Diplomacy, Shmiplomacy

Someone on the radio made the usual remark of "We should just lock politicians in a room until they work out their (our) problems". Oh, sure, it's a fine idea, many people subscribe to it. But, my goodness, it's so dull. I mean, really, where's the glamour?

So, I think we should make our politicians mud-wrestle, instead. Your average citizen would pay way more attention to the proceedings. Just picture it! We'll broadcast the event over BBC and NHK, get some cute Japanese commentator(s) to emcee the whole thing (hm...think "Iron Chef") and toss our statesmen in the mud. In those white sumo-type loincloth things.

Just imagine the ratings!

Today's Geography Lesson: Aruba

That far-flung tendril of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, best known for a great pair of gams and a walk-on role in the film Mission Impossible. (Who can forget Tom Cruise being asked "would you consider the cinema of the Caribbean -- Aruba, perhaps"? Such poise! Such grace! Alas, a little country like that always gets ignored by the Academy come Oscar time. Tragic, really.)

After initially signing on as a jewel in Spain's crown in 1499, Aruba was stolen by the Dutch -- in 1636 -- in a daring raid filled with high-tech weaponry, squinty-eyed square-jawed heroes, the foiling of laser security systems, and two or three strategically placed explosions.

Sneering delicately south towards Venezuela, Aruba typically portrays exactly the kind of restful vacation spot you'd expect from a place known on-and-offscreen for its white sandy beaches and well-regulated [by trade winds, that is] temperate clime. 81 degrees Fahrenheit last year, this year, and probably next year. Even to the casual observer, it's obvious Aruba lucked out by growing up outside the Caribbean hurricane belt.

Worldly but not weary, the urbane Aruban's performance on the governmental stage [appearing regularly in the capital city of Oranjestad -- check your program for details] typically demonstrates a sophisticated blend of Dutch civil and English common law techniques in the parliamentary democracy The Netherlands is known for.

Aruba is mostly Roman Catholic and multilingual -- Dutch, Papiamento[*], English, and Spanish -- and simply adores tourist's shopping dollars. Aruba's currency is the effortlessly sexy guilder/florin, which has been tied to the US dollar at a fixed rate since the mid-80's.

When on tour with its annual production of Bigger Than Washington DC, And Less Traffic, Too, Aruba typically performs evenings in the major ports of Barcadera, Oranjestad, and Sint Nicolaas, and can usually be spotted at a trendy nightclub after the show indulging in drinks and a little dancing.

To find an Aruba webcam, keeps your eyes peeled for the .aw Internet country code!

A regular importer of -- yep, tourists -- machinery and electrical equipment, crude oil and foodstuffs, Aruba exports animals and animal products, art, machinery and transport equipment, and the occasional laundered drug dollar to The Netherlands, Columbia, and that wacky northern neighbor, the United States.

Aruba's flag is as sophisticated as you might expect: blue, with two narrow, horizontal, yellow stripes across the lower portion and a red, four-pointed star outlined in white in the upper hoist-side corner.

[*] That's a spiffy dialect of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English.

Facts: The CIA World Factbook

Film Critique: Sidra Vitale

Story In The Running

It'll be a few more weeks before I know, but I made it off a Certain Someone's slush pile and onto the "maybe".

I'll say who "Certain Someone" is, if and when. (Keep that suspense building, folks!)

Deviant Aunt Redux


Ha! My sister-in-law is going to have a baby! She just found out, after suspecting for most of this week(ish). Weeeeeeeeee!

Today's Geography Lesson: Burkina Faso

Since I like to bitch about the quality of publik ed-you-kay-shun here in the US, I thought I'd invest a little time in putting my money where my mouth is.

So, as a public service, c'mon everybody, let's learn about Burkina Faso!

To Americans, an itty-bitty Colorado-sized country with a weird name, somewhere in Africa -- that's the big scary continent Joseph Conrad said had a "Heart Of Darkness", somewhere in your senior year of high-school English. To residents, Burkina Faso is home.

