If Jesus made a sitcom it would be All In The Family.

I'd like to say a few words about Norman Lear, who's mostly famous nowadays (if he is famous nowadays) as the founder of The People For The American Way, which is a First Amendment advocacy group that's big enough to get onto Free Republic's list of scary left-lib organizations, but not to get mentioned by Glenn Beck: Every generation has its wunderkinder, its reputed super-geniuses, who can't seem to touch anything without it's turning into gold ...until suddenly it doesn't any more. The Eighties had Matt Groening; the Nineties had Klasky-Csupo; the Two-Thousandsies have Trey Parker and Matt Stone; and the Seventies had Norman Lear.

His breakout hit was All In The Family, which aired on Tuesday nights on CBS, from 1971 through 1979. He was 28 years old, and his skit-based comedy program, Turn On, had just been canceled (after just one episode) by ABC. After that debacle, ABC was not enthusiastic about taking on another Lear series, especially not one with a main character who was a "foul-mouthed bigot". CBS, on the other hand, was looking to update their image, after a decade of specializing in hayseed comedies like The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction. Something edgy like All In The Family suited them right down to the ground.

They were careful though. They knew the series broke new ground, in terms of language and subject matter, and they prepared as best as they could to handle any objections. Before the first episode, they ran a disclaimer, which read: "The program you are about to see is All in the Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show -- in a mature fashion -- just how absurd they are.". And they opened several extra telephone switchboards to handle the calls of complaint that they expected would come pouring in.

As it happened, it took a full season for All In The Family to get off the ground, but once it did, it was a phenomenon. Audiences loved the show about Archie and Edith, and their kids Mike and Gloria. Young people rooted for the kids, because they were liberal, idealistic (and in Gloria's case, cute as a button as well, and with a super-mega awesome wardrobe my friends and I would have killed for). Older people rooted for Archie and Edith, who had at least been able to hold things together, through good times and bad, and stayed together with most of their love intact. Angry conservatives rooted for Archie, who said in public what they only said in private (even if he did get slapped down by someone, by the end of every episode). And he was considered such an accurate portrait of his type of uneducated, bigoted working man, that by the Presidential election season of 1972, commentators were talking about "The Archie Bunker vote."

Hell on earth or today's America NSFW

We've all heard it, the lies and deceit spread by the media and the governmental factions. We've all heard the fear mongering floating down to us from the top of Capitol Hill. We've all seen government officials ignore our best interest to line their own pockets with gold. How can we not have? It's all that ever happens in the political world. The political system in America is broken beyond repair. Politicians no longer care about the US citizens. They don't give a damn whether we're freezing to death or starving to death while they cavort around at their fancy coke parties. Politicians don't even have to have a decent IQ to be elected. Look at Sarah Palin! She's only in it for the money and they still flaunt her about and want her to run for president. Really? The whole Republican party is built on Fox news superstars who decided they could spread their insanity better if they were sitting pretty in the Oval office. Do you think they really care about Americans? Do you think they really care about the numerous crises facing us? They're fucking insane! Fox News is a plague that has infected the American population and is now sucking them dry. Its tendrils creep into their brains and soon their brainless slaves working for the Murdoch empire. This can't go on people! If we let Conserva-facists rule our country we're screwed! That's like saying "Bend over America and let me dildo you in the ass." Conservatism? More like Limbaughism! Has anyone else noticed how high Ayn Rand has been elevated in the Tea Party movement? She's like a god to them! What ever happened to "Thou shall not worship false idols"? They call themselves Christian. Libertarian-ism is never going to work. Don't they get that? Are they really stupid enough that they can sit back and watch their country being destroyed without it bothering them in the least? My father once told me that it was easier to find Atlantis than it was to find an intelligent Tea Partier. There is no hope for America if we keep letting the Conserva-Facists gain more power. Money talks and it says "Fuck you America!" This cannot go on. The Democrats are really no better. They cavort around Washington DC giving in to every single demand the Conserva-Facists make and basically asking to be tied up and anal raped. Meanwhile, the citizens of America have no choice but to watch and wait. If they try to spread the word about the corruption occurring in the capitol, they get stalked by the CIA or thrown in a federal prison. Freedom of speech anyone? Not anymore! The lawmakers up on Capitol Hill won't listen to a petition. They actually make up petty little problems with them  to get them thrown out. Damn! It's a sad day to see when the American citizen no longer has his freedom. The Conserva-Facists are denying us public education as they slash more and more money from its budget. They steal  away our Social Security. They throw around money like it grew on trees and then blame the Democrats and the Muslims. They deny good citizens certain rights based on race or sexuality. What's next, a resurrection of the KKK? Look people, if we don't do something soon we're screwed. Go out and hold a sign. Sign a petition. Write a letter to your congressman or the President. Just do something to keep us from becoming the next Nazi Germany. The next time you hear from me, I might very well be in prison. I've said some very "damaging" things. Conserva-Facist fools. I'm so sorry for the course language, but this is a topic I feel strongly about.

