The Death of Romance

I was just looking through Time's top 10 lists, and was shattered by an event I had not heard reported. I suppose to some people it's not news, but Hugh Hefner and Holly Madison broke up.

To be fair, I'd never heard of Holly Madison before - my guess is she must be Dolly Madison's sister? - but you've got to figure if even Hef can't hold onto a girl (or three, apparently the poor icon was also abandoned by Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt) what hope do the rest of us have?

Jocelyn....do not forsake me, oh my darling!

Quote of the day

Pessimists, we're told, look at a glass containing 50% air and 50% water and see it as half empty. Optimists, in contrast, see it as half full. Engineers, of course, understand the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
-Bob Lewis

Advice from the Vamp

In the unlikely case that anybody has been reading me for a long time, they might remember my post on Trudie, economics professor Tyler Cowen's take-off on the advice columnist Prudie (here "she" is on dating multiple men).

But Cowen wasn't the first professor doing advice columns, not even the first that I have read. That honor would go to Camille Paglia (just happened to be glancing through her book "Vamps and Tramps" in my basement) of "Sexual Personae". She did an advice column in "Spy" magazine, and published some examples in "Vamps and Tramps".

Excerpts:

Dear Camille:
I've been severely disappointed in my lady friends, who come across as intelligent women with common sense but end up making bad choices when it comes to men.
Jolted Joe from Brooklyn

Dear Joe:
You are puzzled by the irrational perversity of sexual attraction. Dionysus is a maelstrom. Love will never be tidy or safe. Jump in the boat and row for your life.

Dear Camille:
I'm a female who has rape fantasies featuring ex-convicts, aliens, postapocolyptic mutant gang leaders, etc. While I invent dialogue for both sexes, I feel more "inside" the male character, even after the female has gained the upper hand, which always happens. Am I bisexual, sadomasochistic, or just strange?
Is This Hell? No, This Is Iowa

Dear Hell-In-Iowa:
Make movies as soon as possible. Surf's up in your sharkish libido. It's the cyberpunk 1990's, so take us for a ride on the wild side.

Quote of the day

"A man has the right to defend himself…even against his own leg."
- — AaronS ( regarding Burress )

Quote of the day

"Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning."
- Rommel

Quote of the day

"We are missing one of the mice. I'm upset!"
- Jocelyn Fiederer (my wife, at Nutcracker rehearsal)

My favorite fictional body part....

Unfortunately, there are no news about the crockus, that part of the brain that makes females more verbally skilled than males.

Even though it doesn't exist, the name is just so damn funny this item should be kept in the news as much as possible.

Kelo in retrospect....

The Kelo decision thoroughly established the principle that a municipality can force you to sell your home for only the flimsiest of excuses (i.e., that the person they want to transfer it to is likely to stimulate the local economy in some nebulous way).

The principle is somewhat at odds with the facts, though.... in reality, for all the money they spent on legal fees, the town achieved only a huge vacant lot and a lot of outrage.

I don't know where Susette Kelo currently lives.

Quote of the Day

Speed, velocity, simultaneity, acceleration, and other mathematical abstractions having to do with the patterns of eternity were part of Martian mathematics, but not of Martian emotion. Contrariwise, the unceasing rush and turmoil of human existence came not from mathematical necessities of time but from the frantic urgency implicit in human sexual bipolarity.

Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land"

Quote of the day

For what we will spend on the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought a controlling interest in Saddam Hussein's country.

P.J.O'Rourke

My clean mind

Anybody who reads this and has seen my "study" in my basement will appreciate my inner purity.

"Young housewives having figures that will turn you on"

A serious scientific journal learns the dangers of meddling in things they do not understand.

I got 100% on this

Civic Literacy Quiz. But I do detect just a hint of libertarian bias.

Quote of the day

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

T.S.Eliot (ending The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock)

Quote of the day

I'm sick of the insipid bourgeois neuroticism in current, careerist American poetry. Bring back the psychotics!
--Camille Paglia, via Language Log

4.0!

That was the text my son sent me just now.

I had to text back to confirm that was for the whole semester.

Wow. It's not easy to impress a dad, but if you can't impress him with perfection, it would be a pretty lost cause!

Life is good.

Quote of the day

I used to think the brain was my most important organ. But then I thought: Wait a minute, who's telling me that? ~Emo Philips. (via McArdle)

Quote of the day

When one linguist says to another "Was that good for you?", at least in a professional context, the phrase usually means "was that sentence consistent with your personal grammatical norms?"

Language Log

What I see when I wake up in the morning before I can leave my bedroom....

And in case you were wondering....no, since Sam has been coming over I am sure she has never seen me without my pants on.

Quote of the Day

"He smokes like a fish!"
-- an InDUHvidual from Dilbert.