It's the end of the year as we know it
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Bex gave me a copy of her tranny pic and a frame to put it in next to my tranny pic, so that's all good. Also, the Stewie icon on the left, and a wooden dragon etching that casts shadow puppets on the wall by firelight. I gave her something that I probably shouldn't blog about because she might not necessarily want to be outed. But it involved me asking at least one salesperson, "I enjoy _____ and think my friend would too; what's something good to get her started?" It was quite a thing, it was.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, here's a set of action figures I definitely don't have. But now I kinda wanna, for the sheer balls-out grossity factor. If the American pornstar action figures were anywhere near this good, I'd own the whole freakin' set. Maybe the Japanese can scale back the scat quotient and just do some really good hentai babes beggin' for lovin'? Might be a bit more presentable on the shelves? Whatever, it's Christmas and I've got glow-in-the-dark toys. Who's complaining? Jesus?
I was talking to Bex about how I want to do another big Stanley movie but I probably never will for time and logistical reasons. There's the old script of Keramidas, which is basically unfilmable, given that it's a 100-year Godfatherish look at three generations of the Keramidas klan. Bex suggested that I turn it into a picture book. And so I shall.
"No, the Jews all booked it off and so did the Buddhists." - Brandy Hamilton
[TECH]
Dec 23 2004 - 10:39
a.m.
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Hey, y'know who collects a lot of toys? Me! (Everyone who guessed me: round of applause.)
So, just in time for some of that desperation last-minute Christmas shopping we're all so fond of, here's my annual wrap-out of the five best toys I added to my shelves this year. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Or possibly stunned at how unbelievably predictable I am. It's a toss-up, really, between surprised and stunned. Stunned/surprised: these are your choices. May the Force be with you.
(Hey look, I actually got it done! See, I'm cool.)
Bring me the head of Mike Thorne
Dec 22
2004 - 7:09 p.m.
Tederick.com's Ottawa correspondent, Blair T. Smith, checked in yesterday with the news that Tederick.com has been officially deemed pornography by the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, where he is currently employed. This decision was reportedly made before Tederick.com carried a high-resolution image of a pussy, but I am nevertheless apalled, if only because it is doubtless the students of the OCDSB who could most greatly benefit from some positive sexual education.
Yesterday was another riot overall; a flock of apple-cheeked schoolboys chased my Smart car down the street at one point, while at another, I actually spat on a Best Buy in a fit of insurmountable displeasure. More fun, I served as a de facto employee of the DVD Wave for over an hour. I think I might attempt a career in DVD sales. It's certainly entertaining. Why is it that every hick with bad teeth can be guaranteed to be a fan of the Leprechaun trilogy? (This insight dates back to my BCE days.)
We moved Kate into her new apartment today; I worked side by side with a fireman on the project and almost walked away feeling manly. Now my girl's off to St-C for the hols, and I won't get her back till after I've ate all the turkey and spun my Boxing Day Godfather marathon. It sucks the ass that is ripe. To make up for the loss, we did our Christmas gift exchange; I gave her the A Dirty Shame poster framed in tasteful black, and she gave me Jay's "Berserker" shirt from Clerks and a signed Silent Bob action figure! Signed! By Kevin freakin' Smith!
This, coupled with my gifting Jason with the Jim Henson action figure (and receiving Bad Taste from he and Chandra in return, thankyouverymuch), brought up the Director Dolls idea again, and I was apalled to learn that I blogged about this for the first time exactly three years ago today. Since then, my collection has begun, and now includes:
- a 4" George Lucas
- a 12" Quentin Tarantino
- a 4" Richard Marquand, kinda
- and now the 6" Kevin Smith.
I have not bought the Henson, although I should; I haven't bought Patsy either, although I really want to. I'm wracking my brain to see if there's anyone else obvious who's already been released in doll form, that I'm missing. I still don't have the 12" Lucas, either, but I don't think I give a fryin' flapjack. It sorta just goes "meh." Obviously, now I'd like a 12" Peter Jackson, but I'll settle for a 6" figure of him in a costume from any of his three Lord of the Rings appearance, especially if it's a pirate with an arrow sticking out of his chest.
I've started a documentary, and have not yet started writing the 1-minute movie that had me so freaking excited, not two days ago. Procrasto-harshness.
Why is this the best day ever? WHY IS THIS THE BEST DAY
EVER?!
Dec 21 2004 - 10:04 a.m.
For the first time in a very long time, someone beat me to a major bit of Harry Potter news: Chad just called me and told me that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince hits the shelves on July 16!! AHHHHHHHH!!!! Why is this the best day ever? Why?! What have we done to deserve this joy?!
JKR was supposed to announce the street date on Christmas, but decided to go winter solstice and be pan-denominational about it. Good for her. The book is expected to be slightly shorter than Phoenix, but we've heard these claims before.
Me wantee now now. Don't expect to be hearing from me from roughly the 15th at midnight till midday on the 18th or so.
Meanwhile, here's the first official pic from Goblet of Fire:
And I utter a satisfying heave of "ahhhhhh." (There's also a snap of Ron in his dopey Yule Ball outfit, which you can view here, along with the pic above in high-res.)
But the day ain't over yet! Anyone who considers themselves a fan of anything cool in the universe anywhere needs to go watch the Sin City trailer right fucking now.
And it just keeps coming: here's the first must-have Lego set from Revenge of the Sith. You know my fondness for AT-STs, I'm sure. Leave it to the clones to improve on 'em.
Wow. Too fucking much. It's not even 10:30 yet. All this after I was roused this morning by a panicked phone call, proclaiming that I am now a drug user and that this is good. And then my mother called. Happy first day of winter everyone!
Last stop
Dec 20 2004 - 11:41
p.m.
About three years and change ago, I found out that Star Trek: The Next Generation was coming out on DVD, and I was so over the moon with joy, I started writing an elaborate series of reviews of the show's seven seasons, which I then posted as the year 2002 unfolded, one by one, as the DVDs were released. The following year, I did the same for Deep Space Nine, and this year, more out of a sense of needed unity than any great loyalty to the series, I concluded the trilogy with my seven Voyager reviews. Yup, seven: I just posted the last one. And the whole damn project, which started up so long ago, is over. I wish it could have concluded on a better note than Voyager's seventh season, but there you have it. It's interesting, at least, to go back to that first TNG review and then watch my writing style transform over the subsequent three years.
I sure as hell won't ever do this for Enterprise (I haven't seen enough episodes to even know where to start), and the Original Series is holy enough that I wouldn't think of trying to review it. My Trek reviews are done. I feel somewhat accomplished.
We don't want an attention span.
Dec 20
2004 - 9:11 p.m.
So Chia tells me that Suprnova went down for the count today, the latest in the MPAA's "sue everything that moves" approach to internet piracy. Manny Perry would be so proud. Now, my understanding of the entire torrenting system might be somewhat piecemeal, but exactly how is this supposed to have any effect? If there's one torrent file out there and people willing to use it, does it really matter how many Suprnovas shut down? We will rise again, MPAA. We will be green and ghostly and we will blow through you like angry smoke.
Meanwhile, you weren't wrong, this morning actually was the coldest it's been in Toronto in the past 62 years. And yet, Mer was riding her bike. I've lived in C-da all my life, and maybe I'm just a big wuss, but that's cawayyyzy.
The board of 1MFVF met tonight for the post-mortem on this year's show; we bandied about themes for next year's festival and let me tell you, the leading contender is a doozie. I can't wait till you hear it. It's going to be a wicked year, methinks. I'm already very excited and am noodling around a script called Swept, and all I can say is that it will actually be the Lord of the Rings of one-minute movies. I might even have to return to film for the first time since 1998 in order to capture it properly. It's huge. It's probably too huge. Can a 1-minute movie be too huge?
That's some pretty fucking good Mouth
Dec
20 2004 - 11:41 a.m.
Wars and rumours of wars have reached my ears, and now, the cold snap to end all cold snaps, the snap that puts the "SNAP!!!" back in snap. Is this the apocalypse? No fire, no brimstone, just razor-sharp wind blowing hard enough to make my house speak in languages I don't understand? To blow us all off the face of the earth?
My shower paces the would-be apocalypse by delivering only scalding-hot water or none at all. I stand naked and shivering waiting for some kind of relief from this unrelenting evil, but there's none to be bad, so I contemplate bathing in my own piss. It seems like poor sport, so I give up and am about to leave the tub. Like a miracle, the water returns to normal immediately. It's not the ferocious heat that bothers me, it's the unpredictability; my own shower has me shell-shocked.
Well, whatever. If this is the end, I'm feeling fairly good about myself. And if it's not, I've got the post-mortem meeting for this year's 1MFVF to attend this afternoon, where coffee will be drunk and secrets will be at long last revealed. I might even find out the theme for next year's show. And then, ka-boom! We're off to the races. Well, we're kinda racing now. But I've got a big production breakdown for subculture yet to get through and it's such a large and daunting task that I think I'm going to skip it for another day. How could I hate Movie Magic so much in university and yet miss it so much right now?
It's never over
Dec 19 2004 - 12:24
p.m.
I've been cleaning up and rendering a few things; I adjusted the final cut of Leap to correct an edit that has been driving me insane for the past 8 weeks. There's now a longer beat after my initial jump across the street, to account for a stronger "WTF" factor. I shaved out a bit of Mark's next shot to compensate, but the film now runs a second longer than it used to. As long as it's still shorter than Daniel's 1m4s monstrosity, though, I think I'm good.
Speaking of re-edits, I've just finished Peter Jackson's
commentary on Return of the King, and it seems pretty clear from his
comments that he still considers the theatrical cut of the film to be the
definitive version. His notes on most of the added scenes in the extended cut
are usually a laundry list of how they're nice scenes in and of themselves, but
disrupt the overall flow or intent of his narrative too greatly to have been
included in the real cut. It's interesting: he was so up front on the
Fellowship DVD about the extended edition not being a "director's
cut," and now he seems to be making the same statement about King... but
does anyone recall him making any such disclaimers about Towers? Nope,
didn't think so.
By the way, somebody check their books, because I think today would be the 3-year anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring. Three short years. Oh my love, what a long way we've come.
I'm in a fine Peter Jackson madness right now; Bad Taste and Dead Alive have skyrocketed to the top of my Christmas wish list although I doubt I'll receive either of them. I might be able to squeeze them into the budget on Boxing Day, but we'll have to see. I had a thoroughly bizarre PJ dream last night where I'd somehow got my hands on some of his recent home videos and was reviewing them with my friends; there was an illicit shot of Peter napping on the couch in his living room bare-ass naked (he was face down, don't worry), and I was remarking to my co-viewers that he had indeed seemed to have lost a lot of weight between Return of the King and King Kong... so to prove my point, I reached into the monitor and began manipulating the little PJ inside. It was like playing with a 12-inch piece of silicone, and his body was very floppy and gross, like a corpse. I went "gahhhh!" and pulled my hand back out of the monitor, and the dream ended.
