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(Other than the NH primary, in which candidates won who hadn’t won in Iowa, leaving everything still pretty much wide open):
…we must say goodbye to one of the legends of “outsider” music, risque cabaret singer-songwriter Ruth Wallis. The creator of “Davy’s Dinghy,” “Drill ‘Em All,” and “A Pizza Every Night” had finally been (re) discovered in recent years with an off-Broadway revue of her compositions, Boobs! The Musical.
Leno got it all wrong. The line should be, “It’s MONDAY, time for NON-HEADLINES!” Monday morning newspapers’ “top” stories tend to be feature-y or analytical or, in the case of the Venus Velasquez DUI arrest, more than a week old.
Still, there are a few actual items of interest out there.
Turns out, for one thing, that the Coolest Adult any Seattleite of a certain age ever knew, J.P. Patches, has cancer, but still keeps up a rigorous schedule of personal appearances. The Times’s picture showed the legendary local TV funnyman looking more ilke one of Red Skelton’s sad-clown paintings. Alas.
Let’s figure this one out: The Bellinghamsters at Western Washington U. told a male ex-student he couldn’t sell Women of Western swimsuit calendars on campus, because they were allegedly “demeaning to women.” Four years before, the same administration allowed a student organization to screen erotic art movies under the series title Pornfest.
A good student of semiotics would parse her/his way to a consistent line straddling both decisions–we want to encourage students to do it, not just sit around and look in the manner of passive consumers; or, perhaps, a swimsuit calendar represents an awkward intersection of sexuality and fashion, while porn offers a more directly visceral experience and is therefore more subversive of the dominant paradigm.
We must bid a fond adieu this morning to Porter Wagoner, your quintessential Nashville pop star. Besides his own dozens of hits (my favorite: “The Rubber Room”), he had a modest little syndicated TV series for 21 years. The Porter Wagoner Show was a deceptively plain affair, designed to mimic Wagoner’s touring show. Some patter, a baggy-pants comedian, some solo songs, one instrumental number, and a couple numbers by the band’s current “girl singer.” The second woman to fill the latter role was Dolly Parton, with whom Wagoner co-wrote and co-recorded many tracks between 1967 and 1975, when she went solo.
Puget Sound Energy is being sold to Australian and Canadian investors, who will take the state’s largest private utility “private.” That is, no more stock trading; and therefore no pesky SEC reports to file about the company’s finances.
The Puget Sound Light, Traction and Power Company was Seattle’s original electric company, and also its first operator of electrified streetcars. Even after the formation of the municipally-owned Seattle City Light, Puget Power still ran its parallel, competitive electric lines until the 1950s. (The last vestige of Puget Power’s in-city operation is now the independent Seattle Steam, providing competitive electric service to a wide swath of downtown.)
Further public-power initiatives in Tacoma and Snohomish County left Puget Power with a diminished operating turf that happened to be in the path of suburban sprawl. That territory included Snoqualmie, where the company had already dammed Snoqualmie Falls and built what’s now the Salish Lodge.
In the 1990s Puget Power merged with Washington Energy, formerly Washington Natural Gas, formerly Washington Gas Company (or “GASCO”). That company had run a huge smoke-belching coal-fired gasification plant for almost half a century. The plant was rendered obsolete when natural gas pipelines reached here; it eventually became Gas Works Park. For decades after that, the gas company’s most famous landmark was the giant revolving neon sign on its office roof, the Blue Flame (or, in later street jargon, the “blue vagina”).
In recent years, Puget Sound Energy has become under fire for not getting the power back on after windstorms as quickly as Seattle City Light and Tacoma Public Utilities. It’s not all the company’s operating fault. Its service area includes a lot of rural and exurban territories, still serviced by overhead wiring. Still, the company promised last week that the new owners would pour cash in to help modernize its network. Weezell see.
And, oh yeah, the Boston Red Sox effortlessly swept the World Series.
Every now and then one of these “gender” pundits proclaims that political conservatives have absolutely no tolerance for, or vision of, female sexuality.
Bosh.
There is a right-wing female sexuality. Several, in fact. You might not be particularly turned on by/approve of ’em, but they’re there.
This was proven back in the pre-Reagan ’70s, with Marabel Morgan’s once-popular paperback book The Total Woman. In it, Morgan extols the ultra-eager-to-please wife, who might not have a career but who works damned hard to keep energy in the marriage bed.
The current edition’s Amazon page is chock full of juicy, snarky customer comments. Most of the commentors howl at Morgan’s vision of female totality as little more than passive-aggressive bimbodom.
But is Morgan’s fantasy woman really that passe?
