christie brinkley turns 60

Modeling legend Christie Brinkley turns 60 on Sunday. She reportedly has had no plastic surgery. I looked at a bunch of her recent photos and didn't see any of the tell-tale signs on her face of having gone under the knife. So if she had anything done, it was an expert job.

I'm not entirely convinced about her boobs, however. It could be the dresses she favors, which push up her breasts. If she's doing that because she hasn't had a tit job, it's ending up making her look like she has had one.

Boobs aside, she looks fantastic for her age. She obviously has a fantastic workout regimen and the results show. I hope I look as good as she does at 60.

Happy birthday Christie.

the meter maid responds

Enough with these multiplying State of the Union responses. Enough. From now on, the opposition party gets one response and that's it. No more. Not five official and semi-official responses. Not the dozens more responses from no-name political nobodies attempting to create some kind of worthless media event by tramping out their "response" simply so they can stand in front of a camera and yap yap yap.

No joking -- I saw (but did not watch) some city council member from a city on the West Coast giving some kind of "official response to the State of the Union." Look, no one cares. No one. Not even your grandmother, who pretends to care in order to indulge you and keep you from doing any more yap yap yap.

You look pathetic. You do. A city council member responding to a President? Please. Get real. Do something actually city-ish, like dealing with garbage pickup or parking meters or dog shit on sidewalks. Leave national politics to national politicians in the national capital.

Just because you create a YouTube channel doesn't mean anybody will watch the crap you air. "But look how many hits I got," you respond. At least 99.9 percent of those hits were Google bots who could care less what you post. The .1 percent who were actual humans ended up on your page by accident.

I predict that, next year, the number of State of the Union responses will increase by at least 50 percent.

It's called jumping the shark, people. Jumping the shark.

the farting soprano

I know I shouldn't laugh about this. I probably look mean for even posting the item. But since I'm sourcing from Gawker, if it's in bad taste, I'm not alone.

A Nashville opera singer is suing the medical facility where she had her baby because she claims a botched episiotomy left her permanently flatulent and incontinent. As a result, she cannot sing in public without farting (and presumably shitting her pants). No one pays good money to hear a flatulent soprano.

So I am probably being puerile for posting this. But then so is Gawker (link here). And I showed it to my husband; he laughed, too.

Yes, I feel sorry for the woman. It must be terrible. But I don't know her and she isn't going to read this, so I can laugh in public without fear of a social stigma. I've been known to laugh at inappropriate moments. I did it once at a funeral and another time at a Seder dinner, when I was the only goy in the room. Long story times two.

But how can you not laugh? What would you do if you were watching some opera special on TV and the soprano ripped a really good, loud one right in the middle of a heartfelt solo, in a poignant moment from La Boheme or something?

You know you'd laugh, too, so that's why this news story is funny. You can see and hear the farting soprano in your mind.

busted

The paparazzo photo shown below immortalizes Charlize Theron groping her boyfriend Sean Penn's ass in a California supermarket parking lot last week.

This made me laugh, because if you know anything about Penn, you're probably already aware of his stormy and violent history with photographers. It's a good thing the shutterbug wasn't spotted by the pugilistic actor.

While he's a gifted actor, I have never understood what women see in Penn as a romantic partner. He always seems strident, surly, arrogant, yet barely conversant whenever interviewed. He looks older than his 53 years, thanks to his heavy smoking and boozing.

Yet he has a long history with beautiful women sometimes young enough to be his daughter, having bedded Madonna, Robin Wright, Scarlett Johansson, now Theron, and many more.

I'm left with the conclusion he must be hot in the sack. Because otherwise, why would women put up with him? Given his history, they have to know he'll leave them sooner rather than later.

somewhat insane

If you know anything about the New York subway system, you'll realize the guy who made this video is somewhat insane. He hides in a subway tunnel down among the tracks, and then when a train begins to take off, he hops on the back and rides in the open air.

