Presumably tired of fucking on unequal terms. Never mind.
3: Oh, I'm slow. (Public schools; hee-haw.)
Stanley missing wordplay like that? That's just crazy.
I tried to make up something you could have misheard as this. It involved Latvians eating Vietnamese noodle soup. I couldn't bring myself to make up a tortured backstory so I abandoned the project.
9: Yeah, I also wonder how Becks became friends with Ogged.
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I have just completed a minor task that took twenty minutes and that I should have done a month or so ago, and have been worrying about, rather than simply doing, for weeks. I'm simultaneously pleased with myself and consumed with self-loathing over what I consider to be an accomplishment.
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13: Further evidence that you are, in fact, me. Although the good thing about the job I have now is that most things that don't get done timely become irrelevant quickly enough to provide both meaningful incentives to get them done timely and relief from nagging worry when I don't.
13: Had that feeling just this morning. And it was less than 20 minutes from start to completion.
Eating more fruit really does help.
13: I had a related thing over lunch. There's this burrito place in town that's never open, so if it is open, I feel extra inclined to go, as if it's some treat that they've decided to open JUST FOR ME. So I walked by today, and they were open, and I was all, "Yes! Burrito!" Except then I decided I wanted a sandwich from this other place, which sandwich I got. And now I'm back at work and realizing maybe I'm not hungry at all, actually.
Wait. This is nothing like 13, is it?
I don't understand. Where was the five dollars?
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Hey I think I'm coming to New York for a visit. Like Saturday through Wednesday maybe. Is the New York contingent bored of meeting up?
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I had to miss the last one, so I'm not.
Let me be the first to suggest Fresh Salt.
22: Oh good. I have friends to see but no specific plans- would any evening be particularly good or bad for you?
I'm in the process of figuring out that Monday's my only possibility.
I work for no one. Stop bossing me around.
Quiet, Monday. You're in Time Out until your attitude improves.
I can't make it 'til Tuesday.
29: "See you next Monday" doesn't really lend itself to innuendo though.
30: Whenever Monday comes, you can find me cryin'.
I'll be at the opera on Monday. Sadly, not a euphemism for anything.
32: Just tell people you're spending the evening watching the sopranos. It sounds less alienating to the boorish among us.
You people are really starting to piss me off.
Come to think, Tuesday is right out, but I could probably do Wednesday.
I'm leaving on Wednesday. That probably wasn't clear in my original comment.
Monday is the winner! (are you happy now, Monday?)
What time does Opera happen, Smearcase?
Oh Monday morning,
you gave me no warning
of what was to be...
Oh Monday Monday, how could you leave
and not take me?
The pitched screaming begins at 8 so I'm probably out.
I hope you're enjoyin' the scen'ry
I know that it's pretty up there
We can go hikin' on Tuesday
With you I'd walk anywhere
California has worn me quite thin
I just can't wait to see you again:
Come Monday...
33, 42: I generally take my classical music straight without all of the whoopin' and hollerin', but about a month ago we caught Verdi's Requiem and I must say the singers presented an interesting visual mix. From left to right, there was a pizzeria lady (via the Pacific Northwest though), an easy-on-the-eyes leggy Russian tennis star, young Uncle Fester, and a barrel-chested kung fu master. They all sang well, too.
45: I heard that pizzeria lady soprano last summer. She's pretty great.
46: I thought you might be familiar with her.
Speaking of pizzerias, it doesn't look like anyone's invented the Ranchovy yet as a pizza topping. Someone should get on that, presumably in a locale that has transplants from the South and, um, wherever people who eat anchovies are from.
45: I'm frustrated that I can't find a picture of the concert. Fucking IP terrorists.
wherever people who eat anchovies are from
Portugal! Portugal! Portugal!
Hey, wow, totally on topic: sweet christ, The Atlantic is really getting tiresome with its oh-so-daring sexist bullshit:
While sexual aggression and the desire to debase women may not be what arouse all men, they are certainly an animating force of male sexuality ... The history of civilization would seem to show that there's no hope of eradicating those qualities.
Is the Monday in question the 10th? If so, I should be able to make it.
