Things will be kinda quiet around here for a few days

Team Band Camp will be too busy to post for a few days. Book Stud is off to the wilds of San Francisco until Monday, so no Song of the Day until next week sometime. Meanwhile, back at Gilligan’s Island, La Gringa will be on Miss Mona duty (something that always makes Stinkyboy and Buddy jealous), which means feeding, snuggling, and hours of Shed-Ender delight.

La Gringa is also going to another speed-dating event, one we fear may end up – once again – providing amusing (if self-deprecating) fodder for this here blog on Monday. Really, you would think that La Gringa would have learned by now, but no, no, no – we continue to subject ourself to this ritual humiliation. Ah, well. We are ever the optimist, yes? Besides, the snacks are good.

Nevertheless, we here at Team Band Camp would not like you to feel that we’ve left you with no entertainment whatsoever. So, courtesy of Book Stud, here is Band Camp’s new favorite Live Journal community, Customers Suck. If you’ve ever worked in retail or a service industry, you will LUUUUUURVE this.

Bloggy Maintenance & Self-Pimpage

Just a wee heads up to y’all: Over the next week, La Gringa will be doing some updating and maintenance of this here blog, including adding new links, fixing broken ones, and deleting those links that have disappeared in the cyber-ether. And we’re always looking to collect fun links here, so if you have any you’d like us to add, let us know. Take a look at the categories to your left – we want your links! And we’re always looking to add to our Hot Chicks Making Music collection, so send us some!

Please feel free to use the comments field below to pimp your favorite websites (or yourselves for that matter)!

There’s still time to vote!

We still need your votes for the new name of this blog. So far, La Femme Blogita and Tabula Errata are neck and neck (but we have heard through our secret network of spies that Book Stud favors the name Band Camp).

Go cast your vote now, please!!! 

Yes, we’re still on about that blog name, and now we really need YOUR input!

Oh, I know what you’re saying to yourself. You’re saying "That La Gringa! She gets a bug up her ass about every three months or so about changing the blog name, and gets all excited for about ten minutes, but if you just ignore her, she’ll eventually forget about it."

Well, this time YOU’RE JUST WRONG!

Book Stud, Toner Low et moi are all very eager to give this blog a new moniker, and the sooner the better. But we really want some input from y’all. We’ve come up with a few names on our own (By we, I mean of course, that Book Stud and Toner Low came up with all of these names) and we’re putting it up for a vote.

(And if you want to write-in a new suggestion, use the comments field below. Danke!)

Get Free Opinion Polls

Yes, it’s true:This blog needs a better name

When I first started this blog way back when you were in diapers (and I was still using Blogger), the only one responsible for adding content was yours truly. Your entertainment and the responsibility for your reading boredom was mine and mine alone. This was a mistake, a mistake I soon rectified when I met and got drunk and sang selections from My Fair Lady out loud in a bar with befriended Book Stud.

You see, it wasn’t long before I discovered one of Book Stud’s greatest super powers: Book Stud is A Person Who Can Actually Write ™.

::: cue hallelujah chorus and dancing bears :::

I immediately invited her to become my co-blogger, and the content of the blog improved four bazillion percent (results accurate to +/- .02 percent). 

Over the course of the past year and a half, Book Stud’s contributions have provided this blog with a refreshingly quirky personality, offering readers a much-needed daily dose of laughter, snark, hilarious meditations on her own unusual physiology and – Sweet Jesus! – really bitchin’ music selections!

More importantly, Book Stud has helped make the blog a place that people actually wanted to come back to every day, which is no small feat.

The fact is that it’s well past the time when the blog name should have changed to reflect the fact the it really isn’t just La Gringa & Co. anymore. It’s La Gringa AND Book Stud’s blog. (And sometimes Toner Low’s, when he isn’t, ya know, fretting about upcoming fatherhood.) And, well…La Gringa & Co. is just such a lame blog name. (I mean, really.)

So I’m putting it out there to you, the readers, to throw out some ideas for a new blog name. Suggestions anyone? And, if Book Stud is cool with this, we may take the four or five blog name suggestions we like best and have you all vote on them. (Then again, we may not, because a blog is not a democracy.)

xoxox,

La Gringa

Who ARE you?Introduce yourselves, please!

