Many facts about many things

If Jesus made a sitcom it would be All In The Family.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 02:03:00 +0000

I'd like to say a few words about Norman Lear, who's mostly famous nowadays (if he is famous nowadays) as the founder of The People For The American Way, which is a First Amendment advocacy group that's big enough to get onto Free Republic's list of scary left-lib organizations, but not to get mentioned by Glenn Beck: Every generation has its wunderkinder, its reputed super-geniuses, who can't seem to touch anything without it's turning into gold ...until suddenly it doesn't any more. The Eighties had Matt Groening; the Nineties had Klasky-Csupo; the Two-Thousandsies have Trey Parker and Matt Stone; and the Seventies had Norman Lear.

His breakout hit was All In The Family, which aired on Tuesday nights on CBS, from 1971 through 1979. He was 28 years old, and his skit-based comedy program, Turn On, had just been canceled (after just one episode) by ABC. After that debacle, ABC was not enthusiastic about taking on another Lear series, especially not one with a main character who was a "foul-mouthed bigot". CBS, on the other hand, was looking to update their image, after a decade of specializing in hayseed comedies like The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction. Something edgy like All In The Family suited them right down to the ground.

They were careful though. They knew the series broke new ground, in terms of language and subject matter, and they prepared as best as they could to handle any objections. Before the first episode, they ran a disclaimer, which read: "The program you are about to see is All in the Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show -- in a mature fashion -- just how absurd they are.". And they opened several extra telephone switchboards to handle the calls of complaint that they expected would come pouring in.

As it happened, it took a full season for All In The Family to get off the ground, but once it did, it was a phenomenon. Audiences loved the show about Archie and Edith, and their kids Mike and Gloria. Young people rooted for the kids, because they were liberal, idealistic (and in Gloria's case, cute as a button as well, and with a super-mega awesome wardrobe my friends and I would have killed for). Older people rooted for Archie and Edith, who had at least been able to hold things together, through good times and bad, and stayed together with most of their love intact. Angry conservatives rooted for Archie, who said in public what they only said in private (even if he did get slapped down by someone, by the end of every episode). And he was considered such an accurate portrait of his type of uneducated, bigoted working man, that by the Presidential election season of 1972, commentators were talking about "The Archie Bunker vote."

All In The Family drew objections from both sides. Many complained that it was too noisy, full of slamming doors and arguments that ended in shouting, too vulgar with its too-audible "terlet", the flushing of which was a recurring joke throughout the series. They complained that it was offensive, because of the way Archie talked, constantly making remarks about spades, Polacks, spooks, chinks, Yids, fairies, fruits, pansies, four-eyes, jungle bunnies, and fags. On the other hand, in a piece that has become one of the most famous pieces of television criticism ever, “As I Listened to Archie Say Hebe," Laura Z. Hobson argued that All In The Family was dangerously sanitized. Instead of using semi-offensive words like "hebe" and "jungle bunny", she said, Archie should have been portrayed honestly, using the truly offensive words, "kike" and "nigger", that a real racist would use.

I don't think her interpretation is entirely fair. Certainly Archie's language is prettied up a little bit over what it might have been in real life, but Norman Lear was already fighting CBS to keep it as raw as it was. Furthermore, having grown up with a family much like the Bunkers myself, I question just how much prettying up Lear actually did. My father was a bigot much like Archie, full of beer-fueled anger for most of my childhood, and always ready with the derogatory term whenever he heard mention of any kind of minority, but in all the time I lived with him, I never heard him use the word "kike", and I only heard him say the n-word once. Certainly it is true that Archie was lovable as well as being a bigot, but I don't think it's fair to blame him for making bigotry lovable (even if he did look and sound just like Rush Limbaugh); America's history of racism goes back a lot further than one fat loudmouth in a Seventies TV show.

Rather, when I look back at All In The Family now, thirty years after it went off the air, what I notice most is how none of the characters come across as anywhere near perfect. Archie is hateful, yes, but he is not the only character with flaws. Edith's ignorant, and perfectly comfortable in her ignorance. Meathead loves arguing with Archie, whether or not he's in the right, as much as he loves his liberal idealism. Gloria's a spoiled brat, who throws tantrums when she runs out of arguments for getting her way. And yet it's not just Archie who's lovable despite his bigotry; the others are lovable despite their weaknesses as well.

All Ihe Family shows a side of reality that is almost never shown on television, not because of the lower middle-class setting, or Archie's abrasive language, but because it's "good guy" characters, Meathead and Gloria, weren't always right. Meathead's holier-than-thou attitude comes across in episodes like "Edith Writes a Song" (Season 2) and "Everybody Tells the Truth" (Season 3), while episodes such as "Mike and Gloria Mix it Up" (Season 4), "Mike and Gloria Split" (Season 7), show him to be arrogant, and patronizing toward people with less education than he has (including his wife) as well. Gloria for her part, throws regular tantrums throughout the series, and whenever things get too hard with Mike, she's all-too ready to go running back to Daddy for protection.

The problem with most TV shows is that they pretty up reality. We may want to be as cute as Carly and Sam, or as cool as the Fonz, or as wise as Stan Marsh and Kyle Broflovski. We may want parents who are as wealthy and cultured as the Huxtables, and as supportive as Carol Brady. Deep down, we know that life isn't that simple. There will be times when we're as dorky as Gibby (or Lenny and Squiggy), as vulgar and uncaring as Cartman, and as pathetic as Kenny. Our parents will have times when they make Homer Simpson look smart, when they make Pam Puckett look caring, and Liane Cartman look competent. The truth is, we still have to live with them, as we have to live with ourselves. Sanity lies in finding a way to accept ourselves and our families, in our weak as well as our not-so-weak moments, not just without anger, but with love.

The Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of "Cheap Grace": "Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate." In other words, it is saying everything is just fine as it is, ignoring the weaknesses that are in all of us, pretending that we don't see anyplace where we could use some growth. Cheap grace is static, it freezes people as they are, then puts a pretty gloss of "acceptance" over the situation. It ignores the fact that all of us have places where we could use some growth, and, in doing so, denies us the chance of growing.

Most TV shows, now as in the 1970's, give us cheap grace. They give static characters, and flattened situations that owe more to other television shows than they do to reality. There is an episode on the Nickelodeon series iCarly, where a TV producer sees the main characters' webcast and, charmed by its fresh, real feel, tries to create a series that will duplicate it, only to fail in the end, because he's too dependent on TV formula to drop it, and create something new. At the beginning of the episode, a clip from one of his usual series is shown, with this dialogue:

TV Dad: "But Michelle, why would you accept two dates to the prom but not tell either boy one about the other?"
Michelle: "Because, Daddy. Luke is so sweet, but Brandon is so hot!"
TV Dad: "Aw, Noodles!"

Then at the end of the episode, a clip from the new series, supposedly inspired by iCarly, and it includes the exact same dialogue, to show the extent of the producer's failure.

Well, most television shows are full of Aw, Noodles, moments. Most of them rely on the cliche and the formula, even the really "groundbreaking", and "exciting" ones. What's special about All In The Family, is that it did not. It gave us characters that had real faults, and real weaknesses. Sometimes they were able to overcome them, sometimes they were overcome by them, not just the "bad" character Archie, but the supposedly "better" ones like Gloria and the Meathead as well. Laura Z. Hobson was right, All In The Family did make its bigot character lovable, not by whitewashing his bigoted qualities, but by showing that he had good ones as well.

If Jesus made a sitcom, it would be All In The Family. Like the show, Jesus did not whitewash peoples' weaknesses. In John 4:17-18, when the Samaritan woman tells Jesus that she is not married, he responds that he already knows the worst about her situation. She's had five husbands already, and is now living with someone who is not her husband. And yet he takes the time to sit with her and talk. He welcomes the sinful woman who has come to him to repent, in Luke 7:37-49, and in Mark 2:13-17, he explains his rationale for spending time with sinners this way: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Jesus' message is the opposite of cheap grace. It does not involve ignoring our weaknesses, but
accepting them, learning to live with ourselves as we are, while still taking steps toward more maturity. It involves learning to love ourselves, and others, as we all are, in our current weak and broken condition, the way Jesus loved the sinners of his day. It is the message of All In The Family: Yes, there are lovable bigots out there, as there are lovable self-righteous asshole-pricks, and lovable spoiled brats, and lovable dingbats. We do not become lovable when we overcome our weaknesses, we are lovable now, as we are.

HyperSmash

Hell on earth or today's America NSFW

noreply@blogger.com (Game-Freak) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 14:56:00 +0000

We've all heard it, the lies and deceit spread by the media and the governmental factions. We've all heard the fear mongering floating down to us from the top of Capitol Hill. We've all seen government officials ignore our best interest to line their own pockets with gold. How can we not have? It's all that ever happens in the political world. The political system in America is broken beyond repair. Politicians no longer care about the US citizens. They don't give a damn whether we're freezing to death or starving to death while they cavort around at their fancy coke parties. Politicians don't even have to have a decent IQ to be elected. Look at Sarah Palin! She's only in it for the money and they still flaunt her about and want her to run for president. Really? The whole Republican party is built on Fox news superstars who decided they could spread their insanity better if they were sitting pretty in the Oval office. Do you think they really care about Americans? Do you think they really care about the numerous crises facing us? They're fucking insane! Fox News is a plague that has infected the American population and is now sucking them dry. Its tendrils creep into their brains and soon their brainless slaves working for the Murdoch empire. This can't go on people! If we let Conserva-facists rule our country we're screwed! That's like saying "Bend over America and let me dildo you in the ass." Conservatism? More like Limbaughism! Has anyone else noticed how high Ayn Rand has been elevated in the Tea Party movement? She's like a god to them! What ever happened to "Thou shall not worship false idols"? They call themselves Christian. Libertarian-ism is never going to work. Don't they get that? Are they really stupid enough that they can sit back and watch their country being destroyed without it bothering them in the least? My father once told me that it was easier to find Atlantis than it was to find an intelligent Tea Partier. There is no hope for America if we keep letting the Conserva-Facists gain more power. Money talks and it says "Fuck you America!" This cannot go on. The Democrats are really no better. They cavort around Washington DC giving in to every single demand the Conserva-Facists make and basically asking to be tied up and anal raped. Meanwhile, the citizens of America have no choice but to watch and wait. If they try to spread the word about the corruption occurring in the capitol, they get stalked by the CIA or thrown in a federal prison. Freedom of speech anyone? Not anymore! The lawmakers up on Capitol Hill won't listen to a petition. They actually make up petty little problems with them to get them thrown out. Damn! It's a sad day to see when the American citizen no longer has his freedom. The Conserva-Facists are denying us public education as they slash more and more money from its budget. They steal away our Social Security. They throw around money like it grew on trees and then blame the Democrats and the Muslims. They deny good citizens certain rights based on race or sexuality. What's next, a resurrection of the KKK? Look people, if we don't do something soon we're screwed. Go out and hold a sign. Sign a petition. Write a letter to your congressman or the President. Just do something to keep us from becoming the next Nazi Germany. The next time you hear from me, I might very well be in prison. I've said some very "damaging" things. Conserva-Facist fools. I'm so sorry for the course language, but this is a topic I feel strongly about.

HyperSmash

After the Apocalypse, there will be cake.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 18:57:00 +0000

Christian conservatives are way, way better with metaphors than you ever thought they were. Either that or they're totally insane. I'll warn you right from the start, this post is written entirely from an outsider's perspective, about a phenomenon that has never made much sense to me, not even when I was growing up in a conservative Christian church myself. I am describing something that seems profoundly weird to me, about how Christian conservatives look at Jesus, and hope for his Second Coming.

When outsiders think of Christian conservatives, they generally picture a bunch of angry haters, scary nutballs like the mother in Carrie, who like nothing better than to envision the day when Jesus is going to return and start kicking some serious ass on all the nonbelievers and sinners in the world.

They couldn't be more wrong. Oh, I'm not saying conservative Christians don't single out a lot of groups (like all the ones they don't belong to themselves, mostly) and call them "sinners". They do. And if you corner them and pin them down, they're going to admit that since "the wages of sin is death," (Romans 6:23), that probably means that all those "sinners" are going to burn in Hell when they die. But you've got to look at the tone they use when they say this. There's no glee to it ...usually. Unless you're talking about Evil Uncle Chuckles, anyway.

There's no delight. Christian conservatives express nothing but regret, about the fact that they'll be spending an eternity resting on top of a fluffy pink cloud, while others such as Mormons and gay people and liberal Christians will be turning on the devil's rotisserie down below. After all, those are "...our own brothers and sisters, our own friends and neighbors, or maybe the young person in the next pew..." who will be roasting.

If you look around, you will find a ton of eager talk by conservatives, about how Jesus is coming any day now, and how great that will be. But what their looking forward to isn't the chance to watch sinners fry, it's the chance to see Jesus, their best friend, face to face. And maybe the reason we're all so ready to assume it's the other, is because this is so weird to us. I know it's weird to me.

It was weird to me when I was growing up Christian, and everyone else was always telling me how happy they were at the thought of their friend Jesus, and how comforting it was to lay their worries at his feet in prayer, and how eager they were for the day when they would no longer be seeing "through a glass darkly" (I Cor. 13:12), but would instead see face to face. And I just didn't get it. How could you be friends with someone you'd only read about in History books, the way you were with your best friend down the street? How could you get so excited at the thought of meeting them in some Heaven, that you also only knew about because of books? How could you get comfort out of going down on your knees and talking to them?

Suppose you tried doing that with Abraham Lincoln: Suppose you called him your best friend, and tried to whip up a lot of emotional feelings about him, and knelt at night to tell him all your troubles? Would it make you feel any better? Would it make anyone feel better, except for maybe a psychotic? Well that was kind of how I felt when I tried to use Jesus that way.

Catholics at least, have beautiful statues, and medals and things, they can look at, and maybe get a little comfort that way. Orthodox Christians have ikons. All conservative Protestants have is an empty wooden cross at the front of the sanctuary, and a leather-covered New International Version at home. And yet they manage to whip up a pretty strong froth of emotion anyway.

