Dykes on Bikes @ Vancouver Gay Pride 2008 — the plan! (pass it on)
http://bykedykes.vancouverleather.com/
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Sunday, July 27th — Dykes on Bikes pre-parade BIKE WASH

1:30 — 4:30pm
2304 East Georgia St
http://bykedykes.vancouverleather.com for details….

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Saturday, Aug 2 — The DykeMarch

http://www.vancouverdykemarch.com/
Gather 11:30am at the west wide of McSpadden Park.
Starts at noon.

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Sunday, Aug 3 — the Pride Parade

For those starting on the East Side (Oh, the joys of the queer-women
biker gang run through the heart of the city…) Commercial and 3rd Ave.
Between 10 & 10:30 arrival, leave the east end for the west end at 11 am.

Parade starts at Robson and Thurlow this year!
http://www.vancouverpride.ca/parade/parade_route.php
Offical start time is noon… bykes arrive at Robson &
Thurlow at 11am (or earlier, or later).
Go to the head of the parade. No paperwork required.

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Parade Guidelines:

Wear your helmet to travel to the parade start, but *you* choose whether
to wear it during the parade. Often a float vehicle hear the front will
volunteer some space to hold your lids while en route.

Keep it slow, both on the turns and the long straightaways! Fast riding
scares the moms with toddlers sitting on the curb, and some of our
riders have less experience than you do, hotdogger. And the cops can get damn snarky at high-speed riding. Also, you want everyone to be able to see your sexy self on your hot machine — not just a blur with a bug-spattered grin.

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If you haven’t already…. Join the BykeDykes mailing list!
http://bykedykes.vancouverleather.com/

See the BykeDykes gallery, including some past year’s Bike Wash events
http://elainemiller.com/gallery/bykedykes/

Take Pictures! Get your mom to take pictures!
Send ‘em to elaine@elainemiller.com (with notes about attribution if
necessary) and Elaine will whip ‘em up onto the gallery.

Dykes on Bikes pre-parade BIKE WASH

WHY
You know you wanna look all purty in the Gay Pride Parade. Also, it’s nice to be admired for your shiny machine at every other place in town.

WHO
Dykes with bikes, women with motorcycles, genderqueers with scooters, and all those queer folks who admire ‘em and/or wanna offer polishing help.

WHEN
Sunday, July 27th, 1:30 — 4:30pm
(in any weather except violently inclement)

WHERE
2304 East Georgia St
(1 block west of Nanaimo St)
Look for the pirate flag and the array of motorcyles.

HOW
We’ll provide buckets, a few rags, a garden hose, and some ordinary soapy stuff.
And ice. And a cooler or so.

Bring whatever you’re drinking, a few more rags or sponges or toothbrushes, plus any polishing compounds and the like.

WHAT ELSE?

Join the BykeDykes mailing list!
(even if you did a few years ago, because a webserver crash ate the list a while back)
http://bykedykes.vancouverleather.com/

See the BykeDykes gallery, including some past year’s Bike Wash events
http://elainemiller.com/gallery/bykedykes/

BONUS: Dykes on Bikes Pride Weekend planning cheatsheet:

Saturday, Aug 2 (DYKEMARCH): Gather 11:30am, West side of McSpadden Park

Sunday, Aug 3 (PRIDE PARADE):
East End—> Commercial Dr at 3rd, 10:30am, head downtown @11
West End—> Robson and Thurlow, 11am-ish., Parade starts at noon.

Ryan’s cooking like mad for our party snacks, I’ve got a bin of doohickies to bring, a bunch of dyke porn to pick up, and guests coming in from out of town… Yay! Birthday parties!

You coming to help celebrate?

I have a mild sprain of my right wrist — I’m gonna need help giving volunteer passers-by my birthday spanks.

http://nubianimp.com/sweat/

Ryan Coke’s BDay Bash (He’s turning 30. I mean, 18.)

