Pass on by, this one’s about porn

Somebody is finally biting the bullet and talking about the effect it has, especially on younger people.

You know, one of the things about The Correction is that porn will go back to being like the good old days.  It will be drawings, cartoons, carvings on the outhouse wall, sexxay netsuke, possibly pictures, books for sure, and live shows.  Wow.  Never thought about that before, and all of a sudden I have an inspiration for an SF story. That aside, I will now make a couple of other observations.

When I was a wee tad, my parents tried to protect me from pornography.  They said that it wasn’t bad in and of itself, but it could lead inexperienced young persons to get the wrong idea about sex with a real partner.  Nothing that has happened to me since has changed this received wisdom, which is now my opinion.  If kids want facts they can have them.  But porn?  ehn.  As much as I like porn, or the branches of porn I like (being either big budget 70s porn or home movies of contemporary ‘ordinary people’ having consensual sex, if only to avoid the godawful music of current DVD porn), I still think young people should be protected from it, for the same reasons my parents gave me. Don’t ask me HOW you protect your kids from porn; I was very fortunate in that my kids believed what I told them on the subject, and even more fortunate that they at least appeared to be convinced, and that I didn’t have to have the “Please don’t steal mommy’s credit card to order “Splort – an illustrated history of Bukkake”, thanks!” conversation.

And isn’t it extraordinary that I was born in 1958 and I HAD that conversation with my parents?  Sometimes I think I was born in the future and it was only an accident that I ended up living in the 20th century at all.  Anyway, thanks to Tyee’s twitter feed for bringing this article to my attention.  I well know how that woman feels about talking in public about porn.  It’s not a comfy feeling, but somebody has to acknowledge these things before the lies and hypocrisy overwhelm us.  Besides, my parents probably have no recollection of that conversation.  I know my memory isn’t as good as it was.  Okay, move along, there’s no pictures.

I hear John’s voice

I know, he’s dead.

But in response to this news (first  this) (then this) all I can hear is “It couldna happened to a nicer guy.”  No, I do not condone the pitching of tourist chachkas at political leaders.  No, I do not condone violence as my personal means of effecting political change.  I prefer mockery and bribery, personally, but that’s just me.  When one of the most media savvy and scummy politicians of the modern era gets injured in this way, I know that he has access to the best pain killers on the planet, and he’s gonna come out okay.

snow

We got about an inch of fairly wet snow.  I’m going to put some shoes on and go deal with the worst of it so the mail carrier will continue to be happy with me.

I should REALLY work on music today, it’s just piling up higher and higher.  And I should get Denis’ (sure wish I knew whether he was a one n or two n Denis) life story transcribed.  And do banking.  Yup, I should definitely light a fire under myself today.

That’s a weird coinkidink, holidays, Margot fur

Daughter Katie (Kathryn) is living with Kat (Kathleen) and Kashka (Polish diminutive of Katherine).  Weird, hunh?

We are going to have a LOT of coming and going this holiday season.  Keith goes to Victoria from the 19th to the 23rd.  He comes back the same day as when me, Paul and Katie go to Victoria for Granny’s b’day party.  We stay overnight and then come back Christmas Eve so I can start cooking for the big Xmas dinner.  Then Jeff goes later that week.  And Alex and Darwin will be going at the same time… tis nuts, but that’s Xmas for ya.

Margot is coming with us.  I suspect that despite my pOp’s inability to understand why I took this completely useless animal on as a pet, that he will like her anyway. Many thanks to Paul for allowing me to use his car to transport her.  She’s not a big fan of car trips,

I punted her with a piece of furniture yesterday.  (Accidentally, I didn’t see her).  She just slid across the floor and neither mewed nor changed position.  She has no conception of the possibility that someone would harm her. She can spend 10 minutes being brushed, grousing the whole time, scratching at my hands and kicking like a baby with her back feet.  Any other cat would vanish afterwards, and she merely flops down on the floor in front of the bathroom door and glares at me.  She can try to bite me but she doesn’t have enough strength in her jaw to even break my skin.  This makes her behaviour with Eddie and Gizmo even more hilarious; she’s defenceless, except for the cute; why Eddie hasn’t given her a good thumping I have no conception.

I have picked her up three times in a row to keep brushing her, and she doesn’t run away.  I can’t say she knows she can’t keep up with her own fur, but she sure acts like it.

Should I start keeping her fur as an art project?  She makes a loonie sized tuft of fur twice a day.

