Wars and Lechery

Part of the genesis of this post was a leftover image from the "Philippine Sea" writeup. I went looking for "WW2 Imperial Navy poster" and found this:

Which I thought was perfect; ships, flags, pretty pin-up girl...there you have your basic "Join the Navy, see the world and get laid" appeal that had probably been a central feature of every recruiter's spiel since the first Sumerian sergeant told lies to a bunch of dumb hicks straight off the farm.

The thing is...one of the other images Google showed me was this one:

Wrong country, right period, but...damn. Talk about a different way of looking at the whole "guns/girls" thing.

I find it hard to believe that even in 1944 an 18-year-old Japanese kid, male or female, had instincts much different than an American teenager. Different manners and mores, yes, but the hormones? Right in there pitching. Look at a picture of a pretty girl? He's thinking "I'd like to get next to that..." (and she's probably thinking "I'd like to be that so he will want to get next to me...").

But the WAVE practically radiates sex - she's a Petty pin-up, y'think..? - as opposed to the very G-rated patriotic Japanese gal in the IJN poster. No wonder so many other cultures think we're obsessed with our genitals.

Not that I think we really are - I think ALL humans spend tons of time thinking about putting Tab A into Slot B. Americans are just more upfront about it and it seems were were seventy years ago, too.

Mind you, the Japanese appear to have made up for lost time:

And that's pretty mild compared to the whole "tentacle rape" thing.

But that's a whole 'nother story.

Sophia Loren in a boat

It's hot and nastily humid here in Portland. Really nasty, one of those days that you stop in the open doorway from your air-conditioned home or office as the fetid air pushes against you like a wet dog's mouth. It's just goddamn hot and muggy.

This, on the other hand, is Sophia Loren in a boat.

Hot. But not humid. Amazingly gorgeous woman. At 79 she's STILL stunning.

No excuses; I've just been dicking off. Work, kiddos, the usual worries plus not having anything to say other than vituperitives.

Somewhere in the back of my head there's a Panama story trying to get out. I'll see if I can get it written this weekend.

Good Golly, Miss Molly

I wanted to mention the strange saga of Theresa Vail, Miss Kansas 2014, since I ran across it doing the "Miss America" post below.

Apparently one of the reactions to the Indian-American winner was from one "Todd Starnes", some sort of FOX radio shouter. One of the things he was honked off about was that “the liberal Miss America judges were not interested in a gun-toting, deer-hunting, military veteran.”, that is, Miss-Kansas-Vail.

And I have to say this; I loves me some SGT Vail for what has to be the nut graf of the 2014 Miss America competition, an explanation of why she had to sing some opera for her talent rather than her first choice; archery. "I'm singing by default..." she said, "...because there is a clause against projectile objects."

Yessss, Vail for the win..!

Other fun things I learned about the young woman from the Sunflower State:

I love the fact that Theresa is like a real-life Hermie the Gay Elf; her dream is to be a dentist. Okay, a U.S. Army orthodontist, but still...and she has a tatt on one shoulder of...wait for it...the Dental branch insignia.

(Now I may be prejudiced - probably because the dental tech who did my exit exam-and-cleaning at Gorgas Army Hospital in Panama turned the microwave dental-pick thingie up to "deep fat fry" and jangled every tooth-nerve so badly I nearly came out of the chair; she ended up finishing with a metal pick - but...DENTAC? I mean, the U.S. Army Dental Corps doesn't jump to mind when I think of the honor roll of military glory. But, hey, you go, sarge...)

And that's not her only tatt. She's the gal in the swimsuit photo from the Miss America article and you can see that she has that Reinhold Niebuhr "Serenity Prayer" inked down her right side:

I gotta tell you; the mere thought of letting some character with a needle stab that much ink into a place where I can barely stand to be tickled? Eeegah. You may wear too much eye makeup with your fatigues, SGT Vail, but you are harder-core than I will ever be.