The French settlement formerly known as Upper Volta burst onto the fashion scene and into its independence in 1960, setting new trends in population density v. low natural resources, in a neo-classical subsistence agriculture mode highly vulnerable to variations in rainfall.

Wearing Mali and Niger as a hat, Burkina Faso has consistently flaunted fashion ideals -- detractors argue that sporting landlocked savannah year-round leaves little room for flexibility in times of drought. Several hundred thousand residents head south to Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire annually for the relentlessly trendy lifestyle of the migrant farm worker, some waving at the nation's highest point, Tena Kourou (749 m), on their way.

Though lacking coastline, Burkina Faso has close ties to Lake Volta to the south, and is frequently seen in the company of the lake's 3 principal rivers, the Black, Red, and White Voltas.

With a daring religious distribution amongst the Burkinabe of indigenous beliefs [40%-ish], Islam [50%-ish], and a touch of Christianity [10%], Burkina Faso is a country obviously serious about its cosmopolitan mix of culture and language. French is the nation's official language, and 90% of the population speak native African tongues of the Sudanic family.

For governmental affairs, the Burkinabe step out in an always-appropriate-for-evening French-influenced parliamentary system, deftly accessorized with a native constitution and legislative, judicial, and executive branches all their own. Ouagadougou, like all national capitals, drips with a plethora of acronymed political parties and pressure groups.

A regular exporter of cotton, animal products, and gold, Burkina Faso imports machinery, food products, and petroleum from nearby Cote d'Ivoire and not-so-nearby France.

Burkina Faso's flag, two equal horizontal bands of red (top) and green with a yellow five-pointed star in the center; uses the enduringly popular pan-African colors of Ethiopia.

The well-dressed web Burkinabe can often be seen in the sleek ".bf" Internet country code, so be sure to say "bonjour" when you meet them!

Boring Statistics and Facts The CIA World Factbook

Attitude and Fashion Commentary Sidra Vitale

Speaking For Everyone

As I'm frequently asked to speak for All Women Everywhere®, I thought I'd just go ahead and let you all know what All Women Everywhere® like, since, as you know, we're all completely interchangeable, and one woman [me] is fully capable of successfully interpreting to you not only what she likes but what All Women Everywhere® like. This, way, you'll NEVER have to WONDER AGAIN! Wow!

So all 8 gazillion of us would like to set the record straight --

Our Favorite Color is Blue. Very nice.
Our Favorite Ice Cream is Rocky Road.
Our Favorite Drink is the crystal-clear, refreshing water that comes from Secret Woman Springs. Two X chromosomes required for purchase.
Our Favorite Muffin is Banana with Almonds.
Half of the time we like our steak medium rare, the other half of the time we like it medium well, we flip a coin right before ordering in a restaurant, and yes, we do it that way just to piss you off.

Pardon The Hysterical Laughter

I'm not making this up, I swear.

Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century .

What, I should expound? Like that wasn't funny enough by itself?

It's some kids cartoon. Holmes was cryogenically frozen, thawed out in the 22nd century by a descendant of Inspector Lestrade and her assistant robot with human head? features? called Watson. It seems Holmes' nemesis Moriarty has been cloned and so Holmes must return to business.

I swear to god, I was stunned for the first minute, then laughing hysterically for several minutes further. Y'see,

you see

All I could think of was Duck Dodgers in the 24th-and-a-half Century . So now I have this weird cross-pollinated image in my head of Sherlock Holmes going up against Marvin the Martian, with Porky Pig as Watson.

See? This is what comes of channel surfing.

You Going to Eat That?

Can we clone animal muscle for the purpose of eating it? Not will we, but can we now? If so, how many people would be too squicked out to eat the stuff?

Is it Clarifying Or Covering My ***?

Who can tell, really?

Janis has drilled into some of my questions in the fanfic/feminist post I made earlier this week. I'm not sure the conversation resulted in any real significant refinement of what I'm trying to articulate, but it helped some.

