the mellow tigger's musings

It's Pride month, and I thought I'd share a quick tidbit of lesbian history.

One of my favorite gay comic strips from around the late 1980s was Alison Bechdel's "Dykes to Watch Out For". I like it even better than the "Leonard and Larry" series from the same era, because it has more of a flow of continuing storyline. The bookstore in this comic strip was called Madwimmin Books. That imaginary bookstore was based on an actual Minneapolis bookstore called "Amazon Bookstore Cooperative".

I visited that real-life bookstore a few times, after my move here in 1998. It was important to me as a small local business, since I had volunteered at Liberty Books in Austin TX for a few years by opening the store on Saturdays. That was before it eventually closed, thanks to mounting economic pressure from GLBT books showing up in mainstream bookstores too. The Amazon bookstore here lasted longer than Liberty Books, and they had increased pressure specifically from Amazon, the worldwide juggernaut that is now known for just about everything except books. Seriously, my workplace is switching to an Amazon telephone call center solution in a few weeks, a service that obviously has nothing to do with books. It turns out that Jeff Bezos selected the name Amazon just because "it was a place that was 'exotic and different' ".

What is a small fringe bookstore to do in a world increasingly going online, when the obvious website you want is already taken? The local bookstore sued for the name. It had existed since 1970, after all, long before the online company showed up. The juggernaut won the online battle, though. Eventually, new owners took over the local store in 2008, then with that change they suddenly were disallowed from using the Amazon name at all. Amazon books could no longer be Amazon books. The stored lasted about 3 more years before it closed for good.

So that's the Madwimmin Books source material. Right here in Minneapolis. :)

I keep missing topics that I intend to write about, because the firehose of absurdities keeps flowing.

Kids in cells made for bad optics last time around, so this time we seem to be going for an Abu Ghraib / Guantanamo Bay style of exported incarceration. It's a lot harder to monitor the truth when you export it outside of the national border. What could go wrong with that plan?

The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster.
- Time.com

Knowledge is a threat to fascism. (me) Reality has a well-known liberal bias. (Stephen Colbert) Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny. (Robert Reich)

It's only 8:40am local time, but I already feel unreasonably happy today.

The guy from Wolf Pest Control showed up promptly at 8am this morning. He sprayed the hornet nests, using his ladder to climb on top of my front porch to reach the 2nd one. The 1st one is easy to reach, near the ground. He had a bulky full-body suit like a firefighter that he wore for the work. He said to give it at least a week before trying to seal them up. He recommends people just wait through the winter too. I'll try clearing up the brush next week, at least, so the painters have clear access to my house later. I shouldn't be bothered by hornets by then. It was definitely worth the $240 for 30 minutes of work this morning.

He was surprisingly nice to talk to, while I wrote out a check afterward on the front porch step. He said he doesn't exterminate bumblebees, which are more regulated than hornets, even if they're the infestation, "because pollinators are good". Maybe he liked my pollinator-friendly yard? Appropriate to the business name, he definitely had the "wolf" look with a full beard, from the bear terminology. I have no idea if he's family, but I'll hope that he is.

The mood in Minneapolis is gearing down for winter. I didn't get everything done that needs to be done for the house, but I got the first floor painted, with plans for the second floor this year. I got the 4 worst windows replaced, with only 1 more to go. I bought the latest new smart phone generation, replacing the broken one I had for years. Thanks to a generous gift from my parents, my bank account didn't even suffer from all this spending. It's still growing into what for me is a large nest egg, so I could easily withstand another year or two of unemployed job hunting, if it came to that.

I'm going to encourage this good mood today and avoid the news.