Still. I keep coming back to the notion of Miss Kansas as the "real American" because she's a gun-totin', deer-huntin' troopie.

So I looked it up.

The number of U.S. women serving in the U.S. Army as of 2012: 76,694.

The approximate number of women in U.S of military age (between 18 and 49): 71,941,969

So the percentage of women capable of serving that are actually serving in the U.S. Army?

0.001066 or about 0.107% of the potential soldiers in the U.S. female population.

Assuming 53 contestants (50 states plus DC, PR, and USVI) the actual representative number of female soldiers in the Miss America pageant would have been a little more than half a person - 53/100ths of a woman.

So, no. SGT Vail is NOT the real "Miss America", who is probably a community college sophomore in Des Moines.

Whatever.

One last thing before I go.

Our new Miss America got in a little bit of trouble because she, or one of her pals, was caught calling Miss America 2013 "fat as shit". Now I wasn't kidding when I called MA 2013 "queenly"; on the television Sunday Ms. Hagan filled out her white gown quite nicely.

But...fat? You make the call - here she is with a pal of hers in Hawaii this spring; Miss America is on the left in the black bikini:

Fat?

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Except...by the standards of the Misses America, the standards that all the women that were up there doing the bachelorette-party-dance on Sunday night seemed to be held to, the standards of Hollywood glamor and fashion photography and diet schemes and Barbies...well...maybe that is fat.

And that seems to me immensely sad.

À une Mendiante rousse

I probably pay no more attention to the whole "Miss America" business - pageant, contestants, winner, public appearances, scholarship, the associated hoopla - as the average American male of my age and history. That being, unless said Miss is involved in some sort of scandal involving nude pictures of her ownself...

...absolutely none.

I have utterly no idea who this year's "Miss Oregon" is (Allison Elizabeth Cook of Klamath Falls, for those of you interested, who is all of nineteen and either attends or attended Oregon Institute of Technology and who ran on the "platform issue" of Brain Injury Awareness - isn't the Internet amazing..?) or who last year's Miss America was (Mallory Hagen, Miss New York, whose winning performance included performing a tap dance routine to James Brown's "Get Up Offa That Thing" while wearing a latex rodeo outfit. She's twenty-five) or, well, pretty much anything about Miss America.

So you can trust me when I say that when I channel-surfed onto the 2014 Miss America show Sunday night it was purely by accident.

I'd had a busy day and was ready for sleep, anyway. My bride, however, likes to have a television oblongata as she fiddles with her tablet. I asked her which she preferred, the old movie on TCM or the Misses Americas and she chose the latter.

I watched a little of the opening of the show, which seemed to consist of groups of the young ladies doing a sort of one-too-many-mojitos-at-the-bachelorette-party dance

(you know the sort of thing, a lot of arm-waving and hip-circling along with tottery aimless little steps? Yeah, that.)

at various locales and stepping forward to introduce themselves. This consisted of a two- or three-sentence snippet that started with some sort of topical reference to the contestant's home state and then her connection to it; "Listening to your phone calls from the nation's capital. Just kidding! I'm Miss District of Columbia, Bindhu Pamarthi." or "Our Utah Jazz sure aren't bringing home the championship. Guess It's up to me! Ciera Pekarcik, Miss Utah."

The actual contest venue was in some sort of anonymous auditorium - presumably in Atlantic City, since isn't the whole idea to bring the tourists to the boardwalk and crimp their money? - buried beneath a ziggurat of glitter and lights with some sort of generic male-and-female hosting-type creatures and Miss 2013 Mallory Hagen in a crown and a white dress looking rather queen-like though not in a drag-queeny sort of way.

And, of course, all the contestant Misses Whereevers doing their bachelorette-party dance again, only this time in identical short dark dresses.

I watched all this in a fairly stupefied fashion. It just seemed excessive and I was reminded rather forcefully of that awful Sandra Bullock film Miss Congeniality and got a chuckle out of that.

