body litter

Here's a special kind of stupid: an eighteen-year-old man in Norway paid about $250 to have a McDonald's receipt tattooed on his arm.

After that earned him media coverage, he had the receipt for the first tattoo permanently inked on his other warm.

"Now I'm a living billboard, but I think it's all just fun," he told a reporter. "Maybe it won't be as fun when I'm 50 or 60 years old."

I cannot imagine why anyone would think a tattoo like this would be a good idea. If I had to choose between a receipt tattoo and sticking my tongue in a wall socket, I think I'd choose the latter.

It would probably burn my tongue and throw me across the room, but the stupid would wear off after a few days.

The stupid on his arm, however, will last forever.

band of brothers

After we finished our complete watch of The Wire, my husband and I picked another show for a start-to-finish viewing. Our criteria was a show that one or both of us had not seen or had only seen a few episodes.

We settled on Band of Brothers, which my husband had seen several times all the way through, but I had only seen one or two episodes. I was not wild about this choice, but since we had gone with my choice the last time, I thought it only fair.

After seeing all ten episodes, I'm now a Band fan, too. Before watching, I feared it would have a lot of action violence and war-is-great propaganda.

I was very wrong in my thinking. The series is both pro-war and anti-war. You see the necessity for World War II but at the same time the ludicrous idiocy and random brutality of war.

The program first aired fifteen years ago, but because it is a period story about real events and real people, it's just as relevant and timeless today. If anything, as the world faces the increasing threat from ISIS, the program has an added value.

I definitely want to read the source book now that I've seen the series. I know that the author, Stephen Ambrose, was somewhat controversial, but I want to learn more about the real men behind the story.

If you've never seen Band of Brothers and have been resisting because you think it's a "war story," I recommend you reconsider and watch it. The program has the highest user rating of any series on IMDb, and while I might not say it was the best series ever, it certainly is one of the best.

Some of the real soldiers depicted in the series are seen in the period photograph below after they captured Eagle's Nest, Hitler's Alpine retreat. The photo is huge, so you can right click to see the detailed original.

terrorist ducks

The Independent has a short piece about a new internet meme trend that combines pictures of rubber bath ducks with ISIS fighters. You can see an example below and others and the link provided.

I laughed at some of them, specifically the well done ones. Some of them are pretty sloppy and not really funny.

This made me wonder, however, if laughing at and mocking ISIS is counter-productive. ISIS members are evil, vicious, cruel people. By putting a silly face on them, does that end up making them seem less awful?

Before and during World War II, Hitler and/or the Nazis were sometimes lampooned. The Great Dictator with Charlie Chaplain is a good example of that.

But since World War II, arguably a lot of Hitler/Nazis depictions in the mass media have been humorous. Does that end up glossing over their horrible history?

I guess it's all right to laugh at evil if you make sure you also publicize all the horrible things someone or some group is doing and has done.

I just noticed the toilet brush when positioning this photo. Nicely done!

dumping on trump

The New York Times recently ran an editorial cartoon contest for high school students and unveiled the winners yesterday.

Not surprising, several winners did Trump-themed works and none are flattering. The contest artists found some witty and creative ways to lampoon him.

Trump has become uglier and nastier and has been stooping to lower and lower depths in the past few weeks. He always was a boorish bully, but he's getting worse and worse now.

Despite all his bombast, his public statements still continue to be devoid of any specifics about how he would achieve all the ludicrous promises he has made. I'm amazed people are dazzled by his obvious horseshit.

I certainly hope the American populace wakes up pretty soon and realizes what a colossal mistake it would be to elect that man to the presidency.

turkey day humor

Happy Thanksgiving to Americans everywhere -- those at home and those expats like me. Turkey Day is a holiday that every Yank on earth has the right to celebrate because the tradition is entirely American.

For those who might need a Thanksgiving giggle or two, here is a humorous collection of puns and word jokes I found posted on Imgur. I admit I did not understand one or two of them and couldn't tell if they were brilliantly witty or incredibly bad.

somebody's pissed

I don't really follow the endless Kardashain/Jenner faux drama so I don't know who all the people are in the picture below. You can see Bruce "Caitlyn" Jenner in the white dress accepting some award (larger original), and the look on attention whore Kim Kardashian's face is priceless.

