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Disks in Rotation: Books Lying
Open Soul-Devouring
Worry When I Grow Up:
Curse of the Day: |
Saturday July 20, 2002 |
| Quote
of the Day Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult. -- Charlotte Whitton |
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Daily
Blog These things range from the prosaic; stuff like working out, eating better, quitting smoking, or spending less time watching TV; to existential things like making the world a better place, loving your partner more, donating time to a charity, or finally writing that novel you've been thinking about since college. If people made positive resolutions, and stuck to them, we'd all be much happier. Most people make such resolutions, and forget them by halftime of the Fiesta Bowl. So my theory was that I should make a resolution or two on my birthday, and that by picking that date they would be more personal and precious to me, and I might stick to them. I don't really celebrate New Years in any way, other than by writing the wrong date on checks for a couple of months afterwards, and I usually hardly even notice it, other than by the excess of College Football on TV. I don't do a whole lot more than that on my birthday, to be honest, but at least I tend to notice the date, if only by thinking to myself stuff like, "Christ, thir... twenty-eight and still not gotten a novel published?" Which as you can see, would tie in nicely with a resolution. To stop lying about my age, perhaps. I'll do that one now. I'm fifty-seven. Okay, with that embarrassing revelation out of the way, I'll make another, and it's that I didn't make any Birthday Resolutions this year. I thought about it; doing more content on the D2 site, working more on my fiction, spending less time playing games, doing a few social things and meeting a new girlfriend; but those are things I think about all the time, and have been more months and years, in some cases. Formalizing one as a codified "Resolution" might have been a good idea to fix it as a major goal in my life, but as with most things, I was much better at coming up with the concept than actually following through on the execution. Perhaps I could do a "month after my birthday resolution"? I'll give that some thought tomorrow... And now for some news. • Capital punishment, Iranian style.
Odd they don't drag him back up and throw him off again and again, until he is killed. Sort of like really extreme skiing. I can see the Mountain Dew commercial now.
I'd love to see a photo of the cliff. Does the condemned get to pick his own cliff? Do they have a special cliff they use every time for this? Just how high and steep is it? What kind of sack do they use? Is the guy thrown off, like by big burly Hassan chop type guards, or do they have a slide they zoom him down or something? How about if he survives. Why don't they just drop him again, like really extreme skiing? So what if he does survive, but he's all busted up, broken legs and ribs, severe blood loss, screaming in agony, etc. Do they give him medical care before hanging him? Is there a gallows right near the bottom of the cliff, or do they have to drive him back to town. What if he dies in the mean time from blood loss? Yes, I've got a lot of questions. • A relatively gruesome story from China. Taiwanese women who return to China to visit relatives are being forced to have pregnancy tests, and pregnant ones are being ordered to get abortions or have their tubes tied, since they got pregnant in Taiwan and didn't have permission from the Chinese government. In addition, most couples in China are allowed only one child, which is why they've got huge problems now with vastly more men than women. Obviously this is another China vs. Taiwan issue, with Taiwan wanting to be their own country and China continuing to insist they are a renegade province, and doing whatever they can to fuck with Taiwanese citizens. • New prototype Volkswagon gets 264 miles per gallon. Or approximately 132x what the average SUV clogging up US roads gets. I have got to do that Flux's Driving Guide page, it would be damn cathartic. • Yummy cow! Good, and good for you!
I find that amazingly high, as well as being surprised the figure is climbing. I figured it was on a steady and permanent decline since about 1990, though obviously I'm not factoring in the fact that like 40% of Americans are substantially overweight. Seventy pounds is a quarter pound 280 days a year, so that's like having a burger 5 or 6 days every week, or having a jumbo burger or steak 2 or 3 days every single week. Who eats that much cow? There's hardly beef on the menu at most restaurants I go to, but then I usually eat out with my dad at a nice seafood place, or some other healthy-style California place. You go to Chicago or elsewhere in the Midwest, and they serve roast beef with ribs for a side dish. I haven't had any cow in 7 or 8 years, (barring one in-flight burger when I'd been in an airport with nothing to eat for about 12 hours and was literally dizzy with hunger) and find it sort of amazing that anyone still eats the filthy stuff. It must help a lot if you've never seen PBS documentaries on how ground beef is actually produced, and don't know anything about how cows are raised, inoculated with every chemical known to man, how their food is drowned in pesticides that are banned on human vegetables/grains, etc. That goes for drinking milk (liquid cow) also, BTW. |
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One of the others, Hades, reading that thread replied with this:
Which was funny, since Hades knows me from the d2 site, but he didn't know this was my personal site, and probably wouldn't have worded it quite like that if he had, being as I'm a site admin on the D2 site and all ancient and knowledgable and venerable and stuff. The update he's commenting on was posted June 6th, click that to read if it you are curious. I'd be happy if I got emails like this one. I write a lot of outrageously opinionated stuff on this site, sometimes taking a sarcastically exaggerated PoV for comedic effect, but more often I'm just discussing rather juicy topics. Castration, conjoined twins, religion, slanderous politics, underaged sex, etc. Given the (relatively innocuous) things I see other sites get flame mail or big discussions over, I'm sort of surprised I've not stirred up some grassroots Christian conservative boycott yet. It's not for lack of effort, I assure you. *cough* More on topic, I'm fine with people taking issue with some comment or other, and would enjoy posting emailed