From now on until some as yet unknown time in the future, I will be crossposting between Dreamwidth and LJ and reading in both places, though as people become securely established over on DW I will probably trim the lj list down quite a lot to avoid duplication.

If this is our first introduction, hi!

You may want to read my DW profile before deciding if you mean to keep me or to toss me back. I find that over the years I have been holding house on Livejournal I have developed strong Opinions about how I want my journal to work, so unlike my lj profile, which sort of grew haphazardly, this time I have actually written a position paper of sorts.

Also, I am the sort of person who thinks this is funny:

(This journal is queer. And friendly.)

Spread the Net: Donate ten dollars. Buy one mosquito net. Save three people from malaria.

Got a couple of hours? Volunteer in the developing world from your own computer desk.

Got 25 dollars to spare? Donating money once is good. Lending it over and over is better. Microcredit from microlenders. Like you.

This set are by the fabulous Holly:



High Class In Borrowed... Flannel.



Anyone can look good at 40. Given enough spackle. :-)



Chapeaus. Avec Le Kickitude. Also Avec Les Temporarily Confusing Attachment Systems.



Hold on to your forks; there's CAKE. I told you all that Mel is AWESOME, yes?

I sort of feel like all I've said to anyone for three days is "Oh My God Thank You So Much", and it still isn't enough. It really never will be. We are loved and blessed and overflowing with good fortune.

So many people came amazing distances, some with great effort, to be with us in our crazy and our joy. More tried hard and for one reason or another couldn't make it work. We love you all so much.

We wanted it to be All About Community and Oh My God it sure was.

torrain was the Best Bride Ever in 2007 and the best Matron of Honour ever in 2010. I can't even. She listened and made phone calls and did improbable errands and made iclysdale the most stunning kilt hose garters, and and and...

con_girl and foms and A. showed up at our house one night with food and hugs and fed us and helped us label wine bottles and hugged us some more and offered us hats and went away and left us to it.

kd5mdk was a pillar of strength and a tower of society from the moment he arrived. I kept saying "Andrew? Can you just .... handle that?" and magically, the path would smooth and the way would open. Ladies' maid, gentleman's gentleman, water-carrier, bottle washer, personal assistant, secretary and all around miracle, the man can apparently do anything with nothing. We hereby nominate him for the Ivan Vorpatril Award for Extraordinary Henching Under Fire.

meieresque made the venue look beautiful and did a thousand other things to get us ready, organised, and all pointed in the right direction.

pecunium made breakfast for 22 on Saturday, took amazing photos on Sunday - in dress blues, making him the Prettiest Photographer Ever - and reassured me a million times that people love me even when I am trying to herd too many cats and it turns me into Little Ms Shoutypants.

dagibbs hosted parties and out of town guests and listened to us and hugged us and dropped by for drinks and dragged us out for pho when we needed it.

buttongirl made us the two most beautiful dresses ever, and two utterly spectacular hats, under incredible time pressure, and made it fun to boot. She and D. also lent us bedding for dagibbs' House Of Wedding Bed and (if you make it yourself) Breakfast.

meletor_et_al made us incredible cakes, under even worse time pressure. I don't know when she slept, or even if.

tenacious_snail was the Best Officiant Ever, and surrounded us with love and calmness and laughter and, when we needed it, food.

bipagan organised the Madison contingent and got them all here in good order and good spirits, accompanied by quite a lot of fairestcat's stuff.

lovelokest and izzybeth andspiritbomber and olivia_circe and sasha_feather hauled stuff to Ottawa and helped us clean up and get where we were going and made all the furniture moving and stuff hauling at the venue happen, on time and in style.

Tim and Ed moved chairs and brooms and mountains and made it all happen perfectly and in style.

rottenfruit got my hair up and tamed, and pecunium's as well.

northbard and tormenta and mycrazyhair and corbet gave us a place to sleep and a wonderful breakfast when we were in Toronto Desperately Seeking Shoes.

con_girl and bipagan and northbard and invokation called quarters for us, beautifully.

amazon_syren loved us and hugged us and lent me her apartment for a night.

Pat and Don made us amazing food and unblinkingly tackled a two-page list of food restrictions so that everyone could eat.

Willow found us plates and cutlery and glasses we could borrow, for a donation we could easily afford, to a cause we support. The Ottawa Folk Festival trusted us with their plates and cutlery, and the Bronson Centre with their glassware.

mikepictor lent Ian his nicest kilt.

ironphoenix and soul_diaspora and ilanikhan lent bedding, and ilanikhan ran to the fabric store. Repeatedly. ironphoenix made getting to and from multiple dress fittings in Kanata, after our poor car suddenly died, in viciously cold weather, amost fun instead of hair-raisingly evil.

ami_b helped me run Stitch and Bitch (which will happen again next week and will finally not be All Wedding Flail All The Time) and told us where to find a really good bra.

TSivia, who couldn't even be there, lent us all manner of useful stuff and gave us amazing love and support.

And having done all of these things, when thanked and hugged and tearfully told they were wonderful, all of these people insisted that it had been a pleasure. I love you all, and you are all quite mad.

And I am quite sure I've forgotten people; please remind me in comments if you saw some fabulous person doing some glorious thing that I missed in the haze of excitement and tiredness and flail?

(Ian, Cat, please repost this where appropriate)

If you have a wedding invite and are in Ottawa by tomorrow night, whether or not you're free to come to the wedding, you are totally and completely invited to the port party at Gibbs'.

If you aren't sure where that is, drop an email to the address on the invite and we will send you some clarity by return of post.

I am truly sorry. The Poly Express Message System works so well most of the time, I sometimes forget that it can have failures. I facepalm. Repeatedly.

sock toe; cast on 20, increased to 48.
heel: ten stitches live (12 shortrows)
remember to wrap first non heel stitch on final shortrow.
after heel, dec. to 44 at heel centre for better ankle.

... in an opaque plastic container of some sort, covered with water, so it can be forgotten about until it is so foul it can no longer be ignored^[2].

How to store half bricks of tofu:

In a ziploc which you have put some clean water into on top of the half brick and then squeezed as much air as possible out of, so you can see your tofu and change its water occasionally and possibly even, you know, USE IT.

Look, I don't have that many moments of genius in the kitchen, I like to gloat when they happen.

[1] By which I, I hope obviously, do not mean "you fools, you madmen, you utter failures as human beings, YOU STORE YOUR TOFU WRONG ETA: WRONGLY, OK MEAGAN?", but rather "I can't possibly be the only person for whom this widely used method is not working, right?"

