Who doesn’t love a Gay Pride parade?

Well, at least four San Diego firefighters aren’t too fond of them, although that may have something to do with how they were ordered to don their uniforms and drive a city firetruck in this year’s San Diego Gay Pride parade.

For the 15 years that the San Diego Fire Department has been a part of the Pride parade, participation has been voluntary for San Diego’s firefighters. However, when the firefighters who had volunteered for this year’s Pride parade cancelled one day before the event for personal reasons, including a death in the family, San Diego’s openly lesbian fire chief Tracey Jarman ordered the crew from one of the stations along the parade route to fill in. As fire department spokesman Maurice Luque said:

However, the four firefighters tapped to ride in this year’s Pride parade promptly freaked out when they found themselves surrounded by gay folks, and are now attempting to sue the city and the fire department for sexual harassment.

While local papers reported that the crowd yelled “heroes” at the firefighters as they rode along the parade route behind an assortment of antique police cars driven by the San Diego Police Department, and the fire department claims that this is the first time in 15 years that firefighter participation in the Pride parade has resulted in a claim of sexual harassment, lawyers from the conservative Christian Thomas More Law Center who are handling the firefighter’s case described the parade this way:

Yes, once again the homosexual agenda has unleashed the most feared weapon in its arsenal: Men hugging other men.

Since the parade Tracey Jarman has issued an apology and met with the four firefighters but they still plan to sue. Richard Thompson, president of the Thomas More Law Center, called Jarman’s actions

I’m sure that the Thomas More Law Center, which considers itself “the sword and shield for people of faith” fighting the “culture war”, doesn’t have an agenda they try and force on unwilling citizens.

The lawyers for the firefighters did take care to point out that the firefighters were not physically assaulted during the Pride parade.

If you’re wondering who is physically assaulted during San Diego’s Gay Pride, the answer is sadly not that surprising: Gay people.

For example, the six gay men who were beaten with baseball bats and stabbed by local teenagers shortly after the 2006 Gay Pride festival.

But hey, at least they didn’t have to hear anyone make fire-based innuendos as they rode by.

THE SUNDAY HANGOVER

005

WARREN ELLIS

Dinner tonight? Scotch and Pringles, by the look of things. I'm in San Diego, it's Saturday night, and I go onstage at the San Diego Comic-Con International in less than two hours. The Red Bull Company have delivered me five pallets' worth of cans. I've seen Wil Wheaton for a sum total of about one minute. I saw Zoetica for about thirty seconds -- she's currently across town and mostly naked at the Dr Sketchy's gig, while I'm here in my hotel room banging this out. One may suggest that my priorities are a little skewed.



All I've seen of San Diego this time is the view from my hotel room. The Convention Center itself, which looks like it was made by two architects and a kid with a bucket of Lego while spending an afternoon ripped to the gizzard on Ritalin. And the bay, which has featured military vessels from time to time. I may have occasionally stood at the window with a small drink in my hand exhorting them to turn their guns on the con center. Because you can't trust those furries. Any one of them could be Osama. Open up the big cannons on the fuckers and let their yiffy god sort them out.



They always worry me when they pass wherever I'm signing. They never bring books -- I guess I don't appeal to that crowd. But I still get a little shudder. An actress acquaintance of mine once got shot by a costumed fan. He was a mass of fur, a human-sized Tribble from Star Trek. He asked the actress to pose for a photo with him, which she duly did. And as she put an arm around his hairy bulk, an air pistol nosed out of his side, and fired a pellet into her ribs. Turned her black with bruising all up her side. Obviously, an actual gun would have killed her instantly. The guy apparently leapt back and yelled "you've been morphed!" before he was brought down. So I always have armed security to hand at converntion signings. And I give the furries a wide berth.



My actress acquaintance would come off the convention floor of an evening, go straight to the hotel bar, do a shot in one, look at her hand to see if it was steady, and go up to her room to "wash them off me." She did several cons a year, selling signed photos.



Me? After watching her take that shaky shot every day, I decided I'd hold it down to one show a year. Familiarity, after all, breeds contempt. And also, apparently, armed furbags who want to morth women to death.

