Uppity-Negro.com

Changed the index back to showing 7 days rather than 3, since I haven't been tossing up 10 entries a day lately. Still too long? Loads over the course of a two-hour period on a dialup connection? Bitch now or forever hold your peace.

Also added annoying tracking code to the individual archives, since the disparity between the hit counts the actual server reported, and the ones Site Meter claimed, was getting absurd. This looks awful in Mozilla and NS7, as part of commented code shows for no particular reason. Guess I could file a bug report on that. . . or Opera is correcting my poor code, and that comment isn't actually a comment. . .

And when you're defragging a Windows partition prior to (maybe) resizing the thing, and it keeps restarting because "drive contents have changed" despite the fact that you're in safe mode and nothing else is running, that doesn't mean the kids at Redmond were so mind-bogglingly stupid to have the program use the swap file (because you only have 24MB of memory), notice that change, and start again, right? Because then I would have to have them killed.

I must just be doing something stupid. Like trusting the list of running programs that comes up when I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL.

Update:

<Geekrant>
Like most of the Old School, I remember when hard drives were an unimaginable luxury, and you ran everything off of floppy. Yes, children, including the Operating System. You wanted an app? Take the OS disk out and put the application floppy in. Saving your work? Yet Another Floppy Disk.

And no, we did not get errors constantly. They built the damn things to last back then.

All I needed was four disks to get Debian to the point where it could see the network. And it took more like 8, because half the things threw up errors with fdformat. Not a problem with random files, serious deal-breaker when writing full-disk images.

I think the ones that worked were all older disks that I copied the contents of. The last batch of floppies I actually bought, with the big "Lifetime Warranty" on the side of the box, were the worst of the lot.

Steve Jobs had the right idea. The things are useless.

Ironic, since the last batch I only got to move system files to my Antique SE/30 to begin with.
</Geekrant>

I lied. Geekrant continues.

The laptop is formatting the ~500 MB /usr partition now, after finishing the oddly-satisfying removal of the old root. For some reason, the install instructions don't just come out and say, "If you're trying to install on top of another version of Linux, forget it. Trash that sucker, then we'll talk."

Oh, and I'm a moron, and currently have Apache running open to the world, since the install demanded HTTP for transferring files. Any visitors will just see Red Hat's standard, "Hi, there's nothing here" page. Or the firewall and hosts.allow will block them. Don't know, don't want to find out.

Oh yeah, and my former life as an Amiga and Mac user keeps haunting me, as I put follow the prompts to put disks in and ignore the big HIT RETURN instructions on the screen, figuring that of course the computer knows the disk is in the drive. How stupid can it be?

Better to ask this of myself.

Posted by Aaron at 8:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Seems like there's only one reason I ever link Great Day in Harlem. . .

In an AP story, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports:

Jazz great Lionel Hampton dies

NEW YORK -- Lionel Hampton, the vibraphone virtuoso and standout showman whose six-decade career ranked him among the greatest names in jazz history, died Saturday. He was 94.

[. . .] Hampton worked with a who's who of jazz greats, from Benny Goodman to Charlie Parker to Quincy Jones.

Hampton and pianist Teddy Wilson were the black half of the fabled quartet with Goodman and drummer Gene Krupa that in 1936 broke the racial barriers that had largely kept black musicians from performing with whites in public.

Wilson had recorded with Goodman and Krupa previously, and white soloists "jammed" informally with black groups, but a color line was drawn when a white band was on stage.

[. . .] A Republican Party stalwart, Hampton appeared at fund-raising and celebratory party events, but played the White House during Democratic administrations too, performing over the years for Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Bush.

He was back in Washington in January 1997 as a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts. President Clinton hailed him as "more than just a performer. He is a lion of American music. And he still makes the vibraphone sing."

I'm not in the mood for black Republican jokes just now, thanks.

It should surprise no one that one of the best pages about a jazz musician is in The Netherlands. Google's cache of the page is working; the actual Lionel Hampton Story page seems to be getting slashdotted at the moment.

I'm not checking to see how old Quincy Jones is, because I don't want to think about that now. He's a celebrity DJ at Radio@Netscape; "Thriller" was playing last time I clicked it, but there's jazz there too, and what we'll call pop for lack of a better term. If you like your music kept as segregated as bands used to be less than 70 years ago, it's not the place for you.

And neither is this site.

Posted by Aaron at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Mentioned this cd when writing about Blogcritics a while back, and I must admit I've not really been back since:

Pixies by The Pixies (The Pixies)

They've now got a review of the Gil Evans biography, Gil Evans-Out of the Cool: His Life and His Music. In addition to his work with Miles Davis (including the indispensible Sketches of Spain), Gil and company helped out on what I still consider to be the perfect pop song, Sting's cover of Jimi Hendrix' "Little Wing".

No, really.

It helps that Sting really isn't on the track that much.

I mean, ok, there's the guitar solo by Hiram Bullock, right? Which jams. Then he fades out, Branford slowly builds up on the sax, and you can really hear the rhythm section (including the Gil Evans orchestra) in the back of the mix, making it quite clear they're prepared to keep the groove going for as long as necessary.

Some people would claim the presence of the rhythm section disqualifies this from being a pop song. They are fools. Ignore them. And play it loud.

Posted by Aaron at 8:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, EMusic finally fixed their little link-to-item problem. Meaning that if, for some odd reason, I felt really enthusiastic about:

Piece And Love by Meg Lee Chin (Invisible Records)

I could link directly to it, rather than using one of the generic banners. Not at cure-for-cancer levels in the grand scheme of things, but I like Meg. And am still on her mailing list, now that I think about it. Boy, they've been quiet for a while. . .

Oh, and this really deserves an in-depth, critical analysis. But I'm me. So forget that.

Prime Time in Black and White is a five-year, longitudinal study of 1) the on-screen presence of black Americans in prime-time network television and 2) of issues pertaining to behind-the-scenes control.

[lots of worthwhile information ignored so I can go for the cheap joke]

Table 1: Top 5 and bottom 5 shows in terms of the
percentage of characters that were black

Top:

1. Girlfriends (UPN) [sitcom] 89%
2. One On One (UPN) [sitcom] 88%
3. My Wife and Kids (ABC) [sitcom] 83%
4. The Parkers (UPN) [sitcom] 79%
5. Early Edition (CBS)* [drama] 76%

Bottom:

1. Just Shoot Me (NBC) [sitcom] 0%
2. Dharma and Greg (ABC) [sitcom] 0%
3. Three Sisters (NBC) [sitcom] 0%
4. Dawson's Creek (WB) [drama] 0%
5. Sabrina (WB) [sitcom] 0%

And I kind'a liked Jenna Elfman, too. Not enough to watch the show regularly, mind you. And I thought Sabrina had a Black Friend? Or is that just the cartoon?

Yes, there's a piece about this in Bitch. Shut up. I cannot escape my destiny.

Posted by Aaron at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Don Wycliff writes in the Chicago Tribune:

When should race be used as an identifier?

