aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Drill cancelled
It’s Severe Weather Awareness Week in Georgia, and companies, government offices, churches and more were supposed to conducted a severe weather drill today.
The drill was cancelled.
Beatboxing flutist
The theme song to inspector gadget on the flute while beatboxing…
Via WWdN: In Exile.
A Hacking Netflix idea to pursue
Hacking Netflix has a cool idea using Yahoo Pipes, Netflix, and a PVR. Using your Netflix queue RSS feeds, it would be cool if movies being shown on cable could be recorded automatically from your Netflix queue, and removed afterwards so you don’t have to rent them. The author mentions Yahoo pipes, a nice RSS mashup tool, but it’s not totally necessary.
It’s not currently possible, but it certainly seems doable, and something I’d use if it showed up on my TiVo.
Read on for HDMI cable warnings, “You can find perfectly good cables in the $5-$20 range online at lots of places.”
Unleashing the ugly truth
There is something bracing in the matter-of-fact clarity of Hardaway’s declaration. He cut through the clutter of weasel words and half-truths that traditionally surrounds homophobia, showed us what lies behind honeyed euphemisms ( ‘traditional values’ ), and claims to speak for God.
‘I hate gays,’ he said. Period, end of sentence. The statement had to it the same flat clarity of Bull Connor, straw hat on his head, cigar clenched in his teeth, siccing dogs on children. [...]
So often, we use words to distance ourselves from what we feel, to hide our true meaning, even from ourselves. Hardaway used words to say exactly what he felt, and it is possible to abhor what he felt and yet, appreciate that he does not make you guess or infer.
Think again of Connor, screaming obscenities under an Alabama sun. To hear him, to hear Hardaway, is to know that you have finally come down to it, finally met the beast that lives behind euphemism and weasel words.
It is ugly, but it is also, at long last, truth.
Barbara Gittings dies
I didn’t know her, but I was fortunate enough to have met her while a student working on the film Before Stonewall:
Barbara Gittings, a gay rights activist since the late 1950s, died yesterday in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. She was 75.
Friends say Gittings died after a lengthy fight with breast cancer. She helped organise the New York City chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, an early lesbian rights organisation, in the 1950s. During her work with that group, she met her life partner, Kay Lahusen.
She first became well known to the public in 1965, when she helped organise gay-rights demonstrations at the White House and Independence Hall.
Gittings had served as head of the American Library Association’s Gay Task Force. In 2003, the association presented her its highest honour, a lifetime membership.
Bill O’Reilly’s Genarlow hypocrisy
Genarlow made the O’Reilly Factor Talking Points the other day:
Wilson’s lawyer appealed, but lost. However, Wilson remains an object of sympathy in some quarters. But should he be?
This 17-year-old girl continues to say she was raped by Wilson and five other men who pled guilty in this case. But Wilson was found not guilty at trial, despite the fact the jury saw this:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GENARLOW WILSON, CONVICTED SEX PREDATOR: Look at it closely. (BLEEP).
(END VIDEO CLIP)
The girl says she believes she was drugged. By most accounts, she seem to be intoxicated.
The reason we’re reporting this story is sometimes the media glorifies people who don’t deserve to be glorified.
Everything I’ve read says the sex was consensual. Where does O’Reilly find her saying she was raped?
The hubris and hypocrisy of his moralism is made manifest when you recall their were audio tapes about to be released in his own sex harassment suit. Jurors never heard them because he settled for millions of dollars and a binding non-disclosure agreement that snuffed out his own media fire just 2 weeks after the suit was brought. Recall some details:
Hours after Bill O’Reilly accused her of a multimillion dollar shakedown attempt, a female Fox News producer fired back at the TV star today, filing a lawsuit claiming that he subjected her to repeated instances of sexual harassment and spoke often, and explicitly, to her about phone sex, vibrators, threesomes, masturbation, the loss of his virginity, and sexual fantasies. Below [here] you’ll find a copy of Andrea Mackris’s complaint, an incredible page-turner that quotes O’Reilly, 55, on all sorts of lewd matters. Based on the extensive quotations cited in the complaint, it appears a safe bet that Mackris, 33, recorded some of O’Reilly’s more steamy soliloquies. For example, we direct you to his Caribbean shower fantasies. While we suggest reading the entire document, TSG will point you to interesting sections on a Thailand sex show, Al Franken, and the climax of one August 2004 phone conversation.
Remember, O’Reilly was 55 at the time, married and a father of two; the victim was 33. Genarlow was 17, the girl 15. A perfect example of the point in why we’re freaking out. There I pointed to Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex:
Among other insights, Levine wrote that “obsession with pedophiles stems for the reluctance to confront incest and the rampant sexualization of children” in American culture. “Adults project the eroticized desire outwards, creating a monster to hate, hunt down and destroy.”
STOP DEMONIZING CRIMINALIZING OUR KIDS BECAUSE YOU ARE A DIRTY OLD MAN!
LATER: I now understand that O’Reilly was referring to the girl Genralow had intercourse with, not the girl he had oral sex with. Sorry for my confusion.
Lawmaker who wrote child molestation provision has regrets
He says he never meant to criminalize kids for consensual sex:
ATLANTA - The former lawmaker who wrote a bill increasing the punishment for child abuse and child molestation said Tuesday that he never meant the law to be used against teens engaging in consensual sex acts.
Now, the General Assembly should revisit the law so that those who fall under those circumstances do not continue serving their 10-year prison sentences, said Matt Towery, a former Republican state representative who sponsored the Child Protection Act in 1995.
“I still feel the responsibility so many years later that this has turned out the way it has, and it needs to be fixed,” said Towery, a political columnist and owner of an online media company in Atlanta.
At a news conference, Towery said lawmakers should consider Senate Bill 37 as a way to solve the issue. [...]
Towery, who described himself a longtime friend of [SB 37 sponsor Sen. Emanuel] Johnson [D-Decatur], said he did not want to “blindside” the senator by speaking in favor of SB 37 but added that he has been frustrated for years that the provision was not fixed earlier.
Towery said the only reason the age of consent rules were changed in his child protection rules in the mid-1990s was because Senate Judiciary leaders said it was the only way the bill would come up for a vote in the upper chamber.
“I did not want to see then, nor do I want to see now, them serving 10-year sentences for something like this,” he said.
Yesterday Griftdrift pointed out that the only thing about the Georgia state legislature to be featured on the front page of the Metro Section of the AJC was a story about the licensing of water buffalo. So I went there to find this story today. It was there, but the Jacksonville.com story was nearly have again as long and more complete so I chose to quote it.
RELATED: “Senate President Eric Johnson, R-Savannah, also is facing increased attention outside Georgia for his opposition to reexamining the law.” That attention is well-earned! See: Evidence, jurors be damned. State senator says it’s rape!
AND ALSO: It’s hard to believe, but a case in Florida could be even worse.