[2] I am persuaded that it is this problem which caused me, for years, to be firmly of the opinion that "vegetarians don't EAT tofu. Vegetarians BUY tofu.^[3]"


[3] Which their long-suffering roomates/partners/wives must then chivvy out the door in all its dirty-rainbow stinking inglory, six weeks later, because the vegetarian "isn't touching that!". But I'm not bitter.

It is 842 nautical miles between Boston and St John's.

Somewhere in my heart, it's the end of the world.

I have a request: if those of you who signal-boosted my first Haiti post would also boost this one, I'd be grateful, as it is a partial correction of what I said then.

And, obviously anyone else who wants to boost may do so with my thanks and my blessing.

THING THE FIRST: Targeted versus General giving:

Ok, so, in general it is still true that it is best to donate to "Greatest Needs" or "General Fund" when donating to a relief organisation, even in the immediate aftermath of a disaster:

Money given to a specific fund can only be used for the area for which the fund was set up. General donations are used where need is greatest. There will be other disasters while the situation in Haiti unfolds. ... Greatest Needs and Emergency Relief funds can and will go to Haiti as needed; selecting one of these options will in no way limit the funds that MSF has available for this particular relief effort.

There are some situations, however, where this is not true. If you are donating to a Canadian relief organisation right now, there is a good reason to specifically earmark your donation for Haiti: The Canadian government has agreed to match donations up to $50,000,000.00 CDN so long as the following conditions are met:

From CIDA's Frequently Asked Questions on the Haiti Earthquake

Will the Government of Canada match all donations?

The maximum amount per single donation that the government will match is
$100,000. To count toward the Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, donations must
be:

- made by an individual Canadian;
- made to a registered charity that is receiving donations in response to the January 12 Haiti earthquake;
- specifically earmarked by such organizations for the purpose of responding to the earthquake; and,
- made between January 12 and February 12, 2010.

The government will not match donations made by corporations, governments,
businesses, partnerships, schools, incorporated or non-incorporated
entities, or unions from their existing resources that were not raised from
individuals specifically in response to the earthquake. However, amounts
raised from fundraising events undertaken to raise money from individuals in
response to the earthquake are eligible, and this fundraising may be
undertaken by schools, faith-based organizations, clubs, social groups,
businesses, incorporated entities, or registered charites.

So if you are donating to a Canadian org before February 12, well, matching funds is a good reason to go for the restrictive option.

If you already donated, or you still feel like you want to donate to Greatest Needs, honestly, go ahead and do it. We're going to hit that limit.

THING THE SECOND:

I've seen various people express concerns about giving to the American Red Cross.

Disclaimer: I have some areas of concern about the ARC but I have no defensible opinion as I lack data, so I'm not willing to discuss whether or not they are a good place to give money.

However, ARC are not the only branch of the Red Cross in Haiti right now. You can give to the IRC, the International Red Cross, which I suspect is the most reliable way right now to get cash into the hands of the Haitian National Red Cross Society, with whom the IRC are working, as they do not have a website and I suspect that the mail will not be delivered in Port Au Prince this week.

THING THE THIRD:

SEND MONEY NOT STUFF. Sorry for shouting; it's important.

Disasters like the Haiti earthquake and the Indian Ocean tsunami present colossal logistical challenges. Nonetheless, in Aceh officials and relief workers did their best to sort through this stock: Drugs were stored in private homes, in hospitals rooms and corridors (despite a desperate shortage of space for patients). Eighty-four percent of the facilities lacked air conditioning, rendering their contents unusable, according to the study. A large depot near Aceh’s airport was so overwhelmed that mountains of pricey pharmaceuticals were dumped outside to rot under the monsoons and tropical sun.

Of course, the donors were only trying to help, but misplaced intentions actually worsened the suffering. Buried under care packages and out of date antibiotics labeled in Thai and Chinese were the world’s most advanced malaria medications. Meanwhile along the coast, people who had just lost homes and families writhed in malarial fever for lack of treatment.

If you are in a position to donate LARGE (like, enough to serve over 100 people) amounts of NEW stuff you know is badly needed, like water or food or medical supplies, contact your most local office of the IRC, MSF, or some other relief organisation that is presently in Haiti, tell them you have an in-kind donation, and ask them how best to get it to them. Don't get mad if they take it and use it elsewhere; if you donate 50 flats of drinking water that go somewhere local you just freed up their cost to the org to be used in Haiti, and this is a win. ETA: jonquil points out that Partners In Health is presently actively seeking certain medical supplies. But the basic point is, if you have stuff to donate, get in touch with a relief org that's present in Haiti, make sure it's wanted, and respect their requests for how to donate it. Don't just, for example, mail it to the head office of the Haitian National Red Cross Society, which may or may not still be there.

Because we loves the ilanikhan and wants her to be happy.

Next Wednesday, January 20, 6:30 pm - tennish, Highlander Pub.

Future Stitch and Bitches, every second Wednesday, so:

Feb 3 (I may miss this one)
Feb 17
March 3
March 17
March 31

and so forth.

Same time, same place - unless we decide to audition alternative pubs, in which case there will be a post.

Seriously, darlings, we need your allergies/food restrictions list. Vegan? Diabetic? Kosher? Halal? Nut or Seafood or Tomato allergy? We need to know.

Even if one or more of us has known you forever. Even if you've told one or more of us before. Even if you're recently reminded us verbally.

We need to know what foods to avoid completely, what foods to provide alternatives to, and what foods to provide lots of. And we need to do a list of these, with headcount for each category, and get it to the people doing the food. Soon.

Also: please do not rely on "oh, I'll just bring my own food". We'd prefer you did not. We really really would. What's excellent and safe for you may very well be dangerous to the person next to you, and you have no way of knowing this, because you don't have the allergy list.

Mind you, neither do I at the moment. Get back to us. Please?

Use the RSVP address.

Stitch and Bitch:

Wednesday January 13, Highlander Pub, 115 Rideau Street, 6:30 until probably 10.

... during a conversation over coffee earlier today that I would post my list of Useful Responses To the Truly Classically Bad (but actually verifiably sometimes used[1]) Line:

"My wife doesn't understand me."

1) Under the circumstances, you should probably be grateful for that.
2) What makes you think you understand her?
3) Neither do I, actually. And I'm okay with that.
4) I can fix that for you in three minutes flat. Give me her cel number.
5) Bet you half a dollar?
6) Yeah, that's what she told me last night.

[1] If there's a serious downside to this whole Being Female And Poly thing? It's the opportunities it offers to have hypothetically monogamous committed people hit on you under the impression that you have no morals at all. Or, apparently, standards. Possibly not even preferences.

