Nine Lives: Coppelia's first year

          The art group Coppelia turns one this week, and they are celebrating the anniversary with an art show from 6-8pm SLT on Friday 28th February.
           Art groups are quite fascinating. Not the big message-board ones, but the guild type, where everyone's an artist. Some are free-for alls, with a mix of genuine innovators and wannabes whose talent is mostly for gallery politics. Then there are the B-List cooperatives where nobody is very good but nobody minds, because dancing and gossip are regularly available. At odds with the B-list are the pretentious collectives for 'premier artists', the kind of elitist BS that third rate academics love. You can see where they are coming from - all of us want to escape from mediocrity, but as the Anglo-Saxon proverb says, 'He that

Private Eye

Sadly, you'll never see Photo of the Month; this is a PG blog. It's of Georg Janick, wandering about Caerleon with his penis out. Questions whir across your mind - Who was the lucky non-gender-specific lady? swiftly followed by - How can you eliminate every atom of that mental image from your mind? and then - Is she kidding? Idk, with difficulty, and no.
Then again, it was at Caerleon, so maybe it was Performance Art? An ironic acknowledgment of general opinion? No, he'd have to wear the attachment a lot higher up for that to make sense.
Which brings us to: What is proper SLettiquette when you see unexpected genitalia in a public place? (Snapping a discreet photo is a given.) A floating tag above your head saying 'WANG ALERT' might make the people around you check their fly, but that seems a bit too client-side. Any suggestions?
I miss the heyday of the SL Fashion Police, so much better than the halitosis pumped out by shut-ins like Prok, Saveme and Crap.
Non-gender-specific ladies is a misnomer, of course; any real woman will tell you that we can all specifically spot a shemale a mile away, but like the Happy in the Room, we choose to pretend we haven't noticed, mostly out of pity, sometimes out of friendship. It's not an anti-gay/bi curious thing, it's an anti-don't take me for a moron thing. Everything from word choice to wardrobe lets us know you're a hetero father of three, just like you know we're not 21, and imagining anyone has anyone fooled is beneath your intelligence.
But then that whole Avatar Identity stuff is arrant (and arrogant) nonsense. You don't 'become someone else' when you enter a virtual world - your talent, real life experience, morals, and education don't suddenly take a giant leap forward when you log into SL. *Gosh, imagine those dire poetry evenings and art openings if that were actually possible.* You just drop some of your inhibitions, that's all.
When you open your mouth and move, the real you is revealed, whether you're aware of it or not. For some, that's a wonderful revelation worth sharing with the world, but in many cases, well, let's just say it would be better if you kept it in your pants.