In a previous post La Gringa mentioned that we’ve been getting a lot of regular traffic at this here blog. A couple of lurkers de-lurked long enough to introduce themselves. (Hello! Very nice to meet you!) This got Book Stud and La Gringa to wondering: Just who are the REST of you? The 360-odd folk who wander in here every single day?

So today we’d like to ask you to introduce yourselves! Please, leave a comment and tell us all about YOU! We’re oh so curious! (And we’d really like to say hello.)

Not brain-dead yet…

Yes, La Gringa has been hiding under a rock the past few weeks. Not for any particular reason. I just don’t have anything to say, and my mamma always told me if you don’t have anything good to say, say nothing at all. (I don’t have anything BAD to say, either, mind you.)

Besides, Book Stud has been keeping y’all entertained. How do I know this? Because when I last checked the stats for this here blog, I was surprised and overjoyed to discover that we now have nearly 400 readers per day. When Book Stud & I first started the blog, lo these many years ago (to steal a phrase right out of one of Book Stud’s emails to me yesterday), we had about, um…forty readers a day? Forty die-hard masochistic fans who tuned in every day, rain or shine, to see what was going on in the ever-so-glamorous world of La Gringa & Book Stud. (And their cats.)

My question is: Who ARE you people???  Have you nothing better to do? Is your place of employment so dull that you can get away with reading RSS feeds all danged day? If so, I would like your job, please. (Actually, I would like ANY job. Please. )

And speaking of jobs…I still don’t have one. But I won’t be posting much about that here, at least until I have some very good news to share. (Why harsh your mellow first thing in the morning?) If you really want to keep up with La Gringa’s ongoing search for both a job and the size fourteen, you can pop into my Livejournal. Caveat emptor: It’s dull reading. I don’t post there very often. And… it’s friends-locked. Nevertheless, if you’re truly that hard-up for reading material, let me know that you want to be added to my friends list and I’ll add you.

So many blogs! So little time!

Co-blogger Book Stud is off to the wilds of Denver to do, well, Denver-ish things. Most of which will be bookworm-y, smarty-pants stuff. And cadging free wireless at the hotel. In the meantime, La Gringa has been left to watch this here cyber-house, and – of course – Mona the Cat.

In the spirit of tidying the cyber-house, we’ve decided to embark upon a scrubbing of our various collections of links, making sure that they all work, adding new ones and deleting those that have met an untimely end in the blogosphere. We regret that it has taken us so long to share some of these links with you, but deep down we are lazy bastards, so there you have it.

We must confess that we are also doing this now as a way to strategically avoid at all costs the forthcoming media storm of 9/11 five-year anniversary hell that will soon be descending like a horde of starved locusts upon all forms of mass communication around the globe. Lest you think we are heartless, we are not. It is tragic that so  many people died; it was mass murder on an unbelievable scale. We are very sorry the towers fell. It’s just that we would prefer NOT to see them fall again and again and again and again over the next ten days. (Those of you who remember what it was like and who can count into triple digits the number of times you were forced to endure images of the Challenger exploding in the late 1980s will understand this.)

First things first: Sadly, Cheryl Morgan is making good on her threat to shut down both her excellent Emerald City e-zine and her valuable SF/F news blog of the same name. You still have a few days to go over there and catch the August 2006 issue, which features an excellent review of Karen "That Wanker " Traviss’s forthcoming Eos title Matriarch, (which La Gringa is anxiously awaiting in her brand-new New York Public Library queue).

Speaking of Eos, and our good friend – and That Wanker’s editor! – Diana Gill, Eos has a pretty nifty new blog going on. This is an idea that La Gringa tried repeatedly to introduce at Big Ass Publishing Company, but alas! The Germans, they are so conservative. Anyway, swing over to the Eos blog now – they’ve got Robin Hobb’s new tour schedule posted.

Music lovers, rejoice! Fraser’s Song of the Day – the inspiration for Book Stud’s own Song of the Day feature – is now a blog, featuring all the same great new music that you’ve come to expect cluttering your in-box. Bookmark the BKLYN Song of the Day now, and visit every day to listen to and be educated about fun new indie and world music. (And tell ‘em La Gringa & Book Stud sent you!)

Bookish pal and raconteur Mark Rifkin – editor and publisher of New York City’s best free online event guide – now has a weekly column over at TimesSquare.com.

