Foul note at the Pride Parade

Yesteday, on the way home from the Pride Festival, we drove past a traffic box, one of those commonplace steel boxes about a meter and a half tall and a meter on a side, made of the hullmetal steel which is pretty cheap around here, painted grey. These boxes are everywhere and, given their prominence on streetcorners and the vast plane of unadorned metal they present towards the road, they are popular targets for commercial posters. Usually, these posters are done with waterproof inks, cheap papers, and powerful glues. They'll survive just about anything except the city's anti-grafitti hot-water blasters. Typically, the themes are rocket ships, drug paraphenalia, and scantily-clad women touting the latest band or DJ and similar venues.

At the intersection of Broadway and Mercer, the busiest intersection in Capitol Hill, Seattle's "gay district," and the very thickest part of the parade, stands such a grey box. On it was a single poster, six panels. Each panel was one of the six colors of the Pride rainbow and each had a portrait underneath it.

I recognized half of the portraits: Andrew Cunanan, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy. Gay serial killers and child molestors. Each had the word "Pride" emblazoned above his head.

You have to wonder what the original creator was trying to communicate.

Of what is Pride?

Yesterday, I took my family to watch the gay pride parade, and I have to say that I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Part of the reason that I wanted to go was because I want Yamaarashi-chan to feel that her mother's family isn't broken or wrong because her mother happens to date women and is doing so with the express purpose of finding someone with whom to spend to the rest of her life. And if Pride were to be about that-- that gay people are just like straight people, that poly people are just like mono people, the differences are large but not worthy of significance-- then I could feel comfortable going to pride.

But Pride isn't about that. Pride is an awful lot about sex.

I don't know that it's appropriate to introduce my five and eight year old to topics like the rampant syphilis among gay men, especially not with a giant light-sabre weilding penis as its spokesthing.

And as I wandered around the festival and watched a gaggle of middle-school girls dressed in their goth-loli and kinderslut outfits, I had to wonder if, in five years, I'm going to be talking to Yamaarashi-chan about her own taste in clothing. Do they think of it as just "dress up" or are they trying to attract the hormonal and predatory eye of every straight man who walks past? I don't want Yamaarashi-chan or Kouryou-chan to get the idea that I approve of her doing those kinds of things; sex (and sexiness), like wine, is a privilege that comes with maturity.

The Pride committee advertised that this year's parade would be "more family friendly" than in years past. I don't think it quite made it. It still made it seem like there was a lot about being gay that was mostly about sex. And I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that as a life's focus-- at least, not as an option presented to young children.

Zenra Wadaiko

And after fretting and wringing my hands about too much sex in the world, I'm going to review a fun little porn flick not available in the United States. (Aw, doesn't that suck?) Zenra is a curious genre of smut popular in Japan (although there are examples in the US now) which is a bit expensive to produce because it actually involves some production and training. It involves taking some professional activity and reproducing it naked.

Zenra Wadaiko is just that. Take six shapely women, give them enough training so they don't look like complete idiots, and then film them performing basic Taiko drumming while completely naked, under hot lights. The effect is twenty minutes of bouncing boobies, healthy sweating bodies, and determined, concentrated faces.

Sadly, the women in question are all porn actresses, and the film devolves from there as Act II takes over and demon-masked men come in to, um, "distract" the women from their task. All the naughty bits are pixellated (as one would expect from Japanese porn), and in Act III the women turn the tables on their demonic interlopers and do what taiko is supposed to do, but didn't quite this time: beat out a heavy rhythm that exhausts the demons and drives them away.

Ahem.

But the drumming sequence in the front is a fun watch. And they're all prettily healthy women, not the scrawny, scary type one finds in American porn.

Pain, Captain

It's gotta be nutritional. This seems to happen once in a while; my body just starts to hurt. First, there was the spasm as my right calf locked up, making it damn near impossible to walk. Then, the pain travelled up to my back, making it very hard to turn my head to the right (which makes it hard to look over my shoulder while driving to check the blind spot). Now, my wrists and elbows have begun to hurt.

What am I missing? Potassium, calcium, zinc? I'm doing my stretches and remembering my workout, and I'm taking in plenty of the above. Omaha suspects it might be caffeine toxicity, but I've actually cut back on my caffeine intake by quite a bit recently. It might be potassium shortage, since half my caffeine intake is one 12oz can of pop per day, but reading through the literature I can only find one case where potassium shortage was the cause of muscle fatigue and spasms, and the woman in question was drinking eight liters (!) of sodapop a day.

Oh, Goddess...

Remember that divorce case back towards the end of May when a divorcing couple were both refused the right to teach their child Wicca because the judge feared that the boy might become "confused" between their beliefs and those of his Catholic school?

The superior court of the county where they live has upheld the decree.

This is not an attack on Wicca or the First Amendment. The judge and commissioner support the constitutional guarantee concerning freedom of religion. But this case is not just about freedom of religion. It's about the court's obligation to protect minor children from certain rituals that might be harmful to their well-being, whether or not those things are affiliated with a religion.

Like consuming the blood and flesh of your god isn't a twisted and repulsive ritual?