Blog Archives
Interview from 2004: 30 Years of Pride
The Groovy Like A Movie studio came to the Wedding Expo at the Center in San Diego to interview people for a project called 30 Years of Pride on May 17, 2004, and I was one of the people they interviewed that night. The studio gave me permission to share this on YouTube, and since I can now post longer videos to YouTube, I’m posting the original video with only a couple of minutes trimmed off here and there.
It is timely that I am publishing this video on the day of Phoenix Pride’s 15th anniversary. Thirty years of pride for fifteen years of pride. This is the beginning of the pride parade season, so it is timely. I hope that it inspires, educates, informs, and entertains.
Organizer’s attitude toward deaf, interpreters defeats her
The blog post “How Trying to Provide Deaf Interpreters for a Camp Bit Me in the Ass” paints the conference organizer as the victim, but I’m afraid it was her attitude toward interpreters and the deaf that defeated her, and it is the interpreting profession and deaf consumers that stand to lose by her misrepresentation.
I would hate for the takeaway message from any blog post to be, “Don’t provide interpreters to the deaf if you can possibly avoid it.”
Edmund Berke once said, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” Take a look at John Pozadzides’ 2009 blog post “An Open-Source Look at the Cost of WordCamp Dallas” and the comments that ensue when someone suggests “If you cut out the T-shirts and interpreters, you would break even.” You will learn a lot about complying with the ADA and providing accessibility to a public event.
I hope these two bits of history will help people make future events better for all.
Edited January 22, 2011 for clarity.
I sing “My Satin Doll” as “My Latin Doll”— and I’ll tell you why.
(Anyone who wants to skip to the singing can jump to 2:30.)
You may have heard the jazz standard “My Satin Doll” written by Johnny Mercer, Duke Ellington, and Billy Strayhorn. Well, I learned that song when I was in high school and I attended the Fullerton Jazz Festival music contest— singing contest. It was adjudicated, and we got to go up there are do our stuff and get some feedback from the adjudicators. Well, I remember when I learned that song it just struck me as a little odd, like why would you call her your satin doll, and why would she speak Latin?
Well, a few years went by, and Read the rest of this entry
Why are there nearly identical fonts?
I learned from the movie Helvetica that the reason Arial is nearly identical to Helvetica is that Microsoft didn’t want to pay license fees to distribute the Helvetica font so they hired Monotype to modify Linotype’s Helvetica slightly. They just made sure to keep the same font metrics so that a document written in Helvetica would have the same layout and pagination in Arial and vice versa.
But I don’t always understand why there are other fonts that are nearly identical but with different font metrics and/or line spacing; for instance, why are Monotype Corsiva and Apple Chancery so similar? Is it because Apple wanted their own copyright on a font similar to Monotype Corsiva? And why are Bordeaux Roman Bold LET and Monotype Onyx so similar? Is it because Microsoft commissioned Monotype to create Onyx in 1992 after LET created Bordeaux Roman Bold in 1990? Or is there just a “me too” factor involved, in which each foundry wants a product to fulfill similar demands?
I’ve spent some time looking at the differences and similarities, and I’ve noticed that Bordeaux Roman Bold has ligatures and a more extended character repertoire than Onyx, though Onyx is a bit bolder and easier on the eyes. Also, I like the tighter line spacing of Onyx. So it’s a hard to choose a favorite between Bordeaux Roman Bold and Onyx. It’s easy to pick Apple Chancery over Monotype Corsiva because Apple Chancery has a beautiful set of of both common and rare ligatures, more calligraphic letters (especially the slashed dot on the lowercase i), and a much larger character repertoire than Corsiva. When it comes to extended characters, Times New Roman beats Times, but I’ll choose Times almost every time because of its pretty ligatures. If I needed to format a text with rarer characters, though, I would choose Times New Roman. As with the choice between any two similar fonts, it comes down to the application— how many extended characters do you need for what you want to write?
Flying the Rainbow Flag with Pride
I’ve always been just a little bit of an activist. I wrote research papers in high school about the Nazi extermination of gays and about the Stonewall riots when I was only 16 and 17. I really wanted to learn and teach my history.
In 1983, when I was 15, I was in my final sex education class (all about sexually transmitted diseases), and they didn’t teach HIV prevention at all. They said they hadn’t received any training about it and they didn’t have a curriculum. They let me stand up in front of the class and teach my peers everything I knew about the disease and how to avoid contracting it / spreading it. Looking back even now, what I said was correct. Less than five years later, the school district not only had a curriculum to teach HIV prevention; they changed the name of sophomore Sex Ed to something like AIDS and Other Sexually Transmitted Diseases.
I never make a secret of the fact that I love men and chose to spend the rest of my life with one. My husband and I hold hands wherever we go. We enjoy it, and it’s the least we can do to keep pushing the envelope in all sectors of society. We’re here, we’re queer, enjoy it! 