Part of what I'm trying to ask has to do with post-feminist society. Among other things, feminism encourages me to say "my culture isn't meeting my needs, I'm going to change that", and then proceed to do so. Now, as a third/fourth generation feminist, I personally can look around and see artifacts and structures built to serve mainstream culture, and those built to serve much thinner communities.

My question is, does it ever stop making sense to support those niche systems? For example, 20 years ago, writing fanfic, or forming a womyn's co-op, studying/teaching Women's Studies, or god knows what else, were ground-breaking, important, revolutionary things to do, necessary to the exploration of these non-mainstream community needs.

Shouldn't these things be becoming mainstream? Especially if we're talking about feminism, which has as its fundamental goal the abolition of the need for there to be feminism. If I support womyn-centric art galleries today, am I just prolonging the day until art becomes truly integrated? If I teach Women's Studies today without there being any integration with "standard history", is it just going to take longer to reach the day when women are discussed in history just like men, in high school history books?

So, this is really all just hitting the Inside/Outside of the System questions I asked. There's only so much non-working time spent at work I can rationalize here.... To get back to my current point, which is,

Has the time for change in terms of integration with the mainstream arrived yet?

So, where fanfic is concerned, by producing and consuming fan fiction, instead of producing and consuming the mainstream product it is spun off from [TV, basically], am I actively shooting myself in the foot, and putting off the day where I can see this stuff where I really want to? Am I holding back the next (r)evolutionary step? If every one of us who produces and consumes fan fic started writing spec scripts instead of posting stories online, would we change the face of TV?

Cervantes

"Leading authors have named 17th-Century Spanish story Don Quixote as the best work of fiction ever written, ahead of works by Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky." More >>

Upcoming Reviews

for the feminist website, The 3rd WWWave:

The Nesting Instinct

That Takes Ovaries! [pre-publication]

When I do book reviews, which I haven't for a while but am coming back to, my reviews are typically posted to Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, and my personal website. Reviews of feminist books appear on The 3rd WWWave site as well.

Where Parents Fear To Tread

Or, sex, drugs, and rock and roll

At lunch last week I was describing what I thought a rather sensible decision on my part with regards to my new apartment: the use of designated "nowhere to go" bins in each room. It seemed like a good idea at the time: I have these nice glass platters I rarely put to work, so why not use them as the general repositories in each room for, literally, stuff I can't deal with yet? Keys, bills I can't remit until the next paycheck, odds and ends I find as I unpack. You know. The stuff of life. Crap.

And I always walk around with that kind of stuff, wondering what to do with it, eventually losing it, getting annoyed -- I'm sure you know the drill. But they're things I can't process yet, so it's not like I can put them away.

Well, my lunch partner remarked that this was a very mature approach to dealing with keeping my life, not to mention apartment, in some semblance of order, and we spent a portion of our meal discussing working with yourself, with your own tendencies instead of constantly at cross-purposes. Hey, I admit it, I'm a slob. If I don't deal with things right away, or at least log that they need to be dealt with and then deal with the log regularly, it doesn't get done. On the job I use a computer to keep myself together, and it works well enough that I'm actually that disgustingly organized programmer who writes down what she does as it's happening. Oh, the horror. I document my code, too. But see, it's all just a ploy so I don't have to think about it later, all I have to do is look it up. I call it active laziness.

At home I've never really found the best method for providing a similar level of active laziness. I don't sit in front of a computer all day there, so logging my activities in a text file somewhere is not necessarily helpful. Now, I must admit that the Visor [a Palm OS device] has helped a great deal. I think it's the only reason I'm on top of things with regards to my story submissions to magazines. At any moment, I can pop open my palmtop, fire up MobileDB, and see where "It's The Smell" or "The Last Supper" are, and even where I think I might send them next.

I keep a file cabinet, but -- for whatever reason -- that only works with "done" things. Not pending ones. Maybe it's just training from all that filing as a college student. Filing is the thing you do when it's all over and done with.