Last 24 hours

Skating was wonderful, although I have a blister half an inch across on my calf.  Then, I wrote a song.  I went outside for a second and got inspired and came right back in and sang it into the mp3 recorder.  Slept.  Wrote another song.  Got up.  (Particularly pleased with this most amazing piece of multi tasking, what with the lying in bed and thinking up songs).  Got dressed, and did not realize until I had left the house that not one piece of my clothing was on speaking terms with the next.  Girls, I looked like I had slithered through six closets and only wore what stuck.  Went to church.  Witnessed the single cutest moment I’ve ever seen after a very entertaining and well received children’s pageant.  I’m not going to try to describe it, but I hope there are pictures. Got a phone call from ScaryClown and went to a late lunch with him AND dragged him back here for Primer (neither he nor Keith had seen it, from which you may infer that my gorgeous, vivid, witty and perceptive son is here) and classic Warner Brothers cartoons.

Snow has been falling off and on since church got out.

I swept up straw from the manger this morning.

I had a day with my peeps… Jeff ate his late repast with gusto …. boys killing pixels in the basement.  Beautiful and people-filled day, with music ringing in my ears.  One of the songs I wrote is “Christmas in Vancouver” which is a very Accommodationist-wing-of-contemporary-atheism-anti-hymn, and the other is “Load On”.  The latter is a very Band-ish tune meant to be played trad instrument, light percussion and at least four voices.  Okay, that’s how I hear it in my head.  It’s from Deadwood, when Sol goes to back Bullock’s play with that tomfool popgun his girlfriend Trixie loaned him.  And, like one might reasonably expect, gets shot for his pains.  The song is about Sol loaded up on laudanum before, during and after the extraction of the bullet, and the stuff he raves about while he’s wrecked.  I know, isn’t that the damnedest thing to get an instant song about?  I had sung my song about Al Swearengen earlier in the evening and it made me think about Deadwood, so I guess I was primed for it.  I still can’t believe how fast it came on.

I have a quiet happiness inside me which corresponds to chocolate chip pecan cookies.  Happy Xmas to all reasonable people, in the very broadest humanistic terms and without reference to goshes, I mean gods.

Note to self… call Jeff before starting supper

Jeff worked at the shop today, which is unusual. I expected  him home half an hour ago.  I figured he’d had a bad day and needed filet mignon, mixed veg and potato for dinner, with scratch made chocolate chip cookies.  As a joke I made a cookie as big as his head.

Sigh, he is at a work function which he got drafted into about the time I should have called him.  So I cooked it all and supper will be waiting for him, but I’m heading out skating now.  It’s been ages and I desperately need the exercise.   He was chagrined when I phoned him, but all that stuff reheats.

The cats circled my plate like vultures.

Trading emails

My bro emails me as follows.

This is what Margot looks like to me all the time:

ಠ_ಠ

Concerned cat is concerned.

I email him back.

^    ^
O~O

is more accurate.

He emails me back….

Sez you.

_________________

The mailman was very happy I put down de-icer yesterday.  I try to do as I would be done by, with variable results.  This time it worked.

I can’t find my cell phone charger.  I have no idea what I did with the darned thing, which is rather anxiety making.  At the same time, I know it’s in the house, so I am not too worried.

My cousin Katherine had a b-day yesterday; facebutt lets you know when people on your friendslist are approaching their natal day, so I and many other people wished her a happy birthday.  Her userpic in facebook is a piece of anime art she did herself.  Talented lassie!

My mother also had a birthday recently.  She and pOp celebrated, in part, with a drive in the country, a family tradition to which I, alas, cannot subscribe, as I don’t have a car and I don’t have any friends or relatives in town willing to indulge me in my fondness for aimless carbon release.

Eddie crawled into my lap … twice … yesterday.  Gizmo, not to be outdown, followed me into the bathroom at one point and insisted on being brushed.  It amazes me; both of the cats have changed so much since Margot came along, and apart from the truly remarkable noises Eddie makes when Margot goggles at him unexpectedly, I’d say their behaviour has become more affectionate.  Now, if we could stop them from throwing up.  But in the words of Dr. Jane, the singing paleontologist (now Dr. James):

Cats they shed, and cats they throw up

Cats they defecate and spray (and they spray)

And I’m gonna be a multi millionaire

The day that I can make these products pay.

Hey, if you’re going to sing about cats, one should strive for accuracy with those, dare I say it, caterwauls.

And now we learn a new use for an old word.

The word is ‘rhino’.

Not that anybody cares, but Dr. Peter Watts, a noted Canadian SF writer, was beaten, pepper sprayed, stripped, and made to walk across the Bluewater Bridge and driven to the Canadian side in his shirt sleeves during a snowstorm.  I have already contacted my MP. More deets here. Obviously the US Border Thugs who did this believe they were justified, and have charged him with assault.  Update here http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=935… unfortunately I can’t seem to paste links at the moment.

What are the odds this is BS, and the guards overstepped their authority?

