Point the First: all this talk about pornogroppression! If I could wave my magic feminist wand at the subject and boil away patriarchy, I think we’d be left with a sticky residue described by Brian Ulrich:

I don’t believe healthy sexuality can exist without an interest in the whole person, which does not and cannot exist in internet porn pictures or with paid performers in a strip club.

I think that’s the nut of it: you believe either that sex can stand on its own, or that it falls down without the appropriate supporting framework of emotional and/or spiritual attachments. Eliminate all the unsavory context you want, porn remains a vision of sex standing (or falling down) on its own.

And that’s all the insight I’ve got. Lynn has been writing a series of meditations on the nature of human sexuality at Noli Irritare Leones; there’s too many (and I’m too lazy) to link to them all individually, just go and scroll down if you’re into that sort of thing.

Point the Second: Beans, lots of beans, lots of beans lots of beans! Beans, like misery, love company. Thanks, Wolfangel.

Ah, perchlorate - an issue near and dear to my paycheck! I can’t comment on the toxicology… but once again I am reminded of just how silly it is to plumb with a single set of pipes. I don’t want to drink diluted rocket fuel, but I’m pretty confident that it won’t hurt me to pee into it, or wash my clothes with it. Ground water contamination is putting a pretty severe cramp on many communities’ available water supply, Pasadena included. Since imported water supplies are considerably less than infinitely plentiful, it would behoove us to start thinking about how to make full use of all the water we’ve got.

In other nerdy news, the Sumatran earthquake caused water to slosh around in wells in Virginia… and in Southern California. Of course our wells only fluctuated by an inch and a half, which isn’t nearly so spectacular as the fluctuations observed in Virginia (bedrock wells are wacky!) - and the project for which GeoMonkeyCo was monitoring the wells is so lawyer-ridden that we can’t release the actual data yet. But I have a superfabulous little set of graphs accumulating on my cubicle wall!

If anyone knows how and where to find seismograms from the Western US in an Excel-friendly format, that’d be swell (UPDATE: SCEC has ‘em). I fiddled with the NEIC’s databot, but couldn’t swing the conversion code. My Fortran skillz are not l33t, CM6 compression 0wnz0rs my megahurtz! *sob*

Courtesy Matthew Yglesias comes a discussion that makes me think: Eh? Do I have wax in my ears? Write louder, sonny boy! - ‘cause all I’m gettin’ is burble blah masculine/feminine blah burble doo. Somewhere in there, the statement “women are attracted to masculine men, men are attracted to feminine women” is supposed to be uncontroversial, have a clear, agreed-upon meaning, and not be a tautology.

Any two of those three rhetorical criteria I can handle, but all three at once? Even operating under a gentlepersons’s understanding of the debate (we’re all speaking in broad generalities, it’s inaccurate and impolite to make assumptions about individuals based on such broad generalities, no normative judgments are implied) that’s a lot to juggle. I haven’t seen the word “obvious” this abused since I studied Bessel functions. So, I’m inclined to sacrifice “clear” - when you’ve thrown out all the stuff that’s a bullshit cultural construct, masculinity is like porn, you know it when you see it.

Will has promised to draw up a list of masculine and feminine traits. If I’m still short on Feminist Rhetoric Credits when he does so, I suppose I’ll have a whack, but blathering on about the difference between masculinity and femininity is like trying to draw a line between porn and erotica. It’s fun ‘cause you get to think about things that turn you on, but it’s not exactly vital to free society. Indeed, in all the best free societies such discussions are irrelevant, particularly once you leave the therapist’s or matchmaker’s office.
(more…)

Dear Snow: thank you for the blizzard in Indianapolis. It was exactly what I asked for. Next time, I’ll be more careful.

A thirty-six hour trip from LA, complete with lost luggage and bonus time spent sitting on tarmac; then a thirty-six hour flu. A brilliant lead in to profoundly rotten things, which are as unbloggable as profoundly rotten things always are.

I’m in a bitter place right now, but at least I got to go Christmas caroling in the snow. Life, as the TV in the airport lounge uniformly reminds me*, could be worse.

Regardless, I’m'a try an’ keep myself off the internets for another week or two.
(more…)