HyperSmash

After the Apocalypse, there will be cake.

Christian conservatives are way, way better with metaphors than you ever thought they were. Either that or they're totally insane. I'll warn you right from the start, this post is written entirely from an outsider's perspective, about a phenomenon that has never made much sense to me, not even when I was growing up in a conservative Christian church myself. I am describing something that seems profoundly weird to me, about how Christian conservatives look at Jesus, and hope for his Second Coming.

When outsiders think of Christian conservatives, they generally picture a bunch of angry haters, scary nutballs like the mother in Carrie, who like nothing better than to envision the day when Jesus is going to return and start kicking some serious ass on all the nonbelievers and sinners in the world.

Corporations don't give a sh**, and the government slacks off before the job's done: A short history of America's public safety laws

America's history for the past 150 or years or so, can be summarized with the words "growing urbanization". More and more of the population started living closer and closer together; fewer and fewer people were living the Little House on the Prairie lifestyle of growing your own food, and building your own house, and relying only on yourself and a couple of close neighbors. In other words, people were starting to have to rely on the kindness of strangers. When I say "strangers", I mean Armour Meatpacking (made famous in the 1890's, when they sold the Army 500,000 pounds of beef, that had had already been returned as inedible, when they tried to sell them in England), and Dr. R.V. Pierce (who sold patent medicines that were mostly opiates and lead, for disorders ranging from ovarian tumors to masturbation), and by "kindness", I mean that aside from a few state laws regulating local products, and a regulation against impure tea, there were no laws in this country to restrict companies from selling whatever they wanted, and calling it whatever they wanted.

Ten Strikes You're Out

   Little Jimmy is going away for a long time. Five years to be precise. Why? He linked to a Youtube video that streamed copyrighted content. When the media companies found out about this and the fact that it had received 15 views they wanted Jimmy's head. Poor little Jimmy. He was only ten when they sent him away to prison. He's going to have a hard time there.
   Do you want this to happen to your child? Do you want this to happen to you? It might. Senator Amy Klobuchar has recently proposed a new "ten strikes" bill that adds public performance to copyright laws. Seems harmless enough right? Movies have been warning against that kind of thing for years when they say not to host public performances of the movie. Right? Right? Wrong! Public performance is defined loosely enough that Youtube could be considered public performance. If your sweet little girl decides that she wants to sing along to her favorite Glee song and post it Youtube, she might just be shoved in a jail cell for the next five years. Nice. If she's lucky she'll only be raped repeatedly and not killed. That's outrageous. The bill has not been voted on yet and you better hope that it doesn't get passed.
Demand Progress
Check out Demand Progress' extensive coverage of the new bill and make sure that you send a letter to your congress man. Otherwise you might end up in a prison for nothing more than lip-syncing to your favorite Lady Gaga song. Oh and get this, you get a longer jail cell for breaking the copyright laws then you do for molesting a child. If I had to choose a crime, I think I'd hump a kid before I posted a lip-sync. Lord knows I want to get out of prison sooner.





HyperSmash

Fat Clothes

I've talked before about how my mom made me go to Diet Watchers meetings (not Weight Watchers, Diet Watchers; I think the copyright police caught up with them shortly after my mom and I reached goal weight). I went. And I quite enjoyed the meetings, which were led by a nice Jewish grandmother with a sense of humor, who wore embroidered bell-bottoms and tight tops, to show off her slim figure.  I wanted to be just like her when I grew up.

Who I didn't want to be like, was all the other ones: Flabby middle-aged ladies, like Divine without the attitude, they wore short-sleeved muumuus, and their upper arm flab used to hang out from the sleeves and wave around whenever they moved their hands. I was scarred for life by those ladies. I didn't want to be fat like them. And I didn't want to own a muumuu.

And I wasn't fat. In fact I weighed practically the same thing, from the time I was 14 to the time I was 20: 155 pounds, of which most of it was muscle, because I used to walk everywhere, miles and miles, and for hours and hours, however far I needed to go, to get where I was going. I used to drop about 10 pounds every year or so, when my mom's guilting started to get to me, and then put it back on again as soon as I started eating normally again. I lived in a perpetual state of tight waistbands, and was constantly cycling blouses in and out of my wardrobe, depending on if I could get the buttons to close down the front or not. -- I had this one size twelve red print dress that I never wore, because I could never get down to wearing a size twelve for long enough, and it finally went out of style at the back of my wardrobe. -- Here's me when I was 18:

I remember being very impressed with the fluffy blue thing they made us wear for the picture, because I didn't have to worry about whether it would fit over my ass.  I never got so fat that I had to shop in the fat ladies' section at the department store though. And I never visited a Lane Bryant.