51: I think the article is at times confused between "male sexuality" and "sexuality", but it's not altogether bad. (Vargas-Cooper also writes The Awl's Footnotes to Mad Men.) I thought after a while that this was a good personal essay masquerading as a removed think-piece, and then lo and behold:
He couldn't stay aroused. Over the course of the tryst, I trotted out every parlor trick and sexual persona I knew. I was coquettish then submissive, vocal then silent, aggressive then downright commandeering; in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it's a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, "Because that's the only thing that will make you uncomfortable."
I rather liked that.
...but yeah, it's pretty question-begging with regards to the old script:
Dads are grown men, and they know that when it comes to sex, most men will take every inch a woman yields.
51: The part I most object to is what comes after the ellipsis. But my opposition to the claim "we will never eradicate it" is really just based in a commitment to optimism. If I didn't think that deep and old evils could be someday eliminated, I would never get out of bed.
I think the article is at times confused between "male sexuality" and "sexuality"
This. That's 95% of the problem with it.
You know what strikes me? That the fact that 2/3 of the audience for porn is men is cited as evidence that male desire is [stronger/more rapacious/more violent], but think of the context! Porn watching is totally normative for men. It's totally not for women. (Except maybe in the case of the fun girlfriend watching porn with her man). When I hear that women are a third of the audience for the product that looks on the face of it designed to cater only to men, I think, wow, that's a lot of women.
If I may spout a bunch of nonsensical personal prejudices for a moment: I think a big driver of women's obviously quite strong interest in porn is that it provides access to simulated sex with women, something they'd be pretty interested in if sex with men weren't in many senses easier. (As in, more conventional, requiring less initiative, requiring less finessing of many women's anxiety, coquettishness, and passivity. Of course there are many anxious, coquettish, and passive men, but they aren't the ones out there making sex with men easy to find.)
Speaking of visiting places, I'm going to be in Miami later this month. I really hated Miami last time I was there. But it's supposed to snow here again this weekend, and it's going to be in the mid-70s in Miami, so I'll do my best to survive the experience.
But the reactionary political correctness of the 1990s put forth a proposition even more disastrous to women than free love: sexual equality.
oop. Now we have wondered into the realm of the truly nonsensical. She is saying that equality is a harm to the person who is raised to the level of equal.
57: I'm 4 days in Delray Beach Fl. starting Saturday. Not my favorite place either, but also warm. And a couple of great bird places.
51, 53: I'm sure the article will ring true with some/plenty of men... but it's such a pure regurgitation of traditional cultural narratives as to be rather pointless. I guess if it were packaged as a review of various examples and anecdotes of a particular kind of sexuality, I would probably read it with interest. But Vargas-Cooper just has to do the "look I'm the only one brave enough to tell the dirty truth" thing, which is especially annoying when it's coupled with the "this is true for everyone and if you don't think it's true for you you're fooling yourself" thing. (For an example of the latter, see "many feminists ... would applaud this emasculated masculinity as progress--but we're never going to achieve it.")
The only really interesting part of the article comes in the sudden left turn at the end, when she summarizes Last Tango in Paris and then says, "The most frightening truths about sex rarely exist in the physical, but instead live in the intangible yet indelible wounds created in the psyche. Go try to find that on the Internet." It sounds like she's got something interesting to say about sex-related emotional scarring, but ran out of space or something. Then she just tried to tape that last thought onto the rest of the article with that sentence about the Internet.
57: Miami can be really fun if you take it on its own terms. This joint is fun and eerily authentic, there are some great parks on islands in the middle of the bay, the architecture on south beach is very neat, and SB has a ton of tasty restaurants. Just make sure not to get overloaded on the insane tourists on Ocean Drive.
55: If I didn't think that deep and old evils could be someday eliminated, I would never get out of bed.
Yeah. There's something both boring and deeply, existentially depressing about think-pieces whose main point is that the status quo will never change.
51: The stuff sounded somewhat Pagliaesque and sure enough here she is in an interview at The Awl with Julie Klausner where they discuss Paglia and Lady GaGa, "Her political stuff is bonko but I intensely adore her cultural criticism."
63: Oh god. That interview. Was it spoken or done by sms? Because the style is nauseatingly cutesy.
Exhibit A. "pee-yanny"
And don't even try to tell me she was being ironic. You unfogged people know how to be ironic. This is just gross.
Delayed response: not Fanciulla, which I already saw, but Tosca. (Which....I've already seen a thousand times, including once in this production, but never with this soprano, a minor favorite of mine.)