-- Warren Ellis

THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
004
WARREN ELLIS

I'm sitting on a wooden bench outside Woodchester Mansion, out in the Cotswolds in the west of England, watching the skies. There's a single cloud formation overhead that is, according to meteorologists, as wide as Everest is tall. I'm watching the skies because Woodchester, though dry today, is in a slight dip. And if it rains again we're all going to die. It's a bit apocalyptic here in God's own country today.

It's rained so hard that the surfaces of motorways have been destroyed. I mean, that's serious weather. Half the country is littered with dead cars. People had to sleep in their vehicles overnight, having left on road trips that ordinarily take less than an hour. This is, after all, a small country -- we can cross from coast to coast in a matter of three hours. It takes something special to turn that into a ten-hour (at best) run. Three months' worth of rain in one night, according to one estimate. One couch full of old people reportedly took off on a 3-hour run to a seaside resort for the near-dead yesterday afternoon. Thirteen hours later, they reached the first motorway service station on their route. Imagine a hundred crones trapped in a bus for thirteen hours. The gangway awash with brown urine, seats swampy with wet droppings reeking of tea and partially-digested biscuits, the driver with denture marks all over his neck. Desperate pensioners gnawing on each others' wigs for sustenance.

I'm in the middle of writing a new comics series about a flooded London. I could have done without the actual first-hand research on sunken England.

And in two days I'm off to San Diego (provided they let me into the country), where it never rains and in fact water vapour never actually enters the air. San Diego is an entirely dry-cured city, and is notable for largely looking like it was constructed last week. If you see Europeans laughing at signs seemingly at random in San Diego, it's because they've spotted the plaques announcing the "historic Gaslamp District." I have socks older than the historic Gaslamp District. In fact, there are probably still condoms laying in ditches and around the back of electricity sub-station in the Essex area that, for age and notable events alone, deserve the term "historic" more. San Diego, for me, encapsulates the Philip K Dick Condition in which we live today: just like his paranoid concerns, San Diego looks like it was assembled from flatpacks just before you got there, and will be folded up and put back in the warehouse an hour after you leave.

The postmodern condition, the 21st Century condition, is the Philip K Dick condition. We live in the world that he wrote about because he was afraid of it. This is how deep we are in it: someone created a Philip K Dick android with a computer brain full of his words. And then someone stole it. It's the future not as banal stasis, as JG Ballard would have it, not even as the sort of scary corporate dystopia Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP was turned into -- but as, basically, a broken shithole. The sort of place where rain can break a country and people will somehow fall for a blatantly fake "historic district."

After that, I'm going to Mesa, Arizona, where the sun sears the meat off your bones and... well, I have no idea what else is there apart from crack houses and whatever I saw on THE HIGH CHAPARRAL when I was a kid. Cowboys who dress entirely in blue. Probably while smoking crack.

So next week I'll be speaking to you from the floor of the San Diego Comic-Con, where I'll be signing my new comics from Avatar Press, DOKTOR SLEEPLESS, CRECY and BLACK SUMMER, and my debut prose novel (which you might have seen in Entertainment Weekly this weekend), CROOKED LITTLE VEIN. I'll be the big Englishman with no hair slumped down by the dumpsters and weeping uncontrollably.

-- W

San Diego: some call it a slice of heaven. But if you're a dolphin, the peaceful Californian city has become a killing field; an ocean of sorrow, loss, and regret; the epicenter of hell.



Try and look beyond the coastal climate that seems to soothe the human spirit; ignore the abundance of breathtaking flora that perfectly compliments the glorious Spanish-style architecture. Beneath the surface of this placid hippie-mecca something unspeakably evil lurks. Rather, someone, and he surely possesses a black, cruel heart if he has one at all. For lack of a better name, we can only call him the Dolphin Slayer.

Take a breath, this gets intense. Between May 29 and June 5, five dolphins washed ashore along the coast of San Diego; all the victims of murder most foul. According to the AP:

The victims were found within a 6 mile stretch between Carlsbad State Beach and Oceanside Harbor, just a few miles north of San Diego proper. Officials say this kind of dolphin mass-murder is a first. Statistics indicate that only one dolphin shooting typically occurs throughout the nation each year. Since the 1960s, San Diego has had only one such incident, about five years back.

