Are We Done with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, Yet?

Yesterday, I posted what I thought was an innocuous Twitter update asking if we’ve gone too far with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge because now it is more about famous people getting wet than actually raising ongoing, substantial, awareness for the disease.  Sure, we remember people doing stupid things for a video camera, but aren’t there more dangerous things going on in the world that more demand our rapt attention like, say Ferguson, Missouri and beheading Americans?

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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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Bible Thumpers and the Nincompoop Liberal Elite: John 3:16 vs. the Unexamined Life

In America, we have been brewing a Cultural Holy War since 1969 and I have mindfully tried to stick myself, not in the middle of the argument between Conservatives and Liberals, but between the two diametrically opposing ends to shadow the mean sun.  As a child of the Midwest and a University of Nebraska-Lincoln undergraduate, I comprehend the conservative core.  As a graduate of Columbia University in The City of New York, I understand the liberal mentality.  As I have written many times, this Boles Blog is dedicated to preserving common ground where everyone has a safe opportunity to be heard and that we do our best to honor a “liberal mindset with a conservative morality.”

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The Nincompoop

Scene:  A blackened room.

Time: Yesterday.

(THE ACADEMIC is shining an interrogation light suspended from the ceiling into the eyes of THE PUBLISHER — who is blindfolded and tightly lashed to a steel chair with lengths of rusty chain.)

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Bob Dylan is Not a Man of Arts and Letters

When I passively heard news reports Bob Dylan had been voted into the “prestigious and elite” Academy of Arts and Letters, I was surprised, and immediately recalled famous Groucho Marx quote, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”  Bob Dylan is no hoity-toity academic — he’s a measured man of depth and magnitude.  What was going on?

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