A Year Of Lasts

My son is a high school senior. It didn’t quite sink in until we went to Back To School Night for the last time. I will never again fall asleep to the principal droning on about what a great school year it will be. I'll never again hear the PTSA describe the goal of the annual fundraiser (This year it's a new sound system for the auditorium). I will never again tramp up and down the stairs trying to go from English to Math to Science in five minute intervals just to get all his teachers' e-mail addresses. As silly and pointless as Back To School Night is, in some way I will miss it next year.

A lot of other things we do this year will be for the last time. He is on the last season of marching band. This will be the last homecoming weekend. As he fills out college applications, I realize that any chances for big family vacations are closing.

The apron strings have been steadily fraying for several years. Last November he got my hand me down car and I quit driving him to school on my way to work. That also broke up the band practice car pool. Between his internship and his extracurricular activities, he is rarely home. Much like I was at his age.

I play it light, pretending that I am really excited to get him out of my house. I of course dread facing years of college tuition, but I want him to go to the place that is best for him no what the cost or sacrifice. I’ve got one kid and it is only natural for me to want him to have things I never had.

I keep trying to find the funny spin for this, but there are no easy jokes to be made at his expense. It’s easy to make fun of teenagers. They eat too much. They are disdainful of their parents. They sometimes make hilariously awful choices. And mine only gets to do it in front of me for one more year.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What should I do to make this year count?

Mo MoDo!

My greatest wish has come true. At midnight tonight, the walls to TimesSelect, the New York Times pay service, come tumbling down. For nearly two years, Maureen Dowd and her pontificating stablemates have been locked way in indentured servitude available only to those willing to pay $49.95 a year. While there were ways around the barriers, I was not one of the lucky ones with a .edu mail address that could sneak under the Times Select fence.

The official reason for discontinuing the service is that NYT sees greater growth opportunities in online advertising revenue than in subscriptions. There is a lot of truth in this. While TimesSelect had a subscriber base of about 220,000 a year, these numbers were soft and not growing. Meanwhile the crown jewels of the Op-Ed page were becoming irrelevant because blogs and other web sources just quit quoting the NYT columnists.

Links are the coin of the realm in the online world. Horizontal links from news aggregators like Drudge Report and Gawker are valuable traffic drivers. Joel Achenbach states that horizontal readers driven in by outside pages are much more numerous than vertical readers that come to a newspaper’s web page and follow stories from the homepage. With Thomas Friedman and David Brooks not linkable, they became invisible. And the opposite of relevance is silence.

In honor of this storming of the virtual Bastille, I have liberated this picture of Maureen Dowd from the Washington Post picture archives. When if I first professed my intellectual lust for MoDo, I scanned in this picture from the WaPo Magazine article about her because I couldn’t find an electronic version of it anywhere. Finally I discovered that it was available from the WaPo Photo Store. They wanted $49.95 for an 8x10 glossy. For that kind of money I could have gotten a year’s worth of her words instead. I even tried to e-mail a licensing request to no avail. Instead I am force to resort to playing the fair use card as posting it as review and comment.

Like TimesSelect, this wonderful picture is invisible on the web, but much coveted. I have gotten GoogleHits from people searching for “Maureen Dowd playing chess.” Taken by the Pulitzer Prize winning Michael Williamson, the image succinctly captures the essence of Dowd. She is playful, but whip-smart. She is well-read but not mousy. Casual and earthy but sexy and aggressive, with a gleam in her eye that could cut you to the quick. What is not to like?

Now I will once again be able to hang on every one of her rapier sharp bon mots and relish every deadly accurate pop cultural reference. In the words of a famous orator:

Free at last!
Free at last!
MoDo is free at last!

Trouble In Foobadise

On September 3rd, Mike Patterson opened a scrapbook and starting reminiscing about the days when his little sister and not his grandfather was the family member wearing diapers. Unless you had been forewarned, you wouldn’t have noticed the transition from the old real-time paced For Better Or For Worse to the fozen timeline of the semi-retired era.

The new format will be a hybrid of new strips, repeats, and redrawn old strips. It seems the original artwork of some of the older material isn’t usable. The older material is being introduced by every bad clip show cliché: looking at scrapbooks, running across old friends, bad acid trips. Just about everything except for Wayne and Garth waving their hands in front of their face going “didididididi.”