Personally, a wonderful decade. Globally ... actually, I hope the door did hit it in the ass on the way out. Hard.

A successful marriage is basically an endless cycle of wrongs committed, apologies offered, and forgiveness granted, all leavened by the occasional orgasm.

And via damned_colonial, the OTHER entry for "best line of the week":

TSA: your post-equine-departure gate and barn security experts.

Sticks and Strings tomorrow night!


8PM, Arrow & Loon (Bank & Fifth). Be there or be a mouldy pop tart.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

~ Anne Lamott

Merry Christmas.

So I made one. Christian, Pagan, and secular.

First, because I can't find the mp3 at the moment, some YouTube:



Huron Carol, performed by Heather Dale in Wendat (Huron), French and English.

Winter Mix 2009. 111 MB, 1.5 hours. Enjoy.

Track Listing:

By Northern Light
Oysterband

Salt Fare, North Sea
Chumbawamba

Winter Snowscape (Instrumental)
Jethro Tull

Fire at Midnight
Jethro Tull

This Ay Nicht
Mediaeval Baebes

Snowy Night
Figgy Duff

Ring Out Solstice Bells
Jethro Tull

O Come Emmanuel
Phillips, Craig and Dean

Christmas Eve/Sarajevo
Trans-Siberian Orchestra

The Coldest Night Of The Year
Bruce Cockburn

First Christmas
Stan Rogers

Gabriel's Message
Sting

The Cherry Tree Carol
Baltimore Consort

I Saw Three Ships
Maddy Prior & The Carnival Band

Joy To The World
Maddy Prior & The Carnival Band

Good King Wenceslas
Steeleye Span

Hockey
Jane Siberry

At last, I'm ready for Christmas
Stan Rogers

And a spoken word track, because it's What We Do for Christmas Around Here:
Vinyl Cafe Story: "Christmas at the Turlingtons"
Stuart McLean

First, being a constituent of his, I have an appointment with the office of Paul Dewar, MP for Ottawa Centre and NDP Foreign Affairs Critic. I plan to go in there loaded for bear: so far my list of stuff to print out is: Dr Watts' own posts, cristalia's posts, the Star story, the Making Light post, and my own stuff. Suggestions for additions gratefully accepted.

Secondly, as it turns out, he was NOT dumped on the US side of the bridge by the US Border Patrol with no coat, money, or transportation, in a blizzard.

He was dumped on the CANADIAN side of the bridge, by the Port Huron Police department, with no coat and no money and no transportation. In a blizzard.

Which saved him a nasty awful walk across a high, windy bridge not meant for pedestrian traffic, but it doesn't, in my opinions, actually make a significant difference to the wrongness of what the Port Huron police did.

Yes, friends drove down there and picked him up. Yes, the Canadian Border Service has a building there, with heat, to which he could walk (and presumably had to, to reenter Canada).

Yes, as it turned out, he was not seriously endangered. No, it's not good enough.

When you arrest someone, when you take custody of someone and take away their autonomy and their ability to care for themselves, you take on the duty of providing for their basic care. "Somebody else will take care of him, probably" does not qualify as an acceptable means of discharging that duty.

A couple of years ago, someone who was staying with me and who I had some responsibility for was mistakenly arrested after having been fairly seriously assaulted.

He was released at 2 am, in winter.

The Ottawa City Police:

a) BEFORE the situation was sorted out, got him to a hospital and got him adequate treatment for his injuries.

b) Upon release, provided him with a coat and boots to replace the clothes he had lost or had destroyed in the incident. They were out of the lost and found, but they were adequate.

c) fed him while he was in jail and again before release. Ensured that he was sufficiently recovered to be okay before release.

d) ensured that he had somewhere within reasonable walking distance (my sofa) to go to before sending him out onto the streets. Offered to find him a shelter bed if necessary.

Not exactly luxurious, but adequate. And I know from past situations I've been peripherally involved with that they would have done precisely the same thing had he been released with charges still pending. Because that is what you do, when you have asserted authority over, and thus accepted responsibility for, someone.

Arrow and Loon Pub, Bank and Fifth in the Glebe, 8 pm, Wednesday, on the indoor patio where the lighting is good.

Bring your knitting, or crocheting, or anything else you can comfortably work on at a pub.

I will have yarn and needles with me for teaching purposes, if you don't knit but would like to.

cristalia nails it. In fact, she nails it to the wall, with precision and elegance and very sharp and dangerous pain.

Let me tell you a little story about the cold.

In 1990 in Saskatchewan, a 17-year-old boy named Neil Stonechild was found frozen to death in a field outside Saskatoon. He had last been seen, handcuffed and bloodied, being packed into the back of a squad car.

Ten years later, two more Native men were found frozen to death outside the city in a single week. A third came forward with a story of being driven around outside the city by the police and threatened. There was a public inquiry. Two police officers on the Saskatoon force were ultimately charged and lost their positions.

There's a name for this thing. It's called a starlight cruise.

...

See, here's the thing about living in a cold-weather society. You stick together, because you have to: it's you against the winter. That is, on a certain level, the basic division of life. That's where the concept of the Wendigo comes from. A wendigo is famine, starvation, greed; the insatiable need to eat until you eat the members of your own society. Wendigo are creatures of the cold, the North. They are supernatural, but a human being can become one, if they resorted to cannibalism.

A wendigo is what happens when human beings turn away from their own and throw in with winter.

These are the worst sins of a cold-weather society, the ones that are irredeemable: siding with winter. Feeding off your own. Taking another person as prey, or leaving them as prey for the winter, in jeans and a shirt with no wool coat or scarf or hat; with no lined gloves and no transit home, knowing full well what the winter does.

And she's right. This is the part that was making me feel truly sick, earlier, and still is, though I couldn't articulate it at all, even to myself. Certainly not that well, though it does explain why I felt myself compelled to buy someone a hot drink so that they could stay inside the coffeeshop for another hour or two, earlier, and why that was what made the knot in my guts untie a bit.

As random said to me earlier: you could almost, if you looked at it sideways, find excuses for the beating. For the pepper spray. Peter's a tall and an imposing guy. Border guards are human and they can be frightened, or succumb to the pressure of the group.

Only almost, and not very good excuses, but at least it's a thing people DO. They overreact. They do stupid, vicious, violent things in the moment.

They took his coat. With lots of time to think better of it. In a blizzard. And then they, in their nice warm uniform jackets and hats and gloves, went back inside to their nice heated building, and they left a fellow human out there. Because they could. At least they didn't throw water on him. I suppose we're meant to be grateful; and I am, though to the Universe, not to them. It's been known to happen.