The lies are truer than they were yesterday
Dec 18 2004 - 11:59 p.m.
I am the worst giftwrapper on the face of the earth. There should be a law against me.
Today at the movie there was an asian woman sitting two seats over from me, who talked to herself through the entire movie. Since I don't really make it a policy to tell retarded people that they're retarded (what would it achieve, anyway?), mostly I just listened to the conversation she was having with herself. She seemed to be mostly invested in assuring herself that nothing bad was going to happen to the principal characters onscreen (self, I name her "big fat liar"). There was also quite a bit of snorting and obscene hooting. At one point I seriously considered throttling her, but then I decided that the time has not yet come for me to commit murder in a public place, so I refrained. Now I kinda miss her. She became white noise-y after a while, and she served as a compelling reminder that I am tremendously lucky to (currently) have all my brain chemicals sorted into their proper beakers.
I wanted to get a bunch of stuff done tonight but mostly I ended up continuing with the render queue backlog of old Premiere files that needed to be output as finals, and writing the first episode of Bone Daddy: Animated. Chad showed me a new sketch of BD this week and we talked about whether it was better to start the series with "Bone Fu," an action episode, or "Stroke the Shaft," a comedy/dialogue episode. We're going with the action one, so I put something roughly together, based largely around a character that I named after Kate's breakfast this morning: Fritatta Diego. Is it the pinnacle of Bone Daddy brilliance? No, not really. But it's only 2 minutes long.
My notes tell me that with the addition of Bipedal Blues, which I finally got to show to D-Coc last week, my filmography is now 49 short films long. What will be #50? It's a mind-boggling question. FEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAR, fear for your lives!!!
(Mostly the only reason I've been sitting here blogging aimlessly for the last fifteen minutes is that I was waiting for an e-mail from Kate to come in. It's here now, so I'm going. Eat it, whitey!)
But is your anus pliable?
Dec 18 2004 -
7:12 p.m.
Ever been going commando and forgotten about it? It makes for funny bathroom stall moments, of the "huh, that's unexpected" variety.
After I let the cat out of the bag, and my date to shoot heroin with Mark was postponed (again), I ended up wandering around the downtown core trying to do some Christmas shopping. I'm fairly happy with some of the stuff I found - I knocked off a couple of key difficult gift-ees, and only have one real nutcruncher yet to figure out. When shopping was done, I decided to seize my chance and walked into House of Flying Daggers; I didn't see it yesterday, and I don't see too many more moviegoing opportunities in the coming week, which troubles me. I figure I wanna see Ocean's Twelve, The Sea Inside, The Aviator, Closer, I Heart Huckabees, The Life Aquatic, Lemony Snicket, A Very Long Engagement, and Birth. That's what, about two hundred dollars and change? And less than two weeks left until the end of the year?
Bah.
Hey look, it's a Serenity cast photo!
Notice how everyone looks exactly the same except somewhat hotter (go Kaylee!!)? That's good. But where's Book? That's bad.
This year's Now Magazine sex survey is up and running; go find out a bit about yourself. No prize this year, but hey, it's fun.
You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the
contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis.
Dec 17 2004 - 4:16 p.m.
Wanted to nap; ain't gonna. Cruising the net for stuff to do, came up a meme of threes questions, i.e. "three things you love about yourself, hate about yourself, things that scare you," etc. I gave it my level best for your entertainment and enlightenment, but I honestly couldn't get it done. And I consider myself one of the more introspective persons around! There were just way too many questions I couldn't answer. Love about myself? How the fuck should I know? All things and no things, and certainly not three things. And I don't think I actually hate anything about myself, not really... do you even know what hate is? How can you hate anything about yourself with the kind of ferocious intensity that the word implies? It's greek to me, man. Greek. "Three things you can't do?" I can't even think of one, except maybe fly unassisted, or get the phone number of a woman in a bar. But do I need to do either of these things? Noooooooooo. Need leads ability, always. And the only things that are impossible are the things that are actually impossible, and they don't need lists.
Boy, something about the navel-gazing core of the blogverse just pissed me royally off.
There is no Dana, there is only Zoul
Dec
17 2004 - 1:45 p.m.
I went downstairs to get a sandwich before starting some data storage rearrangement work, and ended up spending an hour and a half cleaning the kitchen and bathroom because apparently, they haven't been cleaned since the last time I cleaned them, the day before the Hallowe'en party. All I know for sure is that
- my mother would be so proud of me
- I'm going to frickin' kill someone.
Yes, I praise Allah Almighty that I alone was permitted to bear witness to the shit stains on the bottom of our toilet seat. I feel that it has made me a better person. I am glad beyond reckoning that there is enough broken glass beneath the oven to lacerate a bull rhino, and that I was chosen to yard it out. It taught me temperence. It is a matter of the quasi-miraculous that I was in such a position as to pull enough food crumbs off the kitchen floor to feed a small Somali family for seventy-five years. It has shown me the value of simple tasks performed repeatedly to prevent larger tasks down the road. My only sadness in this entire affair is that I alone bore witness to these many formidable lessons, and that they are lessons that are clearly greatly needed elsewhere.
(And as I scrubbed beneath the toilet on my hands and knees, I actually said out loud "Yeah I'm so blogging this.")
She has feet
Dec 17 2004 - 11:41
a.m.
Four!
(Very appropriate. Feet. Four.)
Trying to look exactly like Lord of the Rings does not make you Lord of the Rings. Remember wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy the hell back in the day when Peter Jackson released the internet preview for the trilogy, that showed the costume, creature, and prop designs? And it was all so new and cool and exactly like we'd hoped and imagined? Well then, will this Weta preview of Narnia make the Narnia fans anything other than pissed off and angsty? Richard Taylor has apparently sold his soul to the devil, cannibalizing Weta's brilliant work on LOTR into remarkably similar props and designs for CON:LWW. They've even got poor Kiran Shah in there, swinging a sword around. The whole thing's like watching an unpopular kid on the schoolyard trying to dress like the cool posse. Jesus, gimme a break.
Kate found this blog the other day; it's one man's relentless accounting of the initial stages of dating a girl who, it seems, has no idea that he is chronicling her every move in such detail. It's freaking fascinating. Also, given the extremes of description that he's already gone into, it's gonna be a hell of a read when they finally fuck.
Beyond the veil
Dec 16 2004 - 1:45
p.m.
Matthew has done an excellent job of chronicling the Five Stages of Blogging on his site. With the recent blogponderance among the circle of friends, a thorough understanding of the Stages is becoming more and more important. Matty and I are both in Stage Five, being that we're both returned prodigal sons (although my walk in the desert was far shorter than his, taking place largely in a week in 2003 where I did not blog, and contemplated whether I wanted to continue). Bex and Phantom are both in the same boat, now that I think about it. What interests me is the theoretical possibility of a Stage Six, some unseen frontier still ahead of us in this show which will further, and radically, alter the way we're blogging now. What could it be? Blogging in three dimensions? Blogging without computers? Blogging every single thing that happens in every single day, or nothing that happens on any day?! What, lord, what?
Italics what?
If it's true, it's pretty cool: Chow Yun-Fat will be playing Chinese pirate warlord Cheung Po Tsai in Pirates of the Caribbean 2 & 3. If it's true. Mighty. ("Clearly you've never been to Singapore.")
Mark and I were supposed to shoot heroin today, but now it's looking like we're pushing that off till Saturday at least. It's tough getting stuff done even when you have nothing to do. Chris' Lego epic is charging full steam ahead on his bedroom floor, and I've got a list of creative projects "for the holidays" as long as my arm, yet I can't even muster the anti-procrastinatory momentum to send a batch of my flicks to the Hi Mom! film festival. Why do I need to wait for holidays from a job I don't have in order to achieve anything? Like Doc Brown said in the novelization of Back to the Future, beats the hell outta me.
Osama Bin Scratchy
Dec 16 2004 - 9:54
a.m.
I bought some Christmas presents yesterday, and some wrapping paper too, and was coming home to wrap presents, reflecting to myself that I don't feel particularly Christmassy this year. I wasn't necessarily sad about it; I was just noting the phenomenon. And then I came home and put this crappy old Weall & Cullen $4.99 cassette of Christmas carols on my iTunes, and bam, it was frickin' Christmas morning and I was the most excited boy in all of creation. It was the most Pavlovian response I've ever Pavloved. We used to listen to that tape when we were kids setting up our Christmas trees, and its control over my fragile mind was actually more than a little scary. I am that music's bitch.
Meanwhile, popular internet gossip is correct; that was the best Simpsons episode ever. Or at least, in a really long while. I fell off the couch when they pulled out the slide whistle. There's a reason why these guys still rule the roost.
Don't worry: Harrison Ford will win Fallujah. Thank goodness he's on our side. (Insert heavy irony.)
Caught Finding Neverland yesterday and saw the trailer for House of Flying Daggers; I am now all about that shit come Friday. And I'm reading Lord of the Rings again at long last, and now that I actually have mental pictures of all the innumerable people whose names get dropped in the first five chapters of Fellowship, I'm enjoying the book more than I ever have on any reading before. It's quite exciting. If you're me.
Nobody messes with my girl
Dec 15 2004 -
9:47 a.m.
You never want to gloat at the professional misfortunes of other filmmakers, but... MWA HA HA HA HA HAA! Yup, Chris "Piefucker" Weitz is off His Dark Materials, and the hunt is on for his replacement. Now all I have to do is
- Make a small, quirky independent film that captures the imaginations of a cult audience
- Direct approximately 2-3 small-to-medium sized films in a variety of genres, showing dexterity with a multiplicity of film styles and dramatic requirements
- Get handed the reigns of a larger film franchise and achieve a minimum $150 million domestic gross
- Convince New Line to give me His Dark Materials.
Not so hard, is it?
Yo bitchfist
Dec 14 2004 - 10:25
p.m.
Since it's a question I get asked at least ten times a week, check out the One Minute Film & Video Festival web site to find out who won Viewer's Choice. (It wasn't me.)
8/////////
Oh good, I just spilled water on my keyboard. That always ends so well.
By the way, it turns out I've got this:
| Doctor
Unheimlich has diagnosed me with Tederickitis |
|
| Cause: | cursed amulet |
| Symptoms: | slow heartbeat, mildly blurred vision, dancing |
| Cure: | sleep |
I thought the blurred vision was from all the masturbation. I could definitely do with the sleep-cure, but I've got at least 2 hours of work ahead of me (stayed too long at the latke table tonight) and I also wanna watch a bit of Return of the King before I turn in. The easter egg on disk 1 made my whole damn day.
Last march of the Ents
Dec 13 2004 - 9:16
p.m.
