Great Articles
There’s a new site up: danceinfo.org. Allan Hurst is a Bay Area dancer, caller, and a friend of mine. He’s also an excellent writer, who’s been entertaining the gay and lesbian square dance world for the past several years with his articles for various publications, including the gone-but-still-lamented SquareUp!, and the Call Sheet, the GCA‘s newsletter. Now, all of his articles are available online. Many of them are specific to gay and lesbian square dancing, but at least two have universal square dancing relevance:
In addition, if you’ve ever wondered why, in certain circles, it’s de rigeur to say “my peas are frozen” when doing a mini busy, check out Allan’s Origins of Square Dance Sound Effects. Allan was present at the birth of “my peas are frozen” and now shares that insider information with you.
Allan also shares how he created his site here. We share some similar biases, particularly in his answer to Why is this site so plain?:
Want to see animation? Go to the movies or rent a video. You won’t find dancing baloney on any of my web pages. I despise little cutesy icons (animated or static) as bullet points. I spit on the ground in front of those who would force me to endure even more revolting animated cursors that resemble swarming insects or playful little baby animals. Don’t even get me started on pretentious intro screens or animated menus that take three minutes to load so you can spend three seconds viewing scant content or “coming soon” pages.
You go, Allan!
We differ, however, in that I go out of my way to avoid having to use Micro$oft Word for anything, let alone using it to generate HTML. But it’s a losing effort; even the current GCA president is sending .doc files for the newsletter (fortunately, they open in AppleWorks, and there are rumors that the free text editor included with every copy of Mac OS X 10.3 (codename Panther), will be able to open .doc files).
Check out Allan’s articles; they’re great!