Spending Time Wtih Eva Again

    

Tucson Weather Today

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I am back out here in the country with Eva for the week. Well, till Thursday, anyway. I wonder what kind of mischief the two of us can find to get ourselves into.

You know, I have been accused (by readers of this blog) of seeing women as sex objects, probably because I so often post the female birthday photos either in the nude or arranged in sexually suggestive poses. Well, duh! I admit it; I do see women as sex objects. Good Grief! That's because I am a normal, healthy, heterosexual male. That doesn't mean that I am not able to simultaneously perceive superior women in any other pose, as a female who is accomplished in her chosen field, or as a deep-thinking, creative and worthwhile intellectual.

Jeez!

Let's look at Sandra Bullock. . .

 

Wow!

 

Yes, I see her as a sex object, a highly attractive female that any healthy heterosexual male human being would desire to have sex with. But I also see her as a tremendously talented actress (or am I suppose to say actor?) And, having watched and listened to her attentively while she was being interviewed by Charlie Rose, I believe she is an extremely intelligent woman.

Again, Jeez!

'Nuff said.

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Random Images

 

A Somewhat Startling Visual Encounter

 

Tucson, Arizona  March 24, 2014

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Did You Know . . .?

Abraham Lincoln patented a type of flat bottom boat that he used to transport goods down river. He is the only U.S. President to obtain a patent.

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HISTORICAL EVENT

On March 24, 1958, Elvis Presley was inducted, starting his day as the King of Rock and Roll, but ending it as a lowly buck private in the United States Army. Elvis would be granted leave in August to attend to his mother on her death bed. Gladys Presley passed away on August 16, 1958, and four weeks later, Elvis shipped out to Germany.

There would be other huge changes in Elvis's life during his two years in the Army. He would meet a 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu while in Germany, and he would watch while a new crop of teen idols (The Beatles, etc.) took over the limelight on the U.S. pop scene.

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WORD FOR TODAY

heterosexual
adjective
1. Sexually oriented to persons of the opposite sex.
2. Of or relating to different sexes.
noun
A heterosexual person.

Heterosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction or sexual behavior between persons of opposite sex or gender in the gender binary. As a sexual orientation, heterosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectionate, physical or romantic attractions to persons of the opposite sex"; it also refers to "a person's sense of identity based on those attractions, related behaviors, and membership in a community of others who share those attractions.". The term is usually applied to humans, but it is also observed in all mammals.
--Wikipedia

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CELEBRITY BIRTHDAYS

James Joseph "Jim" Parsons
(born March 24, 1973)

Jim Parsons is an American actor. He is best known for playing Sheldon Cooper on the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, with his performance often cited as a significant reason for the program's success. On May 23, 2012, an article in The New York Times noted that Parsons is gay and had been in a relationship for the last ten years.

Kelly LeBrock
(born March 24, 1960)

Kelly LeBrock is an American-born English actress and model. Her acting debut was in The Woman in Red co-starring with comic actor Gene Wilder. She also starred in the films Weird Science, directed by John Hughes, and Hard to Kill, with Steven Seagal.

Terence Steven "Steve" McQueen
(Mar 24, 1930 - Nov 7, 1980)

Steve McQueen was an American actor. Called "The King of Cool", his "anti-hero" persona, developed at the height of the Vietnam War-era counterculture, made him a top box-office draw of the 1960s and 1970s. McQueen received an Academy Award nomination for his role in The Sand Pebbles. His other popular films include The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt, The Getaway, and Papillon, as well as the all-star ensemble films The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, and The Towering Inferno.

Lara Flynn Boyle
(born March 24, 1970)

Lara Flynn Boyle is an American actress. She is best known for her performances as Donna Hayward in Twin Peaks and Assistant District Attorney Helen Gamble in The Practice. She has also appeared in films such as Happiness and Men in Black II.

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A bunch of liberals wanted to outlaw men gazing at women because the gaze was said to objectify women. Sorry, liberals, it can't be helped among the heterosexual crowd.
--Rush Limbaugh

NASA TV

This Is Who I Am

    

Women Are Different From Men... Duh

     

Tucson Weather Today

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A couple evenings ago I watched a segment of the PBS News Hour, an interview with Debora L. Spar, that sparked my interest. I don't know why because Feminism has never been a subject of special interest to me.

