POTUS Sandy Hook Vigil Speech

The POTUS speaking at Sunday night's vigil for the victims of the Newtown CT mass shooting.

The 2012 Presidential Electors Meeting Today

Yes, we American voters handled our electoral business back on November 6.  President Obama won with 51.7% of the vote and got 65,600,358 people to do so compared to Mitt Romney's 47.3% (snicker, snicker) and 60,861,543 votes.

On that date we were not only voting for either the Democratic or Republican party presidential tickets, but also casting votes for the electors who will take part in representing our various states in the Electoral College.

Those electors are meeting in the 50 state capitols and the District of Columbia (AKA Washington DC) today to carry out that part of the presidential election process.  DC gets three electoral votes and is treated like a state per the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution.

The electors barring any defections will ratify the 332-206 blowout win for President Barack Obama over Mitt Romney,  but the results of the 2012 election don't become official until the President of the Senate counts the electoral votes out loud at a special joint session of Congress that will be held on January 6, 2013.

POC's Calling Out Problematic Instances Of Racist Behavior Doesn't Make The POC 'Racist'

And y'all need to chill with that crap, especially in liberal-progressive circles.

In fact, I and other POC social justice bloggers are tired of having to point out the obvious or make this ad nauseum point about race and countless others.  Far too often because of whiteness, white supremacy and vanillacentric privilege,  bigoted and racist crap happens that a person of color for their own sanity is going to have to call out    

Sometimes we're going to have to call you out when you do problematic things in the name of 'colorblindness' that cluelessly reinforces the dominance of whiteness.  

When we POC's do that, that is not 'racism'.   FOX noise got y'all twisted on that.   It is not what a pissed off white individual or a conservafool commentator hurls back at a POC who had the courage to speak up and point out a problematic situation so it doesn't happen the next time.

Racism=prejudice plus systemic power.   In fact, let Moni school you on this one more time.:

Racism is the systematic discrimination, denial of rights and benefits by whites against non-whites in all areas of human activity.  (economics, education, labor, law, politics, religion, sex and war).

And naw, that's the Sociology 101 definition of racism.  Don't even try to pull out a definition of racism from Webster's (or any) dictionary and try to argue with me or any other person of color that everybody can be racist.  No, everybody cannot be racist and you are making the mistake that just about every white person does of conflating bigotry and prejudice with racism..      

Exhibit A of what I'm talking about is the voter ID voter suppression laws.   They were proposed by ALEC, written and sponsored by conservative white politicians, passed by conservative white politicians in white dominated state legislatures and vigorously defended by white conservatives.

They had the racist intent of suppressing the turnout of non-white voters and their ability to vote in elections for the candidates of their choice.

So in this example you had whites who attempted to deny the voting rights of non-whites in elections, an area of human activity that determines the outcome of the laws that govern society and how it's organized solely to keep political power and because they fear what will happen when white people become a minority population in 2040.  

Hint to the wise.  Better keep those affirmative action laws on the legal books.. Your kids, grandkids and great grandkids may need them someday.   

Everyone be bigoted and prejudiced.  Everybody can NOT be racist, because persons of color individually or in their respective ethnic groups alone do not have the systemic societal power to deny whites rights and societal benefits in any area of human activity.   

The Trans Conclusion Jump Strikes Again

One of the things that annoys me about the transgender community is the conclusion jump.

It's a tendency to take a snippet of information and come up with a pessimistic scenario severely out of whack with the available evidence or presume that the jumped conclusion is true even though the weight of evidence doesn't support it.      TransGriot July 5, 2007

The London Olympic Games unfortunately closed without an open trans athlete participating in that fortnight of competition.  But I can guarantee if the conclusion jump were an Olympic event some peeps in my community would take the gold medal for it. 

I wrote about this tendency of elements of our community to engage in this behavior during a situation in 2007 in which liberal-progressive talk show host Randi Rhodes called Ann Coulter a transwoman and transpeople justifiably called her on it.  

