I’ve ignored most of the holidays as they’ve come and gone, at least as far as my writing here goes. I have nothing good to say about Valentine’s Day or its bastard child, this weird “Sweetest Day” thing that’s big up here in Ohio. Since I found out my family is NOT actually Irish (as we thought we were for many years - but no, we’re Scotch) St. Patrick’s Day means nothing to me anymore. (Ok, I’ll be honest. It never really has meant anything to me. I hate beer, much less green beer, and not being a Christian - and definitely not a Catholic - I don’t have any special reverence for that St. Patrick fellow. Not that drinking green beer actually has much to do with him anyway.) Easter, aside from being the time of year that Cadbury eggs are abundant, hasn’t meant much to me since my last Easter Egg hunt at about 10 years of age. (And since I do the whole low carb nutso thing now, the Cadbury eggs are more vexing than happiness inducing, since I can’t have any.) I’ve never understood Memorial Day and Labor Day, aside from the fact that it means a lot of people are off work. (I mean, I know the reason for them, but I’ve never quite understood why it means cooking out and drinking large quantities of alcohol.) Thanksgiving has never been a big deal in my family, so I never really got into it either. Halloween used to be fun, but somewhere along the way, I just sort of lost my exuberance for it. I haven’t dressed up in a costume for Halloween since I was 16. (I really ought to think about changing that one though. Halloween’s a cool holiday.)

Most of the holidays throughout the year mean nothing more than “We’ll be dead at the store today.” or “We’ll be swamped at the store today.” or the more rare (but relished), “Wooo! I get an extra day off cause we’re closed today!”

And really, April Fools’ Day doesn’t even mean that to me. I’m working, but it’s not a holiday that really has any sort of impact on sales of porn or gift items, so we’re neither swamped nor dead, but reveling in the normal Saturday traffic. So I was planning on mostly ignoring it.

Then I was reading a couple of the lists of the creative April Fools’ jokes on the web, like the pretty spiffy WordPattern (of special note are the trackbacks on the announcement where you can’t even tell if some people are taking it seriously or not, and the actual existence of a download file… great attention to detail guys), and Google Romance, which actually isn’t as creative and well done as Google’s usual April 1 fodder. I always dig most of them - they’re good for a few laughs. But I kept finding comments from people, or links to their own blog rants, about how much of an annoyance April Fools’ Day is to them, lots of snipes at the “lameness” of certain ones, or even that April Fools’ has no place in the technology world because it apparently messes up stock markets worldwide. (I had no idea, really.)

Come ON people, LIGHTEN THE FUCK UP!

A sense of humor is really one of the best tools you can wield in the face of real life. (And, just as a personal note, it’s the one trait that can trump nearly all shortcomings when evaluating whether I like people, and wow, can it up a guy’s sexy-o-meter rating.) It’s the only thing that keeps most people sane I think, and you folks have really got to get one. April Fools’ is only one day a year (in my ideal world, something that inspires this kind of creativity would be a monthly or weekly event), and most of the intelligent people in the world (of which, admittedly, there are too few) know to expect some silliness on this day. As for the people that are actually falling for these jokes - well, all I have to say is that it became known as April FOOLS’ Day for a reason, you know?

Sorry about the pissy nature of my post on this humor holiday, but I find it very sad that people can’t let the corn cob fall out of their ass for one day and laugh a little.

To the rest of you, happy April Fools’ Day, and if you’ve found a particularly good web prank, please share. I love these things, and obviously, I could use a good laugh right about now.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is resigining from the Supreme Court.

I can’t help but worry what the future will bring. So many things about our way of life are about to change… and no, I don’t think I’m overstating the case.

This makes me very sad indeed.

There’s a bit of a kerfuffle over on Boing Boing about the Amended Section 2257 recordkeeping regulations and the announcement that some web sites were shutting down rather than trying to comply with said law. I’m really not sure what is different with this amendment from the previous law (Porn producers have long been required to keep records of the ages of their ‘actors’ and ‘models’, not that that has really ended the inclusion of folks under the age of 18 in their work… it just provided fake ID merchants with more job security.) but if I’m reading right, it has been amended to include computer generated images and digital images.

