There was a time in my life when I went down to The South a fair bit.
By this I mean primarily Arkansas, North and South Carolina with a bit of driving through Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. Haven’t yet been to Louisiana, Alabama or Georgia.
As for Mississippi… well, there are people in Mississippi who don’t want to be in Mississippi! (Just kidding. Please don’t shoot me!)
(When you hear them say, “Ah hell no!”… you better run!)
I haven’t been to The South since the Passover/Easter weekend before 9/11.
There’s so much I love and miss about The South.
(1861 Navy Colt – the classic handgun of The South)
One of the most striking things you find down there is the entire gun culture. [1]
It’s not that everyone in The South has a gun. I would suspect that most don’t.
But… there is this general all-round feeling among most Southerners that is in some way supportive of the general idea of guns for personal protection.
There is a gleefulness… and also a kind of playfulness… about this mindset that I find hard to resist.
The over-riding sense is that this attitude of bravado is ‘half in jest – whole in earnest.’ Kind of like, “I’m kidding… but not really.”
The article begins, “Most of us have experienced it. You are introduced to someone, only to forget his or her name within seconds. You rack your brain trying to remember, but can’t seem to even come up with the first letter. Then you get frustrated and think, “Why is it so hard for me to remember names?”
All these years, I presumed I had a faulty or weak memory. I was relieved to find that this may not be the case at all.
It appears that lack of interest, not the brain’s ability (or lack thereof) may be why we forget!
According to Kansas State University’s Richard Harris, professor of psychology, it’s not necessarily your brain’s ability that determines how well you can remember names, but rather your level of interest.
“Some people, perhaps those who are more socially aware, are just more interested in people, more interested in relationships,” Harris said. “They would be more motivated to remember somebody’s name.”
This goes for people in professions like politics or teaching where knowing names is beneficial. But just because someone can’t remember names doesn’t mean they have a bad memory.
“Almost everybody has a very good memory for something,” Harris said.
The key to a good memory is your level of interest, he said. The more interest you show in a topic, the more likely it will imprint itself on your brain. If it is a topic you enjoy, then it will not seem like you are using your memory.
This explains a lot, really, since I generally find most people singularly uninteresting.
It’s not that other people are somehow unimportant or that their lives and problems are invalid. It’s just that they don’t interest me, usually. There are exceptions, of course. Rare ones.
The general rule, however, is that most people I meet are a dusk-to-dawn snooze-a-thon.
Every once in a while I venture to say a few well-chosen words about fashion.
I believe my last foray into beaking off about the world of couture (haute or otherwise) was in my October 26, 2011, article “Fashionate!”
I’m due for another venting.
I’d like to discuss a disturbing phenomenon of which I’ve recently become aware…
People (and by this I mean The Great Unwashed [1]) deriving a sick, perverse thrill from watching fashion models fall down.
And yes, I get the humorous angle at play here.
In The Comedy Biz, it is referred to as a Status Drop. It is as least as old as Graeco-Roman comedies… that is, when the actors weren’t parading around the stage wearing enormous phalli. [2]
The principle at work is this… an exalted person suffers a swift and sudden drop in status. The classic example from silent films is the rich, pompous and usually fat man slipping and falling on a banana peel.
A cheap, easy laugh, to be sure.
But what goes on when The Wretched Refuse watch a fashion model slip and fall is much nastier. There is a meanness of spirit that I don’t believe enters into the old Charlie Chaplin ‘fat banker banana fall’ schtick.
The Huddled Masses LOVE it. There is a fiendish glee that is simply absent when, for example, you see some chunky southern girl destroy an above-ground pool simply by going into it.
The models, people feel, somehow deserve to fall. They’ve earned the humiliation and the howls of derisive laughter. It ‘takes them down a few notches’… it ‘cuts them down to size.’
Ladies, you cannot sit still for this kind of attitude from the common rabble!
It’s bad enough that you’re treated like dogs or glorified clothes hangers from those within the business.
You must reclaim the fashion faux-pas… the runway tragedy… and transform it into something chic and glorious.