Porn (there, I made you look)

A lot of people like to talk about how porn's gotten more disgusting over the years. They'll talk regretfully about the demure Playboy centerfolds of bygone days, and contrast them with the vulgar, vulgar stuff you can see these days, just by turning the SafeSearch off on Google Images (try typing "wet"). But you know, this is a really unproductive discussion. For one thing, it's been going on for a long time now. Geezers nowadays might regret those tasteful nude images of Marilyn, but back in the golden days of the '60's that they remember so fondly, there were plenty of geezers mourning the demise of the pin-up, and grumbling about swingers, and hippies, with their disgusting "free love". If you go back far enough, you're just going to get to 1920's-era fathers, grousing about flaming youth, and how disgusting Joan Crawford looked, dancing the charleston, and going on and on about how much better the world was, back when boys still fantasized about Harrison Fisher girls. Do you really want to have that conversation?

Underwear

I read a story once. I read it long, long ago, and I don't remember where, which is kind of amazing, because I no sooner read it, than it got stuck in my head, and has been fascinating me ever since:

It took place during the Renaissance, someplace in Europe that was north enough to get really cold in the wintertime. And it told about this court lady, a lady-in-waiting to a queen or something, who was following along in the procession behind her royal mistress as was her duty. And this lady needed to go, really, really badly, but she didn't want to leave the procession, and she certainly didn't want to call everyone else to a halt, just because she'd been caught short. And since ladies didn't wear underpants back then, and since she had a huge wooden farthengale holding her skirts away from her body as was the style at the time, she decided just to pee as she walked. But it was very, very cold that day, and according to the story, the poor lady's pee-stream froze solid as it was leaving her body, and the next thing she knew, she was rooted to the ground by a pillar of her own frozen-solid pee.

I've wondered ever since then: Could it really happen?

This story has very little to do with the history of undergarments, I know, and the main reason I led off with it, is because reading it as a teenager was how I learned that underpants had not always been as commonly used as they were in my own time. It was kind of a disturbing revelation. What made it more disturbing, was that it wasn't something people really came right out and discussed directly. You had to piece the information together out of lewd hints, and naughty, embarrassing stories. There are stories out there about Queen Catherine of France, spanking the bare bottoms of her serving women, for instance, or one creepy, perverted story that I read in The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, about how as a boy, he once hid behind some bushes and watched peasant women peeing on the ground while they were standing together talking.

The reality is much simpler (and much less gross) though: Ladies began wearing undergarments that covered their butts in the Nineteenth Century. Actually, they did not cover their butts, as cotton undergarments of the time were were split down the middle in back, as in this image:

While the long woolen kind, called union suits, had patch-openings in back to let the butt out, so a lady could go to the bathroom without having to do too much adjustment to her elaborate clothing.

Under-drawers were a cost-saving measure, a way of keeping one's outer clothes for longer. Gentlemen took to wearing them sooner than ladies, for this very reason: They wore close-fitting britches, which rubbed up against their butts and various other smelly parts of their bodies, and which were frequently made out of various expensive materials such as satin or embroidered velvet. Some of those probably couldn't even be cleaned safely, and certainly it would have been cheaper even for the ones that could, to save yourself having to do it very often, by wearing some nice linen or woolen undergarments underneath.

Ladies on the other hand, wore nice, loose-skirted gowns, that let lots of air get in, to freshen up all their smelly places. They wore chemises under their dresses, which basically protected the underarm area and the torso, in case things started getting sweaty there. They wore corsets, depending on the style of the time, to make their waists look slim and pretty.

But it wasn't until improvements in textile manufacture made cotton fabric (for under-drawers), and woolen knit fabric (for union suits) easy to afford, that they bothered wearing garments that covered places no one was going to see anyway, garments that were, after all, only going to need cleaning themselves as well as the other cleaning that already needed to be done.

At that as I have said, they wore undergarments that were open in the back. This was probably because, with all the clothes Victorian ladies were already having to shift around at the time, they didn't want to make getting to the bathroom any more difficult than it already was. It does make you think though, that it probably saved on the washing, if a lady wasn't extra-careful when she was wiping herself. -- Remember, you wiped your butt with dry corncobs in the old days, or with pages from the Sears Catalog, not with nice, pillowy-soft Charmin.

It's also amusing to think though, that the crotch-less panties your friends all thought were so naughty that they had to pile them on you for presents, "for the honeymoon," at your wedding shower, were just normal everyday wear for all ladies, back in the Victorian Age.

It wasn't until the end of the Nineteenth Century that women started wearing under-drawers that were sewn up in back as well as in front. French can-can dancers, were the first ones to do it; just because they made a living showing themselves off in front of an audience, didn't mean they wanted to show everything, to every man who paid for a seat (maybe they charged more for the good stuff, one-on-one).



As usually happens, it wasn't long until regular ladies wanted to copy the styles the loose women had started. By the 1920's, closed panties were the only kinds still being sold. Ladies found them useful, because with skirts being shorter, it was way, way easier for what was underneath to show by accident. All it took was a stray breeze:

Or an extra-wild night out, dancing with your boyfriend:

And you were going to be awfully glad Sears wasn't selling those split-panties any more.

