Popingay

You Can’t Do That on Television, but You Can Do It on the Internet: Girl, You’ve Got Shemail

Hi Canada!  I’m excited to be talking to another part of the United States country!  I have always been a person who really enjoys talking to people of different cultures and backgrounds.  So I will continue my search because Canadians have less culture than we do.  I joke.  However, when I think of Canadians, Degrassi and hockey come to mind.  Although I will say that for two years I was obsessed with Degrassi, but concerned that you Canadians have a lot of issues in your high schools.  Rape, cheating, violence, revenge… It makes 90210 look tame.

My name is Josh, and Kris has been nice enough to afford me the opportunity to be a guest blogger and I’m really excited about that.  Mostly because it means I don’t have to go through the work of setting up my own blog.  Such work!  Like Kris, I do love me some pop-culture.  In case you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve noticed the increase of GLBT individuals on television shows.  For those of you fortunate enough to have satellite or other means through which you can watch American channels, we actually have the first television station dedicated exclusively to programming for the GLBT community.  Logo has been around since 2005 and actually has some of its own original programming.  Weirdly enough, Logo replaced VH1 Mega Hits.  I guess the people at Viacom had decided that enough was enough when it came to channels playing nonstop 80’s power ballads.  I couldn’t have agreed more.

Logo’s most popular original program is RuPaul’s Drag Race.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with this show (SHAME ON YOU), it is a cross between America’s (Canada’s???) Next Top Model, Project Runway, American Idol, Survivor, and the drag show you saw last night at your local gay club.  Just imagine what happens when you cram 13 bitchy queens in one room competing for prizes (including $75,000, or roughly $13.47 Canadian, actually, I guess I can’t talk now since the exchange rate is $1 USD to $0.98 Canadian.  When my class took our 8^th grade trip to Toronto in 1998 it was great and I got CD’s [remember those?] there for the equivalent of like $7……oh the good old days).  Anyways, back to the queens.  The third season just premiered a few weeks ago and there have already been two laugh-out-loud episodes.

Each week, the queens are greeted with a mini-challenge to start.  This mini-challenge has something to do with the main challenge, which they find out later in the episode.  The winner of the mini-challenge is also awarded some benefit that will help them out for the main challenge.  Once the main challenge is revealed, all hell usually breaks loose.  Queens start bitching, calling each other things that get bleeped out, and waving fingers (like the fabulous black lady in all of us).

I’m a sucker for the runway presentations!  I just love drag and marvel at the mechanics of it.  No matter how many times people explain it to me, I just don’t understand where they tuck their business.  Some of us don’t even have that much business (I’m Jewish, what do you want….if you want to see it though, call me at 800-Jew-4You) and I don’t think it would work for me.  They also have a great list of celebrity guest judges.  Margaret Cho, Vanessa Williams, Chloe Sevigny, Sharon Osbourne, and a lot of other gay icons.

However, the best part comes when then two queens who are up for elimination have to lip-sync for their lives.  They are given one last chance to save themselves and impress Ru by lip-syncing to a song they prepared earlier.  It is a rather strange sight to witness.  Most queens don’t know how to share the stage, which is why it’s hysterical.

I was told by Kris that you can’t stream it from the Logo website, which is a crying shame.  According the (the #1 source for information period!) Wikipedia it is broadcast in Canada on MuchMore.  I haven’t heard of this station, but I remember when cable started really expanding in the year 2000 and we got MuchMusic, one of its sister stations.  I liked it a lot better than MTV at the time because they started to focus more on the TV and less on the M, which we thought was lame since it’s not TVM…..come on.

For those of you who have the Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent (read C.U.N.T.) and are clever enough to figure out how to watch it anyways (I don’t own a TV but that doesn’t stop me from watching every show I want to……use your brains pumpkins!), please check it out.  I promise you will instantly be addicted.  The only requirement is that you like hysterical TV and enjoy watching men dress up like women and (usually) look prettier than most actual women.

I’m quite excited for the rest of the season and being able to reach out to my Canadian brothers and sisters.  I know eventually you’ll like me better than Kris and I will need to start writing all the time instead of him.  It’s inevitable, so that makes sense…

You can start making your t-shirts now.  If you need a catchy slogan, let me know.  I’ll come up with something since I’m quick off my feet… That’s right…

[Josh is a Guest Blogger on Popingay hailing from the good ol’ US of A. He regularly writes a segment called: You Can’t Do That on Television, but You Can Do It on the Internet, and frequently handles death threats from Kris, who’s neurotically paranoid of being upstaged on his own blog.]

Josh: An Introduction

Josh was born in the historic city of Charlottesville, Virginia in The Year of Our Josh, 1984, making him perpetually 21.  He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, also known as “the mistake on the lake” (and they weren’t lying).  After graduating high school (and escaping the waspy/jappy confines of his goofy upper-middle class suburb of intolerance and Dave Matthew’s Band cult-like worship), he studied at The Ohio State University, following in the footsteps of his entire family (GO BUCKS!!!).  He graduated with a Bachelors of Arts in Spanish and a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration in marketing.

After working several odd jobs, including a two-year stent as a server (boy did that teach him a lot about people…), he participated in a national volunteer service program called AmeriCorps*VISTA.  This program was started by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.  For one year, Josh (voluntarily if you can believe it) lived and served in Douglas, Arizona, situated in southeastern rural Arizona, right along the Mexican border.  AmeriCorps*VISTA programs fight poverty around the country as members also live at the poverty line to fully understand what they are fighting (again voluntarily, he can hard believe he did it himself).

Upon finishing his one year term, Josh moved to Phoenix and became the marketing manager for a golf resort.  Feeling that the hospitality industry wasn’t quite the right fit, he made a career move and is now the social media specialist for an integrated internet marketing company in the Phoenix area.

When not trying to solve their client’s internet-related advertising problems and the rest of the world’s many issues, Josh enjoys reading, listening to new music he discovers, and staying fit by running 15 miles a week and lifting weights.  He is also an avid chef and loves to throw things together in the kitchen.  Josh also has an interest in traveling and has already been to several countries around the world.

The picture is Josh trying to smile.  That’s usually the best he can do…

[Josh is a Guest Blogger on Popingay hailing from the good ol’ US of A. He regularly writes a segment called: You Can’t Do That on Television, but You Can Do It on the Internet, and frequently handles death threats from Kris, who’s neurotically paranoid of being upstaged on his own blog.]

Well, hello, Josh: Welcome to the Monkey House

In which “monkey” means “penis”. But I’m assuming you’ve gathered that.

We have a bit of a problem here at Popingay: sometimes, when Kris is too lazy, tired, unimaginative, or coming down off a 6-day crystal meth binge, there is a lag in useable content. And sometimes he’s just too busy contemplating the greatness of pie. But we digress.

In these cases, we search high and low in our social network for people willing to fill in the gap and add to the multitudinous voices on the blog; people like our anonymous gay poet-in-residence (AGPIR—I’ve given him an official name). And in some even rarer cases, we find talented, interesting people willing to put their name, lives, and possible investigation by Homeland Security on the line.

That’s right. Today we are welcoming a new Guest Blogger, and he’s an American. Gasp. I’ll let him say hi in his own words in a couple hours, and we’ll be seeing an extra-special post from him later on today. Hopefully one of many, many to come (each post saves Kris tens of minutes of work writing a blog post).

I hope you’ll welcome Josh with all the respect and admiration you consistently shower on me with boos and death threats.

Above: What Kris thinks America is actually like.