Morning Roundup: The sky is blue

-Hey, guys? Ricky Martin needs to talk to you. Can you sit down? This is really hard for him. Um, he's gay. There. He said it. He hopes this doesn't change anything, you know, like your perception of him as a beautiful, fiery Latin flower that makes his music come alive with sequins and dreams. God, it's been so hard, for Ricky, all these years, holding up this machismo facade of an Alpha male in tight pants who tears through the groupies in every city he goes to. Everyone thought he was livin' the vida loca, but he was just livin' a lie, you see? But that's all over, from here on out Ricky Martin is gay gay gay and he doesn't care who knows it!


-Oh, look at this, haha, Reuters made a "Czech" joke. Except it actually doesn't even make any sense, alas, because nobody's actually 'bouncing' a Czech, it's just Jean Claude Van Damn kicking a wine bottle of some guy's head at the Miss Czech Beauty Contest, like a trashy William Tell. You make sense of that, I'm not going to try.

But man, that's crazy how you can change out "check" for "Czech" and it's a clever joke! Last night I was at the Mount Eerie/No Kids show at Klub 007, and the insufferably cool girl keyboardist in No Kids told the crowd that it was too bad her band couldn't "Czech out Prague... get it? 'Czech?'" Yeah, they get it, hipster, they've just heard it fifty million times from foreigners and the joke's a little tired. Nobody laughed.

-Michael Kocab has finally succeeded in leaving his post as Human Rights Minister. This time it was because his party, the Greens, are protesting Prime Minister Jan Fischer's government. I feel for the guy, because work was probably the only thing keeping him sane. At home, he's got a wife he recently humiliated when the tabloids jumped on his affair with his spokesperson. Good luck with that!