There has been a mini-flurry of publicity marking the occasion including this article in USAToday. The writer also conducted a very in-depth comprehensive interview with Lynn Johnston on his podcast. The interview has been thoroughly fisked by the fine folk at the Foobiverse Journal. Among the very interesting revelations:

• The syndicate didn’t want Liz and Eric cohabitating too explicitly, leading to years of speculation about the state of Liz’s hymen.
• She defends Mike running into the burning house for his manuscript instead of his laptop, oblivious to the criticism that he shouldn’t have run into a fire for any reason.
• One reason for freezing the strip and going to more repeats is that Lynn realizes she is having a harder time staying relevant to families with small children that don’t make more than a million dollars a year. No argument here.
• One topic she might want to explore is the effect of divorce using minor character Annie whose ex-husband is a philandering cad. Hmmm, interesting.

One of the juicier tidbits to emerge from the press coverage is that Lynn and her husband have separated and are expected to get divorced. The stories hint that Rod has already found a new and presumably younger girlfriend. He must have gotten as annoyed with two decades of arm flapping hot flashes as we were. Or he might have gotten tired of being a kept man with Lynn subsidizing his vanity toy train business. I wonder if Lynn will rerun the vintage strip where John hires a hygienist just because she is hot.


Thank goodness Rod/John was a dentist instead of a gynecologist or that recycled punchline would have not been newspaper friendly.

The silver lining in this domestic tragedy (or the insult added to injury, depending on your point of view) is that Lynn has much more time on her hands now than she thought she would. This allows her to put a little more effort into the strip than just randomly selecting old bits out of the hat.

The new strips will continue to tie-up some loose ends. Officially, Lynn is still being coy about the long-term status of the Lizanthony merger, but the handwriting is on the wall. Granthony’s upper lip has been shaved as clean as Ellie’s sheets. Those wedding bells are ringing. Weddings are a time honored shark jumping tradition. Along with an excessive number of nostalgic reminders of how things were when it was new and fresh.

This is how the Foobiverse ends, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a flashback.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Is the inclusion of new material a good compromise or a sad cop-out?

Porn Star Tips

It’s only natural to be interested in the glamorous world of adult movies. Since most people have had sex at some time or another, it sure looks easy. The best possible way to dissuade yourself is to watch this video from the Adult Industry Medical (AIM) Health Care Foundation. They are a non-profit group founded by a former adult film actress that administers health screening tests to keep sexually transmitted infections (STI) out of the porn industry.

The first half of the two hour movie is a catalog of all the various STIs you can be exposed to. It could form the syllabus for an entire semester of high school Family Life class. They cover AIDS, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, HPV, genital warts (you’d be surprised where you can get those), hepatitis, and herpes. They graphically detail the symptoms, transmission vectors, and treatments. If you make it through that gauntlet, they move on to a more general discussion on the adult film industry. For this portion they have the famous (or so I'm told) porn star Nina Hartley (fully clothed) explaining the ins and outs of the business.

Just in case you don’t have the free time I seem to have too much of, I have summarized the more interesting points:

Don’t do anything anyplace you are uncomfortable with. And by uncomfortable place, they don’t mean the back of a Volkswagon. If you haven’t done it in your private life, don’t do it on camera. You can’t ever undo it, but people get to watch it forever.

Don’t get overexposed. That is their pun, not mine. Grabbing every job you can get will burn you out. They will still be making dirty movies next month or next year. Take your time and make it last longer.

Your kids will find out. And your grandmother, your elementary school teacher and all your neighbors. If you can't explain what you do for a living, don't do it.

Reverse cowgirl is great for the inner thighs. Nina and Sharon pantomime some of the more popular positions. They say that one of the trickier moves is the fingercuffs style since the rhythm of keeping both ends in synch can be tough.

Cowgirl

Reverse Cowgirl

Doggie

Some acting is required. If you are female, you have to be able to convincingly say “Gee, I’ve never done THAT with a girl before.” A lot.

Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, it's forgivable to go ass to mouth. This is good news for you fans of the Dirty Sanchez. They do warn that there is an increased risk of hepatitis. However, going ass to vadge is complete no-no. Their rule is “change the hole, wrap the pole.” Anything that has been through the back door has to get washed, dried, and wrapped before being allowed to knock up front.

There are no fluffers. Sorry, guys. Getting up for a scene is completely in your hands. Viagra and Cialis are miracle drugs, but you still have to prime the pump.

