Irregular — a regular

I biked downtown tonight for my last mocha at Uncommon Grounds, only to find it wrapped in plastic and scaffolds. They've been tearing apart the space next door for a few weeks, getting ready to expand southward, and I guess today they closed up shop in order to start knocking out the walls between them. It's fitting, in a way; the old Uncommon Grounds is going away just as I am, and whatever it's becoming I won't be here to see it. The wall that supported my right shoulder for so many hours is knocked down just as I no longer need it. It's a bit silly to be nostalgic for a coffee shop, I guess, but I probably wouldn't be writing a book right now if it weren't for Uncommon Grounds.

Yesterday K and I said goodbye (more successfully) to the Adirondacks. We took a low-impact hike through tall stands of spruce to the Goldmine Stream falls, where water tumbles down over big caramel-colored blocks of stone. We saw a fish trying to swim up the falls, just a squirm of spotted brown and a tail flip before it was pushed back down again.

Earlier today I found a four-leaf clover growing beside the road. Good omens, good omens — it's all gonna be good, right?

(Note to self: take a picture of the giant fungus growing out of the tree by the Springs Motel.)

Won't somebody please think of the children?

LiveJournal has apparently initiated a pedophile purge in the last 24 hours, possibly prompted by an activist group called Warriors for Innocence (key quote: "It’s time to value child safety above free speech"). Cleverly, they've managed to catch survivors' journals, over-18-locked fanfiction communities, and a Nabokov discussion group in their net. This has not gone over well.

LJ's May 1st response to WFI was exactly what I would have wanted them to say:

We acknowledge that this content is disturbing. However, it is not a violation of the LiveJournal Terms of Service to admit to having committed an illegal activity. It is only a violation to incite others to this activity or to solicit information on how to commit, or assistance in committing, an illegal activity. As this is not the case here, we will not be able to take any action.

What happened?

Words for SixApart: discussing pedophilia, fantasizing about incest, or posting photos of yourself in Loli garb doesn't make you a pedophile. Sure, you have the right to delete whatever accounts you want; they're your servers. But free expression is a valuable part of the service you provide, and stifling it in the name of morality is going to bite you in the ass. In fact, I believe that if you check your ass right now, you will find it is covered in bite-marks.

Words for WFI: Even pedophiles get to have their say in our country, just like Nazis, Communists, white supremacists, Anne Coulter, and shrill little wrong-headed activist groups. That's the price we all pay for the First Amendment. You ask, "So it’s ok for some predator to 'make up a story' about how he would love to violently rape a 3 year old, and describe in detail the sick pleasure it would bring." Yes. Yes it is. Welcome to America. Please enjoy your stay.

Another thing...

So, LJ deleted the Harry Potter slash community pornish_pixies because they received a complaint that it listed "incest" as one of its interests. (I'd never heard of the group; I'm not a big fanfic guy.) Part of their response to the maintainer read:

Because LiveJournal's interests list serves as a search function, and because listing an interest enables other people also interested in a similar topic to gather and/or congregate, we have been advised that listing an interest in an illegal activity must be viewed as using LiveJournal to solicit that illegal activity....

So I wonder...how, exactly, do you go about soliciting incest via LJ? I mean, wouldn't you be pretty much limited to members of your own family? "Yo, LJ peeps, who wants to have some incest with me? LOL. ITA." It doesn't work. Is the idea that you list "incest" among your interests in the hope that some long-lost family member will spot it and say, "All right! I can totally have incest with this guy now! Look, he's soliciting it!"

Phooey.

(What's really obnoxious here, on top of the other obnoxiousness, is that LJ's own terms of service say they'll give people a chance to remove offensive content before deleting their journals.)