Junior Strikes Again
Ok. This is just like the last time. No obvious captions, although I can't think of the obvious one right now. I think I might even offer a prize this week.
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Ok. This is just like the last time. No obvious captions, although I can't think of the obvious one right now. I think I might even offer a prize this week.
In fact, I'm really bored. So bored that I just went to two bars to check the price of beer.
Yup, I'm now bargain shopping for pints of beer.
I was right. The yucky, dingy, nasty place has cheaper beer, but only be fifty-five cents. And the food isn't as good.
The entire situation makes me wonder if there is a way to quantatively figure out how the cost of a pint of beer relates to the customer service offered. Then I could determine the theoretical value of the added fifty-five cents and compare with the actual improvement in service.
But that would be dumb.
And the negativespace.net crowd welcomes another earthling into the fold.
All hail Wildcat, the new blogger in the universe.
insert maniacal, evil, dark, and growly "YES" here. But then I suppose only a few people who know us will get that particular joke.
And maybe Bette Middler too, but at least she can only hum the wind beneath her wings beneath the bondage ropes.
Blog: No form of that word seems to have made it into any spellchecker yet. Same goes for spellchecker. I don't think there should be a space there, but the evil bastard dictator that is the spellchecker seems to demand it. I am appalled and creating a revolution in the spelling world by not spacing spellchecker the way the "man" wants me too.
Damn the man, but not the Dan the man in Amsterdam.
Georgia Nicols - Daily Horoscope
Aquarius (Jan. 20 - Feb. 18)
This is a saucy day for flirtations and fun. Frankly, your gonads are in overdrive. Of course, this same seething, passionate energy can be directed to penetrating research into any subject. Not nearly as much fun, but probably more productive.
I suppose it just sort of speaks for itself really.
A few weeks ago, someone suggested the idea of a bondage workshop to the UVic Pride Collective. Seemed like an interesting idea, and a few people had been asking for some safety information for bondage. Cool, we all thought it would be an interesting new thing that we could do.
That same someone found two facilitators and made all the arrangements. We were excited to be doing something along these lines, after all the administrative and political work that we just finished.
I posted an announcement to the mailing list about when we would be discussing the possible workshop and if it would be a good idea. Everyone who came to the meeting thought it would be great. We made the final arrangements with sagacity and posted the announcement to our mailing list, on October 7.
And nothing happened.
Really. A few days passed and nothing happened.
On Thursday, October 8, we got a slightly odd phone call from Ron Strom. Some mysterious stranger had forwarded him a copy of the announcement e-mail, and he had decided to write a news article on it for World Net Daily. I couldn't take his phone call so I asked him to e-mail us some questions, and I would respond as soon as possible.
His questions were a little silly, and a little naive. He seemed to think that the university was offering this workshop for credit, and that people would be naked and there would be live sex acts. He probably thought there would be small children and live animals and trapezes and who knows what else those fundy conservatives think.
We answered his questions, and clearly pointed out that the university had nothing to do with the workshop. The Pride Collective is a student group, and has no official relation to UVic. He didn't seem to care too much. His headline read, "University hosts bondage rope class - British Columbia school features 3-hour course on 'safety skills'". We didn't see the article until Monday morning.
On Saturday, the CKNW radio station web-site picked up the story and ran "UVic offers bondage seminar." I cannot confirm this, but supposedly the first version of the article suggested that clothing was not at all required. A volunteer for the Pride Collective quickly e-mailed the radio station to correct the brief article, although the headline didn't change until I e-mailed CKNW myself. Once the editors changed the article, it dissapeared from their site, presumably because of lack of interest.
I still don't understand the newsworthiness of the event, but at some point we hit a critical mass, and everything went crazy.
Doug Patton from gopusa.com wrote "When Evil Becomes Good," without even trying to verify the information in the article. It is an almost perfect example of right wing propaganda and rhetoric.
"University hosts bondage rope class - The Latest Insanity From The Hallowed Halls Of Learning" (scroll down about six pages) soon appeared on hallindseyoracle.com. Although the content seems to be fairly factually correct, the subtitle really does give it a nice little punch, don't you think? It is nice to know that fifteen people tying each other up in a safe, consensual manner is as important as the national politics of China and Israel.
By noon on Monday, October 13, I lost count of the phone calls from reporters. I spoke with journalists from The Province, The Vancouver Sun, and The Times Colonist, as well as the University of Victoria's administration.
They had been getting phone calls too. Lots of phone calls. We discussed the situation, and I forwarded the e-mail interview. They agreed with us, that we had done everything that we could to dissuade the so-called news media that the workshop was not offered by the university, and that the "journalists" clearly chose to ignore the information in the e-mails.
Many of the reporters have interviewed senior members of the UVic administration, who have expressed confidence in the Pride Collective's abilities, and support for our decision to hold a workshop. I don't think our tiny little office would have survived, had it not been for the co-operation of the administration. The communications department was able to give me some tips on dealing with the media.
The UVic Pride Collective has been mentioned in every major newspaper in the province. I'm told, although I cannot confirm, that our workshop was mentioned on CKNW and CFAX, and that the two local television stations called the office, asking for more information. CBC Canada apparently called but refused to leave a phone number for us to call them back. The Canadian Press interviewed me today, although the reporter didn't really know what bondage actually meant. Several student groups across the country have called asking for more information so that they can have their own bondage workshop. A volunteer spoke with Reuters yesterday.
And now we've even made it into the blog scene. http://wiredtales.blogspot.com/ and http://www.aboms.com/
So how did this all happen? Turns out, someone on our mailing list didn't approve of us having a bondage workshop, and tried to stir trouble for us by forwarding our email to a conservative news/editorial website. From there, the news seemed spread like a wildfire. We are still getting requests from reporters for information and news, although now it seems more like moths attracted to a flame.
I feel like road kill on the information superhighway.