Unsolicited Advice

I'm a little surprised that no one has jumped down my throat over my checking the idea of "acting straight" when writing about the latest Olympic to-do. It occurs to me that if you're sufficiently young and enlightened, you may not recognize that as actually a Thing. I think it's pretty clear from context that what I'm talking about is intentionally suppressing mannerisms and behaviors traditionally associated with homosexuality in the hopes that no one will ask any awkward questions, and it's pretty clear from the quotes that it's not my phrase. It's just that as a concept, it doesn't have much meaning anymore. It describes the act of consciously crossing a cultural divide that has largely ceased to exist, even if the memory of the underlying stereotype persists. Twenty-five years ago, "acting straight" or describing someone as "straight-acting" had a distinct meaning, and it would be disingenuous to pretend that it did...

Finally tracked down Boitano's actual statement , or at least the actual statement sent to that particular website. Given the fuss that everyone's been making, I expected it to be a very gay speech gayly recounting his exceedingly gay gayness, couched in official language. Nope. He mentions it once, near the end. Boitano was apparently in Europe when the names of the delegates were officially announced. I half wonder if he didn't do the same thing the rest of the planet did, which was read that and be vaguely perplexed at his name not being highlighted as one of the athletes who was openly queer. That press release reads quite plausibly as something written before he'd even realized there were still people on Earth who hadn't gotten the memo. He may not have made any statements before now simply because he thought everyone would get the hint without it, and he didn't want to encourage the press to be nosy bastards about who he was actually dating . Notably, ...

I am pleased to note that President Obama appears to be trolling the Russians. He's politely declined to attend the Olympics, but generously offered as his emissaries a number of extremely famous American athletes who also happen to be gay. Putin could still opt to arrest them, I suppose, but now that we've announced that there will be a quintillion cameras focused on them at all times, and the story would break on Twitter before they finished snapping the cuffs on, so this is an unlikely result at best. Accompanying this story is the news that Brian Boitano has come out. If you know who he is, you probably expressed vague confusion and asked if he didn't already do that like twenty years ago? Anyone who has ever seen this man has quickly come to the conclusion that the only closet he's familiar with is the kind that is full of sequinned ice dancing costumes . If you're too young to know who Brian Boitano is or why the hell he is on Food Network, Boitano is the ...

For once, I'm doing all right on Christmas. Generally I spend my time drunk and wishing I had something to do, while at the same time vehemently willing my family to stay the fuck away from me. They don't know where I am now, which is good. Mainly, though, I replace that last thing with rounds of 'hey will the rats eat that?' and the answer to that is 'yes for all food objects, and also yes for several non-food things that are fun to chew', so it's not as absorbing as it could be. We passed some kind of fast food something on the bus route tonight that had their TV tuned to BBC News and visible from the window. Normally, I hate this. World news scares the fuck out of me. At least 50% of my trips to the ER to beg for Xanax have been triggered by this shit. I still resent the pilot years ago who decided to interrupt my nice calm flight over the Rockies -- I am not at all scared of flying, don't ask me why; I actually like it -- with the news that we'...

The new rats continue, unsurprisingly, to grow. Yuki is becoming a tomboy. She's big, she's unsubtle, she's kind of pudgy, and she's lazy as fuck, particularly by girl-rat standards. (This is why she's the one who got the name Yuki, in fact; it means 'snow' in Japanese, and is used as a name for both sexes.) Yuki has already tumbled onto the secret of this whole pet deal. If I come by and say hello to them through the bars while she's awake, she immediately scrambles to the front of the cage and goes NO NOT GOOD ENOUGH YOU COME CUDDLE ME NOW. When I pick her up, she conducts a half-assed inspection for concealed food and, finding none, smashes herself into my armpit and goes to sleep. I have to stand there like a B-movie ronin, one arm half tucked back into my bathrobe sleeve, because that armscye seam is clearly there for Yuki to lean her face on, and if I unbend my elbow she doesn't have anywhere to rest her chin. I introduced her to one of my ro...

I've just got myself fired from a theatrical troupe. I'd be more upset if I hadn't been an hour or two away from quitting when I got the text message. I'm not naming anyone, because I don't like seeing people fail and I really do hope they get their act together and put on something brilliant, but considering I ended up typing up a whacking great list of things I objected to in a Facebook message because I'd never met the director in person, I doubt this is going to happen. First off, consider it a bad sign if the director seems uninterested in vetting you for basic competence. I volunteered to sing. Not only did I not have to audition, they repeatedly turned down my offers to give them a demo, so at least they knew what I sounded like. You can get away with this for extras -- most of the time, at least -- but for a featured act? Not a good idea. What if I were completely delusional and sounded like a strangled cat? Secondly, consider it a bad sign if no one...

I've been distracting myself lately with more cars. You don't have to know the finer points of the engineering specs in order to identify them, so that's what I've been doing. Sort of like in WWII, they used to train plane spotters to ID different kinds of craft by silhouettes, only with cars it's far easier to start with the headlights. Human brains are built to recognize patterns, faces are some of the most important patterns to recognize. We are social animals, and our ability to interact is heavily dependent on not just identifying who we're talking to, but what expression they're making. I learn best when I hang new stuff on old stuff that has a similar shape, so I've pretty much gone with trying to recognize cars by their 'faces' The headlights become eyes, the radiator grille the mouth, and the end of the hood something like a nose. This is a textbook example of pareidolia, by the way, and I'm not the only one who does it -- my mothe...

