Maps and Mirrors

You may or may not have noticed it but I have been very much absent the past few several weeks outside of the occasional drive-by post or comment. Nothing catastrophic, I'm just going through some sort of phase or cyclical thing. I have missed you and will be endeavoring to catch up.

(I just now noticed that two of my favorite icons are of women holding fruit. Hmm.)

Yes, I stayed up and watched The Wedding, well, through the hymn after the vows at least. I think I watched it more as a sequel to Charles & Diana's wedding (I was 11 for that one and I totally bought into it; I remember waking up at an ungodly hour to watch it in a hotel room).

Also, THE HATS.

I did quite adore Kate's dress. I think in the long run she's going to end up just as popular as Diana.

Wired magazine has an article on Nikon's Small World photomicrography competition, featuring the winners all the way back to 1977. This year's winner:

( cut for photo )
There are also links to Nikon's gallery of all the winners and honorable mentions. For me one of the slightly unexpected neat things about this was the fact that this is a truly international competition, and I loved seeing all the different facilities the various scientist photographers were from.

Regardless of the cause of Amazon's massive deranking fail and their response to it, the incident has put a focus on an ongoing problem regarding public perception and media and GLBT (or queer labeling of your choice) representation, in that it's all equated with sex. Which is why Heather Has Two Mommies gets hit with the Amazon Cataloguing Ban Hammer, among other problems. rm pointed out a good post in AfterEllen about this issue (acutally, you should just look at rm's post itself; it has several good links as well as some good discussion).

From my own perspective this brings up issues I struggle with myself. Despite being a reasonably intelligent and thoughtful person I recognize that I have problems when it comes to seeing people outside of binary classifications: man/woman, white/person of color, straight/not straight, vanilla/kinky, vanilla/chocolate. The norm/not the norm. It limits them and it limits me.

And there have been times I realized that I have trapped myself inside the box of equating everything about being not straight as being about sex.

My being straight affects several aspects of my life even if I'm not always aware of them. It affects not just how I go about having romantic and/or sexual relationships, but how I conduct myself in public, how I conduct myself at work, raising a family, health care, and so many other things that have absolutely nothing to do with sex. Now imagine every book about those subjects being tagged as having to do with sex.

Even if we accept that what happened with Amazon was a technical error that was completely innocent, it still happened the way that it did because of a larger problem that concerns all of us.

(Incidentally, apparently I only care about the Amazon issue because I'm just another one of those silly people in the homosexual community. Hey, thanks for having me - my heterosexuality iz pasted on, yay!)

At the Stratford Festival I had the good fortune to see an outstanding production of The Trojan Women. So I was intrigued by a modern adaption being done at the local university called The Women of ... I had mixed expectations, some positive based on the fact that it was written by a university professor who'd done an Alaskan Othello with an Aleut admiral in the Russian navy a year ago that was fairly well received. It was performed by one of our community theatre groups instead of at the university, and I'm afraid I missed it. I was a little wary, however, about The Women of ... in part because of this photo. I realize these kinds of promotional pieces are usually prepared months in advance and indeed I know I never saw that outfit in the play (I'm unsure about the actress), but I didn't consider it a good omen.

The play started with a Hecuba as some kind of Eternal Spirit of Women Hurt by War, serene and wise. Uh oh, I thought, this is not a good sign. An hour and a half later my fears were fully confirmed as Hecuba agreed to read a portion of a letter to a soldier from his mother in Indiana, so that he could hear it in a woman's voice, and telling the soldier that no, she didn't hate him, that it was important to hate war and not the soldiers, because that only led to more hate and more war.

Yeah, one of enormously huge problems with this play is how often it fell over itself trying to say that Our Boys weren't soldiers who did Bad Things. At times it was almost nauseating. Mostly though it was safe and sanitized and a hell of a lot more comfortable than it should have been. It had the decency to not be 100% about white western women, but it was pretty close. It paid (just barely) lip service to Darfur and the rape camps of Bosnia, but the monologues we were offered included a young woman talking about the death of her sweetheart in Iraq after she'd cheated on him and gotten pregnant and he'd said he wanted to raise the baby as is own, and an American Muslim teenager talking about losing her Jewish friend after her friend's brother was killed in Iraq. A USO singer who got peritonitis and TB that killed her after spending a week or two in a Vietnamese jail. Yeah, these are poignant stories, sure, but they hardly compare to your entire family being murdered or enslaved and your homeland being destroyed. These were not women who'd had anything remotely resembling hope or a say in their fate taken away from them. These were not women who saw everything in their lives torn apart like wet tissue paper.

Those women exist today, right now, and they're the ones who deserve to have their stories told.

It appears that I'm not going to work anytime soon due to an extended bout of extremely nasty freezing rain. I tried, but it was just too insane out there. Folks, I take the bus - if I'm staying home it's bad. I'm not sure I've ever stayed home from work because of the weather.

(ETA 1030 AST: I was going to try and go in later after it warmed up but they just canceled bus service. It's officially time to put my feet up.)

Anyway, I was looking for news stories about the weather and I came across this on the Google Local News section:



The news source is the local ABC affiliate. They've corrected the title of the story on their site, but come on. That wouldn't have even cleared through spell check!

So wait, we really didn't elect the felon? Whee!

The truth is I'm not a huge fan of our shiny new Senator-elect, but I'll TAKE HIM.

I swear I'm not going to post much about politics, but I had to comment on this. I noticed the news pieces day before yesterday about Palin using a Yahoo email address to conduct state business and I thought to myself, "And now that they've published that fact how long do you think it will be before that account gets hacked?"

I'm a little surprised it took them as long as it did.

Can I just go into hiding until after the election is over?

PLEASE?!

I realize I am turning into a crotchety old lady well ahead of schedule, but -

I get irritated every time I see the acronym for the Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome spelled as 'Aids', but I try to not let my blood boil too much, because it's usually in a relatively casual setting. Seeing it on the B-fucking-BC News website is another matter. I don't care if it's because you can't deal with the AutoCorrect function in your word processing program or the like; that is not a sufficient excuse.

Also, in Google News the chosen header for the articles describing the new dictionary additions by Merriam-Webster was an InformationWeek article whose headline spelled "subprime" as "suprime". Despite being up for most of the day, it only just got corrected. The headline.