A better site than that other one

SOSAnchorage: if it ends in dot net, that'll get you to the site that fact checks the homophobic fundraising site of similar title sponsored by the Anchorage Baptist Temple.

WAR’s antigay letter to the Alaska Bar Association, 1993

An Acrobat PDF copy of page 7 from the May-June 1993 issue of the Alaska Bar Rag in which Wayne Anthony Ross' by-now famous antigay "degenerates" letter appears is now posted, along with some background info, at Henkimaa.com.

Which is where I'm moving my blog (I'm just updating here for now until Google's spiders or whatever they are catch on to the content there so it shows up in searches). Please make any comments there, as I've got commenting turned off here.

Jay Ramras: “We won’t necessarily be coloring within the lines”

Representative Jay Ramras, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, doesn't seem to mind joining Alaska attorney general-nominee Wayne Anthony Ross — not to mention Gov. Sarah Palin herself — in coloring outside the lines of Alaska state law.

Read the full post at Henkimaa.com (where my blog is moving).

(Comment there too, if you like, since I'm disabling comments here.)

Pro-WAR = anti-LAW

New post over lunch about Wayne Anthony Ross & his disrespect for the rule of law at my new website/blog. See it there.

Anti-WAR lettter: Against Wayne Anthony Ross

A letter sent to all Alaska legislators, posted last night on my new website, which is where I'm in the process of moving all my blogs.

See the letter here.

Note to Jeff Bezos: #glitchmyass

My tweet of the day:

Note to Jeff Bezos: #glitchmyass, we deserve more explanation & apology than that for #amazonfail. Do you really want to regain our trust?

Things have really snowballed. In fact I'd say it's a snow-boulder now, what with the Twitter hashtag #amazonfail, the online petition which is now at over 17,000 signatures, & a Google search on Amazon Rank now brings up as first result the satirical definition coined yesterday by Smart Bitches Trashy Books. (They've now got the definition in the Urban Dictionary too.) Trolls are taking advantage: one Livejournal blogger claims to have written code that brought the delisting about, only to be exposed by another Liveblogger as a metatroll with bad code. I'm only surprised that there's not a Wikipedia article about it, though the Wikipedia entry on Amazon.com now has a section on the delisting (currently subtitled "Deranking of erotic, LGBT, feminist, progressive and sex-positive content").

A huge public relations nightmare for Amazon.com. As well it should be. So far their only public statements are to the effect that #amazonfail was caused by a technical "glitch" which they are working furiously to resolve. But I have a hard time buying that as anything other than, as others have noted, a "templated" cover story as they try to resolve the issue internally. There's too much data provided by bloggers researching the delisting for it to have been merely a glitch: how else explain why a search on "homosexuality" bring books about "preventing" or "curing" homosexuality to the very top of the search results, to the almost complete exclusion of the numerous other non-homophobic books on the subject?

Reports from the disabled community that Amazon also delisted books on disability & sexuality which news needs to be shared more widely.

I do think it possible that some enterprising homophobic souls within the Amazon hierarchy took it upon themselves to interpret a policy about "adult books" rather more widely than top management had intended. But that remains to be seen. For my part, I am looking for something more than weak babble about a software glitch. I want a public explanation & apology from someone at the very top levels of the Amazon hierarchy — preferably Jeff Bezos himself — on top, of course, of correcting the problem itself. They've lost a lot of trust, & they're gonna have to work pretty hard to regain it. I've seen plenty or reports from people saying they'll never buy from Amazon again, even if they do fix the "glitch."

This, for me, comes on top of having learned a month or two ago (after I'd already purchased my Kindle) about their monopolistic actions with regard to their print-on-demand service BookSurge. This is currently in antitrust litigation — see the Small Publishers Association of North America page on the lawsuit and the Amazon Booksurge Antitrust Lawsuit Clearinghouse.

I know there are alternatives to Amazon, but I'm also a hoping-to-be-published writer, so this has relevance to me also as someone who recognizes Amazon as one of the most important places to have one's books listed in order to be able to make a living at it.

There are signs that Amazon is making progress in relisting the delisted books, but it's slow — & still no public explanation or apology besides the inadequate & mealymouthed "glitch" explanation offered so far.

Amazon Rank - Google bomb 'em!

Yep, it's true. Amazon.com has decided that all any any books about or by LGBTA folk are "adult content" -- the equivalent of pornography. Hence, they've removed the sales rankings for those books. Hence those books are tougher to find when searching for books on Amazon.

This is regardless of the books' sexual or any other content.

