Deborama's WWW Number 22 - The Flash Girls, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly and QWERTY Ranch

A homage to lost Minneapolis things. At the May Day parade, I saw a young woman wearing a T-shirt that read "Keep Minneapolis Weird". Amen to that.
Some excerpts from Wikipedia about the Flash Girls and Emma Bull:

The Flash Girls are a now defunct folk music duo based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota..
The duo consisted of Emma Bull, a noted science fiction author, and Lorraine Garland, who went by the stage name "The Fabulous Lorraine". Garland is also notable as Neil Gaiman's personal assistant; the group formed at a Guy Fawkes Day party at Gaiman's home. The connections that both Bull and Garland had with the science fiction and fantasy communities allowed them to have an unusually notable group of people writing songs for them, including Jane Yolen, Alan
Moore, and Neil Gaiman. These songs are mixed in with traditional songs such as Star of the County Down, and Lily of the West, as well as poems put to music, including works by Dorothy Parker and A.A. Milne.

Emma Bull is a science fiction and fantasy author whose best-known novel is War for the Oaks, one of the pioneering works of urban fantasy. . . She sang in the rock-funk band Cats Laughing, and both sang and played guitar in the folk duo The Flash Girls while living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Her 1991 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Bone Dance was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Bull wrote a screenplay for War for the Oaks, which was made into an 11-minute mini-film designed to look like a film trailer. She made a cameo appearance as the Queen of the Seelie Court, and her husband, Will Shetterly, directed. Bull and Shetterly created the shared universe of Liavek, for which they have both written stories. There are five Liavek collections in print.
She was a member of the writing group The Scribblies, which included Will Shetterly as well as Pamela Dean, Kara Dalkey, Nate Bucklin, Patricia Wrede and Steven Brust. With Steven Brust, Bull wrote Freedom and Necessity (1997), an epistolary novel with subtle fantasy elements set during the 19th century United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Chartist movement.

Emma's Blog, Dark Roast
Will's Blog, it's all one thing
Steven's website, Dream Cafe
Neil Gaiman's Journal
Emma and Will's website QWERTY Ranch

I would dearly love to put a link to my Amazon.co.uk site and sell you CDs of the Flash Girls and Cats Laughing. They are unheard of at co.uk, and Amazon.com, there is one used CD available for each group (they both made several). The Cats Laughing CD is $44 and the Flash Girls will only set you back about $120.