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sex
Sex. 'Nuff said.
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I'm sure this one will spark a lively debate: Is pushing abstinence the wrong way to handle teen sex?
Mark Morford makes an interesting point about how the vast majority of the media pushes sex (TV, movies, advertisements, music), so how is pushing abstinence to teens anything more than another instrument in the cacophony?
A friend in high school's mom had a policy where she'd let her kids party and drink alcohol, on the condition that it happened at home, and under her supervision. The rationale was that if she didn't, they'd do it anyway, behind her back, and the main reasons why teens drinking alcohol is a bad thing are usually related to their lack of supervision, or efforts to hide their activity (drunk driving, fights, indiscriminate sex). Keeping it at home but keeping it accepted empowered the kids while keeping them safe.
Maybe if sex weren't vilified in the years when our biology is telling us to try it, we'd have less social problems as a whole later on.
Okay guys, have at it!
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No, I'm not talking about my GAP jacket with pouches for my iPod, Elph, and Sidekick, but instead the tech revolution going on an entirely different 'slicker' industry.
I remember when being desensitized was bad, but apparently it's all the rage in the U.K.
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Okay, so I'm 28 years old, and yet I had a first this week. Monday was the first time I'd ever bought porn.
Well, okay, kind-of. I bought a copy of this month's Playboy, but I can assure you, it was just for the articles, or, to be specific, one article. It turns out that my friend Eve's site, In Passing, was mentioned in the 'living online' section (page 28, at the bottom), and naturally, I had to see for myself.
When I went to the newsstand to get my copy and the cashier put it in a black plastic bag I thought that was strange, then remembered that you don't usually see people walking down the street, flipping through Playboy.
I now find myself with the mildly unusual task of having to find a place for my 'porn stash.'
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At long last, here's my Mardi Gras Gallery
It wouldn't have taken so long except that I took this chance to try out a new gallery model I've been thinking about. The whole layout is created dynamically, grabbing the image information out of a database. I'm planning on using this model, with more features like hide/show thumbnails and prev/next buttons and commenting functionality, for Randompixel, which means that with this gallery, randompixel is a big step closer to going live.
I'd like your feedback on what you think of the gallery design. Is it overbearing? Is it useful? I'm thinking most galleries would have smaller thumbnails, by the way.
Anyhow, enjoy the gallery. For those at work, the pics with the little exclaimation point on the corner aren't necessarily work-safe. It was, after all, Mardi Gras.
Have a great weekend all!
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My family's starting a foundation. Though still a nascent idea in need of a lot of nurturing, planning, and formalization, my uncle has brought together the larger family to found a family non-profit in the name of my grandmother, Frieda Fox, a thoroughly incredible woman. I don't want to talk about it too much now since, again, it's still just an egg of an idea.
It was to learn more about the nature of family foundations that six of us, four family, two friends of family, joined up in New Orleans on Wednesday for the 16th annual Family Foundation Conference, organized by the Council of Foundations. We were actually planning on attending last year's conference in Chicago, but extenuating family circumstances forestalled the trip until now.
I learned about a world of philanthropy that I only had a vague notion of before. I met dozens of incredible people whose foundations make a real difference to thousands, if not millions, of others. Very uplifting, very educational, and above all very supportive and positive. I've been to lots of conferences, but this was the first conference where every participant can gain more by sharing with every other participant, with no sense of corporate rivalry or other competitiveness to apply what the conference had to offer.
I'm sure I'll write more about this as things progress and evolve over the coming years, but it was a great experience.
...
And then of course, there's Mardi Gras.
I didn't even realize that Mardi Gras overlapped our time at the conference. Sure, the Superbowl was last Sunday, and I arrived (very) early Wednesday morning, due to fly out Friday evening, but I thought that Fat Tuesday (literally 'Mardi Gras') was the initiation of the festivities, not the culmination.
We didn't really have much time outside the conference to explore New Orleans N'awlins, but we did spend a few hours Thursday night walking the few blocks to the French Quarter, eating dinner, and wandering along Bourbon Street which, even then, was starting to build into something warranting an MTV broadcast pod.
It was weird, with my only real concept of Bourbon Street coming from Volkswagon Jetta commercials and random flashes of cultural knowledge. The next afternoon, between the close of the conference at 1 and our need to leave for the airport at 3, Kristina, Natalie, and I had a chance to walk along Riverwalk and the less crowded streets of the French Quarter.
