77 El Deora Summer Shows

While I missed the Cowgirl-A-Palooza on Labor Day at El Rio, I have been able to take in some great local shows recently. Lance, Greg, and Jason joined me briefly for a show in the tiny performance space at the Hotel Utah on August 21. Kate and I lamented the lack of dance floor, but I was too happy with the remarkable performance by the B Stars to be too bummed about it.

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The B Stars and 77 El Deora at Hotel Utah

77 rounded off their weekend with a show up at Peri's in Fairfax, CA. The Bay was cold and fogged in pretty far north, but once I hit Sir Francois Drake up by the Richmond Bridge, it was sunshine and hot lollipops. It turned out to be a great afternoon. I've enjoyed talking with bass player Mike A, who found out via Facebook that we have mutual friends outside the band. He's crazy with the hot and I want Maurice or Jen to write a country song about "Taking the B out of Bass Player." That, or "Every time he plucks those strings I wish he were plucking me." We'll see.

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At one point during the outdoor show someone's toddler (I'm guessing 18 months) toddled up to the stage and Jen offered him the microphone. He declined, walked back across the dirt and up to me. He smiled broadly and did the universal "pick me up" signal. As we were both "vetted" by band members from the stage during the show I picked him up with only little fear of "there's a stranger with my baby!" reactions. I bounced him on my knee and the kid just beamed happy with the attention and the music.

A few minutes later a large man came up to me and said something lost in the din which I took to mean, "Hey, that's my kid. Is he bothering you? Thanks for paying attention to him" sort of mumblings. I muttered something equally nondescript along the lines of "No problem. I have nephews and nieces. He's fine here as long as he's entertained."

The man then got increasingly agitated and louder and communicated that he worked for the bar and even in the large outdoor space out back, kids were not allowed. He was telling me, "You can't have your baby here. Your baby cannot be here."

It was all I could do to say, "Okay. My baby's not here."

"You can't have your baby here."
"This is not my baby."
"You can't have your baby here!"
"This is not my baby."
"I don't understand."
"This baby. Not mine. He's just here for the band."

I toyed with the galoot a little longer before his mother ultimately appeared and abashedly took him and his stroller outside to view over the fence with the other performers' children. (I kept thinking about that old joke that ends with "You said your dog did not bite!" "That is not my dog.")

Flickr sets: Hotel Utah, Peri's.

laborious

Well, it was a feverish week for IJS. Literally. Me with the fever. But it's all over and done now and now H1N1 as far as I can tell, just a garden-variety flue bug. Although who gardens a crop of flu bugs I'll never know and don't want to find out (This fall on Fringe!).

As I was bed-bound, and not in the good way, for Labor Day weekend, I missed out and all sorts of SF fun times, not the least of which was the annual fest of awesome knows as Cowgirl-Palooza at El Rio with headliners 77 El Deora. (Kind words from Mau via Facebook: "You were missed. Do you have any idea how many lesbians it takes to replace one absent WilDog?")

I'll be working this weekend so I'll be missing some City Fun Times again, so to catch up on the blog I thought it was time to pull out the weekend fun that has been had recently but failed to make the blog. This blog is part to entertain you, mostly to entertain me, and part to journal what I've been doing so I can remember this stuff later. I can't tell you how many times having this stuff written has come in handy. I can't imagine being questions by the police or on the stand without an iPhone. "What were you doing on the evening of the 21st!" "Let me check the blog..."

Thus the next several posts will be recent friend fun postings. And considering the number of recent redaction requests (Hi Eddie!), I'll go light on the last names. Some folks like to hide their social life keep their private life private, others are flattered and excited to see their name in the blog. (Coco calls I'm Just Sayin' SF's Page Six. Not quite, but nice.)

sick leave

Hey. Been fighting the flu. Be back soonish.

job "searching"

In this who-has-a-job-anymore climate, I have received a few requests to redact certain stories in the blog, or remove names from Flickr sets so certain posts do not show up in a Google search performed by hiring managers or potential employers. During these conversations I have also been warned that I might live too much of my life online, and that my social life makes me appear to be too "exuberant" to be hire-able. This does concern me, but ultimately I decided that keeping this blog is important to me, and the benefits of this forum outweigh the perceived risks.