But a few conclusion jumped to the point where one person jawdroppingly equated her to transphobic right wing talker Michael Savage and another called her a transphobe when Rhodes clearly was neither.

We had another example of the trans conclusion jump at work last week when a transwoman had a not so pleasant flying experience in a Texas airport.    The incident as it turned out as more information became available got blown up way out of proportion to the facts of the case.

One thing you must do as a blogger (or on social media) is verify before posting. Your credibility as a blogger is important, especially when you represent a marginalized community and people are relying on you to help give them the facts they need to form their opinions on issues.  

You have to think like a reporter. Facts and accurate information should be first and foremost in a post. You can do point of view opinion style commentary in a later post if necessary.

Trusting your instincts is also paramount. I had questions about that incident, which is why you didn't see it posted on TransGriot when it first started appearing on the Net. 

Because I'm one of the biggest award winning bloggers of color, I have an international readership, I'm an award-winning activist, I talk about the African-American trans community in my writing, and what I write is highly valued,  I have to get it right.  It's more important in my mind to be accurate than to be the first to post it.
TransGriot will be seven years old on January 1.  I've put a lot of work into building its reputation as a go-to source for information on the African-American trans community and fearlessly and accurately discussing issues of importance to me and the trans community in general.  I take that responsibility seriously. 

The trans community and its hundreds of bloggers must consider the blogosphere as one of the vitally important tools in our civil rights toolkit.   It  has been one of the reasons that our trans human rights movement has made the remarkable progress it has over the last decade. 

Our trans bloggers from our A-list award winners to the folks just starting and building their blogging reps have raised our community's visibility along with bringing the trans community's issue concerns to the attention of the general public, politicians and civil rights organizations.  They have played a major role in pointing out transpeople are part of the diverse mosaic of human life.So chill with the conclusion jumping, okay?   It takes years to build up a solid reputation in the blogosphere for accuracy and being a go-to blog for commentary for our community, and one horribly incorrect post to screw it up.

TransGriot Note: Second picture is of Louisville television personality and Voice-Tribune editor Angie Fenton.  

2012 Texans Watch-Back To Back AFC South Champs!

My fave NFL ballers put on their deep steel blue uniforms, shook off the beatdown they received at the hands of the New England Patriots last Monday and welcomed Andrew Luck back home by pinning him and his Indianapolis Colts with a loss at Reliant.


The 29-17 win clinched the AFC South title for the second straight year for the Texans.  They rolled up 417 yards of offense in this game, with Arian Foster leading the way with 165 yards rushing on 27 carries and Andre Johnson catching 11 passes for 151 yards and a touchdown. 

The Bulls on Parade also showed signs of getting back to normal with JJ Watt getting closer to Houstonian Michael Strahan's single season NFL sack record of 22.5.   JJ is having an NFL defensive MVP type season and is at 19.5 sacks after taking Luck to the Reliant Stadium turf three times. 

The Texans also received an early Christmas present a few hours later when the San Francisco 49ers beat the Patriots 41-34 in Foxborough.


All the 12-2 Texans have to do is win one of their two remaining regular season games against either the Minnesota Vikings or the regular season finale versus the Colts at Lucas Oil Stadium and they will clinch the number one seed and home field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs.

Congrats on winning the AFC South title for the second season in a row.  But the eyes of every Texans player and fan are turned east toward New Orleans.   They took a major step toward making that happen today.

Call Me A Flip-Flopper, But I Have Reconsidered And Altered My Position On Guns

TransGriot Note: A must read post from Deep Thought's Eli Blake  

I've been remarkably consistent in my views on guns over the past few decades. Essentially, it has boiled down to the following statement, which I had posted in more places than I can count:

I support your right to own a gun. Any gun.

