Because of the popularity of yesterday’s post on the Cardinals Kiss Cam controversy (say that 10 times fast), we have a few trailing notes that we wanted to share via a special weekend post!

- Largely ignored in the previous post, we should have given the Cardinals, as a whole, more credit. Good for them for promoting (kinda) a “Out at the Ballpark” day. No matter what happens with the Kiss Cam at the game today, this is a nice gesture and a step in the right direction.

- The Vital Voice did a great video about the “Out at the Ballpark” day along with their own coverage of the Kiss Cam noise. Watch through the end for their own take on the Kiss Cam. “First Gay Day At Busch Stadium / Kiss Cam Controversy“

- We loved making them and more than a few of your expressed that you really enjoyed our collection of “odd” Kiss Cam’s that dotted the right side of the initial post. For that reason, and the fact that we made a few more that didn’t make it in the post, we present to you the..

Top 10 Kiss Cam Photoshops

10. The Kissing Fatties – Notice the bag of Cheetos that we swear to you were in the original photo.

9. The Pariere Dogs - Life on the pariere was never the same after this.

8. Woman and Horse – No idea how she got that horse up in to the stands.

7. The White Sox - …If this Greek-warrior level of closeness worked for them, maybe Tony should look in to it.

6. Batman and Robin – No shock here. You knew it, we knew it, they knew it.

See the top 5 after the jump!

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Saturday afternoon at Busch Stadium, a large group consisting of many gay and lesbian couples plans to attend the Cardinals game. Not sure why, the Cards are way out of it, but whatever, that’s their choice. Another choice of their’s is to put in a request to be featured on the “Kiss Cam”. Ok, cool. We don’t see the problem, or even why this is front page news on STLToday…we also have a full set of chromosomes, which might be why we aren’t “outraged” by this and taking to the always delightfully retarded comment section to scream about it.

A staple of sporting events for years, the “Kiss Cam” is pretty simple: Find couples in the crowd. Keep the camera on them until they give each other a little peck. It’s pointless, but gives people a chance to think about something else when the Pirates have crowded around the Cardinals and keep kicking them in the junk. How the hell could this mindless little thing be a problem for anyone? Well all the trouble started because of…wait for it…the Rams.

The request to feature same-sex couples on the Kiss Cam at Busch Stadium grew out of an incident that occurred Sunday at the Edward Jones Dome, where the Rams hosted the Arizona Cardinals. During the Kiss Cam feature, two men dressed in Arizona jerseys were among the couples shown. The crowd laughed and booed when the two men tried to shoo away the cameras. But there were gay men in the crowd who said it was offensive that the Rams organization would choose to embarrass Arizona fans by portraying them as a gay couple.

Eh. I don’t think this was something that was done to “mock the gay community” any more than when Dustin Hoffman kissed Jason Bateman at a ballgame earlier this year, but people are touchy these days. We like that the Rams went for it there and tried their hands at a joke, but frankly it was a bit tired, and line we wouldn’t cross if we really needed everyone we to buy tickets to our games, since alienating people isn’t good business. Either way, it offended some people and, shockingly these days, they acted rationally: They formed a group to go to a sporting event, and asked politely if they could be on the Kiss Cam for once. Well done! So where did the wheels come off? STLToday happened.

Making the issue 20 times bigger than it should have been and knowing full well that their comment section would ignite in an inferno of hatred, STLToday decided to run the story with the headline:

“Gays to Cards: Put us on Kiss Cam, too“

Are you fucking kidding us with that shit?  Could you have found a more shit-stirring headline that that? What about “Queers Order Cardinals to Play Gay Porn on Busch Stadium Jumbotron”?  ”Gays”? So every gay person wants to be on the kiss cam? We’re talking about 200 people here. If this was any other group, would you lump them all together like that? You can talk all you want STLToday about how you are working hard to keep your comments section clean but you’re full of shit, so just admit you want the hoosier hate because it makes your page views go up.

Fun’s just starting though.

First we have Chris Tunno, a Cardinals spokesman, who says this is why it’s scary territory to put homosexual couples on the big screen:

Do you pick a guy and a girl? And what if you pick someone who is not together? And two guys and two girls? Same thing. You’d be in a total mess.

Ever been to a Cardinals game? Every single time we’ve seen the Kiss Cam in action they always end up with at least one shot of a “couple” that aren’t together. Every. Time. When it happens, you can tell right away they aren’t a couple by the body language, people chuckle, the camera moves on and people forget about it. Happens every time without fail and who does that hurt? If the Cardinals were really worried about this, there is a simple solution to drop the chances of a mismatch down to zero: Do a little couple research during the game. Get some binoculars out and scan the crowd. If two people (guy and girl, guy and guy or girl and girl) are a couple, they don’t have to be making out to tell. No one’s going to confuse two hoosier’s with their cut-off t-shirts high-fiving each other as a couple. Of course those two dudes could actually be gay as a tangerine, but you won’t confuse them with a couple.

Ok, we’ve solved the problem for the Cardinals, exposed STLToday as douche-bags and showed you a few other taboo Kiss Cam situations with our inline images…lets get to those STLToday comments shall we? You know you wanna see them!

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The sun was slowing cooking us and we felt drastically under-dressed, but we were there, in the crowd, for St. Louis’ annual Pride Parade yesterday.

Great crowd (in both size and energy) and as always, visually interesting. We had a great time hanging out (though not as much fun as the guy picture above had hanging out) and putting together another Punching Kitty photo montage, which you can watch below or in HD at our Vimeo page.

We will happily post our whole set of photos if requested, but this is our favorite shot:

Over the last weekend the national media descended on St. Louis for a chance to talk steroids with Tony LaRussa, Albert Pujols and of course Slightly-Less-Big Mac.

Pujols had some really nice supportive things to say about McGwire to the press, but we can’t shake this feeling that Pujols is a little confused about what Mark confessed too exactly…

Maybe not though.  McGwire did seem pretty happy dancing with those “Single Ladies” in that video.

According to The Riverfront Times [Editor's Note: Who we are mad at them right now! Boo!] St. Louis’ only Gay/Lesbian/Transgender newspaper is shutting its doors until 2010.

Voice publisher and owner, Pam Schneider, tells Daily RFT that she decided to shutdown the paper for the rest of the year to concentrate on a redesign of the publication.

“It just made sense to take the time and money we need to focus on coming out in 2010 the way we want,” she says.

Too bad that its come to this, but good to hear they will be coming back in a few months, but haven’t they learned nothing from Cher?!  You aren’t supposed to pre-announce your return, you are just supposed to do it all of a sudden…with auto-tune.

[Editor's Note: Ok, we are over it now. We love the RFT.]

If we would have known that by mid Saturday we would be busy hiding from the heat, re-launching this blog, we would have made a point to grab our camera and head over to Pridefest.  But we didn’t.  We suck.

Luckily we live in an age where you don’t have to do anything to pretend  you are there, all you need is a few moments to do a Twitter or Flickr search!

We found a few great pics and videos via Twitter user @Daethian!  Here’s are personal favorite video:

Note the awesome “fourish” at the end of the flip.  Totally fabulous!

See all of Daethian’s pics and videos by heading to her blog, Forever Purple

We also found some amazing photos (like the one at the top of this post) from Flickr user kperfetto, in her Pridefest photo set.

All the trappings of being there without having to actually leave the house!  We do promise to get over there next year though.

[Note: If you have any of your own photos, link to them in the comments or add them to the public news stream on the right.]