Look at all the Christian art there is out there, showing Jesus, cuddling up to a child or children like he's their Daddy or something.

Or look at the famous "footprints" poem, which tells the story of a woman who looked back on the most painful and desperate times of her life, then felt huge comfort, knowing that Jesus had carried her through them.

Or if you think all that is really media, and no real people actually think that way, here's an example for you: The International House of Prayer is a new and fast-growing conservative church, that puts a lot of emphasis on praying for the Judgment Day to come, so believers can be united with Jesus. They have a Facebook page that's divided sort of evenly, between offers of new merchandise, or ways to spend money on various conferences and retreats, and exhortations about how JESUS IS COMING SOON! Here is a screengrab of one of the latter kinds of posts:

The Bible verse at the top is Acts 3:21, which says that when "all things are restored", whatever that means, that's when Jesus will return to earth. So look how people respond: "Thank You, Jesus...can hardly wait" and references to Jesus as "the Bridegroom", and "my Beloved", and people saying, they're "longing for His Government and His earthly Kingdom and rule from His throne in Jerusalem," like they're talking about running down the driveway to meet Daddy when he gets home from work in the evening.

You can call this creepy (I do), you can call it weird (I do that too), -- You can do like my son did when I told him about it last night and say it's Jesusphilia. -- but the fact remains, if you want to know why conservative Christians get so excited about the Second Coming, this is why: They want to be with Jesus. And if the rest of us burn in Hell while they're enjoying their reunion? That's just a little added side benefit.

(Image courtesy of Redscylla)

HyperSmash

Corporations don't give a sh**, and the government slacks off before the job's done: A short history of America's public safety laws

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 19:06:00 +0000

America's history for the past 150 or years or so, can be summarized with the words "growing urbanization". More and more of the population started living closer and closer together; fewer and fewer people were living the Little House on the Prairie lifestyle of growing your own food, and building your own house, and relying only on yourself and a couple of close neighbors. In other words, people were starting to have to rely on the kindness of strangers. When I say "strangers", I mean Armour Meatpacking (made famous in the 1890's, when they sold the Army 500,000 pounds of beef, that had had already been returned as inedible, when they tried to sell them in England), and Dr. R.V. Pierce (who sold patent medicines that were mostly opiates and lead, for disorders ranging from ovarian tumors to masturbation), and by "kindness", I mean that aside from a few state laws regulating local products, and a regulation against impure tea, there were no laws in this country to restrict companies from selling whatever they wanted, and calling it whatever they wanted.

When I hear people like Rand Paul argue that all you need is a free market, and public pressure will push companies to make positive changes, I think of the elixir sulfanilamide crisis of 1937: Sulfanilamide was the original antibacterial drug, still new, and growing rapidly more popular, in the late 30's, when Harold Watkins, a chemist who worked for the S.E. Massengill Company, got the idea of making a sweet-tasting, drinkable version to be given to children. He combined sulfanilamide with diethylene glycol (It's the ingredient that makes antifreeze so toxic; there was information that it was dangerous available at the time, but unfortunately Watkins hadn't seen it.) and sweet raspberry flavoring, and little kids drank it and clamored for more. Unfortunately, right after that they all started getting kidney failure and dying.

It was standard procedure at the time to test new medications before marketing them, but there was no law requiring companies to do it, and in this case Massengill had made no tests before marketing product. They also weren't the ones who conducted tests after it started killing people, to see if why they were dying. The FDA did that, then they told Massengill the results of their tests. Massengill sent out a recall notice, but they neglected to mention that the elixir was toxic. They also did nothing to go bring back the elixir that had already been sold. The FDA did the best it could with the legal authorization it had. It put out a radio warning (which was not available in some areas), and sent out all the inspectors it could spare, to collect bottles of elixir. And once they finally had them all, the FDA prosecuted Massengill for misbranding, on the grounds that they'd said the elixir contained alcohol when actually it contained the diethylene glycol instead, because it was the only thing they'd done that was actually against the law.

Overall, Massengill's new elixir killed 107 people. When he found out what had happened, Harold Watkins committed suicide, but as for the company, their response was to say, "We have been supplying a legitimate professional demand and not once could have foreseen the unlooked-for results. I do not feel that there was any responsibility on our part."

So much for the responsibility of corporations, which only works to help consumers when the corporations bother to feel some responsibility. So much for the public making informed decisions in the marketplace, which only works when the information gets to the public who need itI might mention the fact that tobacco companies actively worked to hide the risks of smoking from the public for 50 years here). On the other hand however, the government's record isn't all that much better, and for every story about heroic government officials taking action to protect the consumer, you can find several more, where laziness, ideology, or active corruption have put consumers at risk.

Take the Armour Company for instance, that I mentioned at the start of the article: True, it was a government inspector who finally checked the beef Armour had supplied for Army use, and found out that it was inedible. But before it got to him, another government inspector, from the Bureau of Animal Industry, had already checked it over, and not bothered to notice that there was anything wrong with it. Take arsenic: We've known it was poisonous for thousands of years, and people have been warning about its use as a pesticide for decades. It was only in the 1990's that the EPA classified it as a carcinogen; it is still legal for use as a pesticide; and it is still being added to the feed given to our Thanksgiving turkeys.

Take the Ford Pinto, for that matter: Ford was completely within the law, and following standard legal precedent, when they made their infamous cost-benefit analysis, and decided that it was better to put the Pinto out with a design flaw that made eight out of the ten vehicles they tested explode upon impact (and the two that didn't had been modified before the test), than to spend the $11 extra it would have cost to change the design. There was no law against what Ford did, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had no leverage to require that Ford show them their research on the Pinto, so they had to do their own, which took them four years, and who knows how many more cars rolling off the assembly lines (and into the accident reports in local papers) before the Pinto was finally recalled.

The government is basically powerless most of the time, when corporations take steps to screw us over. They're powerless because officials take bribes to ignore abuses, and because corporations scream bloody murder and bog down any positive changes that get made with a lot of legal appeals, and because ideologues in Congress would rather cut our public safety than raise taxes. Corporations of course, do only what they are made to do, which is less and less, as enforcement budgets shrink, and new Supreme Court decisions leave them free to spend as much as they have to, to get a government that will allow them to do whatever they want. A person starts to wonder where we can turn, to get some protection.

In the end, the people who come out best in this story are the cranks and the activists: Upton Sinclair, for example, was a doctrinaire Socialist, who ran for public office repeatedly (and was repeatedly defeated), but his muckraking novel The Jungle, based on his own firsthand investigation of the meatpacking industry, played a big part in convincing Congress to pass the first Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. Another activist who played a part in getting the Act passed was Dr. Harvey Wiley, who generated public attention for his crusade against artificial preservatives in foods, when he got a dozen able-bodied volunteers, whom the press called his Poison Squad, to agree to eat large doses of various preservatives and find out with their own bodies, whether or not they were safe. It is thanks to Dr. Wiley that formaldehyde was outlawed as a preservative for milk. Another more recent activist is Ralph Nader, mostly known nowadays as the guy who can't stop running for President, even though his candidacy helped get George Bush into office in 2000. Nader was a public advocate for auto safety in the 1960's, who's pressure is a good part of why the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act got passed in 1966. It is thanks to this Act that nowadays all cars come equipped with safety features such as head rests, energy-absorbing steering wheels, shatter-resistant windshields, and safety belts.

So I guess this is the lesson I want you to take away after you read this: Corporations don't give a sh**, and the government slacks off before the job's done; if you want something done to make your country safer, go out and join the activists and the cranks in making some noise, and pressuring the government to do it.

HyperSmash

Ten Strikes You're Out

noreply@blogger.com (Game-Freak) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 18:00:00 +0000

Little Jimmy is going away for a long time. Five years to be precise. Why? He linked to a Youtube video that streamed copyrighted content. When the media companies found out about this and the fact that it had received 15 views they wanted Jimmy's head. Poor little Jimmy. He was only ten when they sent him away to prison. He's going to have a hard time there.
Do you want this to happen to your child? Do you want this to happen to you? It might. Senator Amy Klobuchar has recently proposed a new "ten strikes" bill that adds public performance to copyright laws. Seems harmless enough right? Movies have been warning against that kind of thing for years when they say not to host public performances of the movie. Right? Right? Wrong! Public performance is defined loosely enough that Youtube could be considered public performance. If your sweet little girl decides that she wants to sing along to her favorite Glee song and post it Youtube, she might just be shoved in a jail cell for the next five years. Nice. If she's lucky she'll only be raped repeatedly and not killed. That's outrageous. The bill has not been voted on yet and you better hope that it doesn't get passed.
Demand Progress
Check out Demand Progress' extensive coverage of the new bill and make sure that you send a letter to your congress man. Otherwise you might end up in a prison for nothing more than lip-syncing to your favorite Lady Gaga song. Oh and get this, you get a longer jail cell for breaking the copyright laws then you do for molesting a child. If I had to choose a crime, I think I'd hump a kid before I posted a lip-sync. Lord knows I want to get out of prison sooner.

HyperSmash

Fat Clothes

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:20:00 +0000

I've talked before about how my mom made me go to Diet Watchers meetings (not Weight Watchers, Diet Watchers; I think the copyright police caught up with them shortly after my mom and I reached goal weight). I went. And I quite enjoyed the meetings, which were led by a nice Jewish grandmother with a sense of humor, who wore embroidered bell-bottoms and tight tops, to show off her slim figure. I wanted to be just like her when I grew up.

Who I didn't want to be like, was all the other ones: Flabby middle-aged ladies, like Divine without the attitude, they wore short-sleeved muumuus, and their upper arm flab used to hang out from the sleeves and wave around whenever they moved their hands. I was scarred for life by those ladies. I didn't want to be fat like them. And I didn't want to own a muumuu.

And I wasn't fat. In fact I weighed practically the same thing, from the time I was 14 to the time I was 20: 155 pounds, of which most of it was muscle, because I used to walk everywhere, miles and miles, and for hours and hours, however far I needed to go, to get where I was going. I used to drop about 10 pounds every year or so, when my mom's guilting started to get to me, and then put it back on again as soon as I started eating normally again. I lived in a perpetual state of tight waistbands, and was constantly cycling blouses in and out of my wardrobe, depending on if I could get the buttons to close down the front or not. -- I had this one size twelve red print dress that I never wore, because I could never get down to wearing a size twelve for long enough, and it finally went out of style at the back of my wardrobe. -- Here's me when I was 18:

I remember being very impressed with the fluffy blue thing they made us wear for the picture, because I didn't have to worry about whether it would fit over my ass. I never got so fat that I had to shop in the fat ladies' section at the department store though. And I never visited a Lane Bryant.

I was 32 years old when I finally went to a Lane Bryant for the first time, after having discovered the hard way that if you eat everything you're hungry for when you're pregnant, you might have some trouble getting back to pre-pregnancy weight afterward, even if you do breastfeed. By that time in 1994 though, and by that time the days of Omar-the-tentmaker were long gone. I've read horror stories about young plus-sized girls growing up in the 50's and 60's, who would go to stores like that and find rows and rows of dark colored, badly cut clothing, that looked like it was designed for their grandmothers. That wasn't my experience. By the time I went, the styles were cute, and the models were cute; it was like shopping in any other clothing store, except that the clothes had all been sized upward, so for a change I was at the low end of the size-spectrum.

Here's a picture of me from shortly after my younger son was born, when I was in my mid-thirties:

I was wearing something large and loose, but that was okay because the style at the time was for clothes to be large and loose. Even slim people were wearing large, loose clothes, and big, ugly prints, in bright colors. I had a wardrobe full of elastic-waisted knit pants and floaty chiffon things, which were practically the muumuus that scarred me as a child, and I've got a book from the time, Life Is Not A Dress Size, which alternates between liberating messages about accepting yourself, and pictures of eye-hurting prints and disturbing combinations of colors that will probably make you throw up if you have anything to drink before you look at them.

I'm only going to share one picture, because I don't want to be cruel. I loved the book when I read it in the 90's. It was liberating as all hell. And besides, everyone was dressing like that back then, and large women at least looked better in all those big prints than the slim ones did. Don't laugh too much, girls, someday your clothes are going to look just as ridiculous.

...Okay, I lied. But I'm not writing to talk about how ugly styles were in the 1990's. I'm writing to talk about fat clothes, how over the course of my lifetime, heavy girls have gone from being restricted to the Chubby department in the department store, and strict rules like "No Horizontal Stripes" and "Always Wear Dark Colors", to the modern era when there's a whole Full Figure Fashion Week, and instead of hiding their bodies in dark clothes and muumuus, plus-sized models pose in next to nothing, looking as glamorous as anyone else.

It's a good change. And believe it or not, it didn't start because of the rising obesity rates. Fat Acceptance actually got its start in the late 60's, at a time when obesity rates in the United States hovered around 10-15%. It was an offshoot of other civil rights movements of the time, pressing for equal rights for black people, gays, and women. The NAAFA, the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Americans, was founded in 1969, the same year as Llewellyn Louderback published Fat Power, which was sort of the manifesto of the movement.

I remember reading that book in the late 70's, and it was inspiring. It was actually written by a man who was a Fat Admirer, or in other words, someone who preferred to date women who were above average in weight, rather than by someone who was obese himself, but it made a statement that I'd never heard anyplace else before in my life: That people had a right to respect based on who they were, not on how much they weighed. Later on Great Big Beautiful Doll, published in 1977, reinforced the same message:

Written by self-described GBBD Stella Jolles Reichman, Great Big Beautiful Doll recalled the glories of growing up in Austria, at a time when girls were sent to health farms to gain weight rather than to lose it. It also gave grooming advice (Although shampoo your pubes is the only bit I remember), and style hints, and featured this centerfold section of styles Ms. Reichman thought would look attractive on a heavy woman:

I remember wondering where she got the hourglass corset to wear under those, when I read the book in the '70's. I'd shopped the foundation section of the local department store (to try and keep my mom from noticing that my jeans were getting too tight), and the main things I'd found were super-ugly, butt-covering things, that felt like hell while you were wearing them, and never squashed my thighs as flat as I wanted them to.