The Constitutional fact that Americans have the right to be armed aside, I fundamentally believe (as a liberal) that you have the right to read, download, drink, smoke, have sexual activity or whatever as you please as long as you are not harming someone else by it, and therefore also to buy what you please (and if it is a gun, then buy it.) In fact, until recently the debate on guns has been moving further and further to the right, where without changing a single position, I had gone from guns being one issue where I generally agreed with the right (when the debate was about registration and limitations on ownership) to where I was more likely to agree with the left (when the debate had moved past that to trying to force guns into more and more places like public buildings and private businesses over the objections of the business owners.) I summarized this several months ago in this post: The Debate on Guns has been Changing.

Recently though, in light of a spate of deranged gunmen killing large numbers of people, the debate has been moving back the other way. And in theory that would move me back to where I had been focused, against any new restrictions. To restrict individual rights, I believe in a high bar.

That bar has been reached. The slaughter of first grade children at an elementary school yesterday has been the point at which I have to reluctantly agree that the harm to society caused by allowing the ownership of a particular category of weapons-- assault weapons with clips capable of firing large numbers of rounds before reloading, and in rapid succession-- outweighs any good reason one could have for owning one.

And the fact is, this weekend was only a third as bloody as it could have been. In the past 48 hours you didn't read about another school shooting in Bartlesville, Oklahoma because of a brave student informant and an alert school administration, nor about a massacre in a hospital in Alabama this morning because of two alert hospital staff and two police officers, three of whom were wounded but who stopped the gunman before he could shoot anyone else.

You can read the rest of it at his blog

Black Female Intellectuals Chat About A New Black Feminist Reader

I'm not a feminist and identify as a womanist, but I was intrigued to see the note on Dr Kaila Story's (AKA Niece) Facebook page in which she talked about a chat she'd had with Dr. Yaba Blay and Dr. Brittney Cooper

When they aren't teaching their lucky students at their various colleges, Niece is the co-host of the WFPL-FM radio show 'Strange Fruit', Dr. Blay was featured on the recent episode of the CNN series Black In America, and  Dr. Cooper is one of the co-founders of the Crunk Feminist Collective. 

They discussed the persistence of terrible images of Black women in Hip-Hop music and during the course of that discussion, Professors.Story, Blay and Cooper began a dialogue about the need for an updated anthology of Black Feminist Thought.

That what happens when you get three brilliant and accomplished African-descended women chatting about issues in our community.

I hope if that anthology comes to pass and becomes available, Black feminists will take the opportunity to make it explicitly clear where their movement differs from white-dominated feminism.  I hope they call out the maddening tendency of white feminists to engage in cricket chirping silence when prominent Black women such as First Lady Michelle Obama get misogynistic attacks aimed at them, but are in full throated protest if someone even says a bad word or looks crosseyed at a white female no matter what side of the political spectrum she's on.

I commented in the thread I hoped they would condemn the trans exclusionary radical feminists to that discussion.  It is a Black feminist issue since predominately white TERF's have been pushing virulent anti-trans rhetoric for 40 years that I and other trans people believe fuels anti-trans discrimination, negativity toward our community and the anti-trans hate that leads to our murders.   The people who have taken the brunt of those anti-trans murders have been Black and Latina trans women.

If it does happen, it was suggested by Dr. Story that I write that portion of it   And if they do (or someone else) starts working on that updated anthology, should I get the invitation to write that essay, I most certainly will.

Jazz Talks To Barbara Walters On Dating

Y'all know how much I love our little transteen Jazz, a girl like us who was introduced via the first Barbara Walters ABC 20/20 show report on transgender kids.    Jazz is now approaching age 13 and one of the questions Barbara asked in the follow up show that was supposed to air on Friday pertained to dating.

The wise beyond her years trans youngling had some interesting things to say about it, including something that we her trans elders should file away

  Watch More News Videos at ABC
  |
  2012 Presidential Election
  |
  Entertainment & Celebrity News

Miss International Queen 2012 Is....