What can I say? Walking into the French Quarter, I was reminded more and more of New Orleans Square at Disneyland, the ironwork balconies, sculpted faux columns, intricate and colorful paintwork and plants melding into a combination my brain only had one pattern for. I kept feeling like there should be an entrance to Pirates of the Caribbean, or a nondescript door with a buzzer that would provide an ingress to Club 33.
As we approached Bourbon Street, the illusion of Disneyland faded step-by-step into an illusion of Grad Night at Disneyland... with porn. Turning the corner on to Bourbon itself, the disillusion was complete, a bastardization of the uniqueness of the French Quarter, with neon and drunk fratboys replacing dignity and culture. I don't mean to disparage the uniqueness of Mardi Gras itself, or the doubly unique incarnation of Mardi Gras that exists on these few blocks, I'm only pointing out the extreme dichotomy of experiencing the cultural, historical, and architectural beauty of the French Quarter with the extreme cultural manifestation of that uniqueness, spawned by it, but year by year less relating to it.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to like about Mardi Gras, even (and yes, many would say specifically) on Bourbon Street. As most of you probably know, the celebration of Mardi Gras is intended to be the debauchery, the glut of gratification before the 40 days of Lent, the feast before the famine, as it were.
It's easy to look at Mardi Gras and see drunken sex-crazed teens, and of course you wouldn't be wrong, but unlike Daytona, Ft. Lauderdale, or any other Spring Break staging area, the story doesn't end there. Above all, Mardi Gras is the epitome of New Orleans, of their pleasure-seeking nature and openness and respect for others. The parades of the diverse krewes, the music, and the people bind together into an overall celebration of life.
Writing this, I realize it probably sounds stupid to some, but maybe not to everyone. Even on Bourbon street, with guys and girls hanging from the balconies, I saw people cherishing each other, and cherishing themselves. Instead of a riotous Palm Springs gropefest, this was a place with all the sexual overtone, but grounded in the energy of feeling comfortable with sexuality, your own, and that of people around you. Maybe its the beads...
So, while I came to N'awlins for one education, I got another as well, of a city melding its cultural heritage and values and reveling in them more than anyplace else I've seen.
Epilogue: This post reads pretty stupid, with book-reportish idealism and trite realizations that would make Mark Twain roll over in his grave. Twice. I realize that. A lot of it has to do with my own sexual repression. I kept re-reading and tweaking it, but I can't get past the fact that it sounds like I feel like I'm a southern prude trying to justify not being prudish. Heck, I don't know, maybe I am. More likely though, I think I feel like I'm supposed to be aloof in some sort of counter-culture Daria-esque kind of way, and that I'd sound stupid if I just wrote a gung-ho rah-rah Mardi Gras tit piece. Then again, maybe the real problem is that I wish I felt like I belonged there on Bourbon Street, while at the same time laughing at the lemming horde they blur into.
I think the truth is that I'm both at once, but just have trouble admitting it.
I held off posting this until I finished the gallery, but with my sudden flu I didn't get to it. I'd have done it on the train today, but I left the pictures in my other iPhoto. I'll put it together and put it up this weekend.
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 Wouldn't it be nice if every potential partner's offerings were so clearly labeled from the outset?
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Back in '97, at CKS Partners, I worked with some interesting people. It was the dotcom heyday, and uniqueness was embraced. Not to say that individuality is a back-seat commodity now but, well, there were just some strange people at CKS.
One of the strangest was J. J was a copywriter at CKS, a new mother, a nice person, and a real freak. I'm not talking about quirky-weird, like some of my coworkers. Sondra was '88 lines about 44 women' weird. J was Fairuza Balk in The Craft, fake-dead-sparrow-hanging-upside-down-from-her-office-ceiling kind of weird. J was Chicago Elements of Style and Strunk & White bookended by an alien-fetus-in-a-jar kind of weird. Though there was always a second desk in her office, it saw more temps than Murphey Brown had secrataries.
J was seeing an engineer in the Cupertino office (did I mention that she was married? Oops. Yeah she was) on the sly, while at the same time leading on a co-worker friend of mine, C, who was dissatisfied with her own live-in girlfriend because said partner was starting to date other people. Got it? No? Okay: J, married, with 6 month-old baby, is also seeing engineer-guy behind her husband's back (she later leaves her husband for engineer-guy, who leaves the company and changes his name). J is also having a tenuous relationship with my friend C, who is looking for something real to replace the uncertain attentions of her own girlfriend. J gives C just enough attention to give C hope that J might be the one for her, or at least the one to assuage the pain of her girlfriend's infidelities.