There is an eight minute video of that interview:

Wonder Women

In her new book, Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection, Debora L. Spar argues societal expectations that women can "have it all" set women up for failure.

From professor at the alpha-male Harvard Business School to president of the female-dominated Barnard College, Debora L. Spar says the time has come to talk more about gender differences in the workplace.

Debora L. Spar never thought of herself as a feminist. Raised after the tumult of the 1960s, she presumed the gender war was over. As one of the youngest female professors to be tenured at Harvard Business School and a mother of three, she swore to young women that they could have it all. "We thought we could just glide into the new era of equality, with babies, board seats, and husbands in tow,” she writes. “We were wrong."

If you go to Amazon.com you can click on the 'Look Inside' feature, read a goodly portion from the book, and decide whether you would like to buy and read the rest of it.

LINK

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Hold your nose and don't spit out whatever you are eating or drinking: According to ABC News, doctors have found a way to put healthy people's poop into pills that can cure serious gut infections -- a less yucky way to do "fecal transplants." Canadian researchers tried this on 27 patients and cured them all after strong antibiotics failed to help.

It takes 24 to 34 capsules to fit the bacteria needed for a treatment, and patients down them in one sitting.

Pills Made From Poop Cure Serious Gut Infections

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Did you know that . . . ?

The average number of people airborne over the U.S. at any given hour is 61,000.

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HISTORICAL EVENT

On this day, October 4 in 1957, the Soviet Union inaugurated the "Space Age" with its launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for "satellite," was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from the Tyuratam launch base in the Kazakh Republic. Sputnik had a diameter of 22 inches and weighed 184 pounds and circled Earth once every hour and 36 minutes. Traveling at 18,000 miles an hour, its elliptical orbit had an apogee (farthest point from Earth) of 584 miles and a perigee (nearest point) of 143 miles.

Visible with binoculars before sunrise or after sunset, Sputnik transmitted radio signals back to Earth strong enough to be picked up by amateur radio operators. Those in the United States with access to such equipment tuned in and listened in awe as the beeping Soviet spacecraft passed over America several times a day. In January 1958, Sputnik's orbit deteriorated, as expected, and the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere.

The first U.S. satellite, Explorer, was launched on January 31, 1958. By then, the Soviets had already achieved another ideological victory when they launched a dog into orbit aboard Sputnik 2. The Soviet space program went on to achieve a series of other space firsts in the late 1950s and early 1960s: first man in space, first woman, first three men, first space walk, first spacecraft to impact the moon, first to orbit the moon, first to impact Venus, and first craft to soft-land on the moon. However, the United States took a giant leap ahead in the space race in the late '60s with the Apollo lunar-landing program, which successfully landed two Apollo 11 astronauts on the surface of the moon in July 1969.

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WORD FOR TODAY

gender
noun
1. Grammar
a. A grammatical category used in the classification of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and, in some languages, verbs that may be arbitrary or based on characteristics such as sex or animacy and that determines agreement with or selection of modifiers, referents, or grammatical forms.
b. One category of such a set.
c. The classification of a word or grammatical form in such a category.
d. The distinguishing form or forms used.
2. Sexual identity, especially in relation to society or culture.
3.
a. The condition of being female or male; sex.
b. Females or males considered as a group

Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories. In many other contexts, however, even in some areas of social sciences, the meaning of gender has undergone a usage shift to include sex or even to replace the latter word Gender is now commonly used even to refer to the physiology of non-human animals, without any implication of social gender roles.

In English literature, the trichotomy between biological sex, psychological gender, and social sex role first appeared in a feminist paper on transsexualism in 1978

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CELEBRITY BIRTHDAYS

Alicia Silverstone

(born October 4, 1976)

Alicia Silverstone is an American actress, film and television producer, author, and animal rights and environmental activist. Silverstone made her film debut in The Crush, earning the 1994 MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance. She starred in the 1995 sleeper hit Clueless and in the big-budget 1997 film Batman & Robin where she played Batgirl. She has continued to act in film, television, and theatre.

