No, not Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, but Geoff and Brittany, my good friends have begun their globe-spanning vacation. They’re posting updates on their travel blog at Geoff’s blog.
I expect certain downtimes, for example, when in the Mongolian wilderness, unless yurts now come with wifi. Keep checking that link often!
Since everyone has been bombarding me with questions relating to their favourite homoerotic activity these days, I feel it’s only fitting to put up this article I found on the psychosexual nature of sports. I can’t walk 5 feet without someone asking me if I’ve ‘watched the game’ or something like that, so here goes:
I should come here and talk to you people about the meaning of sports in our society. Most of us tend to think of sports as a pleasant diversion…fun and games…a way for Junior to “build character” and learn “fair play”… This is Wrong. The sporting green is a Freudian battleground on which primitive psychosexual conflicts are played out using a sadistic lexicon, both physical and verbal, of sublimated homosexual rape and Oedipal hostility!
I have always thought this, no really!
Let’s see if we can shed some light on why so many people (men mostly) care so much about something so stupid. Even the most non-analytical amongst us would be hard-pressed to deny the presence of a sexual undercurrent in sports, one that is predominantly misogynistic. To be the male figure, the fucker, is to win; to assume the “submissive” female role, the fuckee, is to lose.
This is obvious. If the gladiatorial origins of sports are lost on you, there is no hope for you, my friend. Kill yourself now.
The language of American football, for example, makes this very clear, the object of the game is to enter your opponent’s ‘end-zone’ as often as possible, employing a variety of ‘backs‘ and ‘ends‘ (including those that are ’split’ and ‘tight’) who attempt to ‘find the hole’ so as to ‘penetrate‘ as ‘deeply’ as possible into their opponent’s ‘territory’!
Football is nothing more than a homosexual ritual (look no further than the relationship between center and quarterback)…not unlike other rituals of male dominance such as prison rape and what is known in the animal kingdom as presenting…
Deferring backsides as some of the larger primates indeed. Here, if nowhere else is where Darrow should have looked for his evidence.
Baseball is more subtle but no less interesting. The batter emerges from the ‘dugout’ (a modern slang word for ‘vagina’) holding erect his mighty phallus. The field and especially the enclosed ‘diamond’ have a decidedly feminine quality…Baseball is overrun with sexually implicit phrases: To ‘hit the ball in the hole’, or ‘The bases are loaded’…
In basketball, the goal is adorned with a maternal ’skirt’…Golf, on the other hand is extremely masturbatory…the ‘pole’ (or flag) symbolizes the father’s penis which must be replaced in the hole by the son’s ball (seed) in the fewest number of ’strokes’
Thus, these penis-oriented sports are popular with (predominantly male) adults while equally meaningless games, like say ring toss or horseshoes are laughed off as silly…not because of the intrinsic value of the games, but because the player is symbolically feminized
This is your typical fan. His whole life is based around the actions of people he’ll never meet. He memorizes useless statistics, dreams about trades that will never happen..all that crap…and this is not some isolated fanatic…this is an average guy! This is You!
Sadly, the number of people I know like this has only increased in the last decade. Make of that what you will.
How does it happen? How do we become fanatics? It’s basically the same as Catholicism: We are indctrinated at an early age and only in rare cases do we ever regain our reason
Best analogy ever.
Looking at it logically, even on the most superficial level, being a sports fan makes very little sense. First of all, the players on your team aren’t even from the town they represent. They are free-agent mercenaries with no allegiance to your city or even the team itself.
Judging by the number of people on my MSN list whose names mention ‘The Swedish twins’, the logical inference is that Vancouver’s hockey team has a pair of Swedes on it who are playing for Vancouver because they love the air, the culture and the people here. No, really! How could you even insinuate that an athlete might be doing it for the money. How crass!
And do you think these guys give two shits about the fans? Of course not!…It stopped being fun for them in high school. It’s a business, and the fans are nothing more than interchangeable suckers!
And why shouldn’t they hate the fans? How would you feel if you were a trained athlete who had worked and sacrificed to get where you were and some fat slob who could barely move told you you sucked!
Think of the pressure on these people…No wonder everybody in professional athletics is either a coke addict, a drunk or a hardcore christian.
