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Fear Factor and Fake Breasts

With the recent re-rising of my Boob Jobs article, I am ready to share with you a secret for betting on the success of competitors on NBC’s Fear Factor television show.Fear Factor Psycho House

100 percent of the time women with gigantic fake breasts are unable to successfully complete any cold water challenge. 100 percent of the time the reason they give for not being able to handle the cold water is “I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t catch my breath.”

The reason they couldn’t breathe in cold water is their body could not heat up all that fake boob gel fast enough and so the giant fake boobs become heavy ice-packs embedded under the skin while directly sitting on muscle and bone millimeters away from the lungs.

It’s hard to catch your breath — let alone swim under water — with 12 pounds of ice pressing into your chest!

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Hankering for a Poppy Seed Kolache

Ever since I moved to the East Coast I have searched for a poppy seed kolache.

I have yet to find one.

A kolache is a pastry with icing and it is filled with fruit, cheese or poppy seeds plopped onto its center.

I was raised in Nebraska.

My father’s side is English and my mother’s Czechoslovakian — the Nebraska Czech side came directly from Czechoslovakia when it was just that and not the Czech Republic or some other modern-day re-framing of a country’s identity — and I miss that homemade kolache taste treat of my childhood where authenticity, sweetness and history melted together and touched on the tongue.

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Sexual Knowing

Yesterday a psychiatrist friend of mine who read my Daughters and Sexuality post here in your favorite Urban Semiotic blog, told me “one can never really understand a person until you know their sexual preferences and how that life is expressed in private.” I’m still trying to decide if I agree with her or not.

Continue reading → Sexual Knowing

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Lucky Lucky Number

If you are Chinese, or a numerologist, perhaps you can explain why every time I call my favorite Chinese restaurant to order delivery, the elderly Chinese man on the other end always says in a raspy, smoke-riddled voice “Lucky Lucky Number!” each time I provide my cell phone number.

My phone number has four fours in it and the last four numbers are 4040 — those are the only things I can think of that might be “lucky” when I rattle off my digits, but I’m curious if there is something else at play I’m missing?
When the teenaged Chinese delivery guy comes over and I open the door, the first thing he always says is “Lucky Lucky Number!” three times in a row as he smiles at me and nods.

He doesn’t speak much English and I don’t speak any Chinese so we smile at each other as he repeats that phrase and I hand over my money and he bows and I bow and he leaves and I’m forever left wondering what else is going in the world that involves me in which I have no clue in understanding.

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Big Box of Justice

When you think of a courthouse you think of a place where things are set right and justice is done and that’s good for all of us. It isn’t good, however, for those of us who live near a courthouse. The people who enter a courthouse are rarely happy. They are either being taken down a peg or getting ready to rig up a sail down the river. Courthouses are filled with angry families, disappointed spouses, public sadness, meandering gloom and they are surrounded on all sides by rip-off artists, skeeves and geniuses — pharmacies, lawyers and bail bondsmen — I’ll let you decide which is who. In the meantime, I’ll trot the long way around because some days you just can’t take the remnants that tumble down from that big box of justice.

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Girl or Woman

If you are female, which term do you prefer if you had to be labeled by one of these words: “Girl” or “Woman” or “Female” or doesn’t it matter?

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln I was educated, roughly and roundly, by certain forces in the English Department that one must never call a female a “girl” if she has had her period — how one determines if menstruation has happened or not was never explained — and the correct term for the rest of her life was “woman” but never “lady” because “lady” was an Olde Englishe synonym for “bitch.”

Ladies and gentlemen rightly translated to the modern ear, I was told, as Bitches and gentlemen and it was an unfortunate, but culturally accepted, put-down of women who fought to advance their self-worth beyond being seen merely as property.

Continue reading → Girl or Woman

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How We Raed

WE DON’T USE ALL CAPS ONLINE BECAUSE IT IS SHOUTING AND IT IS HARD TO READ!
We read not by looking at individual letters in a word. We read by recognizing the shape of how a word is created by its lowercase letters.
ALL CAPS CREATE WORDS WITH NO UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL LETTER SHAPES!
Mixed case for words works best for understanding each other via a text medium.
A friend of mine sent me the following in email and this example takes word shape recognition a step further:

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg.The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

It appears we may not even care in what order the letters make up each word — we see the word shape even if the letters of the word are jumbled: Wlid, eh?