Here's the text of a correction that ran in the Tribune last Saturday: "A brief in Wednesday's Metro section about a United Airlines flight attendant who successfully sued the company for race, sex and age discrimination failed to mention the man's race. Leroy Gordon is African-American."

It was a reader who called our attention to this. I was relieved, when the metro desk sent in its report on the error, to learn that it was simply an oversight: In trimming his story down to a brief, the reporter didn't notice that he had trimmed out the complainant's race.

This isn't the first time race has been curiously left out of a story where it appropriately belonged. Every few months, it seems, I get a letter or phone call from a reader wanting to know why, in an otherwise thoroughly reported story--and these seem to come up most often in the context of crime stories--we neglected to include the person's race.

As often as not, after I've queried the editors, the answer turns out to be that someone exercised an excess of caution.

The Tribune stylebook, our fundamental guide in this as in most other matters journalistic, offers this general prescription on race: "Derogatory and unnecessary references to race do not belong in the Tribune."

[. . .] Many of my most rabid correspondents would say that these examples [omitted - hit the link, cypherpunk] subtly load the dice against the truth, because they speak of a white suspect when "everybody knows" that the real problem is crime committed by blacks.

These are the folks who, within hours after the story broke last month about a mob's beating two men to death after a traffic accident on the South Side, began firing off e-mails like this one:

"Why doesn't your paper give the color of the people involved in this murder? Could it be because they are blacks killing whites in a brutal manner? If it were the other way around I know without a doubt you would be doing so, and in a sensational manner."

(Of course, the real reason we didn't mention race was that it wasn't an issue: all those involved were black.)

They're the ones who conveniently forget Charles Stuart, the Bostonian who hatched and executed an elaborate plan to rid himself of his pregnant wife and blame the whole thing on a shadowy black criminal. They forget Susan Smith, who deep-sixed her car with her two children inside and then contrived a tale of a black carjacker to explain the disappearance of her car and kids.

I'd forgotten Charles Stuart's name. I have not forgotten the incident, although, as Mr. Wycliff notes, others have more convenient memories.

Ask around. You'll probably notice a pretty strict racial breakdown of who does and doesn't recall those details. I'm assuming you know black people to ask in the first place; warbloggers are, obviously, exempt from this.

Not that melanin content has anything to do with how the memory works; this is that race as social construct thing again, another point the warbloggers will no doubt miss entirely. I expect one of them to accuse me of being racist for even mentioning the disparity, and dispute that such even exists.

All without actually talking to any black people.

As noted previously, ignorance is fine (and I really want some barfi now, but I don't think the Indian place that opened down the block serves it). Speaking from a position of ignorance, on the other hand, and resisting all attempts by others to rectify it, is being a dumbass. In their case, being a dumbass cracka.

And I'm really tired of dealing with those right now.

Posted by Aaron at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (2)

Um, everyone's figured out the "gender/race as construct" subtext around here by now, right? Excluding the tourists, who have enough problems with the text, period?

Figured out what bothered me about MixedFolks.com. The same thing that really annoys me about the Multiracial Activist types.

If you define "black" as "totally, 100% unmixed African ancestry", then I don't think any of us qualify. Guess you could do DNA testing to check, for what it's worth, but the majority of black people are mixed, or multiracial, or whateverthefuck you want to call it. If everyone is part of a continuum, why should some folks with more recent white ancestry claim uniqueness? Or is that a stupid question?

Realized this while washing the dreads, which may have been a mistake in retrospect. I don't really have black hair, so it doesn't behave the way people expect it to. This caused my locktician no end of grief before the things finally took.

So race does matter. At least when you're getting your hair done.

Or shaving it. I've mentioned the no-shave chits in the military before, yes? And how black guys were more likely to get them, because we're more likely to get razor bumps?

Then there's body hair. Um. Not much to say on that one. Arms, no. Chest, I can count them on the fingers of one hand. Legs, I would lose a competition with a French woman.

And yet, despite this evidence, I still think race remains a social construct.

Will probably add links or something to this later. Just downloaded Netscape 7 final, and want to see what it can do.

After I finally realized there was a Mozilla version of the Stumbleupon toolbar, too. . .

Update 8/30: Neoteny?

From the results I have received so far, it is apparent that though American Indians are amongst the least hairy ethnic groups, people of mixed race are often hairy. But, hairy men of mixed race which includes American Indian often grow their body hair later than other hairy men. Some extreme cases include men who did not become hairy until their mid to late twenties. This should not be confused with the tendency of hairy men to continue growing hair (in new places) well into their thirties. This suggests to me that the American Indian race is generally hairless because of neoteny. Neoteny is the retention of juvenile physical characteristics in the adult individual.

Guess it all depends on what you consider normal. Oh, right, white people are normal. The rest of us deviate more or less from that baseline. Blah.

There's a (mercifully) brief bit on The Idea of Race at the University of Washington's Kennewick Man Virtual Exhibit:

Some physical characteristics such as black hair are common among many, but not all, Native Americans. Others, including head and body shape, height, skin color, and facial hair, vary significantly. Native American men from Pacific Coast tribes, for example, often have heavy facial hair while other Native American men have none.

I get five-o'clock-shadow after about a week, myself.

This bit should annoy the tourists:

Nineteenth-Century Ideas about Race

The nineteenth-century idea that there are only three human races -- Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid -- emerged from European folk concepts of the Middle Ages about the significance of physical differences like skin color, head shape, or type of hair. All people were thought to belong to one of these races and most authorities believed that these physical differences also implied differences in intelligence, abilities, and general merit as human beings. Some believed that such "racial" differences justified social inferiority, colonial control, and even slavery. This attitude is illustrated by the following quote from the 1800s.

"The indominable, courageous, proud Indianin -- how very different a light he stands by the side of the submissive, obsequious, imitative negro, or by the side of the tricky, cunning, and cowardly Mongolian! Are not these facts indications that the different races do not rank upon one level in nature?"
Louis Agassiz, Professor of Geology and Zoology, Harvard University, 1850

The ones who actually read Gene Expression that is. I tried after a. . . discussion with the proprieter at Matt Welch's a while back. Yeah, that was time well spent.

Unlike with lactose intolerance, I couldn't find any stats about what percent of the planet tends towards more or less body hair. Seems to be the same thing again, though; northern European = "normal", rest of the planet = "deviant".

Charming.

And yes, there was something about this in the latest Bitch. I swear, this is the last time I'm ripping off their shit. Honest.

Not that any of the links I looked at even mention body hair on women. The dainty creatures have none, apparently.

Posted by Aaron at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBacks (2)

I have been given to understand that I "don't know diddly-squat about Africa", in the midst of a withering lecture about racism from, um, a conservative white South African expatriate. My sense of the absurd does not quite extend that far, but I do appreciate having my limits illuminated. Kind'a.