Like cristalia, I'm scared of that. Any sane human being who has lived through a 'real' winter is scared of that. We're meant to be scared of that. This is what Insufficient Deference will get you. Placate the Windigo, or join them, or be food for them.

And now I am going to go and get a hot drink, and remind myself that Peter Watts is somewhere warm and safe right now, and pray for those who are not. And for courage in the face of winter, and in the face of Windigo, when and as needed.

ETA: Peter says: Some are concluding that, when I was “dumped across the border in shirtsleeves”, I had to walk across the Blue Water Bridge in a snowstorm without my coat. No. The bridge is on the US side of the border, which they had to drive me across to dump me on the other side of; and Canadian Customs was on that other side. This was no Starlight Cruise; I was not exposed to the weather unprotected for an inordinately long time. Still. It’s winter. And they have my coat.

I am glad he didn't have to cross that bridge on foot. It is one long damned bridge. But it doesn't, really, change as much as all that. People do not leave people outside in the cold with no coat, no money, and no phone. Not in winter.

It's just that now I'm outraged, shaking, nauseated, and Not Crying.

If you buy into the Many Worlds Intepretation of quantum physics, there must be a parallel universe in which I crossed the US/Canada border without incident last Tuesday. In some other dimension, I was not waved over by a cluster of border guards who swarmed my car like army ants for no apparent reason; or perhaps they did, and I simply kept my eyes downcast and refrained from asking questions.

Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.). Nor was I finally dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my fucking paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I was not left without my jacket in the face of Ontario’s first winter storm, after all buses and intercity shuttles had shut down for the night.

In some other universe I am warm and content and not looking at spending two years in jail for the crime of having been punched in the face.

But that is not this universe.

Peter Watts is a friend of mine. Not a close friend, necessarily, but a good one; I try my best to see him whenever I'm in Toronto. I'm appalled and furious and worried and generally incapable of writing a good post about this. I'm not sure I could say anything I haven't already said at one time or another about people I do NOT know who were subjected to this kind of treatment, and I probably said it better then. So I will let other people speak for me right now.

David Nickle, via Boing Boing:

The charge is spurious. But it's also very serious. It could mean two years in prison in the United States, and a ban on travel in that country for the rest of Peter's life. Peter is mounting a vigorous defense, but it's going to be expensive - he's effectively going up against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and he needs the best legal help that he can get.

He's got that help, courtesy of one of the top criminal lawyers in the State of Michigan. We, Peter's friends and colleagues here in Canada, want to make sure he gets the help he needs financially to come out of this nightmare whole.

The need for that help is real. While Peter is a critically successful science fiction writer, he is by no means a best-selling author. Without help, the weight of his legal fees could literally put him on the street by spring.

We can't let that happen. So there's going to be fundraising.

Donate (and read some of Peter's work) here.

And - I don't normally say things like this. But in the words of coffeeem

Don't tell me Watts should have known better. He's a free, law-abiding citizen of a free country, who has a right to believe in the rule of law and reasonable behavior in the nation right next to his. If you tell me he asked for it, he deserved it, what happened to him was justified by his actions, I swear I will ban you from this goddamn journal. Because that could have been any of us.

ETA: It occurs to me in retrospect that if his cel phone is sitting in an evidence bag somewhere I may have just painted a large target on my ass. And you know what? I don't much care right now.

I have previously mentioned Soup from Leftover (fairly plain [1]) Potatoes: mash them well, if they weren't already, combine them with a packet of Knorr Fines Herbs soup, add, if desired, additional herbs and salt/pepper to taste, heat through, serve.

Now there is also Soup From Leftover (fairly plain [1]) Squash:

Mash the squash and toss it in a pan with one can of Campbell's Chicken Broth with Garlic and Herbs (or some reasonable equivalent. Fancy organic veggie broth, whatever.) Add, if desired, additional herbs (and, if you like, cinnamon or cayenne or, garlic or leftover fried onions if you have them or bits of crispy bacon, or... hey, it's your soup) and salt and pepper to taste. Heat through, serve.

[1] You get to define this: garlic potatoes au gratin probably work really well. Squash that has been mashed with brown sugar will probably produce revolting results - but I'm not you. Try it on your mental tongue and go from there.

Twenty years is a long time. Twenty years is a moment.

Tonight is not the twentieth time I've gone to a December 6th vigil, but I've gone to more than I've missed.

Dec 6, 1989, is the day I REALLY became a feminist. I'd been one before, in a take-it-for-granted sort of way, but that was the day I really figured out what we were up against, and what we had to do.

Tonight is not the first time I've seen "but what about the men/you feminists all hate men" comments, either. But this comment on the cbc website:

How much longer until the feminists get here and criticize the CBC for daring to mention that some of these women had men they loved and who loved them?

is the first time I've really felt moved to reply.

Yes, it's the twentieth anniversary of the Montreal massacre, and I'm going to talk about the men. Not because I feel like I have to. Just because I want to.

Not the men like the one who left that comment, because it's obvious that he's met maybe three feminists in his life, and he's sure as Hell never been to a Dec. 6 vigil.

Because if he had been, he'd never have made that comment.

As I looked around tonight at the vigil, I saw that, as is quite usual, about a third of the faces I was seeing were male faces.

Some of the police officers who volunteer their time every year so the event can happen are men. Many of them are or have been on the Domestic Crimes unit, or Hate Crimes, or Sexual Assault, or Homicide. They get it.

Some of the paramedics and hospital workers and ministers and social workers who come every year are men. They've patched us up after domestic assaults and sexual assaults and sometimes they've stood and watched us die of them. They get it.

Some of the men who came are - or were - brothers, or fathers, or sons, or classmates, or colleagues, or friends. There was a woman they liked, or loved, once, and now she's a different, more damaged person - or she is gone. They get it.

Some of the men who came spent some part of their childhoods in a women's shelter, while their mothers got their lives together after domestic assaults. Some of them saw their mothers beaten. Some of them were beaten themselves, for trying to intervene. They get it.

Some of the men who came have, or have had, partners who are living with the aftermath of domestic abuse, or sexual assault, or both. They've sat up at three am and seen and heard the pain. They get it.

And some of these men - just get it. They are fundraisers and activists and social workers and emergency workers and politicians and students and husbands and brothers and fathers and sons and friends and colleagues and Just Plain Guys, and they came on their own to the understanding that they had to oppose male violence against women because opposing our rape and murder and beating and silencing and terrorizing and disappearing is the only decent thing to do, and the only terms under which they want this package called 'manhood' that they've been handed.