She definitely looks cheesed off that her attention whore star is being eclipsed by Miss Bruce's attention whore star.

On an unrelated note, I wonder if the blonde woman on the far left, whoever she might be, is at all worried about how this shot makes her butt look enormous. A little free tip for her from me: a good outfit will flatter your best feature, not the other way around.

embarrassing genealogy

I am supposedly a direct descendant of King John, who was arguably the worst king in British history and one of the worst monarchs ever to reign anywhere. If you know your history, you know he was so bad, the English aristocracy forced him to sign the Magna Carta.

I have a relative who spent a great deal of time and money researching the family genealogy and documented our King John ancestry. He was a historian by profession, so presumably he was fairly accurate with his research.

I have never understood why he expended such an effort to prove we were related to a historical embarrassment. Yes, it's not as bad as being Stalin or Hitler's descendant, but it's nothing to be proud of, either.

He certainly didn't do this in an attempt to establish any claim on the British throne. Our family is supposedly descended from one of King John's female progeny, so we are shut out of any possible spot in the line of succession.

While the Magna Carta was a positive development in history, it certainly didn't come about through King John's good deeds. I guess the only thing to be proud of is the fact that King John was so bad, he inadvertently helped kindle the idea of democracy, given that the Magna Carta was purportedly an inspiration for the American constitution.

unwrapping burt reynolds

The latest issue of Vanity Fair has a longish piece on Burt Reynolds, who is now 79. The article proffers a good bit of evidence about how Reynolds has some serious money problems, which he both denies and then somewhat confirms by admitting freely several times he has no money sense and is a lavish spender.

I've never understood Reynolds' public appeal. I guess it's one of those generational things. With two exceptions, any movies with him I've seen with him have been entirely forgettable, in my opinion.

He's not a bad actor, but his roles offer little challenge as an actor, with a few exceptions. I've always felt he mostly was just playing himself in derivative stories.

Reynolds was considered a huge sex symbol in his day, but again I'm at a loss to understand that. Looking at him and watching him in his physical prime, he doesn't have any magnetism that I can see.

The present-day photograph the magazine chose to run doesn't do him any favors. Like many people who have had plastic surgery in earlier decades, those tucks and trims have made him look a bit freakish now.

Ageism can be cruel for nearly everyone, but never more so than for sex symbols of yesterday.

faux vintage porn

Here's is a curious item: an uncredited photographer has created a fake 1940s porn shoot in a sort of hardcore Bettie Page homage.

I like the idea but the execution needs work. For starters, someone cast a model with obvious breast implants. No 1940s model would look like that.

She's also using a modern sex toy of a style that never would've been sold in the 1940s. So one glance at the photos and you know they're fake.

Also, rather than simply shooting the photographs in true monochrome, someone has dialed down the color to a highly desaturated result with a weird, slight pinkish tint which is inconsistent from picture to picture. (I color corrected the four images appearing below.)

I'm left wondering why the effort here for this fake vintage look. You'd have to be in your seventies or older to remember the 1940s well, so who is this shoot meant to entice?

Would a twentyish or thirtyish man looking at this understand what the photographer was trying to do? Or was this meant to be porn for the Social Security set?

The shoot reminds me of how 1940s hairstyles were not flattering to women. I hope those updo wings never come back into style during my lifetime. If they do, I refuse to wear them.

past transgressions

A news item caught my eye about how some Princeton University students what their school to remove former President Woodrow Wilson's name from campus facilities because he was in favor of racial segregation.

Wilson, of course, was President from 1913 to 1921 and died in 1924.

My immediate thought upon reading this was to wonder if people soon would be calling for removal of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson's names from all sorts of landmarks because they had owned slaves.

Abraham Lincoln also favored segregation and returning all blacks to Africa. Should his name similarly be purged?

What about Henry Ford and Martin Luther? They were both anti-Semites; surely that must mean their names must be scrubed from any public placement.

This begs the question: when is enough quite enough? Does every person in the past who committed some sort of transgression immediately a candidate for such ex post facto banishment?