I finally got my copy of Return of the King. Purolator fucked up yet again and didn't deliver the goods to the store, so Jason and I ended up charging across Richmond Hill to the Puro depot to pick up the order ourselves and drive it back to the store, like the Middle-Earthian heroes we are. It sure made the steak taste sweeter, I'll tell ya. And the steak? Already pretty sweet. Yup, Jason and I finally commemorated my departure from Bearshark (six and a half months later!) with some fine rare meat at the Keg in RH. And honestly, probably in the top five cuts of meat I've ever had in my life. It was masterful.
Anyways I was gonna do all kinds of work tonight, but now fuck it, I'm watching ROTK again. The Minas Tirith statue is easily the best pack-in of the three DVDs to date. Is it bad that I really want Minas Morgul now?
So Succexy
Dec 13 2004 - 3:00
p.m.
No reason, I just miss him.
Spider webs
Dec 13 2004 - 11:16
a.m.
It snowed in Toronto over the weekend, but I completely forgot to take my AT-AT walker outside and play with it in a snowbank, as I do every year on the first major snowfall. Oh well. The Battle of Hoth will have to be postponed, I suppose, but maybe I can make up for it by involving my new wampa. I've always wanted to see a wampa attack a terrain walker. I imagine it would be "gruesome."
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I think I need to re-make A.I. Not in some distant future, but next week. Chris is working on some crazy Lego science fiction movie that apparently involves my cat, Stanley Kubrick, and a whole lot of incredibly verbose monologues. And I'm jealous. He's using my camera and my cat and making Lego sex scenes, and all I'm doing is fucking around with data entry and figuring out how and when I'm gonna shoot my animatic for subculture. Chris and I talk about A.I.'s enormous multitude of failures (and successes) a lot, and started talking about it yet again last night as we were going to get pizza. I blithely proposed that the next FORP project should be that everyone has to remake A.I. as a five-minute film. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do it, but I think I'm going to do it. Because fuck it. As Dr. Virtuous said, Something Is Wrong.
The same, but longer
Dec 13 2004 - 10:18
a.m.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if I could make a living handicapping Survivor, I'd be a very wealthy man. Yup, I am so far behind on my Survivor watching that it'll probably be several weeks before I actually watch last night's Vanuatu finale, but I am informed by Bex's blog that my man Chris did indeed take the prize. I predicted his win after episode one, when he successfully wriggled out of a seeming deathtrap at tribal council. That would make this the fifth time I've successfully called the sole survivor after only one episode (Richard, Tina, Brian, Amber, and Chris). I'm looking forward to actually watching the endgame, because so far Chris' play has been nothing short of terrific, probably putting him fourth or fifth in my estimation of the best Survivor players to date.
I'm behind on Amazing Race, too. In fact, I'm behind on everything. It happens every December after three uninterrupted months of TV: I just get sick of the damn thing. I'm letting everything pile up on the PVR. I'll deal with in the lean days to come.
Looks like the X-franchise is about to explode: not only are X3 and Wolverine in the works, but a Magneto spin-off is now also in development at Fox. Like the comic book titles themselves, it looks like we're soon gonna have more X-movies than we know what to do with. I for one am all for it: I'm becoming less and less interested in the standard superhero event movies, which I think have now run their course, and more interested in smaller, superhero-based movies with (hopefully) a greater ability to treat the themes on a more adult level.
Here are the three Buffy super-articulated figures that I mentioned last week: "Graduation," "Once More With Feeling," and "End of Days." And I'm spent.
Celebrity cars, apocalyptic phones, and the breaking of the
Fellowship
Dec 12 2004 - 9:14 p.m.
My dad has a Smart car now. Kate and I borrowed it for the weekend to drive to Midland to attend the wedding of her friends Tammy and Darcy (which was excellent). The car is patently ridiculous. From the outside it looks like a sneeze could topple it, or at the very least, that one well-built man could successfully hoist it over his head and spin it around like a top, before using it to crush babies whilst laughing merrily. The speedometer only goes up to 140. We were freaked that once we were on the 400, the first 18-wheeler that passed us would suck us under its wheels and crush us to death. But actually, it's a hell of a lot of fun to drive, and when the blizzard hit the 400 about ten minutes after we set out on Friday, our little Smart car kept on going while we passed car after car that had been run off the road by the weather. So: bully for the Smart car. The only real problem with this thing is that people become completely obsessed with it. It's like they think Gwyneth Paltrow is driving it or something. They wave, they give you the thumbs up, they honk, they holler things out at you when you're at an intersection. One women knocked on our window to ask "how is it?" to which I could only reply "it's fine." Most folk seem to think it's a hybrid, which it ain't, and believe me, after patiently explaining that to the first dozen people, you lose the "patiently." It's a car, people. Let's all just try to get on with our lives. Believe me, when you get swarmed by Midlanders at the local Wal Mart, who sit patiently in their range-rovers in a semi-circle around your Smart car waiting for you to come out of the Tim Hortons, you begin to fear for the fate of mankind.
The future of mankind was also in serious doubt at approximately 2:35 on Saturday morning, when Bollocks and some of his chums decided to repeatedly phone Kate and I in our hotel room at the Best Western. The problem with this being, we'd already been in bed for three hours, and the phones at the BW redefine the word "shrill." I mean, I thought the apocalypse was upon us. Kate thought she was trapped in some kind of nightmare from which she could not awake. (This was exacerbated by the fact that the phone just kept ringing. Bollocks called repeatedly for about ten minutes, and then tagged off to Lindsay, who gave us another five minutes' worth. And every time we picked up, they had just hung up. It was with the not-so-funny.) I still get THE SHIVERS when I think back on the whole thing.
Still, on the whole, the weekend was wonderful. Tear-assing around Midland on our first road trip was great. And once you're on the other side of the snow belt, Ontario couldn't look more lovely right now. It's a damn Christmas card out there.
For the first time since I've had my homies on the inside, I was not able to get an advance copy of the extended cut of a Lord of the Rings movie; Jason, however, was nice enough to lend us his copy of Return of the King, so the Fellowship (most of it anyway) gathered as planned, for the very last TEE viewing of the cycle. I was surprisingly emotional about it. This has become a tremendously enjoyable little holiday tradition among my circle of friends, and now that we've run fresh out of Lord of the Rings movies, I don't know exactly what we're going to do with ourselves. I will say that it's been wonderful to be on this road with these people, and that it has greatly enhanced my already-siginficant enjoyment of these magnificent films. Can't wait to see what's next.
Suck it dawn-stylie
Dec 10 2004 - 8:18
a.m.
I'm an 83% stickler. But I'm going to appeal my score because I consider the use of the comma to be more artistic than regimental.
Steven Spielberg is a big fat faker. After 25 years of saying that his final take on the subject of aliens is the Close Encounters / E.T. "they are friendly" approach, the trailer for his new War of the Worlds movie has me scratching my head and saying "yeah but trees can't blow up." Stupid Steven. Tom Cruise is very clearly the devil, leading you astray.
I thought I got up early. Then I read about Bex's morning, and I kinda wish I'd got up even earlier and gone and done some Christmas shopping or at least drank some nog. Now I'm in the "meh" mode of midmorning and not exactly sure how to spend the next 2.62 hours before Kate and I jump in the tiny car and go to Midland. I was consumed with House-related waking dreams and Duff's-related bowel achiness, and am not entirely convinced that I slept at all. Is that bad?
Return of the lost
Dec 9 2004 - 12:41
p.m.
The purgation episode. Beautiful. Not that it hasn't been fun finding out the meandering backstories of every frickin' character on the island for ten weeks, but I needed me some purgation episode pretty damned badly.
See, the flashback structure was just starting to rankle me a bit much. I loved Locke's episode, and Claire's episode, and the Korean mafia one wasn't bad either, but Sayid's and Sawyer's left me disappointed (well, naturally) and Jack and Kate's were both just sorta "meh." I needed a paradigm shift for this show before my monumental interest actually started to wane, and I got it.
Last night's show was probably my favourite episode thus far; it was the first episode that was slightly "meta" - the first one that was aware of how the show has been working so far, and started to mess with it. So, we had Boone snorting at the improbability of Locke's box company job. We had the crackliest interchange between the Best Characters Ever, Sawyer and Sayid, that we've seen thus far. We had the return of Dr. Div Cvetik, to stitch in a bit more of Jack's preflight backstory (his dad's name is actually Christian Shepherd?!). We had the introduction of "the others," Ethan Rom's team of naer-do-wells who apparently have some fetishistic stake in Claire's apocalyptic baby. Best of all, we had the "red shirt speech," which had me completely convinced that one of the principals was going to die ingloriously before the end of the hour; my money was on Locke but I totally bought Charlie's "death," so much so that when they started playing the music from the end of Episode 4, I nearly started crying. Fucking brilliant storytelling. Reversals or rearrangements of almost everything that's been set up so far. Ten weeks of buildup, and ka-boom.
And now we have to wait until the twelfth of January.
Addendum: just found out that the episode was called "All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues." How frickin' sweet is that?
Dakota Fanning is not cute.
Dec 8 2004 -
9:43 a.m.
I've always been a good credit card guy. Pay off the balance every month, don't use it unnecessarily, etc. I merrily mock the citizens who use their cards like it's free money and not free debt.
Well, no more. I am with the free debt. I'm putting all of Christmas on the card, and Indianapolis too, and snowboarding, and maybe a pair of boots of a scythe or somethin', and then I am letting the interest pile up. I am like a tiger waiting to strike: they built my credit limit up over five years thinking that I was their bitch, and now who's the bitch, Visa?! Buy me things, Visa-bitch! Mwa ha ha ha ha ha!
Meanwhile, I may have no real interest in the Buffy PALZ series, but you gotta love that they're doing Marcie Ross. Meanwhile, the latest issue of Toyfare shows that not only is that super-articulate 6" Faith figure still coming down the line, but we're finally getting a "Chosen"-ish Buffy... except it's "End of Days" Buffy. Zuh? At least we're getting a "Once More With Feeling" Buffy variant out of the deal. But... uh... "Chosen?" Hello?
I have something clever with which to end this post.
I'm impressed you were able to write so legibly on your own
butt
Dec 8 2004 - 12:05 a.m.
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Owwwwwwww. Carpal.
Starwars.com cut loose with a glimpse at some of the artwork for Season 3 of the Clone Wars animated series, including a sketch of our man in armour, Obi-Wan. It's almost enough to get me excited. And remember a few weeks ago when I went on about all the Obi-Wan figures I have on card, and how I'm missing one that I consider fairly important? Well, I caved. I bought it for a song on Ebay and have mounted it with its brethren. Happy geek.
Pussy, Ass, Tits and Dick
Dec 7 2004 -
1:27 p.m.
Nothing like taking four days off to remind you that blogging just isn't that important. The greatest irony about my four-day sabbatical is that while I was posting loads of explicit text and images about the funner parts of the human body, halfway across town Kate was getting in shit from her web host for posting a 40-year-old topless photo of Bettie Page on her site. So, I guess my work here is far from done. But by god, I'll normalize the presence of the naughty bits in modern society yet.
