Thanks to PZed's latest tip about how to peel a banana from the bottom--pinch the little brown nubbin together, and voila! split banana peel! no futile tearing at the stem needed--I went looking up facts about bananas. The current banana, the Cavendish, is a cultivar based off of Vietnamese and other eastern Asian banana types. It has been bred to be seedless, presumably because we humans are essentially lazy and hate to pick out seeds. Like certain types of corn and tomatoes and other genetically modified foods*, this means you can't buy one, and take it home and cultivate a new growth from it.

It had never really occured to me how much food is pushed through the marketplace that is a genetic dead-end. While some of this is because we humans can't handle the seeds and demand seedless oranges, seedless grapes, seedless watermelon, etc, some of this is actually because the really big agribusiness people don't want to make their product available to competitors. In Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma (which I need to finish) the corn section details how farmers have to rebuy their corn crops year after year, since the seed sellers have deliberately made corn that you can't rebreed. (Which is funny, because historically corn was a man-made crop, cultivated by man, and tweaked with by man, long before they had actually figured out those crazy Punnett's squares. In fact, because of the reproductive methods and the tassels and the growing season cycles, corn now requires man to be able to reproduce.)

Back to the bananas. So there was another banana crop called the Gros Michel, and it came close to dying out because of a particularly nasty fungus called the Panama disease. So the Cavendish varieties were introduced to the North American banana markets to sort of fill in for the Big Mike. But....because they are bred through vegetative reproduction, and without seeds, it seems that each banana plant is essentially identical. There's no ability to evolve against disease resistance, and that means that in the long run, the Cavendish plant is just as vulnerable to the evolving fungus.

Mostly, this information makes me want to paint a Banana-pocalypse painting and call it "The Bananas are Doomed!"

*Genetically modified could either mean actual genetic modifications, such as those done with gene guns, or merely rigourous breeding programs.

I have to say the new Jeeves alarm clock is remarkably changing my circadian rhythms. On the night end of things, the relaxing Jeeves mantra "Now it's time for sir to sleep," is actually surprisingly helpful at helping one drift off. My only complaint is that it could stand to be a minute or three longer, since I am terrible at insta-relaxing. My body, as has been the case since my mid-twenties, decides to get up earlier than whatever alarm I set by about fifteen minutes. I tried to fool it by setting the clock a few minutes ahead, and it still woke up before the dulcet tones of Stephen Fry could wake me.

Today I will get to meet (hopefully) John's aunt. This is the first person in his family other than his mother who I will meet. Well, technically, his brother and I have exchanged a handful of sentences on Facebook, but that's not the same thing.

John's known family is small. He's got his mum, his brother, and.....sort of, but not really, his dad. I think he's also got a step-grandparents, and a handful of aunts or cousins. Anyway, he has few relatives and I have so many I don't know all their names or even the existence of some. Like I'm never totally sure how many kids my Uncle Steve and Aunt Janet have. When my sister got married, there were people shaking my hand in the reception line saying things like, "Hello, I'm your cousin, Peter." By which, I think he means second cousin Peter, but it's hard to be sure. I'm not entirely certain which of my nine great-aunts-and-uncles he belonged to. And that's just on Dad's side. On Mom's side there's another collection of relatives, just as big, although somewhat generationally shifted since Mom was the youngest by seven years or so. Both my parents were one of six children.

I think the large family scares John a little bit. Well, scare isn't the right word. I imagine it's like being introduced to a pack of corgis though. A pack of friendly people who are all interested in you, but with whom it is perhaps hard to hold a conversation.

....

I've been meaning to journal actual journally things, instead of news item or memes or whatnot. Here's something from my daily life recently: My commute, previously a model commute, has turned into a commuting hell, while they shut down part of 1-90's bridge. I don't take that route home, but all that traffic has been diverted to my route, and thus from 4.30 to 7.30, it is nigh impossible to get home. Thank god for the congestion maps, which show my route in updates and webcames. They have colour codes to tell you what kind of traffic: green means free and clear, yellow means somewhat heavy, red is stop and go, and black means parking lot. What this means is that I go in around tenish, and leave around 8ish. Maybe I hang out in the Barnes and Noble if the 520 map is black as the charred heart of Dick Cheney. I try to make sure that I carry notebooks so that I can make use of my stranded time.