HyperSmash

Ayn Rand

Heroine of the American Right Ayn Rand was a woman who, when reality bit her on the butt, she ran from her principles. The most recent story of course, is the one that tells how this world-famous libertarian railed against government aid her whole life, but rushed to grab benefits for herself, when her smoking habit gave her lung cancer, but it is just one of many. And really, can anyone be surprised? This was a woman who preached the courage of facing reality, but took cozy refuge in dreams her whole life.

Myself, I figured this out back when I read her books for the first time as a teenager: The first copies I had, were from my parents' library, dusty old paper-backed editions of Anthem and We The Living, and Atlas Shrugged. I loved every page of them. I loved the passion, and the free-market ideals, which went well with the Reagan Republicanism my parents had taught me. And I especially loved the cover photo of Ms. Rand that was on the back of each book:



This slim, pretty woman with the dark eyes and the passionate stare was the very embodiment of the individualistic romanticism she stood for, I thought. Surely she was what Dagney Taggart would have looked like if she were a real person.

Those were old copies of the books that I was reading. It was no wonder, I thought, that they had an old picture, of someone who was after all, still alive, on the backs of them. It wasn't until I got to college and went out and bought my own copy of Atlas Shrugged, and saw that the author photo had not been changed, that I started to wonder. After all, this was what Ayn Rand looked like in the early 80's, when I started college:



I know, I know. We all get older. And precious few of us get prettier as we age. But wouldn't Dagney Taggart have shown what she looked like in real time? Wasn't that the kind of gutsy individualist she was? ...That her creator was? I won't say I went right out and got rid of all my Ayn Rand books or anything, but in my mind, this was evidence of vanity on her part, and I thought less of her.

Actually, her books sort of led to the same conclusion. They were romantic books, not in the Nietzschean sense that she intended, but in the sense that they resembled the Barbara Cartland books that I also enjoyed back then, when I was young and foolish. They were one-dimensional characters, who were either good or evil, and never nuanced or partly one and partly the other. And you could always tell whether a character was good or bad by how they looked. Dagney Taggart, heroine of Atlas Shrugged for instance, was slim and drop-dead gorgeous, while her rival, the cynical "moocher" Lillian Reardon was aging and running to fat. The plotlines were simple conflicts of good and evil, with the good always winning, and the heroine always ending up with the most attractive male available. Yes, they were basically romance novels, and after I grew skeptical of Rand's so-called "philosophy", that was how I read them.

Attack of the 50 Ft Advertisments

Thanks to Moresay.com for the image

Have you ever noticed how aggressive advertising campaigns have become? The consumer is flooded with heavily biased information that can influence them to make decisions and purchase products that they wouldn't have otherwise. We see ads telling us to buy certain brands of dishwasher detergent and we see ads telling us to eat at certain restaurants. Companies like McDonalds and Burger King use small toys and games to draw children to their products and images of luscious food products to draw hungry adults. However, there isn't really a way for consumers to differentiate between which products are worth buying and which products should be left behind. We live in a world with an overblown market and no restrictions on advertising. Some ad campaigns even attack other products with silly phrases and accusations. I'm sure all the children of the 80's remember the bit wars between Nintendo and Sega. Do you remember the ads Sega ran in which they said things like "You can't do this on Nintendo" and "Genesis does what Nintendon't"? If not take, take a moment to watch the ad below.

Really? Do you remember the ads for the 3do? They referred to the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo as being "baby toys". Ads for Finish dishwasher detergent attack Cascade and claim that it leaves the dishes with dried on food stains. Ads for Swiffer mops claim that sponge mops simply spread germs and do not kill them. How is the consumer supposed to figure out what's true and whats  BS? There are websites like Rip-Off Report and magazines like Consumer Report who's sole goal is to weed out the bad products and the scams and warn people.  If you search for a product online you can often find reviews from other poor saps who bought the product. But what if you're the sap who buys the product? You're out of luck. I really think some rules and regulations should be applied to the advertising world to keep them from alienating consumers.

HyperSmash

Same-Sex Marriage

So I was driving my son to school today, and we were listening to Stephanie Miller on the radio. And this caller came on the line who was complaining that Stephanie's show spent "way too much time on gay marriage any more". He told her she needed to understand that if gay marriage was going to be legalized, a whole lot of other things would need to be legalized too, such as polygamy, and marriages between men and dogs. So Steph and her co-hosts responded in the standard way that most people do respond to this allegation, which was to pooh-pooh this argument. The argument was just silliness, they said, nobody was stepping up in favor of bestiality or pedophile marriages. And then they made some jokes about New Coke and marriage being a brand, that were moderately funny.

But they left me kind of unsatisfied. It seemed like there was a flaw to the logic there. And I found myself wondering, well now, what if in the push for marriage equality, someone did step up and demand the right to marry their dog (or, as in, say, Korea, their pillow)? Aren't there better arguments out there besides just, "well, nobody wants that to happen"?