First of all, I do not this this online journal is all that salacious. Even I have a filter, and I have witness many things, and thought many thoughts, which do not go online. I do live a vibrant social life and I am truthfully offended that I should feel the need to obscure or apologize for it. I have have had too many mentors go to their grave with the same parting advice, perhaps best expressed as a paraphrase of Thoreau: I shall not spend my life so that when I come to die discover that I had not lived. Live is short, and precious, and I intend to live it before I die. Perhaps my formative education focused too much on life-lesson literature, but I took those morals to heart. Not these least of which is that too much of the world operates not by what they think is best, but out of fear of what others might think. If you have respect for yourself, and behave ethically, you should not worry too much about what the neighbors think.

My life is lively, and at times it is out there. No return, no deposit, and no regrets (plenty of mistakes, and okay, maybe a few regrets). Of this I am proud, not ashamed. And it makes me impossible to smear or blackmail. I own up to it all. I see that as a strength of character, not a flow.

There is also a matter of integrity at play (at work?) here. As an integral part of both growing up and coming out, I made a deliberate decision to live my life honestly and openly, and I am not willing to lie, obfuscate or be ashamed of the truth for the sake of potential and unknown busybodies whose internal shame manifests itself in puritanical judgment of others' personal lives. I have proven myself time and again. My work product is exceptional, as it my work ethic. If a potential employer seeks to judge me, it should be on that basis.

Some friends have counseled me that I am naive to hold such an ideal—that "it does not work that way in the real world." That argument makes me bristle. I have spent so much of my life striving to live with integrity, I feel that I should be able to expect the such from others as well. And while I appreciate and require gainful employment, I also hope that I could work for someone or some company I could respect. And those who would filter qualified candidates based on a capricious judgment of their private lives are not respectable. "Judge not" and all of that. (It could be argued that by keeping a public journal my private life is no longer private, yet I retain control of what I share (giving an incomplete picture at best), and in truth my private life remains separate and distinct from my professional life. And while written down, my personal does remain my private life, even if some episodes are aired for entertainment's sake.

I like my blog and I'm keeping it. If that limits my professional opportunities, so be it. But I find such judgments to be, at their least, hypocritical, and that in the extreme. Would a tea-totalling recruiter deny me an opportunity because drinking stories are in the blog? Would a homophobe send my resume to the trash can? Would a delicate professional of another generation judge my personality as too racy to be professional? Perhaps I have lived in San Francisco too long, or they not long enough. To them I would point out that I my social life is tame by comparison, and that everyone has a social side, and should not be professionally evaluated for it (presuming of course personal life is note directly related to the position question—what should an employer care if one of their editors spends every third Saturday dressed up like Little Bo Peep?). That, and odds are I would not enjoy working for a tea-totaller or a bigot either.

So I'm keeping the blog as it is, a little pushy, but still within limits. It give me a necessary creative outlet, a forum, a soapbox, a little popularity (over 85 thousand hits so far), and a little celebrity. Not to mention, some professionals love the blog. I get fan mail. I also get freelance writing offers. Because of the blog, I'm on the masthead of a southern magazine as their West Coast Correspondent. The blog can be, professionally, a good thing.

All that being said, I am more than happy to redact and reclassify to suit my friends who need to put their best resume forward or avoid cyber-stalking psycho ex-boyfriends.

The most recent request to rename all photos and to introduce a pseudonym came from XYZ, who cited a new search engine from CareerBuilder and Microsoft for hiring managers called Applicant Explorer. Applicant Explorer is pitched to hiring managers so they can find out see how candidates live their lives online or in social networks—basically, their personal life. (Which as I understand it gets off-limits quickly when it comes to legal hiring practices.)

This sounded horribly insidious to me and I checked it out. Here's the link to HR Morning's story on the new search engine. They write:

The engine collects all references to candidates’ names on the Web, giving you a picture of their “online footprint.” Results will include comments posted on message boards, social networking profiles, contributions to blogs and articles that mention the candidate.

I am heartened by the comments to this story by professional hiring managers:

Paul N Benson SPHR Says:
July 28th, 2009 at 11:35 am

This is a disaster waiting to happen! I followed the link to the CB website, read the instructions and the comments, including some very thoughtful comments by one of the development team. I still think this is a huge mistake, and would never allow my recruiters to use this tool – as the expression goes “no good can come from this” – “this” being the action of looking into someone’s “non-work” activities. There’s too much danger of running into one of the “protected” or semi-protected activities of a person’s personal life. Even if the insight is not used in the hiring decision, the employer is now in the position of having to Prove it Wasn’t. That’s why I would not recommending doing any background that was not processed through an independent, licensed or bonded third party source. I don’t need to See someone’s church or political or social club information to make a good hiring decision, and I don’t want the liability of having to defend against that “non-job-relevant” data….. just my thoughts after 21 years in the business!