From left to right, there was a pizzeria lady (via the Pacific Northwest though), an easy-on-the-eyes leggy Russian tennis star, young Uncle Fester, and a barrel-chested kung fu master.
I'm of course taking this as a quiz, but I'm not doing too well.
I thought after a while that this was a good personal essay masquerading as a removed think-piece
You like a lot of those. It's an intensely irritating form; one gets the impression that the authors aren't themselves aware of what they're really writing.
Having said that I need some optimism to get out of bed, I will confess to being at heart a pessimist, and go to bed. For it is clear that nothing exists, and even if it did, we couldn't know it, and even if we could, we couldn't talk about it.
one gets the impression that the authors aren't themselves aware of what they're really writing.
Better that happens in The Atlantic than a checking account.
68: I totally get what you're saying.
nothing exists, and even if it did, we couldn't know it, and even if we could, we couldn't talk about it.
But isn't that state of things just kind of neutral, rather than bad? So that believing in it isn't pessimism, but a kind of Buddhist-like emptiness?
Not that I really have any business talking about Buddhism.
Speaking of things that started in Asia and normative masculinity*, I'm doing yoga on the Wii Fit. It has taken me a month to get to the point where I can balance on one foot for long enough to try the poses. And I'm just now getting to reach my toes without resorting to the old "bend at the knee" trick.
*In the sense that I'd never do this in public.
Emerging from nowhere again to ask opera question: when did it become a fancy thing, exactly, to the day? I love opera and am going to be in the ceiling seats at the Met like all winter/spring, but this seems to get me cred with people I should have no cred with because believe me otherwise I would be at home playing Assassins Creed: Brotherhood or watching Miami Vice either the show or the more recent movie. Anyway, last time I checked, it was 1860 in Italy and there were crazy Verdi riots, and now I can't even sneak a flask in and have a personal riot in my brain without getting funny looks. The history of civilization seems to prove this, for sure.
exactly, to the day?
Julian or Gregorian calendar?
75:It's considered mandatory to blame it on Wagner.
Taking a flask into Parsifal? Sacrilegious...or worse, sacramental.
66.last: Their names are near the bottom of this review if you want to grade yourself.
Young Uncle Fester is probably the toughest since in all the pictures I've found of him he has a full head of hair. I'd guess the bald head is for some part he is playing.
Both, extra credit for including Ancient Macedonian. From my official extra credit reserves.
77: A guy invents a power painter and suddenly he will only go to the opera in tails.
79 to 76. Or I don't know, to everything.
I'm doing yoga on the Wii Fit
I have a FB friend who posts status updates with the results from his Wii golf games. I haven't made fun of him yet, but it's very tempting.
I don't know that it's a question of when, but rather of where and what kind, and of course what exactly you mean by fancy. Opera seria has pretty much always been fancy, though in Italy opera of every kind had a wide audience at least since Rossini (though I think it's pretty much fancy there now too).
Here, have some more: though, though, though, though, though.
82: I should post a FB status update. I don't think I did one for all of 2010.
83: Ok, so it got serious in like 1720, then got unserious again in 1780, then somehow, somewhere, re-serious. Exhausting. I am going to bed, and when I wake up, there had better be a Miami Vice opera.
a Miami Vice opera
Stanley, you have an assignment for your trip.
Will the Mario Bros. opera do? The Jerry Springer opera? They're buffa, I think, but who knows anymore?
Emerging from nowhere again to ask opera question: when did it become a fancy thing, exactly, to the day? I love opera and am going to be in the ceiling seats at the Met like all winter/spring, but this seems to get me cred with people I should have no cred with
I don't know, 1930? 1890? Depends on the location.
That article linked in 51 lost met with its opening line:
As recently as 15 years ago, if somebody wanted vivid depictions of, say, two men simultaneously performing anal penetration on the same woman, securing such a delicacy would require substantial effort
Or, since 15 years ago was 1995/1996, just access to Usenet and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.hardocre or whatever. If the writer is that lazy when comparing the debased present to some more glorious past that she doesn't even think about how long ago fifteen years ago is, she's not worth reading.
I get the sense that if Vargas-Cooper knew my response to her article was "Christ, what an asshole", she would get turned on. But really, it just means I don't like her.
I mean, if she finds debasement really intense and exciting, then different strokes for different folks, but please lay off the contemptuous pronouncements on immutable male and female nature.