One of the sites mentioned as a casualty is ratemyboner.com.

Now, let me make it clear that I’m not complaining that ratemyboner.com is going away. I’m not really that into rating boners, and it’s just another one of the 8 zillion clones of HotOrNot, which has never really been one of my favorite concepts anyway. (Yes, yes, I’m just bitter because I’m sure I’d be planted firmly in the “NOT” category. Bite me.) All in all, the world may actually be a better place for its shutting down.

However - I have to say it’s kind of a shame to see it go, for the simple fact that the law does not actually make a site like this illegal, though I’m sure that someone at some point would attempt to shut ratemyboner.com down using this law. It would be a perfect site to fight the law, as ratemyboner.com is merely a distributor of the digital images, not a producer.

From the aforelinked law:

The statute defines “produces” as “to produce, manufacture, or publish any book, magazine, periodical, film, video tape, computer-generated image, digital image, or picture, or other similar matter and includes the duplication, reproduction, or reissuing of any such matter, but does not include mere distribution or any other activity which does not involve hiring, contracting for[,] managing, or otherwise arranging for the participation of the performers depicted.”

Which is further clarified here:

Two commenters commented that the definition of producer in the proposed rule was too broad and would encompass a convenience store that sold sexually explicit magazines or a movie theater that screened R-rated movies. The Department declines to adopt this comment. As the rule makes clear, mere distributors of sexually explicit material are excluded from the definition of producers and under no plausible construction of the definition would a movie theater be covered merely by screening films produced by others.

So unless the owners of ratemyboner.com are actually sending out photographers to take the pictures featured on the site, they are exempt from keeping records on the age of the subjects of the photos.

And the same could be said for probably 99.9% of the porn oriented web sites out there. Very few of the porn sites I’ve ever seen (and yes, I’ve seen more than my fair share at this point) are actually related in any way to the company that produced the porn they are showing. Most of them are simply distributing movies, pictures, etc.

Which means not only is this a mostly pointless amendment to a law that really changes little (seeing as how the producers of most porn have already been beholden to keep these records anyway), it’s going to be a piece of legalese that may see many fights over its interpretation. It would seem that many of the targets of the amendment, those being porn web sites, are already completely exempt from this.

In addition, what the fuck is up with including computer generated images in the definition? How the hell does one prove the age of a computer generated image?

Here’s a pornographic computer generated image for you:

Considering I just drew these two beautiful stick people (who appear to be strung out on crack as well as horny), that would make them about 10 minutes old. As I’m the producer of this image, do I now need to keep a record of their ages? Am I breaking a law by putting this out there, seeing as how they are under 18 years of age?

_{If anyone cares, I was interested in this mainly because I am employed as a webmaster for a web site that sells some pornographic material. I needed to see how this law applied to us, which of course, it doesn’t. At all. Because we don’t actually produce all the gay porn we sell. Thank goodness.}

Let me me make a couple of things clear before I even get started here:

1. I do not actually live in or work in the city of Cleveland, but living and working in Lakewood is very close, and I would be affected by the addition of a Wal-Mart as much as the residents of Cleveland.

2. I am not very good at expressing my politically charged opinions. This is because I am not always well informed when it comes to the things I feel strongly about, yet, like a good American, I still feel strongly about them.

Ok, I’m not quite that bad, but I do tend to go with my gut or instinct on some things, and I can’t always express why I feel the way I do without sounding like I’m completely uninformed. This is one of the reasons I tend to avoid political topics on my blog.

However, I feel like I need to say something about the impending doom that is coming to Cleveland in the guise of a Wal-Mart store as part of the Steelyard Commons project, despite the fact that I likely do not know half the story.

I do not know much about the whole local deal that was done to get the Wal-Mart to come to town, but apparently there was a bit of backroom politics played and a lot of people are very upset about that. I find it disturbing, and irritating, but it seems as though backroom politics is the name of the game these days, and I don’t have enough information to argue that particular point. If what I’ve read in other places is true, I do think it stinks, but I just don’t know enough of the facts.

