Australia Bound!

I've been booked to do a 1-day tutorial at a computer conference in Australia this August. The bad news is that they want me to do a tutorial that I wasn't planning on writing until November. Oh well, I work best under pressure anyway.

The good news is that... I'M FUCKING GOING TO AUSTRALIA AND SOMEONE ELSE IS PAYING MY WAY!

The other good news is that... Ying (codename for my secondary partner) is going with me! She has a lot of time off and we've decided to go together.

I'm so psyched!

(I've submitted proposals to a conference in Sweden. Wouldn't that be amazing?)

I pervert everything

The first segment on this week's This American Life (a radio program that you can listen to on NPR, or here... http://www.thisamericanlife.org/ra/214.ram and soon http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/02/214.html [these URLs may not work until tomorrow))

"While he was growing up, Dave Paladino (pictured here with his sisters Shari and Lori) always felt different from the rest of his family. People were always asking him if he was adopted, and Dave, who isn't adopted, would explain to them that his mother's father was "dark Italian." He would say that it was a recessive gene that had expressed itself only in him and not his sisters. This was his theory. Ockham's Razor states that if two theories predict phenomena to the same accuracy, then the one which is simpler is the better one, and in Dave's case, there was another simpler theory -- one that he only learned of at the age of thirty -- and it explained why he looked the way he did better than anything else he had ever heard."

It's a facinating story about discovering things about yourself, and how people treat you.

But that's not what I'm here to tell you about.

One of the things that (in high school, in 1967) the mother said is that her parents forbid her from hanging out with black guys. So, since there are safety in numbers, she got permission as long as it was in groups. So she always hung out with a bunch of white girls along with her black friends.

And here's the perversion...

That would be a *hot* premise for a porn movie. Teen girls arrange to hang with big hung black dudes all the while their parents thing they're "safe". The script writes itself!