A gay villain in a James Bond movie? The world has definitely changed since I started reading 007. bit.ly/SEM6gI

— HowardKurtz (@HowardKurtz) November 11, 2012

When ex-Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz greeted the world on Sunday morning with his uncomfortable feelings about the new James Bond movie, it only took professional Twitterer Jack Shafer two minutes to respond with, “You have bad gaydar.” And this is probably true! How could anyone claim to have read the Ian Fleming books and not picked up on Ian Fleming’s delightfully English combination of fascination/disgust with The Gays?

Besides, as the Twitter people quickly pointed out, the gay couple of Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd went from Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever to the movie version without any kind of straightening.

“For a lady,” ah ha ha ha.

The fey Bond villain shows up again and again in Fleming’s books and, depending on the actor, in the 007 movies. Fleming usually writes as a third-person omniscient narrator, approvingly listing Bond’s tastes and fetishes. (An exception is the The Spy Who Loved Me, written as the first-person diary of the young heroine, Vivienne Michel. It is basically James Bond slash fiction written by the actual author of the Bond books.) And in the process of filling out his slim manuscripts with Bond’s thoughts and prejudices, it’s clear that The Gays occupy a lot of space in the brain of Fleming/Bond.

Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterson was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and “sex equality.” As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits — barren and full of frustrations, the woman wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied.

They’re everywhere! This is from the novel Goldfinger, which also contains the most outrageous single slur against Koreans ever published in an American bestseller.

Andrew J. Peters writes on his blog, “Think about the many fey villains in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, their apathy toward women the perfect foil to Bond’s rather active heterosexuality.” He doesn’t find Fleming to be especially worse in this regard than other thriller writers of the time. There’s nothing in the Bond books as horrifically homophobic as any random page in a Mickey Spillane thriller.

As far as the Skyfall villain that gave Kurtz skeevey feelings, both Daniel Craig and Javier Bardem claim their sexy scene is not gay at all! It’s just what dudes sometimes do together, when one of them is tied up to the chair and the other one is caressing him gently and then the one who is tied up says it is maybe not his first time, that is all! Hardly anybody called Christopher Hitchens gay and he wrote a whole book about his various boyfriends, one of which was not Martin Amis, son of second-rate James Bond author Kingsley Amis.

How are we gonna jam another star onto the flag if Puerto Rico becomes a state?

Good news for people who lost everything in Hurricane Sandy! According to the fashion department of New York magazine, “the color of the season is a deep, red wine: somewhere between bordeaux and burgundy,” so you were going to have to replace everything anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ysyZF-DZFY

Did you miss this on Friday? It’s very possible that you did. What with the hurricane and the election and the fact that we’re about a week a way from Thansgiving — which means the nonstop onslaught of Christmas “cheer” should be forcing itself up into you any second now — it seems like everything has suddenly accelerated, and there’s ever so much more to miss. So in case you didn’t catch this one, sit yourself down (if you are currently unseated) and enjoy. As far as these things go it’s actually pretty good.

Laura Elisse Salenger turns 50 today. Perhaps you know her better as Brix Smith. She is awesome.

Say this for Politico: using a giant picture of Pauline Kael to illustrate an article on the Republican media cocoon is pretty great. As is this: “In this reassuring conservative pocket universe, Rasmussen polls are gospel, the Benghazi controversy is worse than Watergate, ‘Fair and Balanced’ isn’t just marketing and Dick Morris is a political seer.”

Amy Sohn and Jonathan Ames reunite for charity. Lynne Tillman and pals read. Madonna wants your money. Plus: welcome back, New Jersey Transit!

• Sei Shōnagon, b. 966: “Her writings were eventually collected and published in The Pillow Book (public library) in 1002. An archive of pictures and illustrations, records of interesting events in court, and daily personal thoughts, many in list-form, this was arguably the world’s first ‘blog’ by conceptual format and Shōnagon the world’s first blogger.”

• Michel de Montaigne, b. 1533: “It’s been said — by Bakewell, with reservations, and others — that Montaigne was the first blogger. His favorite subject, as he often remarked, was himself (‘I would rather be an expert on me than on Cicero’), and he meant to leave nothing out (‘I am loath even to have thoughts which I cannot publish’).”

• William Shakespeare, b. 1564: “Shakespeare writing the first blog ever created.”

• Samuel Pepys, b. 1633: “When chocolate spread to London, renowned diarist Samuel Pepys (history’s first blogger) drank hot chocolate as his hangover cure after Charles II’s coronation.”

• Sir Richard Steele, b. 1672: “Ben Hammersley in a talk called Etiquette and the Singularity delivered in Copenhagen, stated that the first blogger was Sir Richard Steele back in 1709. Steele who wanted to circulate his views and opinions did so by writing a letter three times a week. This letter — The Tatler — was distributed to its readers by street urchins.”

• Benjamin Franklin, b. 1706: “Self-published, self-guided and self-promoting, Poor Richard’s Almanack was the world’s first blog.”

• Paul Revere, b. 1734: “He excitedly retells Gladwell’s (inaccurate) version of Paul Revere’s ride and turns Revere into the first blogger, since the latter uses ‘blogging software instead of a horse to spread [an] idea virus.’”

