Month: April 2011

Pin-up girls from the 1950s, before and after:

Eugene Volokh highlights it:

If you hear that a woman wants sex but doesn’t have a partner, what do you think? She’s picky; she’s afraid of being emotionally hurt; she’s getting over a bad break-up; she doesn’t have the time for a serious commitment; she’s worried about pregnancy; she doesn’t want to be thought of as promiscuous.

If you hear that a man wants sex but doesn’t have a partner, what do you think? He can’t get a woman to sleep with him. A vast overgeneralization, of course, but it has some truth to it. Therefore, a male desire to use a vibrator is evidence that he’s sexually unsuccessful, in a way that doesn’t apply the same way to women. Hence, women with vibrator = sexy; man with vibrator = pathetic.

The Daily What presents "the Peacock spider’s funkadelic mating ritual captured on camera for (possibly) the very first time":

Skip to 2:30 if you’re short on time. Skip to Tube Dubber if you only have time for the inevitable Bee Gees remix.

Paul Collins traces the roots and cognates of "shit-faced" back to this entry:

SHIT-FACED, adj. Having a very small face, as a child, Clydes[dale].; q. chit-faced?

Instead of, say, a deeply unfortunate drunken pratfall, this shit-faced may come from the old Scottish fondness for referring to children as little shits; Jamieson's 1818 edition notes just such a "contemptuous designation for a child."  

Brenna Ehrlich has the story:

The Internet can be a powerful tool when it comes to collaborations between artists of all ilks. Laptop band Project Jenny, Project Jan harnessed said power when it set out to create a video for its new song, “Lucky Me,” producing a lovely, painterly vid courtesy of a Turkish artist the band had never met.

Greg Beato defends rugs:

[W]hat truly distinguishes the toupee from competing hair restoration solutions — and perhaps more important, what makes it feel so timely — is its improvisational nature. Hair restoration medications might not work, but even worse, they might work — in ways you don’t want them to. Propecia, for example, may cause irreversible sexual dysfunction or make you grow breasts. Hair transplants may be the most economical and trouble-free solution in the long run, but what if your surgeon’s having a bad day, or even a bad few minutes, and you wind up with doll hair for life?

A toupee presents no such risks.

Lizzie Skurnick explores a bizarre trend, the Cake Gender Reveal, wherein a couple learns the sex of its baby by the color of the inside of the cake:

Why cake? I know I just asked that, but now I mean it because I think this is happening because CAKE IS WHAT WE USE ON A BIRTHDAY. This is lame! Why not an envelope that releases a stream of urine into the air if it's a boy; a devastatingly cruel giggle if it's a girl? Why not have the audience place bets, so that one partner can forever feel betrayed by the heretofore unacknowledged but distinct preference for what cannot be? 

The latest incident of brutality from the Assad regime. They have begun a slowly accelerating Friday-Saturday cycle of deaths, funerals and more deaths – a pattern which, over months, helped undo the Shah’s regime. There are still elements of support for the Assads – “always keep ahold of nurse for fear of finding something worse“. But what legitimacy they once had is crumbling fast. Does that matter? How does it change things?

We might look to Iran today for an answer. It is not pretty. But it is not stable either.

Natalia Cecire weighs them:

Thinking in public is a difficult habit to get into … because public is the place where we're supposed to not screw up, and thinking on the fly inevitably involves screwing up. Blogging with any regularity in essence means committing oneself to making one's intellectual fallibility visible to the world and to the unforgiving memory of the Google cache. This is particularly a problem for academics, who are, after all, professional thinkers; we have a culture of making it look easy, and of concealing as much as possible "the raw material of poetry in all its rawness."

Philip Connors relishes life at a wildfire lookout in New Mexico's Gila National Forest:

With no one calling on the radio, I swim languidly in the waters of solitude, unwilling to rouse myself to anything but the most basic of labors. Brush teeth. Piss in meadow. Boil water for coffee. Observe clouds. Note greening of Gambel oak. The goal, if I can be said to have one, becomes to attain that state where I’m completely in tune with cloud and light, a being of pure sensation. The cumulus build, the light shifts, and in an hour—or two—I’m looking at country made new.

(Photo of a fire lookout at Winchester Peak in the Northern Cascades of Washington state, not far from where Jack Kerouac wrote Dharma Bums.)