That's no giant carpet, that's a man baby.

We've secretly replaced these historic buildings with giant carpets painted to look just like these historic buildings.


Will the tourists notice the difference? Let's watch!

I'm in Munich, capital of Bavaria! I like it here and will stay for at least two more days! Despite the replacement of historic buildings.

Well, you know, in this crazy city, whose to say what's a historic building and what's a giant carpet? The joint was bombed to bits in 1944.* Every historic building you see is a replacement of a historic building.

*Uh, I noticed after I posted that this is in the passive voice. Curious, eh? And just who bombed it to bits? Who's getting in free to national parks?

Judith Butler Declines Berlin Pride's "Civil Courage" Award

Judith Butler declined the Berlin Pride Parade's "Civil Courage" award in a speech here in Berlin less than a week ago in a call for gay pride movements to fight racism and islamophobia.

Butler said that she declined the award in order to distance herself from the explicit racism of the organizers of the giant Berlin gay pride event (known here as Christopher Street Day or CSD) and their failure to deal with racism in their movement, including racism against Muslims here in Berlin. Butler also decried the commercialism of the pride event. Her action has, as you can imagine, caused a kerfuffle here, but sadly hasn't gotten any coverage in the U.S. as far as I can tell.

I say: Way to go, Judy B.!
Butler suggested that the "Civil Courage" prize be given instead to these Berlin groups:

GLADT (Turkish Gays and Lesbians)

LesMigraS (an organization of lesbian migrants and black lesbians against violence and discrimination)

SUSPECT (a group of queers against violence, racism, and homophobia)
ReachOut (an organization for victims of right-wing, racist, antisemitic, homophobic, and transphobic violence)

Transgenialer CSD (the alternative Pride parade)

Here is an English press release from SUSPECT and and a video of part of Butler's speech (with English subtitles--she apparently spoke in German.)

Angela Davis's statement of support for Butler.

Transgenialer CSD's 2009 logo:

The Greatest Generation

Me: Wow, me and CC sure had to pay a lot to get into the park at the beach today. It is sure expensive.
Dad: Your mother and I do not have to pay at the national parks--we get in free! Because we have the old man pass.
Me: What? That's not fair.
Dad: It's fair. Hey! It's fair because we won World War II.
Me: ??
Dad: We won WWII!
Me: What? You were six years old.
Dad: I collected cans.
Me: Uh, you definitely turned nine in 1945.
Dad: We bought stamps! We collected cans! We collected tin foil.

Putting the *bad* back in tribadism

Nice, friendly reader may remember the 1000-page book, E.F.W. Eberhard's 1924 The Erotic Foundations of Women's Emancipation (Die Frauenemanzipation und Ihre Erotischen Grundlagen). I took lots of digital photographs of it in 2007 and merrily imagined myself reading it later.

Then it seemed for a long time like in fact, I would not read it later.

But yesterday I started reading chapter 6. And yes, the book is indeed the hoot that its chapter titles promised it would be.

Chapter 5: Masturbation and the Women's Emancipation Movement
Chapter 6: Tribadism and the Women's Emancipation Movement
Chapter 7: Sadism and the Women's Emancipation Movement

You couldn't publish certain descriptions of sex acts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even if you were a scientist of sex. The sexologists got around this by putting them in Latin. E.F.W. Eberhard quotes them a lot.

The thing is, you can often tell what they mean, even if you do not speak Latin (or if your Latin teacher did not go over this vocabulary in high school):

frictio genitalium mutua (p. 538)

Which is good, because the online Latin dictionary run by Notre Dame University is no help.