I am a baffled observer of the world around us, from H-Town, Texas, of course. I am an author, editor and the proprietor of Haiku Challenge Daily (haikuchallenge.tumblr.com); an ambitious but average drummer with a penchant for tabloid headlines. Life-long dream: swim with the sharks.
These are my collected ramblings, an online compendium of utter nonsense.
The Twitter handle is @baffled. Keep up!
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Not Quite a Porno Inferno
I heard an amusing story the other day about a fellow who was brought up in a fairly conservative, religious family. Back in 1975, when he was about 15 years old, his attention began to turn rather earnestly toward girls, women and sex. From time to time he was able to surreptitiously purchase a copy of Playboy magazine, which turned out to be a fairly satisfying experience for him. His conservative, religious upbringing though, also saddled him with tremendous feelings of guilt for purchasing the magazine (quite clearly not for the articles but rather for the plentiful pictures of naked women). So it was that he felt compelled to somehow dispose of or destroy the magazine, and one evening as the family gathered around the fireplace after dinner it dawned upon him that after everyone had gone off to do whatever it was they were doing, he could throw the Playboy into the fire and be done with it. Nobody would ever know. He would be in the clear.
So, when the moment presented itself, he sneaked into his room and retrieved the magazine and put it into the fire. Much to his alarm, the magazine did not burst into flames; it just sat there, barely smoldering. Research tells us that back in those days, Playboy was a much heftier magazine than it is today, so it wouldn’t burn as easily as it might now. Undeterred, our young man grabbed the poker next to the fireplace and began to stir up the fire, hoping to ignite the offending article which was now sitting in plain view, should anyone happen to wander back into the living room. His brother did wander back into the living room to watch television, so our young man had to sit blocking the fireplace, turning the magazine page by page so they would ignite. It took the better part of an hour for him to secretly burn the Playboy. To reinforce his feelings of guilt, when he observed himself in the mirror afterwards he noticed that the side of his face that had been closest to the fireplace was actually burned (just a little); a physical reminder of his shame.
Listening to this story got me thinking: surely there must be other examples of this phenomenon out there, no? Young men everywhere, at some time or other, fearful of their mothers looking over their shoulders, must have tried to get rid of their porn and ended up in a situation not unlike our young man here. What a tricky business it is growing up…
from get @baffled
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”What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance… Ask yourself: how has ‘elitism’ become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition, and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn’t seem too intelligent or well educated.
Sam Harris. My hero. (via cocknbull) (via wellthatsjustgreat)
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”If anything, the bragging was even more upsetting. When you argue that you survived a harrowing pregnancy because you’re “tough,” you imply that other women who die under similar circumstances were too weak to deserve to survive. It’s already bad enough that the religious right shames women who choose abortion for choosing their education, careers, relationships, already existing children, or their own lives over the obligation to have another baby. But shaming women for being weak who die trying to fill the mandate (or who are deprived of the choice) to bear children at all costs? That’s dark indeed, no matter how glowingly white the background of the ad is.
The seemingly innocuous Focus on the Family ad has some dark undertones. (via notemily) (via amberlrhea)(via champagnecandy) (via robot-heart-politics) (via stfuconservatives) (via crownofstorms)
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I did not know that “mobile penetration rate among school students” was a metric at all. Did you?
©2010. Postage by Greg Cooper. Icons by P.J. Onori. Thanks to Jamie Cassidy & Panic.
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