I lack stereotypes.

Today, for reasons that don't merit too close an investigation, I was sitting on a park bench in downtown listening to the couple on the next bench over, and I realized that the young man was an aspiring stand-up comedian and the older woman with him was his test audience. When I was there, he was discussing mostly the business and process of writing for the Seattle audience.

He was complaining that he couldn't do ethnic jokes. Anywhere else, a joke about Arabs would get a laugh, but not in Seattle. Tough crowd. And then he said, "I came up with this: I have a Japanese-Jewish girlfriend. She's 50%--" And just then a truck rolled by and I missed the punch line. She said something and he continued, "Yeah! I could never tell that joke in Seattle. Someone would stand up and shout, 'Well, 50% of me is offended by that joke!'"

For the next hour, I racked my brains trying to figure out what stereotypes about Jewish women or Japanese women could be juxtaposed in a funny, even offensively funny way. I'm sure I know the stereotypes as well as anyone else (I'd better; I watch too much anime and my biological family is full of self-professed Jewish-American princesses), they just don't easily come to my forebrain.

I take that as a good sign. Still wish I'd heard the joke.

Recommended for school...

I was looking through the "required" and "recommended" lists for the school district and noticed that high school students are required to have at least one USB flash fob for carrying assignments to and from school, and recommended to have two.

I mention this because I noticed in today's Sally Forth that Sally and Hillary have gone shopping for "back to school" supplies, and the list they have seems so outdated, almost archaic. At least Hillary has the sense to ask for a Powerbook.

Who is Arthur Silber talking to, anyway?

So, yesterday Eugene Volkoh posted an article in which he proposed that homosexuals actively recruit people to homosexuality. Volkoh's comments are a bit silly in one respect: he basically takes the Kinseyan point that sexuality is on a continuum from completely straight to completely gay (and those of us who've been wandering around the queer/poly/bdsm/wiitwd community know that the continuum is a very bent and twisted line) and he claims that homosexuals are actively engaged in a campaign to find those who are even a little attracted to their own sex but have never acted on that attraction to try homosexuality and see if they like it.

His argument is purely Aristotelean; there's no evidence, merely a set of axioms and conjectures that lead to the conclusion he wants, nevermind what the real world is really about. Volkoh repeatedly claims that he's not making "moral" judgements but ends up passing judgement of a kind anyway with a "purely medical grounds" bullpuckey statement that's as pithy as it sounds. Volkoh seems to be in that commonplace "I know I shouldn't argue against it, but it's icky" state.

On the other hand, Arthur Silber's "The Light of Reason" goes over the top responding to Volkoh. Despite its name Silber's blog is far often more heat than light and today's entry is no different. Silber's a gay man who writes, "The last thing gays are concerned about is 'converting' people." Silber describes Volkoh's post as "nauseating."

But Volkoh's basic argument is nauseating only in the context of a nation in the grips of right-wing religiosity. Volkoh only says the obvious: if homosexuality is a morally neutral state and you know a non-Kinsey-Zero who's had a rough time with one gender, encouraging him or her to consider the other is a morally neutral activity. To the extent that numbers are not on our side, it makes tribal sense for gays and lesbians to consider's Volkoh's argument, if not his moralising conclusion. Yes, by saying so Volkoh is encouraging the right wing to believe that "gays recruit," and that's sure to bring out the nutjobs... but so what? They already believe that. Volkoh's not doing anything more than pointing to the obvious, low-level brushwar that exists.

Besides, I don't know if Silber's been to a Pride Parade in the past decade. The "recruitment" poster and "I got my toaster oven^[?]" t-shirts are still out there. Heck, you can buy them on-line. Of course they're tongue in cheek. That doesn't mean they're not serious.

The Feral Neighbor Saga Continues.

The neighbors gave us a better peek into their lives Sunday, despite D., the mother's, insistance that the children not say anything to the neighbors because then we'll know something about them and when you know something about somebody you have power over them. She must take hints from my ex. One of the boys, M., was having his birthday party. It had been put off and put off and put off, as far as we had been told, for various reasons but we were now promised that it would be happening between two and four in the afternoon.

