Vox Popoli

It’s a sad day when a punchline for a political joke obviously understands how the bifactional ruling party works better than most of the political commentators out there:

“The Democrats are the party of slavery and were the party that started every war in the 20th century, except the other Bush debacle. The Federal Reserve, permanent federal income taxes, not one but two World Wars, Japanese concentration camps, and not one but two atom bombs dropped on the innocent citizens of Japan – all brought to us via the Democrats.”
– Cindy Sheehan

She may be an attention whore and she may be an irrational leftist, but she certainly understands what’s going on better than any of the mainstream media whores on the right or the left.

I waded through page after page
of broken verse
of angry grumbles
about unappreciative husbands
or old classmates
or
the lesbian grunts and growls
of anger anger anger or
some excruciatingly explicitly
biological confessional gay porn
mixed in with
the ingrateful poetic hand-bites
of adult children who clearly wished
their parents
had stayed
in whatever third-world pesthole
they’d originally come from
all topped-off with
scoop upon glop of thick word salad
of the sort produced
by stroke and closed-head injury patients
who
are struggling to remember
precisely the right words to
express exactly bungalow torpid giraffe.

Oh, not done-done. There will be any amount of fiddling, tweaking and going back and forth with the publisher, but the first draft of TIA is basically complete, and, one hopes, reasonably coherent. I can definitely send it off Monday, anyhow, which is a relief.

Strangely anti-climactic, to be honest, but I’m having a Disaronno-laced espresso to celebrate anyhow.

DH notes the following scientific marvel:

French doctors are puzzling over the case of 44-year-old civil servant who has led a quite normal life — but with an extraordinarily tiny brain…. Scans by computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed that the man’s cerebral cavities, called ventricles, had massively expanded.

“The brain itself, meaning the grey matter and white matter, was completely crushed against the sides of the skull,” Feuillet told AFP. “The images were most unusual… the brain was virtually absent,” he said.

Is any comment really necessary? I don’t think so.

This is actually supposed to be advice to a man who isn’t attracted to his overweight wife:

Anyone whose bride is curvaceous should expect after ten years and a child or two to have some changes. By now your marriage should have reached the stage of friendship rather than pure lust. You should be more interested in her personality rather than being obsessed about her weight. Is it that you are not, in reality, worrying about her appearance but rather her obvious loss of youth and that you feel this reflects on you? Enjoy her company and don’t give a damn if she is a size 16 or a size 12.

There’s really not much point to marrying in the first place if you’re just going to be friends in 10 years. If you’re just friends, then why should she object if you’re dating a nineteen year-old waitress? And of course a wife’s appearance reflects on her husband, both men and women predominantly judge a man by the quality of the woman accompanying him. When a woman lets herself go, she is not only harming herself, but also how her husband is viewed by the rest of the world.

I suspect this is why some discontent wives seem to take positive satisfaction in getting fat, cutting off their hair and refusing to maintain themselves, because it is a way of striking at their husband’s status. It’s also why men who achieve success during their marriage prefer the proverbial trophy wife. Few things look stranger to the human eye than a successful and powerful man with a frumpy, overweight woman with bad teeth on his arm.

The problem is that while you can lead a horse to water, you can’t lead a human being to the gym or duct-tape her mouth shut. I’m fortunate in that Spacebunny is quite willing to put in the effort required to maintain herself, although that’s also an artifact of my refusal to date any woman who wasn’t at least somewhat of a gym rat.

If you’re okay with a rotund mate, that’s fine, personal tastes vary. If you’re not, then you’ll just have to drag her – or him – to the gym with you every day, work out with them and eat the same high-protein, low-carb diet they do for the next year. Don’t take no for an answer and ignore the inevitable whining, they can do it and they’ll probably even appreciate it in the end, they just need you to provide them with the willpower they’re lacking. Every time they hit a goal, reward them with something they want that isn’t food-related.

It’s perfectly doable, it’s just a question of your will or theirs coming out on top. But if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that neither gentle persuasion, logic nor an appeal to your feelings is ever to work on anyone whose primary drive is hedonistic.

I thought the full text of the final Harry Potter book would be available in one of my preferred formats two days ago, but better late than never. It’s just as well, I probably won’t get around to reading it until next week since I’m hoping to wrap up the first draft of TIA on Monday.

I know I’m excited about the 38th anniversary of the faked Moon landing. How about you?

I have the feeling that any day now, Ralph Wiley is going to rise from his grave and throttle Scoop Jackson for setting black sportswriters back forty years:

This is not about greatness as much as it’s about dominance. And how high school athletes in their respective sports have come to define dominance better than professionals have.

So if I made the statement again — high school athletes are more dominant in sports than professionals — would your reaction still be the same as it was when you first started reading this column?

Thought not. But at the end of the day, your reaction won’t matter; no one will care about this, because high school athletes will still be looked at in sports as less than equal. Their level of competition amongst themselves is not as great. Many will feel that they are not even deserving of being in this type of conversation, not worthy of this type of praise. Blasphemy, don’t forget.

Sad, ain’t it?

Oh, excuse me, Scoop wasn’t talking about high schoolers compared to professionals, but women compared to men. But it is really sad that Cynthia Cooper is not considered to have been more dominant than Michael Jordan, just as it is a travesty that I am not recognized as being more dominant than Pele, Ronaldo or Kaka’ on the basis of my incredible SIX-GOAL GAME against our archrivals in eighth grade. Has any Brazilian international ever dominated Argentina like that? I don’t think so. And not even the bianconeri have ever dominated Serie A the way our team of 8 year-old boys tore up the tournaments two years ago.

As much as I utterly despise every single female writer for ESPN, I feel now that I may have been a bit too harsh on them. Even Mary Bucklesbian’s weekly complaint about heterosexual thought-crimes is more related to sports on this planet than Affirmative Action Jackson’s latest lunacy.

That a university liberal arts degree is completely worthless:

Last week, a 10-week course on “The Magic of Harry Potter” ended at the University of Edinburgh, having tackled every aspect of the books from “possible religious subtexts” to “socio-political context”.

Universities do not exist to educate people. They only seek to bring in students to pay the bills, which means that if you want to pay $40,000 per year to sit around and talk about Harry Potter, they will happily provide you with the opportunity to do so. If you like to play computer games, they will offer you a degree in Game Development. If you want to do nothing but sit around and bitch about how awful the world is, they will give you a degree in Women’s Studies.

Knowledge is free. It surrounds you, it’s all over the place, it’s right there for the taking. If you need external incentive, pay your friend to come over and slap you in the face if you don’t read 100 pages of whatever subject you want to learn. If you have questions, find a blog or a forum devoted to the subject, or ask somebody here.