Punk Smurf pens a bilingual blog

We’ve seen Google change their logo hundreds of times to celebrate some event during the company’s history, but lately they’ve really upped the ante, changing it nearly every day.

It seems that this particular celebration will go on for a couple of days (till November 10th, Sesame Street’s actual 40th birthday). I like it; I love muppets

I started off the day with a dose of Lena Headey. Not only is this lady cute, she’s funny as well.

And who knew she’s into horror movies, too?

Watch the interview here. Too bad host Bridget McManus didn’t have Lena show the audience her tattoos. I’ll be off to take a cold shower in a bit.

Earlier this week I came across an article in the China Daily reporting a step forward in breaking the taboo surrounding homosexuality. Heartwarming.

There’s a little web series called “Anyone but me” (they’re also on Facebook) and it’s introducing a new generation searching for love and belonging in the post 9/11 age. It’s looks small, genuine… And cute. And I actually like it! (Whodathunk, eh?) Anyhoo, one of the main actresses - Nicole Pacent - talks to SheWired about the show and being out

Watch Nicole and co-star Rachael Hip-Flores in an interview posted on AfterEllen earlier this year *here*

Finally, some music news: sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart have been making music together for more than 30 years, but they have rarely shared the vocal spotlight.

Ann did most of the singing, while guitarist Nancy occasionally contributed backing vocals. The formula served them well, producing such classic-rock chestnuts as “Barracuda”, “Crazy on you” and “Alone”.

But things will be a little different for the group’s next album, on which they are currently working. Nancy will take a greater share of the vocal duties as the sisters experiment more with harmonies.

“It’s just a way of reinventing, and having more fun, and taking some of the pressure off of Ann as a singer,” her younger sister said in a recent interview with Reuters. “As you probably can imagine, her voice is really a gift from above. It’s an instrument like few others. To couch a vocal style together more would be something fresh and new and more fun. Harmony singing is my favorite thing to do in music!”

Wilson described her vocal style as “more limited,” although she has sung lead on a handful of tunes including the 1985 chart-topping power ballad “These Dreams.” The sisters also notably traded off each other on their cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Battle of Evermore.”

“I love singing, and whenever I can sing some more vocal leads I always covet the chance. But it’s always got to be the perfect fit for a voice like mine,” she said.

The Wilsons are taking their time with the album, but hope it will come out in the summer of 2010. So far, they have recorded about eight songs, and will return to the studio in a few weeks with producer Ben Mink, who is best known as k.d. lang’s collaborator.

The sisters and their four-person band maintain a vigorous touring schedule. A co-headlining tour with Journey is scheduled to begin in July.

Currently listening to Drive Like Maria (album: Elmwood)

Yesterday I blogged about Amazon’s odd (media) move. Amazon has offered a further explanation of the  de-ranking debacle which stripped sales rankings from hundreds of books, many of them gay and lesbian themed. #amazonfail.

Amazon released a statement late today offering more explanation of an error they say caused the removal of sales rankings for hundreds of books, many of them gay and lesbian themed, over the weekend.

Said the company in a statement:

“This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection. It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles — in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search. Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.”

Earlier on Monday, a known hacker claimed responsibility for the event, saying he exploited a vulnerability in the tools visitors use to rate products.

The hacker’s confession. Is it plausible? Perhaps.

The entire event was notable for Twitter’s role in it. As Sam Machkovech at Slog notes: “Twitter’s the closest thing consumers and average users have gotten to creating an online riot in a long time. Yesterday, after typing #amazonfail into the search, packed lists filled the screen with posts all seconds apart, and screen refreshes kept ‘em coming. This was before any mainstream media had jumped on the story. no less. Twitter’s combination of brevity, semi-anonymity, and topic tracking is ripe for social tidal waves like yesterday’s.”

Watch British Channel4’s report here.

This weekend, people of all sexual orientations all over the world used Twitter to express their outrage about Amazon, and took to blogs and email to call out the new filtering system — and it worked. Amazon is scrambling now to fix what has turned into a PR disaster for them.

Amazon sent out a form response:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

What’s more disturbing: their removal of gay and lesbian books from their search results and sales rankings in the first place, or that they’re categorizing anything about the LGBT community and the lives in the stigmatized “adult” category even when there’s nothing “adult” about it?

Now Amazon claims a “glitch” led to the de-ranking of hundreds of gay and lesbian titles. Follow the conversation and updates HERE.

What were people at Amazon thinking? (Clearly, they weren’t…) Were they trying to find out how many people they could piss off? If Amazon didn’t know already: there are many straight allies.

AfterEllen.com Editor in Chief Sarah Warn took a break from her Dinah Shore weekend and wrote “What Amazon’s glitch says about American Pop Culture”.

As part of a discrimination lawsuit settlement, dating website eHarmony has relented its staunch straights-only stance and will begin to accommodate same-sex couples. But don’t shell out the big bucks for an eHarmony membership just yet — in order to meet the terms of this order, the company will launch the creatively named “Compatible Partners” site specifically for gay-matching next March. Good old separate but equal!

The Christian-founded company has been matching couples based on “29 degrees of compatibility” for nearly a decade — as long as those couples involve a man and a woman. (Granted, it’s not just gays who don’t meet eHarmony’s stringent marriagability standards: Aside from categorically rejecting those seeking same-sex relationships, the site rejects about 16% of its applicants for other various inadequacies including “those believed to have certain types of emotional instability, such as ‘obstreperousness’ (they just can’t be pleased) and depression.”

EHarmony justifies its lame hetero-ness with claims that its “scientific” technique is based on research about what makes opposite-sex marriages work. But their lawyers weren’t about to see if such reasoning would hold up to New Jersey’s anti-discrimination laws in court. The settlement, reached more than three years after a computer programmer named Eric McKinley brought the suit, requires the company to create the separate site, use photos of gay couples in its advertising, and post a link to the same-sex site. Membership to the new site will be free for the first 10,000 users — perhaps because eHarmony doesn’t anticipate gays lining up en masse to shell out $150 to a company that lumped them in with crazies and other unmarry-able degenerates for so long. Unless, you know, you’re into that kind of thing.