Pride and the Food Court

To-day's the second day of San Diego's Pride Festival. I only just heard that George Takei and his husband Brad were Grand Marshals--along with La Toya Jackson for some reason. I see on her Wikipedia page, "The perception of Jackson as an underdog and her support for LGBT rights has led her to be declared a gay icon." The cited source is an interview at Gay Wired in which she says:

Years ago, I remember being at a meeting and my record label said, “Did you know 99-percent of your audience are gay?” I was really excited about that.

So I guess that means around twenty La Toya Jackson fans are gay. I love that her whole record label speaks with one voice, too.

Anyway, I would've liked to have gone to Hillcrest to see Takei though from what I've heard about Pride parades in previous years it sounds like more of a party atmosphere than really appeals to me. Give me events with panels--I figured I probably oughtn't exhaust myself before Comic-Con. It is interesting these two big San Diego events are occurring so close together. It would be kind of cool if a mob of Pride people invaded the Ender's Game panel.

My sister's working at the Pride parade so I look forward to hearing her talk about it. I simply went to a shopping mall yesterday, Mission Valley mall which is at least fifteen miles away from Hillcrest but I was surprised to see rainbow banners everywhere. The remarkable thing about them is that they were clearly corporate produced--this wasn't some hand painted rainbow blankets hung from lamp posts, this was mass produced decoration from Westfield, the massive shopping mall company which bought up malls all over the country. It really hasn't been so long since JC Penney pulled ads from Ellen DeGeneres' sitcom. This has been some year for gay rights, a rather encouraging one. It's somewhat odd next to the weakening of the voting rights act and the not guilty verdict for George Zimmerman. The only consistent thing about civil rights this year is action, it seems like.

I spent a lot of time yesterday looked through the Russian version of imdb while I was having a conversation about gangster movies with a Russian woman in Second Life with the aid of a scripted translator. I rather liked the oddly grindhouse feeling trailer the site has for the 1932 Scarface.

Twitter Sonnet #527

Digital old muffins march in the keep.
A broad doughy hat gave away the thief.
From a liquorice vine he makes a leap.
And lands in the garden of Queen O'Keeffe.
Dilapidated decks begin to point.
Lower hells are where the ham doughnuts go.
U-turns create a tail light socket joint.
Kelloggs deals flakes a slowly burning blow.
The wooden cart's loaded with lost olives.
Indolent steam anthems create no perm.
Plywood chambers prove Digital Joe lives.
Green clouds twist to a hole for a blue worm.
Bold tan puppets play Supermarket Risk.
Just a few thousand hearts fit on floppy disk.