Start Time:
Saturday, February 9, 2008 at 9:00pm

Location:

Send me an email at ryansbday (at) elainemiller (dot) com, and I’ll shoot you the location. It’s a private, rented space in a bar in the West End.

Come and celebrate Ryan Coke’s Birthday.

Costumes, prizes, and performance!

Theme: PIN-UPS, PIMPS, and PORNSTARS!
(DRESS TO IMPRESS)

By donation upstairs before 10:30, $5 downstairs after 10:30.

** This is a private party, so friends of Ryan (and me!) and your dates only, please!

All proceeds benefiting transdude.com

Look forward to seeing you there!

Afuwa is a very good friend of mine — a wonderful woman as well as a wonderful artist… Her paintings are so very vivid; you’ll be wanting to see them up close and personal.

http://afuwa.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 19, 2004
Vancouver

The 2005 LeatherDyke Calendar Launch & Party
Vancouver-based calendar goes into worldwide distribution
Thursday, July 29th, at The Roundhouse.

This launch event celebrates the advent of Vancouver’s first-ever LeatherDyke calendar with a well-hung installation of the original images by Shaira Holman, international photographic artist. Chosen during the leatherdyke calendar contest thought up and run by Pat Tucker, Ms Vancouver Leather 2002, the women who grace these thirteen fabulous photographs will be helping dykes all around the world keep their dates organized for the next year.

Shaira Holman is perhaps best known for her renowned photo-based work G.I.D. … Gender Identity Disorder or Girls in Drag, which was exhibited at The Helen Pitt International Gallery, the San Francisco Public Library, the Advocate Gallery in Los Angeles, the Soady-Campbell Gallery in New York City, as well as at Studio Q, the Vancouver salon that Holman founded and operated.

“I’m excited and proud to be working on this project,” says Elaine Miller, LeatherDyke calendar designer. “There’s still a shortage of imagery in the outside world that reflects our queer lives and desires. In this decade, this is the only LeatherDyke calendar in all of North America, possibly in all the world. It’s good to help put quality images of leatherwomen out there.”

The 2005 LeatherDyke Calendar launch shares space with the Pride in the Written Word event, a night of Readings by local queer writers during the Pride in Art Exhibition, which brings the queer arts under one roof at Pride. This diverse exhibition is a place for celebration and self exploration of Vancouver’s GLBT community. All are welcome.

The 2005 LeatherDyke Calendar Launch Party
July 29th, 7 pm ?
As part of Pride in Written Word during Pride in Art
Roundhouse Arts and Recreational Centre
181 Roundhouse Mews
{East Foot of Davie Street)

The LeatherDykes Calendar is on sale now, both online and, in Vancouver, at Little Sister’s Book Emporium. Partial Proceeds from the calendar sales go to the Little Sister’s Defense Fund.

More information may be found at http://leatherdyke.com/calendar/

Or, for additional information or to arrange interviews please contact:
Shaira Holman, Photographer: 604-254-5869 shaira@sdholman.com
Elaine Miller, Designer: elaine@elainemiller.com 604-650-6867

?30?

Wait a sec for the image below to load, it’s worth it.

Ya, Monday, March 15th. See y’all there?

I have once again committed the grave sin of being anthologized — this time in a mainstream (non-kinky, non-queer) press, with a (surprisingly) non-kinky, non-queer non-fiction piece. But it *is* entertaining, and I’ll be reading it to the assembled.

The Book being Launched: Exact Fare 2.
The Publisher: Anvil Press http://www.anvilpress.com

The Name of My Piece: Follow That Bus!

The Launch:
Date: Tues. Dec. 9th, 6:00-8:00
Where: The Cottage Bistro, 4468 Main St. (at 29th)
Vancouver, BC, Canada

There’ll be about 6 readers, and a band is coming on a little after 8:00.

I dunno yet which band, or which other readers, but I’ll post the info at
http://elainemiller.com/blog/
for the terminally curious.

Do come by if you have the chance…

-Elaine

ps: The CBC picked up on my piece, and it’ll apparently go up on its website by Friday (Dec 5)

Radio 3 website http://www.cbcradio3.com

Hooray!