The massed gyrating ranks of Miss American womanhood, however, seemed faintly intimidating. I assume there were only 53 of them - all the states plus DC, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands - but they seemed like a Multitude.

Perhaps because for all that they were as different from each other as Americans are different from each other (at least you could see in hair and skin color every place of origin from Europe to Africa to Asia and every admixture in-between...) they all seemed frighteningly alike.

Tall, or at least so slender as to seem tall, slim with endless slender arms and long legs. Perfect, glossy hair and lots of it. Gleaming teeth, shining eyes, flawless skin. Perfectly fitted into their perfectly tailored outfits, perfect feet shod in perfect shoes.

Perfection, and lots of it.

I went to read in bed.

A while later Mojo came in and pottered about making her nightly pre-sleep preparations. Finally she plumped down on the bed with a happy sigh.

"What did you think?" she asked.

"About what?" I said, putting Atkinson and my reading glasses on the nightstand.

"Of the swimsuits?" she said. "You're kidding. Didn't you see any of the swimsuit part?"

"No, I left before the thing really got started. How did the fembots look in their swimmies?"

"Very sleek." Mojo tipped her head and looked at me slantendicular. "You didn't even sneak a look at the swimsuit competition?"

"Nah. I know what fembots look like in their swimsuits, and I wanted to finish this chapter."

Mojo snorted. "Sure. You tell me you don't find watching them at all sexy?"

And that stopped me. I actually had to think about that for a moment.

Because when you get right down to it, that's really what all the beauty pageant business is about, isn't it? Sure, there's a lot of guff in the prospectus about talent and poise and style, sure, there are points for interviews and "platforms" and there's a scholarship...but the bottom line is that these women are there because they are beautiful, because they are endmembers of a certain human ideal of appearance, attitude, and aptitude, and the whole point is that they are "Miss America"; the sort of young, single woman that is supposed to be an American ideal.

So as a "Mister America" it seemed logical that these young women were supposed to appeal to me intellectually, emotionally, and - if not most importantly at least importantly - physically.

I should find them desirable. Sexually desirable.

And the more I thought about it the less true that seems, and it made me wonder why.

Pretty? Sure. Well-groomed? Yep.

Sexy?

Not really.

What the hell was wrong with me, then? These were by all appearances healthy, vigorous young women with bodies that appeared (from Mojo's viewing of them in their swimsuits, anyway) perfectly fit and feminine. Knowing how us guys like to look at you girls, well, there should have been an element of sexual attraction there. I should have looked at the Misses America and wanted to roll about naked with at least one of them, right?

I just didn't feel it and it took me a while to pinpoint why not.

It was, for me, anyway, the sheer perfection of those bodies and the women within them.

In those sleek contestants there seemed to be not a hint of human oddity, not a whisper of offhand intimacy, not a scrap of careless desire. All was taut expectation; poised, controlled, and precise. The contestants, the contest, and the broadcasters had done a perfect job of eliminating any shred of human weakness or imperfection.

And the more I thought about it the more accurate, and the less arousing, that perfection seemed. Although for all I know any number of these women might well be bright, funny, warm, desirable people you couldn't tell that from what you saw on television. All you saw was perfection.

And it is imperfection - for me, anyway - that fuels desire.

It's not a perfect ass or perfect breasts or perfect legs or a perfect face; its the ass that belongs to the woman curled up beside me companionably doing a sudoku, or leaning frowsy and warm against a morning countertop, scratching that bottom while she waits for the coffee to brew.

Its the way the parabola of those imperfect breasts shake as she straddles my hips and tells bad jokes and laughs at her own hilarity. Its the feel of those legs twined around my own, or the look on that face as it is drawn in concentration, or lightens in pleasant relaxation, or lours at me with incipient lust.

It is the sudden intimacy of a glimpse inside her half-opened bathrobe, or of the unperfect arc of her calf diving into her furry socks that keep her feet warm on a chilly evening.