Nomi Says:
July 28th, 2009 at 2:20 pm

I agree with Paul 100% This is a disaster waiting to happen. Besides, how many Tom Smith’s do you think are on the net? How do you know which Tom you’re looking at.

CM Says:
July 28th, 2009 at 3:17 pm

Ridiculous. This isn’t a background check, this is interfering in personal and private life. I agree, a disaster waiting to happen.

Let's hope this gets killed before someone's career does.

(Revised and updated 09/15/09)

Sinclair Kelly is one of Nashville's Top 30 Under 30

Alert Reader and Sizzling Socialite Sinclair Kelly is honored this month as one of Nashville's Top 30 Under 30. The event recognizes Nashville's young philanthropists and is sponsored by and benefits the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Big congrats to Sinclair!

The celebration will be held September 19 at the ICON, and tickets are only $50 ($75 for VIP tickets), which is a deal for these sort of windings. Interested parties (hee hee) can get their tickets via the website, and be sure to select Sinclair Kelly as the team captain so she gets the credit.

for the love of Muppet surrealism

From Alert Reader and Funny Guy Scott Grissom (of my past life) comes a link to this: a compilation of The Muppet Show's 10 Weirdest Moments. And that's saying a lot. Even better than the WTF Muppet clips are Jon Gutierrez's summaries. This is Muppet gold.

How the hell did The Muppet Show ever get on the air? Imagine it from a TV executive's point of view: a weekly variety show, in an old vaudeville theater, featuring puppets, and a mix of A, B and C-list celebrities that catered to both kids and adults. That's not a pitch... it's a just list of random words that don't go together.

Of course, I was always a fan of the one-liner dancing scenes and the musical numbers, from the originally surreal Sax and Violence,



to the more contemporary but entertaining Ode to Joy:

metablogging

Via Alert Reader SP's Facebook Newsfeed: "There's now 14.9 million Americans unemployed. That's a whole lot of new blogs."

Poker in the front, Liquor in the black.

Shirley Q. Liquor is hanging up the blackface and becoming a full-time nurse. Often controversial to those who never got the joke, I've always thought that Shirley Q. was hilarious.

At least I hope he checks on his patients with a "How you durrin'?"

NYT on AT&T's problem with TMI

Since their exclusive deal with the iPhone, AT&T has been unable to keep up with the data demands of its customers, to the point that AT&T services crash, a lot, and they have gone so far as to cripple features and capabilities of the iPhone to keep what service they have up and running.

The New York Times looks at AT&T's desperate attempt to keep up with what is clearly too much information for their network. Not surprisingly, this is a PR nightmare for AT&T, and a reported 34% of consumers cited AT&T's service as the reason for NOT buying an iPhone.

a very different sort of Derby Day

Coco, Kevin, Jimbo and the Shilps are prepping for a derby day—a Roller Derby Day.

From Alert Reader Coco Flores: The Bay City Bombers are playing host to the 2009 Roller Derby World Championships on September 12.

You've got to love a Derby where you can throw an elbow. I still want to show up in a linen suit with mint juleps and act all confused as to the absence of horses.

I would also like to celebrate their rebel attitude in their spelling of "Septenber."

poof!

I love the Albino Octopus' photography, and he's back with more. This one is called "Plume."


He gets these shots by capturing special instants of people jumping while hidden under sheets.
(photo by the Albino Octopus, AKA William Hundley)

gay bashing back on the Nashville council agenda

The Nashville Scene has the most in-depth coverage of Nashville news, so much more so than the daily papers. This time, Jeff Woods examines if Nashville is finally ready for even the smallest of legal professional protections for gay and lesbian citizens.

The folks I see when I go home all seem to be intelligent, reasonable people. These must be the only reasonable individuals of the 625,000 people in the city limits (MSA: 1.5 million). Fire, brimstone, ignorance and prejudice appear to still be the primary crops of Middle Tennessee.

You know, after pot.

From the article:

"As a representative of Metro government, I think it's an embarrassment that we don't already have this law to protect employees," says Megan Barry, the bill's sponsor, who was elected to an at-large council seat in 2007. "This is not cutting edge stuff. These protections have become, if anything, common and mainstream."