You can see him swinging around in some of the shots, holding on by only his arms like he's on playground equipment, while the train flies along. The train then crosses over the Williamsburg Bridge, which connects Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan.

At some point the video starts to reverse, for no particular reason, but it's still a very intriguing albeit foolish endeavor.

footballer or virgin

The photo below was posted on Imgur with the following information: "When asked what he would be if he wasn't a professional football player, Peter Crouch responded with: 'a virgin.'"

He does nothing for me, and since I could care less about professional sports, he would remain a virgin if it was up to me. He's six-seven and looks like he weighs 130 pounds. I'm always amused at how wealth and fame are such aphrodisiacs for certain women.

I guess if they really care about conspicuous consumption, they think the rich guy will buy them lots of clothes and jewelry. Whoring for designer duds.

ten strange penis facts

Salon has a new piece up with the provocative title of "The Ten Strangest Facts About Penises." Well some of them are strange, but who's to say this is the definitive list of the ten strangest? Sometimes the Salon headline writers go a bit tabloid with their screamers.

That aside, the most interesting item that I'd never heard of was this: in the 1920s, doctors transplanted goat, chimp, and baboon testicles into men as an impotence cure. No indication if these were added to the man's two testicles for a group of three or more or if one or both of the originals were removed.

This cure -- no surprise -- did not work. I guess no one worried that if had been successful, whether a cured man's wife or girlfriend would bear goat- or monkey-head babies.

la fonction fabulatric

I'm reading a novel where one character, to overcome a personal problem, dabbles with la fonction fabulatrice, called in English "the fabulating function." It's a psychological technique of sorts developed early in the twentieth century by Frenchman Henri Bergson.

The technique was very popular around a hundred years ago for all sorts of issues. You deliberately plant a false memory in place of a troubling or upsetting memory. You keep imagining and embellishing the false memory until it seems more real than the actual memory. That is meant to help eradicate any problems that resulted from the bad situation.

I've heard about this practice before and have known people who do it inadvertently by rationalizing about a past trauma or inadvertently papering it over with a revisionist memory. But no matter whether you do it accidentally or intentionally, it seems to me that hiding the truth with a lie is just a way of fooling yourself. Your subconscious knows the real story.

I've always tried to find something good that came out of something bad. Sometimes this requires sitting down and thinking through the sequence of the bad thing and what good happened afterwards that could not have happened without the bad thing.

The best example from my own life is something I've written about here a number of times: I had to leave Los Angeles because of an impossible stalking situation that resulted from a toxic relationship that I ended. It was a bad time for me, and that's how I ended up in Las Vegas. Some months after my sudden move, I met my future husband in Vegas.

So if it hadn't been for the bad thing -- the stalking in Los Angeles and subsequent flight -- I never would have met my true love in Vegas.

The good thing becomes the balm for the bad thing.

sex can make you smarter

I read this short article in The Atlantic and I think this is the proper takeaway: sex can make you smarter, but then you need to use those smarts or the boost goes to waste.

Unfortunately, the piece doesn't give you any idea of how soon after sex you should be working your brain. Minutes? Hours? Days?

If the window of opportunity is rather short, that could create problems. After a good bonk, I want to go to sleep. I usually can't help but fall asleep. I'm not in the mood to do complex acrostic puzzles or something.

ultimate geek

Someone had an awful lot of times on their hands in order to create this, but it's pretty cool if you're a scifi fan (you'll need to download because of the size, and right clicking will not give you the correct one). It's a gigantic image comparing the relative size for hundreds of space vessels in scores of popular movies and TV shows like Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Event Horizon, Babylon 5, and many more.

Who knows how the length of some of these were determined. The Enterprise is 1520 meters long, or nearly a mile. The Borg cube is much larger in any dimension. The Millennium Falcon appears to be 450 meters long, which actually seems bigger than it looks to me in the movie.

wherein I somewhat contradict myself

The husband was catching up on my blog last night, reading through some of my new entries. He finished this one from a few days ago where I wrote about not liking horror movies.

