Personal Musings category archive

What’s really sad about this column is not its purported point (that, by how they might look or dress, women don’t “ask for” being raped).

It is the casual, tacit acceptance by the writer, a young college student, that women must routinely worry about being raped.

Persons who complain about “political correctness” signify their wish for a free pass to be offensive.

I lived near and drove in Philly for a quarter century.

This is old news.

The city ranks 188th out of 194th American cities in the ninth annual ranking of safest driving cities in America by insurance giant Allstate, which released its report titled ‘America’s Best Drivers Report’ on Tuesday.

It occurs to me that the silly and stupid fuss over Miley Cyrus’s silly and stupid performance at the MTV awards is emanating from persons who think Hannah Montana is real.

Afterthought:

After I drafted this (you really don’t think I spend all day on this stuff, do you?), I stumbled over an interesting and reasonably sane conversation on this topic at Delaware Liberal.

Addendum, the Next Day:

This article puts the ruckus into a cultural and historical perspective that seems sensible.

Is humanity the culmination of evolution or just the means to its end?

Why do people sop with bread when they could Sopwith Camel?

How were parents able to rear children successfully before psychologists came along to tell them how?

If you have not realized how much television is unmitigated unadulterated untreated sewage, spend a bit of time at alt.binaries.teevee.

Daniel Ruth and I apparently don’t matter any more.

“That’s wonderful, sir,” the woman said. “Now first I have to ask your age.”

“Sure. I’m 63.”

The woman’s brow furrowed as she scanned a long list on her clipboard from hell. Then she did it again. And then, once more, before sheepishly looking up from the market research equivalent of a black spot.

“Uh, I’m very sorry sir, but we don’t have any surveys for someone your age.”

“Nothing? Perhaps you could ask me about dry martinis? Bogart movies? Prunes? Nothing?”

“No sir, nothing at all.”

Read the rest. It’s a hoot.

I have known addicts–addicts to alcohol and other drugs.

If they stop using their drugs of choice, their bodies rebel and they suffer horrible physical torment–nausea, DTs, hallucinations, and more.

If a man stops sending pictures of himself to strangers, I guarantee (as Justin Wilson would have said) that he will not suffer nausea, DTs, and hallucinations.

I can be as lecherous as the next guy, perhaps more lecherous than some, and, because I understand lechery, I have long believed that attempts to create an ailment called “sex addiction” are at best attempts to promote full employment for opportunistic therapists and at worst complete and total garbage.

Really, now, Anthony Weiners of this world, if you don’t press “send” on that SMS, are you going to throw up, have hallucinations, and see pink elephants?

Catherine Bennett reports in the Observer:

Now a new study casts such doubt on previous assumptions about sex addiction that questions are even being asked about Boris Johnson’s alleged satyriasis. Could he be, in fact, normal? Shouldn’t NHS Choices take another look at its claim, on its sex addiction page (with hilarious, addict-face illustration) that: “This addiction is similar to substance abuse because it is caused by the powerful chemical substances released during sex.”

Who wrote that – Tiger Woods?

Because researchers at UCLA tested brain activity in self-diagnosed hypersexual people and found no evidence to separate their participants’ reactions from those of normal people with a high sex drive.

Addiction is a real and horrible thing. I was a smoker. I know.

I’m still an addict, addicted to nicotine, but in gum form, without sucking crap into my lungs. (It’s at least an improvement.)

To use “addiction” as an excuse for being a narcissistic jackass insults every person who has ever struggled with a real physical addiction, from smokers on up.

Being a narcissistic jackass may be a “condition,” but it’s not an addiction.

Addictions are treatable.

You know that rap has lost its novelty when rappers enter the New York Times crossword puzzle.

The Battle of Gettysburg is all over the news this week, as death, dismemberment, and dysentery are romanticized.*

I suspect that proponents of the “Lost Cause,” in particular, focus on the battles because doing so enables them to obfuscate just exactly what cause was lost.

____________________

*Yes, I’ve been to Gettysburg, Antietam, the Wilderness, Richmond, and other battlefield sites. Of those, I think the Cornfield at Antietam affected me the most.

When I spent my Junior Year in England, I had a friend who was an American Civil War military history buff. It was a week before I figured out what he meant when he spoke of “the Battle of Aunty Ate ‘Em.”

I predict that the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision will eventually be judged as infamous a sell-out to bigotry and oppression as was the Dred Scott decision.

News pieces about what a Supreme Court ruling might mean if the Court rules this way or that.

Might as well play the ponies.

At least you get some fresh air (as long as you do it at the track and not at the OTB parlor).

I was planning to take out my tripod and try my (relatively) new camera with oodles of megapixels and a long lens at some moonshots tonight.

I find myself downcast at the overcast.

Of course the refrigerator breaks down the day after I drop $90.00 at the super market.

Ran out to Sears and picked up a little chest freezer ($150 on clearance) for the garage, something we have been thinking about anyway, moved all the frozen stuff to that, and am helping the refrigerator relive its ancestral roots as the “icebox” until the repair person shows up.

I guess it’s because they don’t want to admit they are racists, even to themselves, that most racists cannot recognize when they are doing something racist.

It is often said that some girls are attracted to bad boys.

If that is the case, it’s not just some girls. It’s also film and television folks.

Nothing else accounts for the tongue-dragging slavering over Professor Moriarty.

Frankly, they should get over Moriarty already.

He was a minor character invented for only one purpose: to facilitate A. Conan Doyle’s plan to assassinate Sherlock Holmes. He was not a criminal genius; he was a tool and hit man.

The story is a sordid one.

Doyle had decided that Sherlock Holmes was overshadowing his more “serious” fiction (anyone who has read his more “serious” fiction realizes overshadowing it was not difficult) and must be done away with.

Doyle spun the tale of a mysterious shadowy criminal mastermind so he–Doyle–could pitch Holmes over the cliff at Reichenbach Falls. Moriarty never actually appears in the story, being merely an invisible red herring to distract the reader from the true assassin, Doyle himself.

Moriarty appears, again only by name and never in person, in only two of the other 59 tales of the Canon: The Adventure of the Empty House, in which Holmes, defying the malevolence of his creator, reappears, rounds up the last of Moriarty’s (that is, Doyle’s) henchmen, and resumes his career at 221B Baker Street, and The Valley of Fear, again as a mention in what is quite possibly the worst of the Canon–it’s the only one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories I have not been able to re-read, though I’ve read the rest of the Canon five? six? seven? I forget how many times.

Yet movie makers and television broadcasters keep returning to Moriarty.

(Spoiler Alert)

Read more »

The ice cream trucks are in bloom, soon to be followed by UPS knees.

I am so glad that I am no longer a “road warrior,” getting on an airplane twice a month to go to some wonderful place like Bismarck, North Dakota, or Monroe, Louisiana, to spend a week in a classroom.

The people were always nice, wherever I went, but getting there by air was miserable.

But not this miserable.

Afterthought:

It wasn’t so bad when I worked for the railroad.

Train travel, unlike air travel, is fun; a business pass meant a sleeper; and I spent many weeks in Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York.

Two of them are among my favorite cities, along with Philadelphia, the city with the biggest inferiority complex in the world. The third one is on the Hudson. The fourth one is no city at all, but a formless, shapeless, centerless sprawl, the Blob in urban guise.