• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 13th, 2025

help-circle
rss




  • Like most parents, my mom was uncomfortable talking to me about sex, but unlike most other parents, she recognized her discomfort as her problem and she did her best to work around it. She didn’t want me to have the same hangups. Fortunately, this was the 1970s, and she had a lot of resources available. There were lots of books about sex, and she gave me some, and left others around the house for me to read when I wanted.

    At the time, I don’t think there was any specific law against allowing your kid to look at, say Playboy magazine, much less more explicit material. You’d probably get prosecuted for it now, which is reasonable. At that time, Playboy was still fairly softcore, just air-brushed breasts and gauzy drapes. And there were “nudist” or “natural” publications, with people having sex out in nature without the photo tricks used today, so you really couldn’t see much. I was allowed to look at those for a while, although I think the adults felt ishy about it, and soon put those away.


  • In this capitalist hellscape, I think it’s almost impossible to hire anyone to do anything without exploiting them. I’m fairly convinced that the whole “opioid crisis” is really just a chronic pain crisis, brought about by our system that works people to death; nearly everyone over the age of 40 has incurred some kind of permanent physical or emotional damage while working. There are degrees of exploitation, of course, but I’m not sure we can put sex work in a special category based on exploitation alone.




  • I think our brains can only do so much major cognitive work at a time. Playing from your soul, and feeling big feelings, these things override the ability to maintain social control over your facial expression. Perhaps keeping emotions off our faces is a skill that evolved more recently than having emotions, and thus it’s the first to go when we’re concentrating on other things.


  • Not really a lesson learned, but a line that stayed with me. I forget which book it’s in, maybe Post Office, but he writes about a winning streak he had at the track. It was so good he either quit or took a leave of absence from his job. He woke late, enjoyed steak and scotch, then ambled down to the track. And then he says, “it was a great life, and I did not tire of it.”

    All our lives, we’re told that wealth won’t buy happiness, that the only true fulfillment comes from hard work, and that getting what we want will only lead to misery. But here’s Bukowski describing a life of utter self-indulgence, and saying he never got tired of it. Profound.







  • The original versions are old favorites, despite the audio problems in some of them. I’ve listened to most of the Penguin versions. Some are outstanding, like Pyramids, read by Andy Serkis. Most of them are pretty good.

    But a few are so terrible I can’t bear to listen to them. Like Hogfather, read by Sian Clifford. She read the wizard voices in a falsetto to scratch glass. And Katherine Parkinson absolutely laid waste to Monstrous Regiment with her appalling rendition of Jackrum. So clear she Just Didn’t Get It.




  • I’m afraid so. There are a lot of people still fighting our Civil War, the one that supposedly ended over 150 years ago. Even without those troglodytes, there is a distinct cultural difference between the North and South, as I think there is in many countries. We tend to rub each other the wrong way sometimes.

    Old joke about the difference. Walk up to a Southerner’s house, and they say, “can I help you?” Walk up to a Yankee’s house, and it’s, “whaddya want?”