Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Real American Heroes

I’m moved, appalled and angered.

Amero sentencing delayed yet again

Says e-computer security:

I determined the rescheduling to May 18th by calling the GA-21 Criminal Clerks office in Norwich Superior Court this morning at about 11:30PM EDST.  I was told by the media it was not official yet and I suspect that is why none of the media seem to have picked this up yet.  None-the-less, I was told the following, “The Julie Amero sentencing hearing has been rescheduled for May 18th in Norwich Superior Court.” Thus, I have no reason to doubt its accuracy.

For all the others who have not gotten our attention, this is the plea I’ve appended to all of my Amero posts:

WE NEED A COMPUTER FORENSICS INNOCENCE PROJECT; a Barry Sheck and Peter Neufeld of the computer forensics world. We need experts who believe in the presumption of innocence and are willing to spend the time it takes to dig through logs, registry entries and hard drives to find exculpatory material when present. This is not really the first case of its kind and, unfortunately, it’s not likely be the last. Prosecutors who look for - and presume - guilt do selective searches for data supporting guilt; those accused rarely have the resources to pay computer forensics experts to counter that selective evidence.

LATER: It’s official, and apparently comes at the prosecutor’s request, “Tuesday’s motion came at the request of assistant state’s attorney David J. Smith, who prosecuted the case. His request was signed by Judge Hillary B. Strackbein.”

NASCAR Gets First Openly Gay Driver

I’m working on editing the video of the time I drove a car in an enduro-car race in the wilds of central Pennsylvania. Talk about a mid-life crisis! I flipped the car on the 16th lap (and have distrusted the number 16 ever since).

I mention it because among its challenges was the fact that I was a gay man from New York City, an odd duck to find in an enduro racer. The memory is occasioned by word of the first out Nascar driver:

“I’m going to be the first gay pro racecar driver,” Evan Darling said in no uncertain terms in February on the Internet radio show “Lady and the Tramp.” Though, when pressed, he told host Lady Chablis that he considers himself more of “a racecar driver who happens to be gay” than “a gay racecar driver.”

However one wants to define the socially correct parameters, Darling, 39, finally got to live out his dream earlier this month. After slumming in the amateur division for about 13 years, he competed in his first pro race, the Grand-Am Koni Challenge in Miami on April 13.

RSS explained…

...in plain English from Common Craft:

Click To Play

No gay Heroes

The speculation has been confirmed. In Heroes writer Bryan Fuller’s Pop Gurls interview we learn that Claire’s friend Zach on the NBC show was indeed going to be a gay character:

It absolutely was a path that we were going to take. In the first meetings when we were sitting down and talking about the show, one of the things about the show that Tim said that he wanted all these characters to represent different people in the world and we had an Asian guy and an Indian guy andÂ… a whole bunch of white people. He just wanted it to be a united Benetton cast. I said that’s fantastic, but if we have this many people, then we need to have a gay character. If you want to represent the world, that’s certainly a demographic that we need to hit. [Tim completely agreed and] was thinking Claire’s best friend might be a good person – and I couldn’t agree more. So we were definitely going down a route of making [Zach] the gay character and having him have a big role in her life and sort of teaching her to come out about her ability and embrace herself and actually using the coming out metaphor and the gay metaphor in that instance as a fun piece of storytelling.

There was an unfortunate miscommunication and when the script arrived that had the line in it, ‘I would take you to homecoming but you have to know that I don’t like girls that way.’ The actor [Thomas Dekker]’s, manager threatened to pull him from the show because he was up for the John Carter role in The Sarah Connor Chronicles and she didn’t want him playing a gay character because it might affect FOX’s interest in hiring him. It got really ugly.

Considering Heroes is a show about people embracing what’s special about themselves, it would have been great for gay teens see themselves reflected on TV by Zach.

It’s unfortunate and really – we only took one line out of the script. In really, in all of our minds, the character was still gay but we couldn’t say it explicitly.

I was very upset by it – I was not happy about it at all. There were times I had to avoid talking about it because we didn’t want to have a negative reflection on the show. The show’s been such a positive experience for so many people, we didn’t want to get hung up on the fact that one actor’s management felt that it was a career killer for him to play a homosexual which, as a gay man, I found incredibly insulting.

We had episodes planned for him to be in, and she pulled him from the show altogether. So that’s why he sort of disappeared.

Via Gay Orbit, “It’s a shame that some people think ‘playing gay’ is the impediment it used to be.”

Not your father’s manufactured home

Building a foundation for green living photo gallery. CNet story here.