"But you love Alien," he said. "That's a horror movie."

He's right. I do love Alien. It's one of my all-time favorites. (I don't care for the sequels much, though.)

But I've never really thought of that as a horror movie. It's scifi. Yes, it has some suspense elements that make it seem like a horror movie in certain scenes, but I wouldn't call it "a horror movie."

I guess the reason why it doesn't feel like horror to me is because it doesn't attempt to inject terror into the verisimilitude of present-day real life. Horror movies make it seem like it's something that could happen to you or me. It's a "you are there" sense.

But Alien is set in deep space, untold decades -- and possibly centuries -- in the future. That doesn't happen to any of us so we're more removed from the immediacy of the movie.

But I always reserve the right to contradict myself. I am absolutely not an absolutist.

photobombing etiquette

I should start by saying I like Emma Thompson a great deal. I think she's tremendously talented and one of my favorite actresses.

She has been amusingly over the top, most of the time, so far at this year's award seasons shows. I have to say, though, that I think it was inappropriate for her to photobomb Lupita Nyong'o, as you can see in the photo below, when the latter was posing for the press.

Nyong'o is not nearly as well known as Thompson, at least at this point in time. So when the former is in the spotlight, the moment is about her. Suddenly, Thompson takes her moment away and says "look at me instead!" It's stealing her moment, in a way.

planning ahead

It's roasting hot and in the middle of summer here in Australia, but I need a new winter coat so I'm planning ahead. If I decide to buy one, I still have months before I need to do that.

But if I decide to make one for myself, I need to get started on that now. I can sew fairly well and have always made some of my own clothes since my grandmother taught me to sew when I was young. But none of my sewing projects involved much tailoring, which would be required with a coat.

Armed with some library books and some videos from the internet, I could educate myself more on tailoring techniques. I've always been pretty decent at self-education so that doesn't worry me. I would like to take my sewing skills up a few levels, and a coat would allow me to do that.

My biggest concern would be if I spent three or four months working on a coat and it just doesn't turn out the way I hoped. I enjoy sewing my own things, but like most women, I hate that homemade look when things don't turn out 100 percent perfect.

If I decide to sew my own, I need to keep it fairly simple as my first fully tailored piece. But I've sort of fallen in love with the style below, which I think is too ambitious for a first coat project. (Plus, I'm seeing some sewing flaws in the picture, and that was made by someone who has a lot more experience than I do; hence, my pickiness may be my undoing.)

So I'll have to mull this over for a bit, but I can't wait too long. The husband thinks I'm nuts for even considering winter clothes now, given our extended heat wave. I guess it's the snow pictures my cousin and brother keep sending me that has me looking ahead.

scary shit

I have never liked horror movies. Perhaps because I saw too many as a child that kept me up too many times, thanks to my overactive imagination.

I can read horror novels with no problem, but the icky factor keeps me away from horror TV and movies. They just make me too edgy and uncomfortable. I can't enjoy them, and who wants to watch something you can't get into?

Yet I have no problem with thrillers that scare the crap out of me. Perhaps because there's no bump-in-the-night factor that creeps me out after the movie is over.

I remember one horror movie in particular that I saw as a rerun on cable when I was about eleven and beginning to become quite sexually aware. In one scene, a young couple started to fuck on a bed at a summer camp. I remember getting into the scene because they were both attractive and nearly naked, rubbing and thrusting against each other.

Then suddenly one of the couple began to choke and we saw why -- an arrow was being driven through the victim's throat from the underside of the bed. The sexy scene was suddenly turned into gore and that turned me off to horror for good.

I saw this list on Imgur of "thirteen most disturbing films" so I had to check it out. Looking at stills from horror movies doesn't bother me. But I have to say some of the ones on this list are not what I would consider "disturbing" -- some are very quirky and quite sexual but not disturbing.