To rectify the holes in my knowledge left by 4-hours-shy-of-a-minor African Studies classes at UIUC (and you'd think my advisor, Professor Bokamba, would have mentioned this), I was gratified to see that today's MediaChannel.org | News Dissector Web Log covered the conference in SA, and current events there:

Yesterday, I visited the Landless People’s Camp, where a few thousand black South Africans are meeting to plan their own march on the summit. Under apartheid, whites, who were the minority, controlled 87% of the land in this country. Those numbers have not changed radically and these people know it. The government fears more land seizures like the ones in neighboring Zimbabwe that have destabilized that society.

[. . .] After apartheid fell, the spies of the old regime were put in together with the intelligence operations of the liberation movement. It was an uneasy combination. This intelligence apparatus has not had much to worry about until now, but now they are anxious and antsy. The anti-globalization movement feels the government's gaze and resents the climate of intimidation. Last night I met a young woman who was hit by a police stun grenade and was burned while peacefully protesting. “I was singing a song in an African language I didn’t know, just humming along,” she told me. “and this grenade was lobbed at me without warning.” She is now walking with a cane.

Nope, nothing new there. . .

Seizing land would, clearly, be a Very Bad Idea. Just as bad as it's turned out in Zimbabwe, although a sane judge has nullified at least some of the eviction orders.

On Wednesday the Zimbabwe High Court nullified eviction orders served on 54 white farmers as President Robert Mugabe ruled out any possibility of talks with the white landowners, telling them that they had no rights to control property in Zimbabwe.

The beleaguered white farmers have appealed for a meeting with Mugabe to discuss the seizures of their farms but Mugabe told state radio that there was "no room for talks" between him and the white farmers. He said the rights of the white farmers to own land in Zimbabwe were secondary to those of blacks.

"There is no room for talks, there is no room for negotiations because the real owners of this land are asserting their rights and reclaiming their land," Mugabe told a gathering in the southeastern town of Chiredzi.

"If you (whites) want to live with us, to farm alongside us, we, the rightful owners of our ancestral land, will carve out some land for you. But you cannot decide what you will have in our country," he said.

That we/you shit will be the death of us all, but it's almost a relief to see it expressed so openly.

Almost.

South Africa is going to have to deal with the imbalance in land ownership at some point. Doing nothing is also dealing with it, but almost as bad as Mugabe's solution. Well, they can always take the US route to handling land-holding minorities.

The white people already have casinos, so they're halfway there.

Posted by Aaron at 1:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

As someone who shall remain nameless has sent me a set of Debian install cds, and the version of Red Hat on this little laptop is getting long in the tooth, I'll probably be installing that later today. Which means either sharing the cds on the real computer using a nice, simple and already configured FTP daemon, or getting bloody NFS working. At least I've got an ethernet card in the thing this time; last time the install involved PLIP. You don't want to know how long it took. And that was just the configuration. . .

I am not a geek, by the way. Which is why I'll be saving my XF86Config from the current install, rather than setting it up again. You have to configure with a monitor attached rather than using the built-in screen, and I'm already going to have cables all over the place.

The fact that I probably have a copy in one of my sent email directories from when I helpfully mailed the thing to some poor bastard complaining on comp.os.linux.portable is not indicative of geekiness, and I resent your implication, sir.

I appear to be the anti-Lileks. Not just because the warbloggers link here while condemning the politics but grooving on the pop culture stuff, but because both of us are way behind the curve. He recently picked The New Yorker and finally became aware of the anti-SUV crusade that the Car Talk guys have been on for a while. I saw the September Harper's Magazine, and saw they'd quoted a bit of Gail Simone's (quite dated by now) Women in Refrigerators. This was noted a week or so back on rec.arts.comics.misc, and Gail sez there was additional material that didn't make the cut. Or got cut. Or something.

Gail (who's old column/satire thingee You'll All Be Sorry! is still available at Comic Book Resources) is currently doing Killer Princesses with Lea Hernandez, along with lots of other stuff I'm too lazy to look up right now. She chimed in on the WOMEN IN COMICS: This Is Your Last Call thread on the WEF, along with Lea, Finder's Carla Speed McNeil, and a whole bunch of other folks I'm forgetting. Time and money sink, the thing is. Comics equivalent of Ecto, basically.

Other reason I'm the anti-Lileks? I link things. A lot. Possibly too much.

We've all realized that entries with pretty pictures mean I'm using a real computer, while these text-only ones mean I'm on the laptop, right?

Oh yeah, and Cleopatra Jones is looking for laptop recommendations. Not the steampunk variety, so I got nothing to contribute. As usual.

Duh. WiR is described by the woman herself as:

This is a list I made when it occurred to me that it's not that healthy to be a female character in comics. I'm curious to find out if this list seems somewhat disproportionate, and if so, what it means, really.

These are superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator. I know I missed a bunch. Some have been revived, even improved -- although the question remains as to why they were thrown in the wood chipper in the first place.

There's commentary by some pros, too. Go on. It'll give you that warm, "misogyny lives in fiction" feeling.

Posted by Aaron at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBacks (0)

die puny humans

warren ellis speaks clever

If you need more explanation, you probably wouldn't be interested to begin with.

Oh, all right. Warren sez:

die puny humans is my newsmine. I wanted a place to put my research that was accessible, searchable, and, crucially, not cluttering up my bloody computer. This is it. Means I can get to my stuff from anywhere with a web connection. Anything I find on my daily trawls around the web that interests me goes up here.

Now if he just gets rid of that top frame. . .

Posted by Aaron at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Greg Morrow, a/k/a USENET'S Dr. Elmo, now has his own blog. You might remember him from the Elmo Brand Pseudoscience™ featured in several Priest comics over the years. Or not. Your loss.

He also did not appear in a paycheck comic, more or less, as Mike the Parademon. That was Mike Chary. Confusing the two indicates how long it's been since I hung out on the newsgroups, and that I cannot tell that "Greg" and "Mike" are two different words.

Good thing I checked that. Either of those two could flame me into oblivion. Combined? It'd be ritual seppuku rather than face the battle.

For similar reasons, although I may not agree with everything he says, he's way smarter than me, so I shut the fuck up. You might want to keep this in mind if he turns on comments at some point.

And apropos of nothing (no, really, I just didn't feel like making two entries), we have Big Fun with Dayton-Hudson:

Thanks to Target, the nationwide department-store chain, students across the country may be heading back to school in hip-looking white supremacist regalia. The retail giant is selling shorts and baseball caps splashed with “EIGHT EIGHT” and “88” – white-power code for “Heil Hitler,” because “h” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.

Know I read this somewhere. . . in Woody Allen's pre-stepdaughter-marriage-and-therefore-acceptable film Sleeper, folks in the 22nd century are walking around wearing Swastikas, because they have no clue what significance the symbol held in the distant past.

I had no idea 88 meant that today. Learn something new and stupid every day. . .

Where are my manners? Found Greg's blog through What She Really Thinks. And, keeping with the rare outburst of manners, that's all I'll say about that.

Update 8/29: VASpider is really entirely too sensible to hang out here, but does not seem to have realized this yet. Nobody tell her.

Posted by Aaron at 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (2)

Think I prefer this one.