PZ Myers on death

We should feel grief. Pretending that they have ‘transcended’ into some novel quantum mechanical state in which their consciousness persists, or that they are shaking hands with some anthropomorphic spiritual myth in never-never land, does a disservice to ourselves. The pain is real. Don’t deny it. Use it to look at the ones you love who still live and see what you can do to make our existence now a little better, and perhaps a little more conducive to keeping our energies patterned usefully a little longer.

Correction REDUX

I know I haven’t been posting much about The Correction, but not because I haven’t been thinking about it. One of the reasons I took some time off (apart from the fact that I felt I had to) was that I knew the money I’ve earned or been handed due to no effort on my part is going to be worthless at some point.  I am currently guessing 6 to 18 months.

Some American politicians are trying to work on the problem. Without a complete withdrawal from foreign wars, I fail to see how reducing the American debt to the point it can be paid back is possible.

This article, which comes from an American think thank which is focused on the effects of economic policy on working families, but which is centrist by Canadian standards, gives the skinny.  By Murrican standards they are scandalously left wing, but Canadians have kind of a different take on that.  Let’s just say they ain’t the Fraser Institute.  The skinny is that without an immediate deflation of the dollar of 20 to 30%, there cannot possibly be a controlled or ‘soft’ landing of the economy in response to a global shift away from the dollar, and a crisis in which the major nation lenders extend the digitus impudicus to the continuation of American government borrowing.

The US is our biggest trading partner.  For 35 out of the 50 states, we’re the biggest single customer.  Over 50% of what we produce, manufactured or services or food or energy, goes south.  When that market dries up, and believe me, it will, Canadians will be very glad that our infrastructure is in better shape and we can actually feed ourselves, heat and electrify our homes (at hellish cost), and have the banking structure in place to weather the disaster, although the economy will be disabled and crushed by horrific interest rates for a long while.  We may actually have a ‘replacement’ currency for foreign money to flee to… if there’s no place for the Euro-seeking investors and speculators to go.

I really feel for my kids; but we have survived pogroms, forced immigration, religious repression, the Russian Revolution, global depression and war, historically, as a family, and we will do it again.  It’s not an option to whine.  It is what it is, as my old employer used to say.

Right now, it seems like the market collapse is happening someplace else.  It isn’t.  It’s happening right here, right now.  We’re moving goods on credit across the ice of Lake Ladoga, and when the thaw comes, we’ll be pooched. I predicted that the collapse was imminent back in 2004.  The US bailout prevented bad things from happening, but the evil day is still coming.

The future is here… it’s just  unevenly distributed. (William Gibson).

The glue

I think my family is glued together with movies. Last night, Jeff and I watched Support Your Local Sheriff for about the nth time, but it was Keith’s first time watching, and I don’t watch movies the same way I used to, so I was impressed.

James Garner makes being effortlessly masculine and a bit of a selfish bastard poetry in motion; Joan Hackett does the smart but ditzy daughter with a verve and authority which is delightful; Jack Elam is flat out brilliant; Bruce Dern as a yob = lucky guy, he got some of the best lines; Walter Brennan as his long-suffering crusty cuss of a father is like a multi-layered parody of himself; all the casting is marvellous.  The script is where it starts though, and William Bowers, also responsible for Advance to the Rear, the remake of My Man Godfrey with David Niven, and the Sheepman, wrote one for the comedy ages.  Highly recommended.

Another movie I watched recently, which I am not going to recommend because it’s a damned strange, disturbing, and not very kind to animals movie, was The Holy Mountain.  I was whipping around somebody’s personal best 100 movie list on the internet and this one got mentioned with such inarticulate adoration (“Just see it.  It’s too hard to describe”) that I had to make Jeff get it from Zip.

I LOVED IT.  I can hardly wait to show it to all my coolest film fan friends, because it is strange and marvellous and disgusting and eye-popping and very memorable.  About an hour in, I thought, “Man, this movie simply cannot get ANY better (this was at the point a six foot ball python showed up… there are A LOT of animals in this movie.)  In another scene a guy gets to take a symbolic (rebirth) bath with a baby hippo; women get their heads shaved; a guy who’s like Jesus shares a joint with a quadruple amputee; one hundred lamb carcasses are paraded around on crucifixes; a man gets hauled up the side of a building in an incredible, bizarre shot; tarot cards are invoked; and the end … well, it predates the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail by quite a bit, and there’s NO WAY on earth you can convince me that Terry Gilliam didn’t see it before they made Grail.  Anyway, the movie is about spiritual quest(s) and it pauses occasionally to kick militarism, consumerism and religion with glee and hobnailed boots, while mocking itself and occasionally giving hints about how to deconstruct the movie.

Even if you don’t follow the ‘plot’ it is an amazing and very big budget piece of awesome weird, and the visuals completely saturated my ability to take them in.  And I liked the hippy dippy music, so there.  The director says, “I ask from film what most people ask of psychedelic drugs” and the only response to that was/is, “Yes.”