A vegan, Silverstone endorsed PETA activities and published a book titled The Kind Diet.

William Mark "Bill" Fagerbakke

(born October 4, 1957)

Bill Fagerbakke is an American actor and voice actor. He is best known for his long-running-role as Patrick Star in the animated series SpongeBob SquarePants and Michael "Dauber" Dybinski on the sitcom Coach. To date, he has also appeared in 11 episodes of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother as Marshall Eriksen's father Marvin.

Susan Abigail Sarandon

(born October 4, 1946)

Susan Sarandon is an American actress. She has worked in movies and television since 1969, and won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 1995 film Dead Man Walking. She is noted for her social and political activism for a variety of liberal causes.

Charlton Heston

(Oct 4, 1923 - April 5, 2008)

Charlton Heston was an American actor in film, theatre and television and a political activist.

As a Hollywood star he appeared in 100 films over the course of 60 years. He is best known for his roles in The Ten Commandments (1956); Ben-Hur, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor (1959); El Cid (1961); and Planet of the Apes (1968). He also is well known for his roles in the films The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and Touch of Evil (1958).

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Men are sexually predatory in life; and women are sexually manipulative.
--Andrea Dworkin

NASA TV

This Is Who I Am

   

Censorship and the Banning of Books

The mother of a student in Menifee, California complained that the 10th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary contained inappropriate material regarding Oral Sex, to which district officials over-reacted a bit, proposing to ban the dictionary from the school's library shelves.

Here is the supposedly offensive definition:

A district official that stoops to removing books from a school library has merely done his job in a manner he believes right and proper, even if only to further enhance his own eminence in the eyes of a deplorably ignorant electorate.

But a community that condones such actions has injured only itself. Students will mature and self-educate and move on. The village, if ignored by a wiser external society, will stagnate and eventually choke to death on its own vitriolic vomit.

Here are some books that have been banned in the United States.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was outlawed in Alabama schools due to "sexually offensive" passages. Adding to this, four members of the Alabama State Textbook Committee called for the rejection of this book because it is a 'real downer.'

Alice Walker's The Color Purple, where parents and school leaders in Jackson County West Virginia banned the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel due to its sexually and socially explicit nature, in addition to the book's "Troubling ideas about race relations, man's relationship to God, African history, and human sexuality."

The Grapes of Wrath, a novel by John Steinbeck. Banned in many places in the US. In the region of California in which it was partially set, it was banned because it made the residents of this region look bad.

Howl a poem by Allen Ginsberg. Copies of the first edition were seized by San Francisco Customs for obscenity in March 1957; after trial, obscenity charges were dismissed.

Lady Chatterley's Lover a novel by D.H. Lawrence. Temporarily banned for obscenity in the U.S. but the ban was lifted in 1959.

Tropic of Cancer a novel by Henry Miller. Banned in the US in the 1930s until the early 1960s, seized by US customs for sexually explicit content and vulgarity. The rest of Miller's work was also banned by the United States

Ulysses by James Joyce. Challenged and temporarily banned in the US for its sexual content. In 1933 the ban was overturned.

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Banned in the Southern States due to its anti-slavery content.

United States-Vietnam Relations: 1945-1967. A government study by Robert McNamara and the United States Department of Defense. Also known as the Pentagon Papers. US President Nixon attempted to suspend publication of classified information. The restraint was lifted by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision.

Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland. Banned in the USA in 1821 for obscenity, then again in 1963. This was the last book ever banned in the USA.

That's just a few. A list of the most often challenged books can be found on a page of The American Library Association.

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

September 25-October 2, 2010 is hailed by the ALA. as Banned Books Week

(BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

Banning books, indeed censorship in all its multi-cloaked disguises is inherently damaging (often lethal) to the citizens of any supposedly Free State. Any government eventually will, and must, demand the power to regulate the distribution of information to its subjects.

Thinking individuals should always keep that principle in mind. When a government acts (or seeks to make laws) to suppress the free flow of information on grounds of religion, morality, or simply that it knows "what is best for you" or that it

"NEEDS YOU" -- Watch out!

. . . 'nuff said?

Laughter is God's most soothing balm.

--Gene Chambers