• Thomas Paine, b. 1737: “Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger, and Benjamin Franklin was essentially loading his persona into the MySpace of the 18th century, Poor Richard’s Almanack.”

• Charles Dickens, b. 1812: “Scholars are confidant [sic] that punchy opinion pieces, penned anonymously by Dickens in response to the social ills of the day, reveal him to be the first ‘blogger.’”

• Mark Twain, b. 1835: “Mark Twain expert Robert Hirst had this to say about Mark Twain’s posthumously published memoir, which goes on sale Nov. 15th: ‘Partly a journal, partly a diary, and partly recollection. So yeah, I think of it as a kind of blog, a blog without a web!’”

• Mary MacLane, b. 1881: “Excited that Melville House is republishing Mary Maclane, who invented blogging in 1902.”

• George Orwell, b. 1903: “Held at Wellesley College, an elite American college for women, the conference featured panels that described him as the conscience of his generation, a prophet, a rebel, a misunderstood Christian, an early gay rights advocate, a latter-day Tocqueville, possibly the first blogger, and an obvious misogynist.”

• Diane Vreeland, b. 1903: “Vreeland immediately launched her ‘Why Don’t You…?’ column on the pages of Bazaar. These aphoristic musings — which to me made Vreeland the first blogger — coaxed readers out of their quotidian existence and dared them to dream.”

• I.F. Stone, b. 1907: “His putative claim to the title ‘first blogger’ has become a cyberspace cliché.”

• Marshall McLuhan, b. 1911: “Jacobs points out that McLuhan’s writing style — frustrating to those trying to wring out an argument — may have been ahead of its time, resembling the assertion-based, quote-heavy, quick riffs that characterize much internet-based writing.”

• Hunter Thompson, b. 1937: “Dr. Hunter Thompson (the honorific came from a mail-order divinity school) was our first blogger , a skilled journalist who wrote funny, vivid opinion pieces about his time and place — Nixon’s America — in the magazines of his day: The Nation, Scanlan’s Monthly and, his most frequent stomping ground, Rolling Stone.”

• Harvey Pekar, b. 1939: “’He was the original blogger,’ said Dean Haspiel, a comics artist who collaborated with Mr. Pekar on The Quitter, a hardcover autobiography released in 2005.”

• Michael Musto, b. 1955: “’Do you think if you were a kid now, you would be a blogger?’ I asked. “Yeah,” Musto said. “I mean, it’s like in a way I was the original blogger. But now everyone in the world is a blogger, which means everyone on earth is a gossip columnist. I used to compete with maybe five people, now you’re competing with like five billion people.’”

• Doogie Howser, b. 1989: “Doogie Howser has been jokingly referred to as the world’s first blogger. But the kid doctor’s quasi-poignant, ellipsis-laden insights more closely resemble Twitter updates.”

Related: What Famous People Smell Like

Elon Green is a contributing editor to Longform.

★★★ Meltwater trickled everywhere, around the edges of a bright, dry day. Schoolchildren scooped up the remnants of the storm into wet, quartzy snowballs and flung them this way or that. In the bare damp earth between the plantings, a hermit thrush hopped about, puffed to some multiple of its basic dimensions, a speckled globe. Late clear sun daubed and gilded bits of buildings; the Gehry tower for millionaires was a silver fairytale spire. Bursts of light traced rows and columns of another building’s windows on a blank brick wall. Then cold and dark descended together. Smokers huddled along the Bowery.

And The Winner Of The Awl 2012 Electoral College Pool Is…

by Eric Spiegelman

In order to become a wizard, you must first apprentice to a wizard, and the acolytes who followed Nate Silver’s lead did very well in The Awl’s first quadrennial electoral college pool. Out of 160 entries received, 9 of you predicted the map exactly. (That’s right: we’re calling Florida for Obama. I mean, it’s Friday.) This means that 5.6% of this website’s readers have documented psychic powers. You can’t argue with that. It’s math.

Of the people who predicted the map exactly, 78% overestimated Obama’s popular vote total by several million votes, reflecting a wildly inflated expectation for voter turnout. The remaining 22% didn’t guess Obama’s popular vote at all, reflecting a disdain for rules and authority. While we applaud the rebel spirit of these semi-winners, we award them nothing.

UPDATE

So here is the deal, let’s just blame the hurricane for this one. WE’RE CALLING IT A TIE.

The next closest tiebreaker guess came from one just absolutely swell, completely terrific reader, James Martin Cole, who guessed that “Obama wins 332–206, and captures 63,810,000 total votes.” According to “Google,” which is basically the U.S. government, Obama currently stands with 61,210,365 votes.

But there was one other guesser! Who was even closer! And his name is Benjamin Hart, and clearly he is a genius, or is actually embodied inside Nate Silver right now. His guess was 63,246,543 votes. Eerie. Promote this man today. Marry him. Something!

So while there are still many votes to be counted, we do not believe there are enough outstanding ballots to change the fact that this guess comes nearest the actual count. So congratulations, to both Benny Benjy Benjamin and Jimmy James Jim-bob! You are BOTH America’s Next Top Wizard. The Awl will make two $250 donations in your names, one each: one to the Henry Street Settlement and another to the Red Hook Initiative. But the real prize is the Obama Blingee above. So tasteful.

Eric Spiegelman is a web producer in Los Angeles and the proprietor of Awl Music.