According to the necropsy results (apparently that’s dolphin-speak for an autopsy), all of the dolphins were healthy and well-fed, with “bellies full of fish.” The poor, sad bastards never knew what hit ‘em. The necropsy also indicated that the bullets could have all been fired from the same gun, though conclusive ballistics testing has yet to be performed. Officials are offering a $2500 reward for the capture of this inhuman murderer (though he is most-likely human).

This guy offered up an unimpressive theory about the killings:

Taking into consideration all the available evidence, and drawing upon my vast knowledge of bad police procedural shows, I’ve come up with several alternate theories, that -- no pun intended -- blow Mr. Oswell’s out of the water.



First, let’s consider the crime scene. A quick check of the Interweb tells me that Carlsbad State Beach is less than 50 miles from Tijuana (see above); and we all know about the ongoing Mexican Drug War. Could the dolphins have been taught to smuggle drugs? Maybe they turned on their masters, or weren't performing up to expectations so their cartel contact decided to cut his losses and off the aquatic offenders. This fits with the execution style killings.

Another theory is that these killings were perpetrated by someone trying to make a statement. Consider this: in 2001, Dolphins were discovered to partake in homosexual relationships; the males have often been found blowing each other. Try and follow my natural leap of logic: someone who believed that homosexuality is a choice rather than a part of nature -- or "god's will" -- might be angered by this. That someone, probably an outspoken advocate of “homosexuality as sin”, might want to silence the dolphins… or he may have been after revenge. Keep in mind the last time a dolphin was killed in SD was five years ago: shortly after the discovery of homo-dolphins. Potential suspects could include priests, pastors, deeply religious closeted gays, or televangelists. It would certainly be worth investigating Ted Haggard.



And then there’s the final possibility, which, with the added video evidence provided below, seems to make the most sense to my sleuth-like senses. We know dolphins can be gay, and there is evidence to support that they are ‘pleasure driven’ beings. For years now, there have been reports of man-dolphin love affairs; someone even posted a detailed ”how to” manual to help an adventurous would-be dolphin-lover initiate a sexual encounter.

Do the math, if you will. I’m suggesting a man -- probably white, early '40s, single or possibly divorced -- initiated a love affair with a dolphin. At some point, probably after at least one successful lovemaking session, the dolphin would have spurned his advances, pushing the already off-kilter 'everyman' over the edge. Since the killing spree began with a knife and the killer quickly switched to a gun, this shows that what may have been a crime of passion has turned serial, and that the Dolphin Slayer's methods are evolving rapidly.

We can only expect the aquatic body count to pile high in the coming weeks. With that in mind, I suggest the authorities begin their search amongst known dolphin-philes, starting with this guy:



Aaron_Lariviere tries to think of his powers of evidence-free investigation as a blessing rather than a curse.

This Saturday and Sunday, July 29th and 30th is the first ever San Diego Punk Rock Craft Fair. Aside from the many vendors gracing the event, there will also be bands, a zine demo, a henna tattoo demo, a dominatrix stand-up comic, the Derby Dolls, a wrestling show, burlesque show, door prizes, gift bags and more. The event will be held at UCSD's Che Cafe from 10am to 6pm.

I'll be there on Saturday; hope to see you then. However, those missing out on the weekend of festivities can check out the vendor gallery to shop online.


Photo Location

This week kicks off San Diego's enormous comics convention, Comic Con. Beginning this Thursday, July 20th, comic, gaming, animation and anime enthusiasts, creators and fanatics congregate for anything and everything comics-related.

Some programming highlights this year include keynote speakers Dan Clowes (creator of Ghost World, Eightball), Shag, Ray Bradbury (author of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles), and James Kochalka (Monkey vs. Robot) as well as some important contributing artists to ongoing titles and video games such as those published by Marvel and DC.

Aside from the hundreds of exhibitors, there will also be the annual Eisner Awards ceremony, art show, film festival, and something I personally find simultaneously disturbing and entertaining, The Masquerade. Download the PDF schedule for a full guide to programming at this year's Comic Con.


Photo Location

The festivities run July 20th - 23rd with previews for super comics nerds only on July 19th here in San Diego at the SDCC. More info here (and maybe even here) as the fest unfolds.