Others, through, look like they'd scare the crap out of me. Cannibal Holocaust is something I would definitely not want to see and the same goes for Repulsion.

snubbed by oscar

The Oscar nominations were announced yesterday. I didn't see any big surprises. As usual, there are too many "Best Picture" nominees, and the sooner the Academy gets rid of that category overgrowth, the better. No one is fooled that some of those have a prayer of a chance.

The entertainment media went into hyperdrive with gossipy chatter about who was "snubbed" in the nominations. Oooh, Tom Hanks did two big movies but no picks! And then there's Emma Thompson! And Oprah!

What a festering bathtub full of balderdash. No one was "snubbed." There was no place on the ballots for people to vote against anyone. The people who were nominated received more votes. That's it.

One often sees a variation of this in political reporting. Losing candidates sometimes are branded by lazy reporters as "snubbed" by voters. No, they were not snubbed. They simply didn't win.

There's a big difference between that and snubbing. Snubbing is an affirmative act, not a passive result.

apartment untouched since 1942

This is pretty fantastic: a luxury apartment in Paris remained fully furnished and untouched from 1942 until it was opened seventy years later. The wealthy resident moved to the South of France during World War II, continued to pay the rent in Paris, but never returned. The place was only opened when she died.

The artwork and antiques are being sold. One painting alone brought over two million Euros.

How I would've loved to have been the first person inside after seven decades with a chance to snoop around. I wouldn't have taken anything. I'd just want to look -- it would be like traveling back in a time machine.

Except for the dust. But the place doesn't look as grimy as you'd think, except in one room with some water damage from upstairs. I guess those tenants finally understood why no one complained when the tub overflowed.

More pictures at the link. Check it out.

super cell

This was on Imgur and it mesmerizes me. It's a super cell forming over Texas last year. Often these turn into tornadoes, but this one apparently did not.

Stormchasers run toward these things. I would not be a good stormchaser. My preservation instinct would tell me to get the hell out of there as soon as I saw this. I would listen to that instinct.

I remember once reading a first-hand account of someone who saw a friend sucked up by a tornado. The witness literally saw his friend's limbs torn off. That explains how people sometimes find a random arm or leg after major tornadoes.

This sounds very painful. Hopefully the victims were already unconscious when this happened. There would be nothing worse than having your limbs ripped off but you remained conscious until you plunged straight downward with no arms or legs to break your fall.

While tornados can happen in Australia, they're far less common than in the US. Bad news for stormchasers, good news for the rest of us here Down Under.

After looking at this picture, I know what a bug feels like when you accidentally run over it with the vacuum cleaner.

diane keaton freakshow

I think Diane Keaton is tremendously talented. She's one of the few celebrities I'd love to sit down with and have a nice chat.

But my God does she need a makeover consultant to slap some sense into her. The Annie Hall androgyny thing worked when she was younger, but it makes her look beyond freakish now.

I didn't watch the Golden Globes -- I have no patience for that travesty -- but I did catch video of her comments at the ceremony the other night. She is downright scary looking these days, something like a crack-addicted tranny trying to look like Candace Bergen.

earthly delights

I'm reading a Michael Connelly novel where some paintings by Hieronymus Bosch feature in the plot. If you're familiar with the artist, you'll know he painted highly allegorical paintings full of sin and evil imagery.

The author describes a portion of one, Bosch's famous The Garden of Earthly Delights, as follows: "Hell was depicted as a dark place where birdlike creatures disemboweled the damned, cut their bodies up and placed them in frying pans to be slid into fiery ovens."

This immediately raised a theological question in my mind. We're taught by Christianity that one is damned for all eternity. But if you're disemboweled and burned, there will be nothing left. That certainly won't be eternal. At best, that could be dragged out for a few hours, and then it'd be all over.

Bosch's painting was completed more than 500 years ago. Did no priest or cardinal of the time tell the artist that it couldn't be factually correct? Has any organized Christian religion ever issued a challenge to the painting in the last five centuries, saying that it incorrectly depicts hell.