The Fat Acceptance movement took off in the early 80's, when there were still only eight states with obesity rates above 10%. Big Beautiful Woman got its start as a magazine at that time, and it was a liberating read, with fashion spreads featuring plus-sized clothes, on real plus-sized models, and personal ads by and for heavy women. Later on it was joined by Mode Magazine, and by Radiance, which catered to the large end of the plus-sized audience.

As the 1980's moved into the 1990's, fashion began to catch up with the movement. Emme, who weighed 190 pounds at the height of her career (but looked slimmer, because so much of it was muscle) was the first plus-sized model to achieve widespread fame. Lane Bryant, which had started out taking its customers for granted, marketing dowdy, middle-aged fashions, for "Stout Women and Misses" -- And for Juniors with "Plenty", as you see here:

(Can you imagine being at a slumber party, and having your friends see that tag?) -- started evolving toward the trendy shop it tries to be today.

Later, other companies took notice of large women and started marketing to them. Ulla Popkin sells a nice selection of elegant, classic styles, while Torrid, an offshoot of Hot Topic, directs itself toward the plus-size teen market. Plus-size fashion blogs and plus-size models abound (and are quite popular with the gentlemen, or so Ask Men says). The days of girls being scarred at the sight of heavy women in muumuus look like they are gone forever (not to mention muumuus seem to be all the rage again right now). It doesn't seem appropriate even to talk about "fat clothes" any more, so I guess it's time to save that term for the extra-loose pants most of us keep in our closets for Thanksgiving, or days when we're feeling especially premenstrual.

HyperSmash

Porn (there, I made you look)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 23:55:00 +0000

A lot of people like to talk about how porn's gotten more disgusting over the years. They'll talk regretfully about the demure Playboy centerfolds of bygone days, and contrast them with the vulgar, vulgar stuff you can see these days, just by turning the SafeSearch off on Google Images (try typing "wet"). But you know, this is a really unproductive discussion. For one thing, it's been going on for a long time now. Geezers nowadays might regret those tasteful nude images of Marilyn, but back in the golden days of the '60's that they remember so fondly, there were plenty of geezers mourning the demise of the pin-up, and grumbling about swingers, and hippies, with their disgusting "free love". If you go back far enough, you're just going to get to 1920's-era fathers, grousing about flaming youth, and how disgusting Joan Crawford looked, dancing the charleston, and going on and on about how much better the world was, back when boys still fantasized about Harrison Fisher girls. Do you really want to have that conversation?

Anyway, Richard E. Geis has already done it much better, in his excellent book How to Write Porno Novels for Fun and Profit, published in 1986: Geis is a kind of an obscure figure, and practically the only references you can find to him online, are from used booksellers, but if the story he tells in Porno Novels can be trusted, he spent his career writing pulp fiction, usually of the erotic kind, from the early 1960's through the early 1980's, when he gave it up because the porn-expectations had become too gross for his taste.

According to his retelling, standards for porn were about as free as they were going to get, right around the beginning of the 1970's, when a writer could describe pretty much whatever they wanted, with whatever four-letter words they wanted, but preferably in the context of a good story ("young women and men with hang-ups that [can] only be cured by a sexual catharsis", being the one the readers liked best). Before that, prudish editorial standards restricted what writers could include in their books. Four-letter words, descriptions of genitals, and extended sex scenes, for example, were all taboo at the beginning of the '60's. By the 1980's however, it was narrative that had become taboo. Anyone who wanted anything with a little culture to it, had changed over to reading mass-market novels, which were quite graphic enough themselves, by then. Most of the remaining porn-fans out there, were watching XXX-rated movies. And the remaining sex-book readers, "didn't give a shit about characterization... All readers wanted was a series of very graphic, very gross sex acts. One after another..." [Geis, Richard E.: How to Write Porno Novels for Fun and Profit. Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend, WA. 1985. pp.12, 13.]

So in other words, the common wisdom is wrong. Porn isn't getting grosser. It already got about as gross as it was going to get, back in the 1980's. (And if you want to look around anyway, you're going to find some pretty graphic stuff, dating from the 18th and 19th centuries.) What has been getting grosser though, and right straight along ever since the 19th century for that matter, is mainstream culture, and this, I think, is a more interesting story to tell:

Did you know, that at the beginning of his career, Charles Dickens was considered a low-life writer, whose stories of vulgar life were not suitable for young ladies to read?

Dicken's first novel The Pickwick Papers, published in 1836, although it was charming and comical overall, turned dark toward the second half, with prison scenes that shocked middle class readers of the time with their realism. His second novel, Oliver Twist, published a year later, with its cast of fences, thieves, and streetwalkers, was considered even more shocking, and Lord Melbourne, Prime Minster, role model (and secret crush) of Queen Victoria, warned the young queen not to read it, because it dealt with "paupers, criminals and other unpleasant subjects". The young author was so horrified by this misunderstanding of his work, that he wrote a special new preface for Oliver, in which he laid out his intention in putting such low characters into his book, which was " to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really did exist; to paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid misery of their lives; to show them as they really were, for ever skulking uneasily through the dirtiest paths of life, with the great black ghastly gallows closing up their prospect, turn them where they might", because it was the TRUTH, and because by showing the ugliness of a life of crime, he hoped he might keep young people from romanticizing criminals.

After Oliver Twist, there were other Victorian works, of varying degrees of popularity, that also pushed the envelope in terms of subject matter. The Scarlet Letter, from 1850, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, from 1891, both had stories that included premarital sex (it is a tossup as to which one would have been the more shocking to readers: Tess actually included a sex scene, of sorts, but on the other hand, in Scarlet Letter, it was a clergyman who did the dirty deed). And the entire story of Way Down East, a play from 1897, that was filmed in 1920 by D.W. Griffith, was about an unwed mother, who was thrown out of her father's home to die, and then rescued by the heroic young man who loved her despite her "shame".

The early twentieth century saw even more "shocking" material being released, such as Three Weeks by Elinor Glyn, which is the story of a Baltic queen who finds the meaning of life in her illicit love affair with a young English gentleman, and The Sheik by E.M. Hull, which is the story of a young English gentlewoman, who finds the meaning of life in her illicit love affair with an Arab prince (are we noticing a leitmotif here?).

For a while there, film could be quite frank in what it showed. Films like Intolerance, and Cleopatra, starring the infamous Theda Bara, dressed women in the barest minimum of costuming, with beads covering just their nipples up top, and a few skimpy draperies below, and for a while there, Cecil B. DeMille made quite a career for himself, with movies like Why Change Your Wife, Why Not Change Your Husband, and Old Wives For New. Then in the early 1930's, a lot of people got their brains melted when they went to see a German movie called Ecstasy, and managed to catch a vague glimpse of Hedy Lamarr's nipples in one scene, and of her bare buttocks in another scene, where she runs through the trees buck nekkid, kind of like a Bigfoot, only prettier, and the censors rushed in to clamp down on Hollywood.

These were the kinds of things that were blush-making in the thirties. Thereafter filmmakers had to be a lot more careful. Kisses had to be short, doubles entendres had to be kept short on the entendre (which put quite a crimp in the career of film queen Mae West), and sex could only be shown by implication, such as in the rape scene from Gone With The Wind.

People got to be pretty good at reading between the lines before film standards loosened up again in the 1960's. They knew what it meant when a movie took place in a women's prison, and why all those spinsters were so frustrated in Tennessee Williams movies.

At the same time though, this was when literature was starting to get freer and more vulgar. Relatively speaking, of course. This was the time Russell Kirk was talking about, when he spoke of people reading Ayn Rand's books "for the fornicating bits" (both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged contain overwrought little mini-scenes, where non-consensual sex turns out to be exactly what the heroine needs, to get her humming and happy with the world again). It was the era when mass-market paperbacks promised more than the censors would let them deliver, with titles like Dope Inc., and Musk, Hashish, and Blood, blurbs that promised to tell about young men who were tempted by the "twilight life", or so desperate to prove their manhood that they would "go with a prostitute", and covers where no matter what the story was, the young woman's top was always just a hair's breadth away from falling off completely, kind of like the girlfriend's in Menace Beach.

It was the heyday of Kurt Vonnegut's character, Kilgore Trout, when low-end publishers often sandwiched pictures of "wide-open, split beavers" in between science fiction stories, to keep from getting their magazines confiscated by the censors.

Then ten more years went by, and they were the important years of the swinging 60's. Films got more outspoken, and so did novels. I will never forget finding Frank Yerby's novel The Girl From Storyville, first published in 1972, and checking it out at my hometown library when I was 14: My mom tried to warn me away from that one; she told me I might find it "too adventurous" for my taste. Having had a chance to look into the book by that point, I made sure to play dumb, and told her that I liked adventure stories. There was no way I was letting go of a book as educational as that one was, with its sex-descriptions that were way more detailed than anything I had ever read before ("There's something infinitely sad and comical about a pair of small white feet waving in the air on either side of a lean brown rump, muscular as all get-out and hairy enough to justify Darwin, isn't there? And the motions -- pelvic writhe, partial withdrawal, total repenetration, buttock tension, thrust and heave (yet, in this case, somehow, always gently) are, let us admit it, more than a trifle absurd."), and its dark story of a girl who was so insecure of her father's love that she had to go out and degrade herself with every man she met.

I was innocent for a girl of my generation (or maybe I just read older books). I didn't read Scruples (famed for being the only thing besides the Bible that girls were reading in 1980) until the mid-80's. And I still haven't seen The Blue Lagoon (and having waited this long, I think I can survive the rest of my life without doing). But I did pay attention to what was going on around me, and I knew that the mass media was getting freer. Silhouette came out with a romance series called Desire, in which no girl got hitched without enjoying several long, explicit sexual romps with her true love beforehand. First cable TV, and then after that the internet, made video porn available right away, to anyone, without anyone else being the wiser. ...Frank Zappa recorded Sheik Yerbouti and it was supposedly "all about the music" (and not about the fact that he dropped the f-bomb every two seconds and talked about peoples' assholes) for crying out loud.

And now it is thirty years later. And what I notice is that things have sort of come full-circle, back to the wonderful days of the early 70's that Richard Geis talks about so lovingly. Hardcore sex is getting coupled with story again, maybe not in out-and-out porn writing, but in manga, and romantic novels, both het and gay-friendly, as well as in original stories, written by young girls, just for their own enjoyment.

A good example of this new kind of erotic storytelling can be found in the work of Sean Michael, author of gay-friendly romances, such as his "Jarhead" series. Michael's work is always extremely graphic (examples can be found: here), but there is heart to it. The characters are likable, and he takes the time to give them real events in their lives, and not always good ones, as well, instead of just hot, male-on-male action.

I like to think Richard Geis would be pleased, if he knew we were following in his footsteps again.

HyperSmash

Underwear

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:49:00 +0000

I read a story once. I read it long, long ago, and I don't remember where, which is kind of amazing, because I no sooner read it, than it got stuck in my head, and has been fascinating me ever since:

It took place during the Renaissance, someplace in Europe that was north enough to get really cold in the wintertime. And it told about this court lady, a lady-in-waiting to a queen or something, who was following along in the procession behind her royal mistress as was her duty. And this lady needed to go, really, really badly, but she didn't want to leave the procession, and she certainly didn't want to call everyone else to a halt, just because she'd been caught short. And since ladies didn't wear underpants back then, and since she had a huge wooden farthengale holding her skirts away from her body as was the style at the time, she decided just to pee as she walked. But it was very, very cold that day, and according to the story, the poor lady's pee-stream froze solid as it was leaving her body, and the next thing she knew, she was rooted to the ground by a pillar of her own frozen-solid pee.

I've wondered ever since then: Could it really happen?

This story has very little to do with the history of undergarments, I know, and the main reason I led off with it, is because reading it as a teenager was how I learned that underpants had not always been as commonly used as they were in my own time. It was kind of a disturbing revelation. What made it more disturbing, was that it wasn't something people really came right out and discussed directly. You had to piece the information together out of lewd hints, and naughty, embarrassing stories. There are stories out there about Queen Catherine of France, spanking the bare bottoms of her serving women, for instance, or one creepy, perverted story that I read in The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, about how as a boy, he once hid behind some bushes and watched peasant women peeing on the ground while they were standing together talking.

The reality is much simpler (and much less gross) though: Ladies began wearing undergarments that covered their butts in the Nineteenth Century. Actually, they did not cover their butts, as cotton undergarments of the time were were split down the middle in back, as in this image:

While the long woolen kind, called union suits, had patch-openings in back to let the butt out, so a lady could go to the bathroom without having to do too much adjustment to her elaborate clothing.

Under-drawers were a cost-saving measure, a way of keeping one's outer clothes for longer. Gentlemen took to wearing them sooner than ladies, for this very reason: They wore close-fitting britches, which rubbed up against their butts and various other smelly parts of their bodies, and which were frequently made out of various expensive materials such as satin or embroidered velvet. Some of those probably couldn't even be cleaned safely, and certainly it would have been cheaper even for the ones that could, to save yourself having to do it very often, by wearing some nice linen or woolen undergarments underneath.

Ladies on the other hand, wore nice, loose-skirted gowns, that let lots of air get in, to freshen up all their smelly places. They wore chemises under their dresses, which basically protected the underarm area and the torso, in case things started getting sweaty there. They wore corsets, depending on the style of the time, to make their waists look slim and pretty.

But it wasn't until improvements in textile manufacture made cotton fabric (for under-drawers), and woolen knit fabric (for union suits) easy to afford, that they bothered wearing garments that covered places no one was going to see anyway, garments that were, after all, only going to need cleaning themselves as well as the other cleaning that already needed to be done.

At that as I have said, they wore undergarments that were open in the back. This was probably because, with all the clothes Victorian ladies were already having to shift around at the time, they didn't want to make getting to the bathroom any more difficult than it already was. It does make you think though, that it probably saved on the washing, if a lady wasn't extra-careful when she was wiping herself. -- Remember, you wiped your butt with dry corncobs in the old days, or with pages from the Sears Catalog, not with nice, pillowy-soft Charmin.

