Just Curious

Wasn't there a nifty tool out there somewhere that provided an image of all of one's friends using their (presumably default) icons?

If I wasn't dreaming it, and it still exists, what might it look like for folk where sufficient friends have, or have changed to, an allegedly obscene default icon?

As I said, all innocent like, I'm just curious?

Step Apart from SixApart on 06/06/06: Because breastfeeding is not indecent, but LiveJournal's treatment of breastfeeding mothers is.

Shopping

DAB receivers have hit the under £50 mark--so I bought one in Tesco yesterday.

It's neat once you've mastered the controls. The reception's fine, better in FM than any of our other radios (bar the digital feed to the TV) and far clearer--for speech--in DAB than anything we have. It's light, portable, works on mains, batteries (standard or rechargeable) or it's own internally rechargeable ones.

Of course, what I really want is their DAB/MP3 player. I guess it'll be another gadget that's incompatible with our stone-age operating system.

Perverse Pedantry

Just picked this story up in Peter Preston's entry in the Guardian Online blogs.

A Ugandan woman, previously "held for five months and repeatedly raped and beaten" in her home country is to be deported, because Home Office **** (you choose your term(s) when you've finished the sentence) don't accept "homosexual" covers lesbians too. Homosexuals are recognised as a persecuted group in Uganda, but since she's a lesbian she's not, apparently.

Also, she can't really be a lesbian, since she's had a child.

As someone pointed out in the comments, this ought to be in the main news sections, not in the blogs. But at least it is there with a link to the (inevitable, but useful) web site. And yes, I've signed the petition.

Being stoopid, I also turned to my Biblecomfort blanket and looked up homosexual (n) in the big OED which said:

A person who has a sexual propensity for his or her own sex; esp. one whose sexual desires are directed wholly or largely towards people of the same sex. In non-technical contexts it is often taken to mean a male homosexual, a female one being termed a lesbian.

The adjective's even more clear cut:

Involving, related to, or characterized by a sexual propensity for one's own sex; of or involving sexual activity with a member of one's own sex, or between individuals of the same sex.

No question about it: she ought to receive the same treatment from the Home Office as a male homosexual would in a similar situation.

I'm appalled.

Have LJ Abuse and Six Apart shot themselves in the collective foot?

I read El Reg's take on the "kerfuffle" (thanks to purplecthulhu for pointing it out) and had a sudden thought. (I'm assuming that the quotes from the TOS are precisely what was and is said.) So now, providing that they're clothed I could have a couple (hey, why not more? the more, the merrier, tho' there's not much room in 100 x 100 pixels) engaging in overt sexual acts so long as it's gentle? No areolae need be involved. And it all seems legit.