Or could it be that organized religion doesn't really believe that fire and brimstone stuff, but they don't refute it because it drives business to their door? If hell was depicted as a tedious, boring place -- like a DMV office -- you couldn't scare the shit our of parishioners.

I am not a disbeliever, but I don't embrace organized religion that much, either. Paintings like this make me want to interrogate a priest. I think they've been trying to pull one over on us with this fire and brimstone stuff.

full of crap

The elderly dog we care for never ceases to amaze me. For a while, she was becoming increasingly picky about her eating. I thought that meant her final curtain call was coming.

Then one day, about two months ago, it was like she forgot to be picky. Since then, she eats like a pig every day. She will even wake up about an hour before food time, something she never used to do. She hangs around and gives you mournful looks. This from the dog who slept 99 percent of the time.

Around the same time I noticed she seemed to be growing constipated. She would sometimes go three or four days without a crap, and then she'd have an absolutely enormous load. There were never any accidents or attempting to go. It's just like she was on a crap strike.

I asked the vet about this, and he said it's not uncommon in very old dogs. Because of arthritis in the spine, they prefer to hold the crap rather than stoop to go. They only go when holding it becomes more uncomfortable than squatting to relieve themselves.

This can be amusing when she finally goes and is noticed in the process by a stranger. They're amazed at the Guinness World Records-sized poop she leaves behind.

sesame street subversives

We have some Sesame Street DVDs that I picked up for next to nothing at a library sale. We put them on occasionally because Joey seems to like the puppets.

I watched a little bit of Sesame Street when I was a child but not often as television didn't really intrigue me. So it's been a long time since I've seen the show and the first time as an adult.

Needless to say, the programs have all kinds of subtext going on that I'm just realizing now. Kids would find the song below catchy -- and it really is -- but is a dealer in illegal goods, opening and closing his raincoat, a good role model for a child? And the way he says "ooooh" is a bit orgasmic.

I would never prohibit my kid from watching this stuff, because the deeper meaning would fly over his head, and he'll learn valuable lessons from the little tunes when he's older. But it makes me wonder about the people who created this stuff.

not loving it

It's one thing to slap a big tattoo on your body. It's even worse when you've chosen a corporate logo, like you're some kind of epidermal billboard. Still worse is when you use your body to advertise fast food. Forever.

The owner of this looks like he has a very tapered back, so he probably works out quite a lot. So what's wrong with this picture: he spends lots of time in the gym, but he eats fast food often enough to want a laudatory tattoo.

Your arteries will not thank you when you're sixty.

president bimbo

Many political pundits on both the left and right believe Hillary Clinton will run for President in 2016. Whether that happens and, if so, whether she wins is anybody's guess at this point.

I ran across the picture below on a political forum, and regardless of what you think of her, you might find it funny on first glance. I did, but then I'm an easy laugh. Whether it's actually funny is another matter.

That caused me to wonder: what if Hillary Clinton was exactly like she is in terms of intelligence, education, achievements, positions on the issues, and political record. Yet she was also one of those sixty-something women who dresses like a bimbo, like she was thirty with too much makeup and jewelry and enhanced boobs thrusting out of tiny, tight tops.

I saw plenty of women like that when I lived in LA and Vegas -- accomplished, successful businesswomen who dressed like they were half their age and waited tables in a bar.

Could an accomplished woman of 65 who dressed like she was a thirty-year-old stripper on her day off run for high office? Would people take her seriously? Some might, but she'd also lose lots of votes because of it.

Many little things do not matter in our society, like the color of one's eyes. Yet clothing and style choices are critical for an elected official, particularly a woman. Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, she was -- and still is -- lambasted for some of her clothing choices. Why does that matter?

I ask such questions rhetorically, of course, but they make me think. Americans would probably not elect a woman for a major office if she dressed like a bimbo, yet they have no problem electing men who admit to snorting coke or consorting with bimbos who are not their wives.

