Bert and Ernie

There’s a movement that’s asking Sesame Street to allow Bert and Ernie, at long last, to become a happily married gay couple.  And I’m against it.
I’m not against Bert and Ernie getting married because I’m against gay marriage, for I am not; I’m not against it because I think that my childhood memories should never change.
It’s because I’m against the sexualization of every friendship in the goddamned world, that’s why.
That’s one of the things I dislike about most slash-fiction – that quiet assumption that every intense friendship must lead to hot’n’sweaty coupling.  If two people like each other, goes the thinking, then they must be sexually attracted!  And wham, all sorts of terrible fiction get written because if two people have shared an emotional intimacy, they must inevitably rush to entwine appendages.
Fuck that.  There’s all sorts of love in the world, and not all of it has to involve our genitalia.  Particularly to children, I think it’s necessary to accentuate the Agape and Philia along with the Eros.  I think there are a lot of damaged people out there who have bought into this idea that “If I feel an intense connection to X, I must therefore move to sleeping with X” – a concept that often ends in disaster.  There’s nothing wrong with staunch friendship, even with those who continually irritate you – in fact, if Ernie and Bert are a couple (cue the inevitable rendition of “My Girlfriend Who Lives In Canada”), then they’re a bitchy dysfunctional couple who are probably going to get divorced in a few years.
No.  I think you can be good friends and nothing more than good friends. And that is not only a good thing, but admirable.
That said, there’s something distinctly disingenuous about Sesame Street’s insistence that puppets have no sexuality; some of the characters have girlfriends, which is a tacit endorsement of heterosexuality.  (I had no idea the Count had not one, but three girlfriends.  But for a man who loves counting, it seems appropriate he’d be polyamorous.)  So if you wanted to bring in a set of boyfriend-characters, or have Elmo pick up a lover, then I’m fine with that.  (Hopefully, shoving something in Elmo’s mouth would shut him up – and it would provide a lovely frisson the next time you saw someone tickling Elmo.)
I’m all for having more gayness in Sesame Street.  But Bert and Ernie?  No.  Let them remain friends.  Teach kids about gay relationships, but also teach them that not every friendship inevitably dissolves into lust – and let Bert and Ernie be that channel. At a time when our politicians are so hostile and divided that our government can barely function, this lesson’s more necessary than ever.  In fact:
“Bert and Ernie are characters who help demonstrate to children that despite their differences, they can be good friends.”  Wise words from the Sesame Workshop, almost twenty years ago.
 

Your Daily Question: Best Expenditure of Money?

About a week ago, I bought the soundtrack to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.  iTunes informs me that I have listened to it thirty times since then.
My wife’s getting weary of the emo re-envisioning of our seventh President, but every time I play it, I think: it’s getting cheaper.  I paid ten bucks for it on iTunes, and with thirty repetitions my cost-per-listen is down to thirty-three cents a song.  Heck, if you count the individual songs, I’m down to two cents per playing.
Compare this to my media waste of $9.99 for Cat Stevens’ latest album, which I think I listened to twice.  At best.  Or, worse, the DVD for Charlie Wilson’s War, which I paid $5 for and haven’t even taken it out of the packaging.
Judged on a cost-per-listening basis, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is a great bargain! In time, I’ll get the cost of that whole thing down to a thin dime per playing. That’s so much better than videogames I’ve paid $60 for and barely played.  I paid little, I maximized my experience.
So I wonder: on a cost-per-listening basis, what is my best media bargain?  What have I paid the least for, and listened/watched/played the most?
My first instinct was to say “Rock Band!” because I have probably spent literally a month solid playing that over the years – but then you consider all the plastic instruments and bonus tracks I’ve purchased, and suddenly Rock Band is a hobby that probably costs me $1 every time I step up to play it – worthwhile, certainly, but no bargain.  Likewise, I’ve seen Star Wars at least a hundred times, but fifty of those were in the theater, and the rest of the showings were split between three separate DVD/VHS releases – again, satisfying, but pricey.
Queuing iTunes, I see my most-played track (70 times) is Fountains of Wayne’s “Stacey’s Mom,” and I know for a fact my “most listened-to album” on iTunes oscillates between their “Welcome Interstate Managers” (a pure pop gem) and the soundtrack to Avenue Q (foul and surprisingly clever).  So is that my best media bargain?
Well, in modern terms, yes.  But back in the day, I paid $3.99 for a cassette tape of Def Leppard’s “Pyromania,” which as a teenager I listened to constantly, constantly, to the point where that music is engraved in my marrow.  That was the first album I identified with as me, and cassette tapes lasted a long damn time, so I think that price is probably somewhere in the range of half-a-cent per playing.  That’s my best media bargain.  (That, or George Carlin’s “Class Clown” on cassette.  Or, possibly, “Red Dwarf,” which I used to play every night in lonely houses to give myself some noise to drift off to sleep to.)
So.  With this in mind, I ask: What is your greatest media bargain?  What did you pay low and utilize the most? 
(And if the answer is “I Bittorrented it,” well, good for your cheapness, bad for actually recompensing the people who helped make the thing you love.  So we’ll leave out the illegal merchandise for now.  Though technically, things like Radioheads’ maybe-free albums do muddy the mix…)