Yesterday I was about to leave, having spent some time hoping that traffic would thin, but alas, just before I left, I saw a note that they were closing the bridge and actually raising the drawbridge sections in order to float equipment for the other bridge down. So I ended up going up to the 5 and heading back down. Meh. I think I almost would have preferred waiting and crossing the bridge--at least it's scenic.

One thing I love about the 520 is that on any given day, one side of the water will be choppy and the other side will be smooth. If I took a picture, people would claim it was photoshopped. A week back when we had a smidgen of rain, the choppiness on the south side was enough to cause waves to splash over the edges of the bridge. North side: flat as a countertop. My coworkers and I chatted about the phenomenon, but nobody knew what causes it. (I tried googling and while I found a lot of information about the 520 bridge itself, nothing on the wave phenomenon.) Occasionally there are days where it is the same on both sides, and on those days, I feel vaguely cheated and miss the anomaly.

Thanks to a bunch of right wing bloggers freaking out about Malia Obama wearing a peace symbol on her shirt, I hit the wikipedia and found out that the peace symbol (circle with three prongs pointing down) is actually a logo for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. And the symbol is the concatenation of the semaphore signals for N and D.

Guess that blows that whole spoken-in-whispers notion that peace symbols were broken crosses out of the water. I mean, when I first came home with shiny peace symbols hanging from my ears, a number of adults lined up to tell me all the reasons I shouldn't wear the peace symbol. "Broken cross! Sign of the occult! Satanic!"

*rolls eyes*

Ya know, I wish I'd had a better bullshit-o-meter as a kid. Todd Barry notes there comes a time when adults say stuff and they either made it up or just don't know or are repeating what somebody else told them without researching it. (This is also why I got crap for my yin-yangs and my incense. Satanic! Occulty! Inviting evil into your life and banishing the Holy Ghost! OMG! Nevermind that some of these symbols have had benign meanings for centuries before white middle America became aware of them. I love how everything not automatically Christian is a symbol of Satan in some people's eyes.)

Incidentally, I could never figure out why the Mormon adults in my life were so het up over the idea of a "broken cross", given that there were a number of church lessons explaining the reasons we don't have crosses at Mormon churches or wear crucifixes is because Mormons believe that would be like wearing a gun around your neck.

Likewise, I'm trying to figure out the crazy people who think that peace symbols are bad. They are symbols of peace. And tonnes of people use them. Disney and Target sell merchandise with them on it, which kinda dilutes the idea of peace with a hefty dose of commercialism, but seriously, it's a symbol of PEACE. P-E-A-C-E. A state devoid of aggression, violence, hostility, and hatred. Peace. Why are you wigging?

....are going to fiction.

I've been lousy with the updates lately. I can't tell if it's because not much is happening, or if the art and the job have been sucking up the writing side so that I have to eke and eke and eke and carry notebooks everywhere to get anything done.

Working on:

- Snakes and Ladders stuff for workshop.

Temporarily on hold, but returning to RIGHT AFTER the workshop:

- Book One of The Unworthy Gods (What used to be Son/Souls of the Stag. Not sure I like this new title as much as I first did. Too spoilery.)

Shorts:

- The New Nuclear/Reverse Enoch/Enoch is Fled (Not sure on this title. It started off as the New Nuclear, but turned into something else.)
- Taste of Betrayal - As a short, this has a sort of Lady or the Tiger feel. But like EVERY OTHER short piece, it is threatening to turn into a longer one, as soon as I know anything about my characters, and as a long piece, it's a kind of masochistic fantasy romance, but light on the romance.

John and I spent the Fourth of July melting into puddles on the floor of our apartment. I also read a book, while trying to move as little as possible in the heat, and later hit upon the idea of the Tudors. We watched about six episodes, and sorta remained nailed to the couch via dint of narrative causality.

