Diverse TV and games

I never read The Baby-Sitters Club books as a girl. I think I was the wrong age for them, or I thought that the protagonists were all white (in that age when fiction typically just had a blonde, a redhead, and brunette for variety, or used Italians for ethnicity). I was never aware of Claudia Kishi being Japanese American or that she broke Asian stereotypes by being fashionable, artsy, and bad at school. The closest character I ever saw to Claudia was Lisa Turtle on Saved by the Bell, but Lisa was black.

I watched the Netflix show out of curiosity and was appropriately awed by Claudia Kishi's style and coolness. I even watched the Claudia Kishi documentary afterward to see all the other Asian Americans who grew up with her as a role model while I was missing out. She is indeed awesome, and the show overall is great too, updated with more girls of color and modern issues, like standing up for trans rights. I was also touched by the story of Claudia's grandmother Mimi having a stroke, then remembering her internment in Manzanar.

Rest in Peace

So sad to hear about the passing of John Lewis this weekend. He was a great man and a civil rights hero. Why not a statue of him instead of all these Confederates? A pity that the Supreme Court recently ruled against the voting rights of ex-felons in Florida. Just a reminder that John Roberts is a fucking conservative, despite him voting for the good side on some issues.

Meanwhile Trump continues to be an imperial fascist, sending federal troops to invade Portland and trying to cut off all funding for testing and contract tracing. He really thinks he can make the pandemic disappear by not letting the public get tested. (While he gets tests on demand for himself and his staff.)

Congress is trying to hash out another pandemic relief bill. I don't know how much we can get through the Senate, let alone Trump's veto, but people need help.

At least the Texas primary runoff elections are done now. Fundraising for the general election is on, though we still don't know if we're going to be allowed to mail-in vote for November. The Post Office as ever remains in danger.

Under a Cloud

Early voting is open for the July primaries/runoffs in Texas. I voted last week. I wonder if there will be crowds on election day or if people will skip the primaries altogether to avoid another spike of cases. We can only hope that courts make a decision about mail-in voting before the November election.

I was shocked to hear that somebody toppled a statue of Frederick Douglass on Saturday. Revenge for the Confederate statues I suppose. Meanwhile, the Washington football team is now in talks about changing their name, though they still don't promise anything. About five years ago, the sci-fi show Minority Report was set in D.C. in 2065, and they changed the name of the team to Red Clouds. I hope the real life team finally changes its name.

I'm glad to hear that an advertiser boycott is forcing Facebook to finally start taking action against hate speech. They claimed they didn't want to censor free speech, all while ignoring the real harm in letting Nazis take over the internet.

Independence

Fireworks are going off in my neighborhood, and it's almost the end of July 4th. Seems relatively quiet for a Texas summer holiday. Abbott finally made masks mandatory for most counties. If only he'd learned his lesson early. Still not sure why he doesn't try to rein his Lt. Governor in, make him lie low for the rest of the pandemic. Meanwhile, no use expecting Trump to change his tune; same old shit at his ego-stroking rallies.

On July 1st, Netanyahu didn't go through with annexing the West Bank. There's speculation as to why, including the Covid crisis in Israel, Arab neighbors, etc. Hopefully the rest of the world can continue to pressure him to abandon the plan. Maybe Netanyahu can eventually be forced out of office by his corruption scandal. I have to hope.

I've been reading The Westing Game lately. I remembered reading it before as a kid, though I forgot most of the plot, except for America the Beautiful. Sam Westing being super-patriotic and using fireworks to burn his whole mansion to the ground is weird, though this time I was struck by the cast of characters being so diverse for 1973. There's an important theme of feminism too, with Angela Wexler struggling to become an independent, whole person instead of just a doctor's wife, Turtle becoming a business/stock market whiz with help from Sam Westing. Apparently the book has been adapted as a movie before, and I'd like to see it if I can find it available anywhere.

More Holmes lawsuits

It seems that the Conan Doyle Estate is back to suing people again. These extortionists regularly like to claim ownership of Sherlock Holmes in order to coerce TV, movie, and literary people to pay "license fees" for using the character. Back in 2013, Sherlockian Leslie Klinger learned that the Estate was trying to block one of his planned books, so he decided to sue the Estate to get Holmes declared a public domain character. The suit is chronicled on his Free Sherlock website, but basically Klinger won the case and the appeal, so Holmes and his related world are public domain.

Now in 2020, the Estate is trying to sue Netflix about a new Enola Holmes movie. This movie is based on a book series by Nancy Springer about Sherlock's younger sister Enola, but the Estate is only just now suing because it sees there's money in this. Also, they've changed tactics due to their previous defeat in court. The Estate used to argue that Sherlock evolved over time throughout all 60 stories, so because 10 of the original stories were still in copyright, the character as a whole should remain in copyright. This was rubbish because Conan Doyle was never that consistent in writing Sherlock. (The 10 cases are the Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, published after 1923. That's the cutoff year for copyright in the United States.)

In Klinger's lawsuit the judge ruled that while Holmes is public domain, the Casebook stories are still in copyright.  So any characteristic of Holmes found exclusively in this Casebook is not in public domain yet. That's what the Conan Doyle Estate is arguing now, claiming that Netflix's movie and Springer's books feature traits of Sherlock that are only found in the Casebook stories. It's flimsy, but they hope this will work based on the prior precedent. They're so greedy, trying to get as much money as they can before all the stories fall out of copyright in 2023.

Meanwhile, movie releases are getting shifted again, with Mulan going to August now. It's so frustrating because it did have a movie premiere in March just before theatres shut down, but most of the country hasn't seen it yet. We'll have to wait some more I guess.

I knew it

Not all Supreme Court rulings will be good, especially with this court. They already ruled to deport asylum seekers, and now they ruled against hearing the vote-by-mail case. Ignorant people are claiming that the Texas Democrats jumped the gun by trying to skip the 5th circuit. But we have primary elections in July, and it's kind of an emergency to get a definitive ruling NOW before we have a disastrous election as seen in other states.

I mean, the hospitals here are so overwhelmed with cases that Gov. Abbott finally decided to reimpose some restrictions, by closing bars and making restaurants go back to 50% capacity. If it's that bad, then why the fuck can't we vote by mail in July to prevent more infections? But I was always pessimistic, and it's probably too late anyway now to print up enough mail-in ballots for the primary. We just have to hope that the 5th Circuit doesn't slow-walk this case so that we don't have time to prepare for the November election.

This is all Abbott's fault for reopening in May instead of waiting until June, and then, continuing to reopen wider despite the huge spike in cases every single day. (He had claimed that with each phase, he would stop to evaluate the situation, but no, he never did pause until after it became a severe crisis.) It seems only after Trump threatened to pull federal funding for testing, that the governor and our motherfucker senators realized that "Hey, we need to do something!" "Maybe I should encourage people to wear masks. Maybe I should let the local cities and counties do stricter stay-at-home rules, instead of propping up Trump's shit narrative?"

So because of that, we have to reverse the reopening I guess. I wonder what July 4th is going to be like? I'm working that day so I won't be out and about. I wonder if the rightwing loonies are going to be out partying in defiance of new restrictions? What's it gonna take for Abbott and Paxton to voluntarily let us do vote-by-mail? A fucking disastrous July primary? Ugh.