We Americans have, over the years, done a reasonably good job of working through gender and racial stereotypes. Which is pretty impressive considering the northern half of the country was settled by some of the most bigoted people history ever produced. It's saying something that they found Protectorate England so very liberal and permissive that they left it in a fit of pique that would do Victorians novel heroines proud. What's really impressive is that their children managed to construct a mythology where their fathers were virtuous heroes, escaping cruel persecutions that have remained vague and uncertain (and virtually unsupported by fact) at the hands of evil royalists.

One of the up-shots of this is that American entertainment was severely retarded at birth. For instance, we never seemed to go in for one of the most cherished of British comedy standards that pre-dates the colonisation of America by centuries and is still very much at the heart of British comedy. We don't think men in drag are all that funny.

So maybe we started out on a good foot. We did soon develop the Yankee trader figure that appears in the first American play, The Contrast but that's largely faded away. Virtually nobody remembers the 3-or-less limbed Civil War veteran, usually named Snarky or Scumpy, who delivered messages and such in melodramas for the span of five or six decades after The Late Unpleasantness.

Almost completely faded away too have the minstrel shows -- although their ghosts still popped up in cartoons even when I was little, but even those get edited these days -- an black-face as a performance techniques finally keeled over in the last century.

Which isn't to say we don't have our own modern-day stereotypes, but I'd wager to say most of them aren't quite as hurtful or just plain stupid as they were in the not too distant past.

So I'm totally baffled about the entertainment industry and teh Gays. Nobody in their right mind would cast a white man as a woman or a black man and expect him to black up. Nor would they break out the shoe polish when an Arab is called for.

But it's perfectly fine for a straight man to play a gay role.

I just don't get it. Do the people responsible for making TV and film honestly think we think that can't find enough legitimately gay actors? Please.

All of which is a more or less massively round-about way of setting up for the commercial above. I can't quite decide who it's for or just quite what it's trying to say.

First of all, just who is it /for/? All the young men in it seem to be under 30. Okay: young people, then. But I literally do not know one single gay male who doesn't know how to use the Internet to find somebody to fuck. It's far easier, far cheaper and you can get a good lock at the prospective penis. And maybe even the human attached to it, but people looking for that are largely mythical.

Okay then, so it's for older gentlemen who never quite made the leap to the 'net. Then that really changes what those younger men are doing in the ad. It's not the sort of audience identification that you'd might expect (and that gets paid lip service in the copy): it's a presentation of goods: "Gramps, get your chickens here and none of that interweb, computer-y jargon!"

That might explain the gross use of stereotype in what they guy is looking for: gyms, clubs and sex. Very 1978: you'd almost expect to see sleeveless flannel shirts, cut-off jeans and jerky dancing, maybe even a foreign accent and over-developed muscles.



...and you'd be right.

What holds this ads together though is the bizarre subtext. Notice in this ad, the guys aren't dancing together. I mean, I suppose that makes sense if it were a phone sex ad, but this alleges itself to be a way to meet up with people. Oughtn't they to... I don't know, meet?

In both ads, you do get a brief shot two men at the same table, but in both cases, they're literally as far apart as they can be from each other. And making very little actual contact. To me at least, it screams "Yes, we all know I'm straight, but look! I'm touching another man to show I'm supposed to be a gay!" It looks and feels phony to an almost deliberate degree. I wouldn't want to meet somebody who'd look that uncomfortable just talking to me.

Maybe it's my own sense of stereotype working overtime, but it seems like these ads are for closet cases, or maybe old, old school fags, either of which retain a deep-set sort of shame about who they are and what they want, and that hang on to these (hopefully) outmoded stereotypes. I don't think the ads project a healthy attitude, somehow, and that's the sort of resonance they're looking for.

I mean, I don't disapprove of random hook-ups or casual sex. At all. I'm not sure that it does any favours to normalize homosexuals to hetero culture and to valourize monogamy. One of the downsides of doing that is to make all casual sex sleazy, even when it's done respectfully and maturely. Something about these ads, for some reason, manages to make them seem just that sleazy. I think that thing is the weird stereotypes they use and weird subtext the straight actors give them.