John only knows a little of the history, which means I have to cautiously comment in order not to spoil things. He know Henry VIII had a lot of wives, and that Anne Boleyn was one of them, and that Henry founded the Church of England. But of Wolsey and More and Anne Boleyn's brother and Cromwell and Tom Tallis, he does not know. Of course, we are dealing with fictionalised versions of history--narrative causality and TV ratings decreed that it was more interesting for Henry's bastard, FitzHenry, to die at the age of three, instead of 17, because then they could tie it into Henry's brush with death and the divorce actions.

It is a good thing I enjoy the history aspects, because I find myself unable to enjoy Jonathan Rhys Myers as eye-candy. While he is very delicious looking, and I get to see a lot of him, shirtless, or displaying his arms, it is a sad truth that I only find men attractive when I find the majority of their actions attractive as well. And if there is anything you can say about Henry VIII, it's that he was a historical asshole misogynist. I am doubly amused by John's reaction to Henry, because he wants to go and play Medieval Total War so he can take France or Spain or any country but England and wipe Henry's forces from the map.

We spent a lot of time discussing 16th century medicine, royal relations, historical footnotes, and the weird clutches of religion as it dictated the actions of kings and ordinary people. Thomas More, for example, is one of the most rational and sane people in this series, and even he is gripped by a sort of religious fatalism.

Anyway, that's how we spent our Independence Day. Watching The Tudors.

(Oh, if'n you comment, try not to put spoilers in for the series, even though it's history. We're not quite to the end of Season One yet. Thanks.)

I had a writing class from Nick last summer, and one of the things wot impressed me mightily, and which I had failed to acquire before that date, was the Try-Fail-Try-Succeed cycle. It explains why some of my past stories didn't work--protags having either no major obstacles or major moral decisions. No tension. Just....story.

Anyway, the cycle came up again recently during one of the recent Kick in the Pants emails that David Farland sends out, and I'm trying to explain some of this to John, who had been lounging on the couch reading his big fat book of Conan. And he explains the try-fail-try-succeed cycle to me, the Conan Way:

"See, Conan is always getting bonked on the head. Or put in shackles. Or betrayed by a friend. Or bonked on the head, betrayed by a friend, and then put in shackles. But THEN he can bust out, destroy the monster, slay the mobs, and win the day."

Duly noted.

................

In other news, it is FUCKING hot here. And I mean that expletive with all the capital letters I can muster. Even with our fans going full speed, and our windows creating the wind tunnel, it is still too hot. It is TOO HOT to play World of Warcraft. I will let your minds ponder the impossibility of that.

John cleared the first chamber of Lightning Halls for me so I could get my 80 ding on General Bjorngrim. Technically it happened on one of his bodyguards, but the General was my first official 80 kill.

Nick sums up Transformers: "...this is the key to Transformers It is not a feature film at all. It is forty trailers featuring the same characters, back to back."

That probably explains a lot. Given that Bay tried taking the credit for making Nicolas Cage a star a few weeks back, one wonders if he has seen any movies besides his own. And now we know. Michael Bay probably just watches trailer after trailer, and decided to make the ultimate trailer of them all.

We just watched the last four episodes of True Blood STRAIGHT THROUGH. I think we may have overdosed on our True Blood. The last four hours go like this:

Me: Oh, look, it's totally ---------! ---------- is the killer! I mean, -------- was at ----event---- and said --------------!

Five minutes later:

John: No, it's too obvious. They've made it WAY too obvious. It's got to be ----------, who was also at ----event----. Besides, --------- is totally covering up for ------------.

Me: You are right. Too obvious! It must be -----------. Watch, ----------- will totally ----verb----- and surprise -------------. Any second now. Five, four, three, two, one. (-------- totally verbs.) SEE!

John: High-five. So you see, it can't be -----------.

Me: Yeah. It's got to be ---------. Besides, they did that thing with ----character---- and made it so obvious that --------- is a ------------, and then they yanked us around by having --------- show up at the same time as ---------- so you thought ---------- couldn't be ---------.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

People who have actually seen the True Blood finale might know what the hell that all meant.

