Saturday randomness
May. 12th, 2007 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
erastesOK - so I'm still reeling from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
lee_rowan informing me that Edward Pellew was a real person. I've been reading Hornblower since just about since I don't know when - at least from age 10 or so - and it never occurred to me that there were real people (other than Nelson) in the books. Stupid Erastes!
Got my packet ready for the Agent, will give to Dad to post for me tomorrow. I left the bells thing in, it was stupid to worry about it, it's the bloody writing/subject matter/profitabilty they will be looking at, not stupid nit picky details. And there's a naked teenager on page one! What's not to like?
Paypal are issuing postal strips! This is such good news for a couch potato.
Heritage of Pride Forced to Cancel PRIDEFest 2007 - I'm disgusted about this. Another step backwards.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Updated: May 11, 2007
Contact: Dennis Spafford, Media Director
212.807.6468
media@hopinc.org
Heritage of Pride Forced to Cancel PRIDEFest 2007New York City’s Mayor’s Office and the Community Assistance Unit, denied a permit for Heritage of Pride’s 15th annual PRIDEfest street festival, which was to be held in Chelsea onJune 23, 2007.
The General Membership of Heritage of Pride (HOP), the producer of New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Pride Events, had decided on a May 11 deadline for the city to reverse its decision. This date was chosen in order to give the organization enough time to produce the event as it had been planned.
HOP received a formal notification for the denied permit on Thursday, May 10, and is in the process of filing an appeal for symbolic purposes. PRIDEfest has most recently been held in the West Village on Washington and Greenwich Streets, a venue that has major safety issues due to the narrowness of the street, potholes, and other logistical problems. The area also offers few amenities to the hundreds of thousands of LGBT residents and
international tourists who attend this annual Pride event. After serious consideration, HOP determined to move both the location and date of PRIDEfest to better serve the community.
PRIDEfest filed the necessary permit for the Chelsea location and date with the Community Assistance Unit of the Mayor’s Office on December 20, 2006. During a meeting with the NYPD on April 27, HOP organizers were told by representatives of the Community Assistance Unit that their permit would not be approved. Despite several meetings and phone calls with various City agencies, the Mayor’s Office continues to ignore the community’s need for a safer, more accessible event. In addition the Mayor’s Office is insisting on labeling this 15-year-old event a new event and denying the permit on these grounds as well.
HOP remains firm in its stance that holding PRIDEfest at its former location is not safe, not accessible, and not acceptable.
Oh and meme-age. Leave a comment indicating your willingness to be quizzed and I'll ask you about 3 of your icons and 3 of your interests.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 11:46 am (UTC)And my fingers are crossed for your submission to the agent.
Thank you!
Date: 2007-05-12 11:56 am (UTC)bat for lashes, bizenghast,catherynne m valente
no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 11:50 am (UTC)and I will play! :)
no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 12:05 pm (UTC)frida kahlo, harley quinn, pronzvilletopia
no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 11:53 am (UTC)Quiz me, please? (I have no interests listed, but plenty of icons).
no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 12:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 12:13 pm (UTC)The 10 shirt is Jonny Wilkinson's, on his peg in the England dressing room. He is such a wonderful player, a true sportsman and gentleman and the fact that his kick won us the World Cup is a bonus. And he's fit as can be seen from the third picture.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 09:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 02:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 02:47 pm (UTC)My mind - brought up on a diet of Round the Horne and Carry On films - thought there was some desperate double entendre/piece of slang that I was missing.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 02:44 pm (UTC)genealogy, history, photography,
no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 03:06 pm (UTC)Rose Icon: I took this picture on the wall of Villa Petraia in Florence. La Petraia is one of the oldest Villa of the Medici Family and became the Residence of the King of Italy during his permanence in Florence.
Cat Icon: this is Mayo, my latest cat. We took him on the garbage, his mother thrown him cause he had a problem on an eye. He was a wonderful cat, but he died two years ago at only five years old.
Elisa Icon: this is me in Ireland. I was sitting on a window of Aughananure Castle. In that day there was a beautiful sun eclipse. Ireland was my first fly and drive travel
Interest
Genealogy: I love genealogy. I manage to reconstruct all the family tree of the royal european family from the beginning of the eleven century till today. And I also had my own family tree from the seventeen century till today.
History: read of the story of other people, of the place where they lived? Have the possibility to walk among that place and know how it was? I have to say something else? To be a better person, you have to know what and who was before you.
Photography: My father was a photographer. When he died I took his camera, an old Nikkormat, and now, when I go on travel, I take it with me, and make a lot of pictures. I love the angles and the lights, the details. I don't like very take pictures of the people, cause I don't like if other take picture of me.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 06:36 pm (UTC)you definitely need more icons
Date: 2007-05-12 08:27 pm (UTC)baycon, making light, rasfc,
Re: you definitely need more icons
Date: 2007-05-12 09:15 pm (UTC)I've been knocking around the net for a while; I'm far from being a Great Old Fart, but I *did* have to make a decision on which flavour of 33.6k modem to buy for my first home modem, and I remember only too well the joys of dialing up at BT metered local rates. And I'm a usenaut, having spent a great deal of time hanging around usenet, using an offline reader that allowed me to log on in a hurry, slurp down the day's articles, and log off again to read them at my leisure. So I'm of the generation of European propellerheads who got distinctly grumpy about people posting huge pictures or html to text groups just because they could. Because we were *paying* to download this junk. The war cry was "7 bit ASCII!". The other thing *I* hated about people posting html emails etc just because they could was that they tended to use fancy fonts and walppapers because it looks so pretty -- and if your eyesight is a bit dodgy and you've set your preferred font and colour scheme to something you can read, being forced to use something else just because someone wants to show off how creative they are gets annoying.
