sundries

[rm]

Tomorrow. Patty comes home tomorrow. This is highly excellent.

Today is going to be super productive. Why? Because I say so.

Still working on putting the list together out of your contributions for the holiday marketplace thingy.

Wow, my "teasing is confusing" post got a lot of comments. A few clarifications:

1. I don't think the other person was intending to be malicious and I feel badly that I may have upset her by not understanding.

2. I never had any doubt that she was telling me the truth about the outlets until she said she wasn't.

3. I was plugging in my machine and rushing off to get food in a short break, so I was barely looking at her when this happened, as I think is common in New York. It seems odd to me, in a city where we have to often pretend other people don't exist to get by, that I was supposed to be paying enough attention to someone I'd never spoken to before I ascertain their intent in so detailed a fashion.

4. We had not spoken or made eye-contact in anyway before this thing happened.

Kali and I have finished the first draft of the first chapter. Yayness.

A grand jury has been convened to see if the US can charge Assange with... something.

Reviving rituals of tending to the dead.

Act Out: Acting classes for gay actors.

Nearly 40 books on LGBT issues have been vandalized at Harvard.

Stateless babies, made to order.

An ongoing source of personal rage: Wal-mart is once again trying to get into NYC.

Speaking of Wal-mart, they are now a host-site for the Department of Homeland Security (I still find that name rage-inducing), "If you see something, say something" campaign.

This is wild: Synthetic ice-rink.

I think any scholar who does any remotely pop-culture work would be foolish not to try to get a piece into this collection on Neil Gaiman, which is sure to be quite high profile and sell very well. To my great annoyance, however, I'm feeling rather bereft of ideas myself.

Paul Cornell has started his highly excellent (but not as excellent as Patty) 12 Blogs of Christmas.

Comments

[ladyaelfwynn.livejournal.com]

Living in the Metro DC area, there are huge LED type signs scattered around the beltway urging us to report suspicious activity, as well as signs on the metro about abandoned bags and whatnot.

There's a part of me that just gets queasy at being told to spy on my neighbors. What exactly is "suspicious activity"? How will I know it if I see it? How do I know if my own actions look suspicious to others? What happens when suspicious activity is reported? Who is getting reported? Are people being reported for buying fertilizer whilst not white? (Or any number of other things that might get one reported.)

And I just don't trust people to behave correctly. Asking the populace to keep an eye on their neighbors just opens everything up to even more abuse.

I'd add something about not shopping at Wal-mart but I haven't shopped there in a few years, so all this is going to do is make me even less likely to shop there even if they do make drastic changes.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I'm okay with the signs being on the subways, since bombings of public transit and people's assumptions that someone else will address something that seem very wrong and things that make sense. But the idea of randomly policing each other in less public scenarios (your neighbors, while shopping) really sets my teeth on edge.

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

A couple years ago the American Museum of Natural History set up a synthetic ice rink, and I went for a spin. As the Times article notes, you can't glide as easily as on real ice. Also, you wind up with itty bitty plastic shavings clinging to your skate blades and your pants legs.

[5251962.livejournal.com]

The stateless babies thing makes me really angry for a bunch of reasons. They mention in that article that it's often gay male couples who do it- that, well, if rights were in place as they should be- wouldn't be an issue on adoptions. And my biggest one I guess is well, the adoption thing- there are SO many children world wide. In the US, the number in Missouri alone is just staggering. Someone always gets pissed off at me for saying so- but I have a really hard time knowing the stats on foster care kids with no homes and then seeing shit like that.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The fury at my end is at the whole concept that people don't have rights unless they're attached to a country.

[5251962.livejournal.com]

There is that, too. There is quite a bit to be really ragey about with this, in my opinion.

[5251962.livejournal.com]

Oh and because it's not related to my last comment, I wanted to make it separately- but this stuff with DHS is scary. I often joke about it- but a few years back, I was being 'watched', and actually had someone contact me for suspicious activity purely because I was talking to a reporter about a potential interview/day in the life kind of thing. The reporter happened to be from Al Jazeera English, and so, I was asked some questions- I have no idea just how or if at all I was being looked into, but I know I was.
Because I wanted to be involved in a frank discussion of the working poor with someone from a media outlet. Seriously. So for me, the idea of the public at large 'reporting suspicious activity' makes me shudder.

[rm.livejournal.com]

HOLY CRAP.

I am so sick o f Al-Jezeera being viewed as "the terrorist network." It's like fucking CNN in the Middle East.

[5251962.livejournal.com]

It was the weirdest freaking thing- they didn't call me, first or anything. Just one day, I'm slogging away, writing content for some content mill I was working with at the time- infant in a sling, nursing, and I get a knock at the door. There stood these two guys. They asked if they could come in, and I said no, we could talk on the porch. (I mean, seriously? I was alone in the house.) They asked me some questions about what I'd been contacted to talk about, then some pretty weird shit about my views on this and that. I'm standing there, baby still in the sling, just boggled, you know?