Quan Yin's name is a translation of the Sanskrit name of her chief progenitor which is Avalokitesvara, also known as Avalokita. In its proper form it is Kuanshih Yin, which means "She who harkens to the cries of the world."

I mean, there are way too many RHPS types around here to use:

In both Taoism and Buddhism Kuan Yin is the goddess of compassion, she is the Japanese Bodhisattva Kannon or Kanzeon, and is identified with the Indian Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, including all of the scriptures which apply to him. Kuan (Shih) Yin means "the one who hears the cries of the world and comes."

Freaks.

In sculture and paintings, Kuan Shih Yin is variously depicted as male and female. These things happen.

Scholars believe that the Buddhist monk and translator Kumarajiva was the first to refer to the female form of Kuan Yin in his Chinese translation of the Lotus Sutra in 406 A.D. Of the thirty-three appearances of the bodhisattva referred to in his translation, seven are female. (Devoted Chinese and Japanese Buddhists have since come to associate the number thirty-three with Kuan Yin.)

Although Kuan Yin was still being portrayed as a male as late as the tenth century, with the introduction of Tantric Buddhism into China in the eighth century during the T'ang dynasty, the image of the celestial bodhisattva as a beautiful white-robed goddess was predominant and the devotional cult surrounding her became increasingly popular. By the ninth century there was a statue of Kuan Yin in every Buddhist monastery in China.

Despite the controversy over the origins of Kuan Yin as a feminine being, the depiction of a bodhisattva as both 'god' and 'goddess' is not inconsistent with Buddhist doctrine. The scriptures explain that a bodhisattva has the power to embody in any form--male, female, child, even animal--depending on the type of being he is seeking to save. As the Lotus Sutra relates, the bodhisattva Kuan Shih Yin, "by resort to a variety of shapes, travels in the world, conveying the beings to salvation."

No idea if this involves hot and cold running water.

Vaguely apropos to Jewish Task Force's righteous condemnation of Black History Month, education in the West (or mine, at least) doesn't really stress the movement of religion/philosophy/iconography between India, China, Tibet, Japan, Korea, Viet. . . um, them other Asian countries. There are quite a few. Not that Tibet is a country; it's an autonomous region of China. You know. Like Puerto Rico or Washington, DC.

We're only slowly getting a picture of Islam here, and that's colored by the fact that 6,000 5,000 nearly 3,000 Americans people from all over the world were killed in the 9/11 attacks. So it's a rather grim version of history, full of wars, conversion by sword and people whose names are spelled about twenty different ways using Roman characters.

Which is a bit like someone seeing Buddhist monks in Vietnam protest the war by self-immolation, and deciding that Buddhism is all about setting yourself on fire.

No, silly, that's the Falun Gong.

Added a few images from Isisdownunder's Kuan Yin Pictures and Information. There are also some nice images, and lots of info about various godesses, at the Erzulie-Lilith page of The Goddess In World Mythology site. If you're into that sort of thing.

As an ignorant Westerner, I have no clue about the significance of the gesture she's making with her right hand in that first picture. It's a wonder I'm even aware that it has a particular significance, really.

Update 2: Oh, right, forgot.

Today Kuan Yin is worshipped by Taoists as well as Mahayana Buddhists--especially in Taiwan, Japan, Korea and once again in her homeland of China, where the practice of Buddhism had been suppressed by the Communists during the Cultural Revolution (1966-69). She is the protectress of women, sailors, merchants, craftsmen, and those under criminal prosecution, and is invoked particularly by those desiring progeny.

I'd warn Michelle not to go invoking her because of that last bit, but doubt this would really be an issue.

Posted by Aaron at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Haven't tried listening to "Bitches Brew" recently. My neighbors are annoying me, though. Perhaps I will put it on, set it to repeat, turn it up, and leave for the day.

From Not Without My Handbag, by way of VASpider's Web:

Beautiful Welsh names (girls)
Aelwen(fair brow)
Arwen(Fair)
Briallen(primrose)
Drudwen(precious)
Ceindrych(Elegant, fair)

. . .

BOMB WALES NOW! Seriously, take any one of these words, put "Marie Johnson" behind it and try not to laugh. Now imagine the kindergarten teacher trying to say Fflur on the first day of school. That's right. We need to bomb Wales now.

I want to have her children.

Obviously, she'll get to pick the names. I still think "Toyota Corolla" is a good faux-African name meself. . .

Meanwhile, Giles takes on the marketing of Shakira. No quote, go visit him. I'd point out that one of her Pepsi ads appeared in the front of that People en Español I bought a while back, and there's a blurb about her in the latest Bitch. Because they are the zeitgeist.

Also, MeFiMe does that link/discuss thang on the PS2 Network Adapter, but there are some Dreamcast-using filth there. Ignore them, and ask for killfiles as a feature.

Today marks Jack Kirby's birthday. Mixed emotions from me, since despite his central role in creating the comics industry, I remember reading his dialogue.

Want to know more? Much Kirby love at (the archive'd version of) the Toy Wonder's site. Think you get images and working links in other browsers; I'm doing the lynx thang, and don't feel like checking. There is text. It should be good enough.

Plus, lots of good content there means fewer complaints about the lack of such here. It's all good.

Bugger (Yay! Now I can hang out with Jason!). Checked, and there are no images in that particular archived version of Unca Cheek's page. Thought they did graphics files too, but they might pull them from the actual site. And his is long-gone. Might check other versions of the page later.

Update: Ok, they do have images files. Just not the ones for that particular page. Tragically, this is also true of the pages for Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. I think we all agree with Luke when he says, "Sweet Christmas!"

Or not. Whatever.

Posted by Aaron at 7:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

So, those irrepressible scamps at Jewish Task Force (who I liked better when they were called Science Hebrew Team Gatchaman -- and I have a feeling I will regret making this joke) reveal the Truth about Black "History" Month Propaganda:

The United States Constitution prohibits the establishment of a national religion. For this reason, JTF strongly objects to the unconstitutional establishment of America's "national religion" since the 1960s: worshiping blacks.

In January of every year, we have a national holiday honoring a Communist white-hater and Jew-hater named Martin Luther King. All of our Presidents combined get only one holiday. But Martin Luther King, by himself, receives this honor. And King is actually honored more than the Presidents. For Presidents' Day has merely become a day for commercial sales and bargains. On King's holiday, on the other hand, no store would dare to advertise sales and bargains. Because his "holiday" is so sacred.

Every February, we now have Black "History" Month. No other people in the United States receive such recognition. Prior to white colonists coming to black Africa, the blacks had never established a single school, any written language, any mechanical or technical invention or anything else of value. Other than putting plates in their mouths, wiping themselves with leaves, picking insects out of their hair and eating them and living in huts held together by human excrement -- other than these great "accomplishments," blacks never achieved or invented anything. Yet we are now told that they have some sort of celebrated "history."

I keep telling myself this isn't meant to be a hilarious, over-the-top parody of a racist web site, but rather an actual racist web site. Doesn't work. I keep laughing anyway.

