Month: October 2011

Lili Loofbourow gets her hands on a 1656 pamphlet called the Academy of Pleasure:

As a lady, your 'sack' might be tickled by someone's 'Bloody Great Kidney Wiper,' or you could welcome a rolling pin into your treasure. Parts shuffle and recombine in circumvolutory spirals: her 'ruff' to his 'sweepstakes,' his bilbo to her wheel. You could explore her terra incognita with your Robin. Invite his spoon into your tub. Mock a man's rouncival, ride his rope, diddle his distaff. … The words refer to the parts we know, but just as there are nights when a lady's ruff drives you wild, there are nights when it's just a sack. Same goes for rouncivals and spigots.

Her name was Ninkasi:

What’s believed to be the world’s oldest written recipe is for beer, and it celebrates a female brewmaster. Four-thousand-year-old Mesopotamian clay tablets describe the brewing process in a hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer. From ancient Sumeria through medieval Europe, women ruled the kettles. Beer can be described as liquid bread, so there was nothing unusual about women using their baking ingredients to brew in home kitchens. It wasn’t until entrepreneurial women began to sell their beer that men really moved in, restricting the creation and sale of beer to powerful male-only guilds.

An anonymous writer at Jezebel examines her guilt:

When you first meet someone … you don't actually see them. You see a flimsy construction of their personality, created by your interpretation of the signals available. The way they make eye contact. How they interact with the bartender/waiter/homeless man asking you for change. The facts they choose to divulge about themselves. Because you have no other point of reference, every little detail resonates with added significance. Your mind, faced with a scarcity of information, is forced to create a projection of them. … The mirage is sexy. But herein lies the danger. The potential for a schism to exist between the mirage and reality is huge. The probability of being disappointed is gigantic. That disappointment is compounded when intimacy is involved. You sleep with a stranger. You feel like you know them. But you likely don't at all.

"Letter to My 16-Year-Old Self" by George Watsky:

The Paris Review delivers.

George Will unloads on Mitt Romney's congenital inability to stand firm:

Last week in Ohio, Romney straddled the issue of the ballot initiative by which liberals and unions hope to repeal the law that Republican Gov. John Kasich got enacted to limit public employees’ collective bargaining rights. Kasich, like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, is under siege. Romney was asked, at a Republican phone bank rallying support for Kasich’s measure, to oppose repeal of it and to endorse another measure exempting Ohioans from Obamacare’s insurance mandate (a cousin of Romneycare’s Massachusetts mandate). He refused.

His campaign called his refusal principled: “Citizens of states should be able to make decisions . . . on their own.” Got it? People cannot make “their own” decisions if Romney expresses an opinion. His flinch from leadership looks ludicrous after his endorsement three months ago of a right-to-work bill that the New Hampshire legislature was considering. So, the rule in New England expires across the Appalachian Mountains?

A day after refusing to oppose repeal of Kasich’s measure, Romney waffled about his straddle, saying he opposed repeal “110 percent.”

And so one of the leading conservative voices basically issues a vote of no confidence in the probable Republican nominee, while not endorsing anyone else. Despair? Or is there yet another option? A convention challenge? Who knows? Except the GOP is sleepwalking to likely defeat in a year they should have no problems.

You could see this one coming:

Christie Wilcox comforts herself:

Evolutionary biologists would say that it’s not surprising that our emotions have hijacked the pain system. As social creatures, mammals are dependent from birth upon others. We must forge and maintain relationships to survive and pass on our genes. Pain is a strong motivator; it is the primary way for our bodies tell us that something is wrong and needs to be fixed. Our intense aversion to pain causes us to instantly change behavior to ensure we don’t hurt anymore. Since the need to maintain social bonds is crucial to mammalian survival, experiencing pain when they are threatened is an adaptive way to prevent the potential danger of being alone.

A Tokyo timelapse tribute to Blade Runner:

All you really need to know, from a classic Daily Telegraph obit.