Anyway. The guy in the first ad isn't really my type (too much hint of corn-fed goodness and that I'd have to sit down and watch some sporting event with him on TV) but it does seem sad that he's going to grow up to be one of those guys in the second ad.

Bugger!

Or not, as the case may be.

I just realised that my free sample of Astroglide never arrived. Granted, my address has changed numerous times since I ordered it, but still. It's galling.

Please carry on.

Conssssssprica-ssssy

It's not much of a secret that I think conspiracy theories are stupid. Stupid in the worst way, because 99% of them are totally derivative of something CTers are too stupid to recognize as fiction --The Manchurian Candidate, The Matrix, V For Vendetta, 1984, Doctor Who (for which, see below) -- but insist as passing off as their own unique theory.

Generally speaking, they're cooked up by people with fundamental social flaws as a way to make themselves feel superior to the rest of us because they've figured out What's Really Going On(TM). It's no doubt a good thing that their retarded social skills prevent the vast majority of them from actually going out and doing anything about Them -- I mean, Timothy McVeigh was a CTer who /did/ go out and do something, but not even the CTers think he managed to accomplish anything useful. Just killing 200 innocent people.

I think that's 0-1 for the CT community, then.

The New World Order people are almost the worst, just under the 9/11 conspiracy idiots who don't even deserve to be mocked: they can't tell you who the NWO is (except maybe the Rockefellers, or maybe the Jews as a fungible mass*, or just possibly shape-shifting reptile people who may or may not be from Earth**) or what exactly they want, but by god, they know they're out there, waiting in the wings to enslave the human race, blow up planet Earth, initiate nuclear fusion in Jupiter (or is it Saturn?) with the Galileo space probe (or is it Cassini?) and live in wealth and luxury on Europa (or was it Titan?).

No, seriously. People think this. And sadly, they expect to be taken seriously, and vae tibi should you point out normality to them.

So needless to say, I don't buy into them. Except one that I heard last year that I thought about today when I saw they're making a live-action G. I. Joe movie***.

This is also stupid. But I will go see it, just like I went and saw the live-action Transformers film. Me and several million other people (uhh, mostly male) who were young in the 1980s are now the dupes of a clever marketing strategy begun by Japan in the mid 1980s.

Of course, back then, all it was was programming us to make our parents via incessant whining go buy the dolls we saw on TV every afternoon after school. And, oh, we did. And we thought that after puberty, it was all over and done with. But no.

Now that exact same programming is making us paw over $12 a pop (Plus dates. Plus popcorn. Plus soft drinks. Plus the damn Fandango surcharge) to see crap movies without a second thought. Really, I just ought to mail Hasbro two $20 bills and save myself the trouble, but I won't. I suppose that even though I'm a lot smarter than I was in 1986, I still don't know.

And knowing is half the battle.

*Yes, just like the Nazis. They even still tend to use 70-year-old "Aw-shucks, we're not really talking 'bout the Jews, but we're talkin' 'bout the Jews"-type circumlocutions like "the International Banking community"...

**Yes, the Silurians off Doctor Who. At least, I've never seen any Terran pre-historic, super-advanced lizard man theory that pre-dates Mac Hulke's 1970 version of them, anyway.


***Joseph Gordon-Levy is playing Cobra Commander****, which pretty much makes it a cert he's a big 'mo. Is he out of the closet yet?

****Honestly, he's not ugly. At all. Especially for a college drop out. Why stick him under a mask?

I suppose it isn't summer any more. Officially.

It's noticeable that it's getting dark sooner, and it's a little cooler, and the quality of the light in the late afternoon has just subtly changed, proving (I guess) that the sun isn't following quite the same path in the heavens as it did a few weeks ago.

So I suppose it's time to start the transition from summer music into fall -- Dressy Bessy or The Essex Green or The All-Girl Summer Fun Band into Belle and Sebastian and the Tindersticks, winding up with the Field Mice and (appropriately enough) the Decemberists.

It brings on melancholy. Which, like nostalgia, the Elizabethans properly diagnosed as a form of self-indulgence and disease. Such thinking always reminds me of Basil Fawlty in the "Basil the Rat" episode of Fawlty Towers.

So enough with it.

I finished reading Eldest not long ago, and I was fairly disappointed. The sort of disappointed you often get from reading lazy students' work: that from from undelivered promise.

