Reminder: two more days to sign up for the Sixth Annual Sooper Sekrit Buffista Gift Exchange!

Anyone interested in exchanging small presents with other Buffistas during the holiday season, email me at my profile address with your Buffista name and a snail-mail location to which people can send your loot.

Please email me by November 3 . I'll be matching names and sending out notices by November 6 , to allow for plenty of present buying/making and mailing time.

The newest issue of "The November 3rd Club", an online literary journal of political writing, is now up!

Please do me a favor and give it a look, tell me what you think and, err, report any broken links.

The November 3rd Club Fall 2006 Issue

Featuring writing, art and conversation by: BRIAN BAUMAN, GARY BECK, TONY BROWN, RICHARD CAMBRIDGE, COREY COOK, LORI DESROSIERS, FERD EGGAN, ADAM FIELED, JERRY GARCIA, SAM HASSAN, BOB HOEPPNER, MATTHEW HOTHAM, KASANDRA LARSEN, CHERYL LATIF, FRANKY LA MOUCHE and BUCKY JONES, VALERIE LAWSON, DAN LEWIS, DANIEL MCGINN, RACHEL MCKIBBENS, CHAD PARENTEAU, ANTONIA PESTALOZZI, SUZANNE ROBERTS, ELIZABETH ROSS, ANDREW RECTOR, NINA SERRANO, JOHN SHUCK, MARC SOLOMON, ANDREW WATT and TONY WILLIAMS.

Edited by:

Victor D. Infante (editor in chief) Carlye Archibeque & Richard Modiano (nonfiction) Lenore Weiss & Steve Berman (fiction) Ray McNiece & Richard Beban (poetry) Sam Hamill (contributing editor)

Also, if you haven't already, please join our mailing list and/or our MySpace page

Sorry about the delay in sending out sekrit gift assignments. I've been distracted due to family & pet complications (plus swamped at work, because of course those things always go together).

I will send them out tomorrow morning, so if you haven't received a message by noon, please let me know.

A Congratulatory Message to America.

[link]

F2F Voting!

We've got a poll up to decide where/when this year's F2F will be. If you're thinking about going, please go vote, and check the thread for more details.

F2F Date/Region Poll!

This poll will be open until 9 PM east coast time Thursday.

I'm sorry to use Press for this, but I was tempted to spam Natter and Bitches and then decided this was a better place.

I'm spamming everyone with this link: http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/. It's a short film that shows how supermodels are "transformed", about 30 seconds long. Ten years teaching high school and now working at a girls' school has made me pretty conscious of how much girls (and women, for that matter) are affected by the distorted image of beauty perpetuated in ads etc., and I thought some of you might find this interesting. It's making me think a lot, actually.

D'oh! Link deleted due to last minute changes.

I don't think I've seen this around here, but my apologies if it's been everywhere and I missed it. If you had a paid LJ account at the time of last week's outages, you can get a week of free paid time: [link]

Sorry, I was asked before to hold this until some last minute changes could be implemented, but the trigger has been pulled elsewhere.

High Hat #7, ready for the public.

This issue, the Potlatch section is an assessment of Robert Altman, good and bad. There's also articles on pop culture artifacts as widely-flung as:

• In music: Schoenberg, Bonnarude, and death metal
• In literature & art: comics continuity, drunken novels, Charles Schulz, Prayer, and Pryor
• In movies: Artificial Intelligence and monkeys; and
• In TV: Deadwood and The Wire.

Apparently the ads for the day-after-Thanksgiving sales for many retailers are already leaked and online.

[link]

I thought I would share one such site.