The U.S. Supreme Court today said “hell nah” to many parts of an Arizona law designed to fight illegal immigration by racially profiling people. It wasn’t a total victory for those who don’t love America and think a nation built by immigrants will be ruined by them, as the court let a provision stand that allows police to check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws.   

New laws will soon change where and how you can buy things to blow up in Northern Kentucky. In March 2011, a bill passed that allowed the establishment of permanent retail sites for fireworks sales and also legalized the sale of mine shells, aerial shells and other previously illegal types of fireworks.   

Rodney King, long the butt of so many jokes with lead-ins about failed civil rights, police brutality, racism and profiling in the era of Arsenio Hall and NWA at the dawn of videotaping everything before the “broadcast yourself” edict of YouTube, the self-flagellating narcissism of reality TV and the faked friendliness of Facebook, was found dead Sunday at the bottom of the swimming pool he’d built himself inlaid with tiles with two dates.   

I’ve got a problem. Some call it a problem, at least. Personally, I prefer “fixation.” Better yet, a love. Passion. Interest. Civic duty, if you want to be fancy about it. Ask any of my former roommates; they’ll call it a compulsion. A quirk. The one descriptor they’ll use to sum me up to their next roommate. “God, she had this weird thing about recycling … drove me nuts.”    

It’s been about 16 months since I met my father for the first (and what looks like only) time. It would be difficult to describe his presence in my life. For 40 years, he was an absence, a void, a ghost in the machine; one that I can’t say I missed.  

Cincinnati Duke Energy customers could face increased utility costs to help Duke relocate utility lines for the new streetcar, if state regulators decide to permit Duke to recover expenses associated with the mass transit project. CINCINNATI  -1
  

Don’t talk about my car. You know how guests on “talk shows” like Maury or Jerry Springer will literally break a chair over someone’s head if they mention the former’s mother? That’s how I feel (internally, thus far) when others try to bring up my ride.  

I write this to the slurred black icky thump of D’Angelo’s “Devil’s Pie” (I know I/was born to die/searching to find/peace of mind),  pausing occasionally in my writing cockpit to look up at the grainy, overdeveloped black and white Polaroid of my parents on the Hamilton porch of my girlhood home. There is no phantasmagorical narrative. Their body language tells a sweet story.    

Justin Bieber today compared himself to Michael Jackson, telling Billboard that his new song “Maria” is his “Billie Jean.” In response to this, we at WWE! have decided to start calling our traditional Monday dinner of diced hot dogs and macaroni “Surf and Turf.”  

A Minnesota high school student was recently forbidden from wearing black and silver rosary beads in support of his breast cancer-stricken grandmother because school officials said the beads could symbolize gang membership. WORLD -1
  

June 12 happens to be my stepdaughter’s birthday, but this year it takes on even greater significance to our family and thousands of other couples in the United States because it marks the 45th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision making it legal in all 50 states for couples of different races to marry and live their lives without fear of harassment from law enforcement.   

Your black-ass president is a fag hag. A fag hag is usually a woman who co-stars and co-signs in the lives of flamboyantly gay men. Fag hags are pesky cheerleaders buzzing about meaninglessly to little affect; they are quick to appear down with gay (and lesbian … dykes have fag hags, too) causes, but it’s all too much, too little, too late.  

A couple of years ago, I went through depressive funk that led me to withdraw from most social settings. I hermited away not only physically, but also cyberly. I’ve always suffered from some level of social anxiety; now, I was experiencing a kind of social-network anxiety that caused me to ultimately break up with my Facebook page.
  

If the 1985 film Pee Wee’s Big Adventure taught us anything, it’s that rich people think they can have whatever they want when someone loves an object enough, he or she will do anything to keep it. That’s kind of what’s going on over at Music Hall these days.   

Historic Everybody’s Records and Gaslight Café in Pleasant Ridge are facing threats of closure because Walgreens wants to purchase the corner of Ridge and Montgomery to demolish the properties and build a new pharmacy, only blocks from an already-existing location. CINCINNATI -2