Paolini is not particularly original -- for all intents and purposes, his works are set in Tolkien Middle Earth. Which isn't the worst thing in the world (it worked well enough for Christopher Tolkein), but it does sort of insist that your work either be suitably beholden to the original maker of the world and hold strictly true to his/her style. This is what C. Tolkien did most of his life, and while he never created anything truly memorable, he also never made people throw down his novels in disgust.

What worked in Eragon was that it showed the promise of not going down this road. If he chose to create a carbon copy of Middle Earth, he at least escaped a lot of the tiresome traits that keep people from taking the genre of fantasy too seriously. He didn't, for instance, much try to use a sort of cod-archaic English to convey (in the cheapest possible terms) the seriousness and old-fashionedness of his characters. Eragon let slip a few "okays" in the first book, and there's no better word in English to drag someone kicking from a medieval setting.

But somewhere in the hundreds of pages of Elder, that disappears. The dialogue slowly spirals down into the tedious "thees" and "thous" of yore. If it's an effect to make the dialogue seem old, I don't think it works because often enough, it's used incorrectly (and whether that's a fault of Paolini or his editors, I can't say -- there's a reason William says "to thine own self be true" and not "to thyself be true"...) And just for the record, if you insist on using the verb "to wend" you really ought to know its simple past is "went". Yes, it not coincidentally is the same as for the verb "to go" , but that's the English language for you.

I think it might also be an attempt to add a sort of faux-Tolkien sense of gravitas. If it is, then that fails, as well. The prose of The Lord of the Rings moves along at a snail's pace, but its tempo matches the weeks and months and years that the plot covers. Elder is a long book, but it has a pretty small a mount of plot. It isn't equal to the amounts of verbiage potted on top of it, and you wind up with a story overtold.

If LotR is a sort of lumbering giant, it's one that is bulky and muscular rather than flabby. Eldest is flabby, largely for the same reason people are: a lack of discipline and of understanding. Considering Paolini's age, the novel would have been served by a far more exacting editor that would foster a more practical sort of creativity and a hone the author a little more in his basic writing skills.

Not that many people since Truman Capote have cared that much about being a writer rather than telling a story. (I suppose Stephen King thinks he does, what with his book and all, but like a lot of authors, from Zola and Hugo to Brecht, he has trouble putting theory into practice. There's a reason anyone with literary pretensions should be forced -- forced -- to read Pope's An Essay on Criticism regularly and prove they understand it. Writers like Sarah Caudwell, who write as they do naturally, are vanishingly rare.)

There are some good points to the novel, and some signs of improvement from Eragon. Paolini wisely chooses to paint with a broader palette this time around, and includes sections from the perspective of people other than Eragon. This is a sound choice, since it allows for a much larger scope for the novel and does a good job of providing an international(ish) view of the situation. In the hands of another author, it might also allow for more than one narrative voice to come through, even in third person, which would be an ideal way of underscoring the use of the device, but if Paolini intended to do so, then it just doesn't come through. Which is a shame, because it would prevent some of the drag in the middle.

In the end, there's one good way to judge the quality of this book: Am I going to read the sequel(s)*? Probably. Well, I will give the next one a chance. If more isn't better in the third novel, and disappointments out-weigh promise, then I certainly won't bother with the fourth.

Also: Is it just me, or is that picture above Portrait of a Melancholy Young Man by Isaac Oliver (c. 1590-5) alarmingly similar to the Corpus Christi portrait, allegedly of Christopher Marlowe?

*The fact that what started out as a trilogy is now a tetrology (at least) should speak volumes.

I Just Noticed Something...

Ever since the BBC (well, Warner Bros. for the BBC) has been releasing DVDs in the American market, they've felt the need to replace the British release covers. And without exception, the US releases are hideously ugly. As in "Oh my god, put that /down/: someone might see you!" ugly.

I will, for sake of example, use the release of Remembrance of the Daleks, where the dichotomy is most obvious:






















Yes, in the last few moments of the story, a Black Dalek goes mad and spins around a bit, but I've yet to determine why the designer put two in full spin on the US cover, nor why he thought a sort of neon pus color would be an ideal background.

But with the release earlier in the summer of the Under the Surface* collection, the US and UK releases have been identical! Hurrah!