Because the naughty bits are awesome.
So because the site was all gobbled up by anatomy this weekend, you'll never hear about my experience being anally molested by an uncircumcised gay man, or how I yelled "For ALLAH!" in a room full of merry-making jews just to see what security would do about it. Peace, Beaver.
As it turns out, Sharkey's doesn't open until 11:30 on weekdays and they don't serve brunch on Tuesday at all, so I'm home a bit later than I thought, with a massive workpile waiting to fall on me. It's good, though; I'm going to slam the sucker till midnight and see how far I get. I'm feeling peppy and energized.
Speaking of peppy and energized: check out the new look for TheForce.net, pretty frickin' stylish if you ask me. Since I haven't plugged them recently, I'll note that any Star Wars fan who doesn't have this site at the top of their list of bookmarks just doesn't know what they're about.
I've got my head into a new theoretical essay about SW that I may publish just before, or just after, Revenge of the Sith, but that's a while away yet. In the meantime, here's my review of Voyager Season 6, out on DVD today, not that I'll ever buy it. I am determined to complete my DS9 collection by April, but that might just be wishful thinking.
The King returns tomorrow. I am giddy with anticipation, even if I have to wait to assemble the Fellowship before I can watch it.
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Vagina
Dec 6 2004 - 9:04
a.m.
a.k.a. pussy, cunt, vag, twat, slot, slit, bush, quim, hole, beaver, muff, box, snatch, vulva, mound, Elizabeth Regina, gaping axe wound, cunny, clown's pocket, wizard's sleeve, fur purse, flesh taco, front bum, giney, map of Tassie, canyon, flange, honey pot, hotbox, thesnaris, furry cup, gash, jack & danny, jelly roll, coochie, cocking station, fud, fuck chasm, whisker biscuit, sausage wallet, queef vent, old oily, meat locker, hairy grail
We come at last to the vagina, and it's going to be interesting to see what can be done here, because rule #1 about the vag is: it's a complete fucking mystery. Men don't understand it at all, and most women aren't doing much better, in spite of having a working model on their own bodies. This thing is deep fucking space to most of peoplekind. I know a girl who did what Dr. Sue suggested all women should do, and looked between her legs with a hand mirror... and then promptly decided that not only was she never going to look between her legs again, but also that no male would ever be allowed to get his face anywhere near her crotch under any circumstances. It put a hell of a crimp on her sex life.
So why essay the vagina at all? Or, why not at least turn Tederick.com over to one of girl-bloggers, so that we can get something reasonably informed here, instead of the meanderings of a man whose grasp of the subject is tenuous at best? Why not quit while I'm ahead? Why?
I'll tell you why: Because the vagina is the best thing in the world.
The flesh bloom is a wonder of nature. Pussies are endlessly fascinating, exciting, and rewarding. They're jaw-droppingly beautiful. They are a piece of industrial design whose clockwork perfection outguns any other functional system on this earth. And yet they keep to themselves, always teasing you with a few secrets to make you come back again and again. I've known vaginas: I've seen them, I've touched them, I've found my way around them, and yet every time I go back I feel like it's the first time... but not in a bad way. More in that "endless rediscovery" way, like finding your way back into a good book after twenty years, or navigating a forest you're familiar with, in pitch darkness. You might remember the basic framework, but the physical reality of what's facing you is surprising and unique in a whole bunch of ways, and always even better than you remembered.
The twat wears its mystery like a scout's merit badge. It's got layers inside of layers inside of layers; it unfolds like a rose in bloom under the right care, and clamps right the hell back up again when it doesn't want anything to do with you. The vagina is an organ with serious 'tude. It has to be, because it has the most to offer a successful suitor: warm, wet, snuggly, it's the body organ equivalent of a sweet crypt, a cozy bed, a cup of soup, and a roaring Ferarri, all rolled into one. Praise God Hallelujah, because the vagina is the best thing ever.
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I came out of a vagina, or so I'm told; whatever access I had to the vag's deep mysteries must have been lost to me shortly thereafter, because as much as pussies occasionally confuse me nowadays, they really threw me for a loop when I was a kid. Freud would have loved me. I had a penis; my sister had a lack of a penis. In her case, this translated into a crack between her legs, while in my mother's case it was a patch of fur. The first time I got a neighbourhood girl to give me a detailed look at the inner workings of her vag, I completely misinterpreted what I saw, and somehow told myself that the labia minora were a tiny little penis wedged into that crack. I remember explaining my theory to my best friend the next day. I'm telling you, Sigmund would have loved me. I was a fucking Freudianism test tube.
It took me - literally - until I was at least ten or eleven to figure out that my mother and sister actually did have the same thing, and that under the fur was the crack. It's shameful, but what else are you going to do when your only access to vag is fleeting glimpses at family members in the change room, and even fleetinger looks at pornography so softcore, it patently refuses to show labia? When I was in grade 5 or 6, my best friend finally came up with a page out of a Penthouse; it featured a woman in repose on top of a stucco wall, wearing only a t-shirt, and doing what we yogis refer to as a "cat stretch." Bingo: hair, vaginal lips, labia minora, the whole goddamned shebang in one brilliantly illustrative shot. I understood the vagina for the first time. (Thank god no one had told me about the clitoris yet. I didn't know I was missing anything.)
As a whole, the vagina is so gigantically freakin' complicated, and yet so astonishingly harmonious, that I tend to cite it as proof of the existence of God. First of all, "vagina" is the catch-all word we use when we actually mean "vulva;" vulva is the proper term for the complete female genital area, which is made up of about 47 different components: 2 sets of labia (majora and minora), a clitoris (and its Jedi-like hood), a urethra just like mine, the mons veneris (one of my particular favourite vaginal features), the vagina itself (the muscular canal running from the vaginal opening to the cervix), and then all that crazy internal stuff (cervix, uterus, 2 Fallopian tubes, 2 ovaries, jesus christ could this thing be any more complicated?!). There's a lot going on with the vagina, which is at least one pragmatic reason why women and girls simply must get over any social "ick" factor, and get to know their own vag. You can't know that something's wrong if you don't know what to look for.
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Let's give a moment's appreciation to the labia majora. They're the face that the vagina shows to the world, when it shows itself at all; they're a tremendously beautiful pair of skin-flaps and they look absolutely freaking adorable in just about any context. They give a vagina its initial vagina-ness, the first time you meet one. They also provide protection for the rest of the pussy platoon, because let's face it, this thing ain't made out of steel - it's a tremendously delicate and sensitive organ, and its soft tissues don't brook with the abuse. From puberty, the labia and surrounding areas are covered by the pubic hair for an extra dollop of protective power. Some women shave their pubes completely off; almost all women in North America, at least, trim the edges (the "bikini line") to keep stragglers from poking out of their undies at inappropriate times. Me, I have no real preference one way or another. A healthy vagina is an attractive vagina, and the haircut is just one of the things that makes each one unique and exciting.
Let's also take a moment here for the perineum (choata, taint, durf, grundle, chode), that soft ridgeline of flesh between the vagina and the anus. Guys have one too; I would have mentioned it in Penis on Friday, except that most guys are so terrified of their own assholes that they don't know it's there. The perineum is an underutilized pleasure center. It feels great to stimulate it and have it stimulated. Get to know your choata!
The vaginal canal itself is one of the vagina's superstars; it's the passage by which we all came into the world (unless we came in through the window), and it puts the "inter" back into "intercourse" when hetero-sex occurs. Women traditionally experience varying levels of sexual pleasure from the use of their vaginas - it's not the center of the woman's sexual world, as most men would like to believe - but its usage can be fun, and there's no arguing with the pleasure level that men experience from a slick puss. The vagina lubricates itself when the woman becomes aroused, to make it easier to receive a penis (or other friendly object) during intercourse. Again with the mystery: when a man becomes hard, he might as well be waving a flag saying "I'm horny;" when a woman becomes wet, the only person who knows it is her.
The vagina is a muscular passage that stretches to accommodate penetration, and stretches a hell of a lot more to accommodate birth. Vagina size varies by woman, of course, but also varies by what it's trying to take inside of itself. At rest, the average vagina is around 3½ to 4 inches deep. Aroused, it expands to around 6 inches - surprise surprise! the length of the average cock! As usual, though, the vag has yet another trick up its sleeve; the average model can stretch yet more, to around 9 inches total, if need be. That's fuckin' crazy. As I once heard a standup comedian say, if the average male length is 6 inches and the average female depth is 9, that leaves about 9 billion inches of unused pussy around the world.
The Clitoris
(clit, bud, button, happy button, bean, man in the boat, knob, love button, kisimi, moose knuckle, nub, nubbin, the center of elvendom on earth, marble, Coalition for the Liberation of Intinerant Treedwellers, hooded monk)
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Any time some religious yonk gets on about sex being for procreation only (and by extension, hetero-sex being the only sex, and on and on and on), I whip out a single one-syllable word, and I usually say it in a Stanley voice:
"....clit!"
Thousands of years ago the Phoenicians worshipped the clitoris. They weren't wrong. Depending on what side of the upsuck theory you're standing on, the clitoris is looking like the only part of human anatomy that exists soley for the pleasure of its owner, without any collateral purpose having to do with reproduction. It exists so that women can have fun. That is beautiful.
The clit is a bundle of nerve endings that form a small bud at the top of the labia minora, protected by the clitoral hood. How small? This small:
Smallest when aroused - o
Largest when aroused -
O
That's pretty freaking small, and it's no wonder some men have trouble finding it if they don't know what to look for. Women, if your partner's having trouble, it's time to step up and point the way. Home gynecology courses aren't a bad thing, and it's a good way to get to know your partner and your pussy.
The clit is flexible and erectile, just like the penis. During arousal, the blood vessels inside the clitoral shaft become engorged with blood and the clit pokes outward and a bit downward, towards the vaginal opening. It's in prime playin' position now, and the world is the clit's oyster - manipulation by hand, tongue, penis, or a well-placed pubic bone can result in orgasm, and in the vagina's lat coup de grace of brilliance, not necessarily just one. Yup, it's far easier for a woman to achieve multiple orgasms than it is for a man, because after the initial orgasm, there's no retraction period; the clit remains aroused, and the arousal level planes off like a plateau. You can bounce along on that sucker all day.
If the vagina is the best thing ever, the clit is its crown. That's why the next section covers a subject that is actually capable of reducing me to tears.
Female Circumcision
Circumcision is bad. It's bad for boys and it's bad for girls. Your body was designed the way it is for a reason, and you monkey with a body at your own jeopardy - once a change is made, nothing is ever the same. In boys, the results of circumcision can be severe and even dangerous, but the overall impact of circumcision on males is a July-afternoon ride on the Vortex compared to the unbelievable physical and emotional damage that female circumcision can do.
