Archive for March, 2009
Read an E-book Week
Whoops! Almost missed this announcement.
Read an Ebook Week is here. From 8-14 March 2009, you can download loads of free e-books or buy them at discounted prices from these places. No, they’re not LGBT books, ‘cept for sites such as ReadTheseLips.com and Khimairal Ink that give youse free lesbian stories all year round, and nicely packaged too.
[Link from PODpeople]
Keeping our lit queer
The 2009 Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans, USA (not the S&S Ball in Melbourne, Aust.) is set for May 14-17. A great queer lit event for North American writers, editors and publishers of LGBTIQ literature.
P/S Anyone know why the SaSfest sub-logo is a fleur-de-lis?
It’s International Women’s Day!
I hope you do something to celebrate it.
Feminist Porn
That is not an oxymoron. Feminist porn is real. They even have awards recognising female input into real female pleasure.
The Feminist Porn Awards is, I think, the safest, most consensual and erotic way to go for the porn industry, especially for women who enjoy getting hot and off on it.
There are, of course, arguments for or against voyeuristic sexual objectification that is the billion dollar adult entertainment industry, or whether feminism can/can’t include porn, there always will be. Suffice to say I support well-made erotica. But erotica is not porn, you say? That’s an individualistic distinction and I’m not one to tell you what you can or can’t find arousing.
So where can lesbians find good lesbian porn made by and for lesbians? Check out Pink & White Productions, S.I.R. Video and www.gooddykeporn.com. Very adult content (which for some means you must be at least 14 years old and for others even 70 yrs is not old enough) to view.
Want to attend the Awards? It’s on Friday, April 24th, in Toronto, Canada.
Support good porn that supports women in the industry.
Prop 8 challenge
All eyes will be on the California Supreme Court on Thursday, 5 March 2009, when the court hears oral arguments on the validity of Proposition 8 – the heinous constitutional amendment/revision that would deny recognition of same-sex marriages in California that passed on a public ballot in November last year.
The SFC has an article on the legal arguments to expect and the schedule for the hearing. The Attorney-General has published an opinion. On Monday, the CA state legislature passed a resolution supporting the challenge to Prop 8. All banners point forward.
Then Americans do this quaint analysis that is part of their jurisprudence – they analyse the political leanings of their judges. From a British Commonwealth perspective, I find this odd because we’re taught to look at the law and study judgements, never the judges. Perhaps this is based on the unshakeable assumption that independence of the judiciary is upheld by the doctrine of the separation of powers, and that the personal character of judges should never be reflected in their rulings. To be found otherwise would be embarrassing.
Watch the proceedings in the Supreme Court on this channel.
Added 10/3/09: To read the pleadings and hear a podcast of the arguments, go to http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/courts/supreme/highprofile/prop8.htm
Red states for sex
Today’s post is courtesy of this article from ABC news (US). The title says it all Porn in the USA: Conservatives are Biggest Consumers.
Benjamin Edelman collated a report that found that “Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption,…” Based on a study of credit-card data for adult entertainment cross-referenced to a previous study on public attitudes towards religion in the USA, states with head-in-the-sand conservative views (read anti-queer and anti-feminist) had more porn subscribers than liberal states along the coasts.
Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.
“Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” Edelman says.
Do I really need to say it, people?
Added: 2006 vid from GoodMagazine. Check out the stats for internet porn then.
iPhone shoots eggs, usually
The camera on the iPhone is really nothing to shout about. In fact, it’s just one step above useless in this day and age. I mean a measly 2 megs, a silly screen button that isn’t tactical, slow shutter speed, and no other options. It can’t take vids (unless you hack it and use a plug-in) and it can’t send MMSs. So why bother?
I take lots of pics with my iPhone, but unless my hands and subject are still, fergidaboudit.
But some people, obviously those with better visual sense than moi, have taken iPhone cam shots to new heights. Nevermind that they were fiddled with before posting.
[Gizmodo link]
Fishies
We’ve added two pearscales to the aquarium. Meet Princess Miyako and Princess Osagi. We plucked those names out of the air. When I later googled Osagi and Miyako, we found that Osagi is the acronym for the UN’s Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women, and Miyako is a popular name for japanese restaurants. Guess which fish C had picked and which one I did? These fish were meant for us.
Ye auld English
Reading University has ‘discovered’ the oldest English words still in use today. Words like ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘who’ and the first three numbers have apparently been commonly used for at least 10K years, hence their sustainability. The less a word is used, the more likely it is to fade away. Among those predicted to disappear, the boffins at the university say, are words such as ‘squeeze’, ‘guts’, ‘stick’, ‘throw’ and ‘dirty’.
How can the word ‘dirty’ disappear? It’s used in porn and fetish scenes enough. What would be the opposite of clean then?
The Reading boffins have been studying a family of Indo-European languages, using a new IBM supercomputer.
Other simple rules have been uncovered – numerals evolve the slowest, then nouns, then verbs, then adjectives. Conjunctions and prepositions such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘but’ , ‘on’, ‘over’ and ‘against’ evolve the fastest, some as much as 100 times faster than numerals. ‘Throw’ which is expected to evolve quickly, has a half-life of 900 years, there are 42 unrelated sounds for it across all the languages. In 10,000 years time, it will likely have been replaced in 10 of them – possibly including English, unless of course we all do our part to keep the word in circulation.
“50% of the words we use today would be unrecognisable to our ancestors living 2,500 years ago. If a time-traveller came to us, and told us he wanted to go back to that period, we could arm him with the appropriate phrase book, and hopefully keep him out of trouble” explained Mark Pagel, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Reading.
So all you writers attempting historicals, please note that people then did not speak the way we do now. At the rate the English language is evolving I expect we’ll be losing more than a few words.
In 2003, researchers at Auckland University believe they had evidence that the English Language originated in Turkey. Going further back than the Germanic, Frisian and Scandinavian roots of the language, … It was thought the language was spread either by rampaging Kurgan horsemen who swept down into Europe and the Near East from the steppes of Russia 6000 years ago, or by farmers from Anatolia (modern Turkey) who had tilled their way westwards several millenniums earlier.
Gosh, this is more exciting than studying grammar.
