This morning Poupoune and I dressed up in our winter clothes and went to pick up my suits at the dry cleaners, partly as an exercise to see how cold it was before going out for a longer walk this afternoon. The weather was really quite warm and beautiful, so when I got back I traded my coat for sunglasses, and the dog for Mark, and we headed out to the local school to cast our ballots.

As we left the house, Mark locked the door but didn’t set the alarm. I think that’s the first time I’ve seen him demonstrate this level of trust in his neighbours. Chalk one up for becoming Canadian!

Then Mark cast his first Canadian vote at the gym of the local high school.

Outside the local high school gym, about to cast his first Canadian vote

Then… oops, I had left my wallet in my coat after coming back from the dry cleaner’s. No ID? No problem. Mark has ID, and he’s a citizen, and we both have our voting cards proving that there’s someone with my name living at Mark’s address, so all he had to do was swear that that someone was me, and voilà, I voted too. He’s so Canadian, he can even secure voting rights for other people!

And when I come home he dances towards me, dances happily in circles.

… then he has a seizure. He’s been having them daily for the past week or so. We tried him on phenobarbital but it made him ataxic and he couldn’t walk. I was in Winnipeg but Mark says he looked frightened, as if he thought he was dying. We have an appointment tonight to get a prescription for another medication but if it doesn’t help then he may only have a couple of weeks left.

Mark, do you have video of Pepe dancing?

Caller (with southern accent): Excuse me ma’am, do you speak English?

Alison: Yes I do.

Caller: My name is Chris. How are you today?

Alison: [pause] Chris, are you a telemarketer?

Caller: [sadly] Yes I am.

Alison: I’m sorry, could you call someone else?

Caller: [sadly and tiredly] Have a nice evening, ma’am.

Clean My Screen

Not a hoax or troll. Probably not something evil on the part of Amazon either, but could be. I’m sure we’ll eventually find out. I’m leaving my google bomb up, just in case.

*** *** ***

UPDATE:

Sigh. My hoax detectors were clearly full of waxy buildup. This is the work of a troll. Never mind.

*** *** ***

Amazon Rank. 

Amazon has been removing sales rankings for books that contain lesbian and gay content so that they won’t come up in searches. This is supposed to be about adult content, but that rationalisation is not holding up. Twitter users can follow the ongoing saga at #amazonfail. 

From a letter from friend and author Leanne Franson:

And are you on top of the mess at Amazon (apparently german, japan etc as well as .com) where they are removing the sales rankings of lgbt books, often with no erotic content, including selfhelp books and memoirs, classics, historical fiction, as well as making a bunch of them not show up if you do a general “all categories” search, only a book search. Apparently someone has decided that if they have a sales ranking they will come up in bestseller lists etc, and has decided that all lgbt content is “adult”.

Of course books like Playboy Centerfolds is still clearly rated,

What a mess and a huge huge huge step backwards.

markprobst.livejournal

community.livejournal.com/meta_writer (long list of books affected)

queersunited.blogspot.com/is-amazon-censoring-lgbt-books.html

blogs.news-journalonline.com/amazonfail-a-twitter-movement.html

www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/amazon-rank/ (info on googlebombing and use of the new term “amazon rank” “amazon ranked me” etc)

My Assume Nothing book has had its rank stripped. (of course it was something like 500,000th lol!) It is such an EROTIC book. sigh. It comes up with “Assume Nothing”+”franson” in a search of books, but not in an “all departments” search. How bogus. Same with “Teaching Through Trauma”, which weirdly however, brought up a listing for “Juicy Mother: Celebration”: a comics collection I am in that DOES have much more juicy tales. I guess they missed Juicy Mother, since it also has a sales rank still.

Please check titles you love or publish or wrote, and list them to the meta_writer listing above.

Petition:

www.thepetitionsite.com/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy

Use their express customer service form http://tinyurl.com/amazonservice to voice your complaint or call 1-866-216-1072.

Fun.

Leanne

From the online petition:

We the undersigned, state our strong objection to Amazon’s “Adult” policy as outlined in their letter in italics below

“In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com AdvantageWe find it hypocritical that Amazon continues to sell adult books but thinks that removing the sales rating to (keep them out of the public eye) will achieve this.

 

We would like to hear the rationalisation for allowing sales ratings for explicit books with a heterosexual focus such as:

–Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds by Chronicle Books (pictures of over 600 naked women)
–Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love” (explicit heterosexual romance);
–Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Wolf and the Dove (explicit heterosexual romance);
–Bertrice Smal’s Skye o’Malley which are all explicit heterosexual romances
–and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls (which is a very explicit sexual graphic novel)

Yet the following books, which have a gay or lesbian focus, have been classed as “adult books” and stripped of their sales ratings:

–Radclyffe Hill’s classic novel about lesbians in Victorian times, The Well of Loneliness, and which contains not one sentence of sexual description;
–Mark R Probst’s YA novel The Filly about a young man in the wild West discovering that he’s gay (gay romance, no sex);
–Charlie Cochrane’s Lessons in Love (gay romance with no sex);
–The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience, edited by Louis-George Tin (non-fiction, history and social issues);
–and Homophobia: A History by Bryan Fone (non-fiction, focus on history and the forms prejudice against homosexuality has taken over the years).

Please tell us, Amazon, why the explicit books with a heterosexual focus are allowed to keep their sales ratings while the non-explicit romances, the histories and the biographies that deal with LGBTQ issues are not.

We would love to hear your reasoning.

I cleaned him off. He seems weak but ok now. 

I see yet another vet visit in our future.

We were fifteen minutes short of having a nice meal. It’s now spoiling on the stove.

Fifteen minutes.

(Mark just announced that he had sacrificed an evening out with friends to stay home with me, and that I should be displaying more gratitude. (Really, he shouldn’t have.) And pointed out that I started it.)

So. What do people you respect actually do? As opposed to just say? I come from families of people who have set the do-ing bar rather high, which might be part of the reason I find it so hard to identify what I can do.

Mark’s citizenship preparation book suggests composting and recycling as appropriate expressions of core Canadian values, but I’ve got that covered.

Ok, so here I was, waking up in a downtown hotel, putting on a suit, asking the doorman to get me a cab, asking the taxi driver to write me a receipt so I could put the trip on my expense account, then walking into a tall glass tower with a laptop gripped firmly in one hand.

This is not how I envisioned my future when I was in college. Not that it’s bad or anything. But… bemusement.

[originally transmitted by e-mail July 16, 2006]