I could give a lengthy treatise on the place of female circumcision in society, as I did with male circumcision, but I ain't gonna. I'm just going to relay a description of what's involved:
The vast majority (85%) of genital mutilations performed in Africa consist of clitoridectomy (where all, or part of, the clitoris is removed) or excision (removal of all, or part of, the labia minora).
The most severe form [of female genital mutilation] is infibulation, also known as pharaonic circumcision. An estimated 15% of all mutilations in Africa are infibulations. The procedure consists of clitoridectomy, excision, and cutting of the labia majora to create raw surfaces, which are then stitched or held together in order to form a cover over the vagina when they heal. A small hole is left to allow urine and menstrual blood to escape.
If you didn't cross your legs during that passage, you're not the kind of person I think I want to know. There's quite a bit more information on this web page, from which I drew my quote, about the physical and psychological after-effects of circumision, along with statistical information regarding the practice, and some information about advocacy groups.
Female circumcision is illegal in almost every country in the world. It remains legal - and practiced - in 28 countries in Africa, and elsewhere around the world where it is performed illegally, even in North America. Two million girls are at risk of genital mutilation each year.
Birth
The vagina is an in door and an out door. If you fool around with enough of the "ins," eventually you end up with an "out." There you have it, folks: the birds and bees made more simple than it's ever been.
When conception occurs, the cervix plugs itself up with mucus, and the gestation cycle starts inside the uterus. On the outside, everything basically continues as normal. Women undergoing a normal, low-risk pregnancy can continue to have full sexual use of their vagina throughout pregnancy, whenever they feel like it. (Sex drive can varies wildly during pregnancy, due to various hormonal and psychological changes. Play it by ear.) Orgasms are safe for low-risk pregnancies as well, although some doctors warn against intercourse in the final weeks of the third trimester, because semen can actually act as a trigger for labour in some cases.
When it's time for birth, labour begins, and the cervix dilates to ten centimeters. (A full-term baby's head is usually ten centimeters across.) Pushing pushing pushing pushing breathing breathing pushing, and then kaboom: you're gonna see a person's head come out of your vagina. Or, if it's my brother, a person's ass. I remember the first time we were shown the birth video during sex ed: Jonathan Robinson fainted dead away. It was awesome.
A whopping 85% of women will experience some tearing of the vagina during childbirth. This process can be undergone preemptively by surgically cutting the vagina (this is called an episiotomy); some studies also show that perineal massage through the last six weeks of pregnancy may lessen the rate of vaginal tearing during birth. No way around it, though, as much as the vagina was built for birthing, the process wreaks havoc with the poor pussy, and the results can be like looking at a Florida beach after a hurricane. It's temporary, of course; most women will experience a complete return to functionality of their vagina within a few months.
Finally, here's something that just about nobody knows about, because I suppose it links up things that people would prefer stay unlinked: a very small percentage of women actually experience an orgasm during childbirth. It's rare and the popularity of epidurals is making it rarer, but it can happen. What a way to welcome someone into the world!
Fun Stuff To Do With Your Vagina
You've got one and it works, and praise Allah for that. Usually I try to do non-sex stuff in the "have fun" column, and I'm going to do mostly that here too, but there's at least one sex-related thing I have to lead with:
Put chocolate on your vagina and have someone lick it off. No seriously. It's not just a sitcom joke waiting to happen; it's a brilliant flavour combination worthy of your experimentation. Chocolate not your speed? Honey's also excellent. Do not use whipped cream, no matter what you've read in Penthouse.
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Make a vagina puppet. Why pay $300 for something you can make in your own home? In fact, make a vagina anything. I recently had a chocolate vagina, and it was about the most fun I've had with confection this year. Vagina art is really cool. A big photo gallery of vaginas would be awesome, especially if it were outdoors. Get crackin'!
Do the Which Vagina Monologue are you? quiz. I got "Reclaiming Cunt." But then again I don't have a cunt. So who knows what that's supposed to mean.
This one's actually important: go somewhere public, like a Second Cup or a Chapters or something, and have a very loud conversation about vaginas with someone else. Say "vagina" as often as you freakin' can without making it comical. Why does this need to be done? Because it's time to stop fooling around with discretion and shame, and get the word back into the language. We've been vag-less too long.
Further Vagina Reading
All About My Vagina - I discovered this site a few years ago, and she's really kept it up: one woman's exhausting detailing of every - single - thing about her vagina. No, there aren't pictures. But there's everything else.
Clitical.com - Female masturbation information and resources. The girly equivalent of Jackinworld. There's also The-Clitoris.com, a bit harder to use but has some good info.
Pregnancy-info.net - very helpful on the pregnancy stuff, cuz let's face it, I know nothing about pregnancy beyond what I was taught in Grade 5.
The Vice Guide to Eating Pussy - reprinted at SuicideGirls. I've seen a hell of a lot of information about how to make mouth-love to a vagina, but this one takes the (flesh) taco by a longshot. The definitive tome on how to get it done with the tongue.
You know how these things always end, and it's as true now as it's ever been: praise the pussy. Viva la vagina. Commend the cunt, tickle the twat, massage the meat curtains, bless the box. Make with vag-loving today. And thanks for visiting!
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Bum
Dec 5 2004 - 10:02
a.m.
a.k.a. buttocks, ass, butt, glute, tuckus, rear end, behind, posterior, fanny, crack, arse, portable pillow, rump, heinie, tush, tushy, cheeks, keister
Everybody's got one. That's the first great thing about bums. Fat ones, skinny ones, scrawny ones, muscly ones, toned ones, flabby ones, black ones white ones blue ones green ones and every other damn kind of thing you can think of. As ubiquitous as rain and as unique as snowflakes. Everybody's got one, and every single damned ass on this planet is fantastic.
I'm a butt guy. I've always been a butt guy. I don't know how or why that happened, nor can I even remember when I first identified this fact as true - it goes as far back as I remember. When I was ten or eleven Mark brought me a cutout from a fashion magazine that displayed a particularly excellent bum; he said he knew it was the kind of thing I liked. It had already long been true - and discussed - before I was ten years old! Bums turn me on, wind me up, chill me out, and make me smile from ear to ear. They are the bee's knees, except that they are bums.
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All butts are great. Yeah, all of them. Even fat old peoples' butts are one of the things that make the universe smile-worthy, even if they don't exactly elicit the sexual response of a 25-year-old girl's ass, packed into a pair of excellent pants. I like girl bums best; I am naturally biased in that way, although there are few butts I can't appreciate. Low-rider pants on a girl are my Kryptonite. They can - and have - reduced me to a pile of quivering flesh on the sidewalk. They should have been outlawed before they ever went into production, because no article of clothing is better at presenting the butt, and highlighting every single thing that makes the butt great. There's a "reach out and grab it"-ness to a butt in low-rider jeans that is, quite frankly, too tantalizing. Let's get these things off the market before disaster strikes.
Low-riders show dance the soulful line between showing you just enough, and making you guess at more. See, the best thing about the bum is often the ratio of mystery vs. revelation. A good pair of jeans, a decent bikini bottom or Speedo, a short skirt, a pair of soccer shorts, even a well-designed thong can swivel between telling you a lot about the butt beneath, while still concealing enough of the whole to leave the imagination spinning in its tracks. Bums are mischievous little bastards that enjoy keeping you guessing, and that's good for at least half their fun. The other half comes when the bum in question is finally revealed in full. Bums smirk. They have a permanent "I'm better than you ever imagined" grin on their faces.
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I follow girls' bums a lot more than boys' bums, but every once in a while a guy's butt will carry the same eyebrow-raising goodness of any girl's butt. It's a rarer pleasure for me, but it happens enough to keep me interested. I don't know where my butt falls on the butt spectrum; my first girlfriend used to follow me down the halls at school and sing a song about its square-ness. Is square good? Buh. When I was a kid, I got a kick out of looking at my ass in the mirror, but those days are long past. With guy bums there's the issue of hair, which to me is a serious disadvantage; maybe it works better for other people. Believe me, there were few days in my entire pubescence more distressing than the day that I first realized I had butt hair. It starts deep in the crack and then spreads outwards like a swarm of locusts, turning a previously pristine, smooth ass into the top of your pair of hairpants. It's not my favourite thing ever, but for some reason it bothers me on my own ass a hell of a lot more than it does on anyone else's, even girls'. We've all got our little insecurities, I guess.
Girls' bums are great, boys bums can be mighty, but one last butt category deserves special note, although in a completely different context from adult ass: kid bums. If there's anything in the world more adorable than a baby's bum, I don't want to know about it. It out-cutes cat feet, and that's saying a hell of a lot. Coppertone knew what it was doing, too; a kid caught with his or her pants down is just instantaneously adorable. Shake your bum bum, indeed. Kid bums have a kind of untouched flawlessness that, no matter how kind puberty is to you, eventually goes away. They're walking art installations.
Right, the knowledge. Here's what your butt looks like without the skin on:
The buttocks are made up of three muscles. The one you've heard of is the gluteus maximus. It's actually the biggest muscle in your whole damn body, and the strongest - yay for your butt! The other two muscles are the gluteus medius and the gluteus minimus. The glutes are actually the key to most back problems - if your back aches, pay attention to your bum. Forget the feet; I've read more than a few papers that hold that buttock and anal massage are the key to unlocking the tension in the entire body.
In addition to the musculature, there's a decent layer of fat in the butt, which varies from person to person. Muscle tone is nice, but as with food, the fat is what gives the butt its flavour, and reach-out-and-touchability. And then, right in the center of the thing, there's something that does nothing for the overall look of the piece, but plenty for the sorts of fun stuff you can do with yours:
The Anus
(asshole, bumhole, browneye, pinkeye (?), puckered starfish, wazoo, ring, backdoor, ronson, ass pipe, cornhole, buttery cornhole, really buttery cornhole, chocolate channel, Dave Matthews Band bus, exit, dirt track, marmite motorway, bunghole, bung, dirt chute, poop chute, stink star, rusty bullet hole, khyber pass
Hey, guess what? Everyone's got one of these, too. Next time your boss is grassing you out for something, just remind yourself that he/she has an anus, and he/she is currently talking out of it, thus explaining the smell and the whining sound. Everyone has an anus, and yet they get the least play of any errogenous zone, except when you want to call someone a jerk. Whattup with that?
Everybody's afraid of these things. Nobody wants to talk about them, and certainly not admit that they find them appealing, instead of the de facto "gross." My poor Belgian Grade 9 science teacher would hesitantly pronounce it "annoose" before moving quickly on to the next lecture note. Most couples draw the pleasure line at the center of the perineum like it's the goddamn Mississippi: "this far, no further!" As an image center, it's the exact opposite of the phallus. Dicks are everywhere; assholes are the invisible other.
The anus is reasonably simple, and yet it mystifies most people. It goes like this:
- Poop comes out.
- Fun stuff goes in.
