If you gotta dahh

Apropos deaf... "If you gotta die, (pronounced 'if you goddaddaehh'), then I'm the one to put the smile on your face", video.

I'm stunned by the practice of preserving dead bodies. That is morbid. Do people really have such a hard time letting go that they need this empty, useless cadaver around to remind them of their past family member?

In my family we have agreed that we use time and money on the living, we don't keep dead bodies lying around, they get burned. We don't even keep graves or gravestones. When I'm gone, I don't want twenty thousand bucks used on keeping my empty vessel around, I want that money going to the clothing and education of the young ones in the family. (Won't somebody please think of the children!?)

Update:
I'd made a bit fun of the funeral director's grammar, and I received this comment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English

Basically, in this country, there are many African American people who have been affected by both the way Americans have treated them (very poorly) as well as their ancestory. Things like poverty; no role models; poor role models in that many *fathers* of children never stayed, once they found out they were to be fathers.

Lack of education. Being raised in single-parent families...by their mothers; aunts and uncles; or grandparents, mainly. Living in *projects* which, basically, are low-income or government-funded housing where it is ROUGH! I can't think of a movie right now where the atmosphere is depicted but...I have been to one and...I hope to never have to go ever again. It is sad and depressing and not an environment that anyone would want to raise their kids.

*Gang-bangers* live there; drug dealers and drug addicts; prostitutues...among the general population, all looking for a way to survive and make ends meet.

And that is this generation.

The last generation or two dealt with this: http://www.remembersegregation.org/

Sadly, education was not something that was easily available to African Americans, just a few short decades ago. There are, unbelievably, still many illiterate Americans, in our country. I am afraid that...that is what his language tells us.

Many don't have the time nor the money to get the education that they should have had, when they were children. And...now...they are struggling to make a living as best as they can. They have worked hard all their lives and...they will have to keep doing so, until their last breath. We are all just doing the best that we can do and...honestly...that funeral director would be considered pretty sucessful in his family, I'm sure. He has his own business...I believe. At least...he has a job and he has the willingness to work.

This generation and possibly the last of the African American community had the attitude of "why should I bother trying to find work when I can make more dealing drugs?" They knew that they would not get what they wanted (cars; phones; boom boxes; girls...things, in general) if they went about it the usual way (they had no higher education. No one could afford to send them to school) so...they decided to deal drugs. And...basically, no one raised them but themselves. Their mothers worked; their fathers weren't around; their grandparents also needed to work because no one made enough to save for retirement.

Two very different times but...the underlying thread of both, I believe, was...the failure of their fathers to either be there for them or to provide moral support for them and some even had money but didn't see the importance of helping their kids get an education. Kids do a LOT of STUPID things...trying to gain the love of someone. Very sad but true...

Bettie Page

Famed Pin-up model Bettie Page has passed at 85.
The first I knew of her was this exuberant cover to the CD "Sexplosion" by My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult (recommended). Bettie was a positive role model. She was the incarnation of happy and innocent, even when she was posing in SM gear. Bless her.


I very much liked the movie about her.

The quarters game

A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, 'This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.'

The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, 'Which do you want, son?'

The boy takes the quarters and leaves the dollar. !

'What did I tell you?' said the barber.. 'That kid never learns!'

Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store & says ; 'Hey, kiddo! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?'

The boy licked his cone and replied,

'Because the day I take the dollar, the game's over.'

New art, Mandelbrot and Yeller

Dirty car art

Dirty car art.
In this internet age there seems to be a rapid expansion of improbable and difficult-for-difficult's-sake art media. Like etch-a-sketch and now dust on cars.
I'm not sure what to think of it. Does something become more Art because it's difficult to do or especially impermanent?

Brainiacs

If anybody doubts my readers are brainiacs, Ron's book proves it.

I used to be one, but it seems my increasing focus on intuitive knowledge, or something, has ruined my ability to concentrate on feats of pure intellect.

