Be an open book, not a blaring radio, grasshopper.
Thor’s Day Theorem
Category Archives: Big Thoughts
Sex, Sex, and More Sex
Twenty-nine percent of ordinary Americans have had sex on a first date, and about as many have had an “unexpected sexual encounter with someone new.” Among people who are married or living in a committed relationship (or formerly married), sixteen percent have cheated on their partner (nearly twice as many men as women) — while more, thirty percent, have fantasized about it.
Twenty-seven percent of Americans who reported being happy in marriage admitted to having an affair.
Ordinary Americans are pikers.
Voice of America reports that “When U.S. businessman Herman Cain suspended his campaign [Saturday] for the Republican presidential nomination following allegations of sexual harassment and a lengthy extramarital affair, he joined a long list of U.S. presidents and presidential contenders whose personal lives have attracted scrutiny.”
The long list is pretty much all of them.
Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Dwight Eisenhower, Newt Gingrich, James Garfield, Warren Harding, Gary Hart, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then there are the Mark Sanfords, Arnold Schwarzeneggers, Eliot Spitzers, Anthony Weiners. Apparently about 97.7 percent of American presidents and 110 percent of American presidential candidates.
What did we expect? From the Victorians through Viet Nam, public morality did inhibit any open acknowledgment of sexuality but things have (sort of) changed. Most American homes today probably have copies of Playboy and Fanny Hill and the Joy of Sex but the owners still keep them out of sight. On the other hand, a couple generations of soap operas have been hotbeds of in-your-face adultery. They reflected American life or at least American political life.
Now we tell ourselves stories — stories about how prim we are and how licentious our neighbors are — and those stories hurt us.
Countries with an ultraconservative attitude towards sex and sex education like the U.S. have a higher incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy.
I have some simple advice for these people in public life:
Grow a pair!
You ain’t.
You’d like We the People to believe you are King of the Bedroom or at least the oval rug but you can’t even stand up for your bigger self when your littler self gets caught standing up.
Here’s the answer. When the admittedly brain dead reporter asks, “Did you really have sex with three women, and a goat?” tell the truth.
“Yep. What’s it to you?”
About the only follow up to that is, “Was it good for the goat?”
Actually, a decent reporter should ask the spouse to comment. It would be a good teaching moment for relationship building. Maybe for polyamory. Or at least for truth in advertising.
Lie to Me
Choosy mothers may not choose Jif any more 1 .
The price Jif is going up by more than FORTY percent today, according to published reports.
Social Security checks are going up by less than FOUR percent, according to published reports.
Decades before she collected Social Security, my (very choosy) mom branded us a Skippy Peanut Butter household. After all Jif is just creamed peanuts in a jar but Skippy is peanutbutter.com.
Monthly Social Security for more than 60 million Americans will increase by 3.6 percent starting with checks issued January 1, 2012 (the Supplemental Security Income increase starts with checks issued December 31 of this year).
The San Antonio Express News reported that “the Cost of Living Adjustment ensures that the purchasing power of Social Security and SSI benefits is not eroded by inflation. It is based on the percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) from the third quarter of the last year a COLA was determined to the third quarter of the current year. If there is no increase, there can be no COLA. There was no COLA in 2010 and 2011 because the CPI-W, as determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Department of Labor, for those years did not increase above the level of the third quarter of 2008, the last year a COLA was determined.”
Some recipients, may see their Social Security partially or completely eaten by the rising Medicare premiums.
Is Lie to Me Real?
Lie to Me was a Fox television series that spanned three seasons from 2009 into 2011. The show centered on human lie detection based on applied psychology including interpreting microexpressions, a Facial Action Coding System, and body language. Lie to Me was cancelled by Fox in May but probably not because people can’t detect liars.
Nearly 80% of Americans said they do not trust the government to do what is right, according to a Pew Research Center public opinion survey released in 2010. It was the highest level of distrust of Washington in half a century.
That was 2010.
A New York Times and CBS poll released last week shows now, just 18 months later, 89% of Americans do not trust government to do the right thing and 74% of us say that we believe the nation is on the wrong track. That’s higher than the highest level of distrust of Washington in more than 60 years.
There are plenty of partisan political reasons for discontent but I figure it is simpler than ideology.
Uncle Sam lies.
From Vietnam body counts to “I am not a crook” to “I did not have sex with that woman,” we have become lost in a misery of misstatements, mistruths, misdirections. Lies.
I don’t believe the statistics that show my cost of living has risen only 3.6% since 2008. Somebody monkeyed with the numbers. Somebody lied.
I don’t believe Harry Reid who said “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine. It’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers,” last week while pimping a $35 billion bailout for public employee unions. Somebody monkeyed with the numbers poorly. Somebody lied.
I don’t believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming. Lots of somebodies monkeyed with the numbers to make that case. Somebody lied.
Of course it may be entirely because that well-known inventor of the Internet, Al Gore, lied to us in order to feather his own very noble but lightbulb-intense mansion.
Unfortunately, the result of the lies is that choosy mothers can’t afford Jif and really really choosy mothers will have to give up on Skippy for the peanut butter cookies in my Halloween basket.
Art Bras
Today would have been my mother’s 92nd birthday. Mary Harper was an award winning artist, a tolerant housewife, and superlative mother. She died in 2002 after almost winning her fight with breast cancer.
Lexington, Kentucky-area quilters have been decorating bras in advance of Breast Cancer Awareness month which began on Saturday and continues through the month of October.