Make-up sponges make terrible tampons. If your friend visits while at work, don’t go to the stylist for a stop-gap measure. Those things are not very absorbent for a reason. A better choice is a specially shaped natural sponge.

The video emphasizes that the adult film industry is a career field requiring good financial management, perseverance, and sound judgment. That sounds too much like real work. I think I will stick to my day job.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Are you cut out to be a porn star?

BonusScavengerHunt™: I’ve used three Kevin Smith movie references in this post. Can you find them? Identify the lines and the movie.

High School Nude-ical

Every generation thinks they invented sex, despite what all those frisky geezers could teach them. The latest victim of the hubris of presumptive novelty is High School Music star and Teenage Girl President finalist Vanessa Anne Hudgens. Somehow, a photo of her nekkid as a jaybird found its way to the internet.

It’s a hard way to learn the lesson to never have a picture taken you wouldn’t want your mother or potential employer to see. Astoundingly, and perhaps suspiciously, the authenticity of the picture was immediately confirmed and apologies were spread all around. Then more interesting questions started getting asked:

Who took the picture? The general graininess and flash flare makes me think this was a crummy camera with a self-timer set on a dresser. I doubt there was anyone in the room with her.

When was the picture taken? If it was before Vanessa’s eighteenth birthday last December, it would be technically kiddie porn. Since nobody is waving that flag, it must be within the past eight months or so.

Who was the picture for? Opinions here are split between current boyfriend and HSM costar Zac “Too Cute To Be Straight” Efron and Drake Bell of rival tweener network Nickelodeon’s Drake & Josh. Zac in a well publicized beach romp with her must already be aware of how smokin’ her bod is. Drake is a rumored former crush and supposedly the recipient of previous advances. As a gentleman, he is denying everything.

Who leaked them onto the internet? The trail here is pretty cold. It could be someone with access to the camera it was taken with. Or it could be a friend of the recipient’s with access to his e-mail account. It could also all be a particularly puzzling publicity ploy since negotiations for HSM3 are still underway.

Is too big a deal being made of this? Most definitely. By sex scandal standards, this is astoundingly tame. Plain Jane nudity is almost quaint in this post-Paris world. We see more every time Britney Spears steps out of a limo. It almost makes Vanessa seem more wholesome. She doesn't have any tattoos or a Brazilian wax. She even took out her belly piercing for the photo. If anything, it shows that her budoir posing skills are every bit as wooden as her acting.

Am I a perv for hunting down this picture? That goes without saying. In my defense, it wasn’t hard to find and I was completely unaware of it until it made every entertainment news outlet ever. I'm not like the guy that found my blog by Googling “Jordan Todosey naked”. The Life With Derek costar has at least six years before her amateur cheesecake is fair game.

How creepy should I feel for thinking she is hot? Creepiness depends on age. Using the “half-your-age plus seven” guideline she’s off-limits to anyone over 22. Even by the more liberal “young enough to be your daughter” rule, I’m in hot water. My son is a senior in high school and actively dating. I just hope none of his girlfriends are sending him their private modeling sessions.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Vanessa Anne Hudgens - Naïve waif or shameless tramp?

Frisky Geezers Get Freaky

As Baby Boomers hit retirement age, there is a lot of ink being spilled over how gracefully they will age. But we already have the example of the slightly older generation that is well into the Geritol years and they seem to be living it up. A recent study that made a lot of headlines surveyed the sexual habits of golden yearers and found that they are not going silently into that good night. They instead seem to me coming into their sunset years quite loudly.

Between the ages of 57 and 64, 84% of men and 62% of women had had sex within the previous year. I don’t consider 60 to be particularly old, so this doesn’t surprise me. By the age of 75 to 85, that stat falls to 38% for men and only 17% for women. Even better news is that among the sexually active old farts between half and two-thirds are getting action several times a month. I know some McBloggers with children that would love to break into that range.

A lot of this gender difference is pure demographics. Women live longer than men. By a certain age, 9% of men are widowers but an astounding 42% of women are widows. I have a theory that a guy in a retirement home with a valid drivers license that doesn't drool too much is the cock of the walk. In a way, old age mimics high school. A whopping 60% of the surveyed oldsters claimed to have had oral sex in the past year. Now despite the paranoid warnings of the TV news, that is a market penetration that the typical teenager can only dream of.