At two, nobody was home.

Kouryou-chan was very upset. They showed up around 2:45, and they weren't ready, but the children invited Kouryou-chan and Yamaarashi-chan over to play with them, so they did. We discovered that the war of the sexes is alive and well next door: the men drink beer and watch sports until they're tired of listening to their wives yell at them, they get up and do what is demanded half-heartedly and then they go back to drinking beer. D. is in charge. They keep chickens in their unfinished basement and pour their dog's food onto the ground in little piles. They bought a brand new trampoline a couple of weeks ago. Already, the safety netting is torn, the padding that held it up shredded, and thanks to children climbing on it half the bars are broken and twisted at the top so that it looks like some sadistic collection of god-sized dental picks and scrapers looming over us. For all D.'s whining about the driveway, their backyard has gone to hell pretty fast.

The party was a chaotic mess. M. was deeply disappointed, and his father treated him less like a son and more like an embarassment, when he paid attention at all. They got around to hot dogs and cake around 7. There was no plan, no games arranged, no thought put into it. I feel sorry for those kids.

I got home from my bicycle ride Monday night to find Omaha and Kouryou-chan getting ready to walk to the park. Exhausted from the Miller Creek Ravine ride, I decided to stay home make dinner instead. We were worried about the eldest boy, who's 9, because one of the things he had gotten for his birthday was a gas-powered pocketbike, one of those micromotorcycles that quite are illegal on public streets. As it turns out, his parents aren't so idiotic as we thought: it has a governer on it preventing it from going more than 12mph and he has a full set of helmet, knee and elbow pads.

On the other hand, we discovered that the 13 year old girl, A., and the 16 year old boy who often watch over the other five kids are not dating; no, he's her nephew. They're not qualified to watch the other kids, not that many. We discovered that A. had been giving all the neighborhood kids vitamins straight out of the bottle, and Kouryou-chan was taking them-- a double dose if she ate any. Fortunately, Omaha found them because Kouryou-chan had left one in her pocket and it had gone through the laundry, so we've advised Kouryou-chan not to eat anything she gets from the neighbors without our permission.

It's kind of scary, actually getting a real window into a family that qualifies under Dalrymple's "not knowing how to live," whose lifestyle consists primarily of drinking, sex, consuming loud and pornographic entertainment, and whose primary method of communicating with their children begins and ends with screaming and yelling. They've taken the fun out of dysfunctional. It's a bit of a shame that we're now in the "Don't take anything from strangers" camp with the neighbors but I'm just not taking any chances with them and my kids.

My Eyes! My EYES!

As some people here may know, I'm a fan of Maria-sama ga Miteru (The Virgin Mary is Watching Over Us), a touching little comedy/drama set in a Catholic Girl's school rife with, well, schoolgirl costumes and crypto-lesbian themes, but no actual sex. That would be uncouth. It's supposed to be reserved and elegant. There have been, naturally, sex parodies done in a comic-book style (actually doing an anime would be pricey), and it's hard not to look at the Lillian Girl's School uniforms and not think of the old hentai^[?] anime Escalation from many years ago.

Well, someone went over the top and has made Maria-sama ga Miteiru (The Virgin Mary is Staring), a full-bore girl-on-girl porn video set in an abandoned school with shower room, class room, and dorm room seduction scenes, lesbian daydreams, and the best damn costume budget I've seen in a porn flick since Traci Lords wore her Barbarella costume for Whore of the Worlds.

So, the girl who plays Yumi is a bit heavier than Yumi, and the girl who plays Sachiko can't quite pull off the elegance and grace of Sachiko. The girl they got to play Shimako is absolutely spot on, although she never takes her clothes off. pout.

Ah, who cares if it's lame, pixellated porn? It's got hot lesbian action involving the slow removal, piece by piece, of dark woolen Catholic uniforms, followed by bobby socks, buffed-and-buckled shoes, and pure white panties. Party on, Garth!

Or was that TMI?