Okay, true to La Gringa’s nature, we are a little late in getting this one out to you, but here goes: The UK’s most excellent Forbidden Planet International SF/F blog has moved here. Please adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

Lastly (for this evening, at least), the debut issue of Jay Tomio’s superb new SF/F ‘zine Heliotrope has just been released, and it’s damned impressive. Download a free PDF of the first issue here!

The “things we’ve been meaning to post but we’ve been too busy solidifying the patriarchy” Tuesday night link dump

Now that Ron, Sarah & La Gringa have made sure that the patriarchy isn’t going anywhere soon, it’s time for La Gringa to unload the myriad fun links we’ve been accumulating the past couple of weeks.

We’ve been very neglectful in not letting you know that our favorite new online comic creators The Sacrum Sisters have not one but TWO new episodes. Click here for What Will You Give Me for a Basketful of Kittens? and here for The Most Beautiful Monster. (thanks, jm!)

Friend, skiffy colleague, fabulous midday drinking buddy and former burlesque producer Andy Heidel has a new short story collection coming out from PS Publishing. We have gotten our hands on a galley of said collection and are thrilled to be able to tell you that this collection rocks, and you should go pre-order a copy from the PS Publishing website right now. (It also boasts a rockin’ fun introduction by Harlan Ellison, by the way.) This is a limited edition print run, kids, so best get a move on!

One of La Gringa’s favorite ever blogs in the known universe – Bears Will Attack – is back after an extended (and really not-very-well-thought out) hiatus. Mr. Minter, we missed you greatly. Welcome back! (Mr. Minter, by the way, is also the keyboard player for awesome indie rock band Meredith Bragg & The Terminals.)

Some fun new blogs we’ve come across the past few weeks: Four Four (click here for their wild deconstructionist review of horror movie The Descent); group blog Other Blog (which we like even more now that we found out that brainiac hotties Liz Henry, Charlie Anders and Annalee Newitz are blogging over there, and even though certain members of this group blog need to get more of a sense of humor); via cyber-queen of ephemera Jenny Miller, we discovered also YoBimbo, which we will not attempt to define, and celebrity-gossip blog Junkiness, which is anything but junky.

One piece of news about which we here at La Gringa & Co. are most unhappy is Cheryl Morgan’s recent announcement of the forthcoming demise of Emerald City. This is a blow to the skiffy community, and we are sad, but nevertheless, we understand her reasons and wish her all the best.

News that should have been MUCH MUCH bigger: The Michigan Womyn’s (the English major in me shudders whenever I write this word) Festival has finally changed its controversial (and retarded) "woman-born only" policy, which has openly discriminated against transgendered and transsexual women since the festival’s inception. (Read a great article about this by Michelle Tea in a 2003 issue of Believer Mag.) The odd thing is, they apparently didn’t tell anyone they were doing it until some trans women showed up at the festival to buy tickets. We here at La Gringa & Co. can’t help but wonder if comic book creator Stacey Montgomery’s awesome Camp Trans protest comic Transexual Fury: Summer Camp Special! might have had a hand in changing some folks’s minds out there in Michigan. We hope so!

UPDATE: Nightgarden informs us that in fact the Michigan "We’re Really Uptight, Have No Sense of Humor and Cannot Spell" Womyn’s Festival has not backed down from their policy of enforced bigotry. She points me to this press release wherein Lisa Vogel once again rails against the humble penis, even those poor penii (we just made up this fun plural of the word penis, by the way – if Lisa Vogel can make up word spellings, so can we!) which are soon to become organic waste in some hospital’s biohazard dumpster.

Vogel says "I would love for you and the other organizers of Camp Trans to find the place in your hearts and politics to support and honor space for womyn who have had the experience of being born and living their life as womyn. I ask that you respect that womon born womon is a valid and honorable gender identity."

La Gringa & Co. (all of us English majors) would like to point out that – in any English-speaking country, at least – nobody has ever been born a "womon", "womyn", "wymon", wymyn" or a "wimmin." They are born women.   

And sometimes they actually choose to become women. And those of us who are more enlightened actually support that choice, because we understand that it is about a zillion times more difficult to live openly as a trans-woman or man as it is to live as a born-woman or man. (We might even be so bold as to point out that this is one of the reasons God invented compassion, Lisa.)

Thanks, Nightgarden, for setting us straight. Er, well, um, we mean, for correcting us. Heh heh.