Perhaps she’s simply been succeeded by another set of ideals.
Morgan’s vision of the conservative feminine libido belonged to a conservatism that was already fading when her book came out.
It was a conservatism of hierarchy, of rules, of clearly defined social roles. A conservatism of modest luxury and quiet good taste, when business executives at least still talked about prosperity for all; when politicians at least still talked about civility.
Those days are long gone.
The organized thuggery and egomania that are today’s “conservative” culture are topics I’ve ranted about before, and probably will again.
But with a changed culture come changed personal roles. That includes female roles. (I’ve already written that the sole positive thing I can say about Bush is he respects strong women.)
I happen to have had acquaintances of differing degrees with a few of these modern right-wing women. I won’t get into the sordid particulars.
Let’s just say I’ve seen what a new Marabel Morgan might write about in gushing tribute.
I’m sure you can, too.
And as soon as I’ve figured out how to add them newfangled comment threads to this site, I’ll ask you to add your own suggested chapter titles for a new self-help tome, Nookie for Nubile Neocons.
‘Til then, take these as inspiration:
…who have sex with boys (or girls) really be perceived as less icky than men who have sex with girls (or boys)?
…about the latest Republican closet-case scandal, that of Idaho Senator Larry Craig getting busted for lewd conduct in a Minneapolis airport men’s room: TBogg’s “Boys Will Be Boise.”
A male Cinerama employee was accused earlier this week of hiding a video camcorder in the theater’s women’s room.
Reports of this same crime have occurred earlier this year in other cities. At those times, bloggers/pundits (all female) asked out loud why the hell any guy could get off on the sight of a woman on a toilet.
I myself asked the same question out loud in 1999, when Penthouse magazine, in the last years of founder Bob Guccione’s direction, briefly featured professionally-posed pictorials of women urinating.
Such scenes never turned me on. But I tried to figure why anyone else would be.
As best as I could guess, I deduced it must have been something about viewing a woman at a moment when her public persona is as “down” as her slacks.
Sometime circa 2003, I read something by former porn-biz blogger Luke Ford about a porn producer who’d reported some stolen videotape masters or something like that. After the pilf was recovered, a police detective made arrangements to personally deliver it back to the producer. During the handover, the cop said he’d always wanted to meet the porn producer. The cop said he particularly loved XXX videos for the occasional moment when a leading lady, in the peak of passion, would drop all feminine pretense and reveal pure, un-acted emotion.
That moment, I guess, is what toilet fetishists also seek.
But there’s no need to degrade yourself into committing criminal acts in order to play out this fetish (or any other).
In the Internet age, porno images of every kink can be attained quickly and cheaply. Many are created by trained professionals, with unobstructed camera angles and adequate lighting, featuring models who are not only aware and willing but even paid for the job of entertaining you.
…of iPhone hype stories this past week, Steve Jobs is quoted as calling “the human finger the most sophisticated navigation device known to mankind.” I’m sure the Babeland ladies would agree.
…these lists of “the 100 Sexiest Women in the World” that keep popping up. All of them are celebrities of one sort or another (actresses, models, singers, porn queens, one tennis player, and one racecar driver); as if baristas, schoolteachers, policewomen, seamstresses, lady lawyers, etc. can’t be steamin’. All are English speakers and almost all are from the U.S., Canada, or the U.K.; as if there couldn’t be alluring, captivating females in (or from) the rest of the planet. And don’t start me on the uniform mainstream perky thinness of most of the list.
According to some Web site that claims to be authoritative, Seattle ranks 7 on a list of “Top US Erotica Important Cities.” NY/LA/SF are up there, of course, as are Vegas, Miami, and Chicago (the latter in honor of what’s left of Playboy’s head office, much of whose operations have been shipped off to LA and NY). Our reason for getting on the list: “Adult Websites.” (Maybe they didn’t hear that IEG/ClubLove went pffft years ago.)
Other fun alleged-facts on the page: One out of three “visitors to adult websites” are women. Ninety percent of 8-16 year-olds have seen porn online. Twelve percent of all U.S. Web sites are devoted to porn. The U.S. accounts for only 14 percent of “Worldwide Pornography Revenues,” fourth in the world; China (!) and South Korea (!!) lead that category, with fetish-fanatical Japan third. Despite this, “US porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC.” (The latter stat I’m particularly not so sure of; most video and online porn companies are privately held, and reliable financial data about them are notoriously elusive and exaggerated.)
A Pew Research study claims today’s 18-25-year-olds are more tolerant and more Democratic-leaning than their elders, have more casual sex and binge drinking, and are more eager to make tons of money.
