Abstract Acacias

I've decided that the BSG swear word "frack" should be considered to be derived from the Latin frango, "to break." It totally works.

monanotlisa and I went wine tasting along Route 46 today. We went to four wineries, three of which I'd never been to, and the fourth of which (JanKris) is my favorite, so I always try and go back if I can. For that matter, I'm seriously toying with the idea of joining their wine club, except I don't get through wine all that quickly. In any case, the other three were: York Mountain Winery, Pipestone Winery, and Midnight Cellars. We had orders from my mother to get some wine for Thanksgiving tomorrow, so we got a gorgeous Pinot Noir at York Mountain (the best wine on their list, by far, though I also really liked their Roussanne, which is a kind of wine I'd never had before). And we got a Petit Sirah at the second place — the second place was a little family-owned winery at which I loved every single wine on their list because they were all so exceedingly flavorful. Except we quickly determined that monanotlisa and I do not generally look for the same things in wine. She doesn't like her wines to be very sweet at all; I tend to prefer them a bit sweet. Regardless, though, we managed to agree wholeheartedly on a few. At Midnight Cellars, however, I think she pretty much liked the first half of the tasting menu, while I liked the second half, give or take a couple on each.

Anyway, time to go to sleep, since tomorrow's a big day — cooking, eating, more eating, more eating... how will I ever cope?

A (you): Going to see DIDO & AENEAS!!!

Dido & Aeneas

"Love, treachery, misery, fury, vengeance, and death!"

St Alban's
1501 Washington Ave. (at Curtis)
Albany, CA

Friday, November 9 & Saturday, November 10 @ 8pm

played by Alice's Renaissance String Band
& with Baroque Dancers

I'm singing the 1st witch and 1st sailor, as well as being alto chorus, so I'm onstage lots!

Link to the event page on Facebook

With all of my replying to other people's Dumbledore posts in comments, I thought I should collect my opinions here. (All of these are culled directly from comments, so some of the context shifts may be a little abrupt, and there may be repetition.) More to potentially be added as I reply to comments further.

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To be perfectly honest, I don't agree. Not that I think JKR is necessarily a good storyteller, but I don't think that omission of Dumbledore's sexual orientation is proof of this. We don't know anything about any of the teachers' love-lives. Since these books were ostensibly written as kids books, that makes sense. You never know anything about your teachers' personal lives. (I mean, we called our teachers by their first names and knew how many kids they had, but I remember, for example, how in Mathilda it was a great revelation to the students to learn Miss Honey's first name.)

In HP, we don't know if a single one of the teachers is married, has children, etc., so why should we know that one of them's gay? If we did, it would only have been there to say LOOK, I HAVE A GAY CHARACTER, I'M SO AWESOME AND OPEN-MINDED.

If Dumbledore had been alive in the 7th book, that would be a different story, because of all the stuff about Grindelwald. But he wasn't.

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But Snape's love-life is important because it deals with Harry, not because of how it shapes his character in general. If Lily had been, say, Padma and Parvati's mother, and he'd picked on them to no end rather than Harry, we'd probably never have gotten information on why he was so nasty to them.

And as I said on someone else's post, it's not like people reading the books from now on aren't going to know Dumbledore's gay, since her revelation has obviously spread across the internet like wildfire.

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If it's a question of JKR's "bravery," as some people are saying, then I think saying it after-the-fact is really just as brave as saying it in the books, because look at how it's spreading across the internet like wildfire — everyone's going to know.

So then on the other hand (as regards students, not teachers), yes, if she really wanted to be actively pro-gay yadda yadda, then she could have made one of Harry's circle gay. But that wasn't what the book was about, and just tossing it out there would have seemed very much like having any other token minority would. You notice the way she deals with her black characters? There's mention of it maybe once, when we first meet them, in the same way that she would say someone's Irish or has red hair, and then we don't encounter it again. Lee's black, Angelina's black, Dean's black, Kingsley's black — and I didn't even remember those last two until they showed up as black in the film, and I had to go back to the book and say "really?" (And I think Angelina wasn't in the film, tsk tsk.) Except when you meet someone gay it's not going to say "She was small, with freckles and crooked teeth, and terribly fancied other girls." So then it becomes an issue of "is it actually relevant to the story?" And very few kids are out in high school; if they know they're gay, they're more likely just not to have any obvious relationships at all. (Never mind the Harry/Draco fanfic, of course.) So yes, if Hermione or Ron or Neville or one of the Weasley sibs had been gay, then sure, it would obviously have been mentioned, and yes, they were all straight, but making one of them gay would definitely have seemed like making a character gay on principle.

While I was waiting for Heroes to start last night, and during commercial breaks, I was pondering that symbol. ( Yes, THAT symbol, so spoilers for everything that's aired so far, i.e., through 2.03. )


( Episode reactions (therefore spoilers) for 2.04 and the next-week-on )

Ian coined a term last night: hapax legoogleon. It's like a Googlewhack, except for something that's a Googlewhack using only one word. A current example of this is linleyesque.

I had to wash the bad taste of the The Dark Is Rising The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising trailer out of my mouth, so I spent the last couple hours making this. It makes me happy, I'm rather pleased with how it came out. :) Also, my headache (that I had last night and woke up with, naturally) is finally gone.

For the purposes of mezzos portraying more authentic men onstage (it's pure research, I tell you!), I present to you a poll...

[Poll #1029249]

If your gender isn't currently the same biological gender that you were born with, pick whichever gender label you feel more comfortable with — I think I can decode answers for most of you to whom this is relevant. And everyone should feel free to elaborate in comments!