Fundamentalist Science-Haters

I don't like to talk about global climate change, because the subject depresses me. It seems fairly obvious to me that climate change is happening. Consensus among the vast majority of scientists throughout the world is that it's happening. The US Military is so sure that it's happening, that they've already started to put contingency plans into place. Satellites show that the polar ice cover is steadily shrinking. Extreme weather events are becoming more common all over the world. And yet here in the US we continue to do nothing. We keep on buying our big gas-guzzlers and filling them up with $4.00 gas. We keep on making our hourlong commutes, from a job at one end of the county, to an expensively heated and cooled home in a suburb at the other end. And we angrily (and stupidly) deny even the possibility of a man-made climate crisis in our future.

What? The climate is changing? Don't be ridiculous! We had snow this winter! Fox news says that means there isn't any! It frustrates the hell out of me when my fellow countrymen act dumb like this. Experts are called expert for a reason. They study one thing, for a long long time, and when they make pronouncements about it, it's only after careful thought and lots of research. Unlike blowhards like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, who get paid handsomely for stoking emotion and keeping their audience ignorant. I want to see people pay attention to the real scientists, the ones who know the subject and can be counted on describing it accurately, not just because we're running out of time to make the changes we'll need to make to protect the climate we're used to, but because I don't like seeing people voluntarily choose ignorance over fact.

But I think I know why so many Americans do it. And I think you can find the explanation by looking at how we do religion:

The Royal Wedding

For people of my generation, the real royal wedding will always be the one that took place on July 29, 1981, when Diana Spencer shared vows with her Prince, who was some 14 years older (and at the time we all thought he was so old, and what would a girl her age want with a geezer like that). Diana brought romance back, she brought puffy-skirted wedding gowns back -- She brought hats back for crying out loud, after a good decade-and-a-half, where no one wore them at all except for little old grandmothers. -- and for a while there, all of us, were transfixed by her, even the ones who lost interest later on.

And nowadays we look rather pityingly, on the hype surrounding the wedding of William (who we remember in diapers) and Kate Middleton, who's kind of ordinary-looking really, kind of like Lindsay Lohan, only without the coke-fueled burnout.

Diet Watchers (Notes from a time when dieting sucked even harder than it does now)

All my life, I've tended a little toward the fat side. I've had my times of being larger, and my times of being smaller, but when you divide th world up between the people who can eat a 6-pack of Hershey bars and wash it down with a McDouble Value Meal and still zip their jeans the next morning, and the ones who can't, I've always fallen firmly the second category. Here's me in 6th grade; I don't think I look all that fat in this picture (although my parents said I was huge), but I'll admit, the leotards I wore for ballet practice on Tuesdays were getting harder and harder to squeeze into.



DIET WATCHER'S GUIDE: A PROVEN METHOD OF WEIGHT REDUCTION BASED ON THE GROUP PROGRAMS OF DIET WATCHER INC.And this was when my mom and I both joined Diet Watchers. For those of you who have never heard of it (which is probably all of you), Diet Watchers was a diet program based, like Weight Watchers, on nutritional guidelines developed by Dr. Norman Jolliffe, of the New York City Board of Health, and incorporated by a couple of ladies with weight problems, named Ann Gold and Sara Welles Briller.

The two programs are so similar, that I frankly am amazed that Ann and Sara ever managed to get theirs incorporated. These days they'd see their now-shrunken butts sued for copyright infringement as soon as they convened the first meeting. But these were the free-and-easy 1970's, and anyone was free to do their own thing, which apparently included being able to start meetings under practically the same name as another diet plan, teaching people to follow a practically identical program, and making money by selling them books with yummy recipes in them, such as Mock Sweet Potato Pudding (the mockery, in this case, coming from the fact that sweet potatoes were forbidden by the Diet Watchers' program; LOL, those orangey vegetables you just gobbled, were actually summer squashes in disguise).

Weight Watchers was already a very successful program, by the time my mom and I started out to lose weight back in 1973. They had meetings, and recipe cards with pretty-colored pictures on them, and everything. Diet Watchers, was like a low-rent cousin, with only two cookbooks for sale, and no pictures in either of them, and recipe cards that were mimeographed by the local group-leaders, rather than pre-printed by the company and full-color gorgeous.

In her book The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan, Wendy Mc'Clure has already done an awesome job of showing just how ugly and disturbing-looking even the best food photos from the era could be (especially food with names like Inspiration Soup and Fish Balls), although she's helped out of course, by the fact that the food in most old photos looks like barf. If you want to see more of the horrors of 70's-era diet food, you should definitely find a copy of her book and read it, because it's laugh-aloud funny. If you want to read more about what the food tasted like, stay here.