Meanwhile C and I became good friends on some levels, while remaining strangers on others. We have lunch often, talk about our problems, and share stories. She needed an ear and, like van Gogh, I had a spare. We all like to feel needed. Of course on other levels our lives were entirely separate. It's what I would call a 'fourth-wall friendship.' That is to say, We each got a full view of the others life, from one perspective, but there was no interaction with that life. We'd each know what was going in the others 'real' life, but that life was behind the scrim, for viewing purposes only.
The only part of each other's life we would actually touch was in the office. For many people that would mean a Dilbert-Venn intersection, almost a parody of real life with 'how are your projects going' and 'did you see last night's West Wing?' replacing 'what's your major' on the smalltalk punch list. But then there was J, a rust-crimson dot on the overlapping intersection that was CKS.
Like C and myself, J was looking for attention. While at first I rarely spoke with J, eventually C told J that she and I had been talking about their relationship, and J instantly started paying more attention to me. The three of us would go out for lunch together, and occasionally J would try to shock me by telling me about how she hears women masturbate in the ladies room, and she wonders if other people hear her.
J needed constant validation of self-worth, seeking it by trying to fill every nook of her life with physical intimacy. C was afraid of abandonment, and needed a safety-net, or possibly an escape ladder, in case her current relationship fell apart. Me? I fell into my usual role of Jiminey Cricket, acting as confidant to both, while not betraying either. It's not as bad as it sounds: both of them were fully aware. Looking back, they may have gotten off on it, feeling the excitement and fear of telling me what they were too timid or afraid to tell each other. It's a role I've played several times, and one I try hard not to fall into anymore.
Adding to the mix, C was a cutter, and that habit rubbed off onto J. I'm a fixer, and hadn't yet clued into the reality that a lot of people are self-destructive for attention's sake, acting out just so someone will come and try to fix them.
This weird menage-a-twisted relationship came to a head one day when I dropped by J's office for something and she kept wanting to see my hand. "Let me read your palm" as she splayed my fingers, tracing my life-line. For a moment I thought to correct her, giving her my left hand, as I'm left-handed. In palmistry, the right hand of a leftie depicts their 'forecast' at birth, while the dominant hand shows what the person's will has made of their life. I pulled back a fraction, and her grasp on my hand tightened a fraction. I realized I didn't really care so much what she would read in my future.
My hand in her hand, she opened her desk drawer with the other, plucking a pin from amongst its shiny sisters in the front of the drawer. Her fingers grasping my palm, she turned her head up and said, "let me" as she brought the pin toward my hand. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I took my hand back and watched as she slowly, deliberately, pricked her middle finger as I watched in surprise. She dropped her pin onto her desk and took my hand by the wrist once more, while squeezing her pricked fingertip between her thumb and ring-finger, summoning up a growing red drop of blood from the pinprick.
...
When I was seven years old, my sister and I had the same best friend, Linda. Three years earlier Linda and I met when we were in the same kindergarten. One day after school I found a scrap of paper on the playground near the classroom and, ever curious (even more so at that age), I picked it up. The scrap held a phone number. Ever the precocious four-year-old, I took the number home and called it that evening after school. Linda, a hitherto (no, I didn't use words like 'hitherto' back then) unnoticed classmate who had written the number down for another friend, became fast and close friends with me and my older sister, Susie. Linda had a younger brother and golden retriever. Her parents were both teachers and they had a VW van and two bugs, one of which they'd periodically repaint new colors. Our friendship was the stereotypical childhood friendship. We'd spend summers riding our bikes to the mall, camping out in the backyard, and making up games. When one of us would run away from home, it was a fair bet that we ran to the other's. Our parents became good friends.
One day, alone for the afternoon, the three of us decided to become blood brothers, Indian style. I'm sure that we had seen it on TV somewhere; to cement a friendship into a kinship, you each cut your hands and shake, letting the blood mingle and re-enter your system, each of you letting a little of the other's life-blood into yourself. This is a one-way function; irreversible. Forever.
We got the needle, sterilized it with a match, and each pricked our fingers in turn, drawing forth a drop of blood and mixing them in one palm.
It didn't really matter that our mixed blood would never get closer than the palm of my hand. The blood was there, intertwined, and that was enough.
...
