I mentioned earlier that Michael used to say that he considered NorWesCon our anniversary, because he was even worse about forgetting the date of our first date (which is one of the dates I tried to remember as an anniversary) than I am, and neither of us could ever remember the date of our commitment ceremony without digging out the paperwork for our domestic partnership registration.
To be fair, we made it a very small thing we tacked onto another get-together with friends. So it wasn’t like an event planned for months ahead or anything. We needed to file domestic partnership paperwork to get us both on the same health insurance, so we did it and that was that. Just a few months afterward I had already started forgetting what the date was. It just never stuck.
I have not had the issue at all with remembering our wedding day…
Muppet Christ, Superstar is a parody depicting what it might sound like if the Muppets did a version of Jesus Christ, Superstar. Christo Graham sings all the parts. His Kermit is a bit of a stretch, but his Miss Piggy is pretty spot on.
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I nearly died while listening to Miss Piggy Singing “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”
The songs are available for download from Bandcamp. Or you can listen to them here.
I keep telling people it wasn’t that long ago that opposition to interracial marriage was stronger than the current opposition to same sex marriage.A common point of contention in discussions of gay rights is whether it is appropriate, logical, or even accurate to compare the struggle for equal rights for gay people with the struggle for racial equality. There are a wide variety of rationalizations given for saying they are not comparable. Rather than pick each of those apart, I’m more concerned with two undeniable ways in which they are similar:
The arguments that opponents to gay rights use are identical to arguments that the opponents of racial equality use or have used in the past.
The demographics of the people who most adamantly opposed racial equality are nearly the same as those people most opposed to gay rights.
A friend shared the graphic I’ve included above from @HistOpinion on twitter recently, and I was most amused by the people who were shocked to learn two things: as recently as 1970 there were still several states with laws against interracial marriage, and as recently as 1970 a lot of people approved of those laws.
I was alive in 1970, but even more important to this discussion, I was alive in 1967, the year that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that those laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional. It is true that I was only in grade school when that ruling came down, but I remember the time clearly. Suddenly, it seemed as if every adult in my life was talking about interracial marriage. None of them—not my parents, not my parents’ friends, not my Sunday School teacher, not my friends’ parents, not the pastor at church, not any of the adults at the monthly church potluck, not my grandparents—bothered to tell me why they were talking about it, but they were all talking about it.
What’s a hater to do?The song, “America, the Beautiful” got an entire day’s lesson in the Colorado State History class I had to pass in ninth grade. Katherine Lee Bates, an English professor from Wellesley College, came to Colorado Springs in 1893 to teach a summer class at Colorado College. As her train rolled across the plains of eastern Colorado, drawing closer to the dramatic front line of the Rocky Mountains spread across the horizon, she wrote in her journal about the landscape she was passing. Colorado Springs is near the base of Pike’s Peak, one of the taller mountains in the Rockies, and one day Bates took an excursion by train and then mule to the peak of the mountain, where she later said she felt as if all the beauty of America was laid before her, and inspired a poem to form in her mind. She eventually submitted the poem, entitled “Pike’s Peak” to a publication called The Congregationalist. When it was published in the July 4th edition in 1895, appeared under the title, “America the Beautiful.”
We learned that and other facts about the subsequent versions of the poem Bates re-published, and how it was eventually set to music by Samuel A. Ward, in class. What the textbook failed to mention is that Katherine Lee Bates was almost certainly lesbian…Continue reading …with brotherhood?→
If only…I love superheroes. I read superhero comic books sporadically as a young kid, but didn’t get into seriously following them until I was a teen-ager. Even then, I thought the costume choices artists made were a little weird. I understood why Batman’s costume was mostly black and grey and covered most of his pale skin, because his crimefighting style included lurking in shadows a lot, but if Wonder Woman could fight crime in what was basically a one-piece bathing suit, why did Superman (who had similar super powers and fighting style) need to cover everything up?
On the other hand, since Captain America’s costume included armor (in the the silver age comics the costume included chain mail on his torso!) why didn’t Batgirl take advantage of similar protection?
Marvel’s Valkyrie. Seriously?And then, when the Valkyrie was introduced in the pages of the Defenders, she had armor… Except originally it was only her breasts that were armored, everything else was either covered with spandex or it was bare. And that made absolutely no sense at all! Yeah, she has those shiny metallic wristbands and the upper arm bands, but those look more like jewelry than body armor, right? (Saddest of all, within the story, Valkyrie was created by an evil Asgardian goddess for the express purpose of proving that women were the equal of men! Her superstrength originally only worked when fighting males. Take a guess as to how long after the character joined the superhero group before a story line saw her falsely accused of a crime and sent to a women’s prison, where the artist got to draw a lot of ridiculous women’s prison scenes…)Continue reading Four-color boy’s club…→
(I’m posting so much gay-related stuff because it’s Pride Week, a.k.a. the 43rd anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, often considered the beginning of the modern gay/lesbian/bi/queer/transgender rights movement. I’ll get back to my usual observations on more trivial topics next week, promise)
Some years ago I wrote an essay, “What agenda?” in which, among other things, I listed my own agenda, not feeling I could speak for anyone else. I still think that’s a pretty good list of goals. Especially the part about making pie for people. Pie makes just about everything better, after all.
Lately certain people have been reading in public a document which they claim is the actual gay agenda, and it’s pretty horrid stuff. The thing is, the list originated as a joke–a joke on the very sorts of people misinformed enough or paranoid enough (or both) to believe that such a document exists. The original article identifies itself explicitly as satire, though the people quoting it now always leave that part out.
Font Folly 