And they don't set up straw feminists and then tear them down. They don't show up in coversations and announce that they've never raped anybody and they're a nice guy now where's their blowjob cookie. They don't insist that if we ask them to support women's rights or the enthusiastic cooperation standard of consent or to go out of their way a bit to try to find qualified women applicants or we question whether or not it's appropriate for them to call themselves feminists or we ask them to hang back at the Take Back The Night march or refrain from speaking at the Dec 6 vigil or to wear a white ribbon or to speak up against rape and for rape victims even when it will only get them laughed at, for no reward except the reward of being able to look themselves in the face the next morning, that we're "sexist against men".

And they understand that the reason that we don't praise them lavishly and endlessly for doing these simple, basic things, is because we have high expectations for them, and every faith in their ability to fulfil them, and to excessively praise a man for simple, basic, decent human behaviour towards women is to suggest that that man is either dumb as a rock or possessed of the moral sense of a mollusk.

They just roll up their sleeves and get in there and HELP.

(If, on the other hand, you're, for example, Henry Morgentaler, you can have a cookie. Hell, you can have the whole BOX of cookies Order of Canada. But that's the standard, my friends.)

The other two-thirds of the crowd ... were mostly, not all, familiar faces. Some of them are women I see once a year. Some of them are women I see every week. Some of them have lost friends or family to violence against women. Some of them have lost great bleeding chunks of their own lives to it. Some of them are twice my age. Some of them were not born twenty years ago. Some of them I like, or love. Some of them I don't like very much, and they don't really like me.

But once a year we stand together in the snow, with flowers and candles, and remember why we do what we do, and our differences aren't really all that important. And tonight, I love them all.

We're women. We're all a bunch of feminists.

The YWCA has a December 6 Fund:

We offer non-interest-bearing loans to women leaving violent homes.
The Fund supports women in the GTA and the Region of Peel. The YWCA December 6 Fund strives to remove some of the financial barriers that prevent women from leaving their abusers. Women use the loans to establish themselves and their children in greater safety. The purpose of the Fund is to help women make the transition from abusive situations to safety and self-reliance and to raise awareness about violence against women."

Talking of men who get it, have some Stephen Fearing:

As men begin to understand what women say
They see history reaching out to smother all of us
So ring the bells of morning for sorrow and for shame
And let the deep well inside each of us swell with outrage
For those of us who know what went before can come again
Must ring the bells, we must ring the bells of morning.

... which Loblaws sells frozen, in Club Pack bags, and frequently has massive sales on.

Bake from frozen on a cookie sheet or in a pan with deep sides for 25 minutes in a 400F oven.

In the pan or in a bowl, toss wings with pretty much any sort of sauce or seasoning you like (soy, sesame soy, lemon juice, alder-smoked salt and fresh ground pepper, Dante's Inferno chipotle ... ) and return coated wings to oven for ten minutes.

Eat with rice or oven chips or whatever you like.

*is very lazy today*

... standing in the gathering dark, filthy and shivering, over your planted-with-300-bulbs, pillaged, completely turned over, sifted, sorted, in 3C weather thank-you-very-much, totally replanted-and-now-chicken-wire-and-brick-protected front garden shaking your fist and yelling into the treetops "Now get THAT into you, you furry little bastards!"

Which is not the nastiest thing anyone in this family has yelled at a squirrell

I'm sort of exhausted. Lots of pictures to edit, lots of posts to write. Meanwhile, damned_colonial asked me for this when I was in SF, and I think it's worth more general posting:



... gathering knitting to send to Afghanistan, Labrador and Mongolia.

They have also a Ravelry Group.

(So, can some nice person who has a child handy measure a five-year old and/or an eight-to-ten year old for me and tell me how large around their head is? I'd do it myself, but people get oddly excited when you pursue their small child down the street with a tape measure. And I don't really do hats from patterns. I just sort of busk them.)

... with issues, four stalkers, possible legal difficulties, seeks girl with saviour complex, Ford truck (dually preferred) for dysfunctional sex on first meeting followed by co-dependent relationship and mutual recriminations. Must be decisive and easy-going.

... in other words, we have been to Winslow AZ and had a fabulous dinner there (Turquoise Room at La Posada; highly recommended), and are now in Flagstaff having breakfast at Biff's Bagels and Internet Cafe.

This is a stunningly beautiful part of the world and we are absolutely coming back here.

More to follow, probably. Have a woeful armadillo in the meantime.

commodorified
I did a panel at WisCon on Porn Crushes the Patriarchy, it was interesting.

daveamongus
And then there's this: http://www.fmylife.com/intimacy/4274119

commodorified
I think we may have fetishised the Military Industrial complex in there somewhere.


daveamongus
nice
we can be a pretty hot fetish, let me tell you what.

commodorified
On the grounds that the patriarchy hates that shit.


daveamongus
*laughs*

commodorified
we're not well people


daveamongus
not really, no ;)

commodorified*finally reads that link*
... I should totally blog that you made me read that.


daveamongus
Go right ahead.

commodorified
also this is why chiropractors' kids go to Harvard.

I am simultaneously feeling:

too old for this shit.

and

too young to be allowed to sign complicated legal paperwork unsupervised.

... I have the horrible sinking feeling that that might be middle age in a nutshell, right there.

random
ok, monkey, it disturbs me greatly when i hear a very loud "OH SHIT" and then nothing.
what's up?
commodorified
Oh sorry.
Um. I forget.

You all know the BEST stories.

This is just to say that I crosspost between DW and LJ and generally let the comments fall where they may, but on this occasion I ought to point out that if you read the Family Legends thread only on Dreamwidth you are missing a story about a house, several stories about a variety of wars, one assassination, true love, and families divided and reunited under fascinating circumstances, and if you are reading only on LJ you are missing gangsters, shipwrecks, airplanes, and the one about the goose.

Friends of the Experiemental Farm Victorian Tea, Sunday, July 26, 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Classic tea served on the lawns of the Arboretum.
Bring a patio chair and listen to the music.
Enter the best hat contest and don period costume (not required).
Location: Central Experimental Farm Arboretum.
Admission free, Formal Tea $6.00.

I'm going, and I believe that torrain was interested. Anyone else? Anyone local and in possession of suitable Regency[1] or Victorian attire, modern size 16-18, that I might borrow? Otherwise I shall just go modern; I'm not going to even try to rent at my size.

[1] I don't care, I like Regency better. I shall be that elderly aunt who refuses to keep up with fashion.

