Korean Photographer JeongMee Yoon has been taking beautifully arranged pictures of girls and their belongings and boys and their belongings as part of the Pink & Blue Project. So many pictures, and wow! So many belongings.

Pink & Blue Project (JeongMee Yoon)

Crazy eh? You can barely see the child for their toys. The pink/blue split is also kind of remarkable.

I remember lining up all my teddy bears for a group shot when I was about 9 and I don’t think they were so uniformly pink. Then again, I was a tomboy and I think I hated the color because I thought it was sissy. At the time I wanted rainbows painted on everything, in hindsight that was a clue to so many things, from queerness to my inability to choose just one thing and stick with it (as my grandmother says). Okay I also gave all my dolls boys’ names, so forget me, I am not a good sample. What about you? Was pink the big colour for you growing up?

Attend via FaceBook.

As Jayme Poisson tells us in “Mothers of Invention” (Shameless, Fall 2008), Countess Ada (Née Byron) Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers. In fact, her programs, written for friend Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, pre-date the existence of the machine itself, since Babbage died before it reached completion. Both a bleeding edge technician, and the purveyor of Romantic-Era vaporware, Lovelace was a pioneering expert in the novel field of computation in the early parts of the 19th century.

This week Suw Charman-Anderson, angered by yet another set of fairly juvenile activities centred around women, geekiness and objectification, made a pledge that she would write about a woman in technology she admired on March 24th. That date strikes me as being like, the distant future, but assuming I remember, I will certainly come up with someone I can profile from the canon of my personal acquaintances.

(more inside…)

In ‘Enough, Already’ Globe and Mail columnist Judith Timson discusses the cover of January’s O magazine, where a now “fat” Oprah stands before the freakishly slim Oprah of yester-month(?). I don’t know how quickly Oprah’s diet yo-yo is currently going but seasonal weight changes seem to be the norm for anyone with a media empire.

Timson makes the point that if weight obsession makes the cover of O in a month where economic downturns, the first African-American president in history and senate scandals are but a few of the big issues, maybe Oprah’s “body problem” isn’t that important?

(more inside…)

Bush Ducks Shoes Thrown in Iraqi Leader’s Office

President George W. Bush ducked two shoes thrown at him by an unidentified man during a press conference in the Iraqi prime minister’s office to mark the signing of a security agreement.

Bush wasn’t hit by the shoes, which both sailed over his head after they were thrown one after the other. The president shrugged and said “I’m OK” after the incident in Baghdad today. “All I can report is it is a size 10,” Bush said afterwards.

In Arab culture, throwing shoes is a grave show of disrespect. The man shouted an Arabic phrase, which an Iraqi present translated as “This is a farewell kiss, dog.”

Luckily for Bush, a size 10 men’s shoe, while heavier, actually hurts less then a stiletto heel thrown with accuracy. He could have lost an eye, you know.

For those of us involved in youth media or technology, the last few weeks have been all about the results of a 3.3 million dollar research project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation called Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Culture. The project was carried out by investigators at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley. The purpose of the research? To discover and learn about what young people are doing when they hang out online, doing what researchers like to call “informal learning” and what the rest of us usually refer to as “playing”, “hanging out” and, if we have an assignment due, “wasting time”. During this study dozens of research projects looked at teenagers’ use of MySpace, YouTube, Neopets, gaming sites and more.

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Luddites is the Globe and Mail‘s take on the research. For a more nuanced discussion, here is a video of Mizuko Ito, lead author of the study, talking about the findings.

(more inside…)

I have to admit lately I feel *very* ambivalent when I see everyday activities turned into political statements. One minute you’re shopping for some new undies at Zellers, the next, reading the 3 pack of bamboo bikini cuts that says “Protecting your earth” and thinking, “Is this true - does covering my derriere with bamboo instead of cotton really make a difference?”

The trendier social politics becomes, the harder it is to discern genuine change from marketing rhetoric. The more we consume, the more we use consumption to define our politics, saying things like, “I stopped buying Nikes in 2000 because of their labor practice”. As social marketing evolves, it attempts to define consumer politics so we don’t have to make the effort. So when going out to buy diapers the consumer doesn’t just have to decide if absorbency and convenience trump ecological responsibility, they also have to read, “A dollar from every package of Huggies sold helps educate a child in India!”

(more inside…)

Image from Drawn: In the Studio with Jillian Tamaki (Jillian Tamaki)

According to today’s Globe and Mail, Skim, one of my favorite comics of the year is up for Governor General’s award. Exciting and wonderful as that is, there is a problem in that the book’s text-author Mariko Tamaki was nominated in the text category, but not the book’s other author and illustrator Jillian Tamaki.

The independent comics community has rallied in support of the Tamakis, writing an open letter to the Governor General, which explains that text, image and authorship are not so easily separated in the world of comics, and asking for the inclusion of Jillian as illustrator on the Tamaki ticket. Names in support of the Tamaki’s include Art Speigelman, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Julie Doucet, Michel Rabagliati and Adrian Tomine.

Of course the GG’s office, not being very quick on its feet, has said it is too late in the process to change the nomination. So, I would humbly suggest that the Governor General’s awards committee take the time to read and enjoy: Understanding Comics, a book that bills itself as “a comic book about comics”. In it, author Scott McCloud lays out the framework and method that makes comics work as they do, and why comics are not the same as a book with illustrations.

(more inside…)

I am a Victim of H8 is a Facebook photo album created by Gary Shay. Each of the images is of the same slogan, and the idea is that people should tag the images with the names of everyone they know who is negatively affected by Prop 8. Presumably this includes self-tagging.

(more inside…)

It’s true, “GenderAnalyzer” told me so.

I even took a pic of the form results so there is proof. Next time anyone accuses Shameless of being say… a harpies nest of left-wing feminist reactionaries, we can easily fire back with “yeah but we write like men, so whatever, talk to the pen!”

Shameless writes like a boy. Who knew. (Miriam Verburg)

Apparently I also write like a man, or pick manly topics, or use manly sentence structures, or have a masculine vocabulary? Who really knows (sigh). From a quick scroll of the last few entry topics on Shameless we’ve written posts on:

• The US election(4)


• Masturbation(1)


• Halloween(1)


• Abortion(1)


• Fairies vs. Princess (1) ahem - ever so manly


• Sci Fi and Occult TV shows

Oddly both Feministing, and Blogher, were correctly attributed to the ladiezzz. So the theory that this weeks emphasis on politics may have gotten us onto the other team fails, as a quick glance reveals that those two US-based blogs are even more heavily weighted with political content.

(And yes of course it’s silly that ‘political’ writing is considered more masculine, I don’t make the stereotypes I just write about them.)

(more inside…)