Somewhere Different Now

My mother likes sending me links to silly things online.  Imagine my surprise when one day she sent me a link leading to An Archive of Our Own (AO3)!  Had she discovered my fanfiction habit?  Was she coming out of the closet about a fanfic habit of her own?  No on both counts, thank heavens.  The link was for Wait Wait Don't Eat Me, a fic about NPR's news quiz show, Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me*, reporting on the zombie apocalypse.  Let me say that again:  National Public Radio fanfic, with zombies.  It's utterly hilarious!  The voices for all of the hosts and panelists are exactly right, and I cracked up at the news about what various politicians and other famous people were doing in response to the zombie hordes.  A zombie calls in to be a listener contestant.  The consequences of giving too little on the pledge drive are revealed. 

Still curious about where on Earth my mother located this, I checked the Wait Wait website and found that they had linked to the fic on their twitter feed.  I know that my mother uses Twitter to follow some people (our phone conversations frequently include discussing the latest news from Neil Gaiman as if he were a family friend), so I am choosing to assume that she found the story through that tweet. 

God, I love the Internet!  (Other awesome and COMPLETELY unrelated internet stuff:  DW writer Paul Cornell's blog post the other day denouncing the perception encouraged by the media that to be Christian is to be homophobic.  Well said, Paul!  It bothers me that the most hateful strand of the Christian faith is so often the loudest, and it bothers me that the media discourse just amplifies these strident voices who do NOT speak for the Jesus I see in the Bible, nor do they speak for me.  Like Paul, I'm a person of faith, and I am in favor of GLBT rights.  Passionately so.  I know many other Christians of various sorts who feel the same.  As a more or less Quaker person, I might worship quietly, but I refuse to be silent in standing up for the rights of others.  I don't feel the need to talk about my faith a whole lot in the secular world, but I do get tired of hearing atheists and agnostics who are allies on the political and social issues I care about assuming that intelligence, logic, compassion, open-mindedness, and progressivism are antithetical to belief in a higher power.  Stop with the pigeonholing, people.)

*For those of you who aren't in the US or aren't public radio listeners, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is a weekly news quiz comedy show with a combination of listeners phoning in, regular panelists, and celebrity guests.  It's well worth checking out the podcast if you aren't in an area where you can hear it broadcast.  Even without zombie apocalpyse, it makes me laugh out loud every week.  It helps that Peter Sagal, the host, is apparently a huge geek.

First, this NY Times article about kids coming out in middle school was really heartwarming.  Yes, there are really upsetting statistics about how many queer* youth experience bullying, but plenty of these kids are receiving support from at least some of their friends, family, and school officials in a way that would have been unthinkable not so long ago, and the ones who are out are facing their situation with impressive courage.  The coolest part is that many of the kids profiled don't just come from traditionally accepting places like NYC and San Francisco but also from places like Tulsa, OK.  There's still a long way to go, however,  The article's discussion of how much kids use "gay" as an all-purpose insult is sadly on target.  I work with middle-schoolers and hear this sort of upsetting language all the time.  (I'm pretty forgiving of kids' misbehavior, often excessively so, but insults based on sexual orientation make me put my foot down so hard the ground shakes.)  Still, I like to think our culture is slowly but surely making progress towards acceptance. 

On a completely different note, a story from the Onion: Melting Ice Caps Expose Hundreds of Secret Arctic Lairs. 

"You spend your whole career concocting a brilliant scheme to wipe out all of mankind, and what happens?" Dr. Raygun continued. "They bring about a major global catastrophe completely on their own, those fools!"

LOL!  I've been feeling pretty frustrated about the wimpy, minimal progress on the international talks on climate change and the even sadder state of affairs within the US, so it was nice to find a bit of black humor at our ongoing failure to do anything to save civilization and the biosphere while there might still be a chance.


*While the term "queer" is still sometimes used insultingly, I follow the practice of the activist groups at the college I attended in reclaiming it as a respectful term that encompasses all the diversity of non-straight sexual orientation without being as unwieldy as saying gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans.