I’ve written recently about why I like the Dyke March: its inclusiveness, the sense of community, the cute girls… but mostly, it’s an opportunity to feel normal without being normalized.

Despite popular rumours to the contrary, Catherine Winters is not a combination of Angelina Jolie as Acid Burn in Hackers and Katherine Moennig as Shane on The L Word. I’ve never been arrested by the FBI, I don’t bring a different–or even the same–girl home every night to my lesbian bachelor pad, and I’m not the greatest programmer ever. It’s true, I’m afraid.

In fact, I’ve only been in a stylized, cyberpunkesque sword fight at most three or four times. (I know, right?)

Still, while I may tend towards the femme/lipstick side of the scale these days, I’ve never exactly considered myself particularly straight-acting–whatever that means. For some reason, some people are still surprised to learn I’m gay though. In a way, it’s actually more irritating than my baby dyke phase^[3] when I buzzed my hair and was assumed to be a lesbian by pretty much everyone I met. At least then, I knew where everyone stood.

In fact, after I decided that maybe being gay and tall didn’t necessarily imply “butch”, I didn’t actually figure out how to come out to anyone for a while. I hadn’t done it since I was a teenager and even today, I’m out of practice. In fact, I still tend to assume everyone just knows at a glance. It’s always quite jarring to me when acquaintances ask about boyfriends or expect some commiserative banter about men: “You know what guys are like!” “Um, sure!”

Sometimes I don’t bother correcting anyone, and I wonder at times, if that’s being dishonest. Maybe. Then again, most of the time it isn’t relevant. What I’ve never become confident about is my ability to tell when it is.

As I pointed out to a friend over coffee recently, I hadn’t actually ticked the “Interested in Women” checkbox on my Facebook profile until a few months ago. On the one hand, if we’re friends on Facebook, you probably already know that about me. Still, what if you don’t? Almost nobody assumes “I don’t know” about people’s sexual orientation–that’s simply not how our society works. Instead, we assume a default of “straight”. In the absence of that bit of information, someone would have an inaccurate picture of who I am.

So what’s the rest of that picture? Well, I’m loyal to my friends. I like coffee. I’m into graphic design and web development and user interaction and typography. I read a lot of novels and like riding my bike. That’s what defines “Catherine”, not who I am–or am not–attracted to. That said, my sexuality affects who I am in a significant way, just as my height does. I see the world differently as a lesbian than I would if I was straight.

I wonder at times if I’m putting too much of myself out there when I share my thoughts about this kind of uncertainty. My overshares usually involve bodily functions, so I can’t use my usual tricks to figure out if this is getting too personal. At the same time, it’s impossible for me to write about queer topics or events without getting into my personal experience–and I do want to write about them.

So that said, how did the Dyke March go, anyway?

Good! Except it was really hot out. That’s definitely my least favourite part, honestly. I managed to escape without a huge sunburn, thankfully, but I still got more sun than I prefer.

I got to McSpadden Park early and chatted with a few women before my friends arrived. By the time it was ready for us all to walk up Commercial, there were a thousand women clustered under the limited shade provided by the trees at the edges of the field. “No, you all have to come over here,” the emcee shouted into her megaphone.

Mable Elmore, currently the Member of BC’s Legislative Assembly for my riding, LGBT and Filipino community activist, transit union organizer, and formerly my bus driver, opened the march. When talking with friends, I’ve been quite enthusiastic about her, (“You grew up in a big union town, huh, Cat?”) but sadly, we’ve never met.

The weirdest part of the day came at Grandview Park once we’d arrived: someone actually recognized me. By reputation.

I finally found a friend and her “lesbrarians” banner, complete with Venn diagram indicating the intersection between “librarians” and “lesbians”. Frankly, I’m guessing her illustration was conservative about the overlap.

She introduced me to a couple of the other lesbrarians: “And this is Catherine, the Drupal developer I was telling you about!”

“Wow, Drupal!”

“Drupal!?” my friend said. “Pfft, Catherine also invented Second Life–”

That is not even close to being true,” I said.

“Second Life? Wait, Catherine Winters?”

Yes, seriously. It was the most impressed anyone has ever been with me. So that part was pretty rad.

As for photos, no, I didn’t bother taking my camera, and my iPhone is not well-suited for outdoor shots in incredibly bright direct sunlight. There aren’t many on Flickr either, as it happens. I guess the crazy social media circles I usually run in haven’t totally spread to Vancouver’s lesbian community yet.

I know there plenty were photos taken, mind you. While walking up the Drive, my friend noticed a couple dudes with fairly serious-looking video cameras.

“Wait, are we going to be on the news?” she asked.

I assured her I felt this to be extremely unlikely.

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Well, the media tends to not be sure how to describe the event…”

“Hmm?”

“Well, ‘Dyke’ is kind of a slur…”

“Ha!”

True enough, there’s hundreds of stories about Vancouver’s Pride Parade in Google News today and three about the Dyke March. So maybe next year.

[1] The rest of it will be spent being a tired old lady and going to bed at 9PM.

[2] Proof I can be wrong about things:

Girl: “Is this the first one they’ve had?“
Me: “No!“
Other Girl: “Like… the second?“
Me: “It’s the eighth, I think.“
Most Engergetic Emcee Ever: “WELCOME TO THE SIXTH ANNUAL VANCOUVER DYKE MARCH!“
Them: “Ha!”

And then they kept mentioning that! It’s like I have some kind of reputation.

[3] Disclaimer: while I had a phase–and it was a phase for me–where I thought I had to identify as butch in order to be a “real” lesbian, I do want to clarify that I’m not speaking of androgynous or butch lesbians in general. This is strictly my own personal experience of figuring out my sexual identity and the implications thereof. It took me a while to feel comfortable with the idea that I wasn’t betraying anyone by being true to myself. (And hey, I’m still compelled to write this footnote, so maybe I’ll get there fully one day!)

I’ve been convinced for a long time that the biggest threat to free speech in the 21st century is not, as in past eras, some kind of trend towards authoritarianism, but rather, intellectual property encumbrances. The idea that VANOC can trademark lines from O Canada is appalling to me. It’s bad enough that the Olympics have become so branded and mired in the exclusivity of the brand that they’ve threatened Olympia Pizza in Vancouver’s West End, to say nothing of the actions taken since then.

Thus, I wholeheartedly support the choice to the True North Media House in response to the line trademarked by VANOC.

But I’ve been thinking about situations where The Authorities have confiscated memory cards or deleted photos and so, I’m wondering about technical workarounds to this: I would consider using an EyeFi card in my camera to tether with a 3G phone (say, a jailbroken iPhone or possibly something with reasonable battery life.) to automatically upload my photos to my website or Flickr so that I wasn’t actually storing any pictures, I was posting them live. Short of jamming or Iranian-scale network monitoring and packet inspection, there would really be little anyone could do, assuming the images themselves were legal.

If I take a photo of a poster with the Olympic Rings, is distribution of that photo a trademark or copyright violation? Is my use of the words “Olympic”, “2010”, “Winter”, or “Games” in this post actionable? No, but what if I’m doing so in protest of something involving one or more of those words?

I mean, I don’t seriously consider myself at risk for having the last name “Winters”, or for writing under that name, but it’s so important to explicitly affirm that I have the right to do so when proposing –or passing!– any law that purports to restrict speech.

I, on the other hand, share my name with a number of moderately Googleable women, none of whom seem to be serial killers or skinheads or anything terrible like that at all. That said, the most prominent ones tend to be fairly embarassing. So who are they? A couple other Catherine Winters have written embarrassing books, but that’s thankfully a lot better than it could be. No, my fellow Catherine Winters are pretty harmless.

The first Catherine Winters’ story is pretty tragic, however:

Nine-year-old Catherine Winters was last seen around noon on March 20, 1913. A family friend named Dan Monroe spoke to her as she walked along the town square toward her Newcastle, Indiana home. On that day, the schools had closed due to an outbreak of measles and Catherine had spent the morning playing with her pal Helen Stretch. As she skipped toward home, she wore a “red sweater coat,” a white straw hat, and a black and white checked gingham dress. She had brown eyes and light brown hair.

They never found her. At the time, it was a huge mystery — was she kidnapped by gypsies? Did she run away? Her disappearance was covered in a 1913 silent newsreel.

Of course today, we can all guess what happened and it’s pretty horrifying. I really can’t fault her for having the same name, particularly when she met such a tragic end.

Second to her is a Catherine Winters who is also pretty hard to be irritated by. Catherine Winters of Lindon, Utah is 12 years old and plays the flute really, really well. I figure she doesn’t need crazy people picking at her for being good at stuff, so I’ll forego linking to any of the sites that list a little too much personal info.

Catherine, if you ever read this:

• Tell your parents to think about password protecting some of those photos of you. Flickr is a good option for this.
• Don’t let high school get you down in a couple years. In my experience, Catherine Winterses don’t like high school.

So, with the exception of Catherine Winters who disappeared in 1913 and Catherine Winters who plays the flute, the rest are kind of lame:

There’s Catherine Winters, who in 1983, wrote a single entry in the 1980s Sweet Dreams series, How to Talk to Boys and Other Important People. I’ve had people ask me if that one was mine. (“Yes. Yes it was. I was a published author when I was 2 years old.”) I strongly suspect that this is the Catherine Winters who wrote for Young Miss magazine in the early 1980s. If it is, today she’s writing for Health.com and is not as lame as previously asserted. Either way, it’s surprising that someone as prolific as this Catherine Winters could be eclipsed online by a book written 25 years ago.

[Update: May 28, 2009: Catherine Winters good-naturedly confirms that she is, in fact, not as lame as other Catherine Winters have worried and doesn’t sue me. (Thanks, Catherine!)]

There’s a “Katherine Winters Hair Salon” in Irvington, New York. I’m not actually sure of the spelling of her first name, but apparently, the proprietor isn’t actually named Catherine Winters. I’m not totally sure where the name comes from. As of this writing, there’s only one extremely negative review available on Google:

“If she didn’t give me a bunch of attitude for leaving and offered me a discount to come back when she got her ____ together I might have come back. I wouldn’t go back if she paid me.”

Finally, there’s the Catherine Winters who self-published a 48-page book called Being Single and Loving It. In the author’s own words:

I wrote this book because I had experienced some shortcoming also in the area of being single and praying for the right mate to come my way after my journey on being single I am now happily married to a wonderful husband but if I had not stood still just for a second I also would of miss my blessing. I hope and pray that my book would give you some things to consider while your waiting on God and soul searching for what you want your mate to be.

You know, a lot of people look down on self-publishing because it’s not seen as ‘legitimate’ or because you don’t have ‘editors’ or ‘proofreading’ and can have ‘problems’ with ‘grammar’, but to them, I say, balderdash! I’m ordering this right now.

So that’s the big four. Still, that’s not even counting the myriad Katherine/Kathryn/Catharine/Cate/Kate/Kat/Cat/Cathy/Kathy Winter(s)es out there! There’s too many to count, so I picked out a couple entertaining ones.

• In 2008, New Orleans resident Mary Catherine Winters, a nurse at Omega Hospital, (Yes, really!) gave $419 to Hillary Clinton.
• In 1976, British ice dancer Kathryn Winter won gold at the inaugural World Junior Figure Skating Championships. At two sentences in length, she has the shortest Wikipedia entry I’ve ever seen.
• Kathy Winters, NASA Shuttle Weather Officer, gets quoted in the press all the time and apparently has the authority to scrub shuttle launches. I feel this more than makes up for going by “Kathy”.
• Dr. Kathryn Winters, a pediatrician from New Mexico, has at least one patient (or more likely, at least one patient’s parent) who likes her, but thinks her staff is rude.

Interestingly, Catherine Winters have a tendency to be fictional!

• “Catherine Winters”, “Cate Winters” and “Kate Winters” are all popular names in a variety of fan fiction: Twilight, (Damn it.) Smallville, Harry Potter, Boy Meets World, Doctor Who, and so on. The most blatant one of these, a Stargate SG-1 Mary Sue seems to have disappeared.
• Hilary Swank played Professor Katherine Winter in the 2007 film The Reaping, which I have not seen. With a Rotten Tomatoes score of 9%, I have not made plans to do so. (Seriously, Hilary, who is your agent!? Most. Inconsistent. Career. Ever.)
• Kate Winters is the protagonist of Gerri Hill’s novel Coyote Sky, currently one of the top-ten books on Amazon’s ever-mercurial lesbian romance list. Unlike The Reaping, I have read this, and yeah, I’d say that ranking is fairly well-deserved. If your name is Catherine Winters, it might be weird to read though. I’m just saying.
• One of my personal favourites: “Catherine Winters” is the alias chosen by the protagonist of hetero romance novel Indiscreet by Mary Balogh.
  

  Lady Catherine Winsmore, a heroine of quiet courage, refused a forced marriage when rape left her with an illegitimate child. Exiled by her family, she poses as a young widow, Mrs. Catherine Winters. An innocent smile brings the unwelcome advances of another rake, the Viscount Rawleigh, Rex Adams.

  That’s super. Not only do I apparently have a name that makes me sound like a character from a romance novel, I have a name that sounds like a character from a romance novel made it up. Awesome.

Who shares your name?

No, what I actually found interesting was that I’d never made the connection that Donald Sutherland was Tommy Douglas’ son-in-law. I knew who they both were individually, and I knew Donald was father of Kiefer, but I never actually associated the two.

When I mentioned this bit of trivia to a friend, he didn’t seem to understand why I was telling him this. Why was this fact important? At first, I couldn’t tell whether he meant its importance in the article or in our conversation, but that got me thinking — did it actually matter which he actually meant? Why would someone consider that sort of trivia important? Moreover, if it’s not, why did the CBC see fit to include it?

Upon a little consideration, this is easy. To be fair, nobody knows who Tommy Douglas was. However, several million people watch 24. By associating “Tommy Douglas”, a relatively unpopular brand, however important a figure he may have been, with a highly popular, well-known brand like “Kiefer Sutherland”, the article’s details are reframed for a broader audience.

The audience, seeing the man’s grandson hacksaw off terrorists’ heads every week, have formed an emotional familiarity with him. Seeing the vast number of people: A) who try to kill him, B) who he kills, and C) who he chooses not to kill — in a single day — causes us to become interested in his day. For those of us who choose let him into our homes, he’s very much a part of our lives.

So, when we see this story — police pursue popular populist — placed in pop-cultural context for us, what do we come away with? “Hey, the Mounties spied on Jack Bauer’s grandpa! What the hell?”

Predictably, Ze Frank already spent time thinking about this stuff… presumably so I didn’t have to.

(Original link via Rob Cottingham)

If each recording is say 30 minutes long for a road, split it into 10 equal parts, 3 minutes long, and upload all of them to youtube. Ask viewers to leave comments pointing out when they see anything strange. The Kims were in a silver Saab wagon, so it’s probably something that can be seen from above. In total, there’d be 50 or 60 short clips and in a matter of hours you could have millions of people closely scan then and start pointing out the things worth looking into on the ground.

In his incredibly good (yet incomplete!) webcomic Spiders, Patrick Farley describes a world in which President Gore enacts a similar project in the aftermath of the 9/12 attacks on the World Trade Center and US Capitol Building. A million tiny robot spiders are deployed to Afghanistan in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In one chapter, an unseen figure describes how surely this is some sort of psy-ops gimmick; the Americans would need a million operators to monitor the video of every spider. A second figure agrees, and is suddenly revealed to be Osama bin Laden himself, as seen through the camera eye of a tiny robot.

Meanwhile, thousands of kilometres away, a small girl is sitting at her computer. “Mommy? Daddy?” she says. “I think my spider just found that bad man.”

(Via kottke.org)

And finally, because you’re apparently supposed to do so in news articles and blog posts about this leak, here are some entertaining searches to amuse yourselves with while condemning AOL for having invaded these people’s privacy:

Between 9:15 and 9:40 AM, user 12276808 searches for:

• ejaculator
• ejaculator vacuum
• milk machine
• milking devices
• cow milking devices

User 2643851 searches for:

• hotmail.com
• car parts
• effect of eyewitness testimony on wrongful convictions
• the eyewitness laboratory department of psycology university of texas at el paso
• the american psychology association
• sexy girls
• google

And finally, the smug, leaked-data-referencing closing statment: That last search may have been a better option.