The Workhouse and School Testing

Whenever you find someone doing useless, uninteresting work, you can be sure you're seeing an unequal power distribution in action. For example, take the bad child who acts up in school, and is set to writing sentences for his teacher: His writing them doesn't do the teacher any good, it doesn't do him any good (because if writing "I will not kick the Principal/ steal lunch money/ or whatever," the first time doesn't change him any, writing it 99 times more certainly won't either). Why is he writing? It's to make sure he understands that the teacher is the boss, and he isn't.

You can find examples of this kind of unequal power distribution throughout history, but probably the best example of all time was the workhouse of 19th century England. Born out of the arrogant and judgmental attitudes of Victorian aristocrats, the workhouse was seen as a solution, to the "problem" of poor people getting government aid without doing anything in return.

Racial Prejudicing in the Warriors Book Series

Fireheart

At first glance, the Warriors series of books are about feral cats who have established tribal governments and embark upon wild adventures. However there are also some strong undertones of racism. "Kitty-Pets", cats who were born and raised in captivity, are not allowed on clan turf and are banned from ever becoming a part of the clans.

Writing Fanfiction

Fanfiction has a kind of a disreputable reputation. This is based, I think, on the fact that it first came to the public's attention through the Star Trek fandom. Star Trek fans, as everyone thinks they know have no life (Everyone also thinks they know that once, at a fan convention, William Shatner told all the Trekkies to "get a life", but actually that's from a Saturday Night Live skit). Anything to do with them, is automatically vaguely comical. Also, fanfiction is not just associated with the Star Trek fandom, but with what a lot of people might think was the most embarrassing part of it, which is the pairing of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock as lovers. I don't know why it is, but the fact is, there are an awful lot of people in the general public, who are so conventionally-minded that they don't like to see any characters paired, except for the ones who are couples in the original material. And of course back when the Star Trek fandom was first getting big, and the first Kirk/Spock stories were being published, same sex love was still considered fairly disturbing by a majority of the general public.

Cigarettes

Today cigarettes are mostly famous for being highly addictive, and hugely dangerous (although many of us still can't help admitting that a person does look awfully cool when they're smoking one). And it's common knowledge that the tobacco industry had to pay out a huge settlement in 1998 to make up for having covered up their knowledge about the dangers of cigarette smoking for most of the Twentieth Century.

But if you've been alive for more than a few decades as I have been, or if you've studied a little history even, maybe you've noticed that talking about the dangers of smoking is not exactly a new thing. Maybe you've seen ads like this one from 1930, which mention the irritating effects of cigarette smoke:



Or this one from 1935 which touts how great Camel cigarettes are, compared with those others that "get your wind":



Perhaps you've read that cigarettes used to be called coffin nails, or that an old Australian nickname for them was gaspers. Perhaps you've wondered: How long have people actually known that cigarettes are bad for you?

It was after the automation of the cigarette-rolling industry in the 1880's led to a reduction in prices, that cigarette smoking first began to grow popular. There is evidence to suggest however, that the tobacco used in those first early cigarettes was coarse and rough-tasting, so that smokers probably did not inhale. Smoking without inhaling, while not a good thing, is a less dangerous way of smoking.

It was Dr. Isaac Adler, in his book Primary Malignant Growths of the Lung a Bronchi, who first made an anecdotal connection between cigarettes and lung cancer. The first actual research proving the link, wasn't published until 1929, however. And by then cigarette makers had consolidated their place at the center of American society. Cigarettes were given away free to soldiers serving overseas during World War I. And in 1929, the publicist Edward Bernays won what is probably the biggest public relations triumph in history, when he made the connection between smoking and women's liberation, by persuading a group of debutantes to march in the New York City Easter Parade, smoking their torches of freedom.



Further research on the dangers of smoking came only slowly. In 1950, British researcher Richard Doll published his study showing links between smoking and lung cancer and heart disease. Following in 1956, convincing proof of that link was shown by the British Doctor's Study. Public opinion in America began to move gradually away from smoking after that, but even so, the move was a slow one.

As near as I can tell, the reason for that is twofold: First of all, it has been shown by documented proof that the tobacco industry actively hid evidence that smoking cigarettes is dangerous for many years. In addition though, I think it was the anti-smoking forces themselves, who helped keep smoking popular.

The anti-smoking movement, you understand, began in the 1830's, before there was any evidence at all that smoking was dangerous. Activists from the American prohibition movement spoke out against smoking for its role in "creating a morbid or diseased thirst" which only liquor could quench. The Prussian government made a law saying smokers had to shield their cigars behind a wire mesh contraption, to keep sparks from falling on the skirts of ladies nearby. Into the Twentieth Century, cigarette the powers that be said that smoking was "unladylike". They condemned the flappers of the 1920's for smoking in the street, as well as for other such supposedly unladylike behaviors as shortening their skirts and allowing boys to kiss them on dates.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that this kind of condemnation probably encouraged people to smoke instead of stopping them. It's like the anti-drug films our teachers used to make us watch in class in the 1970's, that kept telling us smoking a single joint was going to turn us into strung-out heroin abusers or LSD trippers flying out of ten-story windows, long after most of us had actually tried marijuana and found out differently.



