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Oh, Baby, Don’t You Cry: Unless Your Mamma Makes You Mew

What would you think of a mother who purposefully set out to make her 10-month-old baby girl cry — just so she could record the breakdown and publish it on YouTube for the entire world to see?

Would you champion that mother as the prime protector of her offspring?

Or would you instead be bothered by the unnecessary spectacle of a mother exploiting the emotional well-being of her vulnerable baby for entertainment purposes?

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Advertising Explicit Bodily Functions in People Magazine

Growing up in the 70’s, subliminal advertising was everywhere, and it was always a fun challenge to look at the modern advertising of the day and try to divine the nocturnal missions hidden therein.

“Sex” was a big seller in every way — the most famous evidence of such being the strategically placed curls in Farrah’s hair on her infamous poster.  The “S” in “Sex” is found on her right shoulder, the “e” swirls in the curls above her breasts, and the “x” is found dangling on the inside of her opposite shoulder.

Young men pinned that image to their walls and found great thrills in that lightning rod smile, that hair, and those absolutely hard, and forbidden, nipples!  Yes, Charlie’s Angels on TV was all about erect nipples showing through skimpy bathing suit tops and sweaters.

On today’s television, female nipples are verboten and often blurred by self-censoring series producers.  All the visceral, sexual, fun has been blurred out of current media mainstream.  I’m so glad we have the Universal channel on cable TV where early-morning Charlie’s Angels reruns often appear, uncensored, and still in their full-nipple fury to satisfy the immature little boy left behind in most of us.

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Elissa Reilly Slater Wins Big Brother 15!

Elissa Reilly Slater was evicted from the Big Brother 15 house last night, effectively ending her chance to win half a million dollars, but she kept her morality and dignity intact and that, to me, is more precious than Big Brother blood money, and as far as I’m concerned the real, true, and only winner of BB15 is Elissa even though the show runs for another two weeks.

From the start of the show, Elissa was marked.  Her horrible sister Rachel was a previous winner, and professional whiner, and there are few Rachel Reilly fans in the Big Brother world.  Elissa was tagged by the other houseguests as being favored by the producers — and she was, just because of her shared bloodline with a previous winner — and it didn’t help that Elissa, a doppelgänger of her sister, denied being Rachel’s sister when asked.  A lie from the clean start can never really take you to the dirty end in victory.

That said, Elissa, a premier athlete of a Yoga instructor, bided her time and played the game as well as she could all alone.  She tried to make alliances.  She wanted to team up.  Nobody would have her.  Nobody listened to her insight or wisdom.  She was written off as a sibling airhead by everyone in the house — even her supposed “friend” Helen — who dictated to Elissa without ever hearing her.

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First Night: Imperial Hotel Vienna

The sales pitch on booking.com who we use for all our hotel bookings:

This historic Vienna hotel features a health club with gym, indoor pool with sunbathing lawn, sauna and steam room. Guests reside in a 19th century Imperial Riding School in Vienna’s diplomatic district, while enjoying the lush 2,000 m² private garden.

The boutique style Imperial Club offers uniquely designed rooms and suites with elegant furnishings. Standard features include flat — screen TVs, high — speed Internet access, safes and air conditioning.

Organic Austrian cuisine can be enjoyed at the hotel’s Borromäus Restaurant with a winter garden or on the beautiful summer terrace. The Arsenal Beer and Wine Pub proposes typical Austrian dishes and seasonal specialties of highest quality.

Guests may discover hidden gems only a local would know with Renaissance’s In-The-Know recommendations, personally curated weekly by the hotel’s Navigator.

The Ringstrasse and the city center, the opera, concert halls, theaters and museums are within easy walking distance. The Rennweg Train Station is right behind the hotel and provides a fast and direct connection to the airport (22 minutes). Various tram stops are only a few steps away.

We paid in advance last year and got an exceptionally good room rate — around 75 euros a night.

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Is Paula Deen a Racist?

I have been following the saga of Paula Deen as she tries to answer cries against her obvious, inbred, Racism, and her multiplicity of firings from many companies as spokesmodel for their brands.  Do we want to punish Bigots and Racists by removing them from the public eye?  Or do we want them to be heard, so they can be forced into public recantations and corrections?  Slate magazine creates this interesting take on the problem of Paula Deen:

Paula Deen is America’s racist grandma, and we should treat her as such. Racist Grandma may be racist, but she’s also your grandma. You can’t just disown her.

And, contrary to what some might think, having a racist grandma isn’t entirely bad. No doubt there are many white families where racism is passed down generation to generation like some cancerous gene. But for others, seeing that gene and knowing you’re predisposed to it is a warning sign, a nagging reminder to take preventive measures for yourself. I say let’s push racist Grandma back to center stage and let her keep talking.

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Évocateur: Resurrecting Morton Downey Jr. Just to Kill Him Again

The odd and sad documentary — Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie — is now available for On Demand viewing, and I ordered the movie and watched it with a disgruntled uncomfortableness as I recalled what a boor and a phony Morton Downey, Jr. was in real life and on television.  He was the living embodiment of those who prefer to tear down beauty than create goodness.  He thrived on igniting his live television audience to violence.

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Liberace and the Ring of Terror

The Scott Thorson/Liberace biopic — Behind the Candelabra — premiered last night on HBO, and while it was a sharp looking movie with excellent acting from Matt Damon and Michael Douglas, one could not help but feel the pure terror of Liberace’s life and how his sexuality pinned his desires and did not allow him to be the man he was in private in his public life.  That sort of forced hiding creates an internal, ringed, terror and that fear makes men monsters.

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Bidding Farewell to Angelina Jolie’s Beautiful Breasts

In today’s New York Times, Angelina Jolie shares the story of her decision to have a double mastectomy after her BRCA1 and BRCA2 tests came back with bad news:

My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.

As a red-blooded American boy back in 1998, I remember when Angelina Jolie set the world afire in her debut as Gia, the star-crossed SuperModel.  The hallmark of Angelina’s performance was the baring of her beautiful and natural breasts that became their own phenomenal meme in the lives of all young men long before there was an active internet.  The Google now preserves that original beautiful and naturalistic naked memory — and here’s the start of the stunner that became the star:

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Hillary in the Moon

I subscribe to a cartoon syndicate, and every morning a bunch of great drawings land in my Inbox.  I have a few traditional cartoons, but most of the work that arrives is of political cartoons from across the world.  This morning, I was struck by this political cartoon from Kerry Waghorn, a real master combining the essence of a person with their mission on earth.  The image is Hillary Clinton’s face in the moon and three elephants sleeping on the ground below her.  One elephants longingly looks up at her.

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A Memory of Thanks to Ebert and Siskel

With the passing of movie critic Roger Ebert this week, I have been trying to find a centerstone from which I can write about his death.  Here’s what I wrote about the man on February 19, 2010 in my article — What Roger Ebert Speaks to Our Students:

Now that Roger fights on to live to write and to watch and to read and to love over and over again — any sense of our self-pity or our internal mourning is forever put to rest in the example of his unbelievable fight for an imperiled life that continues to thrive against the belly of the beast best efforts of every malignant cell and troubled tissue to take him from us.  Every day we die a little, and each night, we dream a lot of the days yet to live.

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