This is a splendid editorial: I am endlessly grateful that my curiosity about history came on while my grandparents and great-uncle were still alive and telling stories, so that I listened properly, instead of nodding along dutifully as I hope I would have done regardless.

And endlessly regretful that there was never enough time, especially in the case of my grandparents' last years, when looking after them tended to get in the way of - and suck up the energy for - listening to them. I never did hear the end of the one about the water tower at Dresden[1], or the joke about the duck hunter - Grandpa was going to tell me that one when I was old enough, and then he couldn't tell it properly - it was, I gather, one of those jokes you have to act out.

(On Henry Allingham)But perhaps the best tribute was that people listened to him. The boy who once longed to enlist lived to say on the BBC: “War is stupid. Nobody wins.”
...
The good bit is when they go off-message, quirky and human. I have never forgotten the day that an old lady’s casual remark revealed to my innocent schoolgirl ears her dislike of Churchill — “Horrid bossy man, all boiler suits and bombast”. It does not detract from Churchill, but it is liberating to encounter the stroppy, messy diversity of real experience.
...
You think, for instance, that upper-class Edwardian girls were chaperoned innocents, their swains respectful? Well, a friend’s great-aunt Olive tells of a girl found one morning sewing up the traditional open front of her drawers. She blithely explained why: “I’m going out with Freddie in a punt.” Her virtue hung by those threads.
...
It is instructive, though sad, to chat with a 100-year-old suffragette and have her casually remember turning down marriage with a man she adored because it would have ended her teaching career. “One couldn’t have both, dear. Not like girls now.”
...
In an age where ex-prime ministers (well, the last one anyway) display a sense of pampered entitlement to luxury, cherish also the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire’s story of Alec Douglas-Home. Coming home from the Kennedy funeral, he offered to lie very still in his pyjamas in the Chatsworth guest bed and not rumple it, so they wouldn’t have to change the sheets for Princess Margaret the next night.
...
And only conversations with elders can remind us of the fabulous but untried newness of things: in Canada, I once met a man whose father rode the first cross-continental train to get a job building a new place called — er — Vancouver.

Tell me a family legend of yours? I'll start:

My grandfather was on the railroad from 1916-1965. He had some difficulty with the pension people in '62 explaining that he wasn't actually retirement age, yet: the Canadian Army apparently knew a 6' 15 year old when they saw one by 1916 - thank God - but the Chesapeake and Ohio weren't quite so inclined to be fussy.

Sometime around 1945, when he was an engineer, his freight train nearly derailed. His fireman at the time - who I met briefly when I was a kid - never got tired of telling the story of climbing frantically up the - as he remembered it - damn' near vertical floor of the engine, hollering "She's goin', Hiker, she's goin'!", and my grandfather hollering back, "Well, let the sonofabitch go, then - we don't own her!"

I wish I had thought to ask how the Hell they got her back on the track ... but I guess that wasn't the point.

[1] Yard limits? More like what you might call ... guidelines, apparently.

ETA: and then via friendsfriends, I promptly find this: In the early forties, eight inmates of the Goree prison unit formed one of the first all-female country and western acts in the country, capturing the hearts of millions of radio listeners. Then they nearly all vanished forever..

commodorified: http://knitty.com/ISSUEfall06/PATTcruelty.html
commodorified (to damned_colonial): I am not sure whether your job is to tell me that that pattern is for size 4 women who work out three hours a day or whether your job is to tell me that if the Body Demons have a problem, that is what I have a cricket bat for.
damned_colonial:*hands you a cricket bat*
commodorified: : Right. I assume the 'I am not a real knitter" demons are best dealt with with a crochet hook?

commodorified: *ponders*
commodorified: I assume your unsureness is not about that?
iclysdale: i am not entirely sure. My unsureness is about point #1 in your previous comment. :)
commodorified: erm?
iclysdale: plus i think it's kind of generally fugly, but even on top of that, would not work on you.
commodorified: It's DARLING
commodorified: *humph*
iclysdale: It's FUGLY.
commodorified: HOW IS IT FUGLY?
iclysdale: The terrifying silver satiny layer, the dubious multi-colored "oh untie me now" ribbons over the butt, the weird gathering at the feet...
iclysdale: Since you ask.
commodorified: *sigh*
iclysdale: i don't appreciate your true art, i know.
commodorified: I WANT A DIVORCE!
iclysdale: :)
iclysdale: i don't know that "incompatible taste in kicky dresses" is considered grounds.
commodorified: *posts this*

Poll #1431209
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 77

About that skirt:

ETA:

commodorified: Monkey, you are not winning so far :-)
iclysdale: it's a good thing that aesthetic truth is not determined by the demagogic clamoring voices of the proletarian masses.

I am going to stop reading Lowering The Bar

The Times article points out that under the Code of Conduct of the Bar of England and Wales, "a barrister is not specifically prohibited from charging for sex, but he must not do anything which could 'lead to any inference that his independence may be compromised.'"... if this is going to set a precedent for applying ethical rules to this kind of conduct, there is more that British men may need to be worried about. Rule 701 requires a barrister to act "diligently and with reasonable competence," and to refuse "any task which (i) he knows or ought to know he is not competent to handle; (ii) he does not have adequate time and opportunity to prepare for or perform; or (iii) he cannot discharge within the time requested or otherwise within a reasonable time . . . .""

I am.

"Death v. Graves & Co., CGC-06-451316 (San Francisco Super. Ct. filed Apr. 17, 2006)"

Any minute now.

"United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins, No. 05-56274 (9th Cir. Mar. 17, 2008)."

... I am. Really. I have WORK TO DO.

I took a picture in Tennessee that I actually quite like:



( Mostly I was working on the Photographers Are Mostly Crazy series )

pecunium was, of course,( busy doing Art )

Of which, more here.

pecunium speaking at the Torture is a Moral Issue conference.

It's ten minutes. It's well worth watching. But if you really really don't have time?

Torture: still wrong, still doesn't work. Ticking bomb scenario: still complete and utter bullshit. In other news, water is wet, the sky is up there, and dogs have been known to return to their vomit.

... When Irwin Cotler stood up in the fourth slot in Question Period and challenged the government once again to bring Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik home from years of exile in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum, we waited for the predictable response ... [c]harged once again with responding, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson stood in his place and said simply: “The government will comply with the court order,” and then sat down. For an instant it was almost like you could hear a whooshing sound in the place, then many of us stood up and applauded in total shock

...

Irwin Cotler was a lion in the exile’s defense, rising repeatedly in the house, faced by countless heckles from the Conservatives, and holding true to the belief that law is law and that you can’t keep a Canadian citizen interned when there is no evidentiary base for such a practice

...