After Nigeria's Sahhara got screwed for the 2011 title and it exposed a problematic pattern of dark skinned women and African descended ones not being chosen as the winners for the pageant along with transpinays, in protest yours truly was going to eschew writing a post about the 2012 Miss International Queen contest as had been my blog's tradition.

The controversy over the questionable win of Thailand's Sirapassorn 'Sammy' Atthayakorn over 1st runner up Sahhara and 2nd runner up Margaret (another transpinay representing Lebanon) sparked so much online drama that the Amazing Philippine Beauties pageant organizers considered starting a rival international trans pageant in Manila in the wake of the kerfluffle and transpinays were prepping a boycott of Miss International Queen event..

But when 20 year old Kevin Balot of the Philippines became the first transpinay to win the Miss International Queen title in the nearly decade long history of the event on November 2, had to write something about the groundbreaking win that my transpinay sisters had been anxiously waiting for.  Jessika Simoes of Brazil was 1st runner up fo this year's edition of the Pattaya based event while Thailand's Panvilas Mongkol was 2nd runner up.

What's going to be interesting to observe is whether the Miss International Queen pageant continues to draw contestants in light of the fact the Miss Universe pageant system is opening its doors to transwomen in 2013 and other nations such as Brazil are starting their own national trans pageant events like the one that have existed in the States, Thailand and the Philippines. .

Congratulations Kevin for winning Miss International Queen 2012!

POTUS Comments On CT Mass Shooting

President Obama's remarks yesterday concerning the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT..

Two Fracking USA Mass Shootings

We always like to brag in the United States when we're number one in the world about something vis a vis other nations, but being number one in the number of people who die due to gun violence is not something to be proud of.

We've had two mass shooting in the States this week.   One was Tuesday at a mall in Clackamas, OR that killed three people and yesterday it was a mass shooting at an elementary school campus in Newtown, CT. that killed 27 people.  20 of the victims were children between the ages of 5-10 along with seven adults.

As someone who is part of a community that continues to experience a gun violence plague, I'm beyond sick and tired of seeing people die because some people have a fetishistic attachment to guns.  

I'm also beyond sick and tired of vanillacentric privileged card carrying NRA gun nuts pointing to the Second Amendment and immediately deploying their 'guns don't kill people' and 'if people were armed, it would have stopped the attack before it happened' spin lines.

Yeah right,.the shooters in the last three incidents were wearing masks and body armor.   There were armed people in the vicinity when former congressmember Gabby Giffords was nearly assassinated in Tucson by Jared Loughner and when James Holmes attacked the Aurora, CO movie theater. 

Someone was even mindnumbingly stupid enough to say that if the kids at the school had been armed it wouldn't have happened.  Don't even insult mine or anyone elses intelligence by trying to peddle that line. 

We always hear about protecting the rights of you gun owners.   How about protecting the rights of us Americans who don't want to own guns, but our safety and security are increasingly threatened by the out of control gun culture.  This is not the Wild Wild West anymore and the United States has a highly competent, well equipped professional army unlike in 1787 when the Constitution was adopted.  Our gun laws need to reflect that.   It's time to deal with the reality this fetishistic gun culture is killing innocent people and making our country less safe.  

And it's not just us liberals complaining about the flood of guns in the US making our streets less safe.   The guns are now spilling over across the Mexican and Canadian borders and negatively impacting their citizens and their nations, too.

It's past time for sensible gun control legislation that balances the 2nd Amendment rights of gun owners with the needs of people who don't want to come near a gun, but have just as much right to have the ability to go about their daily lives without the fear of themselves or their loved ones being shot or killed.

To paraphrase Spock from Star Trek, the needs of many Americans outweigh the needs of a few militant gun owners.

I asked this question when I wrote my post in the wake of the Aurora, CO shooting and it bears repeating once again.

How many more people have to die, be wounded or crippled in the United States, Canada and Mexico before y'all stop tripping and allow some common sense gun laws in this country that ban assault weapons, extended magazine clips and people with mental health issues getting their hands on weapons that kill mass quantities of human beings?