Still, I have to say that the one character I really really wanted to die from the moment they stepped onto the screen DIED. Woo hoo!

I was trying to locate some recommended reading and I noticed if you type in Stonewall into Google today, they made the stripe across the top of the search results a rainbow:

http://www.google.com/search?q=stonewall

Today is Pride here in Seattle. John and I are hoping to hit the parade, which will be running along 4th ave until it hits Denny.

Despite the number of jokes I've made about my Mormon ancestors spinning in their graves, I don't march or support GLBT rights just to piss off my family or because I'm a late-developing rebel (a popular theory among the more staid relatives). I support it because after a lot of thought--it involved a lot because of how I was raised--I came to realise it was the right thing to do. I do not see any good reason why two people who love each other should not be able to make vows to support each other that the state recognises. This point actually lies further along a continuum that I have mostly not seen due to my age and again, where and how I was raised, but this is not the start of gay rights, and it will not be the end of gay rights. (Seeing as we still have DADT in place, for one.)

Nick posted a link to Rick Bowes, a writer of some note, reminiscing about Stonewall. He paints a picture of a time where you could be arrested for being gay and in the wrong place at the wrong time. You could be arrested for trying to hit on another person of the same gender, trying to ask them out. You could be arrested for not wearing feminine enough clothing if you were a woman. Homosexuality was defined as a mental illness. People could sometimes have their gay family members committed and given dangerous electrical shock aversion therapies.

In my lifetime, GLBT folks have seen a number of horrifying old laws struck down. A few years back Texas found its sodomy laws to be unconstitutional, and indeed, they were primarily there to police the private acts of individuals the rest of society was a little bit afraid of. Things are getting better.

But Harvey Milk was assassinated when I was nearly two. My lifetime has still seen Matthew Shepard being severely beaten and left for dead. Just the past few months have seen a handful young boys kill themselves, because they were bullied mercilessly at school for being perceived as gay. Trans men and women are often beaten and sometimes killed, while their offender claims some kind of justifying panic over finding out that they were transexual or cross-dressing--and the media eats this up. Things are not perfect. And when clueless folk ask why the gays are so militant over marriage as if it's the only thing that GLBT people have had to care about....I want to beat my head. Even I can tell, sheltered kid from Utah, that the advances in gay rights didn't just come about because gay folk were so meek and polite that we thought we'd just advance them rights. Things are better now because GLBT folk stood up for themselves, banded together, and worked hard for those advances. And sadly, it has taken several violent acts for some Americans to pull their heads out of the tribal ass and say, "Hey, you and I are different, but we deserve all the same rights."

Interestingly enough, as a straight girl, I've noticed a number of benefits from GLBT folk working their asses off for their rights. Because of the laws about domestic partnerships, John can put me on his insurance plan, which gives me greater flexibility in taking on contracts and makes our household more stable. Because I have health care, that means I don't have to rely on emergency services. Ergo, gay people are saving you, the American taxpayer, money.

Another thing that caught my eye was the information about cross-dressing laws. I tend to take it for granted that I can wear pants anywhere I like. But at the beginning edge of my lifetime, that was not the case. My parents have tales about the legendary woman who wore pants to the YBU testing facilities and was not admitted. So she took her pants off in the restroom, put on a longish coat, and took the test, presumably dressed as a modest and pantsless female. These days wearing pants as a woman, or a kilt or a dress as a guy, WILL NOT get you arrested in most circumstances. Lest you think this is something totally frivolous, I think the ability to wear pants and sensible shoes contributed to a more active and healthy lifestyle than I might otherwise have had as a child. (Shoes were another thing--often business environments used to, and sometimes still do, request that women wear HEELED shoes and skirts. UGH. Makeup too, used to be another requirement. I tend to think, clean, showered, clothed: good enough.) Jobs weren't restricted to certain kinds of jobs based on my clothing. Then there's the mindset of the "uniform". Since I was wearing the same things to school, roughly, that guys were wearing, I didn't feel called out from them on yet one more level. Thanks to GLBT and feminist groups, I have the right to wear what I want to work, and be comfortable and healthy.