It's also amusing to think though, that the crotch-less panties your friends all thought were so naughty that they had to pile them on you for presents, "for the honeymoon," at your wedding shower, were just normal everyday wear for all ladies, back in the Victorian Age.

It wasn't until the end of the Nineteenth Century that women started wearing under-drawers that were sewn up in back as well as in front. French can-can dancers, were the first ones to do it; just because they made a living showing themselves off in front of an audience, didn't mean they wanted to show everything, to every man who paid for a seat (maybe they charged more for the good stuff, one-on-one).

As usually happens, it wasn't long until regular ladies wanted to copy the styles the loose women had started. By the 1920's, closed panties were the only kinds still being sold. Ladies found them useful, because with skirts being shorter, it was way, way easier for what was underneath to show by accident. All it took was a stray breeze:

Or an extra-wild night out, dancing with your boyfriend:

And you were going to be awfully glad Sears wasn't selling those split-panties any more.

HyperSmash

Ayn Rand

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 00:12:00 +0000

Heroine of the American Right Ayn Rand was a woman who, when reality bit her on the butt, she ran from her principles. The most recent story of course, is the one that tells how this world-famous libertarian railed against government aid her whole life, but rushed to grab benefits for herself, when her smoking habit gave her lung cancer, but it is just one of many. And really, can anyone be surprised? This was a woman who preached the courage of facing reality, but took cozy refuge in dreams her whole life.

Myself, I figured this out back when I read her books for the first time as a teenager: The first copies I had, were from my parents' library, dusty old paper-backed editions of Anthem and We The Living, and Atlas Shrugged. I loved every page of them. I loved the passion, and the free-market ideals, which went well with the Reagan Republicanism my parents had taught me. And I especially loved the cover photo of Ms. Rand that was on the back of each book:

This slim, pretty woman with the dark eyes and the passionate stare was the very embodiment of the individualistic romanticism she stood for, I thought. Surely she was what Dagney Taggart would have looked like if she were a real person.

Those were old copies of the books that I was reading. It was no wonder, I thought, that they had an old picture, of someone who was after all, still alive, on the backs of them. It wasn't until I got to college and went out and bought my own copy of Atlas Shrugged, and saw that the author photo had not been changed, that I started to wonder. After all, this was what Ayn Rand looked like in the early 80's, when I started college:

I know, I know. We all get older. And precious few of us get prettier as we age. But wouldn't Dagney Taggart have shown what she looked like in real time? Wasn't that the kind of gutsy individualist she was? ...That her creator was? I won't say I went right out and got rid of all my Ayn Rand books or anything, but in my mind, this was evidence of vanity on her part, and I thought less of her.

Actually, her books sort of led to the same conclusion. They were romantic books, not in the Nietzschean sense that she intended, but in the sense that they resembled the Barbara Cartland books that I also enjoyed back then, when I was young and foolish. They were one-dimensional characters, who were either good or evil, and never nuanced or partly one and partly the other. And you could always tell whether a character was good or bad by how they looked. Dagney Taggart, heroine of Atlas Shrugged for instance, was slim and drop-dead gorgeous, while her rival, the cynical "moocher" Lillian Reardon was aging and running to fat. The plotlines were simple conflicts of good and evil, with the good always winning, and the heroine always ending up with the most attractive male available. Yes, they were basically romance novels, and after I grew skeptical of Rand's so-called "philosophy", that was how I read them.

To understand Ayn Rand, here is what you need to know: First off, she came of age in Russia, during the Russian Revolution. Just twelve years old when the Bolsheviks seized control of her homeland, she attended college in Petrograd, where she was kicked out halfway through her studies for being a member of the bourgeoisie, and just barely managed to complete her studies.

Soviet Russia has the reputation for being the culmination of all Karl Marx's collectivist ideals. That it was a cold, harsh place, run by a brutal regime, people say, is just proof that collectivism, or any kind of state-socialism, does not work. Certainly, this was Ayn Rand's view of the situation.

In reality, the Soviet Union was marked from the beginning, by the brutality of its founder Vladimir Lenin. Right from the time his Bolshevik Party took power, Lenin's policies were those of violence and oppression. One of the first things he did after taking power, was to establish a secret police force called the Cheka, who were given permission to arrest anyone even suspected of opposing the Bolshevik Regime. Another early move was to institute forced labor policies over the peasantry, and take full state control over food production away from them, giving it instead to bureaucrats, who knew nothing about farming. Lenin had the advantage that he was the hero of the Revolution at home, while abroad he was the creator of a Golden new age, that was going to show the truth of all Karl Marx's predictions. People liked to delude themselves that Soviet Russia did not really take its turn toward brutality and oppression until after he died and Joseph Stalin took over, but in reality, Stalin only followed in the direction that Lenin had been headed all along.

But, growing up in such a terrible atmosphere, perhaps it is no wonder that Ayn Rand developed such a loathing, not just for the state, but for collectives, or anything beyond the individual as well.

In 1925, Ayn Rand came to the United States. Initially, she came to visit relatives, but she was so impressed by the contrast between capitalist America, and the postwar Russia she had left, that she went out and found a job and a place to live so that she could stay.

People like to talk about her idealization during that era, of serial killer William Edward Hickman. And certainly, Hickman was just the sort of arrogant, sociopathic individualist that a Nietzsche-fangirl such as Rand was would be sure to love. But myself, I think you can get a better understanding of the woman by looking at the job she got in the United States, which was a job as a screenwriter, for Cecil B. DeMille.

DeMille was known for his blockbusters, for huge, dramatic films, with bigger-than life sets, lots of drama, and thousands upon thousands of extras. He made the careers of stars such as Gloria Swanson and Richard Dix.

He brought the unforgettable spectacle of Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea to the screen in 1956.

And he fed the romantic imagination of one little Jewish girl in the screenwriters' department, who would go on to create her own morality plays, as huge and dramatic as his own (albeit with a lot more long, preachy parts in them).

Ayn Rand's philosophy did not hold up in the real world, because it was never intended to. It was the worldview of the blockbuster movie or of the romance novel, not something real people could ever really base their lives on. She loved to construct firm rules about how life should be lived, that she said could be applied to anyone and in all circumstances, but she always envisioned those rules being played out by beautiful people in gorgeous settings, never by children, or by the poor, or by dumpy, Jewish ladies who were approaching middle age.

The most telling story about Ayn Rand in my opinion, is the one about her love affair with Nathaniel Branden: When she was 35 years old and at the height of her fame, Rand met up with the 18-year old Branden. At first, he was her intellectual disciple, then later, when she became attracted to him, they became lovers. She made sure to have both of them bring their spouses into one room so they could announce the beginning of their love affair. She wanted both Barbara Branden, and her own husband Frank O'Connor to understand, their relationship conformed to strict philosophical principles. It was the meeting of mind with mind, not just two married people getting together for a quick shag.

Where things got rough, was when Branden went on to become attracted to another woman. Who'd have thought it: A guy that would cheat on his wife, would also cheat on his mistress. But Rand was outraged. This was a total violation (even though her heroine Dagney Taggart does the same thing, dumping her lover Hank Reardon as soon as the more attractive John Galt shows an interest in her). She renounced Branden and threw him entirely out of the Objectivist movement the two of them had once led together.

This will always be my picture of Ayn Rand: Not the diamond-edged individualist heroine she's held to be to this day, by her fans, but the aging, spurned lover, taking what little revenge she can, when a man fails to live up to her movie-hero expectations. She was just human, that's the crux of it. The tragedy is, that her philosophy was one that didn't allow for humanness. Her own had to be covered up, the people who recognized it thrown out her presence, and the photos that showed it, ignored and replaced with earlier, lovelier ones. And the humanness of others? That was their "weakness", their collectivist, "moocher" side.

HyperSmash

Attack of the 50 Ft Advertisments

noreply@blogger.com (Game-Freak) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 13:10:00 +0000

Thanks to Moresay.com for the image

Have you ever noticed how aggressive advertising campaigns have become? The consumer is flooded with heavily biased information that can influence them to make decisions and purchase products that they wouldn't have otherwise. We see ads telling us to buy certain brands of dishwasher detergent and we see ads telling us to eat at certain restaurants. Companies like McDonalds and Burger King use small toys and games to draw children to their products and images of luscious food products to draw hungry adults. However, there isn't really a way for consumers to differentiate between which products are worth buying and which products should be left behind. We live in a world with an overblown market and no restrictions on advertising. Some ad campaigns even attack other products with silly phrases and accusations. I'm sure all the children of the 80's remember the bit wars between Nintendo and Sega. Do you remember the ads Sega ran in which they said things like "You can't do this on Nintendo" and "Genesis does what Nintendon't"? If not take, take a moment to watch the ad below.

Really? Do you remember the ads for the 3do? They referred to the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo as being "baby toys". Ads for Finish dishwasher detergent attack Cascade and claim that it leaves the dishes with dried on food stains. Ads for Swiffer mops claim that sponge mops simply spread germs and do not kill them. How is the consumer supposed to figure out what's true and whats BS? There are websites like Rip-Off Report and magazines like Consumer Report who's sole goal is to weed out the bad products and the scams and warn people. If you search for a product online you can often find reviews from other poor saps who bought the product. But what if you're the sap who buys the product? You're out of luck. I really think some rules and regulations should be applied to the advertising world to keep them from alienating consumers.

HyperSmash

Same-Sex Marriage

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 22:54:00 +0000

So I was driving my son to school today, and we were listening to Stephanie Miller on the radio. And this caller came on the line who was complaining that Stephanie's show spent "way too much time on gay marriage any more". He told her she needed to understand that if gay marriage was going to be legalized, a whole lot of other things would need to be legalized too, such as polygamy, and marriages between men and dogs. So Steph and her co-hosts responded in the standard way that most people do respond to this allegation, which was to pooh-pooh this argument. The argument was just silliness, they said, nobody was stepping up in favor of bestiality or pedophile marriages. And then they made some jokes about New Coke and marriage being a brand, that were moderately funny.

But they left me kind of unsatisfied. It seemed like there was a flaw to the logic there. And I found myself wondering, well now, what if in the push for marriage equality, someone did step up and demand the right to marry their dog (or, as in, say, Korea, their pillow)? Aren't there better arguments out there besides just, "well, nobody wants that to happen"?

So I went back to the original source of the whole man-on-dog argument, Senator Rick Santorum (and I include the link to his name, not because I think there is anybody left in the world who doesn't know of the Senator's other life as an internet meme, but just to do my part and make sure it always stays at the top of the Google search list), just to see what point it was exactly, that he was making. Here's what he said:

Santorum: "Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality" --

Here, the AP reporter got a little uncomfortable, and interjected:

AP: I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about "man on dog" with a United States senator, it's sort of freaking me out."

You can kind of understand, can't you? The examples he uses are outrageous, offensive to just about anyone. They don't sound like they belong in a discussion about ordinary, regular same-sex couples possibly getting married, to most of us. But to social conservatives like Santorum, it is their outrageousness that is the point. Essentially this is what Santorum is saying: Personally, I do not mind if people engage in disgusting, gross perversions such as bestiality, pedophilia, or, *shudder* even homosexuality, as long as they keep it behind closed doors. But marriage is about keeping society stable, and when two gross, disgusting creepazoids get married, that makes society less stable, not more so. There are two things wrong with this argument:

Number one of course, is that the judgment of what is or is not disgusting, is a subjective one. Leaving sexual fantasies and fetishes aside, isn't most sex kind of disgusting if you're an outsider watching? Aren't all bodily functions, for that matter? Think about eating. Really think about it, picture the teeth, coated with saliva, and imagine them masticating the food slowly into a paste. Now imagine it going down your slimy gullet, to fall into the pool of acid that is your stomach.

Let's face it, humans are animals, and a lot of what we do is pretty gross, if you think about it. That's why most of us don't think about it much. If we took the time to really obsess on our own grossness, much less the grossness of the people around us, we wouldn't be able to handle living with people at all. We'd probably all end up being miserable recluses, like Gulliver, after he'd seen the Yahoos.

My second problem is with the idea of marriage as a tool of social control. In the US, there are a lot of material advantages that you can only access as a married person. These include tax benefits, and survivor benefits, next-of-kin status and access to your spouses's retirement income. My list isn't even a summary, because I leave so many things out. If you take a look at the complete list on Wikipedia, you'll see that it's as long as your arm. This country seriously offers couples a lot of incentives to marry and stay married.

I am willing to acknowledge that these were mostly put into place because it was thought that having more married people in the country would make it more stable. I've heard various arguments about whether or not that was true, but okay, let's say for argument's sweet sake that it is. There is some research to show that married people are happier than single ones, that they do better at work, live longer, and have better sex. There's also some evidence that children tend to do better when they grow up in two-parent homes. So let's grant the pro-marriage advocates their first point: A society with a lot of married people will probably be more stable.

But there's no good evidence out there, to say that the genders of those married people have anything to do with their happiness or stability. Social conservatives practically admit this any more too, what with the lameness of their arguments. They argue that two sexes are necessary in a marriage because it bridges the gap between men and women, and because women "domesticate"men, especially when they act out a traditionally "feminine" role. And then there is the old argument that only two-sex marriage results in procreation, an argument that seems especially lame these days, when almost half of the women giving birth in the country are single.

So if all you want is the stabilizing effects of marriage, it makes sense to encourage same-sex, as well as two-sex couples to marry. But if what you are really after is a more stable society, I would question whether government incentives for marriage of any kind are the best way to go. Weddings are a source of great profit, granted. At their beginnings, they benefit wedding planners, and retail stores, and caterers, and resorts in Las Vegas. At their ends, they benefit divorce lawyers and all the employees of the local county courthouse. But statistics say that 41% of first, 60% of second, and 73% of third marriages in America, end in divorce. So that so-called "stability" we want so badly, are we really getting it in exchange for all the incentives we offer?