Something's wrong there.

a history of masturbation

The Week has an interesting and somewhat disturbing look back at how our forefathers, particularly Victorians, had a great fear of masturbation and the often horrible things they did to discourage it. The article is titled "Masturbation Was Once Considered More Offensive Than Child Abuse," which should give you a pretty good idea that it's not a frivolous piece.

This got me to thinking about why past generations were so terrified about masturbation. Perhaps it was because this happened during the age when sex was for procreation and not for pleasure. One did not fuck for fun. One only did it, fully dressed, with the lights off, when one wanted or needed offspring.

Masturbation could make sex pleasurable; therefore, it must be shunned at all cost. The next thing you know, the lights would come on, clothes would come off during sex, and people would be fucking like rabbits. We cannot have that!

But why were Victorians and others so against pleasurable sex? Why was sexuality such a taboo subject? Some of it might be traced back to religion. Religion's frequent antipathy toward sex has always been something of a mystery to me -- if you believe in a supreme being, and given that sex can be pleasurable, the deity must have designed sex to be pleasurable.

In that case, God wants us to enjoy sex, because He designed it that way, just like he made chocolate cake wonderful and taking a crap far less fun. So when you're only having sex to make babies and with the lights off while you're still fully dressed, God will not be too happy.

I'm left wondering if religion's anxiety about sex grew out of more primitive humans' need to protect themselves. Compare, for example, the prohibition against eating pork or shellfish. That's written into religious law, as seen in the Bible and elsewhere. But many social scientists believe it really was something promulgated by earlier human leadership who realized undercooked pork and shellfish could make people very sick or even die.

In comparison, rampant sexuality could lead to multiple partners and risky behavior, resulting in sexually transmitted diseases, which could not be cured back in the day. So masturbation led to a realization that sex was pleasurable, which led to lots and lots of uninhibited sex, which could lead to things like syphilis that rotted your brain.

Thus, making masturbation bad stopped younger humans from travelling down the path to destruction. With time, that was warped and perverted into the sort of pseudo-scientific gibberish quoted in the linked article.

Maybe my theory is garbage, but then again maybe it isn't. I'm just glad I'm not a Victorian.

bad parenting

I saw this picture yesterday on Imgur when I was uploading some images for this blog. I'm not putting the picture below because I don't like featuring child photos here due to some of my other content.

I vote thumbs down on this example of what I think is bad parenting. I have no problem with the child being punished for her behavior. That's not the issue.

What bothers me is the manner by which this punishment was administered. How is an adult publicly bullying a child okay when a child bullying a child is not? What lesson is being taught here?

The kid is getting a double punishment: what's described on the sign, plus a public shaming that's orchestrated by a parent. I suspect this may not be the last episode of punishment meted out by this parent.

There's no reason this couldn't have been done privately, a matter between the parent and the child. Methinks the parent is a bit too narcissistic here, wrapped up in her self-imposed nobility. Look at me rushing to help the poor bullied child. Either that or she's afraid she'll get her ass sued because of something her kid did.

Punishments should be private and a teaching moment. A public event is something else entirely.

And one punishment per infraction. Anything more smacks of sadism.

heat wave

It has been very hot here down under. Last year set an all-time record for Australia, the hottest year on record. We've had several serious spikes so far this summer.

A few days ago the temperature nearly reached 50 degrees Celsius in some parts of the country, which translates to around 120 Fahrenheit, although it wasn't that hot in our area.

I know overall planetary climate warming is not good, but I personally don't mind the heat. My brother in Chicago and cousin in Pennsylvania have been sending me updates and pictures about their various blizzards and ice storms. I do not miss living in that kind of climate at all.

I've always found it curious how early mankind migrated from the hotter region where we all originated into colder and colder climates as humanity spread around the globe. I could never understand how a whole lot of early people decided they'd rather be someplace like Scandinavia or Siberia as opposed to a warm climate.