*Oh, how I long for this! However, since it took me a month to scrounge together the cash for The Time Meddler, I won't see this collection -- which is more than double the price -- for ages. It's not like I don't already have all three stories it contains on trusty BBC Enterprises (RIP)
VHS**, but it's still a better buy than, say, Time-Flight at any price.


**Well, The Silurians and The Sea Devils. I still have an off-air recording of Warriors of the Deep -- "WUNE-TV. Channel 17, Linville." Cor, that doesn't half reveal my age. Or level of sadness.

Reel Around the Fountain

Or, Why Morrissey is god and Duncan Sheik is an insufferable poseur. Or possibly the other way around.

I have a confession to make. There's this Duncan Sheik song I like.

Well, it isn't a Duncan Sheik song, first of all, it's a Smiths song. But he does a cover of it.

It was released yonks ago, and I grabbed if off Napster, back when I was in college and it was free to do things like that. After college, for some reason, that track never survived -- probably because well, I don't like Duncan Sheik. I loathe him and all his works and all his ways. He is, in his own little way, the opposite of everything I like in music.

But when, in the course of my internet travels today, I saw an mp3 of this song, I was over-joyed. And then drowned in a sea of self-loathing. But it got me thinking:

Why is his cover better than the original?

It hit me: /because/ Duncan Sheik is loathsome and pathetic.

Here me out:

"Reel Around the Fountain" is, like practically every Morrissey song, a song about being pathetic (Deeply pathetic: "Slap me on the Patio/I'll take it now..."). It's Morrissey's delivery of the song, with just the right level of self-awareness, that makes the song ironic. And irony, of course, is based on the existence of two simultaneous levels it is and isn't pathetic at the same time, since it is an honest statement of how the speaker feels, but by being aware of how sad it is, it isn't quite as sad as it could be.

And this wry self-consciousness is what makes oh, every smart adolescent with a sense of style fall hopeless for Morrissey. Your sex doesn't matter. Neither does your sexual identity. A few years ago my friend Maddie Minx, noted Midlands lesbian, went to a Morrissey concert. "Oh," she told me, "I wish I was 18 again, so I could lose my virginity to him*." I remember nodding, and thinking "That is exactly the way I feel."

[Of course, the practical reality is non-sense. We all know he'd ejaculate prematurely onto your favourite t-shirt, then immediately run away crying. Later, he'd write a song about it, and you'd love it and sing it to yourself when you're lonely. But that's hardly the point.]

But Duncan Sheik eschews that sort of complexity. It goes after emotion of the song with all the awareness of a basset hound going after a ham. He revels in it. He recognizes himself in the utter bathos, and brings it out in a way more purely honest than Morrissey ever could.

Which utterly, utterly misses the point.

The song is quite clever, in its way, and Duncan misses it all. Take the verse for example:

I dreamt about you last night
And I fell out of bed twice
You can pin and mount me like a butterfly
But "take me to the haven of your bed"
Was something that you never said...

If you take the time to actually listen to the song, you can hear that Morrissey is quite careful in his phrasing: the middle line, after all, comes in between two references to being in bed; it's fairly obviously a sexual reference. Accordingly, Moz manages to make the verse into a coherent lyrical unit, downplaying the rests between line three and lines two and four. If he were speaking, that line'd be a parenthetical (subjunctive) statement underlying the (indicative) statement of the verse. Irony. Especially considering the concrete blutness of actions of "pin and mount me" with "Take me to the haven of your bed."

But poor Duncan has a plodding rhythm with rock solid rests between the lines: each line becomes another item in a list of wrongs done by the would-be lover. Nothing subtle. Nothing ironic. Just one dumb person getting treated brutally by another. It's almost painful to listen to, since you almost become drawn into the conflict.

Sheik identifies himself with the emotional experience (and knowing anything about his person, this wouldn't surprise you. I don't know that much, but I do know he got locked in a limo by a group of models he was trying to hit on...) completely. He isn't posing, as such, because he is that sad, but he is posing, because he clearly doesn't have the first clue how the song works.