If someone living now advocates racial segregation, then I think that person deserves to be condemned. I think institutions have a perfect right to remove that person's name from honorary landmark titles.

But once decades have passed -- or centuries -- I think it's a pointless gesture. More seriously, it's wasting time on a past controversy instead of focusing on inequality issues in our own time.

Why not deal with present-day racism instead of trying to settle scores on old injustices? No one is advocating purging all references to Wilson's racism. History books will still tell us that.

Here's a thought: Wilson may have been a racist, but he was also an advocate for women's rights, specifically the right to vote.

Doesn't that sort of balance out his transgressions? So you're not honoring Wilson the racist in your campus facilities but Wilson the visionary feminist?

good versus perfect

One of my favorite sayings is: "don't let perfect be the enemy of good." Many people understand and embrace this, but too many do not. The expression is applicable to many things in life.

I occasionally see this axiom posted on political discussion forums after someone complains loudly about something/someone and how X, Y, or Z would be so much better. They won't support a candidate because of one issue or event and then bemoan how all candidates are terrible, we're all going to hell in a handbasket, and all hope is lost.

Politics are like many things in life. You'll never get exactly what you want, whether it be a candidate or a menu item in a restaurant or the color of a garment. So be happy with the good and stop whining about the perfect.

True perfection is great but rarely obtainable. So you need to settle for something less and not throw up your hands and refuse to participate just because you can't get exactly what you want.

what is a woman?

In 2003, Glamour magazine named Moira Smith "Woman of the Year." Smith died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, after leading more than a hundred people to safety.

Last week, her husband returned the award to Glamour, objecting to the magazine's selection of Bruce "Caitlyn" Jenner as "Woman of the Year."

In rejecting the award, he wrote to the editors: "Was there no woman in America, or the rest of the world, more deserving than this man?"

I agree with him. Give the award to a woman who has made the world a better place, not to a man who puts on a dress.

If Bruce Jenner wants to dress up like a woman, he should have the freedom to do so. But that doesn't make him a woman.

He has a man's chromosomes. He was born with a penis and fathered children. He still has a penis (he has said he has not had sex reassignment surgery; thus his junk is intact).

Biologically, he is and always will be a man. Even if he cuts off his dick, he will still be a man.

I don't buy this idea of "you must pretend he's a woman because he says he is." If he wants to pretend to himself, fine. He should have the freedom to do so.

But he doesn't have the right to demand that everyone else pretend along with him.

The absurdity in all this is that Glamour also gives an award to "Man of the Year." If they wanted to present something to Jenner, that would have done the trick.

tasmanian tigers

I heard a radio program the other day while I was driving about the ethics of cloning the Tasmanian tiger, an unusual Australian species that is probably extinct. The last known Tasmanian tiger, popularly called a Tassie tiger and technically called a thylacine, died in 1936 in an Australian zoo.

The more sensational media carries occasional reports about Tasmanian tiger sightings, but these have never been confirmed. The creature was nearly extinct on the Australian mainland when Europeans first arrived but were not uncommon on the island of Tasmania.

The present controversy revolves around the so-called de-extinction process, which would use existing gene samples from that last living thylacine to clone new animals. Those creatures would then naturally reproduce to repopulate the species. The full technology for this does not exist now but likely will in the near future.

Those in favor of the endeavor say we have a responsibility to bring back species that are now extinct because of modern man. Opponents argue it's "playing God."

IMHO, if scientists can bring back the Tassie tiger from extinction, I think they should. The animal was heavily hunted by humans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I would argue man was "playing God" by driving it into extinction. Humans trashed the supreme being's creation.

The thylacine looks like a striped dog and is dog-sized but is not a canine. It was the largest known carnivorous marsupial of modern times. (For those rusty with their biology, marsupials are pouch animals like kangaroos and opossums.)

Neither is it a feline, despite the name, and bears no relation to tigers in Asia. It is more closely related to the Tasmanian devil and other animals not largely known outside Australia like quolls and kowaris.