comments and rebutting or admitting to them. It's ironic that given the amount of potentially hot button stuff I've written about, it's a throw away comment about a dopey sitcom that generates some interesting argument. Just to reply to it here, briefly, I don't think it has anything to do with "cool". Friends is #1 show for years, I believe, and popular in my demographic group, so isn't not watching it uncool? I have seen 5 or 10 minutes of it various times, but never seen any reason to watch more than that. I do plenty of things that are utter wastes of time, but I'm very sensitive to that while watching TV. I'll piss away hours on a sporting event I don't really care that much about, but other than sports, I hardly watch anything that's not informative, like Frontline or Nova or other such shows on PBS. Sitcoms are way way way down my list of ways to spend time. I've not seen any sitcom at all regularly since I used to watch Cheers occasionally (when it was on every night at 7pm in syndication) and that was probably around 1995. I do watch South Park, but not on TV (I don't have Comedy Central even if I wanted to watch it.), only on episodes I've downloaded over time, and it's about as un-TV as any program in existence. So yes, I have a strong aversion to watching TV, especially something as pedestrian as a sitcom, but I just can't stand Friends. I don't want to like it, but there's no danger of that; I have to mute it if it comes on, and the fact that I love how Courteney Cox looks is very aggravating, since it forces me to endure the show for a few minutes if I happen upon it, just to stare at her. I was being entirely literal about holding my hands up to cover the faces of the other actors on the show, especially the guys; it ruins my zombified Courteney-staring state if one of those guys is in sight, lips a-flapping. The usual Friends (or any sitcom, really) scene is the main characters sitting around in a studio set of a living room, with two cameras, and 2 or 3 more for close ups. So they'll show 2 girls and a guy on the couch in one shot, then another one to the left showing another girl and guy by a kitchen table. These cameras are cut back and forth between as the people talk, with occasional close ups of one individual as they are talking, but usually just the longer shot is held, since it's just a sitcom, no one is directing it with zooms and dolly shots, after all. So they'll show say Girl 1, Guy 1, Courteney in one shot, and then Girl 3 and Guy 2 in the other one. I'll mute it, and then hold up my hands to block off the Girl and Guy in the shot on each side of Courteney. Every time they cut to that camera, the three principles are in the same places, so I just hold my hands in one spot and as long as that scene (or my interest) lasts, my manual blocking is effective at least half of the time. Now I've done this for probably 5 minutes total of the 7 or 8 minutes of Friends I've seen in the last half dozen years, so it's not like a regular action, but I have done it and thought it was odd enough to mention on the blog and be amusing for others to read. Obviously I was correct, since it generated some comment. How's that for an overly-long explanation?
On a related topic (this was about boobies, if you'll recall about 15 paragraphs ago) I got an amusing Dirty Slang page suggestion today. I've got several things to add to that page next time I have a chance, thanks to emails. This one was slang for breasts, "rib balloons". I find it quite dumb, but amusing, and those are pretty much the top two prerequisites for enshrinement on the Dirty Slang page, after all. Why "ribs" anyway? I mean boobies are attached to the breastbone. Hence the name... Ribs are in the general vicinity, and "breastbone balloons" isn't good, alliterative or not, but it's just odd how someone came up with that as a term. I was giving it some idle thought while making a quesadilla, and noted how virtually every slang term men have for breasts is sort of goofy and jovial. Affectionate, even. Boobies, Jubbilies, funbags, zeppelin racers, tatas, etc, etc. I don't list that many of those on the dirty slang page, since the list is just endless, and becomes repetitive. Compare those to slang for the vagina, which is often obscene and sort of angry. "Axe wound", for instance. Descriptive, but unpleasant. Men love the vagina, but it's intimidating and mysterious. There are funny flaps and bits of flesh, hair sometimes, even blood. It can do cool stuff, but it's hard to see and has to be handled with an expert touch. The best places to touch it are hard to find and delicate and sometimes aren't good to touch, and it's complicated. Breasts are quite the opposite. They're easily-visible, quite obvious even with clothing on, and fun. No folds or flaps or hidden portions, the sensitive part is very obviously on the front, and color-coded so even the dumbest man can find it. They don't turn into no-fly zones (at least not so blatantly) several days each month, they aren't messy or complicated or demanding or intimidating. Note that boobies are about the only aspect of a woman that's not; genitals and emotions and personality and everything else are confusing and arbitrary and frequently prickly, though oh-so enticing. So men perhaps lavish attention on boobies more freely, since they're (boobies) the only thing they (men) can understand about a woman. Whether this is vastly overcomplicating the source of slang nicknames for boobies vs. pussy or not is open to debate (it probably is), but it occurred to me tonight, and I thought I'd share. I remarked on this to a woman on my ICQ list:
This was a surprising reply; I figured she'd agree and denounce what pigs men were, always staring like 4 y/o's at a puppy in the pet store window. Women I've discussed the topic with in the past were sort of mixed on it. Everyone (male or female) enjoys some observation/attention from a person of the opposite sex (reverse this for homosexuals) if they find them attractive, or at least not repulsive. It's just that women have virtually every man staring all the time, so I'd think they would get really sick of it. It's a very fine line; women like to be complimented on their appearance, or at least noticed, but you can go from appreciated honest observation/admiration to "Quit fucking staring at my tits you asshole!" in a second. That sort of fictional example is just more of the whole "Men can't understand women" debate. Then again, understanding is overrated. As the old joke goes: Guy 1 - I don't
understand women. |
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