We know that what we are saying here is extremely controversial. The truth is always controversial.

Uh-huh. Weird, putting those two sentences together, you'd think they were suggesting some relationship between them, but other than proximity, I just don't see one.

Oh well, Meryl Yourish has a new essay up, and Amish Tech Support keeps on keepin' on.

They're not quite as funny, though.

Posted by Aaron at 6:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Know why I don't write about the military stuff more often?

PURPLE T-SHIRT EVENT

On March 19, 1991, following the cease fire, personnel from NMCB-24 required medical attention after becoming exposed to unidentified airborne noxious fumes. These fumes resulted in acute symptoms, such a burning throats, eyes and noses, and difficulty in breathing. In addition, portions of their brown T-shirts turned purple. It was also reported that portions of some of these same individuals' combat boots also turned purple.

Because no one would believe most of it.

Let's try this again:

Black Steel (live) - Tricky, Sessions at West 54th

I got a letter from the government
The other day
I opened and read it
It said they were suckers
They wanted me for their army or whatever
Picture me givin' a damn - I said never
Here is a land that never gave a damn
About a brother like me and myself
Because they never did
I wasn't wit' it, but just that very minute...
It occured to me
The suckers had authority
Cold sweatin' as I dwell in my cell
How long has it been?
They got me sittin' in the state pen
I gotta get out - but that thought was thought before
I contemplated a plan on the cell floor
I'm not a fugitive on the run
But a brother like me begun - to be another one
Public enemy servin' time - they drew the line y'all
To criticize me some crime - never the less
They could not understand that I'm a Black man
And I could never be a veteran
On the strength, the situation's unreal
I got a raw deal, so I'm goin' for the steel

Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos, Public Enemy
Ridenhour - Shocklee - Sadler - Drayton

Posted by Aaron at 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Some of the warbloggers take umbrage -- in fact, they take all the umbrage -- to the term chickenhawk. Just because they were too young to serve in the last few wars, or declined to volunteer for the the ones they could have served in, is no reason to suggest that they shouldn't be writing furiously about somebody else's friends and family getting shot at.

Pussies.

Various sources, including the Mercury News, report:

U.S. TELLING THOUSANDS THEY MAY HAVE TO SERVE AN EXTRA YEAR
Mercury News Wire Services

WASHINGTON - The Defense Department is notifying more than 14,000 reservists that they may be required to extend their duty, to serve up to two years instead of one, in a move seen as a contingency for possible action against Iraq.

The action, the most extensive since the Vietnam War, affects about 4,800 Air Force reservists and about 9,200 members of the Air National Guard, said Commander Randy Sandoz, a Defense Department official.

[. . .] The call-ups are under what the military calls a ``partial mobilization,'' which was ordered by President Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks. During this, the president can activate up to 1 million reservists and Guard members to serve up to two years.

The last partial mobilization took place during the Persian Gulf War, but few, if any, served more than a year because the war ended so quickly, officials said. The Vietnam War had many reservists serving full two-year terms.

Now, since I got called up during Persian Gulf War I, I can say whatever the fuck I want. Convenient, no?

I was a student at the time, not unlike Ellen Feiss, only of legal age, you sick perverts. So I was actually making more money during the time I was in.

Lotta guys I was over there with were only in the Reserves so they'd have a full 20 years of service, and could retire with full benefits. These were older guys, with real careers and families. Some of 'em ran their own businesses, like our medic, and if you're thinking they were making anywhere near as much running around in the sandbox you haven't noticed what military pay is. People do not live on post because it's a shorter walk to muster; they do so because even with a housing allowance, they can't afford to live among civilians.

Yeah, there are laws requiring creditors to not give you too much shit because you've taken a huge pay cut, and employers (for those who weren't self-employed) were required to take you back if you lived. That still meant for a lot of hardship.

At this point, the chickenhawks would chime in about how these people knew the risks when they signed up. Um, no. Back then, at least, our enemy was the USSR (remember them?), and conventional wisdom was that in the event of a war, we'd all be fucked. You wouldn't have to worry about your construction business or medical practice idling for several months, because we were all going to be killed in a nuclear strike. Paradoxically, a larger enemy meant it was safer to be in the Reserves.

The other funny thing, for expansive definitions of funny, is that some guys had their contracts expire during the conflict. Oddly, they felt little compulsion to re-up. Equally oddly, the military basically said, "Sorry, can't afford to lose you. You're staying."

This really had a positive effect on morale.

They did let this one guy go home, after his house in rural [insert Southern state here] burned to the ground because the [volunteer] fire department had a long-ass drive to the place. That was sweet of them, I think.

Oh, and the guy who had a life-threatening allergic reaction to the perfectly safe drugs we were given. They let him go, too. So it wasn't all gloom and doom.

I can almost accept the warbloggers treating The Enemy as faceless and expendable -- remember how they were whining about not wanting to hear more about Afghan civilian casualties? -- but you'd think they'd treat our forces like human beings. And you'd be wrong.

I'm mostly talking enlisted, though. We were quite aware we ain't count for shit, but from the brass that was expected. These warblogger fucks, though. . . damn. How much you want to bet they're the ones who criticize the left for not supporting our troops or tying enough yellow ribbons around old oak trees?

Fuck the random lottery draft shit. They need to just fire up Google, see who's seriously enthused about invading other folks, and specifically get them to do it. I expect you'd see a rash of foot injuries.

And again I say: Pussies.

I said not to ask. . . turns out the unit I did my drills with was not, in fact, the unit I was actually in. So when NMCB 24 out of Redstone Arsenal, Alabama got the call, so did I in *cough* Chicago, Illinois. If I'd told 'em I lived in Shampoo-Banana, I'd have had to do drills with some group in Danville or something. Oddly, they didn't blink when I submitted the paperwork for education benefits because I was enrolled at UIUC. Internal communication not their strong point. Which is how they once gave me tickets for a flight to San Diego out of Midway that didn't even exist anymore, then told me they'd get me on a flight out of O'Hare (when I called from Midway to let them know). You ever drive from Midway to O'Hare? During Summer Road Construction season? Knowing that if you missed the flight, you'd be declared AWOL?

Ah, the military. They had the audacity to ask me why I didn't want to re-up.

Update: See, same message, but a picture is worth a thousand words. I am so surplus to requirements around here. . .

Posted by Aaron at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (35) | TrackBacks (0)

On the latest, no-we-ain't-going Jo'burg summit, Toren Smith writes:

One can only look at the professional whiners, NGO-ticks, worthless EUnuch bureaucrats, aid parasites and other assorted riff-raff gathered in South Africa like a vast glob of idiocy and wish those black market nukes were just a little easier to come by.

As of 2000, Mr. Smith was President of the translation/localization house Studio Proteus. He lived in Japan for some time, but either never got 'round to visiting the Peace Memorial Museum, or was constantly confused about why the locals didn't find his jokes about nukes funny.

