I’m sure other parents here can empathize when I say I shudder at the thought of the increasing influence and presence of huge ships in the lives my children. – Noel D. Hill
As you can see, our link columns are progressing through the week; the next one will appear on Ash Wednesday, and the feature will slide back into its normal time-slot by mid-March. The major topic this week was prohibition, not merely of sex and drugs as usual but also of toilet paper, certain clothes and things that don’t actually exist. We’ll start off right here with an article on how racism led to the removal of the cocaine from cola (via reader SM), followed by more on the links between racism and prohibition of drugs and prostitution. Alas, stupidity is not prohibited from government, as you’ll see in our second video (which demonstrates the mental capacity of at least some of the people who take it upon themselves to make our decisions for us). That one was provided by Grace, who also gave us “pedophile” and “7-6-5”. The top contributor was Jesse Walker, who supplied everything above the first video; that one was provided by Radley Balko and demonstrates once and for all that absolutely nobody can cover Led Zeppelin like Heart can. Radley also provided “imaginary ban” and “Shakespeare”, and the other links between the videos came from Mark Draughn (“stolen home”), Luscious Lani (“Siberia”), Krulac (“confirmation”), Mike Siegel (“translation quiz”), Lenore Skenazy (“toilet paper”), FilmRot Dave (“child hero”), Franklin Harris (“nude accident”) and the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition (“gender gap”).
- The funniest set of Amazon reviews I’ve ever read.
- Cookie Monster holds golden biscuit for ransom.
- A man feeding swans in the snow.
- 1600 Transylvania Avenue.
- The Everlasting Tag Game.
- A fascinating basement.
- Saudi cleric gets slap on wrist after beating 5-year-old daughter to death over doubts about her virginity.
- Prohibitionists are never stopped by the fact that whatever they want to ban doesn’t actually exist.
- The DEA wants to “protect” you by reading your medical records without consent or warrant.
- Man makes a minor and not-uncommon error; government responds by stealing his home.
- Cop caught in “pedophile” sting rewarded with early retirement at full pension.
- Cops abusively interrogate 7-year-old for 6 hours over alleged $5 theft.
- A Russian family was lost in the Siberian wilderness for over 40 years.
- I’ve always said this, but it’s nice to see it confirmed.
- Match the British word to its American translation.
- School requires boys to “sign out” toilet paper.
- Another child hero of the glorious Fatherland.
- 20 words we owe to William Shakespeare.
- Naked woman hits naked fiancée with car.
- The drug-dose gender gap.
From the Archives
- Libertarians want government out of our bedrooms, but some politicians want people out of their bedroom clothes.
- Huge hordes of hookers do not follow major sporting events, despite repeated claims to that effect.
- In what profession are the professionals considered the LEAST knowledgeable about the job?
- I debunk the “objectification” myth with help from Rene Magritte and Captain Kirk.
- “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
- St. James Infirmary provides compassionate healthcare for sex workers.
- Ashley Madison is not only a ripoff scam, it has sleazy advertising, too.
- America sacrifices more children to evil beliefs than Carthage ever did.
- South African government distributes millions of defective condoms.
- Another European government wants to tell women how to dress.
- Sometimes prostitution law is like a good news/bad news joke.
- The namesake of my “That Was the Week That Was” feature.
- What testosterone does to women, and what it doesn’t do.
- Is the United Kingdom learning from her former colonies?
- The legendary scientific detachment of Dr. G. S. Brindley.
- Possibly the most disgusting pervert of the last decade.
- Iceland’s extra-nasty version of the Swedish model.
- Why don’t some women like cunnilingus?
- Another advantage of breast implants.
- My two previous columns for Imbolc.
- My first big spate of interviews.
- About the “Video Vigilante”.
- Is electrolysis permanent?
- The hooker vote.
It occurs to me that this Mississippi House Bill 819 is probably a protectionist law designed to increase the income of veteranarians. After all, contraception is the ewe’s responsibility.
I love that you included the Cookie Monster story. ^^
How could I not? 😉
Damn, who knew that Robert Plant sounded like Ann Wilson? And by the way … nice to see both Plant and Page there and … check 2:02 on the video – if they ever do a movie on George Washington – Page should play him!!
By the way – “Stairway to Heaven” was a part of the “satanic scare” because it supposedly praised satan at certain parts if you spun the record backwards. A lot of people were “spun up” over it back then.
I think Ann and Nancy did a great job here but I just wish they’d have left the glee club and saxophones out of the number – it’s way over produced.
Would have been nice to see the soloist perform the solo on a double-necked SG the way Jimmi did it. Would have been even greater if Nancy had done the solo herself. Other than that – it was a great video.
I don’t think it was overproduced at all; that was the point of the arrangement. It was recorded at the Kennedy Center honors for Led Zeppelin, not just an intimate concert.