Can somebody in the National Rifle Association answer that question for me?  And this time, I think people in Clackamas, OR and Newtown, CT would be very interested in hearing the answer to that question. 

Shut Up Fool Awards- Less Than 12 Days Until Christmas Edition

Happy Holidays TransGriot readers!   Just thought I'd give you the gentle reminder that December 25 is rapidly approaching, so you still have time to get those Christmas cards out and get those gifts for the special people in your lives.

It's also Friday and that means it's time for my weekly exercise in shining a spotlight on colossal ignorance and unfettered stupidity. 

So let's go to work as Ed Schultz would say.

Honorable mention number one goes to Fox Noise for continuing to pimp that 'War on Christmas' toro caca


Honorable mention number two goes to Supreme Court injustice Antonin Scalia who got called out by Duncan Hosie, a freshman Princeton University student on his homophobia in his case dissents at a campus lecture and Scalia doubled down on it.

Honorable mention number three is the Republican Party, who still haven't figured it out that pursuing the same anti-worker, anti-woman, and voter suppression policies will grease the skid to more national and increasingly state and local electoral defeats.

This week's winner is 2012 Shut Up Fool of the Year Award nominee Allen West.  This fool once again opened his mouth and something ignorant came out of it.   He not only threw in his usual POTUS bashing comments, he cited 'cheating' as the reason for his loss to Rep-elect Patrick Murphy.

Naw Allen, if you really want to find out who is most responsible for your sore loser behind becoming a one term congressmember, look in the mirror.


Allen West, shut the hell up fool!

C-279 Update-Getting Filibustered By The Conservatives

Been keeping track of C-279, the federal Trans Rights Bill that seeks to protect the human rights of my trans Canadian brothers and sisters.  

They've already had a great year and progress in passing trans rights legislation in Ontario, Manitoba and most recently Nova Scotia and would like to keep that positive momentum going into 2013.

Bil C-279 would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code to include "gender identity" and "gender expression" as grounds for discrimination but seems to have hit a little resistance while it was in committee.  

Not surprising since the Conservatives were already borrowing tactics from their south of the border Republican cousins and conservahaters by throwing 'bathroom bill' shade at it.  

The NDP's Randall Garrison, the sponsor of this private members bill ain't happy about it, and neither is the Canadian trans community and their allies..  

Mercedes Allen breaks it down for us in terms of what transpired.

2012 TransGriot NFL Picks-Week 15

Well, was not a good Week 14 for me or my Texans.   They took a 42-14 buttkicking at the hands of the New England Patriots.  After holding as much as a seven game lead for most of the season I'm now trailing Mike by two games with three weeks to go no thanks to the Buffalo Bills expensively sorry defense blowing their lead against the St. Louis Rams.

But as Mr Watts painfully remembers,  I erased a four game deficit last season in less time.  I have three weeks left starting with this one.

I know what happened the last time the Texans embarrassingly lost a nationally televised game.  They took out their frustrations at Reliant on the Angry Birds.   This time it's Andrew Luck coming back home as the quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts and the Texans needing a win to clinch their second straight AFC South division title and needing to just win baby to stay ahead of the Patriots for the number one AFC playoff seed.

Let's just say the Colts picked a bad week to be coming to Reliant for this crucial game.

Well, gotta handle my Week 15 business and stop the bleeding  Tired of the mediocrity that's allowed him to inch ahead and erase my lead in the first place.   Mike's picks are here, mine are in underlined bold print.

