sundries

[rm]

I have heard from Patty. She was in Paddington Station stealing Internet and should be hitting Cardiff any minute now. Cardiff. That is so weird. (Also, I really miss her).

On Oct 1, not only do I have a Friends of the Text meeting, I have my first rehearsal for the demo of a musical spoof of Inception created by mithrigil. I'm playing Arthur (and I totally have the best song) and there's a Bollywood number (not mine, but it's existence must be noted). It's amazing how all the disparate parts of my life tend to eventually relate to each other, so much so that I'm now sort of absently thinking to myself, "Should Dogboy & Justine be a musical?"

In light of that, I recorded myself singing on my Mac this morning a bit, because I'm weird about my singing voice, and I need to reassure myself often, that, actually, despite all the mean people in girl's school I can motherfucking sing. I can motherfucking sing! So that was nice.

supertailz: Thing I promised you on Twitter. Everyone else: old story you probably know, but I did write it a couple of years ago now, so I suppose if you're new here this year, you maybe haven't seen it yet. Possibly way more than you want to know about me, but relevant to recent topics. (In fact, this piece feels about a billion times stranger considering recent changes to Craigslist and my social calendar for the week -- I'm not really ashamed of it; mostly, I'm just slightly chagrined at an over-employment (no matter how effective) of the "my mother never loved me" strategy of writing, and how tortured some of the sentences are).

There's a bit of a contretemps going on in my office building about the Unbeleivably Fucking Broken Elevators. People are making noises about rent strikes and violence at this point. I'm suitably entertained.

Tomorrow is the Butch Voices conference in New York. I was planning on going, but have almost come to my final decision not to -- I'm just too busy -- Dances of Vice tonight, the opening of the New York Musical Theater Festival on Monday, the Paley Center thing on Thursday, meetings and rehearsal on Friday, and I should really plan my birthday party too. So I'm skipping it and am going to use tomorrow to buy shoes and do work.

Speaking of Dances of Vice: nothing like getting up with a wardrobe plan and then not being able to find the item in question. So, serious plan B is going on here. Better today than Monday.

The new Harry Potter trailer is that good. Finally, someone realized that Harry's story is, ultimately, a tragedy most of the time for every single person in it. I'm jumping up and down about it. This, this is the world that made me fannish.

Tensions between Native Americans and the rodeos that want them there, sort of.

Irish President Mary McAleese turned down an invitation to be the Grand Marshall of New York City's St. Patrick's Day parade, because parade organizers still will not allow a gay Irish group to march.

As you may know Wiscon 35 did not disinvite Elizabeth Moon as Guest of Honor after her offensive and ignorant remarks about Islam, Muslims, immigrants and more. While Wiscon is presenting the matter as a teachable moment, and the situation is admittedly challenging on a number of levels for the concomm, it places a high burden on those who were the targets of Moon's speech and general consensus seems to be this was the wrong choice (a consensus I am largely inclined to agree with, although I have never attended Wiscon and so don't have any insight or stake in some aspects of this situation).

Regardless, Elizabeth Moon was never the only guest of honor for the con. The other is Nisi Shawl who has been speaking to Moon, and who has this to say about the con. For people considering going or not going or having an opinion, I think Shawl's words are a must-have data point.

Hey, laughingirl does this thing where she gets celebrities to autograph little teddy bears and then auctions them off to raise money to fight breast cancer. She always manages to get amazing people, and there are some auctions that start ending tonight that involve people like the cast of White Collar, James Marsters, Amber Benson, a bunch of awesome authors and a whole lot more.

Comments

[mamadar.livejournal.com]

I'm from Baltimore. My Eloise books belonged originally to my sister, who was born in 1955; I'm eleven years younger.

I seem to remember reading a couple of years ago that Eloise was very popular and heavily marketed when the books were first published, but that Thompson rather mysteriously nixed the marketing and let the books go out of print. There was a flurry of new interest back in the '90s; I have a tiny Eloise doll, a DVD of an Eloise movie, and a posthumously published new book, plus an omnibus of the original books.