Let’s take that frown and turn it upside down, ladies. Find the fun in a bad situation!
I give you… SPAZTIQUE!!
Your slip and fall at Paris Fashion Week Spring 2012? It is no longer clumsy… it isTrès Spaztique!
That time you lost your balance and fell off the runway in Milan? Proprio Spazticamente!
Everyone thinks your ankle-twisting walk on the Prada runway was klutzy? Far from it! It was Totally Spaztique!
Don’t let Walmart zombie shoppers define you!
Be Chic. Be Spaztique!!
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This article is affectionately dedicated to my dearly beloved friend, Chelsea Dagger [3], who is tall, slender, blonde, gorgeous, smart, athletic, fun, funny, generous, philanthropic, kindhearted, sweet… and a totally spastic klutz!
If it’s beside her or near her, she will find a way to knock it down, trip over or bump into it.
Here’s to you, my darling Chelsea. You’re delightfully Spaztique!
[1] (i.e. The General Public) I doubt many in the fashion world experience quite the ‘laugh riot’ when a model twists, sprains or breaks her ankle, cracks her kneecap or fractures her wrist.
[2] See Aristophenes’ deliciously funny play Lysistrata – a hilarious account of one woman’s extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnesian War. The title character Lysistrata persuades the other women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers as a means of forcing the men to negotiate peace.
[3] She has, hands down, the coolest name in the world.
Hot chocolate! Finally! The down and dirty goods on that sickest, most sex-addled of creatures… the penguin!!
A study on the sexual habits of penguins with findings so graphic and “perverted” that it remained hidden for nearly 100 years is finally being revealed to the public.
Yes, boys and girls, you heard correctly! After 100 years under wraps, details of depraved sex acts by penguins during a polar exploration mission are finally published.
Curators from the National History Museum in Tring, England, have discovered an old paper written by Dr. George Murray Levick, a surgeon and medical officer who accompanied Captain Robert Scott on an expedition to the Antarctic in 1912, full of shocking revelations of the “astonishing depravity” among Adélie penguins.
(Perverted Adélie Penguin)
Details, including “sexual coercion”, recorded by Dr. Levick were considered so shocking that they were removed from official accounts.
Fortunately for us, a century’s worth of moral decay, depravity and desensitization has readied us for the unvarnished truth!
Let ‘er rip, boys!
Dr. Levick witnessed males attempting to mate with other males and also with dead females, including many who had died the previous year. He also reported that “hooligan males” would often “rape” or sexually coerce females, sexually and physically abuse chicks, occasionally killing them afterwards.
Levick was so horrified and shocked by the findings in his paper, the ‘Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguin’, that he originally recorded his notes in Greek, and at one point even writing, “There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins.”
On his return to Britain, Mr Levick attempted to publish a paper entitled “the natural history of the adelie penguin”, but according to Douglas Russell, curator of eggs and nests at the Natural History Museum [1], it was too much for the times.
“I just happened to be going through the file on George Murray Levick when I shifted some papers and found underneath them this extraordinary paper which was headed ‘the sexual habits of the adelie penguin, not for publication’ in large black type.
“It’s just full of accounts of sexual coercion, sexual and physical abuse of chicks, non-procreative sex, and finishes with an account of what he considers homosexual behaviour, and it was fascinating.”
The report and Mr Levick’s handwritten notes are now on display at the Natural History Museum for the first time. Mr Russell believes they show a man who struggled to understand penguins as they really are.
“He’s just completely shocked. He, to a certain extent, falls into the same trap as an awful lot of people in seeing penguins as bipedal birds and seeing them as little people. They’re not. They are birds and should be interpreted as such.”
Scientists now understand the biological reasons for behaviour Dr Levick considered to be “depraved.” Mr Russell said they simply did not have the scientific knowledge at that time to explain Mr Levick’s accounts of penguin behaviour.
Piffle! [2]
That’s just the sort of liberal twaddle one might expect from the head egghead at the Natural History Museum. [3]
The message to us right-thinking members of society is this, plain and simple…
All penguins are rapists, necrophiliacs and child molesters.
