Slumber

Urgh, you guys, this makes my heart swell ten-fold. ♥

For those new to my flist, I've written about the LGBT movement in hockey before. It's not anything grandiose, and it isn't really league-led, but considering this is one of the four big sports, it's definitely something. (I don't follow the other three so I'm not aware of how the developments in hockey compare to those.)

Anyway, an update to that is the You Can Play project, spearheaded by Patrick Burke (Brendan's brother), and their first step involves filming a PSA from some of the biggest names in the league. They may not look like it, but those are All-Stars, top players in the league. And Burke says they have filmed 30 players in total out of the 35 who are committed to joining this.

This is a really good recap of everything too.

You Can Play is Burke's bold new initiative that enlists NHL players — the count is up to around 30 as the campaign kicked off Sunday — to "change the sometimes homophobic culture of locker rooms with a message that athletes should be judged on athletic skill and ability, not sexual orientation or other discriminatory factors," according to the organization.

"Through You Can Play, we want to let guys know why that [casual homophobia] is hard for gay athletes to hear. Even if you don't mean it in that sense, there's probably a guy in the locker room that can't take it in any way but in that sense," said Burke.

It's just a really awesome thing to have happen, and like I said last year, I just hope we continue to move in this direction.

Does your royal family have a last name? It can't just be Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth and a string of first names with tagged-on nths to identify how original the name was, right? Can it? Am I to assume they are all Tudors? Or is Tudor not a last name but, like. A place of birth or something?

ETA: Windsor! It wasn't in Wikipedia when I checked, but it doesn't mean it isn't somewhere. :| :P

I don't even know why I started wondering, but I am direly uneducated and need immediate rectification. Will a Brit please educate me? Like, about the whole monarchy system thing.

Thanks!

***

In other news, did you know that in France, women who wanted their marriages annulled used to bring matters to court, charging their husbands with impotence, so that the only recourse would be for the husband to prove in court that he was not impotent, and so therefore, as part of the court proceedings, masturbate in front of a so-called team of experts?

Of course, hardly (haha, no pun intended :|) anyone would actually be able to do that, so husbands who didn't want the humiliation that came with being proven to have a flaccid penis would demand a Trial by Congress, which is, essentially, a live show. Husband and wife had to show up at a ~neutral~ spot, and perform the act in front of the ~experts~, and there must be sufficient proof that they ejaculated, too.

I don't know how they thought that would help. :|

Let that sink in for a bit, and then I'll return to this wonderful, glorious, fantastically hysterical historical book.

PS. It's Napoleon's Privates. Tell your friends. :|

So yesterday I helped a bit in cooking for a Nigerian dinner that one of my hallmates wanted to throw, and for some reason I skipped the dinner. (Apparently, Line, it went on, nobody just told me. :| And I didn't check. :|)

Anyway, today I found a bottle of malt beer on my table as a thank you for the help, and it embarrasses me that since I'm currently reading A History of the World in Six Glasses (what, the title wouldn't make you want to read it?), I've found it amusing that I got "paid" in beer like they did back in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

God I'm such a dork.