A Probability of Being

The other day, I browsed Youtube for Alexander Rybak videos and songs. I have a liking for the songs he composes, because they tend to be simple, carefree, and non-jarring - just like light'n'easy pop should be. He has some sad songs, some very emo songs, and most of them are all sentimental with a taste of frivolity. Essentially, fluff, but good fluff. But I was squicked out to find that he covered Frank Loesser's Baby, It's Cold Outside . Now, I understand why he would - it's a pop standard, and has lasted since the 40's. His voice suits that song perfectly, and much of his fanbase is in the Northern Hemisphere, who would understand the song. The rest of this doesn't have much to do with Rybak, but the song itself and the fact that it is April.

I recently received in my inbox an email from my father, who likes to forward me a lot of things that he thinks will interest me. Except of course, he never really realizes just how easily antsy I can get, and how willing I am to pick apart an article. (I used to hit Reply to All whenever he'd send me an email to let all and sundry know what I thought and all the problems with whatever he sent me, so now he wisely BCCs people instead.) This article was about Miss Singapore, and I can't find the original article, but hree's another one about the same issue . While at the Miss World pageant in South Africa, she inadvertently slipped into speaking Singlish, the Singaporean creole that mixes English, Malay, Chinese and god knows what else. And this was a huge fucking deal because apparently, all beauty queens must be able to speak perfect English, the standard of which is probably set by the English-speaking world that is the UK and North America, I guess. And because Miss S...

These are the options for skin colour at ModelMayhem,com to insert into model profiles. It enables photographers to search for us by skin colour, or gives a photographer / makeup artist a sense of the model's skin type (for the former, lighting would be an issue; for the latter, foundation types). I currently have "Olive" picked as my skin type, but I can't say I like it. You see, whenever I go out for pizza with a friend, he always orders a pizza with cheese(s) and olives. The olives that come out are always black . And whenever I go to the supermarket, olives are green . Neither of these are indicative of my real skin colour, which is either white or tanned with a yellow undertone . And yet I have to pick Olive, because it definitely isn't an "Other" or any of the other skin colours listed. I know that Olive is supposed to be this safe alternative to "yellow" seeing as the term "yellow" has all sorts of unpleasant connot...

So I read somewhere, I can't remember where, "The Japanese do not appropriate, they assimilate". This meant, of course, a Great Long Think on what the difference is. No one can yet define what cultural appropriation is, but from the discussions I've seen, it's a common theme that appropriation happens when a dominant culture takes a cultural artifact from a minority (or subordinate) culture, strips it of its meaning and takes it on as part of its own cultural identity. Hence why, in this day and age of globalisation and underlying fear of white supremacy, minorities are holding their heritages tight to themselves, wondering how much they should share, and if they do, whether the dominant culture appreciates it or sees it as just another source of empty amusement. This is, of course, the issue of cultural appropriation from my point of view. There have been many discussions on this very fraught topic, for example at Racialicious , What Tami Said , and the Angry Bla...

Here's a question that comes up occasionally regarding fandom and subcultures and whatnot. "Isn't that the point?" I saw this come up a few times in the comments to my essay at Racialicious, and maybe I'm being a pedant, but it seems kind of silly to declare what the point of certain things are. Here's something that occurred to me: There is no point . I don't mean this in the "there is no spoon" sort of way, but, declaring what the point of steampunk is - "the point of steampunk is to re-invent the past!" Well. Not really. It's certainly the purpose of some of its participants, but I hesitate to name that the whole point. Now, I recognize that it's possibly useful as a rhetorical tool, but the more I see it, the more confusing it gets. Some things... just are .