[1] This has to be in the running for “World’s Nerdiest Job Title!”
[2] Yes, I said ‘Piffle’ and, by gum, I meant it!
[3] It is a well-known fact that there’s a certain amount of tosh to anything said by someone admitting to being a ‘curator of eggs and nests’ at a natural history museum.
[1] When I was a young rōnin, I was for several years in a relationship and living with an even younger partner. While I did not fully appreciate it at the time, we were in a common-law marriage. That person is, therefore, my ‘first spouse’ [‘SA’ aka ‘Susan’], as opposed to the person I legally married (then legally divorced) many years later [‘WHN’]. My children, Exhibits One and Two, were tendered into evidence during the second marriage.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist. He is currently the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space and a research associate in the department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. This talk is based on his well-reviewed book, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries.
I suppose it was suburban. It’s probably a stretch to call it urban metropolitan living.
My city was/is located in the middle of what was then a sprawling agricultural area, so even while I myself grew up on pavement and asphalt, it was an island of concrete in a sea of strawberries, cherries, peaches and grapes.
As far as I could tell, everyone of my generation loved peanut butter. We couldn’t get enough of it. Everyone liked eggs. Everyone drank milk and lots of it.
(What happened to the Mr Peanut we knew and loved?)
I thought about this as a was reading an article at ScienceDaily.com reporting on a study that found that city kids are more likely to have food allergies than rural children and that population density is a key factor.
Children living in urban centers have a much higher prevalence of food allergies than those living in rural areas, according to a new study, which is the first to map children’s food allergies by geographical location in the United States. In particular, kids in big cities are more than twice as likely to have peanut and shellfish allergies compared to rural communities. [2]
Here are the key findings of the study:
In urban centers, 9.8 percent of children have food allergies, compared to 6.2 percent in rural communities, almost a 3.5 percent difference.
Peanut allergies are twice as prevalent in urban centers as in rural communities, with 2.8 percent of children having the allergy in urban centers compared to 1.3 percent in rural communities. Shellfish allergies are more than double the prevalence in urban versus rural areas; 2.4 percent of children have shellfish allergies in urban centers compared to 0.8 percent in rural communities.
Food allergies are equally severe regardless of where a child lives, the study found. Nearly 40 percent of food-allergic children in the study had already experienced a severe, life-threatening reaction to food.
The states with the highest overall prevalence of food allergies are Nevada, Florida, Georgia, Alaska, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and the District of Columbia.
When I was in grade school, I don’t recall any of my friends or indeed anyone I knew suffering or dying from food allergies. Did they all die before making it to kindergarten?
In high school, my dear friend Jo McB (and, for all I know, the entire McB clan) had food allergies but I didn’t know it. It just wasn’t on the radar.
Nowadays, it seems like every other kid is allergic to some food or another.
Not sure if it was an urban legend but I recall hearing a story from one city (let’s say it was New York) where it was discovered that one child on a school bus had a peanut butter sandwich. They halted the bus and practically brought in a hazmat team to dispose of the toxic substance.
(The sandwich is secure and has been neutralized)
Sadly, the study, while showing urban living is a key factor in food allergies, doesn’t yet show us why. Further research is required.
Food allergy is a serious and growing health problem. An estimated 5.9 million children under age 18, or one out of every 13 children, now have a potentially life-threatening food allergy, according to 2011 research by Gupta. A severe allergic reaction that can lead to death includes a drop in blood pressure, trouble breathing and swelling of the throat. A food-allergic reaction sends an American to the emergency room every three minutes, according to a March 2011 study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
[2] The study will be published in the July issue of Clinical Pediatrics. The study controlled for household income, race, ethnicity, gender and age. It tracked food allergy prevalence in urban centers, metropolitan cities, urban outskirts, suburban areas, small towns and rural areas.
(When you hear them say, “Ah hell no!”… you better run!)
(1861 Navy Colt – the classic handgun of The South)
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koshersamurai 