Yet in 2003, when then Metro Council member Chris Ferrell introduced a similar bill, Nashville went berserk. (Ferrell is now CEO of SouthComm, which owns the Nashville Scene.) Psychotic preachers staged protests outside the courthouse, decrying this "ploy to place government approval upon the monstrous sins of Hell-bound sodomites." Good times. The bill was defeated at a torturous council meeting, with the vice mayor at the time—the star-crossed Howard Gentry—casting the dramatic tie-breaking vote.

"It was ugly," says Gentry, who still agonizes over his dilemma. "That was probably one of the low points in our city's history."

What happened that night at the courthouse was shameful to many people. The venom from the anti-gay opposition was a little too reminiscent of ugly scenes from the civil rights era. It raised a bothersome question: Are we a city of bigots?

[snip]

"I don't know why this wouldn't pass," she says matter-of-factly, as if she were discussing a resolution that honors puppies. "I don't know why everyone wouldn't stand firm on this one."

To be sure, evangelicals are pitching fits this time too. The Tennessee chapters of the Rev. James Dobson's Family Action Council and Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum are orchestrating an email campaign to bombard the council with glimpses of the horrors to come. A sample: The ordinance would force people to use courthouse rest rooms in the company of cross dressers, and it would require the city to pay for sex-change operations.

"It's unfortunate, but there's a segment of the population that hates us more than taxes," says Chris Sanders of GLBT advocacy group the Tennessee Equality Project. "This is just about hiring, firing and promotion, but according to our opponents, the apocalypse is going to turn on what Metro Council does."

That's no exaggeration of the evangelical point of view. In a call-to-arms email only last week, the Family Action Council of Tennessee warned, "This is a very dangerous path for the city to take."

"Let me be clear," wrote David Shelley, FACT's director of church and community relations, "Family Action of Tennessee does not 'hate homosexuals.' Our opposition to this bill is out of love and compassion for the homosexual community as well as the rest of Nashville. It is not 'loving' for government to approve of or protect a sexual lifestyle that is clearly unhealthy and a perversion of God's natural design for intimacy, marriage and procreation (Genesis 1, 19, Leviticus 18, 20, Romans 1, I Corinthians 6, I Timothy 1, etc.).

"While it may be 'politically correct' to adopt this type of ordinance in our modern culture," Shelley continued, "no civilization in human history has survived after legally approving of same-sex marriage." Actually, the pending ordinance has nothing to do with legalizing same-sex marriage. But let's not bog down in details.

I like to think the best of my Tennessee Volunteers, but I have a lifetime of empirical evidence to suggest I should not expect it.

that burning sensation

Many of my creative and/or party type friends are letting their freak flags get ripped by sandstorms this week out at Burning Man. While James is away, I'll be taking care of his cats roommates.

Deathguild Thunderdome at Burning Man 2009
Originally uploaded by mr. nightshade

For those of you who love the scene and not the sand, Laughing Squid has a handy guide on How To Experience Burning Man 2009 Remotely.

Rx not included.


(Read about the Hot Topic joke at right.)

party of five million plus

Curbed SF's guesstimate question this week: How much will the Party of Five house list for now that it's going on the market?

In 1999 it changed hands for $5.4 million.

Happy birthday Kevin!

We don't see enough of you anymore! Get that place to change shift times back to be more nightlife-friendly. Sheesh.

Celebrations all around for the fun that is Kevin Koberle!

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These days and nights are drab without you!

don't sing for your supper, just bark for your beer

It's Thursday, so if you bark like a dog at your server at Showdogs, you get a free beer! (On Market near Golden Gate.)

They are enjoying some free press from CNN for their use of Twitter, Four Sqaure and other "3.0" social media. (I got a little Four Square happy there for a while and had to quit as the Facebook feed was annoying my friends.)

blogblocked

Hey kids. I hear you. More with the posting. You got it. It's been crazy fun time with vacations and reentry, the birthday and now Labor Day weekend. Snark and City updates to resume shortly.

thought of the day

Two things today:

1) Note to straight women: Gay men are not accessories, unless it is to a crime.

2) I am thinking about the pseudonym Robert Arthur Ganouche, just so I can write Bob A. Ganouche.

sleet leopard

Mac users might want to wait a couple of days before installing Apple's new OS update (Snow Leopard) and there may be some quick updates. Some users are experiencing some permissions problems, although these seem mostly ignorable or self resolving. (PGP users, of which I am not one, also note that the current PGP desktop does not work with Snow Leopard.)

Monday morning

Let's get started.