My recent post about Bettie Paige, the apparent first bikini babe in the US of A, has gotten more viewership during the last week or so than Napoleon and his Industrial Warfare Principle. So maybe I can push this change along by posting about “nipple exposure”. Here’s how Time Magazine describes the latest prohibitions re nipple exposure.
On the one hand there is Jean Vanier reminding us that caring for the most vulnerable among us draws us together better than booze or sex. But in the good old US of A people like Barb Walters are “uncomfortable” when an actively nursing mother sits next to her!!!!!!!!!
Maybe higher order vulnerability is good, except when the rules of prurience are offended!
Which ever way you look at it, or not, there are many worse things than nipple exposure, specially nipples being used for feeding. And isn’t it a fact that the Nature Programs on TV abound with nursing scenes that we all go googoo over!
If it quacks like hypocrisy and sounds like it then it must be HYPOCRISY!
What we call “The Sixties” in the United States, with its ethos of reform and protest, ended with Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection in 1972 and the winding down of the Vietnam War.
In the same way, the outcome of this year’s election means that 2009 will, finally, mark the beginning of the 21st century.
I sure hope that the next “century” begins better than the last one ended, with special mention of GWB’s horribilis regime!
In the book, he wrote not only that he reunited with his wife in New York years after she threw apples to him over the fence, but also that he had actually gone on a
“You’d think somebody would say, ‘Hmm, that’s amazing, let’s just spend an hour or a day seeing how plausible that is,’ ” said
Mr. Andersen compared Mr. Rosenblat to
“The will to believe something that is convenient to believe is strong in all realms,” he said.
I suppose that Oprah’s rep will end up slightly tattered for those who take the trouble to read serious journalism, but many people don’t bother to examine what they prefer to “believe” especially if “Oprah said it!”.
I am beginning to relate more and more to many things she writes, even though she is 50some, female and a US citizen from the Northeast. Of course, I know the Northeastern US reasonably well, skiing in Vermont and NY, summering in Ogunquit, Nantucket and Cape Cod, finally hiking in Vermont and NH. But I’m a 73 yr old curmudgeon who lives in Vancouver and Dalian China now.
So it’s a wonder that I related very well to these words from her Op-Ed today:
How we seem to love and hate those men and women we never knew. What we would give to know their secrets: how Dad managed to come home at 5 p.m. to read the paper or watch TV while Mom fixed dinner and bathed the kids. How Mom turned up at school, every day, unrumpled, coiffed, unflappable. And more to the point: how they managed to afford the lives that they led, on one salary, without hocking their homes to pay for college, without worrying about being bankrupted by medical bills.
How we make them pay now, when we breathe them back into life. Our cultural representations of them are punishing. We defile the putative purity of the housewives — those doe-eyed, frivolous, almost simple-minded depressives — by assigning them drunken, cheating, no-good mates. We discredit the memory of the organization men by filling them with self-loathing and despair. Each gender invites its downfall, and fully deserves the comeuppance that history, we know, will ultimately deal it.
That’s where the pleasure comes in. No matter how lost we are, no matter how confused, no matter how foolish we feel, we can judge ourselves the winners.
Judith Warner writes Domestic Disturbances, a column at nytimes.com.
Of course, there is one important difference between Judith and me: I was one of those men and she has only seen them on TV and read about them and their wives!
I did not know till this morning that there is a Tokyo Tower and it is about 30 ft higher than the Eiffel Tower. Here’s the image borrowed from Wikipedia under the CC licence.
Here is two paragraphs from the Wikipedia article:
Tokyo Tower(東京タワー,Tōkyō-tawā?) is a communications tower located in Shiba Park, Minato, Tokyo, Japan. At exactly 332.6 meters (1,091 ft), this orange and white lattice tower is the tallest self-supporting steel structure in the world, the tallest artificial structure in Japan and is the 20th tallest tower in the world.[3] Built in 1958, this Eiffel Tower-like structure supports an antenna that broadcasts television and radio signals for important Japanese media outlets such as NHK, TBS and Fuji TV.[4] In recent years, the tower has been instrumental in furthering Japan’s push to switch from an analog signal to digital signal.
