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GoodWill’s LGBT Programming Needs Your Support

GoodWill Industries of North Central Wisconsin is helping sponsor an event for LGBTQ youth which is a celebration of 15 years of the GLBT Partnership. The Partnership is a youth group that meets and provides support to teens who identify as LGBT and their allies. GoodWill helps by sponsoring space for those meetings.

And now a local “family voice” is encouraging their supporters to call GoodWill and complain about this programming. I won’t give this person the traffic by actually linking to him, but I’ve copied some of the text below so you can see exactly what you’re dealing with. On the same page, they provide the numbers and contact info for the people at both GoodWill and Kimberly Clark. (If you absolutely must see the page for yourself, email me & I’ll send it to you that way.)

So here’s what we need to do.

  1. call or email:
    • Thomas J. Falk, Chairman/CEO of Kimberly-Clark, 920-721-2000, or Media.Relations@kcc.com, or use their on-line form HERE
      and/or
    • GOODWILL INDUSTRIES, webmaster@gwicc.org,1-800-482-0030
  2. donate to the LGBT partnership
  3. spread the word by posting this info on your blog, Facebook, etc.

What I want to see is support for these teenagers. Too many local LGBTQ teens have taken their own lives, & the GLBT Partnership is a real light against this kind of homophobia. Do help if you can, in whatever way you can.

Below is the text of the person who is getting people to call these groups & discourage this event AND the LGBT teens. We need to outnumber them. Continue reading “GoodWill’s LGBT Programming Needs Your Support”

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Sound Writing Advice

Some cool tips from C.S. Lewis about writing, via Abagond:

  • Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.
  • Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.
  • When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the rewriting of things begun and abandoned years earlier.
  • Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
  • Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “more people died” don’t say “mortality rose.”
  • Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”: make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please will you do my job for me.”

Read the rest at Abagond.

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Moving Day

We are moving again, and again within Appleton, this time from our lovely cool industrial apartment on the river to a house that will be just ours. A basement, a garage, & a yard. It will be the first time my address hasn’t had an apartment number since I lived in my parents’ house when I was 17.

So I’ll be a little busier than usual packing, moving, & then unpacking.

If you’re the sort who has my personal address & needs it updated, let me know. I’m going to try to get cards/emails/etc out but that may not be right away.

Wish us luck. We’ll post photos when we get around to it.

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Idle Idyll

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.

From this cool article by cartoonist Tim Krieder in The New York Times a week or so ago. I’ve been out drinking with him, & can report that he is the louche he says he is.

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Men & Strippers

I found a blog of men’s letters about their experiences going to strip clubs – some stories of first times, or lifelong membership, but others try to explain the why of going.

Its unfair to say that all women in strip clubs are weak pawns in a male dominated world, some entries here suggest the opposite, but it was true of this place. I went to a strip club to prove to the world I was a man, maybe I did but as the brother to 3 sisters I don’t think I can justify it on the basis of my self esteem again. I’m pretty bad with women but I prefer rejection to guilt.

While most Feminist would say that a strip clubs demean and objectify women, I believe any woman who has the ultimate control in this situation, really, has the upper hand. Does it bring them self confidence? Perhaps this is just a slimy justification on my part. I imagine most women dance; not because they enjoy it, but because they have to feed their families or something else. This is the cold reality of strip clubs but I prefer to think they dance for the pleasure of making me poorer. Regardless of what I think; I will pass along my Benjamin’s, and when that Benjamin is passed along there is always that look in the girl’s eyes that says I got you sucker…

You pay a fee. For this a naked girl sits on your lap and listens.

It’s ludicrous. I’m forty, drive a Cadillac, have traveled the world and am fully clothed. The girl is half my age, drove her mothers Hyundai to work, hasn’t been out of the state since a trip to Disney World when she was ten and is stark naked.

But she listens for a bit and all is right with the world. That’s why I go.

I’m going to have a hard time not staying up all night reading it.

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Make Her Toast

No, really, it’s on the list of bad sex advice tips from Cosmo as compiled by Jezebel. You know, equal opportunity goofiness.

Here are a few favorites:

21. Take a pearl necklace and “…lightly lubricate the pearls and your penis. Have your partner wrap the pearls around the shaft and slowly stroke up and down with a gentle rotation.”
Just don’t tell Mother. She’s still cross about the time she caught you rimming the good china.

23. “Try facial intercourse. This smooch mimics sex from foreplay to penetration, beginning with a tongue exploration inside the mouth. Rub your tongues together in small and large circles, then dart them in and out of your mouths as if you were having intercourse.”
Here’s a second take on that one: don’t try facial intercourse.

31. “Pop your chap in a jar of Nutella, then present it to your lady. Be rewarded with a very enthusiastic blowjob.”
Did you know that ladies love chocolate?

Great: now I can’t get the visual of someone sticking their penis into a jar of Nutella out of my head.