Boy George's newest tweet about the Meghan-and-Oprah interview.

Silly but funny! pic.twitter.com/oozoMIQdsg

— Boy George (the truth is in your breath) (@BoyGeorge) March 11, 2021

I'll just quote his previous tweets on the subject, oldest to newest: 

1. "I found the big @oprah interview to be hugely dull. Is there more? I pray not!" 

2. "The one person not mentioned in any of this Harry & Meghan saga is the little boy Archie. If they had left the royals without creating a shit storm (it could have been done easily) he would still be an important future member of our royal family. I hope he still can and will be. I feel neither family deserves applause."

3. "You'd think they would have in house therapists at Buckingham Palace and if they don't, now is the time."

4. Responding to someone who said Harry needed to protect his family from the pararazzi: "You are talking to someone who knows more about the press than you could imagine? Harry, has slagged this country for years, long before Meghan. Fighting the press, then embracing the press because it tells you what you want to hear? It's a mugs game!"

Please don't keep asking.

Please don't keep asking me to explain everything I tweet. I don't have to!

— Boy George (Boomer) (@BoyGeorge) June 27, 2020

"Toxic masculinity."

Toxic masculinity! https://t.co/LcJB52JNSX

— Boy George (Boomer) (@BoyGeorge) May 16, 2020

"'Wow, the ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got 'swamped' (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT."

Trump just tweeted to exult over his superiority to Schwarzenegger.

'So much for being a movie star - and that was season 1 compared to season 14,' Trump tweeted.

'Now compare him to my season 1. But who cares, he supported [Ohio Governor John] Kasich & [Democratic nominee] Hillary Clinton.'

The President-elect is taunting a movie star on Twitter. That's something new.

We watched the first episode of "The Apprentice." Arnold was trying to step into the role that Trump originated, and it was obvious that the actor was acting. What do you expect? He's a bad actor. By contrast, Trump was acting too, but he was better at the role than Arnold. Maybe that's not such a huge deal, Arnold being quite a bad actor. The key to the role is seeming to be intimidating the contestants while deserving of their respect and provoking their desire to win his respect. Trump did that convincingly... and moved on.

I do like Boy George, who is one of the contestants on the new season. And I wondered what Boy George has said about Trump (because that relates to whether Trump would say "who cares?" about  him). I found this rather cagey statement:

“A lot of my friends are really, really upset but I reminded them a that they were still them. You’re always you and you bring the same to the party that you did always,” singer Boy George told Billboard... on Nov. 17. “For a lot of gay people, mainstream politics really isn’t where we find the answer. We find the answer in our own community by joining together. There’s an amazing kind of spirit in the LGBTQ community and you saw that through the AIDS epidemic and you see it so much every day. I’m not sure how much it relates to mainstream politics.”

I wish more celebrities would take that distanced approach. Ah, but there's this tweet (from just before the election):

I saw a list of celebrity Trump supporters, some quite surprising ones but I blocked them all. My timeline feels sanitised!

Were there any celebrity Trump supporters? And Boy George had been following them? Hard to believe.

ADDED: Schwarzenegger responded: "I wish you the best of luck and I hope you'll work for ALL of the American people as aggressively as you worked for your ratings."

Johnny Carson learns the word "bustier" from Madonna, who presents herself "as a virgin" to him.

And here's Boy George's first time:

What is Boy George singing about God?

I found that this morning at NPR.org, which manifests zero interest in the religious orientation of the song, which is called "My God." There's this puzzling sentence:

In 1982, the Irish Catholic singer joined a Jewish drummer, a Protestant guitar-and-keyboard player and a Jamaican bassist to form Culture Club.

I say "puzzling," because I can't tell if George remains a Catholic or if he just was one in 1982. He's still Irish, and maybe Catholic is, at least to NPR, something like an ethnic group and it sticks to you for life. Then the other members of the band are Jewish, Protestant, and Jamaican, which is a funny lack of parallelism. Are we talking about ethnicity or religion or just whatever diversity factor makes each one seem most "diverse"?

"Sometimes attorneys are desperate to find a way out of the legal profession."

"Sometimes that desperation will lead them down a strange road to an entirely new career — and not just a new career, but a new way of life."

ADDED: From the comments at the link: "That Boy George, come-hither look seals the deal."

What are you doing New Year's Eve?

Alone? At home?



Not alone? Out?

"I'm a man without conviction."

Sang Boy George in "Karma Chameleon." As Sonicfrog notes, Boy George is not a man without conviction anymore.