The picture below shows two Tasmanian tigers photographed in a Washington DC zoo in 1904.

symptom versus cause

One thing I learned by having a lot of doctors in my family is that often the best way to solve a problem is to
attack the cause, not the symptoms. You fight the rash by curing what's causing the rash.

I've been thinking about that maxim in the aftermath of the Paris attacks this past weekend. A considerable effort will be spent pursuing and fighting terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda.

But terrorist groups are really symptoms of a problem, not a cause. So what are the causes, the root social illnesses?

Many books and articles I've read since 9/11 return to a common issue: terrorists often start out as disconnected, disillusioned, disenfranchised younger males drifting through their lives.

They are young loners existing in society's fringes who find radical terrorism attractive because of a comradery with like-minded loner males. This is also true for urban gangs and other modern forms of organized crime: loners belonging to an organization of loners who channel their anger into self-destructive nihilism.

I read an article recently about how ISIS deliberately targets disenfranchised young males who have little to no knowledge of religion and almost no family support structure. In many ways, ISIS then acts like a religious cult to draw them in, indoctrinate them, and isolate them from the rest of their world as they control them.

So how to cure this problem?

I'm sort of wondering aloud here in print by thinking some sort of compulsory civilian corps for young males that might direct such individuals into a more productive mindset. Directionless, drifting young males would find some structure in their life through a quasi-militaristic work program, a "civil draft," so to speak.

In the real world, I know quite a few young men who were major fuckups in their directionless teenage years and turned their lives around after a stint in the military. I also knew a firefighter in Los Angeles who was a model citizen but as a teenager he was prosecuted for several felonies until he entered a bootcamp sort of program where young offenders helped fight wildfires.

A large country will probably have more young males than it needs for the military, so that's why I was thinking about some kind of compulsory civilian corps that would be military in discipline and structure but not involved in defense activities. Alternatively, young males could enter the military for compulsory service, as is required in some countries, like Austria, Denmark, and Israel.

Such civilian corps could work on infrastructure improvement, conservation, and other public works projects. Of course, all countries where terrorism germinates would need a similar system of compulsory service.

So what about women? Why are they usually less prone to becoming disenfranchised loners who turn to violence? I think some of that is genetic but some is the way girls are raised differently than boys.

That leaves the question of whether ladies must also join my compulsory civilian corps. As the benevolent dictator spinning this idea, I don't know about that.

near-death experience

This is a pretty scary video. An elderly man in Brazil carrying a heavy satchel of some sort is nearly struck by a freight train moving through an urban area. If he was one second slower, or even less than a second, it would be curtains.

He's moving parallel to the crosswalk in the street itself, so perhaps there were barriers and he went around them. You can see people behind him calling out to stop but he obviously either did not hear or ignored them.

When I lived in Los Angeles, about once a month or so the media carried reports about people who were killed crossing railroad tracks in the northern San Fernando Valley part of the city. It never ceased to amaze me how people didn't apparently realize that a train is a lethal object.

alien nudity

I was amused reading this short article about the images sent by NASA decades ago on spacecraft traveling into deep space outside our solar system. One featured a naked man and woman waving in a welcoming greeting.

"NASA faced a backlash for the nudity of the human figures," the article explains.

What kind of idiot worries about an alien race seeing earthlings with their kit off? (American translation: "kit off" means naked.)

Quite likely, any far distant galaxy with an advanced race that receives these messages countless millions of years from now will look nothing like us. They could look more like starfish or zebras or tribbles than humans.

I wonder how these human prudes who are so worried about nekkid people would react if an advanced species in a somewhat humanoid form showed up on Earth, willing to help us with their super advanced technology...

...and those aliens were completely buck naked.

la ville de la lumière

Paris is one of the most beautiful and vibrant cities in the world. It lives on forever in the memories of all who are lucky enough to visit.

I am writing this as news continues to pour in about the horrible terrorist attack in the city of light. War is horrible, but terrorist attacks like this arguably are worse because civilians are viciously targeted when they least expect violence.

No cause is just that warrants the slaughter of innocents.

charles manson sitcom

I have only seen a few episodes of the American sitcom The Last Man on Earth so I don't know the whole backstory. But I've seen enough of the show to wonder why Will Forte (first picture below) looks so much like Charles Manson (second picture below).