When I first got an LJ (not this one, but my original one now used mainly for fanfic territory, which has a username which says *exactly* what I think of HTML-based fora:-), I didn't have an icon at all. I thought I'd better get one when I started posting at the Crack Van -- so "7 bit ASCII" in black Courier on a white background... That LJ also has one that says "You are in a maze of twisty" in white text on a blue background, a colour scheme used by the DEC VT340 terminal.
The cat-vacuuming one is a rasfc reference. Cat-vacuuming is the art of doing something that is supposedly meant to be useful to writing, but is in fact a means of avoiding Bum In Chair, Fingers On Keyboard. Because we are deeply sad, Suzanne drew us a little icon we could use as a badge, and it does in fact exist as a small metal lapel badge that people wear to cons as a recognition device. You'll see it being used on rascafarians' LJs as a way of acknowledging that they're engaged in displacement activity instead of getting on with writing.
I've got two icons showing the covers of recent books. The one you've picked is right now showing the cover of Lord and Master, which is my take on that old Mills&Boon staple, the tycoon/secretary romance. Only because it's me, it's original slash. :-) It turned out rather yaoi in tone, so my publisher used a yaoi-style cover. Since it's legible even at LJ icon size, I'm using it as an icon. It does however look much nicer in large format, and I have a particularly nice tote bag from CafePress with that on one side, where it looks *gorgeous*. I mostly use those icons where there's some relevant context -- e.g. talking about books, or a thread over at
Baycon is The San Francisco Bay Area Regional Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention, currently my local con. Sufficiently local that I commute to it rather than staying in the hotel overnight.
Making Light is the blog of Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, sf fans and editors at Tor. It's one of my main hangouts online, being a good place for conversation about the sort of things sf fans converse about, including stuff to do with publishing. It's also proof that not all Americans are far right religious nutcases.
rasfc is the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.composition. It's a newsgroup for people interested in the process of writing speculative fiction. It's a great place to talk to people in the business, and discuss stuff or get advice. There are some Big Names who hang out there and are excellent teachers. Quite a few of the people on my default flist view are people I know from rasfc, and some of my LJ posts are essentially off-topic conversation with those people.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 07:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 08:34 pm (UTC)clerihews, n'early music consort,
shrdlu to you too!
Date: 2007-05-12 10:22 pm (UTC)The first icon is the official logo for D'Zenove Convention, which was the 19th UK filk convention in February this year; I was treasurer. The name is (approximately) Portuguese for 19 (two of the committee were half-Portuguese, as their father, also on the committee, was formerly married to a Portuguese woman). And D'Zenove is pronounced (more or less) as Genova, which sounds rather like Geneva ... hence the name. And the logo.
Second one is the icon I created for
Third one may take a bit of explaining... ETAOIN SHRDLU is the frequency (more or less) of letters in the English language. It's also a nonsense set of characters which old Linotype operators used to use to fill up gaps on pages, or where they couldn't read what they were supposed to be typesetting. Several friends and I thought that shrdlu sounded like an animal cry, and we deemed it to be the cry of the etaoin. Further discussion produced the idea that the etaoin (pron. eh-tao-in, where 'tao' is pronounced as in 'The Tao of Pooh' *g*) is a shy arboreal marsupial mammal, with a long prehensile tail and a longish woofly nose with whiskers. Being marsupials, of course, they probably live in Australia. I used a warning-sign-creator webpage that turned up somewhere a couple of years ago to make the icon. Shrdlu!
The clerihew is a verse form, in which I am (occasionally) endeavouring to become proficient. You might remember me posting a couple (or three dozen....) on LJ last year? It's a four-line verse, rhymed, but not scanned, and more or less in the rhythm of speech. One of the most famous is "Sir Christopher Wren / said: 'I am going to dine with some men. / If anybody calls / say I am designing St Paul's.'"
The n'Early Music Consort is the filk choir I sing with. Membership ranges from Swindon to Cambridge ... er, I mean from bass to soprano ... sorry, from 12 to 16. Sometimes all at once. In March we were the combined guests of honour/toastmasters/filk waifs (etc) at FilkONtario, the Canadian filk convention.
Did you mean to put a third interest in there?
Re: momentum
Date: 2007-05-12 08:38 pm (UTC)Don't worry I didn't know what it was either.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 08:23 pm (UTC)old trout, new tricks etc.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 08:41 pm (UTC)Pretty horse icons you have!!
no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 12:32 am (UTC)*comments* I only have four interests on my profile, and they're pretty self-explanatory, so if you want to skip that one, go ahead.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 07:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 05:03 pm (UTC)(http://www.hopinc.org/events/pridefest.html) on the issue, you'll see that the permit denial was only one reason (albeit a very significant one) for cancelling PrideFest. Rest assured, there will be numerous giant, wild, crazy Pride events in NYC. Or, as my dear friend who tends bar at Rawhide, Chelsea's most popular leather bar, "The streets of New York will be awash in se[a]men... like Fleet Week, only more rum and sodomy."
As someone who has worked to produce special events in parks and public places in NYC, I can tell you that navigating the Permits office can be a HOLY NIGHTMARE. Heritage of Pride is not the first, nor will it be the last, to be denied on ridiculous grounds. I feel confident in saying it has nothing to do with homophobia and everything to do with arcane avenues of bureaucracy and an application that ended up on some irritable civil service pencil-pusher's desk on a day s/he decided to be a pain in the ass, just because s/he could.