GeekGirlCon...and where Care Bears Fit in...

In August of last year, the idea for GeekGirlCon took shape.  In October, it really got going.  We have two special guests lined up (Thank you Bonnie Burton & Trina Robbins!) and a lot of fun and informational events lined up.  In Seattle later this year, we Geek Girls will take the city and the world by storm!!

This coming weekend will mark another All Hands On Deck open-to-everyone meeting.  It will be Saturday, January 15th from 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. at the Madison Park Starbucks at 4000 E Madison St., Seattle. There is a conference room there which we will be using.  This is an important meeting, not just being the first large meeting of the New Year but we will be introducing our Board Members...and the California crew will be making the trip north to join our Washington comrades!  I will be making the long 15 hour drive north beginning very early Friday morning.  To help promote GeekGirlCon along the way, I will be traveling with one of my daughter's Care Bears and photograph the Bear with a GeekGirlCon promo card at various stops along I-5.

For reference, these are the original 1980's Care Bear stuffed toys, not the remade 1990-2000's releases.  I got them all for Christmas when I was about eight or nine when Care Bears were all the rage.  I watched the TV show and the movies.  I had the little plastic toys and the Care-A-Lot play set.  They ranked up there with My Little Pony and my MLP & Care Bear toys regularly teamed up in adventures where they would try to save Strawberry Shortcake from the evil Decepticon Starscream...ahh the good ol' days...

Back to the plan for the road trip...

I hope that people will follow the Care Bear road trip on Twitter and also visit www.geekgirlcon.com to learn more about us and maybe even decide to make a donation.  If you like the GeekGirlCon mission of promoting awareness of and celebrating the contribution and involvement of women in all aspects of science fiction, comics, gaming and related Geek culture, then please make a donation and help us make this the biggest convention of 2011 and beyond! 

Care Bears, GeekGirlCon and a Road Trip!

As I announced on Twitter, I will be making the long 15 hour drive north this Friday the 14th from Northern California to Seattle for the All Hands On Deck meeting of GeekGirlCon.  However, I will not be travelling alone!

I will be taking one of my daughter's Care Bears with me to help promote GeekGirlCon along the route.  Originally, these were my Care Bears and I passed them down to her.  She has them all, including Grams, the baby bears Hugs & Tugs..and even one Care Bear Cousin, Cozy Heart Penguin!

I will be taking pictures of the bear with a GeekGirlCon promo card at various stops along the trip.  With the way the weather has been going, you may even see a picture of the Bear in the snow!!  I will be tweeting these pics so that you can follow along on the road trip too! 

Sooo...which Bear would you like to see on the trip?  Wish Bear?  Tenderheart Bear?  Good Luck Bear?  Cheer Bear or Funshine Bear?  Send in your votes by twitter or blog comments & then tune in Friday Jan 14th to see which Bear is going to be designated official GeekGirlCon Promo Bear!!

And if you feel so inclined, please visit www.geekgirlcon.com to learn who we are, how you can help or to make a donation!  Thank you and I look forward to reading your votes!

Editing of Huckleberry Finn is just politically correct censorship crap

I am an avid reader.  I'll read almost anything that can hold my attention past the first chapter.  However, I've always enjoyed the classics.  I've read Gone With The Wind so many times that I'm actually on my third copy.  To Kill A Mockingbird still makes me cry.  The Grapes of Wrath could have been written about my own family who drove to California from Oklahoma with every possession they owned piled on their trucks, hoping to escape the drought of the Dust Bowl and find hope in the Golden State.  I think that's why I am taking it so personally that they want to sanitize the language of Huckleberry Finn.

True, Huckleberry Finn does use the N-word a lot.  This, of course, has led to the book being banned in school districts by supposedly educated paranoid intellectuals.  Is it really so painful for children, usually teenagers, to read that word in print, especially if it is used as a point of discussion within the class?  Just because we have a black president, do we have to sanitize historical literature so we will not be able to find any derogatory speech that someone might find offensive?  What does this accomplish, other than to hide our country's past in a cloud of PC bullshit?  Yes, I said PC bullshit.  I've always found political correctness to be complete bullshit and this is taking it a step too far.

By destroying classic American literature to clean up the language, we are destroying an important part of our nation's history: the bad part.  The use of the N-Word in books like Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Gone With The Wind and To Kill A Mockingbird is representative of where we were in the past and how far we've come from that time.  Of course there is still racism in this country but attempting to scrub it from our history will not make it go away.  Banning books has never resulted in anything positive.  Sanitizing history will never make up for any atrocities or prevent them from happening again.  I wish these so called intellectuals would remember the most important lesson we learned in school.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.