He continues:

The sight of pompous liars like Mbeki, who took a stable, relatively peaceful, and prosperous nation and turned it into a economic basket case rotten with crime and paralytic with corruption telling us to clean up our act is sick-making. Yes, there's no more apartheid in South Africa. Except now the blacks there have a lower life expectancy and a reduced per capita income, among other miseries. Don't get me wrong--apartheid had to go, but the reality is that the end result has been a worse life for the average South African black, including a nearly doubled chance of being murdered by members of another tribe.

For a minute there, I was getting him wrong. It almost sounded like he was saying the lives of blacks were better under apartheid.

No, wait, that is what he's saying. Oddly, I got that link to Kim (old boy in the next entry) from Toren's site. Can you figure out what these two have in common?

Update: Any San Francisco readers who aren't headed to Toren's for a quick, full-contact "diversity training seminar", let me know how the PS2 Online Launch Party at the Metreon goes.

Oh, and any Windows users out there want to tell me if the Kingdom Hearts site is worth rebooting for? You maybe want to make sure the kids ain't in the room. I got a feeling Square + Disney = Even Worse Crack for Children than Yu-Gi-Oh.

Yes, I'm a hypocrite. Sue me.

And I'd look for the guy who basically called for the West to re-colonize the lesser races, as we're incapable of running countries on our own, but am in a shitty enough mood as it is now.

Posted by Aaron at 8:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (3)

Answer:

Kim du Toit was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. Kim emigrated to the United States in 1986. [. . .] Kim, proudly, became a U.S. citizen in 1989. Having fled the liberals in Chicago, Illinois, Kim now lives in north Texas. He still hates Mayor Daley.

Question: Who the fuck would write this shit?

Lest anyone forget, the sainted Nelson Mandela's African National Congress party is essentially Communist. This is one reason why Mandela was imprisoned for so long (apart from his being a self-confessed terrorist, of course), and why the ANC were hounded out of South Africa.

Mandela was released, open elections were held and the ANC came to power. People held their breath, expecting the Blacks to wreak vengeance on the Whites for the years of apartheid-- and largely because of Mandela, who had become a lot more pragmatic while in prison, this never happened.

That whole "wreak vengeance on the Whites" notion is sounding better and better these days. Darn shame I'd be spending this period keeping idiots from vengeancing themselves on friends & family. Otherwise, I could probably get a PS2 during the looting.

np - Lisa Germano, Geek the Girl

Posted by Aaron at 7:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

And on this Women's Equality Day, or a few days ago when he had a spare minute, Our Glorious Leader did proclaim:

Today, American women enjoy unprecedented opportunities in business, education, politics, and countless other aspects of our society. Historically, however, women suffered grave inequalities and were denied some of the most fundamental benefits of citizenship.

Each year on August 26th, we mark the important anniversary of the day on which women gained the right to vote. In celebrating Women's Equality Day, we remember the brave and determined individuals who worked to ensure that all women have the opportunity to participate in our democracy. Their dedication to the suffrage movement improved our society, and continues to inspire women today.

[. . .] In Afghanistan, the Taliban used violence and fear to deny Afghan women access to education, health care, mobility, and the right to vote. Our coalition has liberated Afghanistan and restored fundamental human rights and freedoms to Afghan women, and all the people of Afghanistan. Young girls in Afghanistan are able to attend schools for the first time.

Mind you, at a different part of the White House site, we have:

This is the first time in several years that many Afghan boys and girls--especially girls--will have the chance to attend school. The people of Afghanistan have been hurt by years of civil war and a brutal government that didn't give its citizens the freedoms that we enjoy. When the Taliban regime was running the country (from 1996 through 2001), girls were banned from the classroom. Women teachers weren't allowed to teach. Not many boys went to school either. Only 32 percent of Afghanistan's 4.4 million children were enrolled in school in 1999. Nearly all girls, 92 percent, were not in school.

Maybe the Proclamation meant young girls born after the Taliban took power. Yeah, that's the ticket.

And we're back to the ever-popular agentless passive again. Naming no names, or even groups, "women suffered grave inequalities and were denied some of the most fundamental benefits of citizenship."

Wankers.

Posted by Aaron at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (0)

One site that pops up doing a Google search on civil rights movement Jews (and for some reason using that term makes me uncomfortable) is From Swastika to Jim Crow - Black-Jewish Relations, for the ITVS program of the same name. Was a bit surprised to see this praise for the show, given the source:

The story of Black-Jewish relations in the United States is a long and complex one.... Jews were among those who worked to establish the NAACP in 1909. African-American newspapers were among the first in the U.S. to denounce Nazism.... FROM SWASTIKA TO JIM CROW creates hope and reminds us of a time in U.S. history when the two communities came together.

- David Horowitz, Washington Review

I mean, that doesn't sound anything like the current David Horowitz:

You'll recognize many of the names of the Reparations movement leaders immediately. It's a who's who in the racial shakedown racket: Jesse Jackson. Al Sharpton. Johnnie Cochran. Randall Robinson. Cornel West. These men, and others from the far left, are preparing for the biggest legal shakedown in the history unless they're stopped. During the past half year, David Horowitz has spoken campuses across this great nation, appeared on countless television and radio talk shows, and distributed thousands of books and booklets detailing who is behind the reparations movement and why. Hes worked hard to expose the true motivation - money and power -- behind the movement and to educate millions of Americans to the damage this divisive movement will do our nation if it is allowed to proceed and succeed.

I like the <em> tag. It's purty.

You don't have to be in favor of reparations -- I'm not, after all -- to find rhetoric like that more damaging and divisive than the call for reparations itself. Reasonable people may disagee on this, as with all things.

Back to the show:

With the late 1960s came the birth of the Black Power movement, emphasizing self-determination, self-defense tactics and racial pride, and representing a radical break from the nonviolence and racial integration espoused by the Reverend Martin Luther King. The separatist rise of Black nationalism was just one of the difficulties facing the Black-Jewish alliance since the end of the Civil Rights movement. The rapid decline of American anti-Semitism since 1945, combined with the nation's continuing pervasive racism, convinced Blacks there was an insurmountable racial gulf separating the two groups. Blacks no longer perceived the division as one between the persecutors and their victims - including Jews - but between those with white skin and those with black. Through the eyes of Blacks, Jews became Whites with all the privileges their skin color won them, regardless of alliances they had in the past.

As early as the first two decades after World War II, James Baldwin, Kenneth Clark and other Blacks encouraged liberal Jews to give up the "special relationship." This came in part from a fear that the Jews' determined belief in their bond with Blacks would eventually become offensive and, paradoxically, provoke Black anti-Semitism. The prospect of this shift was incomprehensible to Jews who believed that their own history, culminating in the Holocaust, defined them as oppressed and thus incapable of being the oppressor.

And here we are today.

There's an utterly appalling -- there's that word again -- little site called Blacks and Jews Newspage, which describes itself as "dedicated to the dissemination of accurate information about the historical relationship between Blacks and Jews. This site IS NOT an OFFICIAL website of the Nation of Islam or of any individuals or organizations named within."