As for your first statement, back in their heyday Ann Wilson sounded more like Robert Plant in concert than Plant did. Listen to their covers of “Black Dog” and “Rock and Roll” sometime. 🙂
No I didn’t figure you’d think it was overproduced and I’m not saying I don’t LIKE this version. To me though, StH is just better as a minimalist song (though it’s arrangement is a bit more complicated). This version kind of “operas” it up too much for me. It’s the kind of thing we humans do to things that become iconic in our minds … and I guess now most people view StH in this light.
krulac, I’m sorry you couldn’t just sit back and let it fill you up. I’m a musician, I’ve been covering that song since it came out (carefully, accurately, no doubt with less soul and more note-for-note nitpickery) and I was just taken right to the mat the moment she began to sing. Zep deserves huge cred and honor for the song and everything else they did, and that’s how I took the whole thing — a well deserved, enormously powerful tribute. It made me cry, and I don’t cry easily or often.
OTOH, if you’d like to see some true bumbling, hunt down the wreckage Kid Rock and his, uh, crew, made out of Ramble On the same evening. Maybe that’ll deliver some perspective on Heart’s cover, for that matter. Oy. 🙂
While I’m at it, Heart, what a fabulous thing they’ve been. I remember seeing them in a little college venue in Pennsylvania with Renaissance before either band really made it into the zeitgeist. What an evening that was. To this day, whenever I pick up my Martin, Heart songs tend to leak out of it…
For your amusement, here’s an instrument tribute of my own to Zep — Since I’ve Been Loving You:
http://www.ideaspike.com/bensmusic.shtml
…I played bass and guitar on that. Feel free to heap abuse on me. 🙂
There is an eerie similarity between the Russian story of the Lykovs fleeing Soviet purges, and the American story of Medvedik being denounced by his son for a non-crime in true Stalinist fashion.
The more specific research that can be done to tailor treatments to each sex, and to each individual, the better.
The article about Fayhan Al Ghamdi refers to Saudi Arabia as “ultraconservative”, when it is nothing of the sort. Before 1979, women could legally drive, associate with unrelated men, and go about unveiled.
That’s what happens when journalists try to cram the entire world of human experience into a moronic one-dimensional left-right continuum that wasn’t even accurate when it was first used just over 200 years ago.
Tell me about it … I’m very confused on it myself. Eight years ago leftists told me that it was WRONG to waterboard terrorists because that was torture. The right said it was basically legal, ethical and wise and that it saved American lives.
And just today we have the American Right criticizing the “Leftist” White House administration over drone strikes on American citizens while the LEFT pronounces them … “legal, ethical, and wise” and that it basically saved American lives (that’s a quote from Jay Carney).
You’re comparing two very unlike things as if they were the same thing, and you’re assuming that Jay Carney is a spokesman for “the Left” when he’s nothing of the sort.
Killing, whatever other problems it may have, is effective, in that the person stays dead. Waterboarding is an effective way to get people to confess to witchcraft.
The American left has a BIG problem with these extrajudicial assassinations, including American citizens, based on one man’s say-so. Such liberal-and-proud-of-it folks as Cenk Uger, Rachel Maddow, Ed Shultz and Lawrence O’Donnell have denounced them.
The problem, really, isn’t the drones. Suppose that, instead of sending a drone with a HELLFIRE missile, the President sent a marksman with a rifle. Same problems. Actually, the marksman and rifle would be better, because there would be less collateral damage (you know, women and children, stuff like that). It would still be illegal, unethical, and unwise.
The article concerning the human-animal “hybrid” bill is amusing, but the reality is more serious. The bill is in fact targeting certain specific types of stem cell research,and attempts to impose the beliefs of some that human pluripotent stem cells derived from in vitro fertilized eggs are morally equivalent to a human being. To them it is irrelevant that no organism could or would be derived. This is all part of the larger battle on that front.
Yes, the “personhood” language in the bill was kind of a giveaway, and I actually wondered whether the bill isn’t really just a Trojan horse for that.
Maggie,
Would a Trojan Horse be an example of a Human-Animal Hybrid? Or is it merely a very large condom size?
LOL. I guess a trojan horse would actually be a chimera…
teehee. Unless one of those Trojans pulled a Poseidon. Then they might get the hybrid version.
On checking out toilet paper – I hope they don’t have to account for depletion, at least, not in a physical inventory. Although maybe that would make the appropriate point to the school administrators.
I heard that Hank Johnson statement when it first happened. I have to say that I give big kudos to the military guy when he answered, with a straight face, “We don’t anticipate that.” Lordy!
I got 31 of 50 done at the timed British-American test but I plead that I had to take a phone call in the middle.
That naked woman must’ve been pretty strong to pick up that car and hit her fiance with it.
Isn’t it ironic that the WOD and DARE have given us a phenomenom that the propaganda departments of totalitarians were required to create out of whole cloth?
