Q-Seattle Events: Tacky Tourist Clubs

You can't blame folks for being confused about what's going on here with the Pride parade/march/festival/rally mess. We're confused. But one of the more intriguing bits of "news" comes from the generally reliable and superb gay news site 365gay.com. Based apparently on the SOAP's claim of an outpouring of support for their downtown parade to nowhere, 365gay "reported" this afternoon that SOAP's $102,000 debt had magically disappeared overnight.

Hmm.

Count on that bit of "news" to spread because 365gay feeds a lot of information-hungry blogs and sites including the digest on our own Squidoo Gay news page.

Under the headline "Seattle Rallies Behind Financially Troubled Gay Pride" we could read this fabulous (literally) info:

Within hours of Tuesday's announcement that Seattle's Out and Proud - the volunteer group that puts on the city's annual gay pride parade and festival - was filing for bankruptcy and canceling this year's event, the organization's phones began ringing.

The city's gay community was rallying to the cause. By the end of the night enough money had come in to pay off the group's $102,000 debt from last year's parade and save the organization from bankruptcy.

"Due to overwhelming support ..., we will move forward with our plans to produce the parade down 4th Avenue on Sunday, June 24, 2007", the group said in a press release Wednesday, following another emergency meeting of Out and Proud's board.

Yeah, sure. Forgive us for not being ready to believe that. This for a group that didn't have a donation link on its website before most of the site disappeared yesterday and that hadn't -- according to the Seattle PI -- registered as a non-profit. In case you missed that bit in one of yesterday's stories, here's the 'graph:

[SOAP vice-president Weston] Sprigg said the group is deeper in debt than the $102,000 owed to the city. He declined to reveal the amount, but said money is owed to vendors as well.

Out and Proud's financial information is not available because the group didn't register with the Secretary of State's Office, a requirement for non-profits that plan to solicit money. Multiple letters had been mailed to the group requesting their financial records, a staff member in the charities office said.

We're usually impressed with the staff at 365gay, but this time around they came up with something that clearly belongs on the Colbert fan site Wikiality.com.

But then, that site hasn't exactly ignored us. Wikiality.com offered this bit of "breaking news" (written, as always, "in the spirit of Stephen Colbert"):

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, April 23, 2007--

For most Americans, what homos do is a mystery best left hidden. But, recent events threaten to spritz America's Pacific Northwest in a lavendar scented rainbow.
According to sources, June is Gay Pride Month. This is when homosensuality bursts into bloom and those of the sodomite persuasion engage in their fabulous mating ritual: the Gay Pride Parade.

However, Americans will not sit back while the gays run wild through their cities primping everything in sight.

No.

Just days after Washington's lady governor, Christine Gregoire, signed a law giving the gays the right to have driver's licenses, American citizens came forward to fight off the encroachment of yet another Gay Menace into the very heart of straight America.

Apparently, the gays use their driver's licenses to parade through the streets, dancing and waving rainbow flags. Sometimes, they even ride on floats. Obviously, such rainbowfying of America's streets could not be taken lying down! So the good Christian people of Seattle bent over backwards to ensure that the gays would not bring this abomination of a parade upon their city.

No one is coming forward to take credit for this victory, but Wikiality.com can rule out Pastor Fred since the Westboro Baptist Church prefers to picket/picnic at funerals, leaving the parades to less holy organizations.

For more information and updates, please visit this gay tube.

Thanks for the link, guys. But really... it's Pastor Ken that you should be looking for. Someone should pen an entry on him... but not one of the Mormons over there.

Labels: Colbert Report, Seattle Pride, wikiality

A site where you used to find hundreds of pages of satirical "reports" generated "in the spirit of Stephen Colbert" now shows only a copy of a faxed letter from a law firm telling the site that it must shut down.

This comes from lawyers for Viacom -- the same company that recently slapped down a $1billion suit against YouTube owner Google charging copyright infringement. Viacom seems to want to keep anything and everything involving their "properties" within a tightly controlled little sub-world.

[See update below.]

The corporate suits of Viacom seem to be mistaking their Real World franchize for the real world, wanting to lock everything up behind locked doors into a sanitized fantasy land.