Most people leave 2 out of the equation entirely because they're so wrapped up in 1. They're convinced that the poo connection rules the anus out of any involvement in their body pleasure altogether. It's their loss. (And anyone who lets shit win the battle for any part of their own body, well, they should be resigned to their fate.) The truth is that the anus, a mightily tightly-wrapped sphincter, has the exact same type of nerve endings that you find in your penis or vagina, and plenty of 'em. For boys, there's also the prostate to consider, that G-spottish gland nestled deep in the butt which, when manipulated correctly, can basically make the stars go out and the sky turn black. (In a good way.) There's a lot going on down there, folks, and it's time to get it out of the closet. Be proud of your butthole. It's never done you any harm.
Yup, the biggest problem facing all of our poor little anuses (anii? hell, I dunno) is that their very involvement in any pleasurable or sexual activity is considered, by most folks anyway, gigantically deviant and taboo. More than a few quasi-unreadable philosophy books have been centered around the anus as the birthplace of the entirety of queer culture, because the notion of the anus itself is queer. If Hocquenghem was right and the anus is the most private and personal area of the body and therefore the physical representation of our most concealed self, it's no wonder we're so hesitant to reveal it... it's also no wonder that people who aren't afraid of their own butts are just a little more rounded than than those who are. They have been to the heart of darkness, and found that it was good.
Fun Things To Do With Your Ass
Tried the sex stuff before? All right, I'll give you some other giggly stuff to let you appreciate the awesomeness that is your butt:
Get some friends together and take adorable photos of all of your bums side-by-side. Let's face it, no picture like this is ever not brilliant. Extra fun can be had, however, by adding a creative touch, like body-painting your entire backside like the cover of your favourite Floyd album.
Tan the gorram thing. Hey, tan lines are sexy and there's nothing like a blazing white ass laid against an otherwise bronzed body to say "target me!" to anyone you show it to, but tanning your butt is hilarious. When my family was in Spain in 1990, my brother and I began to feel like our pearlescent asses were becoming fairly unsightly compared to our deep-tan backs, so we covered the rest of our bodies with towels and tried to tan our butts only. My dad took pictures. If I can find 'em, they're yours.
Write a song about your bum. Like bums-in-a-line photos, these are rarely flops. Tom Green has "The Bum Bum Song," Max Price has "The Naked Dance Song"... what's your bum's song?
Show off your bum in a pair of assless pants, a thong, or any other ass-highlighting item of clothing. Let's face it, a well-presented ass is one of the seven wonders of the world, and the only good thing about the entire damn fashion industry. Put something on that makes your ass look fab, and go out and strut. Let people see it, and enjoy the attention.
Further Reading About Asses
Finding actual web sites about the ass is pretty freaking hard. It makes the penis and the breast look downright well-represented on this internet of ours. If you want ass-pounding action, mind you, the internet is the place to be, but intelligent discourse about butts is as hidden as anal enjoyment itself. Still, here are a few fun ones:
How To Bend Over Your Boyfriend - As obvious, and excellent, as the name suggests. There's also a flick called Bend Over Boyfriend, which Mark and I rented a few years back, but it's fairly disappointing.
All About the Anus - Very introductory, on a web site aimed at teenagers, but you can't beat that title.
Prostate Cancer Research Institute - As usual, there's a bum-related cancer to be concerned about. Some good info on this site, as well as a donation page.
As usual, I bid you farewell with the hope that you will find your way to a nearby butt, possibly yours or possibly someone else's, and enjoy it as thoroughly as you can. We wrap everything up tomorrow, with the only important thing left...
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Breasts
Dec 4 2004 - 10:33
a.m.
a.k.a. boobs, tits, boobies, titties, teats, jugs, hooters, knockers, melons, kasabas, bosom, ta-tas, Springfield Two, twins, honkers, bazongas, buds, mammaries, boulders, cantaloupes, coconuts, woofers, udders, rack, funbags, headlights, shirt puppies, Double Lotus Peak
Rivalling the penis in our culture's preoccupations are the breasts. There are restaurants named after them. The arrangement and presentation of the breasts in a garment can become that item's key selling point. Men are unilaterally divided by nothing more complex than whether they are "breast men" or "butt men." And of course, entire industries exist for breast enhancement, from benign clothing accessories that accentuate the natural breast size, to surgical options even more invasive and dangerous than the already-ludicrious penis enlargement procedures. Breasts rule the roost in near-acceptable sexual imagery: they're on every billboard, every magazine cover... but heaven help you if you flash your nipple during the Super Bowl. Then it's a problem.
In the aforementioned categorization process, I fall under "butt man," but that doesn't mean I don't still love and worship the breast. There's no way around it: these things are just freakin' cool. They're soft, they look nice, they're fun to play with, and if a woman enjoys and has confidence in her breasts, well, she's about as sexy as any creature on God's green. Bless the breast.
If we were lucky infants, we were raised on breast milk, and so got to know at least one pair of boobs fairly up close and personal from about as far back as you can go in this life without hitting amniotic fluid. I don't know whether I remember breast feeding or not. I do remember that the first time I got my lips on a nipple as an adult, there was a disconcerting pang of familiarity. My parents were never inappropriately shy about nudity in our household growing up - we even got to a topless beach or two before I hit puberty - so breasts were never any great mystery to me. They were around. They were what made mommies different from daddies. It's a good thing my dad wasn't massively obese, or the issue might have become clouded.
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I remember the first breasts I saw that were significantly larger than the ones I was used to; they were in a Playboy that my best friend showed me, and when we both wondered aloud why her breasts were so bizarrely large, and so relatively pale compared to the rest of her body, I immediately surmised that this was because they were so full of milk. At age 7, functionality still came before sexuality. It would be quite some time before I really began to look at breasts as sexual objects, but I got there eventually (as the above paragraphs will have fully demonstrated). I love breasts. Let's have a closer look at them.
The breast is essentially a mound of fatty tissue, built above the chest wall and rib cage. It's made a breast by the fact that it's got a nipple, the tip of a series of milk ducts which, in women anyway, secrete milk to feed the kiddies. Men have milk ducts and nipples too, but like those racing stripes on a station wagon, they're pretty much just meaningless decoration.
I've known some women who have insisted to me, rather indignantly in fact, that the only reason for the existence of the breast is to feed a woman's offspring, and that any sexual attraction caused by the breast is purely coincidental and based on cultural bias. This analysis is fairly wide of the mark. The milk ducts themselves, in fact, make up a relatively small portion of the breast as a whole, the rest of the structure being made up of fat and connective tissues. The size and shape of a breast has nothing to do with its functionality as a feeding source. Biologists have theorized that the breasts developed as a counterpart to the buttocks when women began walking upright; buttocks remain a primary sexual attractor in other primates (and this one). Like most of the other truly fun parts of the human body, boobies serve multiple purposes.
Breasts are a secondary sexual characteristic; they begin to develop at the onset of puberty in girls, and will grow for however long they have to, to get to the size they're going to be. Most women have a slight size difference between their breasts. Nothing ever works out exactly perfectly in nature, and almost no woman finds herself with two breasts that are precise mirror images of one another. Just one of the things that makes breasts fun, IMHO.
Nipples
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The nipple is the tip of the breast, and is the canal through which a mother's milk will be delivered to her child. The nipple is surrounded by the aureolae, a darker area of skin that makes the nips look the bullseye of some great target. The nipple is filled with nerve endings, which makes the nipple a nicely sensitive part of a woman's body, and a key element in most women's arousal mechanisms. In fact, women's breasts can swell by as much as 25% during sexual arousal. Any guy would be foolish to skip the nips during foreplay... but thankfully, most guys won't have to be reminded of this fact. Playing with boobs is one of those great win/win situations.
A very small percentage of women have reported the ability to achieve an orgasm based exclusively on nipple stimulation. If your bod is wired this way, you're a lucky lady. If you've never tried to have a nipple orgasm... cripes, what's stopping you?! You could be sitting on a goldmine.
For whatever reason, the nipple seems to be the key to whether not you have actually shown your breast. The Janet Jackson debacle ("debacle" in this case referring to the media's fascist conservativism response, rather than the event itself) proves that you can do an enormous number of sexually-revealing things on television, but you sure as hell can't show nip without being "indecent." Another interesting double standard for decency is what I call the "National Geographic issue," meaning that for reasons having largely to do with residual racial preoccupations, it's perfectly acceptable to show tribal women topless in just about any context, but showing caucasian women's breasts remains largely pornographic. The moral messages for women and girls that are carried on reversals like this are troubling and dangerous.
Here in Ontario, a great deal of media attention was given to the 1996 judicial decision to allow female toplessness in the province. It hasn't exactly caught on like wildfire, but at least women have the option in our province. Female toplessness remains illegal in most of the rest of North America, although it is fairly common in Europe, where a healthier overall approach to nudity issues leads to a culture less fraught with the kinds of moral quagmires that are currently sinking us on this end. Good for Europe!
Breast Size and Size Modification
As with penis size, breast size gets a hell of a lot of play in today's world. Unlike penises, however, there really is no "average" breast size, because breast size is widely variable and depends on body type, overall body fat ratio, hereditary factors, nutrition, and a hell of a lot of other things. A better word than "average" breast size would be "mean" breast size; in other words, if you add up all the breast sizes in the world and divide them by the number of subjects, you hit the dead center. The dead center in boobs is currently a 36C bra size.
The overall societal notion, I guess, is that larger breasts are more attractive than smaller breasts. What makes this especially dumbfounding is that women are also currently being prized for being extremely slender - a natural contradiction that basically results in any woman who isn't Barbie not being able to achieve the "perfect" body.
Breast size has never mattered a whit to me. Here's the big secret: I just like there to be breasts. Most of the guys I've spoken with about this agree: as long as there are breasts, we're happy. Breasts are good. Tiny breasts are excellent. Large breasts are also excellent. Medium sized breasts? Excellent too. Ginormous, life-choking pillow-sized breasts are somewhat unmanageable but, I'm sure, have their excellence as well. I even knew a 22-year-old anthropology student once, who had no breasts at all, just slightly extruded nipples, and she was freaking mega hot. Breasts are accessories, not the be-all end-all of womanhood.
Breast implants, on the other hand, are the very walking definition of gross. Particularly if you watch Survivor, where the dimwits with breast implants don't seem to realize just how foolish you start to look when your body loses weight due to your all-rice diet, but your implants stay exactly the same size. It's freaky and disgusting. The same effect, to a lesser degree, essentially exists on every implant I've ever seen: they just look dumb. Stretched, rubbery, fake, and dumb. Enhanced boobs are about as attractive as highway traffic cones.
On the other side of the fence, there's breast reduction surgery. Women with larger breasts can experience all manner of ongoing related ailments as a result of the excess carriage up front, and reduction surgery can be an effective tool for solving these problems. If you're massively chesty and you're having problems, talk to your doctor. It might be time to see how the other half lives.