Breast cancer accounts for 16 percent of all cancer deaths among women nationwide; a womans risk for developing breast cancer in her lifetime is one in seven. A man’s risk is smaller but not tiny.
The Plum Creek Quilters Guild and the Lexington Regional Health Center will sponsor the Think Pink Cele-bra-tion next Thursday.
PCQG member Kathy Beck made themed art bras called “Cheer for the Cure” and “Snow Boobies.” Cancer survivor and member Linda Maloley made two art bras, “Flat Busted” and “Support Bra.” The quilters’ art bras will be modeled and auctioned to raise money for the Eppley Cancer Center.
90% of all diagnosed cases of breast cancer have no family history.
In other fund raisers, Art beCAUSE held its 9th annual Breast Cancer Foundation Gala at Westin Copley Place in Boston yesterday. Art beCAUSE is a foundation founded by an art gallery owner and breast cancer owner. Together, they decided together to use some of the profit from the art gallery to fund research.
Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among Vermont women.
My mom studied fashion design at Spring Garden Institute after she earned a B.A.-English at Swarthmore. Once, when I was about 10, she covered one of her own brassieres with colorful fabric to form the top half of designer bikini. She would have made a bra for the Think Pink Cele-bra-tion. She did donate paintings to events like Art beCAUSE.
Art brings joy and can bring funding. And art projects like these help more than cancer survivors. You can do that in your own town.
Pigeon Scratches
Not many people in North Puffin know that my college buddy Jabe Roy snuck me onto a flag station at Bridgehampton Race Circuit when I was a bit shy of my 20th birthday. That wasn’t the weekend I set the land speed record from Hoboken, through New York City, out the L.I.E. to NY27 and on to the track. That came in Jabe Roy’s ’65 Vette a year or two later.
“The Bridge” was a 2.85 mile, 13 turn, road course sitting on some prime real estate out near the tip of Long Island, New York. OK, when I was there it was only a decade past being a potato farm but the area was growing by leaps and bounds. Today you can drive a golf cart on the same pavement that Mark Donohue, Dan Gurney, Bruce McLaren, Paul Newman, Jackie Stewart, and Rufus drove. And, of course, me.
My good friend and crew chief Rufus says he never drove my cars at Bridgehampton; he drove only to the flag stations. The earlier named star, racing legend Rufus Parnelli Jones, started on the pole with a 1:44.04 lap time in the 1969 Trans Am race.
Stirling Moss called it the “most challenging course in America.”
I was a year too young to set foot on a race track when I earned my National license in Flagging & Communications. I jumped the fence and earned my National competition license shortly after I did become “legal.” And it all started at the Bridge.
“All who have raced there know that the earth is flat and ends in the sand at turn two,” Bruce MacInnes said once. He was just another amateur racer when I knew him but he grew up to be Chief Instructor at Skip Barber’s Racing School. I have kept the hammer down through that turn; the temptation to feather the gas there is great.
Over in the political department last week, I remarked that (most) people apparently want to live in pigeonholes. Maybe it’s because they don’t have to think there.
That resonated for me in a way that transcended politics.
People reading this know I’m a news and political junky but how many readers know that I’m a mechanical engineer? Or a landscape photographer? How about that I chopped down some of Vermont’s vast fiberglass forest to build the 30′ production catamaran that I also designed? That I have skied the Alps and the Chesapeake, managed a movie theater in Times Square, or taught in Vermont Colleges? Perhaps you do know I anchor a local teevee show but not that I taught lifesaving. Or that I raced cars.
We get pigeonholed.
Pretty much everyone appreciates that Paul Newman won an Academy Award for The Color of Money. I knew him as one the drivers who pushed my Camaro along the pit lane when we were sitting waiting for a red-flagged race to restart. Bob Sharp once said PLN could have been world champion had he started racing before he was forty years old. He was that good. Who knew?
We get pigeonholed.
Neuroscientist Dave Sulzer, a professor at Columbia, studies how the different parts of the brain communicate and pursues treatments for certain diseases. In his other life, he co-founded the Thai Elephant Orchestra, a 16-elephant ensemble that performs in Lampang, Northern Thailand. Their second album includes the music of Beethoven and Hank Williams. Who knew?
We get pigeonholed.
Here in North Puffin my public persona is arts council chair and newspaper columnist. And occasional geek. Discovering that I can drive anything with wheels or build a dovetail joint for a cabinet drawer surprises most everyone.
“The emotional rewards of driving this turn ‘flat out’ are just as intense as the physical consequences of blowing it,” Mr. MacInnes said about Turn Two at the Bridge.
The rewards of living outside of the pigeons’ roost smell pretty good, too.
Rufus suggested I list the race cars I’ve owned and driven.
- ’60 TVR. This car was allegedly Mark Donohue’s but we never confirmed that. It spent an interesting afternoon with a tow rope through the windshield opening.
- Triumph TR4. My “school” car. Came with a Mercury wagon tow car painted to match. I learned that front engine/RWD drive cars handle differently than rear engine/RWD drive cars when Porsche driver Alan Howes gave me the hot line at the New Thompson Speedway. Rufus eventually bought it from me and made it into a much better race car than when I owned it.
- ’69 Camaro. The blue car which started out life painted yellow and which we raced in red-and-white.
- ’71 Camaro. The gold car, built at Three Pines Farm. This was my primary ride from the time it was new until I smacked the wall at Charlotte and put an end to it.
- Lotus Formula C. I drove this at Pocono to get some “logbook time” and learned that being able to see the tires going round and round is very distracting.
The 1969 Trans-Am at the Bridge.