Still, such is the glory of music, I suppose. He gets it wrong, but it's still sort of right. His appeal comes from his forth-rightness, his genuineness, in presenting it. But if you like the original song, there's a fundamental feeling of him missing the mark, a sort of "Yes, but..." that you can't shake. I mean, I suppose I should laud someone that willing to open themselves up to the world, but like I said, it also makes you a party to his abuse and emotional stupidity.

Good lord, I've gone and turned a Smiths cover into a Sarah Kane play. Excuse me, but I'll have to go and masturbate into my shit now.**

*Quote slightly altered to preserve dignity.

**This isn't pointless vulgarity. Honest.

You rub two sticks together until something good happens.

Pretty, no?

And in the picture I wanted to find, blond, too. But oddly, the photos from Eragon weren't quite as amusing.

Actually, I don't find blond twinks all /that/
attractive; I find them more purely aesthetically pleasing than anything else.

Riiiight.


Anyway, I posted that picture because I'm currently working my way through the novel the film is based on. I've been hired*, you see, to do a sword-fighting demonstration for the release of the third novel in the series. I figured it behooves me to know what sort of sword-fighting actually goes on therein.

And the book's not horrible. It seems to me exactly the sort of novel a bright but not very wordly 15-year-old would write -- he works in the verb "to fletch" on the first page, which ought to tell you enough -- and though I'm none too keen on fantasy, the book works. Too supplement some of its weak spots, though, I've taken to imaging the protagonist pretty much as you see above and his dragon as a giant basset hound**. And added a shower scene or two. And a rather different sort of treatment for chafed thighs.***

But reading the books has done largely what I wanted it to: finding out what kinds of hardware the mention and what their fighting and/or training is like. Pleasantly, they make a point of mentioning training with wooden wasters and there are both (anachronistically) rapiers and broadswords. And target shields.

Although, pointedly****, no daggers with those rapiers. So that'll be a fun thing to fold in.

The only thing I can really find fault with is the use of language. Well, not language, as such. It's pretty much just a "drop a letter from a real Germanic word and pretend it's a new one" deal. It's the orthography is /awful/. I don't think the kid has a grip on what actual diacritical marks mean. I mean, I know I can't castigate someone's /made-up/ language, and only someone trained in hist/comp linguistics would probably even notice, but still.

*Well, asked.

**Okay, that crosses the "creepy" line from fanfic to slash that I am unwilling to actually make.

***Think the Falcor the Luckdragon from The NeverEnding Story, but with more drool.

****Insert rim shot.

Dear Channel 4:

I don't understand why you insist on casting straight boys in gay roles (I mean, what: you can't find enough gay actors? Seriously?) but I have resigned myself to it.

But do you really have to make them so heart-achingly pretty? It's cruel.

In completely unrelated news, Skins premieres on BBC America tonight.

[The pictures, by the way, are a game. Can you guess which are stars on a Channel 4 series and which are porn models? Didn't think so...]

It's not all about Central Asia:

Lake Como is also nice this time of year.

One Thing I Absolutely Do Not Understand...

...is slash.

In any form.

I mean, I get porn. I even get erotic writing. I get fanfic, too, sort of, inasmuch as it's a way for fans to creatively interact with writing and the shows they love. So it there oughtn't to be this huge idealogical gap in me understanding slash in a meaningful way.

And what staggers me is the sheer /bulk/ of it. From TV shows that really don't easily suggest it.

The new Doctor Who does sort of lean towards it a bit, what with Rose and Martha's attachment to the Doctor, so some "shippers"* do something that sort of makes sense. And Captain Jack lends himself to poorly written erotica easily.

But there are Doctor on Doctor freaks. That just short-circuits my brains in all kinds of ways and leaves me twitching and drooling in the corner. There's Adric slash. Tegan-rape. Ugh. That's just as foul, if not worse.

And there's Office Slash out there, which I found out accidentally. (And you know I mean that accidentally, too, since I have no problem discussing actual my porn habits from time to time.)

Gay Office Slash. Which, because it was Jim/Ryan I looked at. Still didn't get it. I mean, I'd /watch/that in a heartbeat, cause I think BJ Novak and John Krasinski are both cuter than average. But it falls a little flat in practice, though, because it's just so creepy.

The Dwight/Michael stuff and the Dwight/Jim stuff -- god help us, there's a /word/, "Dwim," for that, which sounds like a semen euphemism -- I couldn't bear to look at.