Joanne Deschamps from the Bloc deserves full credit for marshaling her party’s response and reminding everyone in the House that the Bloc have been pathfinders in the realm of human rights and that they need not take a back seat to any party on that issue.

But the one person who stuck on this file and deserves full praise for the victory yesterday was the NDP’s Paul Dewar

...

Against all odds, Dewar exhausted every parliamentarian option, time after time, not just in an attempt to exonerate an innocent citizen, but to prove that the Canadian parliament could be relevant in such a case. I watched as the government members of the committee fought him vociferously. But he worked the system - very well. In key votes on the case, the three opposition parties worked together and won by one vote each time, Paul’s example being the key cause.

Paul Dewar is my MP, and I am very, very proud of him. I was lucky enough to run into him for a few minutes on Friday to tell him so.

Note: Mostly, when I say "I", I mean "we" because I have a cowriter and a steady editor, and with a few exceptions what I post, whether it's under my name and damned_colonial's or just mine, is the product of a shared universe with shared assumptions and agreements between me, her, and fairestcat, and the only really reliable functional difference between what I post as just me and what we post as us is who did the actual plot-generation.

Mostly, but not always, so I shall use "I". This is not true in reverse: Skud has written quite a lot of stuff that I had little or nothing to do with. Also, she may or may not agree with anything I say here and I do not speak for her. But she has been a huge influence on my thinking, as has fairestcat.

Warnings, my general philosophy on:

In most ways, I am the anti-labelling ficcer. I don't write summaries. I generally don't give pairings. My notes tend toward the terse or nonexistent. I'm not going to tell you if you're getting slash or het or both or none. Those are plot points, and I work reasonably hard at not telegraphing them. I don't use rating systems that involve suggested ages, because I think that's an awful, stupid system and I refuse to perpetuate it.

In general, I label things according to sexual explicitness or otherwise, and explicit or otherwise violence, and that's that.

But I firmly believe in warnings. I can't make you use them, but I can think that if you deliberately don't use them in general that you're being somewhere between sort of thoughtless and a right jerk.

If you go out of your way not to use them on fics with a lot of triggery content I can think that you actively enjoy luring people in to be triggered and that you're not someone I want to read, or indeed know. I can also think that if you really think your artistic freedom is threatened by warnings then you're badly confused about either 'art' or 'freedom' and should consult a dictionary.

I will particularly think this if you post pairings, summaries, notes and slash/het/both tags and yet refuse to give warnings because somebody somewhere is asking you to and that makes it automatically an assault on your integrity. As Blessed Saint Dorothy of Oxford hath truly said^[1]: "Some consideration for others is necessary in community life".

This is not an exception to my general approach, it's an intrinsic part of it. If I'm going to ask people to read stuff based entirely on a fandom, a list of characters, and the fact that it's me writing it, I need to make sure that they can trust me to do my best to make sure that that experience of diving into a story to see what happens isn't going to be triggering or damaging for them. We're going for enjoyable uncertainty, here.

A Small Digression:

"But Marna, hardly any of your stuff has warnings!"

Well, true. This is one reason I'm writing this post, actually. I don't want to be mistaken for someone who refuses to warn.

The paucity of warnings on my fic to date is because I largely don't write fic that seems to me to need warnings, barring the one where 18th C and 21st C definitions of 'underage' ended up in conflict and the Shakespearean dubious consent one - both of which I warned for.

In general though, I'm on the romance end of things, my sex scenes tend to involve not only consent but enthusiastic cooperation, my violence tends to be offscreen or inexplicit, and I don't expect that to change.

Warnings, my general philosophy on, some practical applications of:

Slash/Het/Both: Does not get a warning, a label, or whatever you want to call it. Ever. Don't ask.

Violence: gets a warning, with a note as to explicitness.

Dubious consent/Non-Consent/Sexual Assault: Damned well gets warned for if it's going to happen onscreen. Probably gets warned for if it's going to happen offscreen but during the period of the narrative. Probably gets warned for if it's in the past but is going to be discussed in any detail. Is slightly less likely to be warned for if it's canon. Questionable consent due to impairment: judgement call. The only time I've written really drunken sex it was between two people who'd already established a baseline of mutual knowledge and trust such that presuming consent was in the situation as written reasonable in my mind.

And really, those two are roughly it; the rest is details of how those two work out.

Significant Age Difference/Underage: The age of consent in Canada is 16. I am extremely unlikely to ever write or want to write any fiction in which sex involving a person under 16 is dealt with explicitly, but if I do, I shall warn for it very clearly indeed. If the age of consent is different where you are and you have concerns, email me and I'll tell you how old the youngest character involved in a sex scene is.

Age difference: if everybody is over 21, there will never be a warning. Sixteen to twenty-one with a significantly older partner or partners is a grey area. If in my opinion the age difference makes it Dubious Consent/Non-Consensual/Assault, both warnings will appear. If in my opinion it does not but the age difference is eroticised, or is accompanied by a power differential, or if for some other reasons it seems to me to be potentially problematic, I will warn for it. If the age difference is just a function of circumstance/time/place/culture, I'm just going to note that it's there.

(I hope this is far clearer than what I originally posted)

Death: ( Not "character death". If someone dies in a piece of fiction, they were a character, ne'st pas?)

If someone dies in their bed, after a long and happy, I won't warn you. If they die offscreen, ditto. If they die onscreen but without any detail being given, I won't warn you.

If I am warning for explicit violence in the fic and said violence results in death, I'll tell you, but I won't tell you whether it's your favourite main character or Midshipman Redshirt.

It has, however, been pointed out to me that for some people - especially people dealing with recent or imminent death in their own lives - death in fiction is actually a trigger (and of course, for others in similar situations it's a valued catharsis). So - if you need to know if a fic has death in it, ask me, and I'll tell you. If you need to know if it's a particular character's death, ask me that as well, as I won't give out more info than I'm directly asked for.

Incest: If it would be potentially actionable in a court of law in 2009, I'll warn you (and probably also warn for dubious/non/assault, because incest generally is). The fact that some cultures at some times have considered, for example, marrying your brother's widow to be incest, or the fact that everybody in Shakespeare's history plays calls everybody else "cousin", does not, in my mind, constitute a reason for me to warn should I write such a thing, even if the scandalous nature of it is discussed in the fic.