In addition to being a television and radio communications tower, Tokyo Tower doubles as a major Tokyo tourist site. Over 2.5 million people annually visit the tower’s recreational Foot Town and two observations decks.[5] Foot Town is a 4-story building located directly under the tower that houses museums, restaurants and shops.
I guess that I’m like John Tierney, who writes in the Science section of NY Times, a heathen.
I certainly believe that I am an agnostic about belief in religion, the personal God and about the power of faith. I think that those human values can be destructive and lead to all kinds mayhem and unhappiness in living.
So how do I deal with this kind of thinking:
So what’s a heathen to do in 2009? Dr. McCullough’s advice is to try replicating some of the religious mechanisms that seem to improve self-control, like private meditation or public involvement with an organization that has strong ideals.
Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy.
“People can have sacred values that aren’t religious values,” he said. “Self-reliance might be a sacred value to you that’s relevant to saving money. Concern for others might be a sacred value that’s relevant to taking time to do volunteer work. You can spend time thinking about what values are sacred to you and making New Year’s resolutions that are consistent with them.”
Of course, it requires some self-control to carry out that exercise — and maybe more effort than it takes to go to church.
“Sacred values come prefabricated for religious believers,” Dr. McCullough said. “The belief that God has preferences for how you behave and the goals you set for yourself has to be the granddaddy of all psychological devices for encouraging people to follow through with their goals. That may help to explain why belief in God has been so persistent through the ages.”
Certainly sounds good and useful to me. But how to do it in my own case!
I love Vancouver. It is beautiful here even in the snow, fog, rain, and whatever. I live in very modest circumstances but I enjoy very much most minutes that I spend outside in the ordinary or picturesque parts of the city. I don’t wish the worst for the city or its citizens or VANOC in 2010, but I agree with most of what is written in the Globe. Winter like we have experienced during the last week could cancel the 2010 Winter Games.
I have felt more touched in my agnostic’s soul by a series of articles in the Globe and Mail about Jean Vanier than anything that has happened to me since I met Emma, my wife some 4+ years ago.
I will return to these writings because I feel they describe authentically how a truly moral man deals with life and the justifiable celebrity he gets from his contribution to making life so much better for the more vulnerable among us.
Here is Jean Vanier with the author of one of those articles:
It is difficult to explain the feeling I get after reading about Mr. Vanier. It is a mix of envy, admiration, love for his simple generosity, and a bit of teariness when I think of the admirable life he has lived.
But most of all I feel the authenticity of his words about abortion and how he decided to keep his Order of Canada when all the eminent hypocrites gave theirs back with loud public protest because the Gov Gen awarded the Order of Canada to Dr. Morgantaler.
Dr. Morgantaler is not the kind of man that Jean Vanier is in most ways, except for one. Morgantaler cared for his patients and practiced ‘good medicine’ by doing clinical abortions for women who decided that was a better outcome for them. Jean Vanier obviously cares for the most vulnerable in our society.
I can’t say as much for all those public anti-abortionists, who do their best to make political gain from a not very nice human condition. May they lose, rather than gain, from their less then moral actions
another and another. I was fooling around with my blog post about how my birth family “escaped by sea” from southwestern France in late June 1940. I clicked on a google map and glimpsed the Gironde Estuary and stuff farther south and east. Soon I was looking at this map cut:
and recalling my visit to Bordeaux in 1990 something or other. I have lots of pics of cruising the lower parts of a part of the lower Gironde and getting a water side view of lots of small castles, or wine chateaux in the Ste-Emilion area. Then a visit by bus to a smaller winery across from the better known and tonier Cheval Blanc winery.
Some memories are nice to review in my mind’s eye.
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