They provide a helpful link to the Nation of Domination site, though.

Found a link there at another site that pops up in the original Google search, Jewish Tribal Review. Their self-description states:

This site exists for non-profit educational purposes only. Its purpose is to elicit public discussion about the issues above. It is against all forms of bigotry. Criticizing the wealthiest ethnic group in America and any expression of its ethnocentrism, in-group solidarity, racism, unethical behavior, dual moral standards, political influence, dedication to a foreign nation, and exertion of power is not bigotry. It is one of our most elemental rights in a free society: to expose the bias, hypocrisy and injustice of influential power elites that effect all our lives.

(The Jewish Tribal Review has been defamed by a web site called "The Hate Directory" as an example of "hate." That defamation is fraud. Read our email exchanges with that Hate site's proprietor and decide for yourself which web site -- that one or this one -- holds the higher moral ground).

If the words "wealthiest ethnic group in America" don't set off alarm bells, there's something very wrong with you. True or not -- and I can't be arsed to look up the stat, and worry about anyone who'd actually note such a thing -- it plays to some very old stereotypes.

Mind you, there is a double standard about stereotypes, too.

The site is listed under Google Directory - Society > Issues > Race-Ethnic-Religious Relations > Hate > Hate Groups > Anti-Semitism, and they've some fairly nasty company.

There's also a category for Google Directory - Society > Issues > Race-Ethnic-Religious Relations > Hate > Hate Groups > Jewish.

At an August 17, 2002 rally in Washington to demand "slavery reparations" -- also attended by the black Hitler Louis Farrakhan, recently returned from giving aid and comfort to America's enemies in Iraq -- ungrateful New York City Councilman Charles Barron threatened to storm the Treasury Department for his "40 acres and a mule" before promising random racist violence if his demands were not satisfied: I want to go up to the closest white person and say, "You can't understand this, it's a black thing," and then slap him, just for my mental health.

A former Black Panther, Barron joined with Brooklyn Borough President Marky Markowitz in ousting pictures of the Founding Fathers from Brooklyn Borough Hall in favor of the drug-dealing pimp, rapist and woman-beater Malcolm X, who admitted in his ghost-written Autobiography that he enjoyed beating white prostitutes for his "mental health."

Oh, that wacky Jewish Task Force.

There are only 7 Jewish hate groups listed, as opposed to 12 for blacks. But the winner, and still champion, with 242 different organizations of sweet, sweet hatin', are white folks.

This figure does not include warblogs. They need a new directory editor.

Posted by Aaron at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

The lovely and talented Bob Mould was on Wait Wait -- Don't Tell Me! this weekend, for those of you who have lives and disposable income, and don't rely on public radio for entertainment and companionship.

Couple weeks back, they had Buddy Guy (and I just mistyped that "Buffy", but will chalk it up to bad finger placement). Week after that, Orrin Hatch was on the show, being all human and what-not. It's harder to hate people when they do that.

Luckily,

Why has nobody put a bullet through Yassir Arafat's skull yet?

this is not a problem with Mister Charlie. Christ.

A few weeks back, he wrote:

Aaron of Uppity Negro couldn't open his mouth to me without insinuating I'm a racist

Gee, I'm not allowed to post at his site, so I guess I'll have to respond here.

Bitch, I ain't insinuating shit. You make racist statements, if that's a preferable way of conveying the idea. Otherwise, yes, I think you're a racist, dumb-ass mother fucker, and I ask about you the same thing you wonder about Arafat. Or is it a threat when a Negro says that about you, as opposed to you writing about a member of the lesser races?

Honestly, you meet the most appalling sorts of people.

Yes, I appall people too, but at least I don't claim to be "politically incorrect" or "provocative" when I do it. Wankers.

Posted by Aaron at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, again with the Scrawl. The mix tape ended with "11:59 (It's January)" from Nature Film, leaving me to think this was a New Years Eve thing. Which year? Um. . .

Dwayne McDuffie and Kyle Baker goodness up at Comicon.com:

[WB Animation studio is] also chock full of comics folks. Of course, Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, the masterminds behind the entire Batman Animated franchise work there. In addition, Denys Cowan is co-producer on Static Shock, and Dwayne McDuffie is story editing JLA. While I was snooping around, I saw a cubicle with the name plate "Kyle Baker" - alas Kyle was not there, but I did see his storyboards for a new Looney Tunes short he had pinned to his wall. But I can't say anything about them! I don't know about you, but when I hear the words "Kyle Baker" and "Looney Tunes" together, I get all tingly.

[. . .] At last, I saw Dwayne McDuffie, hard at work on a JLA script. I even asked him some questions, and I am allowed to tell you what he said.

THE PULSE: How did you make the jump from comics scribe to animation scribe?

MCDUFFIE: STATIC, a comic book I co-created for Milestone, was adapted into the Kids WB series STATIC SHOCK (now going into its third season). Producer Alan (BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES, BATMAN BEYOND) Burnett gave me a shot at writing a script for the series early in the first season and was also kind enough to ask me back for two more (I've ended up doing three scripts in each of the three seasons). When an injury prevented Paul Dini from finishing his work on a two-part JUSTICE LEAGUE episode, producer Rich Fogel gave me the nod (I can account for my whereabouts at the time of Paul's accident. My lawyers say I can't stress this enough). The scripts came out well and I was given two more. Later they asked me to join Justice League's staff as a story editor for the second season. I've also done a Scooby Doo episode for the fall season.

Yes, back to cartoons, but at least now they're American cartoons. And Dwayne McDuffie, Kyle Baker and Denys Cowan are black, so technically this is vaguely on-topic for this site.

Oh, the person doing the interviews is one of the few women working in the comics industry, which also makes this on-topic.

What, me snarky?

Posted by Aaron at 7:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Am listening to an old mix tape I never got 'round to sending (was it for Alex?), because I suck. Think I managed to kill Scrawl, although I did get to see 'em live once. Beezus I know broke up, but deny responsibility. As both groups had actual talent rather than relying on T&A, neither achieved the success of [insert pop tart of the moment here]. Stupid Americans.

Anyway, you can get a Beezus single for fifty cents from Parasol, if you're a dino like me and actually own a turntable. Otherwise, there's EMusic. Who I can no longer download stuff I bought and paid for from, since I don't have a subscription. They're getting a nasty email one of these days.

Oh yeah, and listen to Women in Music with Laney Goodman. It does tend towards granola, compared to the old "She's Actual Size" show on WEFT, but don't let my ignorant prejudices stop you. And I'm sure there are some people who just can't get enough of female folk singer/songwriters with guitars. . .

Posted by Aaron at 6:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

See, I'd actually connected to AIM and everything, using Gaim, right, but then I foolishly decided I wanted to use a buddy icon. C'mon, who can resist Skank Zero Hopeless Savage?

Anyway, the instructions call for changing the protocol from TOC to Oscar. Don't worry about it. Just don't do it. Took me right back to thinking I was on, when this was not the case.