I'm just trying to accomodate reality, and work with my tendencies instead of against them.

So, here I am sitting in my home office [oh, what heart-filling words] pondering the fact that people as a rule find it easier to accomodate our pets rather than our own natural inclinations, so of course I start thinking about teen sex.

You read that right.

Teen sex.

Ah, adolescence. A time of raging hormones, not to mention exploration of boundaries of self, society and life. Emotionally and physically.

I ask you the following:

Is it practical, is it sensible, to insist that you can effectively control everything your children face over the entire course of their formative years? When I say it that way, it sounds absurd, doesn't it? You can't live their lives for them, and you can't demand your local school ignore statistics and pretend teen sex doesn't exist, just because you want to avoid thinking about the subject.

So, how about accomodating reality, instead? Why not operate on the assumption that your children will encounter unpleasant aspects of the world? That they will face a bully at recess, even though they shouldn't have to. That they will meet up with the tragedy of a suicide, even though they shouldn't have to. That they will "do it", or know someone who does.

Pretending things away doesn't seem to have a very good track record, so why not take a more pragmatic approach, and prepare your children, instead of hiding things from them. If you really want your kids to do better than you, to not make the mistakes you made, to learn from your errors, you're going to have to share your errors with them, not just the lesson you learned, but the stupidity that got you in hot water in the first place.

Turn off the TV, open your mouth, and talk. And when you do, keep the following in mind.

Point the first:

The world is not always as you might wish it to be. No matter how much you may want it to be otherwise, no matter how remote and insular your environment, someone is going to get offered weed at a party, someone is going to get hot and bothered over another someone who hits their buttons. What can you do? Plan for it. Plan ahead. Because you cannot keep your children locked in a cage of your making and then expect them to survive, when, magically, on their 18th birthday, they become legal adults and you have to let them out.

Which leads us directly to point the second, being,

Your children will make mistakes, just like you did. What tools you equip them with to learn from those mistakes, to recognize them as mistakes, to move forward and build on them, are the tools they will use the rest of their lives.

Don't damn them with only half a kit.

So, It's a "Yes", Then

I've decided I like the current A&E Nero Wolfe, with Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin. Aside from the fact that Chaykin is too skinny [probably, what, the first time in TV history of that complaint being heard -- but oh, that's a rant for a different time], and is a little too physically active for my taste, I think he makes an excellent Wolfe. And from the start, I had zero misgivings about Hutton as Archie Goodwin. He's a marvel. Rex Stout's genius was not in the invention of Wolfe, it was Archie.

I had the good fortune to watch two dramatisations of Wolfe tales last night I had not previously read, which tends to make me more open to accepting something like this. I love the 'Mercury Theatre Players' aspect of re-using cast members, and of course the color and design are remarkable.

"Their names we cannot list,
so many they are that lie
under the eternal guard of granite.

But know you who hear this,
No one is forgotten,
Nothing is forgotten."


Olga Berggolts

Feminism and Fanfic

A question to ponder:

How does the self-marginalization of authors of fanfic -- not making money for writing effort, being in an 'underground' community -- fit, or fail to fit, with feminist ideals?

Fanfic anti-feminist?

Fanfic writers are typically women. Fanfic writers talk in closed communities about what they wish was different about the show/film they fic. They often deliberately distance themselves from the actual production, cast, and stories. They choose to write 'outside' the production.

Be on the In or Outside of the System?

Would it be

better
worse
different

to apply that same interest and activity more publicly, as pressure on the actual production of TV shows and film? Are we eliminating our own clout as a market when we write fanfic instead of spec scripts? When is separate but equal ever equal?

Inferior?

Do we think we're "not good enough"? Whether it's not good enough to warrant response to our stated desires as a market [and there's certainly historical support for that], or not good enough to make it with the Real Writers, Real Film Editors, Real Actors?

Food for thought.