Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ He'll be out in six short months.

And yes, of course I live close enough to a busy street to hear whether the pavement is wet or dry under the tires of passing cars.  Why do you ask?

Sorry, the volcano isn't entirely hollowed out yet, so the base is still on hold.

If you need more proof, here it is. Where is PETA when you need them?

Why does this exist? What is the purpose? I have no idea.  Anyone who speaks Japanese and wants to decipher it, be sure to let me know.

They are supposedly unable to leap that high or run very fast (for obviously reasons) and are therefore good for people who don't want the kitty up on their tables or counters or desks, etc. However, according to the AACE's official munchkin info page:

Munchkins are a small to medium size cat. Munchkins exhibit shortening and may have slight bowing in the forelegs. The spine is unaffected and similar in form and flexibility to that seen in other domestic cats. The short legs do not hamper mobility or survival ability.

I'm not sure why this seems to outrageous; after all, rat-dog breeds are fully-accepted, and they are mutated just as horribly from how dogs are supposed to look and how wolves actually do look.  And yet the mutant cat seems so very wrong. You can find a ton of stuff about them online (of course).  Look on this breeder's site for tons of pictures and more info.

¤ Absolutely astonishing Honda Accord commercial that must be seen here, or here on the Honda site.  How can a car commercial be "astonishing?"  Watch it and see.  It's Flash, so almost no loading time. Rather than describe it myself, I'll just link to one of the articles about it.  (The first link in this paragraph goes to a page with more info about it, and this article link.)

Three valve stems roll down a sloped bonnet. An exhaust box is pushed with just enough energy into a rear suspension link which nudges a transmission selector arm which releases the brake pedal loaded with a small rubber brake grommit. Catapult! Boing! On goes the beautiful dance, everything intricately balanced and poised. Nothing must be even a sixteenth of an inch off course or the momentum will be lost.

Six hundred and six takes it took, and if they had been forced to do a 607th it is probable, if not downright certain, that one of the film crew would have snapped and gone mad.

On the first 605 occasions something small, usually infuriatingly minute, went just slightly awry and the whole delicate arrangement was wrecked. A drop too much oil there, or here maybe one ball-bearing too many giving a fraction too much impetus to the movement. Whirr, creak, crash, the entire, card-house of consequences was a write-off and they had to start again.

The article mentions how they got the three tires to roll up the slanted board (weighted inside with screws and other bits of metal), but it doesn't mention the muffler, which seemed like the one thing defying gravity to my eye.  It's about 1/3 of the way in, and it doesn't seem to have enough momentum to roll over more than about two or three times, but goes about 8 flops before the last one is just enough to hit the next device.

I guess it's just more prone to rolling over than we think, since they say there's no trickery.  I was thinking maybe an internal weighted thing, that somehow stayed on the right side, thus pulling it to roll over more than the shape would allow...

Just watched it again and for the first time noticed that it's the trunk closing that unbalances the car at the end, making it roll down the teeter-totter ramp. So how the hell do you drive a car up on a ramp and get it balanced, when the person inside it is enough weight to the front to screw up the balance?  Neutral and pushing? Bit harder to position than a nail or cog, eh?

¤ This story of the hiker who got trapped and had to cut off his own arm with a knife is just amazing.  It's gruesome, but then you hear how the guy did it, compare to yourself, and you're like, "Damn, I am so not a real man."

He was canyoneering, where a hiker uses rock-climbing gear to negotiate narrow canyons. He pushed his arm into a crack in the canyon wall and the boulder shifted, pinning him, said Steve Swanke of Canyonlands National Park. He tried to use his ropes and anchors to free himself, but couldn't.

The experienced outsdoorsman would have died if he had stayed in the canyon, pinned by an 800- to 1,000-pound boulder that had shifted onto his right arm, said Sheriff's Department Sgt. Mitch Vetere.

So that was Sunday. And he was stuck, sixty feet (18 meters) in the air, in some impossibly remote canyon. He hung there for three days until he ran out of water on Tuesday.  Come Thursday he was too thirsty to wait any longer, and had to cut off his own arm, just below the elbow, with a pocket knife.  Can you even imagine the pain and shock that would put on you? He seems to have just about ignored it.

He applied a tourniquet and administered first aid before rappelling 60 feet to the canyon floor, where he began walking. He encountered two tourists and was about two miles from his car when a rescue helicopter spotted him, still bleeding, officials said.