Of course, migration probably took time, perhaps many number of generations, so the memory of warmth was lost. And maybe it was about food or getting away from a violent tribe. But at some point, before they went too far north, I would've thought some would've said "this is too damn cold; let's turn back."

selfie olympics

Someone with time on his or her hands has searched out some of the best selfies on the internet and put them all in one place.

Some of them have a little too much visual information while others are clever in varying degrees. My favorite is below.

Click through the link and enjoy the rest.

prisoners

My husband and I still have a bunch of screener DVDs sent by my Hollywood friend we've yet to watch. The last two nights we watched Prisoners, starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. It's been in theaters for several months both here in Australia and in the US, but not yet on DVD, so it was a treat once again to view it in the comfort of home, a real bonus for new parents like us.

Both of us thoroughly enjoyed the movie, although enjoyed might be an odd word to use for this one. It's relentlessly dark. I've never been a big Hugh Jackman fan, but Prisoners made me rethink that; he's exceptionally good in a disturbing way. Gyllenhaal is also very strong as an obsessed, lonely, strangely twitchy police detective, as are a number of the supporting players.

The story is about the closest you can get to a horror piece without actually being horror. It's more like "horror that could actually be real," which makes it more frightening. It's just that good.

yosemite in winter

Growing up in the Chicago area, Yosemite was only a name to me. I knew it was a pretty place, vaguely out west, but I had never been there. It seemed remote and far away.

When I lived in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, I visited Yosemite and fell in love. I made four or five more trips during the four-plus years I lived there. I never went in summer -- too many tourists -- but I did in the other three seasons.

Winter was my favorite, and I went there twice in January, staying one time at the legendary Ahwahnee hotel. I'll admit half the reason I went on that latter trip was because a rather boring guy who was pretty good in the sack paid for it.

We're in the middle of summer here in Australia so I'm not longing for snow and cold. But I saw some Yosemite winter pictures online yesterday at a political website and that brought back fond memories, so I've been thinking about it again.

The man who took me the second time might be crushed that I remember the fact he played a Willie Nelson CD on the car radio better than I remember his face. But most of all I remember Yosemite in winter and the gorgeous scenery and the deer wandering nearby and the near silence as a fresh blanket of snow covered everything with its magical white.

the war on monster porn

Business Insider has a new article up about the curious sub-sub-subgenre of smut called "monster porn" and how sites like Amazon have declared war on it and banned its sale.

For the uninitiated, monster porn is explicit fiction featuring voluptuous young women and creatures like Bigfoot. The latter is no gentleman and often sexually assaults women.

I don't think potential Pulitzer finalists need worry that any monster porn authors will push them aside and grab some big awards anytime soon. But the stuff sells well in ebook form; one author is putting her daughter through college on her earnings.

Amazon and other online outlets of efiction have recently gone berserk, however, wholesale deleting bestselling novel series by monster porn authors. The sites claim the material glorifies sexual violence or blah blah blah.

These books sound like trash but Amazon and its kind are ridiculously overreacting. Do they think someone will actually go out and commit rape because he or she read a monster porn novel? Where do you draw the line between "good" material involving sexual violence and "bad" material?

Acclaimed movies like A Clockwork Orange and Boys Don't Cry feature rape. How are they "less harmful" than material like monster porn?

Hopefully sites like Amazon and others will feel the heat and back off from this ridiculous e-puritan rampage. They've become so large and powerful they're almost like private governments. And like all governments, they shouldn't be in the business of censorship.

my thirtieth year

I realized this morning that this is the 30th year I've been in existence. I just turned 28 a little more than three months ago; I was born in 1985. But counting all the years since then, and adding this new year, that takes me up to 30.

Yikes, so that makes me sort of 30, even though I'm actually only 28. I'm thirtyish. I'm thirtysomething. Didn't there used to be something about not trusting anyone over 30?

For what it's worth, I'm also closer to being 40 than I am to being 16. That happened as soon as I passed my 28th birthday.

This aging shit is definitely no fun. Just keep telling yourself it's only numbers. Only numbers, only numbers, only numbers...