Fun Things To Do With Your Breasts
Enjoy your breasts in any and all sex play, of course, but when sex is the farthest thing from your mind, there are plenty of other funtastic things you can do with your tits:
Using a felt marker, make your breasts the eyes of a massive face drawn across your entire torso. This is hilarious, particularly if you're drawing "surprise." If your boobs are huge, this is going to be unbelievably humourous because the eyes are going to look like they're bugging out of the sockets in gobsmackin' shock.
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Going skydiving naked might sound like fun, but it probably isn't. Convex. They're supposed to be convex.
Learn to knit, and make yourself your own over-the-shoulder boulder-holder. Why is this fun? Because they're your damn breasts, and you should treat them to some personal TLC every once in a while to remind them that you love them and that they are excellent. And besides, it'll make you a hell of a knitter.
Beat someone up with them. This doesn't have to be done maliciously. But if you've got enough size to manage it, try smacking a willing partner around with your breasts. You'll never even think of having a normal pillow fight again.
Further Reading About the Breasts
Breasts turned out to be harder to research than wangs. Obviously there's the porno bullet to dodge, but a lot of internet space is also taken up - rightly so - with information about breast cancer. Here are some pages worth reading for anyone who has, or admires, breasts:
Gurl.com - A good site for girls in every regard, and publishers of the Deal With It! book. A great advocate for positive body image issues, but gone a bit pop-y with all the advertising swag.
Normal Breasts Gallery - the images are low-res, but helpful in getting a sense of the enormous variance that exists in size, shape, colour, texture, and structure of the breasts.
The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation - A breast self-exam is a must for every single person who has a pair, so don't be squeamish or uninformed about the process. This site is who I donate to when I'm donating for breast cancer.
The Blogger Boobiethon - this year's drive is over, but you gotta admire what they're doing and how they're doing it!
If you've got breasts, give them a big hug. If you don't have them but you have access to someone else's, nuzzle in and say thanks. Breasts are awesome.
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Penis
Dec 3 2004 - 10:37
a.m.
a.k.a. dick, cock, wang, rod, shlong, tool, weiner, willie, trouser snake, baby's arm holding an apple, love muscle, man-meat, pecker, peter, johnson, john thomas, knob, prick, pud, pork sword, love tackle, wedding tackle, tallywacker, lightsabre, tube steak, phallus
Today we're going to talk about the penis, because it's high time we did. I've had one all my life and I can honestly say in complete sincerity that I love it. Mine specifically, and wangs in general. I've been fairly fascinated by dicks for about as far back as I can remember. My childhood best friend and I compared our penises in the alley beside his grandparents' house when we were seven. My cabin at Kamp Kandalore was basically a 14-day penis discussion. My grade 12 math class with Ms. Lu frequently disintegrated into round-robin cock talk between myself and a half dozen other guys. Mark and I continue to discuss wangs and wang-related issues with a frequency bordering on the uncanny.
So it pisses me royally off that talk of this nature - hell, even saying "penis" itself - is still considered strange or inappropriate in most circumstances, and inappropriately funny in others. It's stunning that we could (consciously or unconsciously) center so much of modern society around the dick, and yet be so terrified of addressing it directly. Victorianism? Homophobia? Some other stupid preoccupation? Whatever it is, it's way past its time. So Tederick.com is now Tederick.cock. We're busting out the wang oldschool. Like the Learning Channel said, it's a marvel of fluid dynamics. And it's one awesome fuckin' organ.
The dick is reasonably complicated, owing to its multi-functional nature. Besides just hanging around looking adorable, the dick deals in both waste extraction and sexual function. The hole at the end of the dick, the end-game of its various tasks, is called the urethra, but most of us just call it "the hole at the end of the dick," if we refer to it at all. The two tubes that run up the length of the penis and give it its penisness are called the corpus cavernosum; these are what allow the penis to be that fluidic marvel that it is. They allow the penis to change size and shape in response to various stimuli; some fun, some not. The other key penis element is the head (glans), that oh-so-sensitive bundle of nerves that turns the penis from a tube of steak hanging between your legs, to the center of all sexual pleasure in the male body. Sure, we can enjoy having our nipples bitten or our neck tickled with a stiff feather, but sooner or later, it's going to be all about that glans.
Beneath the wang itself are the greatest backup combo in history, the testicles (a.k.a. balls, nuts, nads, nards, berries, stones, two veg), contained within a sack of skin called the scrotum (a personal nominee for Most Expressive Word in the English Language). From puberty, the testicles produce sperm, which is combined with a liquid medium to become semen (cum, jizz, spooge, splooge, hot sauce, quart of hot yogourt). And when you think about all these various parts working together in the ways that they do, well, it's enough to make you fall on the ground and praise the maker for the perfection of nature.
Erections
(boner, stiffie, hard-on, morning glory, woodie, tent-pole)
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Yeah, boners. The penis may be mighty fine at hosing down the undergrowth and hanging out on nude beaches doing its thang, but the boner is what give the penis its strutting creds. As my childhood puberty book explained, when the man becomes aroused, blood rushes into the corpus cavernosum, engorging the blood vessels, and voila: the penis becomes stiff and bigger than usual. It's erection time. There isn't actually a bone in a boner, but that doesn't keep it from feeling like a damned steel rod sometimes.
Boys get erections from birth - I can't remember ever not having them, and my memories of having boners go as far back as my memories go, a lot further back then knowing what a boner actually is. The erection engine goes into overdrive at around 12 or 13, when puberty kicks the boy's testosterone production into grown-up land. The morning-erection phenomenon starts, and I sure wish someone had warned me; I, like most boys, had no idea that this was happening to every single other boy on the planet, and I wasted a hell of a lot of time going to drastic measures to conceal my daily affliction.
Following those mad, bad teenage years, erections become a bit more manageable, although we still get them all the fuckin' time and have to deal with them. For the ladies who don't understand what I'm talking about, put a zucchini in your panties and take a 20-pace walk. You'll get the idea.
Here's the before-n'-after on an average-sized penis:
Because the two corpus cavernosa can vary in length, most cocks
will display a slight curve when erect. If this curve is less than 25° and
is not painful, it's normal, and let's face it, fairly cool. It's the reason
for that whole "banana" analogy you frequently hear. Approximately one quarter
of all penises bend upwards when erect (the best kind ,
in-my-humble-and-biased-opinion), while approximately 15% bend downwards, and another
15% bend to the left or the right. That makes a grand total of around 55% of
men with a bent wang. Again, if the curve exceeds 25°, you've moved beyond
bent wang and into what my brother calls a "meat claw." This might be worth a
visit to the doctor. Your penis should not be attempting a u-turn during
intercourse.
Size Matters Not
Let's face it, the whole goddamned culture is completely obsessed with penis size, and the internet - being the culture's right arm - is flooded with the shit. It's hard to do any serious research on the cock, without hitting overdrive on "penis enlargement" sites. It's the same shit that makes it hard to check your e-mail without feeling inadequate.
Guys, penis enlargement is even stupider than breast enlargement, but (I suppose) appeals to the exact same brainlessness in certain types of men and women. Just. Don't. Do it. For cryin' out loud, respect the cock.
You know the stats: the average size of the erect penis remains just shy of 6 inches, with the average circumference being 4.85. Now check this: this average size is shared, within a few eighths of an inch, by over 90% of the male population of the world. Think about that - if you're 5.9", eight other guys on the bus with you have a dick less than two eights of an inch different in size, while one will fall outside the average range. My money's on the driver.
Recent studies have also knocked down the old "black men are bigger" theory. In fact, whites and blacks nearly tie in the size range, with the other racial groups falling slightly smaller on average. Does any of it really matter? Of course not. The average aroused vagina is as deep as the average aroused penis is long. There's a cosmic synchronicity at work here.
It's hard to even talk about size reasonably, because the penis has no true "native" size of its own. It's in a constant state of fluctuation. In cold environments, it shrinks; in warmer climes, it grows; in varying stages of arousal, the length of the erection will also vary. Although all men will have what they believe to be their "normal" size for their fully-erect penis, even this baseline varies by several eighths of an inch depending on environmental, sexual, and psychological factors, from one erection to the next. Give it up: enjoy the wang that you've got. Unless the head's been lopped off by a kill-crazy Scandanavian, it'll to everything any other penis will do.
Circumcision
I'm circumcised. My best friend when I was a kid was not. Seeing his penis was the first awareness I had that dicks come in two varieties. Being seven at the time, I chalked it up to something hereditary (!) and didn't learn the truth until five years later, when my mom laid the puberty book on me. Even then, I was confused.
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Circumcision, the process by which the foreskin is surgically removed leaving the head of the penis bare, remains a complicated and morally questionable practice around the world. When the foreskin is removed , the nature of the tissue in the head of the penis is radically altered, basically turning it from moist mucous membrane to - uck - "scar tissue." (I hate that pair of words in just about every context and y'know what? "My penis" is a pretty significant context.) Additionally, the removal of the foreskin eliminates the penis' natural "gliding" mechanism, used during intercourse and masturbation to limit chafing and increase male arousal. It's a fairly hefty change to the nature of the wang, so parents should do what they can to learn about the issue before making a decision that will, for junior anyway, be reasonably permanent.
Circumcision has long been practiced for religious purposes, but has also, in the past century, been co-opted by the medical profession in certain areas as a "treatment" (usually preemptive) for certain potential ailments. The popularity of circumcision varies wildly by nation, cultural group, and age range. Large population groups who continue to practice circumcision include Jewish and Islamic peoples, Americans, and the Bushmen of the Kalahari.
"Medical" circumcision has pretty ignominious roots, having been developed in the late 1800s as a means to prevent masturbation. Well, fuck that large; a) it doesn't work, and b) fuck you. Fortunately, while routine infant circumcision experienced a surge in popularity in North America in the 60s and early 70s, it has since all but disappeared, except (for reasons unknown) in the United States, where over 60% of newborn boys are still routinely circumcised at the hospital. The Canadian Pediatric Society ruled circumcision medically unnecessary in 1975, and as a result, the circumcision rate in Canada has fallen to under 12% in 2003. I love my country.
On the other side of the fork is religious circumcision, which is - at least - circumcision with a "purpose," as opposed to medical circumcision which remains basically groundless. Religious circumcision has existed for a very long time, and has significant cultural and spiritual roots. In the Jewish faith, for example, circumcision is performed as a symbolic representation of the newborn boy's entrance into the covenant with God, as originally undertaken by Abraham. Among the Massai, circumcision is performed at the onset of puberty, as a ceremonial rite signifying the boy's transition to manhood. It is compulsory for Muslim males to be circumcised, traditionally after having recited the Qur'an in its entirety, between the ages of 10 and 12. There is even hieroglyphic evidence of circumcision being practiced in ancient Egypt, possibly in an attempt to keep the body from too closely mimicking that of the gods. That may be the best reasoning for cutting your wang that I've ever heard: you do it to keep from looking like a god. Okay then. To paraphrase Lou: "I suppose if I want to look like a god I'll just have to rely on my massive genitals."