I was -- in equal measures -- curious and repulsed so I nosed around looking for other bizarre slash. ER? Kovac and Carter, Malucci and Romano**, and a cross-over so bizarre it makes my brain hurt: Kerry Weaver and Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager.

That's so weird I have to go cry now.

*God, I loathe that word. The lingustics student in me understands it perfectly well but the English major just want to hit people who use it with a big book.

**Erik Palladino is another in the category with Philip Olivier that elicits a "shut up and fuck me" reaction in me that makes /no/ logical sense.

Virtual Dirty Looks

Heh heh.

Sitemeter is great.

The same day I posted about Sakhalin island, I got several hits from there (*waves).

Привет Друзья в Сахалине! Я надеюсь, что москиты не слишком плохи!

I also got a mysterious hit (no place of origin, no IP address, no referring page) from a government office in Moscow.

Привет Товарищи в ФСБ!

When I posted about Chechnya and Georgia, I got a few hits from the Caucasus!

Прошу прощения для того, чтобы использовать Россиян, но нет никакого ингуша Английским переводчикам в Интернете.

Долой российский империализм! Свобода для Кавказа!

And a few more from gov. offices in Moscow!

Этническое Сельское население - всегда скука, да?

(You can run those through this to see the Russian bits. And see and hear them here. Back translation is a hoot!)

We were born at night, when the she-wolf whelped.

It feels a bit weird to be writing this, after a recent post. But Russia's invaded Georgia.

I don't claim to know much about the situation, but I do know a bit more than the average American. Before I moved to New York, I worked on a production of a show called The Man Who Tried to Save the World -- about the American, Fred C. Cuny, an American relief worker -- and maybe spy --who disappeared in the last Chechan War. I learned a bit of Chechen language (enough to translate a few lines their national anthem, sort of -- see title quote), and enough to learn their country was more than bomb craters and ravaged cities.

Even the briefest of study of the area reveals a long, nasty history of military brutality. It'd be nice if you could reduce that brutality to just one side, but you can't. The Russian/Soviet/Russian occupation of the area has been anything but pleasant (they pretty much removed the entire Chechan ethnicity away from the Chechan homeland, so there are no natural-born Chechans), but so has the Chechan reaction to that occupation. They've done horrible things to innocent people, too -- murder of aide workers, innocent children of different ethnic backgrounds...

And the situation is happening all over again in Georgia, for the same reasons, it seems. The old super-structure of the old USSR feels like it needs to prove itself against the machinations of some tiny republic with a history of a free past. Whatever he says, Putin is aligning himself exactly with the old-school Soviet rulers, and only someone as deeply stupid as Bush would ever believe otherwise.

And most of America will be looking at Beijing.

Pah.

"I Read About You on the Internet!"

Or, Sixty Million Tween Girls Can't Be Wrong.

I spent last Friday night at an out-of-town book release party for Breaking Dawn. I was intrigued by the concept, mostly because the proprietress of the store, Miss Laura, had sent me an email specifically barring me from several of the activities.

She mentioned something about the innocence of the teens there, her good name in the small town, and (with a delicate sniff honed, no doubt, through generations of Southern Good Breeding) "my reputation".

*My* reputation, mind, when one of the survey answers to her question, "Name a mode of transportation mentioned in the series?" was a seventeen year old boy. Well, who wouldn't snigger at that? Especially considering some of the seventeen year old boys she's had in the bookstore...*

I was also informed of the negative consequences of introducing alcohol to the festivities. Actually, I wasn't. Those were sort of left up in the air to increase the general air of malignancy associated with them, but they were No Good Things. It was sort of a shame I nevertheless got a thin covering of Crown Royal that night.

I got there early so I could help set things up. She -- in defiance of years of knowing me -- asked me to set up a PlayStation 3. Which I pretty much did. I got all the wires and things plugged in where they were supposed to be. Then I got to blow up balloons. Lots of balloons. /Lots/ of balloons. With little fortunes in.

After that, I went to go get ice. At this point, I should mention that I had grabbed dinner at a local Long John Silver's. ("Oh," I thought, "that'll make a nice change," forgetting that "sea-food" and "quick-service"** go together a bit like "feminine charm" and "Amy Winehouse".) When I came back to my car, I saw the refuse from dinner. Without thinking, I grabbed it an tossed it into a nearby bin. Along with the car key.

