I'm trying to come to terms with the referendum votes in Maine and Washington - a narrow rejection of a previous-passed same-sex marriage law in Maine, and a narrow approval of a civil partnership law in Washington. The Washington law only passed because Seattle and its suburbs went strongly pro - and the religious groups still threw enormous amounts of time and money and deceitful advertising at the No side because even civil partnership is too much approval for gay/lesbian relationships. ( Read more... )

I may moan and whine about the dumb-ness of the characters and the unlikely whiteness of the town as a whole(and yes, the books are worse). But here is why I will keep watching True Blood: for the lovely and ruthless Pam


and for Eric, Mr. January


I can put up with a lot of stupid for them.

You are The Empress
Beauty, happiness, pleasure, success, luxury, dissipation.
The Empress is associated with Venus, the feminine planet, so it represents, beauty, charm, pleasure, luxury, and delight. You may be good at home decorating, art or anything to do with making things beautiful.
The Empress is a creator, be it creation of life, of romance, of art or business. While the Magician is the primal spark, the idea made real, and the High Priestess is the one who gives the idea a form, the Empress is the womb where it gestates and grows till it is ready to be born. This is why her symbol is Venus, goddess of beautiful things as well as love. Even so, the Empress is more Demeter, goddess of abundance, then sensual Venus. She is the giver of Earthly gifts, yet at the same time, she can, in anger withhold, as Demeter did when her daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped. In fury and grief, she kept the Earth barren till her child was returned to her.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Because all the cool kids are doing it. Interesting result, in that my real name is in the description.

You are The Star

Hope, expectation, Bright promises.

The Star is one of the great cards of faith, dreams realised

The Star is a card that looks to the future. It does not predict any immediate or powerful change, but it does predict hope and healing. This card suggests clarity of vision, spiritual insight. And, most importantly, that unexpected help will be coming, with water to quench your thirst, with a guiding light to the future. They might say you're a dreamer, but you're not the only one.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

My god I haven't blogged since August. Oh well, here's something to show I'm not dead, just busy. And avoiding the 45-minute presentation on Denys Arcand's films I should be writing up for the 30th. I've decided I'm not going to do any more meta on TW until after the Christmas specials. I need to get RTD off my screen before I can pick through the mess in one fell swoop, see if there's anything redeemable added to Captain Jack, or whether my version of the Whoniverse ends with the Dead Line and doesn't resume till Steven Moffat shows us how he's starting over.

First off, big hugs and warm thoughts to a friend of mine who's going through a miserable time. I'm way too far away to help her in any concrete way, but she knows I'm here and thinking of her, and ready to do anything useful. Timmy's coffee could be in the mail Tuesday BTW? The holiday weekend here delays me.

Wednesday night I went to a concert that I really wish this friend could've attended with me. If Josh Groban were a nice Canadian boy, he'd be Ken Lavigne. Wonderful voice, check, curly hair, check, self-deprecating sense of humour, check. Given that he's Canadian, those funny stories involve things like duct-taping his good shoes back together before a big concert, Tim Horton's, the CBC and Leonard Cohen. What did he sing - couple of his own songs, Because We Believe (which he sang with David Foster, at DF's invitation, at a big LA party this spring), Hallelujah, Dell'amore non chi sa. But also a wonderfully OTT C'est Moi, which he dedicated to Robert Goulet, and an equally funny O Sole Mio in which he sends up all those solo-artist cliches from the hand gestures (the Hey Taxi, the manicure, the table saw) to the big white handkerchief.

And I like it very much.

Your Word is "Think"

You see life as an amazing mix of possibilities, ideas, and fascinations. And sometimes you feel like you don't have enough time to take it all in. You love learning. Whether you're in school or not, you're probably immersed in several subjects right now. When you're not learning, you're busy reflecting. You think a lot about the people you know and the things you've experienced.