Fun Things To Do With Your Penis
You know most of the fun stuff: wank it, suck it, stick it in a warm n' friendly hole, whatever. In the meantime, here's some fun stuff you might not have thought of:
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Make with the body paint and turn your dick into an elephant's trunk. Come on, you've always wanted to be able to compare your dick to an elephant's trunk anyway, at least this way there's fun colours.
Stick your penis in food. Now who's the pie-fucker, Biggsy?
Have a conversation with your penis. Grab the head, give it a 90° twist, and use your thumb and forefinger to manipulate the urethra to make it look like it's talking. This is freakin' hilarious if you get a felt-tip marker involved. You may end up making an entire movie using only talking penises. It could happen, is alls I'm sayin'.
Visit cookingwithcum.com and decide if it's for you. It sure as hell ain't for me, but who knows, maybe it's the secret to turning a mediocre pasta carbonara into fucking ambrosia on earth. By the way, for the dietarily conscious: the chief ingredient of semen is fructose, resulting in an average caloric content of 5 calories per teaspoon. The average dude will squirt about half a teaspoon to a full teaspoon, per orgasm.
Write a damn penis love letter and mail it to your penis. No really: it's wicked fun. There's nothing in the world better than getting something in the mail with this address, even if you wrote it yourself:
My Penis
c/o Matthew Brown
TEDERICK.COM
29 Parmacheto Rd., Suite 2100
Toronto, ON
I suppose you could send a love letter to someone else's penis too, if that's more your steam. Extra points if it's guy/guy and you're not gay.
Further Penis Reading
Some web sites that were helpful to me, or were just fun to read, or just had "penis" somewhere in the title, include:
My-Penis.org - One man's exploration of all things penis, including both in-depth factual information, and ongoing personal accounts. Quite extensive and well-authored.
The Penis Website - Very interesting photo galleries for size and circumcision issues. Wanna see some really small (and big) wangs? Be amazed.
The-penis.com - A good amount of information, but contains a great number of links to (softcore) porn sites to support itself, including its gallery pages.
Jackinworld - still the definitive male masturbation resource in the entire goddamned world.
The Testicular Cancer Resource Center - Nobody likes to think about it, but testicular cancer is a killer and a self-exam is an easy, and fun, way to kill five minutes of your month and keep on top of your testicular health. Get informed!
The penis. I still love it, and I just did enough research on it to kill a small horse. As for you: stop sitting here reading a blog, and get out there and enjoy a penis today! I think you'll be glad you did.
Today's post is dedicated to Ben on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah, with the hope that he will enjoy a lifelong friendship with his penis.
I know that guy Ethan Rom, and believe me, he's not the kind of
person who lasts long in Ontario
Dec 2 2004 - 7:05
p.m.
House is officially on the list. It's on the sched. It's on the PVR and it ain't leaving. Yeah, I could be completely sick of it in six months. But right now it's on par with Lost for sheer look-forwardness. I just downloaded the Massive Attack tune and I'm Housein' it up oldschool at 3QF.
Yesterday Matty and I were talking about the PVR, and the online bittorrent universe, and how it's basically completely spun my entire process of television viewage in just six short months. Everything has completely changed. It's like the end of linear time or something. It's a fundamental phase-shift in the way I get things done, and I likes it. Suddenly, being told that the Enterprise episode two weeks ago was actually worth my time is no longer academic; I can download the sucker and offer up my 2¢ an hour later. The pizza guy arrives ten minutes into Lost and I just pause it, and then skip the next commercial break altogether by jumping back to the live feed. The only thing we're missing here is the ability to actually move forward and backward in time at will, but I'm sure it'll be integrated into the next-generation PVR.
The other thing that comes up a lot is: "Matt, how do you have time to watch all the TV you watch?" This is actually fairly erroneous because I watch the least TV of just about anyone I know. I watch:
- The Simpsons
- House
- The Amazing Race
- Lost
- Alias
- Survivor
- E.R.
- Dinner for Five
That averages out to exactly an hour a day, and it's all PVR so it's actually 44 minutes a day without commercials. I also PVR Letterman and Smallville, toe-test them with a five minute preview before deciding if I'm going to watch the whole thing, which probably adds roughly another hour to an average week. Any special programming, parades or movies, might be good for an average half-hour more. So even being extremely charitable about my time, I'm watching an average of 56.8 minutes of television per day, or 6.8 hours per week. Check that against the national average.
O'course, I also make with the DVDs, but I'm snail-crawling through them so freakin' slowly I don't think it accounts for more than an additional four hours per week. I have a DVD backlog the size of my arm: about three dozen movies, nine or ten television series, and a hundred and thirty commentary tracks. I'll be able to finish all this in mid-2006, provided I never buy another DVD again.
With Golden Girls and Seinfeld finally here, Lost inevitable, and The Muppet Show coming in '05, the only TV show I'm still lacking on DVD is Ally McBeal. And me wants it precious, yessss. But I want The World of Jim Henson more. Can this be the bonus feature on the first season of The Muppet Show? Pretty please?
The apocalypse in miniature
Dec 2 2004 -
6:26 p.m.
Matty Price and I went on a hike this afternoon in lovely rural Ontario; my mapping skills weren't brilliant and we essentially ended up going completely the wrong way at one point but it was still a very enjoyable stroll through some beautiful, snow-dusted countryside. Here's a map - the red line is the path we were supposed to be on, the blue line is the non-path we thought we were on once we realized we were lost, and the green line is where we actually were, now that I've had the chance to collate all the data in Photoshop. If I had GPS this couldn't be more accurate:
As usual, walking in the world really charges me up. At one point we were talking about weddings, and I decided that when it's time to get hitched, if I can't afford any kind of normal ceremony, I - if the missus agrees, of course - will just get married on top of a hill in thin woods like the ones we were in today. Just me, the girl, a holy man and a witness. I was shocked to learn that the Sfoo season that Showcase is hyping up the yinyang right now is only Season Two, so I don't want to get too spoiler-specific here, but let's just additionally note that when I die, I'm taking a cue from the show: someone find a hole in the ground in a forest somewhere, and throw me into it. Cover with dirt and walk away. That's all I'm gonna need.
Better than Ben & Jerry's, anyway
Dec
1 2004 - 2:52 p.m.
One more procrastinatory shot over the bow, because I am drunk and lusty with power:
Matt Damon ("Maaaaaaaatt Daaaaaaamon!") was on Letterman on Monday night. It was freaking fantastic. It was the first time he's been on since the Red Sox won, and after a half-decade of having Letterman take the piss out of him for being a Sox fan, he got to gloat hardcore. What was great about it was that for about five minutes, Matt and Dave apparently completely forgot that they were on camera: they had a baseball argument so "deep code" that it must have been completely incomprehensible to a decent 90% of the viewing audience, myself included.
Anyways this reminded me that I've been owing Chad a "why I love Ben & Matt" post for about a month and a half now. Here goes:
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I think I might have a little crush on Matt Damon. He's got a dose of visual charisma that completely sucks me in any time I see him doing anything. Some people have it and some people don't; most actors don't have it but moviestars do, and Matt Damon is a MOVIESTAR with a capital-boldface M. I don't think I want to have sex with Matt Damon; I do think that if I were ever to meet him I'd pretty much just sit with my hands hammocking my chin and gaze lovingly at him with doe-eyes. Add to this, let's face it, he's a fucking solid actor, and better still, he legitimately seems to choose projects that he's interested in and can get behind. Sometimes this runs afoul, sure, but sometimes it results in his anchoring one of the best franchises out there, and being hungry for more. He also remains resolutely a guy's guy, the sort of dude who can rhyme off obscure Star Wars trivia on cue and doesn't want VIP passes to the Sox victory parade if it means he has to give up standing in the streets with everyone else. If I were a moviestar, I'd want to be a moviestar like Matt Damon.
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Or maybe I'd prefer to be like Ben. See, the thing about Ben is yeah, he's made a lot of shite movies and he seems to legitimately sign up for literally every single script he's sent. But at the same time, he's a real guy. He's one of the Askewniverse cronies, not just because he's their big-ticket marquee idol, but because he's exactly like everyone else in the posse: a normal dude who made it big, and is doing the best he can to negotiate the bizarre tidepools of Hollywood while retaining as much of his individual self as he can. Sometimes, he fails utterly, just like when he's choosing scripts. Other times, he succeeds brilliantly, also just like when he's choosing scripts. I'm telling you: his career track is a pretty solid metaphor for his personal life. It's eerie. Anyways, at the end of the day, I love Ben because I feel like if I sat down with the guy for a beer, not only would I walk away at the end of the night soused off my ass, but I'd have had a damn fun night and heard a lot of interesting shit about the weird stuff that goes down in H-wood (and Jen's undies) (and new-Jen's undies).
Who do I prefer? Sacrilegious question. It varies by week. Besides, I'm fully aware that the "Ben & Matt" brand name is basically completely artificial and that Matt's more in with that Casey dude than he ever was with Ben. That's fine. They'll always be best friends to me, and I'll always follow them around from movie to movie, hoping they're having a good time doing what they're doing.
Things of no consequence on a day of no sunshine
Dec 1 2004 - 10:47 a.m.
I scored a 70 ("Brat Packian") on the '80s quiz... it was easy cuz there were so many damn Empire Strikes Back questions.
Meanwhile, on the Lost quiz, I got Locke. How weird is that?
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I accept it because of the line about my accompanying soundtrack.
I knew the third word on page fourteen of The Cat in the
Hat, and it was "fear"
Dec 1 2004 - 12:50
a.m.
I sat in at poker tonight for the second week in a row; they were doing a full evening of Hold 'Em and my performance last week demonstrated that I was in desperate need of some practice, so I anted up. I spent the first three and a half hours getting destroyed on almost every single hand, with my few wins being for a negligible amount of bounce-back. Then I had three or four really lucky hands within half an hour of each other - picked up pocket kings at one point, and got pocket aces twice - and managed to rebound myself back to a healthy profit on the evening. A lot of luck, and I'm not convinced my Hold 'Em skills actually improved, but hey, I'll take it where I can get it.
One place where I obviously can not get it is in iPod accessories. I'm totally fucked on these things. My headphones and remote crapped out today, within about a half an hour of each other. This will be my fourth pair of headphones, and sixth remote, when I submit my service requests tomorrow. The truly infuriating part is that both of these items are fairly new - the headphones are less than a month old, and I got the remote ten damn days ago. And it's not like I'm whipping them around over my fucking head or anything. I treat them with extreme care. Ten damn days. I've said it before (and drawn derision) and I'll say it again: stupid fucking Apple. How hard is it to make a product that actually works?