Scare tactics don't really work so well unless they're connected up with some real facts. Sometimes they don't work very well even if there are some facts behind them, because the facts end up taking a back seat to the overblown hype. A lot of the kids I went to school with went on to try cocaine, and a lot of the other BIG, TERRIBLE DRUGS we were all warned about, because so many of the warnings we were given were so obviously dumb, that they stopped taking any of them seriously.

I suspect the same thing happened with cigarettes. After years of stuffy old ladies saying dumb things, like "no lady smokes", smoking came to be seen as cool, and emancipated. Men smoked to look "manly", and women smoked to keep up with them, and finally you end up with so much smoking going on that I imagine the average room must have smelled like those horrid designated Smokers' Rooms that you're sometimes unlucky enough to have to rent when you show up too late at the Holiday Inn Express and all the good rooms have taken.



HyperSmash

Gingerbread Part 1

Nowadays they're made by little kids in daycare classes or Girl Scout meetings, out of graham crackers glued together using tubes of store-bought frosting, and decorated with peppermints and M&Ms, but when I was a kid, gingerbread houses were in their glory. Their proliferation, during the 1960's and 60's was, I think, another result of the Feminine Mystique. Intelligent women, kept at home by the expectations of the time, needed an outlet for their creativity. For the rest of the year maybe, knitting or Paint-By-Number would do, but during December, they made gingerbread houses.

Here is Betty Crocker's picture of what one was supposed to look like, from the classic 1963 edition of the Betty Crocker Cooky Book, the edition my generation grew up with, that we all studied when we wanted to try baking, or to beg our mothers to make cookies for us:



My own mom made gingerbread houses every Christmas for several years in a row, enough years that I was quite shocked, and outraged, the year she said she wasn't going to do it any more.

"Make one yourself, if you want one so badly," she told me. And so I did.

I am here to tell you, that making gingerbread houses back then, was a labor-intensive process. Nowadays you can find ready-made pans; all you have to do is glop your dough into them and bake, and wa-la, perfect walls, roof, etc. Back when I was young, first you made your gingerbread dough. You chilled it, you rolled it out, then you laid it carefully onto un-greased cookie sheets, trying very hard to get it smooth, so your walls would come out flat. After you'd baked it, you used paper patterns that you'd made by scaling up the template-pattern in the Cooky Book to cut out your various house-pieces.

Then you waited. Your walls and roof had to be perfectly dry before you were going to be able to put together a house -- Believe me, I know; my house looked like it had been through the San Francisco earthquake, there were so many cracks and cemented-together broken bits. -- You stuck the pieces together, using a special, hard-drying type of frosting that you made yourself, again following the instructions from Betty Crocker. Finally, after you'd taken pains to decorate it as nicely as possible, and set it on display for an admiring family until well after Christmas, then was when you were able to eat it.

And then was when you found out that a properly-made gingerbread house is inedible, at least for anyone over the age of 5. By the time the gingerbread has hardened enough to stay together in the form of a house, it's not only totally and totally hard, but close to flavorless as well. The special hard-dry frosting has no taste at all besides a vague sweetness. And as for the candies you put on so carefully to make it look "special", well those have all fallen off by then, and your little sisters or your dad have taken them away and eaten them. I was never so disappointed by anything in my life, than I was by that damn house I made, and I understood finally, why my mom had stopped making them.

HyperSmash

To be or not to be...a furry

Fur Suit

Lucario Fursuit

The term furry is a fairly obscure one, kept hidden away in chat rooms and on forums, but the concept is very common. A furry is an anthropomorphic animal like Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse. Everyone likes Mickey Mouse right? Then why is it that the furry fandom is received in such a bad light? The answer lies in the fact that it's a little on the strange side and can have some sexual connotations. The majority of the furry fandom are people who simply like animals and feel a connection with them. Sometimes this connection is expressed through visual media or prose, and sometimes it's expressed through a simple sense of community with others who feel like they do.

American Exceptionalism and Little House on the Prairie

I could get really political with this article on American Exceptionalism, and talk about
this article from the leftwing site AlterNet, titled "We're #1 --
Ten Depressing Ways America Is Exceptional", which talks at some length about all
the advantages this country had when it started out, and how over time we've squandered
most of them, to the extent that we are now a poorer, less healthy, and less fair place,
than most of the European countries most Americans feel so superior to. But I won't.
Instead, I want to talk about the idea of exceptionalism, where it came from, and how it
has shaped American perceptions.

Carrot Babies

HyperSmash Yay! My first blog post! Enjoy.

The AK 47 (AK.A The most well known assault rifle ever)

USSR Flag

What weapon pops into your mind first when you think of assault rifles? The M16? The FN Scar? The Famas maybe? Or do you think of the AK 47? The AK 47, unlike the rest of the AK family, has become quite famous in modern times.