These are just two small examples of how my life has been helped by somebody else fighting for their own rights. Rights granted to one group should not be prohibited from another, particularly on the basis of religious belief. Our country has been founded on the proposition that all men are created equal and deserve equal rights.

So. Pride. Be proud of your history, my GLBT friends. Your forerunners have worked their butts off and made this world a better place. I love you all. I'll try to work with you to continue to make this world a better, safer place for all of us. We are all connected--what harms you, harms me; what helps you, helps me. But beyond that, you should just have everything I take for granted.

Firstly, I dragged John over to Olivar because I'd been wanting to try it for ages! AGES! And oh my god, was it good. We had the best watermelon salad I have ever had: slices of pink and yellow watermelon with chopped goat cheese, cucumber, and pumpkin seeds sprinkled on top and drizzled with olive oil. Then we had some zucchini flowerets with chicken liver mousse: a little too salty, alas, to be a repeat for me, although tasty enough to have tried the once. Then I had a leek-and-goat cheese ravioli with Cinncinati radishes, snow peas, and asparagus, while John had a Spanish omelet. For desert we finished off roasted peaches and licorice ice cream (John) and olive oil cake, black olive caramel, and confit fennel with olive oil ice cream. (Me.) I loved the way the flavours hung on the tongue afterwards.

I am full and happy, although because I lack self-restraint and have lactose intolerance, I should undoubtedly invest in Lactaid so these happy moments don't come with painful abdominal moments.

Today at lunch, I ate a piece of sushi that unwound itself from its seaweed wrapping, and then proceeded to try and strangle me with vacuum-seal seaweed. My co-worker actually had to Heimlich me, which efforts at least dislodged the seaweed from my airway. I more or less spit out the offending article into a plastic bowl, and everyone commenced eating.

I had a sore throat for a few hours, but no other side effects.

...I am amused by CNN's overblown hyperbolic headlines: Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/06/26/michael.jackson.internet/index.html

The picture of the Twitter birds carrying him off is one of their better illustrations too, since normally what they offer is warmed over stock photography.

Like any other child of the 80s, I don't remember life without knowing who Michael Jackson was. I can't remember which was my first memory of him, Thriller or the Pepsi commercials or the King of Pop declarations. I was just a wee too young and we got our TV a little too late to really remember him as part of The Jackson Five.

My parents had some of his singles--notably Man in the Mirror--and by the standards by which I judge fame, which include "Do my completely culturally resistant and proud of it Mom and Dad know who they are?" Michael Jackson was famous.

I wasn't big on MJ...not like some of my classmates. I liked some of his songs just fine, but I don't think I LOVED his music, but it still defined a large portion of my childhood's soundtrack.

Poor guy had issues, no doubt. Terrible financial sense. Terrible sense of boundaries. Who knows which rumours about his life were true and which weren't. None of our business really, but I think his music and dancing will last longer as his legacy than the Whacko Jacko that was.

...

Farah is a celebrity I don't really recall much of. I never saw much of Charlie's Angels (see note about the TV above) but I did see her as Holly in Logan's Run. In any case, she seems to have fought tooth and nail, and furthermore used her remaining time trying to help spread awareness of cancer. Good on you, Farah.

Books show up a lot in my dreams. Anyway, from the library of books that were never written comes Doctor Seuss's Encyclopedia of Wrestlers.

I found this while wandering around in an orange wedding dress made of two sheets.

I think between the parade and yesterday's party I may have spent too much time in the sun. I'm not sunburned, because I blocked up good several times, but I am nauseated and achy and beyond tired.

"Where were you? We were at 34th and Troll."

I took a LOT of pictures and video yesterday. My favourite picture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster isn't even in this batch. But it's a pain to label and describe and rotate, and not all of these are. But if you are interested in some preliminary shots from the Solstice Parade, here you are:











Oh, and HAPPY SOLSTICE!