   
Week 14 records 
TransGriot  8-8
Mike Watts 10-6

2012 Season Records
TransGriot  130-77-1
Mike Watts 132-75-1

Week 15

Thursday, December 13
Bengals at Eagles

Sunday, December 16
Packers at Bears
Giants at Falcons
Buccaneers at Saints
Vikings at Rams
Redskins at Browns
Jaguars at Dolphins
Broncos at Ravens
Colts at Texans

Sunday Afternoon  
Lions at Cardinals
Panthers at Chargers
Seahawks at Bills
Steelers at Cowboys
Chiefs at Raiders

Sunday Night
49ers at Patriots

Monday, December 17
Jets at Titans

Indonesian Trans Festival Shut Down By Islamic Defenders Front

There are some areas of our planet in which it's a struggle for our trans brothers and transsisters to openly live their lives in peace.  Unfortunately for the seven million transpeople who live there Indonesia is becoming one of them no thanks in large part to the Islamic Defenders Front and neglect of their human rights.

That neglect of trans human rights is particularly galling since Indonesia was where the Yogyakarta Principles were created.

A 2010 ILGA regional conference was disrupted by these so called 'defenders of the faith' and earlier this month the IDF was back on the reprehensible job of hatin' on the local transwomen by disrupting a trans festival in Jakarta planned to dispel myths and lies being spread about the local trans community.

IDF thugs showed up with sticks and helmets to break up the event, claiming the organizers didn't have a police permit and the neighborhood didn't want them having a trans pageant there.   The festival and its pageant portion was moved to the Legal Aid Foundation in central Jakarta

Merlyn Sofyan, the initiator of the festival, denied the event was only just a trans pageant.

“It’s called Festival Waria Berbudaya [Cultural Transgender Festival], not a pageant where contestants are judged by their looks,” Sofyan told the Jakarta Globe. “Festival Waria Berbudaya is an attempt to answer the wrong perceptions in our community by producing decent human resources of waria. It’s not going to be instant, but we’re trying to nurture them.”

But Salim Alatas, the head of the Jakarta chapter of faith based transphobes the IDF insisted that such an event would not be tolerated, whatever the reason was.

Sofyan, who herself was a winner of the Miss Waria 2006 pageant, said in that interview it was not the role of the IDF to say who was right or wrong.  "If we’re talking about religion, who has the right to judge other people?” said Sofyan, who had hoped the festival would counter negative sentiments toward the transgender community in Indonesia.

Indeed, since when did the Islamic Defenders Front get the right to judge other people in Indonesia, much less use thuggish tactics to break up and disrupt events they don't like?  

That's not defending your faith, that's expressing to the world how little faith you actually have if you can't live up to the principles of it and let others live their lives in peace.

Happy 20th Birthday Sage!

Today is Sage Smith's 20th birthday.    Unfortunately she's still missing..  We'd hoped that she'd be back home by now celebrating this day with her family and friends.

And she should be. 

Sage should be doing what any twentysomething would do on their Big 2-0 birthday.  She should be at home tearing into her gifts and preparing to blow out twenty candles on her birthday cake enveloped in the love of her family and friends. 

Instead she's been missing since November 20.  Christmas is approaching, the person who last talked to her in Erik McFadden has left the Charlottesville, VA area and several searches have revealed no clues to Sage's whereabouts.

One thing people have been pissed off about is the lack of media coverage, but it looks like that may be starting to change as well.  

Continue to pray not only for Sage but her family in this trying and painful time for them.  If you have any information concerning this case please call Crimestoppers at 434-977-4000.

TransGriot Update:  Found out there will be at Lee Park in Charlottesville, VA a rainbow balloon release in honor of Sage's birthday starting at 5:30 PM EST.  If you live in the area and can attend please consider going to the event and supporting the family and friends of Sage.

Dominican Republic Trans Org COTRAVEDT Demands End To Anti-Trans Discrimination

There have been some interesting things happening for trans people in the Caribbean since 2010.  With the Organization of American States adopting a resolution urging its member nations to implement their resolutions covering human rights sexual orientation, and gender identity we are starting to see some of our transpeople in the region become more insistent that their various nations respect and protect their human rights.  