My advice, would be to take the money the government spends now on marriage incentives, and put it toward programs that are guaranteed to improve society's stability. The best predictor of how successful a person will be for example, is the quality of their education. Furthermore, research shows that the best way to grow an economy is through investment in education. Why not put more money into educating our kids, and less into encouraging their parents to get married ~~and divorced a couple of years later~~? Research has shown that unemployment destabilizes both families and the wider economy. Why not put more money toward job creating, or at least getting money into the hands of the unemployed and their families. Research shows the high social costs of incarceration. Why not put some money toward finding better ways to deal with non-violent offenders?

There are lots of ways we could use government resources, that would provide a much greater stabilizing effect than promoting marriage, whether two-sex or same-sex, and I personally would like to see the government take its nose out of the marriage business. Give family rights to all couples, whether same-sex or two-sex, whether married or unmarried. Let them take responsibility for each other and for the children they raise. Let them marry or not, in the church of their faith-tradition (if any), according to their own good judgment. It is not the government's place to put a moral judgment on whether or not people have a ring on their finger, or a certificate signed by a preacher in front of a couple of witnesses. It is not the government's place to get picky about whether a man loves a woman or another man, or what they do together in the bedroom; let's leave that to the prurient obsessions of the Rick Santorums of the world.

...And there now, I've just done what all liberals do: I've gone on and on for far too long talking about something, instead of condensing it neatly and adding a laugh to keep an audience interested. That's the difference between me and Stephanie Miller. It's why she's the one with a lucrative radio contract, and I'm just a stay-at-home blogger, ah me.

But I can at least offer a laugh for the end of this blog-post:

HyperSmash

Fundamentalist Science-Haters

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 29 May 2011 16:09:00 +0000

I don't like to talk about global climate change, because the subject depresses me. It seems fairly obvious to me that climate change is happening. Consensus among the vast majority of scientists throughout the world is that it's happening. The US Military is so sure that it's happening, that they've already started to put contingency plans into place. Satellites show that the polar ice cover is steadily shrinking. Extreme weather events are becoming more common all over the world. And yet here in the US we continue to do nothing. We keep on buying our big gas-guzzlers and filling them up with $4.00 gas. We keep on making our hourlong commutes, from a job at one end of the county, to an expensively heated and cooled home in a suburb at the other end. And we angrily (and stupidly) deny even the possibility of a man-made climate crisis in our future.

What? The climate is changing? Don't be ridiculous! We had snow this winter! Fox news says that means there isn't any! It frustrates the hell out of me when my fellow countrymen act dumb like this. Experts are called expert for a reason. They study one thing, for a long long time, and when they make pronouncements about it, it's only after careful thought and lots of research. Unlike blowhards like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, who get paid handsomely for stoking emotion and keeping their audience ignorant. I want to see people pay attention to the real scientists, the ones who know the subject and can be counted on describing it accurately, not just because we're running out of time to make the changes we'll need to make to protect the climate we're used to, but because I don't like seeing people voluntarily choose ignorance over fact.

But I think I know why so many Americans do it. And I think you can find the explanation by looking at how we do religion:

I was raised in a conservative Christian household. My dad's never believed much of anything as far as I can tell, but my mom's one of the kind of Christians who believes every word of the Bible is literally true, and you'll probably go to Hell if you doubt any of it, even the really unlikely parts like ...well, like the earth being created in six 24-hour days. I grew up creationist (of course). I even took the creationist side in a debate when I was in High School (against nobody, because none of my classmates could be bothered to argue for the other side). I went to my mom for help, and we worked together to find the materials I used to prepare. And it was then that I learned exactly what it takes to be a creationist in the modern world:

Number one, you have to make common cause with people you don't respect. In general, the church I grew up in was pretty strict about who counted as Christian and who didn't. There was a long list of other churches, including the Catholics, the Mormons and the Seventh-Day Adventists, which were basically cults by their standards. Which were of course the standards my mom accepted, and that I was taught to accept as well while I was growing up. But my church wasn't so much for publishing books themselves. And there weren't all that many mainstream publishers putting out books in favor of young-earth creationism, so when it came time for me to research creationism for my debate at school, my mom told me to ask the local Seventh-Day Adventist church for books. Then as now, the Seventh-Day Adventists were putting out a lot of books defending creationism. Back then, they were mostly printed on really bad paper and cheaply bound, the kinds of things that screamed THIS IS A MARGINAL PUBLICATION!!! Plus they came from a cult-y church. But they were what there was in favor of creationism, and God forbid I should give up my belief, right?

Number two, you have to favor the fringe-y theories over the mainstream ones. My parents weren't big on fringe-y ideas coming from either side. For example, they had some of Ayn Rand's books on the shelves in the den, but when I asked about reading them, my mom told me, "well, they're kind of immature." As opposed to the mainstream, "mature" conservatism she favored, the kind you'd find put forward by nice respectable thinkers, like William F. Buckley. When she gave me some books by Immanuel Velikovsky to study for my debate, she told me right out that some of his theories were questionable. They were iffy, immature like Ayn Rand, not trustworthy like Buckley and his kind. And yet I was supposed to use them to make people believe in creationism? Why? I could only conclude that you were allowed to lower your standards where needed, in order to protect your faith.

Number three, you have to actively reject science. I remember the big pile of books I finally collected to use for my research. I remember reading them, being alternately stirred by their ringing denunciations of those evil, evil evolutionists, and confused when they'd get into technical science-details to support their arguments. There was a lot in there, I remember, about Carbon-14 dating. Apparently, it had never been conclusively proven how much carbon would break down in how much time, and you could never use it for anything more accurate than an estimate of how old a fossil or something really was. I don't really remember the details, probably because I used to skip past them as quickly as possible, and jump to the bits that would always say, "well, if their estimates could be right, ours could be right too." Even though "theirs" said one million years, and "ours" said six thousand. It didn't make much sense even if you did skip the details. But that didn't matter, because the point wasn't to make sense. The point wasn't to give both sides a fair study and then pick the one with the most evidence. The point was that you believed. You had to believe, or else you'd go to Hell, and that meant you had to reject whatever got in the way of your belief.

Conservative Christians have been in this mindset since the 1920's, I think. When John Scopes won the right to teach the theory of evolution in Tennessee schools in 1925, a lot of believers went into defense-mode. They felt they were being required to make a choice between their faith and objective science and, when push came to shove, they believed the stakes were just too high for them to choose science.

Denying evolution and denying climate change are two different things of course. There's not much in the Bible about climate one way or the other, for one thing. For another thing, there's not that much at stake survival-wise, if you choose to believe that life was created by a deity in 144 hours, rather than evolving on a planet in a small solar system, over the course of millions of years. But once you're in the habit of rejecting objective scientific information, I don't think it's that easy to turn the rejection on and off. You start looking at things differently. Scientists are Hell-bound enemies, sent to test your faith. Your friends are the ignorant, the ones who can bring real conviction to their voices, when they say, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it."

There is A, LOT, OF, MONEY being spent to encourage people to reject even the possibility that humans are contributing to a change of climate on Earth. Personally, though, I think half the job has already been done for the deniers, by the previous century of religious-based science-rejection that has primed so many Americans to believe them.

HyperSmash

The Royal Wedding

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 22 May 2011 00:01:00 +0000

For people of my generation, the real royal wedding will always be the one that took place on July 29, 1981, when Diana Spencer shared vows with her Prince, who was some 14 years older (and at the time we all thought he was so old, and what would a girl her age want with a geezer like that). Diana brought romance back, she brought puffy-skirted wedding gowns back -- She brought hats back for crying out loud, after a good decade-and-a-half, where no one wore them at all except for little old grandmothers. -- and for a while there, all of us, were transfixed by her, even the ones who lost interest later on.

And nowadays we look rather pityingly, on the hype surrounding the wedding of William (who we remember in diapers) and Kate Middleton, who's kind of ordinary-looking really, kind of like Lindsay Lohan, only without the coke-fueled burnout.

But you know the funny thing is, that back in the day when we were dreamily watching Charles kiss Diana, and wishing a handsome Prince (or even a reasonably presentable one) would come and sweep us away too, our parents were looking on us rather pityingly as well. Because for them, the real royal wedding was the one between Princess Elizabeth and Philip of Mountbatten. Their hearts had already thrilled to the story of a young girl who'd served her country during World War II, who had to be given extra ration coupons just like any other bride in Postwar Britain just to be able to afford a trousseau, and who's special day was a bright spot for a whole nation, still struggling to rebuild. By comparison, what was the match between Charles and Diana, but the story of an aging playboy, picking his mate like he would a brood mare, rather than for love?

And the funny thing about that, is that their parents had found romance in the story of Edward VIII marrying Wallis Simpson. And before that... Well before that, came the very boring King George V and his equally boring wife Queen Mary.

And before them, came Queen Victoria's son Edward, who was barely out of diapers when he started having affairs with people, such as one with actress Nellie Clifden, that is supposed to have been the death of his father. Edward's wife Princess Alexandra was a lovely young woman, and she stood by him the whole rest of his life, and bore him several children. But there wasn't much romance in it, and these days she's forgotten (unlike the chair a Parisian whorehouse provided for her husband's lovemaking).

But before him, came the royal wedding of all royal weddings, the first one that was a popular romantic event, instead of just an alliance of state, when 21-year old Victoria promised herself to Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha -- And wrote gushily in her diary after their first night together that "I never, never spent such an evening. His excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness. He clasped me in his arms and we kissed each other again and again." -- and then lived together happily and romantically until his death some 20 years later.

Victoria's is the gold standard for all royal marriages, somehow more romantic than any other before or since. One reason for this, I think, is because Victoria was so demonstratively smitten with her husband, and so faithful to him during his lifetime -- The Victorian lady's comment about Cleopatra's tragic love affairs being "so unlike the home life of our own dear Queen" is famous. -- Another reason, I think, is because as the reigning Monarch herself, Victoria was the one who chose the man she loved, rather than just being chosen.

But another important reason I think, comes from the change in Britain's political system that was happening during Victoria's lifetime: At the beginning of the 19th century, King George III was a real Monarch, a man who actively ruled his country (at least until he was incapacitated by mental illness). By the end of it though, Victoria was mostly a figurehead, with the active governing responsibilities given into the hands of Parliament. At the beginning of the century, people had strong opinions about their King. They were in favor of him, or they were against him, rather the way people will take sides nowadays, about Barack Obama or Newt Gingrich. By the end of the century, no one bothered being against their Queen. She was a person with no power.

But she was more than a person, she was a symbol of her country too, and nowadays the Royal Family still holds the same position. It's kind of amazing when you really think about it: They're not very intelligent, they're not very attractive, but they represent the UK. And it's only very precious few people, who begrudge them the money to live in the style they're used to. -- That would be about $450,000,000 in U.S. dollars, as of 2009. If you have the time, you might take a minute to be grateful that the symbol of our country, here in the U.S., is a flag, which costs about $5-$20, and can be replaced very easily, if it gets damaged or you want a new one.

And then you might want to take another minute to wonder just how many more royal weddings the current Queen Elizabeth, who's already reigned for 59 years, is going to live to watch, before she finally dies and lets one of her offspring have a turn at the throne.

HyperSmash

Diet Watchers (Notes from a time when dieting sucked even harder than it does now)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 19 May 2011 11:04:00 +0000

All my life, I've tended a little toward the fat side. I've had my times of being larger, and my times of being smaller, but when you divide th world up between the people who can eat a 6-pack of Hershey bars and wash it down with a McDouble Value Meal and still zip their jeans the next morning, and the ones who can't, I've always fallen firmly the second category. Here's me in 6th grade; I don't think I look all that fat in this picture (although my parents said I was huge), but I'll admit, the leotards I wore for ballet practice on Tuesdays were getting harder and harder to squeeze into.

DIET WATCHER'S GUIDE: A PROVEN METHOD OF WEIGHT REDUCTION BASED ON THE GROUP PROGRAMS OF DIET WATCHER INC.And this was when my mom and I both joined Diet Watchers. For those of you who have never heard of it (which is probably all of you), Diet Watchers was a diet program based, like Weight Watchers, on nutritional guidelines developed by Dr. Norman Jolliffe, of the New York City Board of Health, and incorporated by a couple of ladies with weight problems, named Ann Gold and Sara Welles Briller.

The two programs are so similar, that I frankly am amazed that Ann and Sara ever managed to get theirs incorporated. These days they'd see their now-shrunken butts sued for copyright infringement as soon as they convened the first meeting. But these were the free-and-easy 1970's, and anyone was free to do their own thing, which apparently included being able to start meetings under practically the same name as another diet plan, teaching people to follow a practically identical program, and making money by selling them books with yummy recipes in them, such as Mock Sweet Potato Pudding (the mockery, in this case, coming from the fact that sweet potatoes were forbidden by the Diet Watchers' program; LOL, those orangey vegetables you just gobbled, were actually summer squashes in disguise).

Weight Watchers was already a very successful program, by the time my mom and I started out to lose weight back in 1973. They had meetings, and recipe cards with pretty-colored pictures on them, and everything. Diet Watchers, was like a low-rent cousin, with only two cookbooks for sale, and no pictures in either of them, and recipe cards that were mimeographed by the local group-leaders, rather than pre-printed by the company and full-color gorgeous.

In her book The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan, Wendy Mc'Clure has already done an awesome job of showing just how ugly and disturbing-looking even the best food photos from the era could be (especially food with names like Inspiration Soup and Fish Balls), although she's helped out of course, by the fact that the food in most old photos looks like barf. If you want to see more of the horrors of 70's-era diet food, you should definitely find a copy of her book and read it, because it's laugh-aloud funny. If you want to read more about what the food tasted like, stay here.

Dr. Jolliffe's original idea of course, was to make a nutritionally sound program. Poor fellow, he dreamed of taking all us red-blooded meat and junkfood-eating American couch potatoes, and introducing us to the joys of green vegetables and plenty of fish. His program was a little restrictive sure, but hey, you don't lose weight by snarfing up every T-bone and sack of Granny Goose chips you see. What Ann Gold and Sara Welles Briller made of it however, is something that has haunted me ever since my childhood.

