Tragedy and triumph often walk hand in hand — and the news today within the world of all things gay proves there’s no exception to this yin-yang cosmic law.

We only wonder if somehow the following two events might be connected:

First the bad news: A pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz has vanished from a Grand Rapids museum. Police believe that someone snuck into the Children’s Discovery Museum through an open window late Saturday or early Sunday and broke into the display case holding the slippers. (read the full article)

Celebrity watchers are burning up the chat rooms this week with news that Paris Hilton has dumped her chihuahua Tinkerbelle for being too old, too fat, and just too damn heavy to heft up to nipple-line for those adorable look-at-ME! photo ops.

The lapdog-cum-purse-prop has been replaced by a much younger chihuahua, Bambi, which the Toronto Fashion Monitor repeatedly — and somewhat cruelly — kept describing as “teacup size.”

The reaction from PETA was, as you might expect, a Code Level Red Alert. The animal rights organization has a history of overboard passions and might just as easily have firebombed Hilton’s L. A. digs; instead, they issued a fiery condemnation: (read the full article)

Last Sunday Six Feet Under made TV history, bowing out with the sort of bold, imaginative stroke that made it the hippest show on TV. Poetic justice was served to all concerned, in a manner that will make this finale rank with such justice-dealing endings as the burning sled in Citizen Kane and the legendary Seinfeld finale — a show famous for "being about nothing" — where the entire cast is jailed (and quite deservedly) for "doing nothing" (during a robbery.) (read the full article)

Is crocodile blood the magic bullet that will take out AIDS? That is what medical researchers in Australia are cautiously suggesting after laboratory tests demonstrated that crocodile blood kills HIV — as well as a whole deadly menagerie of penicillin-resistant germs, viruses and bacteria — according to reports from Reuters and the BBC News. (read the full article)

He loves basketball. His favorite movies are American Pie and Rocky. And System Of A Down is what’s playing on his iPod right now.

Meet Henri, our new cover star and cause célèbre! (read the full article)

Would anyone know Bo Bice’s name if Mario Vazquez hadn’t dropped out of the American Idol competition last March? Oh, how we wailed when he left. Mario Interruptus we called it.

When the 27-year-old Vazquez began making explanations — profoundly unbelievable — that he wanted to fly off to be by his mother’s side during "a family crisis" (his bewildered mother told the first reporters on the scene that if there were a crisis, it was news to her) and hoped the fans would respect his "privacy," (this, after years of trying to crack into show business), Mario’s midnight departure became the object of major — non-stop — Laci-Petersen level speculation for the next two weeks, much of which was marinated in the most delicious homo-innuendo.

The New York Daily News published an account of his "close friendship" with a male hairdresser. The National Enquirer chimed in that this same hairdresser (always unnamed) was beside himself because Mario was now publicly denying that there was "anyone special" in his life. (read the full article)

"Well, she’s drunk all the time on champagne."

Such is the envy and bile, the gossip and bitchery you must deal with when your are the grandest Diva in the entire known world. Oh, you can talk about your Judy Garland, your Maria Callas and even — poor thing, if you are so bereft of queer references — Madonna, but two of those are dead and the other, while increasingly pathetic, is not yet fabulouslY, self-destructively insane. No, on the earthquake scale of Diva-locity, Shirley Bassey is a full-tilt 27.9 (read the full article)

In our dream, we are having a big, splashy dinner party.

Tom Cruise is there — and so are Keanu Reeves and Jake Gyllenhaal and Orlando Bloom and — in an odd blip of the ole dream logic — Clay Aiken is there too.

Oddly, there are no women at this party. Odder still no one is put out by this.

Oh wait, there’s Jodi Foster, arriving late, and right oh her heels, sweet, heart-faced Desperate Housewife Marcia Cross, looking for all the world like the cat that ate the canary. Perhaps the two are together. We do not know because right now all eyes turn to our guest of honor who has just risen from his chair at the head of the table to make a speech. (read the full article)