We saw a bit of that the other day when we posted a rumor we'd heard that Colbert might be appearing next week as a guest host on the Regis show. In response to our post we got a sternly-worded email from a ComedyCentral address telling us that the rumor was "patently untrue," but warning us not to post anything more about it. We didn't rate a fax from the lawyers, but the email suggested it would be coming if we didn't shut up about the Regis appearance.

We still don't know if Stephen will be sitting next to Kelly sometime next week, but the actions of the outfit that employs him makes us think it's more likely. I mean, really... Why worry about a post on a little blog in Seattle if there weren't more than a grain of truth in it that somehow irritatates their petty corporate imaginations.

[Update: You'll notice the date... April 1. The front page and all the other pages of wikiality.com are now back to their usual places. The shutdown notice had replaced everything on the site during April Fools Day.]

Labels: celebrities, Colbert Report, TV, wikiality

WA-DOMA's Initiative 957 got a Tip of the Hat last night from Stephen Colbert. (And, you've also gotta love the Wag he gave to John Howard, Australia's wedge-issue PM whose son worked on the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign).

We're guessing the folks at WA-DOMA will want to put this honor on the shelf in front of the Shrammie they picked up last week from that guy on one or another of the KOMOs. (He keeps popping up. Maybe we should watch or listen... On second thought, no!)

Schram insists, "I get it." He gives Gregory Gadow and crew "high marks for the 'hoot' factor," but insists that the humor is misdirected.

The problem is Gregory doesn't get it.Mocking marriage does nothing but provoke
P.O.'d people to dig deeper for reasons to discriminate.

Hey, I've long been a strong supporter of gay marriage.

And I'll admit Gregory got me to laughing. But Greg [which isn't his name] doesn't need me slapping my knee.

He needs gay marriage opponents slapping their foreheads and thinking.

So, for sacrificing substance for silliness; for taking a shot without first taking aim, and for making a point with no thought of making headway, take a bow Gregory, 'cause this "Schrammie's" for you.

But all that assumes that the more vocal opponents of marriage equality are willing to engage in something like "slapping their foreheads and thinking." There is too little evidence of that. The legal argument that managed to get procreation tied so closely to marriage in a Supreme Court decision was put forward by the "Family Research Council."

They are the ones who made this a precedent in state law. They are the ones who convinced the court to turn a silly argument into a precedent that could, perhaps, be used by a clever divorce lawyer for a childless couple to deny benefits to one of the parties. The Family Research Council did that. Although it's a weak precedent because it was accepted only by a deeply divided court, it's still on the books as a result of the Andersen decision.

Will the vocal opponents recognize that because of I-957. No. But the less vocal opponents just might engage in that kind of epiphany of forehead-slapping as a result of the discussions spurred on by this bit of political street theater. Maybe.

Labels: Colbert Report, I-957, initiative, politics, video, wa-doma, Washington, wikiality

We rarely get comments here (sigh), so I (dropping my usual plural pretense for this uber-long post) thought I'd bring one up here from the post about Savage's appearance on The Colbert Report.

This is from uno, the founder of Wikiality.com, who was quick enough to register the domain name as soon as Colbert had coined the term:

Anyone is welcome to come and edit my site in order to improve it. Such is the nature of the opensource wiki model. As the site grows, more and more users will pour over old articles, hopefully improving them for the better. Obviously I'd like my site to have the highest calibur of truthiness known to man and we are slowly but surely getting there by tagging short or unrelated articles so they can be deleted or requested to make them better. We have given incentives to those who write good articles and the site grows every single day. I love your story and appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

Since I'm one of those who pore over and occasionally do my small part to add to or improve the articles on the site, I appreciate the admirable efforts being made to fortify the site's truthiness and faithiness, especially by WatchTVEatDonutDrinkBeer, who not only writes very funny articles, but also is on the forefront of fighting off the usual wiki vandals who infect that site as they do all wikis. (And he also seems to have an encyclopedic awareness of all the thousands of images that have been uploaded to the site.)

(My contributions there are one of the reasons that I temporarily abandoned this site in October and November. That along with a certain why-botheriness, as Malcontent recently called the attitude, brought on by lack of contributions or comments here.)

Wikiality.com is a great site overall. Readers of this blog who understand the nature of Colbert's satire and are looking for a safe-for-work chuckle at the desk should check it out. Add something in the spirit of Colbert or edit one or several of the articles marked as needing fixes.

