I am named, it turns out, on the website of what’s probably the biggest (and, therefore, nastiest and bastardliest and generally most unspeakable) “pray the gay out” organization in the country. It’s just a pointer to the online edition of a TV news story in which I defended same-sex marriage a couple of years back, but it’s definitely me.

(I am, apparently, a Gay and Lesbian activist; this is news to me, but it was on teevee so it must be true.)

With all the kerfuffle recently over the relationship between blogging and the ability to get a job, I’ve been occassionally running vanity searches to find what prospective employers might find out about me.

I just Googled [the version of my name employers are most likely to have] + livejournal and was surprised, a bit, to find that the number one top result was to an LJ that is not mine but could, I think, easily be mistaken as such by someone not taking the time to dig through to the user-id page.

So here’s the question: We are being made increasingly aware of the necessity of not tying one’s real-life identity to things employers might find objectionable, which certainly makes sense, but what can one do when someone else’s identity becomes mistaken for one’s own?

Will it, in other words, become common for people to be denied jobs because of things written by people they’ve never even met, who they never even knew existed? This is a troublesome prospect, I think, and an insurmountable problem.

Participating in a discussion of pies and Elder Gods over at Catherine’s LJ, I came to a rather surprising realization: The very root and essence of Souther pie-making is Eagle Brand Sweetened Condensed Milk. Without that amazing product our dessert tables would be very sparsely populated indeed.

Was running through a premise last night, came up with a First Major Plot point, and immediately realized that anyone reading it now would assume I was ripping off Rowling’s idea of horcruxes. I put the premise away and continued about my business.

A little later, though, a memory crept up out of somewhere and I realized that I had a sort of prior-art argument working in my favor. I had written about a horcrux-like thing long before, back in an Image Guided Story on the Lemur. I had clearly ripped off Neil Gaiman, not Jo Rowling, back in April 2002.

(In a fit of misguided vanity, I’ve put up the story, Voodoo Economics, with only a few minor edits.)

Brief therapy and managed care: readings for contemporary practice

Just when I’d come to terms with people getting antidepressants for their puppies and treating their cats for anxiety, I find that there’s a movement toward people helping their freakin’ underwear work through issues. Hmph. O tempura, o morays.

Pre-occupied, that is. As the stuff I’m working on right now is 100% fiddly bits, my job performance is definitely suffering.

‘cuz I’m beginning to think it’s something I should keep in mind today.

I’ve just now loaded on three Chicago cast recordings, the Original Broadway, the Broadway Revival, and the Film Cast. These join OCRs for Wicked, Urinetown, Ragtime, and both major American productions of Assassins. Also, Binky plays host to every Rufus Wainwright album thus far released, along with a few of his miscellaneous singles.

Maybe I should’ve gotten pink instead of silver.

Gleaned from misreading as I scanned down a page of titles: “The Hemorrhaging Peacock”. I see it as a murder mystery, with the peacock’s hemorrhaging somehow serving the same role as the dog’s not barking in “Hound of the Baskervilles”.

In the software that allows access to the catalog’s back end, one display field contains a two-letter abbreviation declaring which division within the library system a given item belongs to. One of the major divisions in our system is Government Documents, but its system abbreviation is given as GP, presumably for Government Publications. The reasoning behind this puzzled me for a couple of weeks, actually, until I remembered that a ridiculously large number of persons ’round here are so devout and/or superstitious that they will refer to a certain common curse word only as “GD”.