It was a very rigid plan, you see. If you're mostly familiar with the current Weight Watchers plan, and how it gives you a certain number of "points" that you're allowed to eat in a day, with special provisions you can go by if you've got a holiday coming up and want to allow for overeating, then be prepared: There was none of that in the Diet Watchers program. The foods were all listed, which ones you could eat, how much of them you could eat and when, and which ones you could not eat, under any circumstances.

Bread, for instance, was mandatory, one slice at breakfast, and one slice at lunch, with none to be consumed ever, at any other time at all. Milk was another mandatory food, with all adults required to drink two cups a day, and all teens (such as I was when I was on the diet) required to drink four cups. It had to be skimmed milk of course. But the rules specifically said, you were not allowed to drink fresh nonfat milk from the market, but instead had to make up your own as needed, out of powdered instant. To add just a couple more examples of inconsistency: Julienne-sliced green beans were a "free food", as in you could eat as many of them as you wanted, any time, anywhere. But straight-cut green beans were strictly limited; you could eat them only at dinnertime, and never more than a 1/2 cup portion. And tomato sauce was forbidden, not to be eaten any time for any reason, but tomato juice was an unlimited food (when served in 8 ounce portions. And I ask you: If you can have unlimited 8 ounce cups of juice, isn't that the same as saying you can have as much juice as you want?).

Such were the arcane rules that went with being a Diet Watcher. I haven't even mentioned the fact that watermelon was forbidden (Why? I don't know. It only has about 50 calories per cup). Or that sauerkraut was unlimited, and hot dogs came in portions of 4 dogs per serving, so that conceivably, you could sit down to a whole can of salty-salty kraut, with half a pack of wieners soaking in it, and consider yourself a successful Diet Watcher, as long as you didn't add a bun (because no bread with dinner, of course).

I stayed on this diet for about three years. My mom stayed a lot longer, but by the time I was in 9th grade, I'd pretty much had it with eating horrible food, and I rebelled. Because the food we ate really was pretty horrible. Diet Watchers' spaghetti for instance, was ground beef in tomato juice, over a bed of canned beansprouts. Diet Watchers' gravy was reconstituted bouillon cubes, thickened with dry milk powder. And Diet Watchers' cookies were dry milk powder mixed with saccharin and canned pineapple chunks.

It was awful food even for a sedentary adult, but for a young teenager like I was, who walked a mile each way to school every day, and rode her bicycle the 5 or more miles it took to get into town whenever she wanted to go to a store, it was positive torture. I felt like I was starving pretty well the whole time I was on the diet, even with the petty thievery I committed whenever I could, snitching handfuls of dry cereal, or a few of my father's peanuts, or a pat of butter if I couldn't get something better, anything to slow down the pangs of hunger a little. The thing that finally pushed me over the edge and made me rebel, was what I like to call The Ground Tuna Incident:

It was on a Saturday. I spent the morning, helping out with a 4-H carwash, and well before my shift was over at 1:30 P.M., I was famished. I spent the last hour or so, thinking thoughts of food, going over everything that was in the kitchen, and wondering which of it my mother would give me for lunch when I got home. Now you have to understand that just recently, my mom had gotten a good deal on a case of canned tuna. She didn't read the labels too carefully, and when we got it home and opened the first can, we found out it was ground tuna, not the flaked kind people normally eat. Even then, you mostly only saw ground tuna sold as catfood, but this was labeled for human consumption, and after she'd paid good money for it, by god my mom was going to make sure humans consumed it.

So that day of the carwash found me coming home the hungriest I could ever remember being in all my young life. I was hungry enough to eat anything, I told myself, having forgotten entirely about the ground tuna. -- My mom and I used to eat a lot of tuna while we were dieting. Diet Watchers' rules mandated that we eat at least 5 fish meals a week, and it was hard to keep that much fresh fish in the house, especially in the 1970's, when for most Americans, dinner meant red meat. We ate tuna mixed with mayonnaise and mustard, and tuna on toast with melted cheese on top, and tuna with pineapple mixed in (which was actually pretty good), and tuna mixed with chopped apples (which wasn't). -- And of course when I came in the house and sat down for lunch, that was what I was given. And my mother had mixed it with some of the soft apples from the very bottom of the fruit bowl, the ones I always tried to avoid when I got a piece of fruit for myself to eat. Hungry as I was, I couldn't stomach a bite of it.

And the next day, I told my mom I wasn't going to diet any more. No matter what happened, or how fat I got, that was it for me, I wasn't going to starve all day any more, just for the dubious opportunity to enjoy catfood-and-mushy-apples again. And this is what I looked like a couple of years later:

Here again, I don't think I look all that fat. But my closet still had a rack (more accurately, a pile) of fat clothes, that I wore all the time, and a rack of skinny clothes, that were waiting until I could lose 20 pounds.
HyperSmash

The Workhouse and School Testing

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 18 May 2011 01:28:00 +0000

Whenever you find someone doing useless, uninteresting work, you can be sure you're seeing an unequal power distribution in action. For example, take the bad child who acts up in school, and is set to writing sentences for his teacher: His writing them doesn't do the teacher any good, it doesn't do him any good (because if writing "I will not kick the Principal/ steal lunch money/ or whatever," the first time doesn't change him any, writing it 99 times more certainly won't either). Why is he writing? It's to make sure he understands that the teacher is the boss, and he isn't.

You can find examples of this kind of unequal power distribution throughout history, but probably the best example of all time was the workhouse of 19th century England. Born out of the arrogant and judgmental attitudes of Victorian aristocrats, the workhouse was seen as a solution, to the "problem" of poor people getting government aid without doing anything in return.

Marx's Kapital for Beginners
England's policy of aid for the poor goes back to the 16th century. Improved efficiency at that time, was making it less expensive to produce woolen cloth, and wealthy landowners were eager to cash in, by plowing under the farmland on their property, and replacing it with grazing land for large herds of sheep. The peasants who used to make their living farming that land were thus displaced, and headed for cities like London, to look for work.

Before this, punishment was usually the fate for anyone caught begging in England. With so many new beggars showing up though, this was no longer really practical. Plus with so many families and decent workingmen joining their ranks, it no longer looked very humane either. Parliament passed The Poor Law of 1601, which provided for giving money, food or clothing to the needy. This worked passably well and, after its passage, there were fewer people starving in the streets, fewer scenes of outright destitution to be seen in England. It had its limitations however, and one of those, that bothered moralists of the time very much, was that sometimes it allowed a few of the "able-bodied poor" to receive benefits without doing any work in return.

This was very upsetting to wealthy people of the time. They felt that anyone who could work, should work, and it bothered them no end when sometimes there was no work that could be found for them to do. In order to fix this perceived problem, an amendment to the Poor Law was passed in 1834. The main point of the amendment was to put pressure onto poor people, so that they would move around the country as needed, to go wherever the jobs were, instead of staying where they'd always lived, after all the jobs there had disappeared.

The main way this was to be done, was through a new rule, which said the only way anyone could get any aid at all, was by moving into a workhouse, an establishment where someone got food, of sorts, and a place to sleep for the night, but in return had to do whatever hard, menial work was set for them, by the workhouse administrators.

By design, this was always something depressing and nasty. The idea was that the poor should so hate the prospect of doing such horrible things, that they would go anywhere, take any job, accept even the most miserable wage, in order to save themselves having to go to the workhouse. Jobs like hammering rocks into gravel for use in road-building, were favored by workhouse administrators. Another popular job was picking oakum, which was fraying old ropes into fiber, for use as caulking to stop leaks on ships.

These jobs were useful at least. They might be back-breakingly difficult and unpleasant, but at least a person doing them could see that he was producing something useful. The worst job given to workhouse inmates however, walking the treadmill, frequently served no useful purpose whatsoever.

Although sometimes the power generated by work on the treadmill would be used to turn a mill, most of the time it went completely wasted. Able-bodied poor people would be forced to walk (or climb) in place for hour after miserable hour, frequently closed into cubicles so that they could not interact with the other people on the treadmill. By this useless labor, they supposedly "paid" for whatever food and shelter they were being given.

And what lesson were they to learn from this work they were doing? What lesson could be learned, except that the ruling classes ruled, while they served. The workhouse system in England was not a way of giving aid to the poor, nearly as much as it was a way of making sure they all understood their inferior status.

You know, what got me thinking about workhouses today, was the time I spent helping to fill out the demographics bubbles on standardized tests at the school where I work. The kids already took the tests a few weeks back, but they can't be sent in to the state to be scored until every detail about every child has been discovered, and filled in, on the proper little box on the test document. This includes such momentous decisions as what ethnicity to write in for the little girl with the Spanish-sounding name, who's parents were born in Mexico, and who speaks Spanish in the home, but who does not self-identify as Hispanic or Latino, and which of all the totally inaccurate ethnic designations to use for the Arabic-background kids (You'd think a state like California, that has hundreds of thousands of Arab-Americans living here, would have an ethnic designation for Arab-background on their standardized tests, wouldn't you? But no-ooo-oooo). My fellow reading teachers and I were sitting in the Vice-Principal's office, carefully filling in all the bubbles we were sure about. Because you see, there is a "correct" way to fill the bubbles in, and if you don't know what that is, you have to seek out your school-site expert to help you. And if they don't know the answer, you have to call the State and find out the correct answer, because heaven forbid the bubbles should be filled out incorrectly!

And I found myself amazed, at the thought of all the time this was taking. It wasn't just the time the kids had spent testing, or even the time the teachers had spent preparing them to take the tests -- It wasn't even the time the other reading teachers and I were spending filling in the damn bubbles after it all. No, what really amazed me, was how much extra time, on top of it all, the administrators were spending, in order to learn all the rules of bubble-filling.

No one was getting any benefit out of any of it. Research has shown that standardized tests are a very inaccurate way of measuring student achievement. Too much testing hurts student morale, not to mention what it does to the morale of the teachers. It also eats up valuable administrator-time. Whenever we reading teachers had questions about our bubble-filling duties, we had to go track down the Vice-Principal to answer them. And if he couldn't help us, we had to find the Curriculum Coach and see if she could. And if neither of them was sure, we had to wait while they debated various options, and precedents, and discussed whether a call to the State would be necessary. All along, life at the school was going on. Sixth-graders were breaking school rules, and needing lectures, volunteer parties were being planned that needed speeches by the Vice-Principal. And there he was right when he was needed, helping us figure out how to fill in bubbles.

And I asked myself, "what purpose does this serve? Is it helping anyone at all, or is it just a way of showing public school personnel that we don't matter very much -- that public schools don't matter very much -- because the movers and shakers can always force us to do this pointless, unnecessary work, when we could be doing something useful. I ask you now: What do you think?

HyperSmash

Racial Prejudicing in the Warriors Book Series

noreply@blogger.com (Game-Freak) — Sun, 15 May 2011 16:24:00 +0000

Fireheart

At first glance, the Warriors series of books are about feral cats who have established tribal governments and embark upon wild adventures. However there are also some strong undertones of racism. "Kitty-Pets", cats who were born and raised in captivity, are not allowed on clan turf and are banned from ever becoming a part of the clans.
They are treated like outcasts or untouchables and are shunned by the cats who were born feral. Kitty-pets are also banned from ever attaining the status of leader because of the simple fact that they're kitty-pets, disregarding Firestar who is a special exception. Inter-group mating and marriage is strictly forbidden and results in the immediate exile of the cat who engaged in these activities. If these inter-group matings produce kittens, those kittens are shunned by both clan cats and kitty-pets alike because they are the product of forbidden intercourse. *Spoiler Alert* In the original series, the character Fire Heart meets and mates with a female cat he had known when he was a kitty-pet. This copulation results in the birth of a kitten named Cloud Paw. Cloud Paw is of course shunned by the other Thunder Clan cats because he is a "mulatto", for lack of a better word. *End Spoiler Alert* The clan cats also display strong feelings of racial prejudice towards the kitty-pets. They seem to consider themselves superior in all aspects, and it is this feeling of superiority that makes them look down on the kitty-pets. It really is interesting to consider why there are such racist motifs in the stories and whether they imply that Erin Hunter harbors racist feelings or that Erin was trying to defeat racial prejudicing. Take the messages however you please, but take a minute to consider them.

HyperSmash

Writing Fanfiction

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 15 May 2011 16:17:00 +0000

Fanfiction has a kind of a disreputable reputation. This is based, I think, on the fact that it first came to the public's attention through the Star Trek fandom. Star Trek fans, as everyone thinks they know have no life (Everyone also thinks they know that once, at a fan convention, William Shatner told all the Trekkies to "get a life", but actually that's from a Saturday Night Live skit). Anything to do with them, is automatically vaguely comical. Also, fanfiction is not just associated with the Star Trek fandom, but with what a lot of people might think was the most embarrassing part of it, which is the pairing of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock as lovers. I don't know why it is, but the fact is, there are an awful lot of people in the general public, who are so conventionally-minded that they don't like to see any characters paired, except for the ones who are couples in the original material. And of course back when the Star Trek fandom was first getting big, and the first Kirk/Spock stories were being published, same sex love was still considered fairly disturbing by a majority of the general public.

Fortunately, times have changed. Fanfiction nowadays can lose its disreputable image. What is it really, when it's done right, but amateurs doing what TV and movie writers get paid big money to do, writing about other peoples' characters? There is of course, the problem that a lot of the time it's not done right, but why should that be a disadvantage? The same thing can be said of any genre, can't it? Have you ever tried to read a teenage girl's poetry?

Fanfiction is written by people who love a story (usually a book or a movie) so much, that they don't want it to end. Mostly, it's written by people who love a character from a story, so much that they don't want to say good-bye to them. Most of us start out by writing about our favorite characters. And we start out by writing as fans, reveling in every detail about them, maximizing the word-count we give to them, not trying to do anything but spend as much time on them as we possibly can, without driving all our potential readers away. Which brings me to the cardinal sin of fanfiction.

