The soonest she’ll get coverage is September.
To even attempt to qualify, she must regularly see a doctor, visits her mother has been paying for, along with the dozen or so prescriptions she takes for the multiple maladies she’s been living with for nearly a decade.
“So how are we today?” Dr. Hugh Stoneburner asks Manning as he settles in for what will become a two-hour assessment of the little medical mystery in the exam room.
“Pretty crappy,” Manning said. The response comes as no surprise to Stoneburner but it puts a furrow down his upbeat demeanor.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “Really, I thought we were making some progress.”
“Me, too,” Manning says, wishing as much for “the best doctor I’ve ever had” as for herself that the news was better.
Better is at best a long shot, and they both know it. There’s a Whitman’s Sampler worth of prescriptions to review. The seizures, the fibromyalgia that still rattle her nerves, the general too-pooped-to-pop feeling that makes even being tired ache.
“And the migraines?” the doctor asks
“Well, they’ve been pretty good lately,” Manning says. “Not so many.”
“Well, that’s good. Something positive; maybe something to go on.”
Just after 3 p.m., Manning emerges from the room feeling worse somehow. She’ll spend $93 for the appointment (the clinic gave her a 20 percent discount). And another $40 for some prescription refills.
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SALT LAKE CITY — The IRS building in downtown Salt Lake City was evacuated Tuesday afternoon because of a suspicious package found in front of the building.
Police said a big, black bag was found on a pillar of the IRS building just before 3 p.m. The bomb squad responded to the scene and blew up the package using a robot, said Salt Lake Police Sgt. Robin Snyder. Police currently have 200 East from 100 South to South Temple blocked off, though Snyder did not believe there was a further threat.
She said investigators are unsure of what was inside the bag, but said it very well may have been little more than abandoned personal items.
“I don’t know how far they’ll go with the investigation,” Snyder said. “So many times people will leave packages and they could be stashing it until they come back later. There was no note or letter, no threatening phone call made. The only really suspicious thing was that it was left by a pillar at the IRS building.
The Deseret News will post more information as it becomes available.
— Pat Reavy and Lana Groves
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Really? Not only is this an incredibly homophobic bill but Florida would lose out on the much-needed money these productions bring to the state
"… a new bill that increases tax incentives to lure television and movie production to Florida would deny those tax breaks to films that feature gay characters. And unlike the ultraconservative Republican politician in The Birdcage, it doesn't seem the bill's sponsor, Rep. Stephen Precourt, will have a change of heart anytime soon.
Current laws prevent tax breaks for films that feature smoking, sex, nudity, or profane language. The proposed changes make Florida guidelines seem even more like the Hays Code that censored Hollywood from the the '30s to the '60s. Thankfully, Precourt hasn't borrowed more ideas from that censorship office and written in language that would also disallow interracial relationships, suggestive dancing, and 'lustful kisses.'"
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Exactly! We need to go back to the old layman diagnoses of just weird, odd,…
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Jim Tressel, the popular Ohio State's sweater vest-wearing head coach who is a conservative Christian and was also a Bush supporter, was recently interviewed by Outlook, an Ohio GLBT magazine. According to the weekly, "this is the first time that a Division I NCAA head football coach has done a one-on-one with a GLBT publication." Tressel has some surprisingly supportive things to say about out gays on his team.
When asked what advice he would give a player who were to come out as gay, Tressel responded:
"We strive to teach and model appreciation for everyone. One, we are a family. If you haven't learned form your family at home that people have differences and those strengthen the whole, then you are hopefully going to learn it as a part of the Ohio State football family.
Two, every part of our team is important and every role has value – no job is too small and no person is irrelevant – that's a great lesson that transcends society. When I think of the diversity on our team the past few years, it goes way beyond just a racial, sexual or ethnic mix…Whatever a young man feels called to express, I hope we will help him do it in a supportive environment."
Read the entire interview here. You'll want to skip to page 32.
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Southern Utah is actually a very fun and interesting place for the outdoor enthusiast. There is just so much to do and so much empty land available. What can you do in Utah? Here is a list of 4 great adventures you can have while in this wonderful state.
1. Go to the Arches National Park
This park houses some of the most amazing natural wonders on the planet, the natural arches. These creations are simply amazing to look at. They are so huge that you will look insignificant next to them. It really is nice to see these natural wonders and makes you think about just how special Mother Nature is.
2. Go to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary
The Best Friends animal sanctuary is one of the largest animal sanctuaries around. They take in horses, dogs, cats, birds, and other animals who do not have an owner anymore and give them a home. They are similar to a pound, but the animals are treated 10,000 times better and are given a lot of land to roam around on.
3. Go To Hovenweep National Monument
An ancient Indian civilization lived at Hovenweep hundreds of years ago. Many of their old buildings are still intact today. By visiting this area you get to see just how ancient Indians used to live and how life might have been for them. You will love this place especially if you like learning about other cultures or history.
4. Fish
Utah has some amazing fishing spots. Places like Fish Lake and Lake Powell are famous for their excellent fishing and their wonderful camping grounds. If you are an active fisher this is one state you do not want to pass up.
Those four areas are just some of the great things that you can do in Utah. There are plenty of adventures to be had, so take a trip and see what the outdoors can bring you.
For more things to see in Utah visit this site about Utah Vacations
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Tags: destinations, southern utah, Travel, Utah, utah vacations, vacation
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