Yeah, there’s a whole big corruption thing going on with police and tow companies. My brother, who got broadsided by an uninsured driver in Virginia, wasn’t allowed to drive his car home because it was “unsafe.” (He was less than two blocks away at the time.) The cops forced him to have it towed and then the towing company played a shell game with the cops – holding it in impound as “evidence” while the impound fees accrued. He was offered the same “surrender the title” option but was also informed that if the impound yard selling the car didn’t cover their fees, he was liable for the “deficiency.” Geez.
‘cuz cops and clerics are different (And Better!) sorts of people than we folks that work for a living. I mean HayZeus! what kind of psychopath “doubts” the virginity of a 5 year old girl? Unless he was the pervert that deflowered her. Which in this instance would surprise me not at all. As far as the cop-o-pedo-feel goes, time was, that to maintain honor, they’d have offered him a pistol with one round. Nowadays, I guess they just offer a full pension.
That Oregon basement was a fascinating if inadvertent time capsule.
The story about the family lost 40 years in the Siberian Taiga was incredible.
I’m not surprised that the Worcester cops protect and serve…themselves.Someday, I hope, their ineptly provided “public service” will be provided by the free market. I wonder how “Officer” Shea justifies his conduct to himself? I wouldn’t be able to look my mother in the face, if I had trolled the web like he did. Sad to say, I live here, so, involuntarily, I have to pay to fund Shea’s pension!
Private law enforcement? That’d be even more ripe for abuse…
As for conscience, I guess cops with one don’t last long.
Wow, Heart covering Stairway to Heaven… moved me to tears. That woman can sing, and no doubt about it. Best cover I’ve ever heard of the song by a huge margin. Lord. I gotta go get some tissues.
I felt the same way; I liked it so much I paid to download the whole thing from Amazon. When I called my husband to tell him about it I got so choked up I could barely explain myself.
🙂
Unrelated to this post, sorry Maggie, but this is for your attention. Two posts; one reasonable, the next from the sorority of debutantes.
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2013/02/05/the-war-on-sex-workers/
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2013/02/06/supporting-sex-workers-rights-opposing-the-buying-of-sex/
Keep me posted of anything you write about these, if you decide to.
I’m glad somebody’s finally dealing with the issue of huge ships!
C is for cookie; that’s good enough for me.
My new desktop wallpaper.
Well, it’s bipartisan.
I might set a news alert (predicted by Arthur C. Clarke in The Fountains of Paradise) for “everlasting tag.”
A very interesting basement indeed.
I went to write a filk parody of StH once. It was about Robert L. Forward. I didn’t finish. But maybe I should try again.
The Saudi cleric and the Worcester cop should form a club. Invite a few Wall Street “too big to jail” folks in as well. They could all meet at a hotel somewhere. I don’t think all these immune elites are conspiring together, but it might be a better thing if they were.
That family’s story is both inspiring and sad. How much suffering could have been avoided if either they hadn’t been so religious, or the Soviets hadn’t been, well, so religious (because atheism at this level is not only a religion, but a state religion). Then again, how amazing that they were able to make so much of such isolated lives.
That prison teaches one to be a better criminal is hardly new. Carolyn Cassady wrote letters about it when her husband Neal (who was the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road) was in San Quinton on a marijuana charge from 1958 to 1960. But yes, it’s good to have official confirmation. With all the hue and cry about how easily influenced young people are, you’d think this would be avoided.
And now I’ve got Lag From Hell, so I’ll come back and check out the rest of these later.
I got 23 right, but 27 wrong. I could have done better with more time, but not a lot better. A couple I only knew because of book like The Overman Culture which gave me torch=flashlight.
It seems there should be a better way to stop boys from deliberately clogging toilets. I don’t know what that better way would be.
The kid is fifteen. He has some responsibility. I can see getting taken in by the propaganda, but he couldn’t find a less severe course of action?
It doesn’t surprise me that the Bard introduced new words. He sure introduced a lot of tropes.
This is not on my list of “Fun Things to Do While Naked.”
My first exposure to the way many drugs are tested on men only was in high school, when I read a thing designed to scare us all away from marijuana. A girl tell her little sister all the awful things it could do, while also saying that it may with glaucoma. However, she points out, the tests with done on healthy young men, so nobody knows if things might be different with sickly people, old people… or junior high school girls, you got that little sis?
I’m happy to say, though, that the trials of MDMA in treating post traumatic stress disorder are being conducted on both men and women.
I… don’t think Rep. Johnson is kidding. Isn’t he kidding? I don’t think he is.
So, that’s why there’s no longer any coke in the cola. I knew racism was behind the bans on opium and marijuana (why do you think it has that Spanish-sounding name?), and that racism was why you get a stiffer penalty for crack cocaine than for powder cocaine. So I should’ve known it was behind the de-coking of Coke.
Oh, and I seem to have skipped the ban on human-animal hybrids. Frickin’ centaurs.
Sweet jesus, Maggie, the ship avoidance Amazon reviews (1300+ and rising) are just bloody awesome.
Bless you for the gift of laughter. ❤💐💐💋😎