5 minutes -- "not a second more, not a second less" -- with Rufus Wainwright.

"Somewhere where there's silence would be good." = Why he'd like being an artist if he wasn't a musician.

"Isn't gay marriage kind of the death penalty?" = What Boy George said to him when they were discussing gay marriage and the death penalty.

"One of those titanic moments." = The election of Barack Obama (presumably "titanic," large, not "Titanic," shipwreck).

"I'm writing an opera in French"... He is, and he's a native French (and English) speaker, a consequence of Canadianness.

"The 100 Greatest, Gayest Albums (of all time)."

From Out.com. I have no idea how gay these choices are, but they do seem pretty great.

To create our list of the 100 Greatest, Gayest Albums of All Time, we polled more than 100 actors, comedians, musicians, writers, critics, performance artists, label reps, and DJs, asking each to list the 10 albums that left the most indelible impressions on their lives. After receiving responses from Boy George, Rufus Wainwright, Cyndi Lauper, the Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray, Candis Cayne, Perez Hilton, Nate Berkus, Jake Shears, John Cameron Mitchell, Wilson Cruz, Justin Bond, Darren Hayes, Junior Vasquez, Bruce Vilanch, Janis Ian, the Cliks, Ari Gold, Holly Johnson, and a slew of others, we tallied the results to determine our top-100 list.

So this was about indelible impressions on real people, not any abstract conception of what kind of music is somehow gay. It produced a nice list... and a real tribute to David Bowie.

Which of these albums do I have? 7, 8, 12, 17, 26, 38, 39, 43, 49, 50, 54, 57, 60, 62, 64, 68, 100.

It was almost a theme day...

... here on the blog, what with those last two posts about or partly about coined verbs. If I could revise titles -- you know there are blog rules, don't you? -- I would retitle that first post "Boy Georging."

Your Honor, I think you can see the importance of not Boy Georging my client.

Speaking of language, did you notice the way the Boy George article ended:

Later the exhausted star, who was supervised by a uniformed guard, paused for a fag break.

He said: “I am now going to go and have sex with the guard.”

He had a "fag break" and then he had sex with the guard. The British... they're an endless source of amusement, aren't they?

Humiliating Boy George.

Lots of photographers turned out yesterday to snap Boy George as he swept the streets in performance of court-ordered public service. George snapped back with obscenities, which look nasty in writing but sound fairly good-natured in the video clip. It was, as his lawyers argued, a media circus, and it did impose a much greater degree of punishment on him that the same work imposes on someone who is ignored. After 10 minutes, George is reassigned to indoor work, as if the spectacle with the photographers had not been predictable all along. I feel sorry for him and annoyed at the authorities for subjecting him to this, but only just very slightly.

Oh, look at that picture.

Who will even know it's Boy George?

Is a fashion-and-makeup workshop a ridiculous proposal for community service?

The judge in Boy George's case thought so.

His lawyer [Louis Freeman] said O'Dowd [AKA Boy George] hoped to do something more worthwhile than sweeping streets and sidewalks.

"There's nothing wrong with that if that's part of his punishment, but it will turn into a media circus, and the press will be following him every day," Freeman said.

The judge said he understood the objection to street cleaning: "It's humiliation." However, he said, O'Dowd "got out from under a felony, and he took a (misdemeanor) deal that had an element of humiliation..."

A celebrity shouldn't get special treatment, but the lawyer -- naturally -- is going to argue that to be treated the same is to be treated differently. There's more humiliation. It's a media circus.

"Gay unions, what is that about?"

Says Boy George. "I haven't been invited to any ceremonies, and I wouldn't go anyway. The idea that gay people have to mimic what obviously doesn't work for straight people any more ... I think is a bit tragic. I am looking-forward to gay divorces."

He's got his point of view:

He dislikes George Michael, and wishes Will Young "would go back in the closet. He is a common or garden homosexual, he is NOT a queer."

George has very distinct ideas about whether people are the proper kind of gay. George Michael is the wrong kind, according to George, for being caught in a California loo and thus enforcing the reputation that gays are "rampant". He remains furious that Elton John performed with homophobic Eminem in 2002 at the MTV awards.

ADDED: Are George's opinions offensive? I think it's just fine for him to have a bohemian outlook and to cast all conventional persons outside of his preferred group. But do gay people have a special obligation to unconventional? The answer should be no, and I don't see that he's saying yes. But, then, I've always liked Boy George and naturally tend to construe his remarks in a positive light.