My wrist in her clasp, J said she wanted to 'mark' me, to make us closer. I was certain that this was exactly the kind of situation that gave mankind the term 'ulterior.' I took my wrist from her grasp; not violently, but with determination. "No. I don't think that's a good idea." "Please? It's important." (reaching for my wrist again) "I don't think it's a good idea." (pulling out of reach) "Fine," she said, and looked around her desk. I was wondering what had her attention until she said "well I need to wipe it somewhere" and she smeared her finger on my jeans, front-mid thigh. "Wha" "Don't worry, it'll wash out." This awkward blood-power struggle over, I turned and left her office, the red spot on my pale blue jeans already weaving its way into the fabric, turning rusty as it went.
 Days later, folding my laundry, I noted that the stain didn't come out; it only faded a bit.
A few weeks later, after a second washing, the stain was gone. To be specific, the spot where J's blood infused the fabric was gone, completely, inexplicably.
I'm glad it wasn't my hand or anything else.
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People have many different motives for finding love on the web, and those motives aren't always obvious at the surface level.
After reading about Rob-in-his-ferrari cover to cover, I've decided that the motivation for this love connection comes from his administrative assistant, Linda, who is secretly pleading for someone to snap up this catch so he won't keep hitting on her and angering her husband.
Actually, my real curiosity is the choice of MIDI background music on the page. Is the "Bizzare Love Triangle" supposed to reference Robert, his Ferrari, and the love of his life, or is it just Robert and his two cars? My bet is on Rob, Linda, and her jealous husband.
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"You know it's not the best time for you to be in a relationship when the best part of fantasizing about it is a two-income household."
--Me
Not that I always feel that way, just now and then.
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Not a month goes by that you don't hear about this group or that group decrying the evils of sex and violence on TV and movies, and how they're desensitizing our youth to sex and violence, making them more likely to hurt other people or lessening their sexual ethics.
My feelings of the validity of these points notwithstanding, I find it interesting that they always focus on R-rated movies, violent cop shows, and morally loose situational comedies as the perpetuators of this evil, and children as the victims.
What is surprising to me is that nobody seems to consider the daytime soap as harmful, despite the fact that daytime soaps subsist on a steady stream of lies, deception, sexual promiscuity based on the intent to lie or deceive, kill, maim, or otherwise create false drama on a daily, if not hourly basis. Of course the quick answer is that the 'victims,' that is to say, children, aren't home to watch daytime soaps, so they can't have an impact. But what if they're not the only victims?
What if, through daytime TV, we're raising a generation of adults who are just as desensitized to the kinds of acts portrayed on daytime TV, and though more mature, may be just as susceptible to this desensitization because it's packaged in a more 'realistic' and serialized format which sucks people in to such a degree, that for many avid viewers, the characters become a part of their life?
In short, I wonder how many of those protesting against violence on television are closet soap addicts...
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Man, I'm so out of the l33t haxOr culture. I used to be hip to tha jive, but I saw this on Geeklife and I can't make heads or tails of it:
Current Rating: 5 - Votes: 1
Rate this story: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
(1 = sux0rs to 5 = totally ballz)
Which is good and which is bad? Sexual innuendo can mean so many things...
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I go to BIGWORDS.com looking for textbooks. Naturally, I follow the link to textbooks. There, in the middle of the page, is an ad for HOT SEX: How to Do It:
"Why have mediocre sex or even pretty decent sex when you could be having steaming, smoking HOT sex? Find out the details (with tips on every step from foreplay to orgasm) in this juicy-juicy-juicy how-to guide."
Talk about targeted advertising. New students looking for textbooks. Holy cross-sell, Batman! I'd hate to see the up-sell.
I think the worst part is that you can buy a used copy. Hurry before they're all gone!
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I get a kick wondering how often people confuse Vivid and Vivid with Vivid.
Things will only get more confusing now that vivid the latter, agog that there's a new entertainment technology out there (napster, gnutella) that wasn't spearheaded by the distribution of pornography (the vcr, cable tv, e-commerce (really), streaming media, cd-rom) is moving into the communal file sharing of porn video clips.
"If surfers find a snippet from a movie, it might entice them into buying the whole tape. We can actually turn these shared files into mini-infomercials."
--David Schlesinger, VP for Internet marketing, Vivid Video
It's nice to see that someone's actually paying attention to reports that mp3 sharing actually leads to increased sales.
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Okay, this is the funniest thing I've seen all week.
Porn stars beware! Nobody is safe from design criticism!
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A friend told me today about a study someone (with too much time) did on the 20,000 most common words in the English language. Turns out all of them have been registered in the .com TLD. Out of curiosity, I decided to check what grand purposes the low number domains are being used for:
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