Lisa Simpson is a minor

[Thanks to Mary]
God, this makes me sick. Is there no end to the irrationality of humans and the legal system?
If somebody gets in your face and is crazy, you can brush it off. But when it gets into the legal system and puts people in jail and so forth, it's no longer funny.

As Neil Gaiman puts it:
"The ability to distinguish between fiction and reality is, I think, an important indicator of sanity, perhaps the most important. And it looks like the Australian legal system has failed on that score."
Indeed.

On a different subject (?) I think if the famous Wally Wood poster had been published today, Disney would probably try (and succeed) in outlawing it. After all, while it's clearly satire, it could be argued that it is both a copyright breach and defamation of character.

---------
Changing subject again, that Wally Wood sure could draw.


And new subject again, I found this while searching for the poster... super-risque!


... And again... does anybody know her?
Strangely, she turned up on this search, but not on google itself, so I can't find the page. (And now she's gone again on GIR, so weird.)
Leviathud helps out: she is Jojo.
It can't be a coincidence that the more taboo teenage sexuality is made, the younger do the highly sexualized pop idols become...

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More updates: of course there were times within living memory when censorship was much tighter yet.

Excerpt from comment by Pascal:

- I'd be the first to stand up for protecting children from molestation. But imaginary minors?? Isn't there any REAL crime with nasty consequences that takes priority?

- As the Wikipedia article I've cited mentions, there is no objective evidence that "virtual underage porn" endangers real children, and evidence seems to indicate THE EXACT OPPOSITE. Just like legalizing adult porn disintegrated 1/3 to 2/3 of sex crimes.

- Anything that helps prevent real harm to real children, I'll immediately support as a principle, no matter how sickening it could be considered. That would include providing photo-realistic CGI porn depicting raped babies, if it were proven to have a calming effect on a sicko's pulsions and preventing REAL aggressions. As a doctor, I'm trained to overcome the vomiting reflex, especially when stoicism helps human beings in some way or another. Have you ever seen a surgical operation? You get used to it...

- The argument of "immoral" or "sickening" in itself is not only fallacious, it is scarily fascist.

Libraries wild

Could be worse, there could have been details.
I'm reminded of an evening back in Denmark, in a library. It was the week's late-open evening, and the library was pretty deserted, but I was there. And so were two young women. And while they were just behind a shelf I was browsing, the younger one started telling the other one how she was envious of how she had "been with" so many people while in "gymnasiet" (Danish three-year schooling for people in their late teens, comes before university). And the other one said not to worry, it would happen. And proceded to detail some of her adventures, including boffing some boy at a school party in the basement, behind a window anybody could walk by and look through.

And then suddenly they got very quiet. I could almost feel them realizing that they might possibly not be alone in the room. And they got out, red-faced and giggling, and left the library quickly.

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Since the advent of Amazon and me earning better money, I've bought more books than I can read. But in my yoof I was unemployed for a couple of periods, messing with my art and goofing off, and man, did I use the library! In Denmark you can borrow music and comics (graphic novels) as well as books, so that's your whole entertainment life right there (except for films).

Compact cameras tested

DPreview test a bunch of super-compact cameras.

Photo by Lee

Photo by Lee. Good eye and humor.

GG is slender

Let's do a little survey.
If you look at this nude picture of the model GG, does she seem "worryingly thin" to you?
Apparently it does to several people. Which puzzles me, because while she is clearly very slender, she also seems to me to be obviously healthy (even very healthy), and not pathologically thin in any way. I asked Pascal, who is a doctor, and he has the same opinion. But then he asked an older family member, who has the first opinion. So I decided to do a little informal survey, just to see if we can shed a little light on this puzzling diversion of opinions.
I am suspecting an emotional over-reaction here. For decades fashion models got thinner and thinner, and now there's a strong reaction against it which goes a bit too far.

Clickthrough

New hack fixes the irritating aspect of Mac OSX that if you click on a background window, the window may react to the click as well come to the foreground. Article.

Update: there may be a downside. I am used to, many times every day, to drag a folder or file from the Finder into an app. Now I have to click on the finder first before it reacts. I'll have to see whether this proves too much of a disadvantage in the long run.