Month: June 2011

Jim Gillian shares how he transitioned from Christian fundamentalism to a Web-based belief system:

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is impressed:

Perhaps the best and most significant part of the talk is this quote: “God is just what happens when humanity is connected.” And indeed the unique feature of Christianity is that it is based on a personal relationship with God—indeed, a god who is both fully human and fully divine. I do believe that God “happens” when humanity is connected. I also believe that God is more and not “just” that, but I also think it’s as important to get the first part as it is to get the second part.

Cord Jefferson confesses he used to not wash his hands after peeing. But "perianal sweat" changed his mind:

The perianal area is the small patch of flesh just outside the rectum, a spot on the human body that "inevitably becomes loaded with fecal bacteria," according to [assistant biology professor Pat] Fidopiastis. ("Frankly, toilet paper only satisfies your visual senses into thinking that you're clean"). When you start to perspire, even a little, sweat from the perianal area starts dripping around in your underwear, eventually getting into the fabric and moving onto your genitals.

"But what about oral sex?" I ask. "We never tell people to clean their crotches before oral sex the way we tell them to wash their hands before they eat." Fidopiastis says that's because the human mouth is actually far less hospitable to bacteria than, say, chips and dip at a party.

Kathryn Schulz champions cursing in literature:

[T]he idea persists that the use of swear words by writers is fundamentally uncreative and indolent—that the lazy man’s “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is “Fuck this shit.” … Writers don’t use expletives out of laziness or the puerile desire to shock or because we mislaid the thesaurus. We use them because, sometimes, the four-letter word is the better word—indeed, the best one.

Martin Hogue reasons:

[B]y now most of the old necessities — hiking to and clearing the site, hunting for game, collecting water and firewood — have given way to such less arduous activities as parking the car, pitching cable-free pop tents, buying cold cuts at the campground store, hooking up electrical and sewerage conduits, setting up patio chairs, etc. Serviced by networks of infrastructure and populated with trailers and $100,000 RVs, campgrounds celebrate a unique form of American ingenuity in which intersecting narratives and desires (wilderness, individuality, access, speed, comfort, nostalgia, profit) have become strangely and powerfully hybridized.

Lorin Stein nominates a moment: when M.A.S.H director Robert Altman cast Elliott Gould (with Jewfro and handlebar mustache) as Trapper John (a football hero from Dartmouth) :

You read the coverage of Gould at the time—it’s all about how he’s a Brooklynite, how he’s a street kid—but that’s not what the movies are telling you. The movies are telling you that in the better America we are now inhabiting—and in which we get to rewrite the history of the Korean war and redo Raymond Chandler—Elliott Gould is an American. Brooklyn born, but American. That America is, in its coolest and freest and most aristocratic stratum, maybe partly or secretly Jewish.

It all comes together in that first scene where Elliott Gould reaches into his army parka, pulls out an olive jar, and drops two olives into his martini. What’s that line? "A man can’t really savor his martini without an olive.”  Those olives put the mix back in mixology. They’re miscegenating olives. In interviews Altman liked to pretend that he himself was “half-Jewish.” He was a philo-semi-Semite.

Nathan Heller calls its roots "unremarkable and un-American":

The pies of the ancients, rather than being oozing desserts, were combinations of savory foods baked in a pot made of tough dough. … This crust-pot baking method spread through Europe and gained popularity through the Middle Ages, since the dough shell, called a bake-meat (later, just as appetizingly, a coffin), allowed meats to stew without losing moisture. It also helped seal off the meal and slow down spoilage.

Stay cool this weekend:

A reader writes:

I've been reading through Frank Mott's A History of American Magazines vol. 1, 1741-1850 (1930), when I came across a paragraph about beards in the 1840s.  The first half is – to a rather bored, bearded grad student anyway – rather funny.  I thought of your blog while reading it and figured I should share:

Beards became a political issue for a time in the early forties.  For several decades before that they had been almost unknown.  Joseph Palmer, the  transcendentalist, "expressed himself" by wearing a long beard, which caused no small excitement wherever he went; finally, he injured some representative of the established order who attempted to cut the unusual appendage off by duress, and was thrown into jail.  If he had been a martyr to some great religious faith instead of to the sanctity of his beard, he might now be celebrated rather than forgotten. 

Philobarbus, in the Southern Literary Messenger, commented in 1842 upon "the temporary obscuration of beards for nearly a century past—and their wonderful resuscitation at the present time."  The secretary of the navy, however, considered whiskers of certain styles and lengths in contravention of discipline, and issues a famous "Whisker Order" bringing them within proper limits, thus almost causing open mutiny in the United States Navy.  Beards continued to grow in spite of all obstacles, official and tonsorial; the Mexican War appears to have helped the fad along.  (477-478)

(Photo via Jon Dyer. The inscription reads, "Persecuted for wearing the beard.")

Adult gentoo penguins keep an eye on their newly born chick at Edinburgh Zoo on June 10, 2011 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The gentoo chicks, which started hatching in early May, are looked after by both parents who regurgitate partly-digested food. When the chicks are hungry they peck the beaks of their parents to signal feeding time. By Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.