What I do know is this: I do not like Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart uses their powers for evil, near as I can tell. I have been told that that’s the way business goes when I’ve presented my arguments, but I have issues with business being that way in general. (Thus my giving up the corporate life to do something different.) I think they are hard on small businesses - both retail and manufacturing - to the detriment of our way of life. Yes, you can buy things at Wal-Mart cheaper than anywhere else, but what’s the real cost?

I know of a small manufacturer that was dealing nearly exclusively with Wal-Mart when they wanted to break into the market. Their product was retailing for $0.96 in Wal-Mart stores, and Wally World was one of the few places you could find said product. Not long ago, they finally decided to make their wholesale business available to other small businesses, and I talked to them about buying the product for our stores. I found that their regular wholesale price was higher than the retail price Wal-Mart was using, meaning they were supplying their product to Wal-Mart for a much lower wholesale cost. (The average markup in retail is twice the cost, so I’m estimating that Wal-Mart was paying around $0.50 a piece.) I can’t imagine this company was making any money on the product they were selling to Wal-Mart; in fact, I’d venture they were probably losing money on the deal. I happen to know that they have since stopped selling to Wal-Mart, and the fellow I spoke with at the company hinted that it was because Wal-Mart tried to negotiate an even lower wholesale cost, which I’m guessing would have put this small business under. But not having their product available in the nation’s largest retailer is hurting them too.

They can’t win.

(more…)

I was really bored for a little while today (and trying to avoid the cleaning I needed to do in the store, which alas, I did have to do eventually), then Jerry (over at Red Wheelbarrow) got me thinking. He posted a bit about one of our (not-so) esteemed local news stations that ran a puff piece story that was ripped from an Internet humor site. Not surprisingly, they turned this fluffy bit into a scare piece, this one about how all those evil clerks in retail don’t check the signatures on credit cards, putting you and your credit cards in grave danger. I’ve mentioned before that local news’ fear mongering irks me. This one isn’t as “scary” as some of the others, but they make it seem like retail clerks comparing signatures is going to stop credit card fraud. Considering most fraud is perpetuated with random number generation these days (or flat out identity theft), it makes little sense to try and make a news story out of something this asinine. Plus, it makes us retail clerks look bad, which pisses me off. (I also have a hard time just ignoring things that irk me. You should probably remember that if you ever hang out with me.)

The following is what happens when I get bored, and some unsuspecting news director at the station decides to play along. (And not include a disclaimer at the end of his email marking his correspondence as private and confidential.)

(more…)

That’s right, you heard me. Leave my child alone. I know, you’re all saying, “But Mel, you don’t have any kids!”

You can bet your ass if I did, I’d be screaming even louder about this:

Buried deep within the No Child Left Behind Act is a provision that requires public high schools to hand over private student information to military recruiters. The purpose of this invasion of family privacy is to allow minor students to be recruited at home by telephone calls, mail and personal visits. If a school does not comply, it risks losing vital federal education funds. The only way to keep your children’s contact information from military recruiters, is to submit an “opt-out??? letter in writing to your school district’s superintendent.

Listen, I don’t care what your feelings are about the military (I come from a partially military family, so don’t give me any crap about this stance being anti-military - it’s not in any way), this is a blatant breach of privacy. A blatant breach of privacy involving KIDS. This is just unconscionable if you ask me, and extremely creepy.

I don’t care who it is - if this was any other organization I would feel the same way - no one should have access to kids’ contact information without the parents’ express written permission. This should not be an opt-out situation; I’m not sure it should exist at all, but if we’re to have schools releasing information to outside parties, it should be strictly opt-in.

To get your kids’ contact information out of this program, start here.

Those of you who are not in the Cleveland area may not find much interest in this, so feel free to skip it if you want. My feelings won’t be hurt, I promise.