But how is sex, as a human experience, anything less than extreme? Not the kind of sex (or lack thereof) that occurs in marriages that double as domestic gulags. Or what 30-somethings do to each other in the second year of their "serious relationship."
So you see, when she talks about sex, she doesn't mean your sad pathetic "mutual respect" scenarios-- she means real sex, the only kind that counts, like when Jeanne says she'll eat vomit in Last Tango in Paris!
when did it become a fancy thing, exactly, to the day?
Recall the American opera singer in A Farewell to Arms - that would put the cut-over in Italy as late as the 20s. Adjust for Hem's exaggeration and constant romanticising of anything vaguely European, although there are limits: it can't have been too ridiculous at the time the book was published without some reviewer cudgelling it.
There should be a genre of writing that defines "stuff that consists entirely of arguments you could never use on a half decent blog", as there seems to be an entire class of writers whose work depends on nothing but strawmen, no-true-scotsman, etc.
please lay off the contemptuous pronouncements on immutable male and female nature
"Strangely, my views on immutable male and female nature seem to accord with my own sexual preferences! It's like that time my views on fundamental political philosophy led me to vote for the guy who offered me a tax cut..."
71: The Buddhist understanding of existence is supposed to be a middle ground between a kind of nihilism (saying that nothing exists) and a kind of eternalism (there is one perfect unchanging existence). If you translate it to Greek terms, it is a middle ground between the Gorgias I linked to and Parmenides.
Or, since 15 years ago was 1995/1996, just access to Usenet and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.hardocre or whatever. If the writer is that lazy when comparing the debased present to some more glorious past that she doesn't even think about how long ago fifteen years ago is, she's not worth reading.
Wouldn't acquiring enough bandwidth to acquire the videos, at that time, constitute "substantial effort"?
Now, if you're talking about the effort required to secure a non-trivial collection of bestiality porn in, say, 1990, sure, that took some doing, especially for a sixteen-year-old.
97: in 1995 a used modem would probably run you a hundred bucks or so. By that time AOL had usenet access and CompuServe, if it didn't have usenet (can't remember) definitely had both web access and copious amounts of porn on its internal networks.
1995 is way late in the game, as far as that goes. It may well have been 1995 when I decided I needed an image of a policeman for some photoshop or other that I was doing, so I searched the alt.binaries groups for pictures of police, and learned that the internet was quickly approaching 100% porn saturation.
so I searched the alt.binaries groups for pictures of police, and learned that the internet was quickly approaching 100% porn saturation.
Honest, guv.
I can't believe I just read something as useless as that article.
The author does that thing where she mistakes media (porn in this case) for reality, as if media can't create its own realities.
(See also, the annoying genre of writing that analyzes women in terms set by Sex and the City.)
As I recall, downloading a picture from usenet was a fairly time consuming operation. You downloaded several text files, put them together, and then used some software I don't remember to create the picture. If you were looking for something very specific, it would take some time, and you were not guaranteed success.
Actually, by 1995 you could just search Altavista for "double penetration" and find plenty of websites willing to work to help you.
Porn over a 33.6K modem was definitely a different experience than it is over broadband. That is, uhhh, so I've been told.
Oops, Altavista wasn't launched until December 1995. I take that part back, I guess. Still, there was plenty of porn on the web.
Anyhow, her timing is off by a couple of years at least. In mid-to-late '96 we came up with a game called "number of clicks to porn", which was kind of like "name that tune" except instead of notes it would be the number of links clicked to take you from a given site (fbi.gov, say, or disney.com) to hardcore pornography. Typing into search bars wasn't allowed; it all had to be hard-coded links in the page.
105: non-interlaced GIF porn over a 1200 baud modem was yet another experience, especially on Compuserve, which was the first service to render images as they downloaded. "Oh, oh, another line of the image is here! You can see some... shoulder. Damn. Only fourteen minutes to go."
Even today it is hard to find a video of a Princess Leia look-alike being spanked while calling out "Oh, Lord Vader, only you could be so cruel."
Ok, I just wanted to put that image in your mind.
Thanks for that little window into your mind, rob.
108. I'm sure that claim is wrong, but I really can't be arsed to look.
Imdb tells me the line is "Darth Vader. Only you could be so bold."
It's like that time my views on fundamental political philosophy led me to vote for the guy who offered me a tax cut..."