I seem to have purchased some more critters. See, I was out at a gig in Allston, and it turns out there's a PetCo between where I was and the nearest T stop. One thing led to another and somehow I walked out of there with a box of itty-bitty rats. I was worried that they'd get uncomfortably cold on the walk back to Harvard, but no. Apparently it's never too chilly to jam your nose into the leading corner of the box and try to smell where you're going. This batch is a trio of ruby-eyed albino girls. Notoriously, red-eyed rats have eyesight even worse than the normal ones. As far as I can tell, they can see blotches of light and dark and that's about it. They can't track my hand if I wave at them from outside the cage, although they'll happily chase my fingers if I make some kind of noise for them to follow. They've been named Bianca, Yuki, and Edelweiß, although this is largely for my convenience. If history is any indication, what I'm actually ...

I go on a reading binge every year at Christmas. The learning-things center of my brain is mysteriously the only one that works when I'm otherwise not having any fun. I can't do anything with it when I'm like this, since concentration requires massive amounts of caffeine, and I can only do that for so long; I just start pounding large wadges of some random kind of information into my head for a distraction, and take it on faith that it will be someday be of some use to me. I read through most of the sci.electronics.repair FAQ collection one winter when I was laid up with flu, and now I know far more than any normal human being ever needed or wanted to know about how to dynamite my way into a broken portable CD player and make a Jacob's ladder out of an old microwave transformer. This year it is apparently going to be cars. Mainly because my sidekick is about to cough up 30k for a convertible, and when she gets neurotic about enormous things she knows damn well she...

Top Gear is one of those things that's much easier to watch than to describe. You start out telling people, "It's about cars," and twenty minutes later you find yourself trying to explain why the BBC is sending an automotive journalist to the North Pole on a dogsled. They have used cars as a flimsy excuse to go to so many exotic places that Top Gear is now better at being the National Geographic Society than the actual National Geographic Society. The three of them have bickered like children in some of the most gorgeous spots on the face of the planet, usually while Clarkson is trying to fix his car with a very large hammer. Moggie has just finished her physics homework and needs something to stop the weeping, so I'm going to talk about Richard Hammond for a while. The bookseller from whom I attempted to order  On The Edge  somehow managed to be out of copies before they got around to shipping mine, so I'll just be doing my usual semi-baseless speculation...

I'm not a gearhead. Everything I know about cars, I learned from Car Talk and Top Gear -- so it's probably a good thing I don't drive. Both of these programs are nevertheless entertaining, so I keep up with them anyway. I watch Top Gear  mainly because the three presenters -- Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May -- are hilarious. The show is partly scripted and partly edited segments of live camera commentary, which means both a lot of interesting ad-libs and a lot of interesting gag reels. The three of them do play characters, which have a sort of "based on a true story" relationship with their actual personalities; Clarkson is a bit of a curmudgeon, Hammond is a bit of a scrapper, and May is a bit of an obsessive geek, but it's exaggerated quite a lot for comic effect. They spend a lot of time dreaming up creative ways to be total cocks to one another without actually getting anyone killed -- pay attention and you'll notice that, while they ...

The First Doctor: William Hartnell First serial: 100,000 BC Last serial: The Tenth Planet Costume details: A gentleman's day wear from roughly the Victorian era, with an appropriate shoulder-length hairstyle. Frock coat with astrakhan collar and karakul hat, dark cloak, long scarf. Wears an ornate ring on one finger. Companions: Susan , Ian Chesterton , Barbara Wright , Vicki , Steven Taylor , Katarina , Dodo Chaplet , Polly , Ben Jackson At first glance, the First Doctor is egotistical and imperious. At second glance, he's egotistical, imperious, and also flubs his lines a lot. This is because the Doctor was not initially supposed to be the focus character of the show. Originally, the show that we know as Doctor Who  was conceived of as less a science-fiction serial, and more of an edutainment program -- you will notice, if you watch the very early stories, that they're rather heavy on history, and comparatively light on stuntmen in giant rubber suits. The audien...

Collins is still piqued over the Destiel kerfuffle on Twitter. Gif'ed version  with subtitles on tumblr, if you're on a thing that hates Flash. [Otherwise irrelevant note: "Миша" is how you spell Misha in Cyrillic. Just in case you ever need that.] He's past being pissed off, and has progressed into exasperated. He's been doing this for a few months now, sitting up there on a stage with a microphone and saying, "Well, this here is what I'm doing with this character," and apparently there are still people going, "No, you aren't!" He can't be doing that badly -- five kabillion people on tumblr have noticed, and getting a coherent argument out of that lot is like herding a load of schizophrenic tweaker cats. There are only so many ways you can debate with someone who keeps telling you what your own opinion is, and refuses to listen to what you actually say . On a psycholinguistic note, Collins specifically says ' wh...

Before I go on with any more of the SPN stuff, I should probably do the whole listing-of-ye-biases and meta-commentary thing. This is 145% opinion, speculation, and personal orneriness, and should not be taken as the basis of anything. I was sort of aware of Supernatural before I started watching it. I hang out on the internets, after all. I had been told that Dean/Cas was a thing, although I had no idea who the hell they were at the time and I'd heard much more about the infamous "Wincest" people -- that happens to hit one of my personal squick buttons, and I was told it was prevalent, so I read no fanfic before I started prodding Netflix for episodes. I watched the first couple of season 1, then skipped to season 4, since I'd been specifically asked about Misha Collins. I've been a fanficker for a long, long time. I write it (no, you can't see it), I read it (don't ask me for recs unless you want things that are slashy or interesting), and I study it...