Okay, so there’s this company that spammed me ( UniClear.Com ), and they’re a little PayPal wannabe Canadian start-up from Victoria, BC, Canada, which gave me a soft spot … so I fwd’d the spam to ‘em, along with this note…

_______________________________

> Elaine Miller wrote:
> MIsspelled spam coming in under your name? This will ruin your business before you ever manage to get off the ground…. FYI.
> -Elaine

>
> ——- Forwarded message follows ——-
> Return-path:
>
> To: website@elainemiller.com
> Subject: Better Than Pay Pal

_______________________________

and the reply came back:
_______________________________

On 4 Nov 2003 at 15:10, info wrote:

>
> Thanks for the comment Elaine. As for the spam allegation. We subscribed to a mailing list of opt in email addresses. If you never subscribed we apologize. Please simply unsubscribe.
>
> Ken

_______________________________

So I wrote again, because I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about spammers.

_______________________________

Damn, your poor thing.

If you subscribed to that supposedly “opt-in” list, you were snookered, and you’re building a huge wave of bad feeling in the online community even as we speak.

The address the original came to was an old one, listed on a webpage on my site — I’ve never used it for any other purpose, and I spam-filter it now, since it got picked up by spambots and disseminated over the known universe.

Sorry to hear about the bad start-up.

-Elaine
_______________________________

But wait, there’s more! (laughing)
Seconds after I sent the first note about the spam, and before I got Ken’s reply, I noticed that the links in the email all said uniclear.com but pointed to a different scrambled-letter domain. I thought it was another company fucking with them, and I thought I’d give ‘em the heads up (because of the afore-mentioned soft spot for Canadian start-ups) — so I resent the spam copy with a cryptic note…

__________________

> Elaine Miller wrote:

> had another look… active fraud attempt
>
> -Elaine
>
___________________________________

And Ken, probably the janitor-in-residence when all the polite people went home, wrote back:

___________________________________

On 4 Nov 2003 at 15:14, info wrote:

>
> Hardly. You should be careful when you make such allegations Elaine. Do
> your homework carefully before jumping to such foolish notions.
>
> Ken
>

___________________________________

And so I retorted:

___________________________________

No, Ken, actually, I was taking it for an attempt on the part of another site to hijack your images and front page, and sucker users into signing up, with all their financial info, with the rival company. (It happens to PayPal all the time…)

I was warning you that someone was trying to defraud *you*. You know, in that friendly Netizen kinda way that’s going out of style.

That…. because I couldn’t imagine a company that would depend so much upon consumer trust and name recognition making such a foolish move as to spam potential clients.

However, now that I know that your company (1) rents spam lists for marketing purposes and (2) won’t respond in a polite and businesslike tone to correspondence, I’ll be sure to refrain from using your services, and advise my clients and friends of the same.

A good day’s work for you today, hmm?

-Elaine

___________________________________

and now I’m afraid that search engines will pick up this blog page when “uniclear” and “fraud” and “spam” are typed in the same search box.

Hmm.

Fancy that.

If anything else comes in, I’ll keep y’all posted…

As an extra funny, this appears on their uniclear.com website:

Important Notice
At no time will UniClear send you any email other than to inform you that you have new messages waiting in your iMail inbox (in your account). Should you receive any email saying anything else that appears to be from UniClear, delete it immediately because it is fraudulent. The only exception is a response from info@uniclear.com to a message you have sent us first.

-E

—————————–
Update September 15, 2005

Okay, something extra-extra funny: I got hatemail about this long-forgotten posting. It came in through my webform. I see that Uniclear has one loyal customer — or employee?

Here’s what I got:

You are a stupid bitch! You know nothing of Uniclear as they are a reputable company. I deal with them on a daily basis.

Take a dirt nap bitch.

I’d suggest listening to some od Disturbed’s songs. They’ve been one of my favourite bands since the first album… but whew! Grumpy, much?

DISTURBED