Or the time my role as an early adopter of the Internet made me ridiculously overestimate the availability of Internet porn to the population at large. You are right Tweety it was "easy" for connected people (a tagline of mine at work was to contrast how much easier it was to get a picture of a woman fucking a horse onto the desk of our CEO than relevant data about the company) but your overall contention is misleading. Look at the volumes for instance. An Internet year in the early '90s is a YouTube week today.
Look at the volumes for instance.
I was just amused to read that AltaVista at launch had 500GB of drive space.
113: Daaamn. That's the size of the external drive I have dedicated just to my iTunes library.
But anyhow, I get what you're saying in 112, but that doesn't mean it was difficult. It just wasn't as popular. I mean, AOL connected to Usenet in 1993. There were search engines. There were garishly laid out porn sites. Universities by and large had high-speed internet in the dorms. There were image search engines. All the components were there, you simply had less people using them.
116: no, I mean the people were lesser. Goddamned nerds.
Language Log recently had a really satisfaying discussion of less/fewer and mass vs. count nouns that I'm not going to link because of course nobody here would buy it.
75: Define fancy. I mean not really, but...there's stuff to pick apart in the idea that it's fancy now, maybe. Audiences in Italy are Not Well Behaved. People in standing room at the Met are dressed just about however and frequently quite mad (though if certain lore is to be believed, the old Met's standing room was a wilder place by far. Thread convergence, almost, regarding double penetration!(!)) It's classified in pop culture as fancy and For Those People, partly because most seats are so fucking expensive--and I don't know when that happened--but there are lots of unfancy weirdos like us that go.
As for riots, the spirit is willing these days any time they do a production that doesn't call to mind Merchant and Ivory, but the flesh is often elderly. I saw a fight almost break out at Sonnambula! Actual exchange "why don't you go back to Long Island!" "Why don't you go back to Greenwich Village!"
As for flasks, I've smuggled mine in for use at intermission but always been too sheepish.
Also Bob is probably right about Wagner, I'll wager.
Meanwhile, this guy couldn't be more wrong about the Yankee/Yankees distinction, past usage be damned. I'm going to a Brave game and then to the Rolling Stone concert!
regarding double penetration!(!)) It's classified in pop culture as fancy and For Those People, partly because most seats are so fucking expensive
And you'd hate to ruin your seat with DP if you couldn't pay to have it repaired.
I'm pretty excited to take in a Red Sock game next season, for sure.
Of course "less" works just as well as "fewer".
118: I'm going to go find it anyway! Because I like that kind of thing. One of these days I'll give in and start using an RSS feed. It's just so soothing to click from one thing to another.
I used to get a season package (yes, yes) at the Met with some friends, all of whom brought flasks and used 'em. We had 2nd or 3rd story box seats (not as pricy as it sounds, really), sat together with our flasks and thermoses and snacks, and generally had a wonderful time.
I'm not going to link because of course nobody here would buy it.
If you're going to start charging for you're links you're probably talking to the wrong audience.
I love the Sox and all, but the singular Sox is a minor linguistic abortion. Even worse than an Athletic.
Of course "less" works just as well as "fewer".
In reference to double penetration, anyhow.
128: "Was there full double penetration?"
"No, less" vs. "No, fewer"
DISCUSS.
The prescriptivist view is that it depends on whether the acts of penetration were discreet or not.
Hard to be discreet with double meat in your seat.
were discreet or not.
I think the fact that they were filmed and released publicly rules discretion out as a possibility.
I love the Sox and all, but the singular Sox is a minor linguistic abortion. Even worse than an Athletic.
Is it Sok, or Soq?
119 I think explains to me what I was even thinking? I know there are a lot of untutored opera-going wolf-children like me. And that's as it should be, because opera is pretty weird. But somehow, whenever I get myself in a fancy situation (work related? sometimes rich friends' parent's 30th anniversary gala?) I get seated next to some aging news anchor (say) because I am the youngish person who can talk (sort of) about opera and there I am like oh that was a really daring production he knows we are talking about the part where she is accused of/maybe actually having sex with the devil, right? And ok, of course he does that's probably why he wanted to sit next to a young woman who could talk about opera but oh my god we're in PUBLIC. Where did this veneer of cocktail-party respectability come from, and is there some way I can make money off of this?
52: Yes, Monday the 10th. This very next coming Monday.