So I'm joining in the Google bombing on Amazon Rank. Read about what a Google bombing means in this post about this stupidity at the Smart Bitches/Trashy Books blog. Include the hashtag #amazonfail in your Twitters. Read how it's affecting LGBTQ authors at Kelley Eskridge's & Nicola Griffith's blog and the other pages they link too. And let those idiots at Amazon know how you feel.

Lauren Green sings

Last Saturday (April 4) I attended a concert at UAA of the winners and honorable mentions in two competitions held recently by National Association of Teachers of Singing Alaska (NATS): Classical Voice (held April 3–4) and Musical Theater (held February 28).

My niece, Lauren, competed in the "upper avocation" division of both competitions. And guess what? She took first place in both.

This is her singing during the concert.

She is one kick-ass soprano. I told her afterwards that she looked so relaxed as she performed that she made it look easy, & she laughed and said, "I'm glad the audience thought it was relaxing!" — but of course I know the hard work it takes to appear that way, no matter how much native talent one might have. (And she has it.) I can't wait for more people to discover her.

I heard a lot of other fine singers that night too. I finally located an announcement with the full winners list posted on the Anchorage Daily News website: "Singing winners announced" posted April 6, 2009. Congratulations, all of you.

Ballad of the Splash

In honor of National Poetry Month, & also in honor of breakup (which is Alaskan for the time of year we're now in, when the ice & snow melts & everyone's car is splashed with mud) — here's a poem I wrote back in 1997, based on a little tragedy I experienced when I was a child growing up in Columbia Falls, Montana.

Ballad of the Splash
by Melissa S. Green

'Twas one day after school let out
the child was walking home,
on her feet red rubber overboots
to keep her dry and warm.

The mountains’ southern slopes were bare,
the northern slopes were white,
the street one-third of pavement grey,
one-third not melted quite,

and one-third, lo! a thousand lakes!
and puddles, rivulets, streams,
to watch, or dam, or stomp and splash
though it might damp her shins.

Into a flow she moved pebbles
and rearranged small sticks
so to watch with all a child’s delight
some fluid dynamics.

And then she held her foot just so
above the reservoir
and stamped it down to swamp the dam
and cause a muddy shower.

Thusly moved she down the street,
through this puddle and that,
till she came upon the greatest lake
outside the laundromat.

And as she set foot in the pool
her overboots so red
did slip; she went horizontal
as though she’d gone to bed.

Overbrimmed her overboots,
overbrimmed her coat —
she felt no longer dry but wet
as an overhumidified boat.

She hopped up tearful and soggy and cold
and ran home in a thrice
and was careful evermore not to wade
in puddles bottomed with ice.

Out of the cave

I've been going through a rough patch lately. A patch . . . oh, about 8 months long. A cave, to be sure, well-supplied with bookshelves, TV, laptop, Kindle, iPod Touch, & plenty of escapist entertainment; but a cave nonetheless, where I lived with my cat & the boy's dog & not much else but a deepseated hurt & a need to think/feel/work my way out of it. Unlike other rough patches in my life, this one rendered me unable to communicate much, or to desire to. I mostly just wanted to be alone. Stopped most of my online communication, only kept up with a very few select friends & relatives, & even that's been fairly sporadic.

(Except for my valued Mondays w/ Marcia & Wednesdays w/ Sylvia.)

There are reasons, of course. Briefly: changes in the relationship with my partner of 16 years, which are inevitably leading to the end of the partnership (though not the love & friendship); & the approaching death of my father (though his matter-of-fact acceptance helps with my own).

I seem to be have come out of the cave now. Not just feeling better — I've felt better a number of times (only to then go back into the grey again) — but actually able & willing to communicate. Maybe it was that I'm finally accepting the inevitable with my partner. Maybe it was finally getting the plane tickets bought to fly down in late April to see my dad. Maybe it was taking enough 5-HTP to keep the serotonin cooking in my brain. Maybe it's the light coming into the days after a looooooong winter. Maybe it's all just been perimenopause. Anyway... seems I'm back in the world again.

(Long parenthetical: My partner hasn't lived here up here for the last two & a half years anyway because she was in school in Seattle, though we were in almost daily contact &, of course, visits. Last summer, after much internal exploration, she made the decision to transition from female to male (or FTM, as it's oft-abbreviated), which presents its own set of challenges for someone like me, a lesbian); & more recently he's gone into a kind of wandering, living mostly off-the-grid mode, currently living out of a backpack & bivvy bag in Nevada. As per my yesterday post — he found himself with bars on the cellphone yesterday & called me up for Google Map help. He intends to get up to Spokane later this month when my brother & I fly down to see my dad, which is important to me.)

It feels good to feel good again, for the first time in months. Not that I was was continually in the grey all that time, but even my better days were inside the cave, not able to see much beyond its walls. Why, I even feel like carrying my camera around with me again.