In the episodes I've seen, there was no explanation. The resemblance is so strong in certain shots, I find it distracting because I'm paying more attention to that and not the story.

I'm not the only one to notice this. Google Will Forte Charles Manson and you'll see both professional critics and ordinary people making this comparison.

Manson has been in prison for decades, but he's still so widely known, he arguably remains one of the most notorious criminals in the world. He could not walk down a city street unnoticed. So you'd think the show's producers and network might be more alert to this strange coincidence.

Unrelated to the above, while researching this topic online, I learned a curious fact: since 1949, Manson has only spent a total of four years as a free man.

good sex/bad marriage?

I read a magazine article recently where a woman was quoted as saying she had a bad marriage but great sex with her husband. I turned that over in my head for a while because that didn't seem to make logical sense.

I was left with the conclusion that her definition of great sex is different than mine. Maybe she just had an orgasm when she shagged her husband and thought that was landmark sex.

If you have a bad marriage, that means something is seriously wrong between you and your spouse. That problem (or set of problems) has to create a great deal of animosity that begins to fester into dislike and then even into outright hate.

So how can you have great sex with someone you loathe fundamentally at least on a certain level? Because sex isn't just about getting yourself off -- it's about taking your partner over the moon, too.

How could you do that if you're warring with the other person?

This left me wondering if my idea of a bad marriage is different than the woman. In my mind, a bad marriage involves a major breakdown in communication and a serious disagreement over fundamental issues.

It may not mean you're shouting at each other all the time, but some kind of animosity is always seething and roiling below the surface. Because otherwise you would be able to communicate and connect to resolve your mutual issues.

Maybe she's really having great anger sex. That could be it.

I never could get into anger sex. It's mixing two diametrically opposite emotions. I guess I'm hopelessly romantic or something, because for me sex is always about connecting and loving and sharing, not warring and conquering.

classy femdom

I'm indifferent to a lot of femdom erotica because the men look like such wimps. I don't think it's sexy to see a man being easily bullied by a woman who is in better shape.

In contrast, erotica featuring a woman dominating a strong, powerful man can be very sexy if done well. Such imagery suggests the woman was smart enough to overpower the man somehow so that he submitted to her -- she used her pussy or her brain or both.

My change, I happened on the Classy Femdom Universe blog -- whoever curates it is a follower of my Tumblr. I like many of the images she selects, with the exception of the pegging stuff (I'm assuming it's a woman who compiles the images but it could be a man).

The pictures and loops feature mostly strong, verile men submitting to women. Much of what's featured there is superior to most femdom erotica, in my opinion.

In my view, good femdom is about empowering women and men accepting their power. Bad femdom is just women humiliating and/or mistreating unworthy men.

democracy prevails

As I'm writing this, the final election results are rolling in from Myanmar. Voting over the weekend marked the first free election the country has held in more than a quarter century.

While the results are not yet official, the party aligned with the former military dictatorship apparently has been resoundingly defeated in a landslide. Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition party will win about 70 to 80 percent of the national legislative seats up for election.

Aung San Suu Kyi, however, was constitutionally barred from running for president because she's a woman. I'd be willing to bet, when her party is in power, that limit will not last long.

A caveat to that optimism is warranted, however. Myanmar has had elections in the past, which the military dictators promptly ignored and annulled. Hopefully that kind of disgrace will not be repeated again.

Democracy can be messy and imperfect at times, but it is government by the people and for the people. It's a good day whenever dictators are sent packing.

Like many westerners, I have always lived in a free society. I think we westerners take freedom for granted too many times, a fact that's demonstrated repeatedly in the United States with a chronically abysmal voter turnout.

Last week Americans held elections in a variety of races. In many states, turnout was at historic lows.

In contrast, authorities are estimating that 90 to 95 percent of eligible voters turned out to cast ballots in Myanmar.

And, yes, I voted last week by absentee, like I do with every election. I hope you voted, too.

is this erotic?

I'm not as far along in my pregnancy as the woman seen in the photo below (full series). I'm guessing she's in her last trimester.

