Lileks has some thoughts on clueless anti-Christian bigots in entertainment. And the fact that they’d never bravely slander Muslims in the same manner.
Also, a question about movie stars past. I left a heretical comment that Marilyn Monroe was highly overrated. And I think that Hedy Lamar was hot for her brains (she invented frequency hopping).
Why bad jokes are easier to remember than good ones.
There may be a new trend in the Midwest:
Temporary Mayor Michael Brown made the off-the-cuff suggestion Friday in response to a question at a Rotary Club of Flint luncheon about the thousands of empty houses in Flint.
Brown said that as more people abandon homes, eating away at the city’s tax base and creating more blight, the city might need to examine “shutting down quadrants of the city where we (wouldn’t) provide services.”
He did not define what that could mean — bulldozing abandoned areas, simply leaving the vacant homes to rot or some other idea entirely.
Presumably, those areas would go back under the jurisdiction of the county, like other unincorporated areas, including policing by the Sheriff rather than city police.
I am not qualified to render an opinion on this subject:
The idea that birth can be orgasmic isn’t new. The British birth guru Sheila Kitzinger says that she has met “hundreds” of women during the course of her career who report experiencing orgasm during labour – some were hoping for it, others were taken completely by surprise. She herself has experienced it during three of her four labours (she has five daughters: one birth was twins). “It is difficult for a man to understand,” she says “hard, too, for any woman who has had an average hospital birth. But it can be one of the most profound psychosexual experiences in a woman’s life. Each contraction may bring a rush of joy so overwhelming that the pain recedes into the background.” She puts this partly down to simple biology. “The pressure of the baby’s head against the walls of the vagina and the fanning out of the tissues as the head descends bring for some women an unexpected sensation of sexual arousal, even of ecstasy.” But is this really an orgasm? Or just a very unusual sensation? “It can be orgasmic. People recognise it as an orgasm. And it can be a multiple orgasm, one with each push.”
Well, there can be a fine line between pain and pleasure, particularly when it comes to this sort of pain and pleasure.
You know, William Shatner had a three-word phrase for these people a few years back (the third was “life”):
Mr. Veazie, a manager at Underwriters Laboratories, built the chair himself last year, and has been gratified to find, since installing it in the living room in May, that “when someone comes in, it’s the first thing they comment on.”
You don’t say.
But I thought they didn’t like the word “Trekkie.” Isn’t it supposed to be “Trekker”?
You know, short of the Simpsons cat lady, I’m as big a cat person as they come, but I would not wipe my hands on this thing.
Paul Spudis has some interesting ruminations (with a comment from Neil deGrasse Tyson).
…only outlaws will wax:
Cherry Hill salon owner Linda Orsuto said that women would “go ballistic” if the proposal passed. She said that some women would resort to waxing themselves, visiting unlicensed salons or traveling to other states, including Pennsylvania, in a quest to remain bare down there.
“The clients are going to freak,” said Orsuto, who owns 800 West Salon & Spa, on Route 70. “It’s a hot issue, and we’re going to have to do something.”
Isn’t it wonderful to have a government so solicitous of our welfare that we (well, they) are driven to back-alley waxing?
And as Jonah notes, it is interesting how many people didn’t want to discuss it.
Only after we come to see that additional goods add precious little to our happiness;
Nonsense and hypocrisy. Computers aren’t basic needs. E-mail isn’t a basic need. Who says so? Me. So this person’s life cannot possibly be happier by the addition of a device that lets him peruse the words and deeds of the world. As for me, base shallow grasping materialist that I am, let me spell it out:
My computers bring me happiness, for they are instruments of knowledge and art. My cameras bring me joy, yea, for they allow me to capture the fleeting shadows of the day or the laughter of my child or the happy romps of my old dog in the new snow, and fix them forever in a form whose quality exceeds the fond dreams of D. W. Griffith. My car gives me pleasure, for it gives me freedom and ease of movement, allows me to meet friends, gather food for the family, and drive to work with the glories of Beethoven crashing from the speakers. Or AC/DC, depending on the mood. For that matter the morning drive is made pleasurable by possessions like the coffee maker, which serves up a hot delicious beverage the moment I wake from a comfortable bed – and the waking, I should add, was gently occasioned by a machine that cost a bit more than one of those $19.99 alarms that sounds like someone tripped the perimeter alarm at Los Alamos.
Since I seem to be seeing possessions in terms of the flow of the day, let me go on: my computer, which is hardly a basic need, gives me freedom at work unchained to a veal-pen desk; my cellphone lets me write messages to a network of beloved strangers or listen to music from around the world – and take a picture of something, if I choose. Photography is art, right? Art is good, right? Yes, I know – if it serves the general weal in a spiritual burning-issue sense. If I use the camera to snap a picture of the Catholic-run men’s shelter down the street, do I get a pass if I buy a new camera this year?
Or would that be overshadowed by the bilious negativity that rolls in dark waves from my large TV? It’s not a basic need, I admit – can I still have one? Yes, if it’s not LARGE. People who grudgingly admit the usefulness of a TV for pedagogical purposes reserve the right to frown on your TV if it’s larger than it need be, for several reasons: 1) you probably went into debt to get it; 2) it uses energy that makes the planet die; 3) you watch the wrong kind of programs; 4) the size of the screen is regarded as a direct reflection of the stupidity of the viewer.
Unless we’re talking about careful, pained, exquisitely sensitive motion pictures about the horrors of life in the suburbs in the Fifties.
They really should have called the fight after the first round.
Amitai Etzione calls himself a “communitarian.” But there is nothing new about his beliefs. There’s an older, shorter word for them. It starts with “f.”
Actually, quite a bit, but not as much as it could in the future:
Scientists have therefore proved resourceful in using the web to further their research. They have, however, tended to lag when it comes to employing the latest web-based social-networking tools to open up scientific discourse and encourage more effective collaboration.
Journalists are now used to having their every article commented on by dozens of readers. Indeed, many bloggers develop and refine their essays on the basis of such input. Yet despite several attempts to encourage a similarly open sytem of peer review of scientific research published on the web, most researchers still limit such reviews to a few anonymous experts. When Nature, one of the world’s most respected scientific journals, experimented with open peer review in 2006, the results were disappointing. Only 5% of the authors it spoke to agreed to have their article posted for review on the web—and their instinct turned out to be right, as almost half of the papers that were then posted attracted no comments.
Actually, I think that climate science has gotten a lot of review, peer and otherwise, on the web.