And they are not always being shy or coy about it. A Florida retirement center had a herpes epidemic from all the saggy skin slapping. At retiree haven Sun City West a few years back, they had a rash of outdoor sex sightings of it's senior sexa(and older)genarians. All I have to say is “Get a room!”

It seems that granny porn is everywhere in society now. Helen Mirren is a bona fide sex symbol. More explicitly, a new HBO series "Tell Me You Love Me" supposedly pushes the boundaries for even pay cable. One of the stars is sixty-seven-year-old Jane Alexander who plays a marriage counselor with her own rather active love life. As Tom Shales describes:

Where the show becomes discomforting is when it explores the therapist's own sexual relationship with her mate; both are in their 60s. The filmmakers want us to be aware that sex is not something restricted to the young and the cute, and so if you're inclined to think "gross" at the sight of the couple in bed, you've only helped the filmmakers prove a point.

It’s not TV or HBO, it’s Over 50 on film.

Joel Achenbach in the Washington Post Outlook Section examines the vigor of what he calls Frisky Geezers. The money quote is:

Much of the revolution takes place out of sight. Recently we all read the front-page story about older people having sex like bunnies. According to the University of Chicago study, 53 percent of Americans between the ages of 65 and 74 remain sexually active, along with 26 percent between the ages of 75 and 85, despite the fact that 100 percent of their kids and grandkids would rather not picture it. Now we understand that special twinkle in Grandpa's eye when he looks at Grandma and says, "I'll show you an Early Bird Special you'll never forget."

Thank goodness my parents just left town, because they are big fans of Early Birds and I will never be able to hear that phrase the same way again. Dealing with amorous parents is awkward for all involved. Many years back, we all rolled our eyes as my dad gave us grown kids the bum’s rush one evening. He had an early flight to catch the next day and time was wasting. Eeewww! I know how I got here and I have a good suspicion of who the culprits were, but I don't need to be reminded.

The only reason I'm tolerant of the whole sexy senior citizen phenomenon is that I hope to be one too someday. Then I get to gross everybody out.


BlatantCommentWhoring™: Do frisky parents embarrass you?

BooksFirst - August 2007

Books Bought

Spook Country By William Gibson

Books Read

China Road by Rob Gifford
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
One Perfect Day by Rebecca Mead

Comments

While hanging around BigBoxOfBooks™ waiting for Pottermania to kick in, I ran across China Road, Rob Gifford’s take on modern China. The gimmick of the book is that it is told travelogue style as he takes a road trip from Shanghai to the western border of China all along Route 312, which is like a Chinese Route 66. I started reading the chapter about Xian since I had been there on my trip to China this summer. I got hooked and put it on reserve at the library since it was too long to read in one wild night at the bookstore.

While on his road trip, NPR reporter Gifford talked to a wide variety of people including businessmen, truck drivers, Buddhist monks, karaoke prostitutes, abortionists, AIDS activists and others. He often goes incognito since journalism is heavily censored in China. This way he gets a real look at the current attitudes and opinions of the general population. He follows some themes through the whole book. One is that the pace of modernization is massively disruptive to Chinese society. The Chinese government has made an implicit deal trading economic growth for political freedom. This trade-off is very fragile and growing unrest in the traditional peasantry could topple the balance at any time. His other wider observation is that the years of communist rule and the Cultural Revolution in particular erased the long established Confucian values. As communism is discredited, there is a moral vacuum in Chinese society that has not been filled. The growth at any cost attitude without any tempering sense of responsibility is ripe for disaster.

The travel aspect of the book is really secondary to the multi-faceted insights into the rapid changes affected the world’s most populous country. I only spent two weeks in China but I found the results of his six years of work in the region to be both eye-opening and consistent with my own observations.

When I found out that William Gibson would be in the region promoting his new book Spook Country, I immediately felt guilty having never getting around to his earlier book Pattern Recognition. I immediately launched a crash reading program to get through it before the signing. Fortunately, this was not hard. Truly a page turner, the book was fast paced and intriguing. Much has been made that both this book and Spook Country are not “true” science fiction and set in contemporary culture. There is nobody "jacking in" to the "net". The characters use chat forums and search engines and all the tools of the post-internet world available to everybody. The one true cyberhacker in the book is not even particularly competent. In Pattern Recognition, the only suspension of disbelief required is that the protagonist Cayce Pollard has an allergy to branding that she has found a way to monetize. The conceit works on a very metaphorical level and helps make the themes of the novel clear.