I know some (many?) men think the sight of a naked pregnant woman is erotic. I guess that's one of the things I'll never understand about men.

I don't think she looks awful or ugly, but she looks very pregnant, and in my mind, that's not erotic or sexy. Her profile is more like a gourd than a shapely woman.

My husband knows if he ever attempted to photography me pregnant and naked, I'd probably beat him senseless with a rusty shovel. I obviously don't like the sight of myself naked with a swollen belly.

I don't know what James honestly feels about seeing me knocked up and naked. I suspect he's secretly turned on about it, but he's diplomatic enough not to say that when he knows how I feel.

I freely admit I'm vain about my weight and my figure. That's why when I'm not pregnant, I'm determined to keep in shape. I may not be proud of my small breasts, but I am proud of my small waist.

If some (many?) men are turned on by the sight of a pregnant women, then good for them. But if any of them leer at me as I become more visibly swollen, that will not make me feel sexy or wanted.

I will still feel like a large overripe fruit, ready to burst.

urine-colored hair

This picture showing the back of Donald Trump's head was run up by a number of media outlets in the past week (enlargement).

Two things struck me upon seeing this. First, Ben Carson has a "get this crazy man away from me" expression on his face. That made me laugh.

The second is Donald's weird urine-colored hair. It doesn't look like a natural color nor does it look like a natural pattern where an older man's hair would be partly gray and partly the original color.

It looks like a really bad color job to me. I used to see a lot of bad dye hair on older men when I danced in clubs -- up on that stage, you can see the top of their heads.

This looks like Donald uses one of those comb-through products to darken his thin locks because he's too vain to even let his hair person know he's coloring it. That may be why he now wears the ballcap when he's outdoors, because he knows that shit will run in the sunlight.

In somewhat related news, I was heartened to see Trump is sliding in the polls and often ends up in second place hopefully. Like the express elevator in one of his overpriced buildings, I hope he goes down quickly.

I'm not wild about most of his opponents, but any of them would be a better President than Trump.

bond rents a car

My husband is a Bond fan, but I am not really one. Nonetheless, we both found this very funny. Sometimes Colbert's humor is too inside American for James to understand fully without my explanation, but he got this one without any problem.

I love how the Internet makes me feel like I'm still able to watch American television, even though I'm far away from my homeland.

suing strippers

Think Progress, a website with a left-of-center perspective, has an interesting and detailed new article up about some strippers in Las Vegas who are suing for better working conditions. Although I also danced at Vegas clubs, I don't know the woman featured in the story.

The piece details a familiar issue in the exotic entertainment business: are performers independent contractors or are they employees?

I'm of two minds about this issue. As a former performer, I side with the women who have a right not to be mistreated and exploited.

At the same time, anyone who has danced more than a few days in the business knows about the conditions and what it means to work as an independent contractor -- you have to go into this work with a realistic expectation

I certainly had issues with certain club owners and managers. You quickly learn who are the shits and who are the saints.

The saints certainly won't hire everyone, but they do want girls who bring in the customers, are drug free, and have a minimum of personal problems that would interfere with the job.

I guess it's my personality, but if anyone tried to push me around, I always pushed back. I also well understood that as a performer, I had something the managers and owners did not have: tits and a coochie. That gave me bargaining leverage.

The owners and managers need the women. There is a finite supply of above-average women. And they know if they treat a woman shabbily, she will find work in another club quite easily.

The trick is to make yourself indispensable. When they know you bring them a lot of business and cause them minimal headaches, you are in the position of power, not the owners and managers. Put your foot down, stick by your guns, and you can work the times and nights you want.

I absolutely refused to work with a tip maximum. I told them that it was either the rule goes or I go, and I got my way.

That's not to say the women in the linked article don't have a legitimate case. Many women have difficulty being assertive, and the managers and owners know how to exploit that.

I hope they succeed with their quest. But at the same time, if I was a performer again, I would prefer being an independent contractor and not an employee.

is vaginal fisting sexy?

Women fisting themselves or other women and men fisting women are scenarios sometimes seen in porn. IMHO, it looks more gynecological than erotic.