Driving potential readers away: The quickest way to do that, is to write your main character inaccurately. Remember, most readers of fanfiction are there because of their love for a particular character. This is why if you go to Fanfiction.net, which is the biggest source for fanfiction online, you will see that it's laid out so that first, you can find stories about the exact book or series you want to read about and that, inside all the most popular series, it's organized further so that you can find stories about your favorite characters.

Dirty secret, I still go to Fanfiction.net sometimes, just to see if anyone's written something new about my favorite series character of all time, Pegasus J. Crawford, from the series Yu-Gi-Oh! Most of the time there isn't. -- Pegasus was only the villain during one season of the series, and after that he showed up a couple of times, mostly as a sort of a comic figure. -- And when there is, a lot of the time it's written by somebody who doesn't understand him very well, so I don't bother reading it.

Some people understand a character intuitively, but for a lot of us, it takes practice. For most of us fans, there are certain moments in our chosen series, that just speak to us, that encapsulate in a moment or two, all that we love most about our favorite character. Sometimes it's hard though, to remember that it's the context of the rest of the series, that gives those moments their meaning. There are for instance, a lot of very popular villain characters, who spend most of their screen-time doing terrible, evil, awful things, and then at the very end of their time in the series, it comes out that they did it all because of their Tragic, Tragic Past. Novice fanwriters will often make the mistake of "woobiefying" these characters (from the slang term woobie), or in other words, writing them more endearing and pitiable than they ever are, any other time in the series, just because of this last little end-bit. I have a friend who automatically clicks away from any story where any of the characters have been woobiefied even the least little bit. Me? Well I'd never have any new Pegasus-stories to read, if I didn't read the ones where he'd been woobiefied a little.

It is rather nauseating though, to read a story where your favorite kickass-villain has been turned into something sweet and gentle and pathetic. It's also aggravating when a writer will notice a faint bit of tension between two characters, in one passing scene, get to thinking dirtily about it, and then wrench the characters' natures all around to write a fetish-story about them. There is a very popular pairing in the Yu-Gi-Oh! fan-community, for instance, a sort of a dom-sub thing, that is entirely based on the fact that one major asshole-character, Kaiba Seto, occasionally uses derogatory terms to address another character, Jounuchi Katsuya, whom he mostly doesn't notice at all. Personally, I find it annoying as hell, because neither character is ever shown as wanting to spend any time at all with the other one, except for maybe to play a card game together (and even that's one-sided), and the only way to write them as any kind of a steady couple is to absolutely mangle the personalities of both of them. It is a popular pairing though, so you can take my opinion with a grain of salt here.

Please don't get me wrong, I have no problem with stories that pair characters who are enemies in the original series. Enmity creates tension, and tension, well it's what wakes a lot of us up and makes us start thinking dirty. -- Indifference now? But, I'm not going to keep ranting about Puppyshipping. -- For some reason that I don't understand, most fanfiction doesn't seem to come out of romance series, but out of stories that are more action-oriented. And most action series don't have a lot of couples in them (and for some reason, the ones they do have mostly aren't the most popular pairings), so if you're going to write romance or erotic fiction about them, you're going to end up extrapolating a lot from the nonsexual tension between the characters. Villains always get paired with the heroes. Best friends usually get paired as well. And there is a subset of fanfiction that involves just finding ways to pair all the most unlikely characters together as plausibly as possible, which is very popular with both writers and readers.

Good fanfiction then, involves writing your characters as much like they are in the original material as possible, while putting them into pairings they would never have considered in the original material, in a hundred million years. If you can fit a fetish or two in there as well, that's all the better. Internet-anonymity makes people feel free, and believe me, whatever your secret quirk, you will have no trouble finding an audience that is delighted rather than squicked by it. What it doesn't involve ever though, is writing yourself into the story.

You will find fan-people who actually like to read stories with self-insertion in them, but for most of us they are taboo. A lot of times the self-insertion will be confused with the Mary Sue (AKA the character who is more awesome, more beautiful, and more perfect than anyone else in the story), and people sometimes take pains to distinguish the one from the other. Self-insertions do not have to be Mary Sue-type characters, they will say; there do exist writers out there, who are skilled enough to write themselves in fresh and interesting ways. Personally, I still think they suck. Fanfiction is all about seeing our favorite characters in action, not about learning something new, about some random person, and I no more want to see an author insert herself into a fanfic, than I want to see Dennis Snee traipsing around the set of The Simpsons with Homer and Marge.

Perhaps I'm just angry because like I said, there is not much written these days about my own favorite character, and a lot of what is getting written includes self-insertions. Girls for some reason like to fantasize about themselves being Pegasus' daughter, or the one really understanding woman, who can bring him back from the brink of tragedy and death. This is understandable of course. These are the kinds of fantasies girls have. They're also the kind of thing you should never let anyone else read, in the entire world, with the possible exception of a best friend or two. Anyone with aspirations of being a good fanwriter, needs to keep practicing until they have moved past these embarrassing experiments before they start posting (either that or be ready to do some heavy deletion to their FF.net account once they start to mature).

HyperSmash

Cigarettes

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 07 May 2011 21:24:00 +0000

Today cigarettes are mostly famous for being highly addictive, and hugely dangerous (although many of us still can't help admitting that a person does look awfully cool when they're smoking one). And it's common knowledge that the tobacco industry had to pay out a huge settlement in 1998 to make up for having covered up their knowledge about the dangers of cigarette smoking for most of the Twentieth Century.

But if you've been alive for more than a few decades as I have been, or if you've studied a little history even, maybe you've noticed that talking about the dangers of smoking is not exactly a new thing. Maybe you've seen ads like this one from 1930, which mention the irritating effects of cigarette smoke:

Or this one from 1935 which touts how great Camel cigarettes are, compared with those others that "get your wind":

Perhaps you've read that cigarettes used to be called coffin nails, or that an old Australian nickname for them was gaspers. Perhaps you've wondered: How long have people actually known that cigarettes are bad for you?

It was after the automation of the cigarette-rolling industry in the 1880's led to a reduction in prices, that cigarette smoking first began to grow popular. There is evidence to suggest however, that the tobacco used in those first early cigarettes was coarse and rough-tasting, so that smokers probably did not inhale. Smoking without inhaling, while not a good thing, is a less dangerous way of smoking.

It was Dr. Isaac Adler, in his book Primary Malignant Growths of the Lung a Bronchi, who first made an anecdotal connection between cigarettes and lung cancer. The first actual research proving the link, wasn't published until 1929, however. And by then cigarette makers had consolidated their place at the center of American society. Cigarettes were given away free to soldiers serving overseas during World War I. And in 1929, the publicist Edward Bernays won what is probably the biggest public relations triumph in history, when he made the connection between smoking and women's liberation, by persuading a group of debutantes to march in the New York City Easter Parade, smoking their torches of freedom.

Further research on the dangers of smoking came only slowly. In 1950, British researcher Richard Doll published his study showing links between smoking and lung cancer and heart disease. Following in 1956, convincing proof of that link was shown by the British Doctor's Study. Public opinion in America began to move gradually away from smoking after that, but even so, the move was a slow one.

As near as I can tell, the reason for that is twofold: First of all, it has been shown by documented proof that the tobacco industry actively hid evidence that smoking cigarettes is dangerous for many years. In addition though, I think it was the anti-smoking forces themselves, who helped keep smoking popular.

The anti-smoking movement, you understand, began in the 1830's, before there was any evidence at all that smoking was dangerous. Activists from the American prohibition movement spoke out against smoking for its role in "creating a morbid or diseased thirst" which only liquor could quench. The Prussian government made a law saying smokers had to shield their cigars behind a wire mesh contraption, to keep sparks from falling on the skirts of ladies nearby. Into the Twentieth Century, cigarette the powers that be said that smoking was "unladylike". They condemned the flappers of the 1920's for smoking in the street, as well as for other such supposedly unladylike behaviors as shortening their skirts and allowing boys to kiss them on dates.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that this kind of condemnation probably encouraged people to smoke instead of stopping them. It's like the anti-drug films our teachers used to make us watch in class in the 1970's, that kept telling us smoking a single joint was going to turn us into strung-out heroin abusers or LSD trippers flying out of ten-story windows, long after most of us had actually tried marijuana and found out differently.

Scare tactics don't really work so well unless they're connected up with some real facts. Sometimes they don't work very well even if there are some facts behind them, because the facts end up taking a back seat to the overblown hype. A lot of the kids I went to school with went on to try cocaine, and a lot of the other BIG, TERRIBLE DRUGS we were all warned about, because so many of the warnings we were given were so obviously dumb, that they stopped taking any of them seriously.

I suspect the same thing happened with cigarettes. After years of stuffy old ladies saying dumb things, like "no lady smokes", smoking came to be seen as cool, and emancipated. Men smoked to look "manly", and women smoked to keep up with them, and finally you end up with so much smoking going on that I imagine the average room must have smelled like those horrid designated Smokers' Rooms that you're sometimes unlucky enough to have to rent when you show up too late at the Holiday Inn Express and all the good rooms have taken.

HyperSmash

Gingerbread Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Game-Freak) — Sat, 07 May 2011 00:43:00 +0000

Nowadays they're made by little kids in daycare classes or Girl Scout meetings, out of graham crackers glued together using tubes of store-bought frosting, and decorated with peppermints and M&Ms, but when I was a kid, gingerbread houses were in their glory. Their proliferation, during the 1960's and 60's was, I think, another result of the Feminine Mystique. Intelligent women, kept at home by the expectations of the time, needed an outlet for their creativity. For the rest of the year maybe, knitting or Paint-By-Number would do, but during December, they made gingerbread houses.

Here is Betty Crocker's picture of what one was supposed to look like, from the classic 1963 edition of the Betty Crocker Cooky Book, the edition my generation grew up with, that we all studied when we wanted to try baking, or to beg our mothers to make cookies for us:

My own mom made gingerbread houses every Christmas for several years in a row, enough years that I was quite shocked, and outraged, the year she said she wasn't going to do it any more.

"Make one yourself, if you want one so badly," she told me. And so I did.

I am here to tell you, that making gingerbread houses back then, was a labor-intensive process. Nowadays you can find ready-made pans; all you have to do is glop your dough into them and bake, and wa-la, perfect walls, roof, etc. Back when I was young, first you made your gingerbread dough. You chilled it, you rolled it out, then you laid it carefully onto un-greased cookie sheets, trying very hard to get it smooth, so your walls would come out flat. After you'd baked it, you used paper patterns that you'd made by scaling up the template-pattern in the Cooky Book to cut out your various house-pieces.

Then you waited. Your walls and roof had to be perfectly dry before you were going to be able to put together a house -- Believe me, I know; my house looked like it had been through the San Francisco earthquake, there were so many cracks and cemented-together broken bits. -- You stuck the pieces together, using a special, hard-drying type of frosting that you made yourself, again following the instructions from Betty Crocker. Finally, after you'd taken pains to decorate it as nicely as possible, and set it on display for an admiring family until well after Christmas, then was when you were able to eat it.

And then was when you found out that a properly-made gingerbread house is inedible, at least for anyone over the age of 5. By the time the gingerbread has hardened enough to stay together in the form of a house, it's not only totally and totally hard, but close to flavorless as well. The special hard-dry frosting has no taste at all besides a vague sweetness. And as for the candies you put on so carefully to make it look "special", well those have all fallen off by then, and your little sisters or your dad have taken them away and eaten them. I was never so disappointed by anything in my life, than I was by that damn house I made, and I understood finally, why my mom had stopped making them.

HyperSmash

To be or not to be...a furry

noreply@blogger.com (Game-Freak) — Mon, 02 May 2011 23:29:00 +0000


Fur Suit


Lucario Fursuit

The term furry is a fairly obscure one, kept hidden away in chat rooms and on forums, but the concept is very common. A furry is an anthropomorphic animal like Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse. Everyone likes Mickey Mouse right? Then why is it that the furry fandom is received in such a bad light? The answer lies in the fact that it's a little on the strange side and can have some sexual connotations. The majority of the furry fandom are people who simply like animals and feel a connection with them. Sometimes this connection is expressed through visual media or prose, and sometimes it's expressed through a simple sense of community with others who feel like they do.

If you were to define the term furry as expressed above, you could claim that famous animators like Walt Disney and Chuck Jones and authors like Erin Hunter were/are furries. This defines the majority of the furry fandom and really is the best description, but it's not the art and prose that earned the furry his/her bad name. It's activities like fur suiting. Fur suiting refers to the act of dressing in animal costumes and role playing that your are that animal. Some people choose to fashion their costumes around real life animals and others go for the more mythological aspect. Some even choose to use anime and cartoon characters. I've seen fursuits designed to look like foxes and fursuits designed to look like wolves. I've even seen a fursuit designed around the Pokemon Lucario which, for those of you not well versed in the gaming world, is a character from the Pokemon series of video games and anime television shows.The act of fursuiting is really quite similar to cosplay, a.k.a the act of dressing up as and imitating cartoon characters, and plays a similar role at furry conventions and gatherings. The reason that fur suiting gives the furry world such a bad name is that people don't normally feel comfortable around those who get pleasure out of the act of imitation, unless their actors of course, and that role playing in general has a bad reputation after the unpleasantness that went along with the release of Dungeons and Dragons. The second aspect of the furry fandom that wigs people out is the sexual aspect to furry artwork. Like all other things there are people who choose to add a pornographic aspect to their artwork, and this could be likened to beastiality which really isn't held in the highest respect. Some artists design their art around anthropomorphic animals engaging in intercourse with humans or each other, and others design their art around anime and video game characters engaging in intercourse with humans or each other. Most furries don't deal in the pornographic side of the furry world, and the pornographic side doesn't make being a furry a sexuality. Taken in its basest form, being a furry simply means, as stated above, that you like animals when their drawn anthropomorphized. If reading this has left you interested in the furry fandom and you feel that you might be a furry, there are plenty of safe websites out there where you can meet other
furries and learn a little more about the fandom. If you curious check out some of the links below.