Bastards. Just when I found some cool Sakura and Escaflowne icons, too.

No one has said, "Shut the hell up about your anime, nobody wants to hear about your anime," but this should be the last of it. Really.

Another part of the source of that last set of icons, strictlyshoujo.com | anime and manga for girls, focuses on Card Captor Sakura. The Japanese version, obviously, rather than The Crime of Cardcaptors:

A few weeks ago, KidsWB began airing a show entitled "Cardcaptors." Fans of Card Captor Sakura may have noticed that this show bears some eerie semblance to our beloved CLAMP creation.

Alas, it is, in fact, only a semblance.

Nelvana seems to have mutilated the show beyond all possible recognition.

If you visit their FAQ, you will notice that Nelvana attributes this to market research which indicates that "kids" wished to see the show center more on Li Syaoran (Li Showron, to uneducated Americans -- and never you mind that Li is supposed to be his last name). While we don't have access to their hard data, I rather suspect they polled a heavily male audience. You know, the ones who watch Pokemon. Because it is this same audience they wish to attract. (A later interview with Nelvana confirmed this fact -- it was requested by Kids WB. See http://www.fantasticon.com/anime/features/cardcaptors.html for more information.)

Since the existing animation market in American is something like 70 percent male, young males after all are the only people worth polling.

Girls just don't matter.

For once, the long-suffering-fan routine (which is what keeps me from most anime and manga newsgroups and web sites) is actually appropriate. KidsWB took a show with a female protagonist and tried to edit it into one with a boy in the starring role. This meant actually skipping the first seven episodes of the series, so they could begin with the one introducing Li, but the others just set up the situation and the minor characters. You know, the girls.

Fox did something similar with Escaflowne, starting their version of the series with the second episode. They also, paradoxically, played up the fighting while removing the bloodshed. The Escaflowne Report, linked in an earlier entry, goes into actually troublingly obsessive detail about what was removed from the US broadcast version. A brief sample:

As the reports said, the first episode was skipped almost entirely. Or rather, as I predicted it was folded down into about 5 minutes total, then interspersed into the second episode at reasonably appropriate times to create a backstory; a sparse one, but at least it's there, which is more than you can say for Cardcaptors. Generally, whenever Hitomi cuts to one of her visions or daydreams in the second episode, we are instead shown key visions or events from the first episode.

[. . .] But by far the most meaningful change is how the American edit handles violence. As I mentioned in my introduction, there is a lot of violence, blood, death, and destruction in Escaflowne, much more so than anything else you're likely to see on Saturday morning. This is because Escaflowne was targeted towards a high school teen audience and showed at a less juvenile pre-prime-time slot. The American edit does not - because it is targeting [younger] kids. I was curious as to how they could deal with this discrepancy. As expected, they did find a way, although I can't say I'm all that pleased with it.

First of all, it would be impossible to omit the death and destruction without completely screwing up the show, so they didn't try to do that. Insteady they chose to tone down how it is done. Virtually all signs of blood have been eliminated. Anytime someone is attacked, they never actually show them being hit. Instead they show them aiming, firing, and then cut to the victim falling to the ground. We never see the weapon actually hitting them, piercing their body, or making them bleed. Nor do their bodies afterwards show much visible signs of damage. But the unfortunate consequence of this method of reducing the intensity of the battle is the disruption of the flow.

For those of you who saw the original version, yes, that was my reaction, too. . .

If you're really bored, you can debate whether or not Escaflowne was shoujou to begin with; Anime News Network's editorial on the Fox edit says it wasn't, and there were two different comics/manga adaptations of the series, girly character-development heavy shoujou and fightin' robots action shonen. If I wanted to lose serious money in the dying comics market, I'd buy the rights to both and publish 'em together in a flip book, half of each issue dedicated to each version. Then retailers could write saying it sold better when they racked it the boys' version cover facing out, and wouldn't it be more sensible to use the back cover for ads instead? And maybe take the girls' version out completely, since people were complaining about paying for half a book they had no intention of reading?

Funny. I was writing about pop culture so I wouldn't get annoyed.

Want to know more? There's more info on the Escalowne Manga if you want. Warning: Hitomi seems to have gone all upfront in the shonen version. Another reason it would sell better in comics shops. Perverts.

Slight return: The archive doesn't have a copy of that interview from http://www.fantasticon.com/anime/features/cardcaptors.htm, and their 404 isn't that interesting. There's a discussion about the interview from way back in 2000 from rec.arts.anime.misc at Google Groups, if you're interested. There's one pull quote from Nelvana:

This series is about capturing the various magical cards running about, not about sexual relationships. The various relationships you speak of are not conducive to children's programming.

Because, you know, children don't have crushes or anything, and everyone is perfectly, totally straight until they hit college at the earliest.

Anyone else amused at the loss of the interview due to the site going down (well, along with the robots.txt instructions)? At least when a print magazine goes under, there are old issues floating around. I'm sure someone saved/printed a copy of the thing, but for it to no longer be publicly available (without more digging than I felt like doing), in the face of all we've been told about how the web is superior to dead trees media. . . No, this is a rant for another day.

Posted by Aaron at 1:31 PM | Permalink

Plugged Lynn Peril's name into Google, since I'd forgotten the location for Mystery Date and looking for it here would mean reading my crap writing and wincing. One of the results was an article she did about (a book on) Bettie Page.

LET ME get it off my chest right away: I am sick of Bettie Page, the dark-haired, straight-banged pinup model who walked away from it all in 1957. What has led to this ennui? In a word, oversaturation. The years following Page's disappearance have seen the rise of a veritable Bettie Page cult.

Which is actually more than I ever knew about the woman. The sorts of stores that feature merchandise bearing her image usually aren't the sorts of places where you want to ask questions. Not needing Comic Book Guy mocking my ignorance, thanks. I'll just hide it instead.

The review was in The San Francisco Bay Guardian, the current issue of which features an article on Deep Dick Collective. Which Ronn Taylor mentioned a few days ago, but he's cooler than I am.

"D/DC occupies this space that isn't exactly comfortable for anybody," [member Tim'm T.] West tells me a week later, during our interview at Sexual Minority Alliance of Alameda County (SMAAC), the Oakland-based gay youth center where he worked until he recently left to pursue teaching high school full time. "We're not comfortable for black gay people; we're not a comfortable act for white gay people, white straight people, black straight people. We draw people who are actually thinking about identity - dealing with their racism and erotophobia. You don't get to be this cool gay white guy and not called out in some regards. But there are audiences that do get committed to the ideas that we're talking about, and they are doing some soul-searching."

I'm all in favor of soul-searching. For other folks, anyway. I ain't got time for that shit.

There's also a piece by Annalee Newitz of Bad Subjects fame. Or perhaps fame and Bad Subjects should not appear in the same sentence. . .

Any road up, think sfbg.com gets added to the sprawling monstrosity that is my bookmarks.

Since otherwise, I'd have to come back here to find the link. And ah hates doing that.

Posted by Aaron at 8:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

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