Holiday Greetings
To each of you whose snailmail address I don’t have. And for those I do, a sneak preview.
Althouse: the Algonquin of Our Time
Okay, so I’ve outed myself by publishing this prematurely. I was reading the 200+ comments on this Althouse post about Tiger Woods’s women (even if you don’t care about celebrity, and I certainly don’t, this is such an archetypal plunge-from-grace story; how many public men throw it all away for nookie? but how many have quite this much to lose?) and admiring the display of flashing wits at that virtual Round Table. I have trouble making it through all the comments (I don’t get updates), so I thought I would pick out some gems for you. (It takes nothing away that you often have to pick them out of the trash. It’s enough that there are so many.) I didn’t get all the way through the comments, though. So I may add more, little by little.
Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) said: “A rewarding marriage is hard and somewhat angular. Eventually you grind the worst points off each other.”
William said: “Repression is like a weight bearing exercise that strengthens the libido.”
bagoh20 said: “Being good is easy when you have few temptations.”
Arturius said: the truism that rich men go for looks, beautiful women go for money “explains why guys like Mick Jagger or Steven Tyler who look like science projects gone awry can score supermodels.”
William said: “People with Tiger’s money and Elin’s looks do not suffer tragic ends. They live high up on Olympus and the ordinary rules do not apply. They play at normalcy for awhile–the way Marie Antoinette played at being a milk maid–but then the upward lift of their world pulls them from our banality. They go back to frolicking among the immortals, and we go back to our dull marriages and higher morality.”
shoutingthomas said: “What kind of world is it when a guy who has $100 billion can’t get a little pussy?”
Caption Contest
“Season’s Greetings,” by Barry Blitt.
Kudos to The New Yorker.
Perhaps words can add nothing, only subtract. Go ahead, take the challenge.
Ham-let
(I just made this post “sticky,” not knowing what that meant. Turns out it means it stays at the top, so you can watch it again! Look for new posts directly below. Let’s keep it here for a while.)
(H/T: The Anchoress)
The Last Instrument Fit for a Gentleman to Play.
A little music by Sylvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750) to warm your cold, snowy evening, played by the incomparable Robert Barto. This is a Courante in Bb major.
Weiss was an almost exact contemporary of J.S. Bach (1685-1750), a friend of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and a sometimes friendly competitor with Johann Sebastian Bach himself.
Weiss’ style is astonishingly like Bach’s. It’s pretty obvious that Bach’s lute music, like the rest of his output, was the ultimate expression of its genre. You can hear another take on this style, however, by Weiss. Although Bach has long been given first place among Baroque composers, and perhaps composers generally, in lute music, at least, J.S. Bach seems to have been only first among equals.
Here’s another Weiss piece, a Presto in A major. It’s recorded live in front of an audience, so you hear more room echo and noise. I think it’s a wonderful fantasy to imagine having this gentleman over to play by your fire on a December evening:
(Reposted from A Quiet Evening.)
Porn: Harmful or Helpful?
They threw a study of male “porn virgins,” and nobody came.
Mind you, the sensational title of the article — “All Men Watch Porn, Scientists Find” — is misleading. The study was done at the University of Montreal; the subjects were in their 20s. That means they were Canadian (insert bad Canada joke, e.g., what else is there to do up there?), and members of the Internet generation, for whom parental controls are not hard to circumvent and porn is just a mouse click away. Indeed, the average age of first exposure was 10 — an age when peeping is motivated more by curiosity and mischief than by deeper, darker currents, which might nonetheless draw a 10-year-old in.
So, do all men watch porn? Or, better put, have all men watched porn? Have some sworn never to watch it, the way some people never smoke a cigarette? Has anyone watched it once and never again? Are there men who have watched it, found it dangerous or repellent or boring, and quit? Is it possible to consume porn regularly and not become addicted, or desensitized to real sex with real women? For those (if any) not at risk of addiction is porn even useful, as a harmless (no risk of disease, no actual infidelity) safety valve for the alleged innate superabundance and variety-craving of male desire? Note that frequent ejaculation appears protective against prostate cancer (though not against benign prostate enlargement). Are the possible benefits outweighed by spiritual and emotional harm? Or is that a lot of puritanical fussing, making a mountain out of a molehill?
I’m really curious about this issue. You might even want to set up an anonymous e-mail account so you can comment frankly. (It will be like a masked ball — we can try to guess who’s who!)
“Tim’s Revived, See How He Rises!”
This seems the only song with which to salute the passing of Liam Clancy.
Unless it’s this one.
Ambiance 