Someone posted a shoe-fetish shoe (picture of) at Facebook, which naturally triggered a lively discussion of the semiotics of catch me-fuck me shoes. I pondered the agony to the calf muscles that would be caused by attempting to stand on the damn things – the heels look taller than the foot is long, so how is that even possible?

Anyway, some fella came along to straighten it all out with an aphoristic insight into the nature of women.

Great shoes, fancy clothing, cosmetic surgery, lipstick, waxings, hairdos, jewelry, makeup, and perfume are all unnecessary. However, if they were eliminated, I think the gay male population would increase rapidly and the women of the world would all look like the babushka

A puppy of my acquaintance.

… Read the rest

Eric got to Ross Douthat ahead of me, but I’ll duplicate his effort anyway just because Douthat’s piece irritated me so intensely.

He says

the moral case for assisted suicide depends much more on our respect for people’s own desire to die than on our sympathy for their devastating medical conditions.

I don’t think he demonstrates that, and I don’t think it does – I think it depends on both. For one thing, if people don’t have devastating medical conditions, then they don’t need assistance with suicide. Part of what people fear is losing the physical ability to exit; that’s where the “assisted” comes in.

Fortunately, the revolution Kevorkian envisioned hasn’t yet succeeded. Despite decades of agitation, only three states

Texas governor Rick Perry called a court ruling that banned school prayers at a public high school graduation

“reprehensible.”

“The First Amendment prohibits governments from interfering with Americans’ rights to freely express their religious beliefs, and accordingly the U.S. Supreme Court has maintained that Congress may convene every day with a prayer,” Perry said in a statement.

Oh yeah? But then governments are interfering with Americans’ rights to freely express their beliefs that there is no god, aren’t they. My religious belief is that god is a non-existent imaginary agent. I don’t get to say that at public school graduation ceremonies or Congress’s morning prayer. Since other people do get to say that god is a real, non-imaginary agent, the … Read the rest