William Gibson has become increasingly interested in the intersection of technology and pop culture. In Pattern Recognition, the macguffin is a series of viral videos that have become a cult obsession. The denouement is not as mind blowing as it would be in a full hardcore science fiction novel, but it is clever and consistent. The plot has been intricately crafted so that everything follows the internal logic of the world he has created. Gibson really believes in a sense of verisimilitude. The descriptions of places that I have been to are spot on, which gives me a trust over his other descriptions. His recent books by being set in the modern world are actually more fascinating than the far future tales.

Another book I (well actually my wife) discovered in a bookstore and went to the library to finish is One Perfect Day. The book tries to be an expose into the industrial wedding complex. It’s biggest revelation is that many of the “traditions” seen at weddings and receptions are recent innovations often created by people wanting to sell you something. If this is not a huge discovery to you, the other parts of this expose will be even more anti-climactic.

• Weddings are too expensive.
• Brides-to-be get really carried away.
• People want to take advantage of your need to keep up with the Star Joneses.
• Wedding paraphernalia is really silly.

This book started life as a magazine article and the stretch marks show. There is a lot of padding. Each chapter covers one particular part of the industry including wedding planners, wedding dresses, honeymoon destinations. The reporting is thorough and comprehensive, but not earth-shatteringly new.

Anniversary Ideas

Today is my wedding anniversary. They seem to roll around more and more often. My marriage is now old enough to drink. After 21 years, the need to come up with a unique and appropriate anniversary present each year is becoming increasingly difficult. This year I have punted entirely.

Last year I put together a slide show video of my wedding, but I can only get away with that once. My problem is exacerbated by the the fact that my wife has exquisite but precise taste. Anniversary gifts fall in a narrow range of appropriate categories.

Jewelry

One of my mantras is "They are ALL diamond anniversaries."

Over the years I have managed to obtain the various pieces of jewelry that she likes, which tends towards diamonds, sapphires, and the occasional pearl. She has rings and earrings in each of these gemstones that cover her from daily use to fancy events. The level that it takes to "wow" has generally gone up as well. For the fifteenth anniversary, I gave her a very nice diamond band, but then a year later her mother gave her a hand-me-down ring that outsparkles my gift significantly.

While in China this summer, we spent some time in the open markets haggling. We got several nice pearl items at fantastic prices and even found a beautiful jade pendant. Nothing in my price range is going to top those.

Clothes and Purses

My rate of success in picking appropriate clothes or accessories is spotty at best. I still bask in the glow of the one time I selected the perfect Talbot's sweater. Since then my clothing choices have mostly been fabric gift certificates. I get stuff from stores she likes and she is welcome to exchange them at her leisure.

Purses are even worse. Her standards for a good purse are just inscrutable to me. The perfect purse is some indefinable combination of roominess, compactness, quantity and location of pockets and ease of organization. Not surprisingly, it seems only Coach meets her exacting standards lately. When in New York recently our path to dinner inadvertently led us past the Madison Avenue Coach store. It seems that she had seen a purse on the web site that was only available in their Manhattan store. Sure enough, it was in stock and met her current criteria perfectly. I tried to make the "Hope you enjoy your early present" joke several times to responses that range from a derisive snort to an icy stare.

Flowers, Chocolates, Balloons and Trinkets.

Like most men I have a reputation for never sending flowers often enough, so that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Before we were married, she had a gay coworker whose partner was a florist. The manager had to tell him to have his partner cease and desist with the deliveries because it was creating too much ill-will among the women with less thoughtful significant others.

As a teacher, she gets tons of chocolate at every gift-giving occasion. The sweets tend to linger around the house until discovered by my ever-hungry teenage son, or worse, snatched by my delicate-stomached dog. The gifts he then leaves behind are even much less wanted.

Sports Cars

In our dating phase, we would frequently drive up and down Peachtree Street in Atlanta which has the highest per capita ownership of Mercedes I know of. I used to jokingly tell her that I would get her a 450SL for our 25th anniversary. With that only four years away on the horizon, my rash joke doesn't seem so funny. At least I never specified a model year.

BlatantCommentWhoring™:It's too late for this year, my goose is already cooked, but what should I have gone with?