Just a quick update - I do promise to write up that thing on heteronormativity and mainstream media, I do. Had a brief but interesting conversation with a colleague at work today on this topic - she had to catch up on CoE, and I want to go through it with her and Cynthea (there are 3 of us who are interested in pop culture and gender/sexuality issues in the Faculty) before I put my thoughts together in a longer format. I certainly won't have any trouble pulling together lots of evidence that the people who disliked TW as it was and in particular the fluid sexuality are the ones trumpeting CoE the loudest as what TW should have been from the beginning. The fact that RTD and Julie Gardner were overseeing the whole process from day one, that RTD in fact went over TW scripts and made substantive changes is overlooked, and for these new fans CoE represents what RTD and JG always had wanted to do with the show and/or an apology and a repair of everything that had been wrong about the show to start with. Yeah, I'll have lots of material when I get a chance to sit down to it.

As far as notmywife is concerned -- she's back to work fulltime now, looking for another lawyer to come into the office at least part time, and has lost over 40 pounds of the weight she gained in the last 18 months. The surgery has done everything that we hoped it would do in terms of improving her overall physical and mental health, and she has her 6 month checkup with the endocrinologist tomorrow.

For the kids - well, the big news is that my 10 year old is playing Kate in a youth production of Pirates of Penzance on Friday. She loves singing and performing and has been working very hard on this. Pics will be forthcoming.

Yes, another CoE post. One of the things I found most irritating and unnecessary in CoE was all the "OMG Ianto's GAAAAY!". It threw me right out of the story because it was so unlike anything TW has done about sexuality since Jack's pointless and annoying transsexual story back in Greeks Bearing Gifts. Yeah, like the 51st century is cool with omnisexuality but not gender shifting. Anyway, if his family's reaction had been it then okay, even though I didn't like the "I'm not gay it's only him" line either, but it wasn't, we had to have Clem (and nice way to stick up for your friend there Gwen, smooth) and Andy (which to me made the whole thing even ickier, by putting this reaction into the mouth of a "good" character). Not only does it seem wrong, it seems out of place. The world is ending, and you care who Ianto's sleeping with? It also seems either old-fashioned or American to me - would people really react this way in modern Britain? Captain Jack's been a hugely popular omnisexual character for more than 4 years now, kids are cool with him having a boyfriend. John and Scott are so mainstream a couple they're more normal than Posh and Becks.

Or is this just my nice sheltered Canadian life talking? Yesterday was my 6th legal-wedding anniversary. We've both been out in our workplaces for 20 years. I got my first job with same-sex partner benefits in 1993, when I was finishing grad school. We adopted our first kid as an out couple nearly 13 years ago. The kids' school knows, other parents and kids there, colleagues, pretty much everywhere we do business regularly, neighbours. We do not run into this kind of remark any more. So why did we need a coming-out story, a very stereotypical in some ways coming-out story, and a story in which the "gay" character turns out to have been lying about something to everyone in his life and then dies of a virus in his boyfriend's arms? At some point I'm going to write about all the things that got changed between s2 and s3, how they reflect RTD's decision to "relaunch the show for a new audience" (many thanks to the person who found the newspaper interview in which RTD says exactly that), and what that says about mainstream audience expectations and values. Maybe even get it published, but not today.

ganked from cyberducks Because I was curious.

Which American accent do you have? Neutral You're not Northern, Southern, or Western, you`re just plain -American-. Your national identity is more important than your local identity, because you don`t really have a local identity. You might be from the region in that map, which is defined by this kind of accent, but you could easily not be. Or maybe you just moved around a lot growing up.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

Will the Torchwood fandom stay together until Comic Con this weekend? If it does manage not to splinter into hostile factions until then, will the TW panel be the last straw? In a sick way I'm finding this fascinating. Other fandoms I've been in, there's been a more consistent reaction to seeing our show cliffed (because this is far beyond whether Ianto dies or not). Are the pro-CoE folks really holding onto the belief that there will be more Torchwood and that it will be recognizable and likeable to the folks who've been watching up to this point? I'm unconvinced of the first point, but if it does happen I'm pretty sure it will have nothing in common with our dear old Cardiff-based dark-and-yet-cracky show. Because, seriously, this is a show that did gender-swapping in an authorized tie-in novel, that had blowfish in suits driving sportscars, that made smutty innuendo out of hockey sticks. And if there are that many folks who've just been dying for Torchwood to make itself into "serious quality drama" by turning into Spooks-with-aliens, then good luck to them with their new fan community, which will not include me.