The Itty-Bitty Titty Committee

One thing you'll notice, if you watch old TV shows, is how small everyone's breasts used to be. This picture of Farrah Fawcett, taken right before her success in the role of Jill Munroe on Charlie's Angels is a good example. Tina Louise, in her role as Ginger Grant on Gilligan's Island, is an even better one:

The Potato Masher

German Stick Grenade

To the right you can see a potato masher. No, not the kind used to prepare mashed potatoes and other soft mashed foods.  I'm talking about a German stick grenade which was nicknamed the potato masher because of it's similar appearance to a potato masher.

Fashion and Cruciferous Vegetables

Here's a cartoon that's un-funny, if not downright incomprehensible, without a pretty extensive understanding of early Twentieth Century society. To begin with, you have to understand that good parenting, as of the early thirties, when the cartoon first came out, basically required that children be fed a diet that was as full of nutrients as possible. Childhood mortality has been very low for about fifty years now; thanks to plentiful low-cost food and childhood vaccines for a lot of major illnesses, we take it for granted that our children will grow steadily and healthily, from infancy through adolescence. This was not the case in the 1930's. My mother, for instance, who was born in 1937, caught rheumatic fever when she was five years old, and even after recovering, she remained sickly. Her reminiscences include stories about how her father moved the family to the country, so he could buy a goat, and she could drink the nourishing goat's milk to get healthier. She never looks at her old childhood pictures, but what she has to point out how thin and frail she looked, years after her bout with rheumatic fever.



But to get back to the spinach: Vitamins were, in the 1930's, still a rather new discovery. It's interesting, really, to read advice about healthy eating from before and after they were discovered (in the 1910's). At the beginning of the century, people were preoccupied with calories, understandably, in a world where the poor still went hungry, rather than, as nowadays, being overfed and undernourished. Ideal diets prescribed for children involved getting as many calories into them as possible. High-cream milk, white bread, butter, and hot cereal, were the recommended foodstuffs, all to be accessorized with sugar as necessary, to please picky appetites. I've always thought it must have been nice to be a child at that time. Imagine being encouraged to eat as much fresh-baked bread, preferably slathered with yummy, fatty butter, and washed down with milk so rich that it's half cream. Men preferred their ladies stout in those days too; really, there are reasons for calling them the Good Old Days.

Then around about 1914, vitamins were discovered. And all of a sudden it was the accepted thing that children should eat as many of them as possible -- And, if possible, plenty of minerals as well. Liver went from being a cheap and filling entree, to being a sort of nutritional slam-dunk for children, loaded with A and B vitamins. Spinach, was another one. As if life hadn't been hard enough for children already, what with the persistent risk of dying, from childhood illnesses we don't even remember nowadays, and family members going off to World War I and whatnot, now it became even harder. You want to know how bleak food became for kids after the discovery of vitamins? One of the popular candy bars of the thirties was called Tasty Yeast, which was basically vitamin-rich brewer's yeast coated in chocolate. Really. Imagine sitting down to a dinner of liver with spinach on the side, and for dessert, a yummy Tasty Yeast bar.

There's one more reason to be glad you live in the Twenty-First Century (if you needed one). At any rate, to understand the cartoon at the beginning of this post, you've got to understand how all-pervadingly normative spinach was as a children's food, in the 1930's. After that, you've got to understand a little about how various cruciferous vegetables were perceived:

Cabbage, you've got to understand, was considered just horribly vulgar and declasse. In 1984, a pervasive smell of cooking cabbage in apartment hallways is one of the details George Orwell uses to denote poverty. M.F.K. Fisher, in "The Social Status of a Vegetable", describes an extraordinarily ladylike woman she knew, who professed never even to have tasted cabbage, for fear she would be thought common.





Broccoli, on the other hand, had some class to it. It was a vegetable that had just recently been discovered, one that was still grown in small enough crops that it was expensive. Plus of course, one could serve it with hollandaise sauce, which added a little class to everything. Broccoli wasn't asparagus perhaps, but it was almost as good, a wonderfully trendy vegetable for an arriviste lady to eat -- And to serve to her little girl (who, in her turn, punctured Mama's pretensions wonderfully, by relating the hyper-fashionable vegetable on her plate, to plain old, ordinary, spinach.

There is still a class element to cruciferous vegetables, incidentally. Broccoli and cauliflower have lost their elegant image of course, now that they're grown and marketed in bulk -- In fact the last time I looked, cabbage cost more than broccoli. -- but there is still a hint of foodie-glamor to Brussels Sprouts. This is not, because they are difficult to grow or market. The Trader Joe's where I do my marketing sometimes gets shipments of frozen Brussels Sprouts, imported from Belgium actually, and they only cost 99 cents a pound, which leads me to suspect they grow them in bulk there at least. Here in the US however, it is their strong taste which keeps them from becoming widely popular. Let's face it, we Americans like foods that don't have much taste to them.