Liberally taken from Twentieth Century Eightball, by the great Daniel Clowes. Humourous and true, I say!
If you’re as sick as me of seeing the news and media orgasm over every back-alley stabbing in every souk in the Middle East, simply because of our dependence on foreign oil, here’s what we need to do:
1. Find an alternative source of energy. All I have to say is, the Sun! Using oil as an energy source while we receive trillions of joules of energy from the Sun everyday is akin to searching for a flashlight at high noon on a sunny day. If we as a species can go into space and engineer all these other marvels, it’s high time we started harnessing the Sun and moving on.
2. Ignore the Middle East. Once we don’t depend on them for gasoline anymore, the media will stop caring and they will become another Rwanda or Sudan, a region ignored by the industrialized, capitalist nations simply because they have nothing to offer. Greed begets humanity.
A far more violent alternative to Step 2 is to give everyone in the Middle East unlimited weapons of short-range destruction and let them unleash their unbridled hatred on each other. I mean, every time a bunch of religious people kill each other, it’s time to rejoice, right?
We may just end up saving the planet too. Scores of religious people dead + natural sources of energy = win for Planet Earth!
What a world we live in, where wastes of sperm like Angelina Jolie or whoever, $insert some nauseous celebrity here$ live on but Kurt Vonnegut dies! This is too terrible a tragedy! One of my favourite authors of all time, Vonnegut is a writer of Brobdingnagian proportions. Anyway, bitter recriminations aside, I am proud to say that he had a good run. I’ve read all his books and he is a gentle secular humanist, one who tackles life’s harshest problems with the sweeping scythe of cynical jest. I use the present tense, because Vonnegut can, must never die. There are some who say he will be supplanted soon, but since when can compassion and gentle mockery be usurped by anything else? Reading Vonnegut’s books have changed me forever, much more than any author except for perhaps Dickens, and maybe Kipling. But Vonnegut is much darker, much more postmodern, much much more compelling and applicable to our modern, misbegotten industrial civilization which is rapidly hurtling towards freefall.
Vonnegut soars towards nihilism and sheer madness in his tales, but returns to the frailties that bind us together, including plebeian values such as courtesy and chivalry. Vonnegut’s injection of sci-fi into his more serious books only makes the entire premise so much more surreal. Vonnegut’s absurd short stories are a stark reminder that not everything in science fiction is necessarily untrue or even far-fetched. I love his books and I recommend all his works to you.
Vonnegut, Requiescat In Pace!
Stranger, buy and READ all his books, for they might make you a better person.
I leave you with some quotes to sum up one of the greatest postmodern writers.
The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.
Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.
How embarrassing to be human.
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
We’re terrible animals. I think that the Earth’s immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
(Speaking at Isaac Asimov’s funeral) Isaac is in heaven now, that was the funniest thing I could have said to a crowd of Humanists. God Forbid, Should I pass on sometime, may all of you say that Kurt is in Heaven too.
The dangers of careless polyamorous lifestyles, brought home quite well by these posters.
Here is Terry Jones’ apt response to the hysteria in the media about the Iranian abduction of some British naval personnel last week.
Call that humiliation?
No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch
Terry Jones
Saturday March 31, 2007
The GuardianI share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this – allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world – have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God’s sake, what’s wrong with putting a bag over her head? That’s what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it’s hard to breathe. Then it’s perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can’t be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.
It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn’t be able to talk at all. Of course they’d probably find it even harder to breathe – especially with a bag over their head – but at least they wouldn’t be humiliated.
And what’s all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It’s time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That’s one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.
The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn’t rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it’s just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras!
What’s more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British prisoners any decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting “stress positions”, which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so as to improve their stomach and calf muscles. A common exercise is where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat so that their thighs are parallel to the ground. This creates intense pain and, finally, muscle failure. It’s all good healthy fun and has the bonus that the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.
And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from her TV appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists to examine the footage and they all conclude that she is “unhappy and stressed”.
What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her “unhappy and stressed”. She shows no signs of electrocution or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going on.
As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not be right to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer – whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends to anyway, and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in Iraq.
Say it like it is, Terry. Taken from here.