sundries

[rm]

Rape and violence against women in post-earthquake Haiti.

kalmn alerts us to the story of a Ghanaian king who rules from Silver Spring, MD. Also, the king's a woman.

Hey, if a woman has ever had sex and then talks about sex professionally it's apparently perfectly reasonable to call her a hooker (and no, the headline's later change to "good time girl" wasn't actually better):

"Last week the Independent ran a feature with the exciting headline 'I was a hooker who became an agony aunt'. Sounded fascinating. Another tart with a heart story, perhaps?

No, reading the piece indicated the headline was wrong.

The feature described blogger and sex writer Zoe Margolis, better known as the Girl with a One Track Mind. It focused in part on Margolis work as an ambassador for sexual health charity Brook, raising issues about sex and relationships with young people.

Zoe Margolis is not, and has never been, a sex worker."

Question: more earthquakes lately or more coverage of earthquakes? Does a 4.4 in LA really merit coverage on this coast, as an example? Being in a non-earthquake prone region (although we do get them sometimes and are technically on a fault like) I can't tell if it's the coverage or the planet lately. Anyone?

The rules for getting an exit-row seat on an airplane are very specific. Which doesn't stop random people from requesting (and getting) them so they can have more legroom. Now some airlines just want to sell the seats at a premium price. Why that's not the best idea.

We've all heard about the private contractor assassination squad thing, right? Or do we have outrage fatigue again? But seriously: "'While no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up, it’s generally a bad idea to have freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond,' one American government official said."

Did we all see Hayworth being horrifically condescending and having trouble with the definitions of things like "facts" and "opinions" on Rachel Maddow last night? Seriously: when you say something says "quote-unquote" whatever, the words you are quoting need to actually BE IN THE THING WHICH YOU ARE QUOTING. When you say something is a quote, and those words aren't in the thing you are quoting you are somewhere between incorrect and lying. It is not a difference of opinion.

I'm sorta on a tear lately about people not grokking the difference between opinions and facts. On the one hand, I don't think people should have to say "in my opinion" before stating an opinion. It's obvious, isn't it, when someone says a piece of art is good or bad that they are expressing an opinion and the way it is expressed provides the viewpoint and how informed a perspective said opinion is coming from? Right? We all get that? Okay. But at the same time, between politicians who tell the people who call them on flat-out lies that they merely have a "difference of opinion" and fandom discussions in which people assume that their emotional response not only should be, but is, in fact, true for everyone else, I'm starting to get a little tetchy.

Apparently, this facts vs. opinions confusion is making other people really frustrated too. Via billijean.

Oh hey, here's another example. Fresno prof in trouble for teaching anti-gay opinions as facts. Article, sadly lacks enough details for me to properly outraged, however.

Oh, look at that, action on DADT seems to be languishing.

Our census form came in the mail last night. Must wait to send it in until we get our little Queer the Census sticker though.

Read this White Collar fic last night. I was moved. This may be a case of fic smarter than show. We'll see.

Oh! White Collar realization: Peter and El don't have kids. So I think Neal is supposed to be their Tina the Troubled Teen, but this being the Internet, we're all like "oh man, they are so doing it" as opposed to seeing it all as a parental/mentoring relationship. But they are so doing it.

Actorly people: I'm an AFTRA must-join. I've put off joining AFTRA for YEARS because they keep threatening to merge with SAG, but at this rate I feel like it's never going to happen. More and more of the cool shows that shoot in NYC are AFTRA. Should I just suck it up and pay the horrific AFTRA initiation fees already?

Comments

[joemorf.livejournal.com]

As for AFTRA, I'd wait until your next AFTRA gig, join, and then let the initiation get sucked out of your check... or checks, as the case may be.

It kinda sucks the way they do it though - my sister got a nasty surprise when she received a check for 0.00 after initiation dues. Much different from AGVA which will take a percentage until the balance is met.

~j

[rm.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of doing that, but a lot of people don't want to even call me in for an audition because of crap like that because some people are whiners about it. I had no idea AGVA was so humane.

[joemorf.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of in the same boat with SAG. I'm SAG eligible, which would be awesome if I had $2335 just laying around waiting for me to plunk down on initiation fees if I got a union gig. (And this is where the rarely enforced "no working for other 4A Sister Unions once you've joined one of them" rule really chaps my hide.)

And that initiation policy may be the only category where AGVA does not suck. In the decade or so that I've been a member I've found them to be completely anemic when dealing with Disney (which is where most of the West Coast AGVAs perform).

I don't even know where to start.

Part of the problem is that there are very few performers who are around for the long haul - because no one comes to California to spend their whole lives performing in Anaheim - the company is only just starting to be supportive of the notion, but they also encourage folks to move on by pulling crap like, for instance, in a show that runs 7 days a week, with performers required to work 25 hours/week to qualify for minimal benefits, casting 7 people in 1 day slots (Which happened most recently with the last incarnation of the High School Musical show).

So the performers have a tendency to be much more involved with their SAG or AFTRA contracts, or to a limited extent AEA - if they're politically minded at all - because here's no incentive to stick around longer than a couple of years. So when contract renewal negotiations come around there is very little tribal memory of what went on before, which makes negotiations go rather poorly for our side... so things like grandfathering get voted in, which gives the company even more incentive to shuffle the veterans out.

I don't know how much sense I'm making here, I have a tendency to get a bit wound up on the subject.

I'll leave you with one other example of why AGVA sucks. We don't have working dues, instead we have quarterly dues which are assessed on the work you did in the previous year. If you're diligent enough to sock this money away when you're making it, awesome. But if you're like most of the people on the planet, then you're gonna get a $248 bill based on the full time work you did a year ago, when you might be working less than 1 day per month as a sub and hustling other gigs wherever you can.

So, yeah. It's frustrating, and it's a big part of why people try to avoid getting sucked into it for very long out here.

All that said, I've always maintained that the performance parts of the job are awesome. 100% fun, and a big reason why people are willing to let themselves get sucked into it for very long.

It's the backstage B.S. that sucks, just like everywhere else.

~j

[rm.livejournal.com]

The SAG dues thing is like that too (but it's twice a year, so it's a little easier to remember it's coming and not as big of a chunk at once.

And HOLY FUCK the SAG initiation dues are that high now? I think it was like $1300 when I joined. I'm AEA eligible if I get own the damn paperwork and should probably deal with that chunk of change too, but the whole thing just sucks. That said, what I should really do is just use my next residuals check to take care of one of those (AFTRA OR AEA) things as opposed to being all "ooooo, shopping."