The Care And Feeding Of Ferretts

I’ll be attending WorldCon in Reno next week, and – as with every convention I attend solo – I’m terrified.
See, if my wife is there, she makes me look good by making the introductions, shoving me into crowds, and otherwise serving as the social lubricant in my sticky New England gears.  But if I’m alone, I seize up.
I have a real issue with bothering people I don’t know that well – “that well” as defined by “would be considered damn near best friends under any circumstances” – and I’m convinced they never remember me, so even at a convention where I “know” a lot of people I often wind up sitting in the corner, waiting to be recognized.  It usually doesn’t end well.
Once invited into the circle, I’m friendly and gregarious, which is in some ways more of a problem; since they’ve seen me merrily chatting away with people earlier in the day, they assume my isolation must be me, purposely wanting some down time.  No, what’s happened is that I’ve become separated from the people I knew, and am alone again, stalking a social experience.  So I sit in the corner making puppydog eyes at everyone who walks by, and then there I am, feeling like the biggest loser in the world.
This happens at every convention.  Every damn one.  Even the really good cons have these moments of “Lord, you are a sad and asocial little bugger, aren’t you?”
So.  If you’re attending Reno WorldCon, let me know now!  I’d love to see you.  We’ll exchange cell phone numbers, text a little, hopefully hook up for a meal.  And if you should see me at WorldCon and I’m sitting alone, feel free to sit down and talk to me – remind me of your name, I’m great with faces but often get lost between people’s three or four online identities – and I will be cheerful.
I love people.  I’m just not convinced they love me.
 

When The Robot Uprising Hits, I Know I'll Be A Cult Figure

Ever wonder what my most popular piece of writing was?  Here it is.  It’s a short-short anecdote about how Gini and I thought the third episode of Sherlock was extremely slow-paced, until we realized that a background process was playing the video at about 75% speed.
Spambots fucking love this piece. I get three, four comments a day on it, mostly about prostitutes: “prostitutki moskva on layn.”  I clear them out overnight and come back to the applause of more spambots, happily commenting away.
I’ve considered locking this entry, but I’m actually curious to see how far it’ll go.  For the past three months, it’s like clockwork: I wake up, and the spambots have commented on my Sherlock post.  I’m not sure why they’ve settled on this piece, when there are so many others to choose from, but there you have it: spambots love Steven Moffat.
It’s good to know that the robots love me.  Maybe when the Singularity hits and the ad-bots rule us all, I can be their poet laureate.  Or a comedian.  Or whatever floats their boat about this entry, I don’t know.

New Story! "My Father's Wounds," at Beneath Ceaseless Skies

My latest story is live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies – have a sample of the opening, why don’tcha?

Father carries the knife, because I asked him to—but he keeps turning to look at me, earnestly, as if he hopes I’ll take it back.

 It’s hard to believe he knows I’ll stab him with that knife. Even harder to believe he’s eager for me to do it. But that’s my father; he thinks the world of his precious daughter. He’s thin yet unbowed in his ascetic gray Blacksmith robes as he leads me up through a cold forest to the Anvil.

It doesn’t matter whether my father will live once I stab him. That’s not the point. The point is all the questions that no one thinks to ask after we’ve healed their fathers, their soldiers, their daughters. Nobody questions our magic, except for us, the loyal priests and priestesses of Aelana.
We can’t stop asking. We can’t sleep for asking.

The origins of this story are either mildly embarrassing or total nerd cred, depending on how you look at it, since it stemmed from a question I had about D&D – how do those first-level priests learn how to Cure Light Wounds, anyway? Do they just stab each other and hope for the best? And I wrote a story that wound up answering questions not only about that question, but as to why a cleric who can cure wounds can’t mend a country.
I really like the ending on this one.  I hope you will too.