Two bits of news out of South Florida

1. From today's Herald:

The same company that kicked shock jock Howard Stern off its radio stations to stem ''the rising tide of indecency'' owns a billboard seen everyday by more than 100,000 South Florida road jockeys -- some of them shocked and puzzled by its message.

This is what the ad on the billboard says: FCUK FM.

The billboard promotes French Connection United Kingdom and their new British-music-promoting radio station here in South Florida - the FCUK store is about a block from my office, and their store signage also has the same language on it.

The billboard doesn't really bother me; what bothers me is Clear Channel's obvious hypocracy in this. An "anti-indecency" attorney here in Miami agrees - "For Clear Channel, which is portraying itself as the good guys, the Carrie Nation of the decency movement, to be doing this is just hypocritical. They're out of their minds."

So that's the annoyingstupidugh stuff.

2. On the flip side - those of you who are furious with Virginia, and planning to avoid the state as long as their (badly written, likely unconstitutional) law is on the books - come to Miami Beach! Our city is writing laws right now to bar a type of contract, too - the city will not be allowed to contract with companies that don't offer domestic partnerships to their employees (and independent contractors, afaik, as well). They're also working on laws which will bar discrimination against transgendered people - currently, our city laws don't include them specifically, although there is a bar on discrimination based on sexual orientation, which arguably covers it although not to the degree that some advocates wish.

So when you're chastising the entirity of the United States or bemoaning governments in general, remember that there are some places, including my hometown, that will not stand for bigotry.

(Of course, we may end up seceding from the state of Florida, but that's for another day).

And isn't it ironic?

Setting aside a few memes, where I didn't even write five sentences to choose from, and the three "backdated" posts I made in connection with 9.11, here's my 23rd post meme:

I don't like it.

It's from this post, where we were discussing the NY Times article about Mean Girls, which, of course, was conceptually transmogrified into a movie, and said movie comes out today.

Weird. I still hate mean. And I still know that universal popularity isn't happening any time soon, and that's ok, but I still find it annoying when one of the comments about Why FA Doesn't Deserve That Webby is that FA starts "interfandom awards". But, of course, we never have, so I have no idea what the complainant is talking about. People keep asking us to do fic challenges so people can vote for the "best" fic, but we think it would cause more bad feelings than positive, so we've refrained from doing it. But it doesn't matter - we get accused of doing it anyway. Weird.