I got to dig through the bin liner to get it back. Conveniently, someone left a bottle of Crown Royal somewhere in the middle of the bag, and I drenched myself up to the elbows before I figured out what it was.

There were several other fascinating things in the bag besides the whiskey, like an empty bag of Hershey's Miniatures, a box of sleeping pills and a used container of Depends (though, uhh, fortunately, no actual Depends). I can only assumed I missed a rockin' Seniors field trip downtown...

So I showed up almost 30 minutes later with the ice. The festivities soon began.

It was actually a lot of fun. There were a lot of people -- about 300 teen girls, it seemed, and one guy. Yeah. One of /those/. He was first in line to a get a copy of the book, too, apparently. We all talked about him after the shop closed. It was rather a pity he was so intensely creepy, since he was sort of cute. In a beady-eyed, "don't turn your back on him unless you want a bread knife stuck there" sort of way. Which really wouldn't be a problem as long as he was a bottom.

There were bingo games, and fortune-telling, and arm-wrestling, and make-overs, and raffles and quizzes and Pictionary ("It looks like a homeless man's last will and testament," Ben said, when we looked at it after), and everyone left ecstatic. And clutching their copy of the book.

Which was pretty good, considering that at the climax of the night, a 6-foot ex-marine girl climbed the counter and shouted at people. The guests, except for someone who threatened to rip Laura's face off, were charming, and I met some really lovely people, including Laura's sister, who gave the title quote. Yes. It's nice to be in the same category as Goatse.cx!

Clean-up took a long time, and I didn't get on the road till 3.30 -- which is about my standard for leaving from a trip to see Laura. One day, I should really take a camcorder and record myself singing aloud to Sharleen Spiteri or New Order or the 1989 London cast of Anything Goes about 5.15 to keep myself up.*** That would keep her in stitches for weeks.

You can see pictures of the event here. Though, curiously, I'm not in any.

*Well, not that kind of had, though she probably could have with the Boy G. Not that I would wish that on anyone. Well, twice. (I'd remind you of what Dan Savage says about paying sex workers...)

**That's the industry term for "fast-food". Like all industry terms, it's stupid.

***Granted, the infamous Interstate combined exit/on-ramp, complete with on-coming traffic, I once found on the way back from Laura's worked a lot better at waking me up.

"There's a one-eyed Yellow Idol to the North of Kathmandu..."

You know, I don't think I've ever mentioned something to /anyone/.

As much as I like to travel, I've never been interested in going to Japan. Or India. Or (most) of China. But I'd love to go to Central Asia. As in the northern branch of the Old Silk Road -- places in Xinjiang, the Chinese far West like Turfan or Urumqi or Gaochang or Khotan, the Tarim Basin where Tocharian mummies were found, The Flaming Mountains and the Tian Shan Mountains.

Places like Bukhara and Samarkhand (in Uzbekistan), Bamyan in Afghanistan, Hazrat-e and Tamburlaine's summer palace at Shahrisabz in Turkmenistan.

(And a little further away, but just as remote and seldom heard-of, the Amur River or the Sakhalin island)

The closest I've ever gotten to any personal contact with the area was my friend Phil who decided to travel the world. After I watched a years old (now) episode of Globe Trekker where Ian Wright goes to that part of the world, I convinced him through a series of lies and promises to get me a Kyrgyz hat. Yes, my virtue was used, but it was long gone before I knew Phil, so it wasn't that much to promise. Unfortunately, SARS broke out while Phil was in China, and he got the boot back home. He never got across the border into Kyrgyzstan, and I never got my hat.

Anyway, you almost never hear of most of these places anymore. Most of them are poor, or have unstable governments, and travel is pretty difficult there. But a few days ago, an attack in Kashgar made it into the news. It made me sad that something like that was the only reason the area got name-checked.

[Blogger, as far as I can tell, give you no options short of editing HTML (a bit beyond my ken) to select where the pictures go. They are -- from top down -- the Amur River; Registan, a citadel at Samarkhand; Shahrisabz; Khan Tegri, one of the tallest of the Tian Shan mountains; and the Flaming Mountains in Turfan.]