Consensual BDSM: Is consensual and not violence, and will not be warned for. I'm aware that reading about it is a problem for some people, and if you ask me if it's in there I'll happily tell you - but don't ask me by emailing me to say "Is this 'violent pornography'?" Just ask me if there's BDSM, and any additional details you need to know. And when I write it, I will always do my very best to make the consent transparently visible.

Gory medical details: I am, in the matter of medical/surgical/bodily details, almost completely unsquickable. Keeping this in mind, if I ever have an overwhelming urge to write a fic that contains a detailed discussion of the proper treatment of sucking chest wounds or kidney stones, I will warn for this as my personal "well, wouldn't bother me" is known to be completely unreliable.

Animals: violence/abuse/death will get the same treatment as with humans.

Potentially triggery things that are also canon: will be warned for if they would otherwise be warned for. I used to think otherwise about this, but, really, if it's canon it's not exactly a big spoiler for the fic, right? Generally dark themes in a fic with generally dark canon, no, but if I retell a violent or potentially triggery bit of canon I'll warn.

Language: if it's merely crass, crude, rude, or explicit, no warning. Sexism, homophobia, racism, bigotry (in character speech or actions: I hope to refrain from committing such things in narrative voice entirely): contextual.

I'll warn for anything that refers to a group still dealing with oppression today, not otherwise. In short: characters expressing anti-American sentiments, no warning. Characters expressing Anti-Semitic sentiments, warning.

People with unusual or idiosyncratic triggers: are invited to email me using the address in my profile, or send me a private message, or jump to the bottom of the post and hit reply or go to another post and hit reply and ask me straight out if the thing they need to avoid is in my fic, whereupon I will tell them. Seriously. I'm happy to. I like being read and am pleased to make reading me as easy as possible. I may sometimes put in a warning for a non-standard trigger because I happen to already know that someone who reads me has it. If you have a different trigger, or you have that one and are concerned about a different fic, please ask me anyway; I'm not perfect, but I am happy to answer.

Squicks-that-are-not-triggers: Sure, ask me. As long as it's something reasonably specific, I'll do my best.

Don't ask me if I've 'made the [male]characters into girls/women'. Unless you either specifically mean genderswop because that's a squick or you're prepared for me to reply "do you mean like Joan of Arc, or like Grendel's Mother, or what?"

I'm not really open to discussing the pro-warnings anti-warnings thing. I mean, if you want to tell me how you feel about it all you may, but there's a fair chance I won't really answer, because my mind's pretty extensively made up.

I am absolutely and emphatically open to discussing my particular approach and how it's working well or could be improved. Specific suggestions for specific warnings on fics I have already posted will be received with gratitude, considered with care, and acted on promptly.

[1] In Gaudy Night.

The American State Department has issued travel advisories for Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia and Haiti — but will it issue one for Vancouver?

An American couple living in False Creek North says they’ve alerted their government that the neighbourhood is unsafe for visitors, and is requesting it issue a travel advisory during the 2010 Games.

Deirdre Barlow, who is part of a group called Concerned Citizens of False Creek North, said residents are on edge after the city opened a shelter nearby, which she said has attracted violence, prostitution and drug use.

Ok, that's IT, people. NO MORE APOLOGISING FOR DAVID FRUM FROM THIS CANUCK. NO MORE. Not unless y'all come GET THESE MUPPETS.

ETA: Yes, it's a media stunt. I just think it's an incredibly lame one, and therefore I point and I laugh. Nastily.

Made for tiferet, in response to this.

Via random:

I am FRYING BRATS FOR SUPPER.

pecunium assures me that IN AMERICA THIS IS PERFECTLY LEGAL. THE WAYS OF HIS PEOPLE ARE STRANGE INDEED.

Also, Fritos are made with ALL NATURAL OIL. The mind refuses to contemplate origins of UNnatural oils...

Ottawa Sun, via seanchaidh.

This story takes place at a private birthday party held at City Hall this week in honour of an acquaintance and friend of many who work there.

He's not a politician, and as such, he's not going to be named here.

One of those in attendance was Rideau-Goulbourn Coun. Glenn Brooks, a man who's been a municipal politician longer than most can remember.

Brooks' gift to the senior, marking his 80th birthday, was a curious sight -- an armless mannequin sporting a blue bikini top and something flowered.

Brooks, in presenting the gift, suggested the birthday boy had a reputation as a bit of a ladies' man, so the gift was perfect for him -- a woman who couldn't fight him off and couldn't say a thing.

Cue the awkward silence.

I look forward to Coun. Brooks' apology. And by "apology" I mean "sufficiently copious personal donation to SASC that it actually cuts into his personal spending money for a month or so".

ETA email I just sent him:

Dear Sir,

Your reported behaviour at a recent City Hall party, as discussed here -

http://www.ottawasun.com/news/columnists/susan_sherring/2009/05/30/9621301-sun.html

is appalling.

I'm sure that you will be making a suitably political apology for "any offense you may have unintentionally, etc, etc", in the coming days.

May I suggest that while you're at it you apologise, in a genuinely meaningful way, to the women of your city and of your riding who "couldn't fight and couldn't say a thing"?

A personal donation to the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Ottawa, of a sufficient size that you will actually notice the shortfall in your discretionary income for a month or so - nothing extreme, regular coffees instead of lattes, perhaps - would be an excellent sign of a willingness to make amends.

I enclose a link to their web page for your convenience:

http://www.sascottawa.org/

Though were I you I'd drop by there in person and see where your money is going, and to whom, as it seems as if what they do would be news to you, and it ought not to be.

In other words, Councillor, don't bother apologising for having made the joke. Apologise for having made it to your present age and stature without ever having taken the trouble to understand why it is not, never was, and never could be, funny.

Marna Nightingale,
Ward 14, Somerset.

He can be reached via http://www.glennbrooks.ca, should anyone else feel so moved.

Poll #1409632 Faith and Poly Poll Two: The one where everyone can play!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 110

I am taking this poll

The description that best matches me is:

The description that best matches me is:

The description that best matches me is:

I am a member of a World Religion, and I identify as

More specifically, I identify as a member of a World Religion and my denomination/tradition/sect is:

I identify as a member of a world religion and as

I am a member of a smaller religious group or organised religion, and its name is:

I identify as a member of a smaller religious group or organised religion and as

I am a solitary practitioner and would describe my beliefs and practice as

I am a solitary practitioner and identify as

Also:

I am in Tennessee with pecunium, and have had two decent nights' sleep. I feel mostly recovered from the Greyhound Trip Of Doooom, so comments on the WisCon Take Back The SF panel are now reopened (a day late) at both DW and LJ.

If you've been linked here, welcome! Please take a look at my DW profile for a sense of how things generally work around here.