Monday was the 64th anniversary of the ratification of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.   In the Dominican Republic COTRAVEDT, the organization that advocates for the Dominican trans community, chose that date to hold a press conference demanding an end to anti-trans discrimination and they have equal access to basic services in their nation.

COTRAVEDT represents over 1,200 trans people in their island nation and Nairobi Castillo, the coordinator for the group pointed out 18 transsexuals and sexual workers have been killed this year, but no indictments to solve any of those killing have yet been made by authorities.  

Castillo noted the Dominican Republic lags further behind in discrimination in education, health and freedom of movement for the trans community.

To add an exclamation point to the anti-trans discrimination being decried by Castillo, Eddy Flores, the mother of a transwoman described her outrage over taking her trans daughter to a public hospital but having to leave because of the negativity aimed at her.  She eventually had to find the money to take her trans child to a private clinic.


Flores also proclaimed at the COTRAVEDT press conference her trans child isn’t a monster and she loves her the same as any other mother loves her child.

It's past time for the Dominican Republic to treat transpeople living inside their country's borders with the same dignity and respect that they would have for any other citizen of that nation.

Be nice if that would happen for our trans cousins in the Dominican Republic as expeditiously as possible.
.

I-69 Signs Finally Going Up In Houston Area

When I lived in the Louisville area, during one of my trips to the Indianapolis metro area I actually got to do a portion of it on I-69, the eventual NAFTA superhighway which was approved in 2002. 

I -69 is being extended across several states from Indiana to terminate at the Mexican border here in Texas.  When I moved back home in 2010 I got to travel on a co-signed portion of it on I-55 from the Mississippi-Tennessee state line south to the I-69 interchange near Hernando, MS that heads off in the direction of Tunica and its casinos.  

When US 59 was widened and rebuilt over a decade ago in the Houston area, it was done to interstate highway standards.  That came in handy when the 1-69 NAFTA superhighway corridor in Texas was routed along much of US 59 which transits east Texas and becomes a major freeway just northeast of Houston.

There is another 6.2 mile (10 km) section of I-69 that has already been signed along US 77 from I-37 in Corpus Christi to Robstown.

TThose of us in the Houston area will start seeing gradually over the next few months I-69 signs installed on the section of US 59 running through our area with the first section being a 35 mile (58 km) one from FM 787 near Cleveland, TX  past IAH to the North Loop 610. 

The 40 mile (63 km) section of 59 (AKA the Eastex and Southwest Freeways) that runs in a north-south direction from Loop 610 past the east side of downtown, Minute Maid Park, the George R. Brown Convention Center and the southern half of the Montrose gayborhood to Rosenberg, TX in Fort Bend County is awaiting approval to be signed..  

But it's just a matter of time before we see the I-69 sign across the entire Houston area      

Donna Summer Posthumously Inducted Into Rock And Roll Hall of Fame

The 2013 Class for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was announced, and after six nominations Donna Summer FINALLY made it in.  

Would have been nice if you could have done so while she was still on the planet.

In addition to the Queen of Disco making it in, Public Enemy was inducted in their first year of eligibility (yeah, boyeeee) along with fellow Class of 2013 inductees Albert King, Rush and Randy Newman.


While I'm happy for Donna Summer, Albert King and Public Enemy, still pissed that Chic, who should have been in with Summer a long time ago is getting the Susan Lucci treatment. 

This was Chic's seventh time being nominated and once again they missed getting inducted.   

The induction ceremony for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2013 will be held at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles on April 18.

12-12-12!

Today is December 12, 2012, the last triple digit date of the 21st century.  

We've already experienced 1-1-01. 2-2-02, 3-3-03, 4-4-04, 5-5-05, 6-6-06, 7-7-07, 8-8-08 (which was the opening date for the Beijing Olympics), 9-9-09, 10-10-10 and 11-11-11 last year.

And thank God I'm alive to see it.

TransGriot readers, hope this is a wonderful day for you and revel in the fact that this unique date won't come again on the calendar until the 22nd century.