Uncouth Reflections

Question Lady Question

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Question Lady

The Question Lady writes:

How do you deal with people who differ from you politically?

Posted in Politics and Economics | 10 Comments

What I like about . . .

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Fenster

Fenster writes:

Ruben Blades’ Primogenio.

1. The opening section is clever, splendid and musical–especially at higher volumes when the bass and percussion come in. The piece starts with bagpipes and sounds almost, but not quite, that it is going to be played straight in Celtic fashion. Then–boom!–it reveals itself in its underlying Latin glory. The continued interplay between the Latin rhythms and the almost Scottish theme is quite nice.

2. There’s a side of salsa-style singing that almost feels like a recitative, with the singer looking you directly in the eye and talking to you. Blades is particularly good at this, especially in the call-and-response middle sections.

3. It is nice to see kind of music that Americans think of as ethnic adopt a world pose. The lyrics to the song are a kind of ode to Africa in terms of human beginnings, but it is less an ode to Africa per se than a celebration of human connectedness. On the one level, it’s a multicultural thing. One another, it is Blades making a forceful statement that Latino culture is large enough, and self-confident enough, to do its own appropriation thing.

Posted in Music | Leave a comment

Hurricane Wellies

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

After a week of Hurricane Sandy-caused inconvenience, the Question Lady and I are enjoying a return to normal life. Seldom have dependable electricity and running water (let alone wi-fi) struck us as so wonderful. During the adventure, I made some notes and took some snapz, and I’ll be sharing a few of them over the next couple of days.

First up: Man, was I amazed by the number of young women who, during the bad weather, were going around wearing variations on Wellingtons, the British rain boot. We saw hundreds and hundreds of young women in Wellies. I’d had no idea that these boots had become such a popular style in America. A few examples:

Two questions:

How on earth do young women all over the country manage to seize on style ideas at the exact same moment? Do they read the same magazines and watch the same TV shows?
Are young women sheep or what?

Bonus Links

Wellies get a thumb’s-up from The Manolo. God knows they are pretty cute.
Wikipedia has a good entry on the history of the Wellington boot.

Posted in Personal reflections, Photography | Tagged Fashion, The Manolo, Wellington boots | 15 Comments

Question Lady Question

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Question Lady

The Question Lady writes:

Whatever happened to political parties?

Posted in Politics and Economics | 7 Comments

Linkathon

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

Gregory Cochran on how quickly evolution can act on human populations.
Dennis Mangan, a blogging pioneer as well as my favorite reactionary blogger, is, after a hiatus, blogging once again.
Fascinating cultural history from F. Roger Devlin about Madison Grant, an early conservationist who was also — horrors! — a eugenicist and an immigration restrictionist. One lesson to be drawn from the piece: The political categories of other ages seldom line up the way ours do.

Posted in Politics and Economics, Science | Tagged Dennis Mangan, Environmentalism, Gregory Cochran, Madison Grant, politics | Leave a comment

Body Hair, Photoshop, These Kids These Days …

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

Young people today seem entirely grossed-out by body hair. My old-codger mind makes sense of the phenomenon this way: Either (for whatever reasons) today’s young adults have remained developmentally at the level of 12 year olds; or they’ve been affected on such a deep level by the glossiness of today’s media (and especially Photoshopping) that real bodies (flesh, hair, textures, etc) don’t look alluring to them, they look like a failure to be fantasy-perfect.

The old push-pull tension between fantasy and reality that previous generations learned to take as an important aspect of real erotic experience seems to elude them entirely. They expect the fantasy, darn it, and nothing but. They can’t even imagine that cultivating a taste for flipping back and forth between fantasy and reality can enhance erotic experience overall. It’d just spoil their fantasy-lovin’ (and, to my mind, solipsistic) fun, I suppose.

Hey, is it a total coincidence that fantasy spectacles (especially sci-fi) are ‘way more central to today’s pop culture than they were to the pop culture of many earlier eras?

All that said, I can definitely remember encountering a few ’70s bushes that even in those funky years struck me as needing a little judicious pruning …

Posted in Personal reflections, Sex | Tagged 1970s, body hair, bushes, Photoshop, youth today | 7 Comments

Helicoptering

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

You hear a lot about helicopter parenting these days. The term refers to the tendency of contemporary parents to monitor and assist their adorable little meat spores at every micro-stage of their development — to cajole and fertilize and prune them, like anthropomorphic bonsai trees. I’ve dated a few products of helicopter parenting. Odd experience. The girls were both hyper-confident and exceedingly fragile; they were glittering yet brittle, like people made of glass. I think this was largely because their sense of self was based almost entirely on external validation — on the attention they received from parents and teachers and boyfriends. And so they were like overgrown teacher’s pets, constantly striving for the comforting buzz of an A-plus grade or a silver star, and yet never quite knowing why. In their lack of introspection and basic feeling for others, they scarcely resembled people at all.

I think that’s partly why I find this ad for Google’s Chrome to be so loaded. Have a look:

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