Fur Affinity

Furry 4 Life

Or check out this awesome free MMOG. Furcadia is a online game full of furries and role players.

American Exceptionalism and Little House on the Prairie

noreply@blogger.com (Game-Freak) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 21:27:00 +0000

I could get really political with this article on American Exceptionalism, and talk about
this article from the leftwing site AlterNet, titled "We're #1 --
Ten Depressing Ways America Is Exceptional", which talks at some length about all
the advantages this country had when it started out, and how over time we've squandered
most of them, to the extent that we are now a poorer, less healthy, and less fair place,
than most of the European countries most Americans feel so superior to. But I won't.
Instead, I want to talk about the idea of exceptionalism, where it came from, and how it
has shaped American perceptions.

The idea of American Exceptionalism put briefly, is that America enjoys certain
advantages, because God or a beneficent nature, gave them to us, and that because of
that, we also have certain responsibilities. It comes out of the Puritan tradition, from the
original settlers, who moved to New England to escape religious discrimination at home,
and found a fertile land in which to make their home. John Winthrop gave voice to the
idea first, in a sermon he
preached in 1630.

Over time, the original
Puritan idea has gotten itself coupled with the so-called "Frontier Theory" of American History. This is historian
Frederick Jackson Turner's theory that Americans, because for most of our history we
lived in a land with plenty of undeveloped land, where all a person (a white person,
at least) had to do to lift themselves out of poverty, was to move westward, to a place
that hadn't been settled yet, and make a home there. He said that this former freedom
had nurtured a unique American character, distinctive for its individualism, self-
reliance, and distrust of established authority, that the American tendency to want to "do
for ourselves", and keep Big Government's hands off our lives, was something we'd
developed mainly because whenever someone couldn't make it at home, they could just
light out for the territory and do better.

I think he has a good
point. And just recently I found his point exemplified, in a book titled Let The Hurricane Roar,
first published in 1933, by Rose Wilder Lane.

Rose Wilder Lane is mostly known today, for being the daughter
of Laura
Ingalls Wilder, author of the popular Little House book series. In truth though,
she was a lot more. An author in her own right (and thought by many to have done a lot of
the writing on the Little House books), she was famous enough in her time, to have
been chosen by Henry Ford to do his biography. She was also noted for her political
activism, which came from a libertarian perspective.

Libertarianism is a political movement, mostly American, which holds up individual self-
reliance as the highest good, and staunchly opposes most government programs (or laws
for that matter). Libertarians take seriously, Thomas Paine's famous statement, "that
government is best, which governs least". The most famous libertarian of the present
day is probably Texas Representative Ron Paul. Ron
Paul opposes military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is usually thought
of as a leftwing issue, and for government spending on social programs such as Medicare
and Social Security, generally considered more of a rightwing concern. If he looks like
he's all over the place politically, it is only to people who don't understand the libertarian
orientation behind all of Representative Paul's views, which all come out of his desire to
keep government as small as possible.

Likewise, Rose Wilder Lane wanted to keep government in America very small. She
was offended by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's introduction of Social Security, and cut her
own lifestyle back to a bare-bones minimum, in later years, to make sure of not having to
pay Social Security or income taxes. (For more details, click here) Americans
should should stand or fall on their individual initiative, she thought, as they had done in
pioneer times.

As anyone familiar with
the Little House books knows, Lane was thinking of how her mother grew up, raised by

two authentic American pioneers, Charles and Caroline Ingalls. Her book Let the
Hurricane Roar tells about how Charles and Caroline made a homestead together
near Walnut Grove, Minnesota. It is a sort of an adult version of her mother's book,
On the Banks of Plum Creek, although there are differences to how Lane and her
mother treat the story.

What stood out most to me when I read the book recently though, was not how it
compared to the Wilder book, but rather, what a good example the book was, of
Turner's "Frontier Theory", and how the pioneer life it showed might have shaped Lane's
own libertarian beliefs.

The book begins with Charles and Caroline Ingalls, settling in for their first summer at
their homestead on the Minnesota prairie. They are living in a dugout-house Charles has
made with his own hands, dug into a hillside, and roofed with prairie sod. Their diet is
game Charles catches out on the prairie, cooked over a fire stoked by tight-twisted marsh
hay. Their income comes from the hides of the animals he catches, which he takes into
town and sells.

Charles and Caroline pride themselves on their self-sufficiency, not just in good times,
but in bad as well. When locusts eat their entire young wheat crop, Charles hops a
freight train and goes back East to find work, while his wife stays on the homestead, to
make sure some squatter doesn't take it over. It must have taken incredible strength and
courage, yes, to live as they did. But what's missing from the story, is that it also took a
lot of material advantages, that were there for the asking during pioneer times.

There was the
advantage of plentiful game, for instance. As anyone who has ever played the
educational game Oregon Trail knows, game supplies are limited. If too many
animals are hunted at any one time, there will be fewer available for later hunting.
Indeed after the locusts come through, Charles and Caroline bewail the fact that there
aren't any jackrabbits left to provide food for them, never realizing (at least as far as the
book lets on) how fortunate they were to have plenty of them available before.

There was the advantage of free land, which was available to them because of the Homestead Act of
1862, which said that anyone could have 160 acres of undeveloped frontier land,

provided they stayed there and farmed it for five years. This too, Charles and Caroline
take as their natural due -- And so does Lane who, for a libertarian, is surprisingly
pleased with this bit of federal intervention.

Charles and Caroline have plenty of free fuel, thanks to the free-growing grass in the
marshes. They have money, thanks to the wild game, free just for the cost of bullets, that
Charles hunts. They get more money, from Charles working on the Transcontinental
Railroad, built thanks to a collaboration of private companies and the Federal
Government, a fact which also seems not to have bothered the libertarian Lane. (See here:
Pacific Railroad Acts)

When the situation is at its most desperate, Charles goes back east, not by buying a
railroad ticket, but by walking until he reaches the nearest freight train line, and then
hopping a free ride. In other words, this self-reliant man takes advantage of the work of
others, for his own benefit. Being a young, strong white man (another advantage), he
finds it easy to get a job, and sends back money to his wife and young child.

What bothers me about Let the Hurricane Roar, and about Rose Wilder Lane's
pioneer-influenced libertarianism in general, is how much good fortune it fails to notice.
Charles and Caroline work hard, yes, they are strong, and they are brave, and in the end,
their accomplishment is a significant one. But they do not do it all on their own. They
are helped by the wonderful situation of the time, when land, wildlife and wild plants
are available freely, and all a (white) couple has to do, is go out past the urbanized area,
and take charge of a farm of their own. They are helped by the Federal government too,
however much libertarian admirers of our pioneer past might like to admit it. In truth,
for a bunch of self-reliant individualists, pioneers such as Charles and Caroline Ingalls
are really much more like George W. Bush, born on third base, but they think they hit a
triple.

Carrot Babies

noreply@blogger.com (linkzelda98) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 23:31:00 +0000

HyperSmash Yay! My first blog post! Enjoy.

The AK 47 (AK.A The most well known assault rifle ever)

noreply@blogger.com (Game-Freak) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 01:41:00 +0000

USSR Flag

What weapon pops into your mind first when you think of assault rifles? The M16? The FN Scar? The Famas maybe? Or do you think of the AK 47? The AK 47, unlike the rest of the AK family, has become quite famous in modern times.
The Soviets manufactured thousands of AK 47s in preparation for the seemingly inevitable war with the US and then stashed them in weapons dumps. However when their economy crashed and the USSR fell they were stuck with all the rifles and a huge deficit. In an attempt to raise money and rid themselves of the AKs, the Russians sold the majority of the weapons to black market arms dealers and various insurgents all over the world. Like so many things in life this weapons dealing has become a popular subject for social commentary and documentaries including the popular film Lord of War. I was hoping to include a clip from the movie in which the main character is purchasing caches of AK 47s from a Russian arms dealer, but I could only find the clip in Spanish. Very sorry about.

Of course the purpose of this post was not to discuss the decline of society and all that jazz. I'll leave that to the politicians and Fox News. The AK 47 has become a very popular weapon over the years. In fact it has become so very popular that Kalashnikov, the company that originally manufactured the weapon, has complained that others are producing "boot-leg" AK 47s.

AK-47

The AK 47 is a defining point of the Cold War and Soviet Russia. When the Russians are included in a game they always run around with AK 47s blasting things to bits. The majority of semi-modern FPS games include the AK 47 as a playable weapon or at the very least a reference in-game to the gun. The AK 47 also has a very prominent place on the big screen making numerous "cameos" in movies and televisions series. Rarely does a single weapon earn a following like the AK 47. One car dealership in Texas even went so far as to offer a free AK 47 with the purchase of a car. Imagine that, Texans rollin' around in their pickup trucks with AK 47s in the cab. But I digress. The AK 47 is one of the most popular weapons ever and very likely will remain that way for years to come.
HyperSmash

The Itty-Bitty Titty Committee

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:18:00 +0000

One thing you'll notice, if you watch old TV shows, is how small everyone's breasts used to be. This picture of Farrah Fawcett, taken right before her success in the role of Jill Munroe on Charlie's Angels is a good example. Tina Louise, in her role as Ginger Grant on Gilligan's Island, is an even better one:

Back in 1976, the style for women's bodies was to be slim, athletic-looking. Plus Jill Munroe was supposed to be a crime fighter, albeit a sexy crime fighter; too much up top might have gotten in her way, when she went to kick ass on some bad guys. Ginger though, was written as a starlet, the sort of woman whose livelihood depended on her glamor. Every few seconds on the show, it seems like, there will be film shots calling attention to her shapely body. It's the kind of character that nowadays, might be played by someone who looks like this:

Or like this:

This is because our expectations for what a woman's body should look like have changed, and the reason for that change is the increasing proliferation of breast implants.

Silicone implants first entered the public consciousness in a big (you should excuse the expression) way, back in the 1960's, when professional dancers started to get them so they could make more money on the topless dancing circuit. At the time and for some time afterward, there was something tacky, almost comical, about the idea of very large breasts. Take for example, the 1980's-era book The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, by Jane and Michael Stern, which included an entire entry, devoted to "Breasts, Enormous," and linked together images well-endowed 1950's-era film queens like Jayne Mansfield, with those of early-model Barbie dolls and the projecting automobile bumpers known as Dagmars, because they stuck out like the breasts of another star from the 1950's, known by the screen-name Dagmar.

As late as the end of the 1980's, breast implants were very rare, and women, even onscreen, tended to be smaller rather than larger. People still saw C-cups, or even B-cups as normal, in celebrities as well as in regular women, so much so that when the fashion industry chose to highlight the breast at the end of the decade, and cosmetic surgeons began to advertise very aggressively, Susan Faludi chose to highlight these as dangerous, anti-woman trends, in her bestselling book Backlash.

Stylish bustier-dresses, with poofy skirts meant to create an hourglass figure, provided that a woman had the breasts for it, and articles like this one from April, 1989, that proclaimed, "Good news, ladies: Breasts are IN," (Lehman, Gigi: "Thou Shalt Have Breasts". April 11, 1989. http://articles.dailypress.com/1989-04-11/features/8904100187_1_ten-commandments-breasts-betty-ford-center) were not enough to create the change that has taken place, that now makes us see normal-sized breasts as being too tiny, and has created a new "normal", where any woman who is seen onscreen anywhere, always has to have big huge enormous titties.

Two things, I think, came together to create this change: First of all, implants became safer. Silicone gel implants, the commonest type used from the 1960's to the early 1990's, had a long record of malfunction, and were linked to higher rates of breast cancer for the women who used them. In 1992, the FDA banned them altogether, and even today, they are allowed only for use by women seeking breast reconstruction after a mastectomy. The breast-implant industry survived by improving the quality of saline-filled implants, which are now the commonest type used.

The other development which helped the industry I think, was the short economic boom the US enjoyed during the George W. Bush presidency. From an article published by USA Today in 2006 at the height of the boom: "From 2000 to 2005, the number of U.S. women who enlarged their breasts with implants jumped 37%, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons." And, "In 1998, according to the plastic surgeons' society, 132,378 U.S. women had their breasts augmented — fewer than half as many who had the operation in 2005." (Rubin, Rita: "Buoyed by Bigger Breasts". December 19, 2006. http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-12-18-breast-implants_x.htm)

Sadly, I think ubiquitous breast implants are here to stay. They join Botox, and rigorously styled hair and the mandatory pedicure, as things a woman is obligated to do these days, if she doesn't want to look untidy and frumpy. Myself, I think this is an unfortunate thing. I long for the day when young women looked like this:

And older women looked like this:

For the days when a woman could have a little bit of flab on her or a couple of wrinkles, or even a less than ginormous bosom, and still be considered attractive.

The Potato Masher

noreply@blogger.com (Game-Freak) — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 22:27:00 +0000

German Stick Grenade

To the right you can see a potato masher. No, not the kind used to prepare mashed potatoes and other soft mashed foods. I'm talking about a German stick grenade which was nicknamed the potato masher because of it's similar appearance to a potato masher.

German soldier tying a stick grenade to a fe

These grenades were first manufactured and used in combat by the Germans during WW1. The design featured a small pull cord with a porcelain ball attached to it, that hung from the bottom of a wooden handle. Atop this handle rested a metal head filled with explosives. The idea was that one would pull the string at the bottom, activating the trigger mechanism, and then hurl the now live grenade at the enemy. After a period of time the explosives would detonate and shards of the metal head would fly everywhere. Unfortunately this design worked far better in principle than it did in reality because the cord would often get caught on things and pulled, causing the grenade to detonate while the soldier was carrying it. Needless to say this was not pleasant for the hapless soldier. In the end, this problem actually gave rise to the addition of a metal screw-on cap on the bottom to hide the cord until the soldier was ready to detonate his grenade. Despite the hazards associated with it, the cord proved to be useful in combat situations because the grenades could be hung from fences. When someone tried to climb over a fence hung with stick grenades he would trigger them and cause them to detonate. German stick grenades can still be obtained as replicas and antiques, but they are no longer manufactured or used in combat.