In the most recent issue of The Scene (a weekly alt rag here in our lovely city), the gossip column “First Punch” takes a swipe at several Clevelander’s blogs, labeling them banal, and generally poking fun at them with the sharp and biting wit of a 4^th grader. I wasn’t planning on giving this ridiculous waste of writing space on my blog, but you know, ugh. I just can’t help it. I have to mouth off. I’m a bit late to the party guys, I hope you saved me a table.

As others have mentioned, this smacks of a publication fearful of losing its relevance in the digital age. No matter that it already lost its relevance long ago, and is surpassed in quality on a weekly basis by another weekly alt rag (The Free Times). Striking out like a jealous child, the Scene chose to lambast several personal blogs (Emily, Craig, & Shannon), a Vegan specific blog, and a blog that dares - the nerve! - to try and foster some community in the Tremont area. Now, I certainly don’t mean to add insult to injury here for any of these fine folks. It’s your blog, you get to do what you want with it, and I am certainly not in a position to judge anyone for that, so I applaud you folks for getting out there and doing it, no matter what your topic.

But one has to wonder why The Scene chose such easy targets. I mean, of course a personal blog is going to seem banal to some people. So don’t read it. Simple enough. Our Vegan friend has a specific topic, and if you’re not interested in the topic, skip it and move on. The Tremonter is just getting started. Give a guy some time before you start taking cheap shots, will ya?

Again, please don’t get me wrong, I have nothing but love for those who were targeted in this (not-so)scathing piece of “journalism”, but you know what? There are a LOT more Cleveland blogs out there (and man, I still haven’t made it through half the NEO Blogroll), with quite a few that put The Scene to shame easily. But of course, they aren’t going to mention those, because a reader might just follow-up and decide that blogs are a better way to get their local fix. You know, because they would be.

This little bit of kerfluffle caused me to rethink something on my own blog. I’ve been reading a couple of NE Ohio blogs for a few months now, but not linking to them. Not because I didn’t appreciate them, but just because I kind of had a theme going with my links and I don’t think that my readers (or the 5 people who come and BS in the comments here with me at least) give two shits about what’s happening in NE Ohio as most of them are not living in this area. So this weekend I created a category of “NEO Blogs I Dig”. There are still a couple of other NE Ohio blogs in the other section of my list too, ones that I haven’t seperated out mainly because they don’t tend to focus on NE Ohio topics very much.

So I want to take one minute here to point out some NE Ohio blogs that The Scene, wisely for them, chose not to go after. Cause then they’d look like bigger dumbasses than they already do.

Jockohomo - One of the blogs that I stumbled on that inspired me to give it a go again, with gusto this time. Art, music, politics, and so much more, sometimes in a stream of consciousness delivery, other times more focused. Amazingly nice guy to boot.

Brewed Fresh Daily - George Nemeth tracks so much good info, both local and blog specific (in addition to maintaining the NEO Blogroll), it’s overwhelming sometimes. I mean that in a good way. I don’t leave enough comments to let my presence be known, but I’m there every day.

The Traveling Spotlight - Though it looks like Patrick sadly won’t be an NEO Blogger much longer (he’s moving away), he’s been cracking me up daily or so for the last few months, and his adventures in dating are anything but banal (I could make a very bad gay joke here by removing a letter from that word, but I think I’ll skip it). I’d love to see his actual standup act at some point.

Have Coffee Will Write - I’m nearly ashamed to admit that I didn’t link to him till he linked to me. (Though I am actually honored for him to link to me, given his criteria for linking.) Jeff Hess is a soul searcher with a sense of humor. He reminds me a bit too much of my dad sometimes (that’s sort of a compliment) but I dig his outlook.

The Red Wheelbarrow - (Lakewood might as well be Cleveland) Jerry and I had a six degrees of seperation moment when one of his friends came to shop at my store. Very strange since I’d been stealthily reading his blog since before I actually got up the nerve to start writing again. Jerry’s a Canadian here in the States, and he’s got a unique perspective on things. I dig him. (Plus, I love that he used The Red Wheelbarrow for the title… So much depends upon the red wheelbarrow…)

I wasn’t always like this… - (Technically not in Cleveland, but NE Ohio) Not much I can say about Kim that her legions of fans haven’t said a thousand times already. If you aren’t reading her blog already, get yourself over there. This woman has some damned crazy stories to tell and has a hell of a way with words in telling them. Anyone who’s raising 10 kids and is still as close to sanity as she is (I’m not sure even she would claim to be sane) should be getting some sort of reward. (Though that cruise certainly qualified as a reward.)