During the chopper flight to a hospital in nearby Moab, Utah, Ralston was clearly tired but asked only for water, Vetere said. He climbed out of the helicopter and walked to the emergency room, his bandaged arm in a makeshift sling.

Ralston matter-of-factly explained what had happened and that he had lost a lot of blood, Swanke said. He later was transferred to the hospital in Grand Junction.

Think about that next time you stub a toe or hurt a little finger, and want to whine.

onestly, I had no intention of writing about circumcision three days in a row. I thought I'd just post that one article Thursday, and that would be it.  But there was good feedback yesterday, and now there's more of it today.  So here we are.

To recap: a news article talked about a new scientific analysis that was run on a bunch of dicks.  The tests on the dicks proved that penile sensitivity, just of the head, was basically identical for men who are and are not circumcised.  This seems to defy logic, since after all, that's pretty much what a foreskin is for; to protect the head of the penis from damage. However human flesh is quite durable and meant to be used, and unless you mistreat something long enough to callous it (like my hands and feet) the sensitivity should remain nearly 100%.  It's not like guys without a foreskin are going around banging their dicks into walls and rubbing them with sandpaper.  Why do we assume just rubbing on (generally) soft underwear for a life is going to permanently deaden the sensation?  Do you think people who wear long sleeves a lot have less sensitive forearms than people who always wear short-sleeved shirts?

Anyway, yesterday's update presented the other point of view, with a male reader writing in to extol the virtues of being uncircumcised, and then a female friend of mine who hates uncircumcised cocks replied to him from her point of view.  In the US most men are circumcised, so women here grow up to expect that, and think that's how a penis "should" look, and think a cock like that looks good, and the elephant-trunk look of an uncut one looks weird.

Is that all cultural though, and learned?

Well of course; people who grow up in other cultures have entirely different opinions of beauty.  It's hard to turn off our cultural feelings when we see people covered in facial tattoos, or with huge rings in their ears or noses, or the archetypal "plates in their lips" look.  But obviously people who grow up in cultures with those as the looks of "beauty" think it's fine.  Lots of men on earth think women with hairy armpits, legs, and pubic hair is very sexy and how women should look, while the current fashion in the US at least is for women to be nearly or completely hairless.  A fashion I'm guilty of falling victim to myself.

That being said, here's an excerpt from an email from PAZ.

I'm a 20 year old male living in Sweden, the land of elks (but not the kind of elks you have in america, bur rather.. nevermind). Anyway, we have no tradition of circumcising our boys here, and I'd say that 95% are "intact". What you probably don't know is that we're even having debates about whether making this illegal or not. Many think its a cruel act to amputate (you said it first =)) little boys that can't decide for themselves. Especially since there is no medical reason for this in our ages, but rather a risk of infections and such.. and I don't have to point out for you that an infection there would be uncomfortable to say the least..

I think you are 100% correct when you wrote that the girls only like what they're used to, and I must add that horror stories about icky goo under the foreskin doesn't really help. I can assure you that the reaction of girls here would be the other way around: "how ugly! how disgusting!" and so on.. disgusting in the way that uncircumcised penises tend to have a harder, more leather-like texture.

The bottom line is, of course, that it's just different cultures. Psychologists say that you grow fond of looks that you see all the time, and this is definitely one of these issues.

The main reason for circumcision is to prevent boys from exploring their sexuality, ie wank. That's why America is advocating it.. 

There was also an email from a Dane named Thor (really) who said much the same thing.

PAZ's comments on the cultural issue are interesting, and how about that possible illegality of circumcision?  People in the US and other Western nations are always going on about the barbaric horror of female circumcision, and clearly it's a far worse thing, happening later in life and involving much more mutilation and risk of death.  But how different is it really?  I mean in concept, it's similar, it's just that a circumcised penis is still capable of feeling pleasure.

OT, but could a culture develop a male circumcision style that would actually lead to a removal of sexual sensation from the penis, I wonder?  It's probably pointless to think about, since men have held the power in 99.9% of earth cultures, and obviously would never allow such a custom to exist. But would it be possible?

Sure, it would complicate reproduction, but there are other ways to trigger a male ejaculation (prostate massage being about the least unpleasant; just ask male livestock about electro-ejaculation techniques), and how about future cultures?  There's no need for males to be able to ejaculate at this point, in terms of reproduction.  Sperm can be removed directly from the testes, and used to in-vitro fertilize, or even with the lower tech turkey baster technique, so in theory a culture could exist and perpetuate itself without men enjoying penile pleasures. There would probably be a lot more accomplished also, without men ruining everything thinking with their dicks or about sex.

