excerpts.

An excerpt from "The Smart Girl's Guide To Porn" that I really loved:

(on the subject of the question "Does porn degrade women?)

"Those who believe in porn's alleged degradation of women are making a lot of assumptions about the people in porn, specifically the women, and about the people viewing the imagery.

* The woman is ashamed of what she is doing -- or shoulde be.
* She isn't enjoying it, or women as a class can't and don't enjoy certain types of sex.
* She is sexually receptive and therefore less than human.
* The viewer is always male.
* The actress doesn't know the effect her image has -- that porn leads to real-life acts of rape, child abuse and degradation.
* Open sexual desire is shameful for all participants, on- and off-screen.

How can anyone possibly know how every viewer or participant feels, or sees him or herself as? The answer is that no one can. Each individual must be allowed to decide what is healthy and okay for him or her -- no one else can decide that for you, or for another person."


While I don't really like the way she concluded her thought, I love that she calls out the people who think of porn as degrading and debunks the myth.



***



And a couple of passages from "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers":

"... anatomists came to occupy the same terrain, in the public's mind, as executioners. Worse, even, for dissection was though of, literally, as a punishment worse than death. Indeed, that -- not the support and assistance of anatomists -- was the authorities' main intent in making the bodies available for dissection. With so many relatively minor offenses punishable by death, the legal bodies felt the need to tack on added horrors as deterrents against weighter crimes. If you stole a pig, you were hung [sic -- should actually be "hanged"]. If you killed a man, you were hanged and then dissected. (In the freshly minted United States of America, the punishable-by-dissection catergory was extended to include duelists, the death sentence clearly not posing much of a deterrent to the type of fellow who agrees to settle his differences by the dueling pistol.)
Double sentencing wasn't a new idea, but rather the latest variation on a theme. Before that, a murderer might be hanged and then drawn and quartered, wherein horses were tied to his limbs and spurred off in four directions, the resultant "quarters" being impaled on spikes and publicly displayed, as a colorful reminder to the citizenry of the ill-advisedness of crime. Dissection as a sentencing option for murderers was mandated, in 1752 Britain, as an alternative to postmortem gibbeting. Gibbeting -- though it hits the ear like a word for happy playground chatter or perhaps, at worst, the cleaning of small game birds -- is in fact a ghastly verb. To gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and suspend it in a flat iron cage (the gibbet) in plain view of townsfolk while it rots and gets pecked apart by crows. A stroll through the square must have been a whole different plate of tamales back then."



"We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between, we do what we can to forget."

criminal justice.

Serj Tankian has committed murder, and the victim's name is MUSIC!

As punishment for his crimes, I sentence Serj Tankian to stop making music for the REST OF HIS LIFE. Or maybe just mine. As long as I don't have to hear another goddamn note from that guy ever again.

OW MY EARS ARE BLEEDING AND IT'S NOT THE GOOD KIND.
I would honestly rather have some slowly pull my eyeballs out with a rusty ice cream scoop than listen to System of a Down, Serj Tankian's solo crap, or anything else he ever chooses to do ever again.

The only thing I have ever heard him do that sounded halfway decent was a cover of "Holiday in Cambodia" by the Dead Kennedys, and that's because there is no one else on the planet who has a voice annoying enough to replicate Jello Biafra's voice (but god I love Jello! props!).

You may resume your daily routine.

L