[The title quote, which has nothing to do with anything, really, is the opening to "The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God", an interesting poem set in Nepal during the Raj.]

More shilling...

...for more excellent t-shirtage. This lot come from Ninja-Bot.





I'm not sure when exactly I began to believe that excellent t-shirt-making became a trait as vital to the species as agriculture, bread-making and wit, but I do. It was probably 'round about the time I realized that 90% of my shirts had some band's name across the middle, and that was boring.

If You're Not From Lesbos...

O Dykes, Rejoice!

The Greeks are okay with you being Lesbians and not Lesbians.

In other gay news, South Carolina is not gay-friendly. Despite what they tell people.

I know. Shocking. And I'm not sure whether it's amusing or disturbing, but SC's response to a gay ad agency doing ads for the state to attract gay tourists was to not pay them. I can't help but wonder if they actually said "Nyah Nyah Nyah" when they refused to pay.

Fucking Pterodactyls.

These are t-shirts designed by Jeremy Kalgreen available over at amorphia-apparel.com. Needless to say, I adore them. And shall, in the fullness of time, purchase some. When I have teh monies.

Dear Person from Sussex:

I know -- through the magic of Sitemeter, so don't get any creepy ideas of me stalking -- you're from East Sussex and this happened in West Sussex, but do you know anything about the GrannyKart Blowout?

I found this bizarrely, and maybe macabrely, fascinating. For instance, did happen at Tesco's or Sainsbury's or somewhere else? I don't know why that matters, but for some reason it does. What started it? I could see if it were over the last package of Chocolate Hob-Nobs.* Was either morbidly obese, and therefore have an unfair advantage? One was taken away to hospital, after all.

Update: Further research tells me it happened in a place called Crawley, (Really? "Crawley"? What's the next town over, Little Snivelling?) a new town which has Tescoses, Sainsburyses, and ASDAses and Icleandses.

*Mmmmmm. Chocolate Hob Nobs. Though my research has discovered a Milk Chocolate and Orange Hob Nob, which I would Kill to Get. Yes. Kill.

**Seriously, check out the site. It's angry! No wonder the grans were playing at MarioKart.

Why I hate NC, part 12,563

Senator Dole:

As one of your constituents, I wanted to inform you how appalled I was at your attempt to attach Jesse Helms name to the recent Congressional bill for AIDS relief.

Helms was a racist and a bigot, and I am sure -- whatever his late actions in office may have been -- history will confirm his legacy as little more than a rabble-rousing hate-monger, and a relic of a less progressive age.

Your attempt to attach his name to the bill was a flagrant act of partisanship and an obvious attempt to whitewash Helms' dark memory. Were you just not able to find the names of some actual victims of the AIDS epidemic to attach to the bill?

While I don't doubt this act will be popular with the majority of your electorate, I think it's important the strong minority make their voices heard.

--Jaylemurph

Dammit!

The day -- the very day -- I mention ER here, I find out next season will be the last one.

I'm not very torn up about it -- it jumped the shark a while back* -- but still, I had to find out today?!

And in other TV news, who's going to tell that Dayton kid from The Baby Borrowers** that he needs to go somewhere and do a solo stroke flick and/or a Peter Z Pan movie***? Oh come on. You know you'd watch it. And I refuse to believe he uses that much peroxide, Nair and fake tan without self-selecting to look like a twink.

Not that I'm convinced he hasn't already, but he is the sort of ammo that the US twink market needs against Eurocreme and the other leading companies from Eastern Europe. And something in me is adamant that the US can -- and should --compete in this market.

*I'm pretty sure it happened 'round about the time /every/ episode got promoted as "a very special/touching/can't miss episode."

**You should really, really hate NBC for thinking you need to be watch hours of TV to learn that teen-agers are stupid and shouldn't (successfully) breed. I say "you" because *I* watched it and can't personally bitch. Granted, I probably watched with a creepy leer (see above), but I did watch it.

***No? Oliver Twink? Betwinked?**** The Da Vinci Load*****? Tell me he doesn't belong in there, somewhere.

****Well, obviously you know about the dreadful mike problems in the last few scenes. Marred an otherwise lovely film.

*****The gay one. Apparently, there's also a straight porn title called "The Da Vinci Load." Who knew?