the mellow tigger's musings

It's Pride month, and I thought I'd share a quick tidbit of lesbian history.

One of my favorite gay comic strips from around the late 1980s was Alison Bechdel's "Dykes to Watch Out For". I like it even better than the "Leonard and Larry" series from the same era, because it has more of a flow of continuing storyline. The bookstore in this comic strip was called Madwimmin Books. That imaginary bookstore was based on an actual Minneapolis bookstore called "Amazon Bookstore Cooperative".

I visited that real-life bookstore a few times, after my move here in 1998. It was important to me as a small local business, since I had volunteered at Liberty Books in Austin TX for a few years by opening the store on Saturdays. That was before it eventually closed, thanks to mounting economic pressure from GLBT books showing up in mainstream bookstores too. The Amazon bookstore here lasted longer than Liberty Books, and they had increased pressure specifically from Amazon, the worldwide juggernaut that is now known for just about everything except books. Seriously, my workplace is switching to an Amazon telephone call center solution in a few weeks, a service that obviously has nothing to do with books. It turns out that Jeff Bezos selected the name Amazon just because "it was a place that was 'exotic and different' ".

What is a small fringe bookstore to do in a world increasingly going online, when the obvious website you want is already taken? The local bookstore sued for the name. It had existed since 1970, after all, long before the online company showed up. The juggernaut won the online battle, though. Eventually, new owners took over the local store in 2008, then with that change they suddenly were disallowed from using the Amazon name at all. Amazon books could no longer be Amazon books. The stored lasted about 3 more years before it closed for good.

So that's the Madwimmin Books source material. Right here in Minneapolis. :)

I didn't see any reports of violence at the No Kings protests here in Minnesota. That's good news. After many were cancelled at the request of law enforcement and Governor Walz, I wondered what the actual turnout would be like.

It was great.

There was a 2-hour livestream of the event on YouTube, which I didn't know yesterday. Here's a photo from this thread on BlueSky, with many more photos posted in the replies. There are also good photographs showing up on Reddit in the communities for Minneapolis and Twin Cities, like this one about Minnetonka and this one from the desk of slain representative Melissa Hortman in the House chamber. This BlueSky photo, below, even made it to the generic Pics community on Reddit.

A special honorable mention to this 102-year-old veteran out doing his #antifa duty during a protest somewhere in the USA yesterday. Also to a random girl at a small town of Alexandria in Minnesota who held a sign that said, "I deserve better."

I wish I was able to attend, but I had to work. Thank you to all the Minnesotan's who showed up, at every location. But there should be a lot more N95 masks on faces, okay? Now, I need to get ready for work again today.

I propose a new word for use in biological science: corollatype. This word is meant to be a counterpoint to karyotype whose etymological origin refers to the kernel, seed, or nucleus of a form. I chose corollatype as a reference to the biological corolla, which I understand as the collection of petals and reproductive organs on a flower. That term is derived from the latin word corona for crown or garland. Together, I intend this term to refer both to the physical form of the reproductive parts of an organism but also the appearance and behavior that draws attention to the sexual process too.

This term is meant to complete the following analogy:

Genotype is to Phenotype, as Karyotype is to    (blank)   .

Rephrased slightly to emphasize the utility here:

Genotype does not restrict an organism to a single Phenotype, just as Karyotype does not restrict an organism to a single Corollatype.

Used in this way, it would end the illogical gender-restrictive and anti-trans arguments, even before they start. It would require the proponent to first explain why, when Nature itself does not, they think they know what sexual appearance and behavior must be. If we need to quibble about Greek/Latin origins, then maybe peritype would be a better word choice to mean everything "near/around" the reproductive process of an organism (form and behavior)? Or maybe stemmatype as a reference to a crown or the ostentation that draws attention to the inner form?

I'm surprised that I haven't used this analogy on Dreamwidth before today. I've been searching for at least half a decade for a word to complete this analogy. I found an email to foeclan in 2020, where I was trying to find an even earlier mention that happened on a different social network, MeWe. Based on my experience with trying to ask the right question of AI, I tried to get a language model to create a new word to finish that analogy. Gemini was absolutely terrible at it. Copilot was much better. Copilot didn't give me the new word, but it pointed out the origin of karyo- as referring to kernel, which led me on my own to think of the other side of plant growth and flowering. So, AI got me there eventually but not directly.

Anyway, what do you think? Would such a term be useful? Is there a better word choice to select for this term?