Despite that, I don't think I'll advocate it just yet.

What I really wanted to comment on from PAZ's mail, was the last paragraph.  And it's something I hadn't thought to mention yet, though it is a subtext in the whole circumcision thing. The custom is religious in nature, but with religion (well, Christianity) almost always comes prudery and unease about sexuality.

Why?  Dunno.  You can get psychological and into a discussion of how religions need to control the thoughts and actions of their adherents, and forcing people to deny the most basic pleasures in life is a power symbol, and way for the heads of the religion to feel more intricately involved in the lives of their members. But I'm not going into that discussion at this point.

Suffice to say, lots of Christian leaders (Mormons especially) have spent much of the past two millennium trying to get people to stop having sex, or at least stop enjoying it when they do.  And sex for any purpose other than procreation, (sometimes expanded to something like, "strengthening the holy blessed union between man and woman") is said to be evil.  This especially includes such things as homosexuality, but also oral sex, masturbation, pre-marital sex, and everything else you can think of.

You can look up information about the early 1900's and the ridiculous amount of devices and techniques to prevent sexual feelings and desires in children, or even young adults.  Chastity belts, bizarre devices to warn about nocturnal arousal, machines to give electric shocks to condition against arousal, and more.

Of course the most lasting aspect of circumcision as a means of preventing masturbation is how totally ineffectual it is.

And there was another mail from the guy I quoted yesterday.  Here's an excerpt:

In clarification, I do not think my foreskin deadens sensation as one might think by what I wrote. No, I believe it is nature doing it's work. Men are born by nature with foreskin because it assists the sex act in that there is yet an extra foil, another variable of friction. 

Friction must be much more direct without foreskin -- there is less skin on the dick! A penis shorn of it's foreskin is more bare. When my foreskin is retracted all the way down to the root of my cock, my piece looks just like a circumsized one (perhaps somewhat thicker at the base). Sure, my cock looks it's best this way, with the foreskin fully retracted. This may be the only reason that circumsizion is so prevalent in American to begin with.

When my son was born it was my wife who reminded the nurse that our instructions were for no circumsizion. If my son ever in his life decides to get circumsized, it will be his choice and his decision.

I repeat that I would never part with my foreskin. I would never ask my wife to surgically trim her labia (careful not to nick the clitoris with the scalpel, please). 

In closing, I ask you this: what if it 75% of the women in this country were circumcized at birth, that the excess skin was removed but not the clitoris? Do you imagine that people might think vaginas to be more beautiful without those unsightly flaps of labia? Would they wonder if sensation was any different for uncut vaginas, wonder if the clitoris was somehow deadened without it's hood? Why are some people so angry about female mutilation, but condone male mutilation purely for aesthetics?

I don't have any big conclusions on this topic, even after all this discussion.  I am happy with my penis as it is, there is plenty of sensation, etc.  However, I do wonder how much better it might feel if I still had a foreskin, and wouldn't greater sensation from it be well worth any potential difficulties?  It's not like I've had women lining up to fellate me as it is, and I'd think any long term relationship partner would get over it quickly, even if she were initially repulsed by the foreskin.  And probably grow to like it, I mean more penis to play with.

And with modern hygiene there's no reason to worry about infection or smegma build up anymore than you would about getting an infection in your arm pit or something, from not washing it.  And if you do have issues with that, you've got a lot bigger problems than an elephant trunk looking cock.

This being said, I wouldn't go to war to preserve the foreskin on my son, if I ever had a son, and if my wife/his mother were all for having him circumcised.  Yes, I'm weak and spineless on that topic, but I base my opinion on being satisfied with my mutilated penis, so it's not a big deal to me.  Although really, what right does the mother have to even comment on it, given her anatomical differences?  Is she worried about her newborn son not getting enough head 18 years later?

Lastly, I'm not picking on anyone in particular here, but let's all make a note: "circumcised"  not "circumsized"  The second spelling is incorrect, even though it seems much more natural and logical, since "sized" is a word.  I keep wanting to spell it that way myself, and having to remind myself about the time I get to "circumsi..."

In the dozen or so emails on this subject, probably 90% of the time it was spelled "sized" so don't feel alone if you are making that error.  Spelling is overrated anyway.

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