A Ropey Old Bird in Ohio… (Formerly known as “A Day In the Life of Andrea Knapp”, also technically not in Cleveland, but very close) - Whether she’s giving us a hilarious view into her rock star existence, or just writing missives about her melons, Andrea Knapp totally cracks me up with every post. Humor is the best medicine.

So there you have it. There are 7 blogs that The Scene wouldn’t dare take a swipe at. Because they’d get the shit kicked out of them in no time flat.

The great part about this? If The Scene even bothers to follow through on the criticisms that have been levied on this little topic, it’s gonna take them a week or more to respond, because it’s a print publication. By the time First Punch can take another swing, we’ll have knocked him or her out on the mat, and I’d say the “writer” behind that drivel is already down for the count.

Or is it? New evidence suggests that it’s actually 616. Bummer. Iron Maiden will totally have to re-record that song now. Lucky for them it’s not 676… that just wouldn’t have the same ring to it. Since it should be easy to fit in though, maybe they can just do some fancy editing and sub Bruce Dickinson singing “one” over the middle six, you know, like when they edit movies for TV and you hear “shoot” (instead of “shit”) so seamlessly integrated.

For anyone who cares: stay tuned and the second part of my little story about an actual member of the Church of Satan will be coming along, though probably not till tomorrow.

(And I know there’s at least one of you out there singing along with me now, the one who is responsible for me even knowing that song. Your memory might be shot for some things, but I’m betting you still remember all the words to our title track here.)

This is the time where I have to admit, despite my hawking it to every person who’s come in the store during the month of April, that I have just finally read through some of The Antidote. So now, impressed with it even further (I was already very impressed with the editor and the design), I’m hawking it here too. A good read all the way through, The Antidote is an unabashedly liberal paper, publishing the cream of the crop of the liberal press’ political commentary (from what little liberal press there is left) and the best of the left-leaning political cartoons. It’s can be found monthly in lots of great locations in the Cleveland area (for free), or you can subscribe if you live in some other red state and are in need of a monthly dose of sanity. I suppose you lucky blue staters can subscribe as well, it’s just that those of us who are surrounded need a little booster sometimes.

Specifically, I’m hawking the editor’s column this month, Craig Williams’ take on the “intelligent design” vs. evolution debate. You should read the entire thing, it’s long but it’s quite worth it. (Why do I always feel the need to warn people that articles are long? Because I’m relatively sure that most people have an attention span of 10 seconds.) If you just can’t be bothered, you have to at least show some appreciation for this tasty tidbit:

While we’re at it, we ought to teach them my own personal theory, which is that the Earth was created by kittens. Kittens who can fly through space due to a magic extra nipple located just under their chins. I haven’t quite worked out where the kittens lived before Earth, but Christians have a lot of gaps to fill in, too.

Craig is my hero at the moment. (He’s a really nice guy too.)

Logo - the first 24 hour gay & lesbian themed TV network - is starting June 30. Well, if you live in a city where the cable company realizes there’s an audience for it, it’s starting June 30. Unfortunately, it would appear that Cox cable doesn’t realize that Lakewood, OH has a large gay population, and would probably appreciate the opportunity to check this out. Actually, Cox cable for the Greater Cleveland area won’t be carrying it, according to the guy from Logo I just talked to. I’m not sure about Adelphia yet. (But since I have Cox myself, that’s who I’m really worried about.)

I’m not going to debate the merits of the channel (brought to you by MTV Networks - so I’m sure I’ll have some griping to do eventually) - but I will say that I want it. I signed up on their site (via the Get Ready section), and they’re going to gather that information to send to the cable companies. I know there are more important things in the world I should be worrying about on a daily basis, but right now I just want my Gay TV!