Given the amount of time it's seen in porn, I suspect some men are into it but not a whole lot. Because if many men liked to see it, porn would have a whole lot more fisting.

I'm sure vaginal fisting is pleasurable for some women, and if it's done safely and with full consent, then good for them. But the sight of it doesn't seem very sexy at all to me.

I never had a man ask to fist me during my sexually adventurous single days, but a few eased into it with too many fingers too far up there and I put a stop to that. In my experience, a man who knows how to use his fingers and tongue to get a woman off doesn't have to put his whole fist up there.

My personal theory is this: other than a baby, the only things I want in and out of my coochie are phallic-shaped objects no larger than a well endowed man's penis: a tongue, a finger or two, and/or a tubular sex toy are perfectly okay. But no vacuum cleaners, traffic cones, large vegetables, wine bottles, bowling pins, or fists, please.

debate debacles

I have been following news about the various disputes in both the Republican and Democratic parties back in the States. Some Democrats want more debates while some Republicans are angry about how their debates are run.

No matter what happens with either party, the reality is that neither Republicans or Democrats actually hold anything that could accurately be called a debate. Instead, they sponsor some kind of weird hybrid reality show that often deteriorates into shouting fests, finger pointing, and playing to the camera.

I think political debates need to be more like traditional debates. Candidates need to be focused on specific questions so they succinctly respond with their position and the reasons why.

If I was running the debates, I would put each candidate in an isolation booth so he or she could not interrupt other candidates or hog the debate time. They each have two or three or four minutes to respond to the question, and then the microphone is cut off in the candidate's booth.

Each candidate would be given the same question, so no one could whine about "gotcha" tricks. I also would hold the debates without any live audience to focus the candidates entirely on the issues instead of working the crowd.

The results might not be as lively or headline-grabbing as the current squabble-fests. But then they would cease to be the national embarrassment they are now.

windows to the soul

Someone compiled a touching gallery of photos on Imgur from the last hundred years or so of world history seen through the eyes of innocent bystanders who often ended up as victims. Some of the pictures moved me to tears even though I had seen a few of them before, although pregnancy hormones may be part of the reason.

If I had to compile a short list of the most important inventions in history, I think I'd rank photography in the top four, alongside the printing press, penicillin, and the computer. Photography gives us a living window into history.

The photo below is one of the lighthearted images from the linked gallery. It shows grown men in Indonesia being taught how to use condoms for the first time.

I love the variety of expressions. Some look angry, some look confused, some look skeptical, some look defiant, but only one finds it funny.

jealousy versus contempt

I received a rather venomous email from a woman who is obviously a Kardashian fan. Somehow she found my blog, took exception to my posts about America's favorite media whores, and berated me for "hating on" her idols.

"You're just jealus because they are succesful & not a stupid loser like you," the missive concludes.

At first, because of many misspellings in the note, I thought the sender was a child. She has a very unusual name and I easily located her Facebook page. She is older than I am, so she's no child.

I found her email funny and was not offended. I'm always amused when anyone uses the Internet to knock someone else's intelligence yet makes basic grammar and spelling errors in their intended barbs. People who wear glass dunce caps shouldn't throw stones.

On a more serious note, I'm not envious of the Kardashians. I have no desire to shamelessly prostitute myself for the sole reasons of fattening my wallet and stroking my ego.

I am not jealous; I am contemptuous. I think the public's adulation of wastrels like the talent-impaired Kardashians is a sad commentary on our society.

The world is filled with many admirable people who deserve attention because of their deeds and talents. The media and the public should not waste time on clowns who have no accomplishments nor any skills other than an ability to shamelessly prostitute themselves.

speaking of karma

After I wrote about karma yesterday, I happened on this short article about a lion that killed an illegal hunter looking to shoot him.

I think that's about the best example of karma I've ever seen. The incident brought to mind the Hemingway short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" where a hunter is accidentally shot and killed by his wife when he's trying to shoot a buffalo.

Do I really believe in karma? I don't know. It's one of those things I want to believe, but like any spiritual theories, it can only really be proven by dying.

But I guess I believe enough in the idea of karma that I never want to tempt it or overdraw my account.