[1-mad-squirrel.livejournal.com]

Nearly 40 books on LGBT issues have been vandalized at Harvard.


This worries me. The Prescott Pride Center has a significant library, which is now going through the process of becoming a part of the library system in my little Arizona city (and possibly the county) The books will still be housed at the Center, but they will be cataloged in the libraries' databases, and a wider public than would normally come to the Center will have access to them. Reading about this occurrence at Harvard of all places makes me worried for our books.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

This has been resolved as an accident:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/12/14/damage_to_books_on_gays_called_accidental/

Although I don't quite get who leaves behind bottles of urine on a library shelf in the first place...

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

God, I hear you about DHS. I thought it was a fucking joke when it was first floated, and then was in utter disbelief as I realized it was for real.

It reads like a bad version of Nazi-era schlock...

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

This is wild: Synthetic ice-rink.

I remember seeing a Teflon-coated rink depicted in a 'goshwowscience' type book from the 1960s, but I'm glad that they've managed to make a rather more ice-like and usable surface, and are willing to install it in places where there wouldn't otherwise be much ice.

Ugh, so much agreed with your anti-Wal*Mart animus. I was reading commentary at nytimes.com (I think) that rather gloomily suggested that WalMart might be able to crack NYC this time simply because the recession has left a lot of people desperate for jobs.

I didn't know they were helping out DHS, though. Eurgh. (And yes, I do see why the message makes more sense onna subway, though I still think WMATA's "'Scuse me, is that your bag?" ads on the DC metro when I was there last were more effective because they were slightly better psychologically targeted. Maybe?)

[sunhawk.livejournal.com]

I missed the original teasing post and went to read it just now, my take on it was that the social miscue was all her and she compounded it by blurting out something actually hurtful in her moment of embarrassment. She misjudged the plausibility of her claim and then tried to make yet another joke to clue you in that she felt her original statement was very implausible. I've seen people try to make jokes like that, usually as a spontaneous decision, and it usually backfires the way it did with you. Super awkward all around!

Book vandalism always bothers me but targeting LGBT books is especially troubling @_@

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Wal-mart, they are now a host-site for the Department of Homeland Security (I still find that name rage-inducing), "If you see something, say something" campaign.

I saw this and was both horrified and deeply unsurprised. Walmart is after all closely allied with people and organizations that can best be described as the "fear industry". Ick.

[hoyland54.livejournal.com]

Stateless babies, made to order.

It's somewhat unlikely such a baby would actually be stateless. An American biological parent would pass citizenship to the child, regardless of place of birth. For a baby to be born stateless, it would have to have parents from countries that don't pass citizenship to children born overseas and born in a country without birthright citizenship.

I have no idea why I feel the need to be pedantic on this point, but I do. (It seems more likely to create some sort of dual citizenship muddle than stateless babies.)

[rm.livejournal.com]

The article is mostly about babies born overseas, often not in their home country, to non US citizens to be adopted by US citizens in a surrogacy arrangement.

So that's how the stateless baby happens, because it becomes difficult to get passports/papers to get the baby to the US to finish the adoption process.

[hoyland54.livejournal.com]

The article, at least as I understood it, didn't suggest difficulty getting such a child a US passport (though it sounded like the State Department wanted a biological connection to the child, suggesting you'd have to come up with adoption papers in the absence of such a connection). The US government being unwilling to give the kid a passport doesn't make the child stateless, though, which was my point--they'd have to be entitled to a passport from no country.

(I can envision situations where the kid ends up stateless. Say the kid's born in India, which I don't think has birthright citizenship, and only the names of American citizens are on the Indian birth certificate. If the State Department refused to acknowledge the child's citizenship, India might not because the (presumably Indian) surrogate's name isn't on the birth certificate. But surely you ask the State Department what they want before the kid's born.)

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the Gaiman link. Will definitely look at submitting something to that.

[pineapplechild.livejournal.com]

As a former hockey player who's done some heavy "dryland" time on synthetic ice, I can tell you this: first, it's hard to skate on. You use a lot more muscle, and it's not as fun. Second, it wears down your blades like billy-o. Third, while I don't doubt that they've improved it some, it's nothing like real ice. Passing is a lot, lot slower (friction!), as is, well, just about everything. And hockey is all about speed.

Also, this is how ice time goes, at least around here: the youngest boys get the best times. Youngest girls compete with the pre-teen and teenage boys for next best. Teenage girls get the late times. And if you're adult, you get the wee hours of morning/late at night times, doubly if you're women.