The articles in that last link are guilty of excessive factiness which sometimes results from an excessive wikiphilia. As Colbert explained it, Truthiness comes from the gut, not from the mind. It's based on feelings rather than facts.

But an opposite problem often infects articles on the site, something that the admins call randomness. [I can't link to the example pages since that category seems partly broken at the moment.] This affects articles that seem to mistake the unique take on the world of The Colbert Report with the odd take of a site called Uncyclopedia. On that site, the humor derives from the utter absurdity of an article. Like Wikiality, Uncyclopedia eschews facts but it encourages near-total separation from the fact-based world.

Dozens of articles on Wikiality -- like the current (as I write) iteration of the Ted Kennedy article -- demonstrate that kind of Uncylcopedic vision. The random uncylcopedic articles on Wikiality often use the kind of made-up sci-fi-nerd genealogy demonstrated in the Kennedy article.

It's a fine line, but Colberican truthiness (in my opinion) generally requires at least a slight grasp of actual facts.

A good article for Wikiality.com should be something almost like the sillyness that Bill O'Reilly spews out each evening on his show. Almost like Papa Bear, but taken to the next level where the absurdity of his claims becomes apparent. That's the kind of thing that Colbert does so well each evening on his show. But it seems to escape some of Wikiality's volunteer contributors.

Both O'Reilly and Colbert's character start out with indesputable facts. Neither of them would spin out the kind of silly genealogy that seems to be popular with uncyclopedians. But both then spin the factiness in absurd directions. It's just that Colbert takes it farther until it falls over the edge.

The admins on Wikiality have created a fix-it category for articles that are too liberal, but so far there isn't anything similar to mark articles that read too much like direct quotes from a posting on a right-wing site like World News Daily (and, no, I won't link). I hate that article on Stem Cell Research because it really does look like it could be copied directly to a wing-nut site without causing much of a stir. When Colbert has approached the issue, he's taken it to absurd lengths that would surely irritate wing-nuts who focus on that issue. [We'd link to video examples, but Comedy Centrals dreadful video interface removes them almost as fast as the lame Viacom lawyers force YouTube to remove them.]

And that's the point. The language of articles on Wikiality.com should irritate liberals who can't find the intended humor, but the articles should irritate right-wing conservatives even more.

I'd love to see more of the bitchy-queen spirit of Queerty or G.A.Y on the site. It's truthy that the Colbert character thinks all of us are going to hell, but there's room (and even a need) on Wikiality to pull that attitude to it's silly lengths, to make it apparent as Colbert always does how absurd the attitude is.

So, please, head on over there and start editing.

Labels: Colbert Report, wikiality

Seattle's own Dan Savage appeared last night on The Colbert Report (TCR). Savage, of course, offers a report of the experience on Slog. (And notice in Dan's picture that the green room table features Big Brass Balls. Colbert fans will recognize the significance of that.)

As many of his commenters on Slog have noted, being interviewed by Colbert is a thankless spot for any guest on the show, but Savage did a very good job of it, especially when Savage's comments forced the Colbert character to reveal that he has no idea what a "clitoris" might be.

Unfortunately, Comedy Central's lawyers force Google's lawyers to take down the constant feed of TCR videos on YouTube's useful service, but you can still catch the interview on Comedy Central's own, dreadful video service:

Savage on TCR, Part 1
Savage on TCR, Part 2

A fan-created site called Wikiality.com offers this Colbert-centric take on the appearance. Elsewhere, on the same site's entry for Washington, we can "learn" that

Everyone who runs for the state legislature from Seattle is required to pass a mandated gaydar test administered under contract with City Government (Soviet of Seattle) by sexologist Dan Savage who is also editor a local alternative weekly called The Stranger.

Obviously, it's an odd site, and the vast majority of its 3000+ articles demonstrate how difficult it is to do the kind of satire that Colbert excels at. Too many of the Wikiality articles read like they could be posts on a wing-nut blog, and miss the edge that Colbert gives to his bloviating right-wing character. But there are some fun takes like the featured articles on the Department of Homeland Security or Ted Haggard (who Savage mentioned several times in his interview), or of course, the article on gay bears.

Labels: Colbert Report, Dan Savage, video, wikiality