Don't get me wrong. I "get it", the human ability to desire an anonymous ideal body, a perfect "zipless fuck". I'm not a marble saint; I've looked at women and thought carnal thoughts.

But...those women tend to be everyday, ordinary women whose everyday bodies, as imperfect and ordinary as my own, seem infinitely more desirable than the most perfect Miss Somewhere whose gelid smile and serene glance seems to free them from the earthy everydayness I share with their imperfect sisters.

I won't pretend I had figured all this out last night as a settled beside the warmth of my sleeping bride. But I think perhaps I had the main of it, in the lazy flush of warm, undemanding passion I felt for her.

No one will ever gaze in awe at her perfect skin, or marvel at the tautness of her perfect breasts. She will never again have the sleek vigor of youth. She will never wear America's crown of womanly perfection.

But to me she is infinitely, imperfectly desirable, far beyond the rank upon rank of perfect Misses.

To a Red-Haired Beggar Girl

Little white girl with red hair,
The holes in your frock
Show poverty
And beauty,

For me, a poor poet,
Your young and ailing body,
Spotted with, freckles,
Has its sweetness.

You carry more gallantly,
Than can a queen of fiction
Her high-boots of velvet,
Your heavy clogs.

In place of rags too short for you,
May a fine court costume
Be drawn in blustering, long folds
At your heels;

In place of stockings in holes,
May a dagger of gold
Glitter for the eyes of rakes
On your leg;

May barely fastened knots
Reveal for our sinning
Your lovely breasts, radiant
As two eyes;

May, to undress yourself,
Your arms require coaxing
And may they archly repel
Mischievous fingers,

May pearls of finest water,
Sonnets by Belleau,
Be ceaselessly proffered
By your enslaved lovers,

Trains of servant rhymers,
Dedicating first lines to you
And watching your slipper
Under the staircase,

Many a flunkey struck at random,
Many a lord and many a Ronsard
Would spy to seduce it,
Your tender retreat!

You would count more kisses
Than lilies in your beds
And you would hold in sway
More than one Valois!

— Meanwhile you go begging
Some old rubbish lying
On the threshold of some
Vulgar Véfour;

You go gaping past your shoulder
At twenty-nine sou jewels
Of which, I cannot, I am sorry,
Make a gift to you.

Go then, without other ornament,
Perfume, pearls or diamonds,
Than your emaciated nudity,
O my beauty!

~ Charles Baudelaire

Navel Proceedings

Watched the Disney John Carter again with the Boy last night.



My online pal and commenter mike luuuurves this film, and I have to admit that mostly because of that I really wanted to love it, too. Instead I liked it well enough but not with the same fervor.

I found a lot of the same problems that many of the reviewers had; a fair amount of draggy exposition mixed in with the slam-bang action sequences, and an overall sameness to the general feel of it. Lots of it is fun, there's some gorgeous spectacle, but it's hard to avoid the feeling that you've seen it done elsewhere before.

As this Globe and Mail review pointed out, that isn't really a John Carter problem, it's a Burroughs problem. The stuff that seemed so awesome in 1917; flying machines, ray guns, dying empires on lost planets...by 2013 they've been done to death. We've been there and done that so often that the liveliness just kind of leaches out.

It's not a bad film, though, not at all. It's a good popcorn actioner and both the Boy and I enjoyed it.

The Boy liked the fighting, we both love the Tharks, but I think one of the reasons I enjoy it is Lynn Collins' Dejah Thoris.



And let's face it, why not? Dejah is a fanboy's wet dream. A nubile and gorgeous alien babe dressed in a couple of bits of jewelry and...well, a couple of bits of jewelry

(Here's how ERB describes her costume: "She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure."

Here's cartoonist Frank Cho's version per the ERB description:

Good luck with your PG rating with THAT one, Disney. Sheesh.)

This is pure Slave-Leia-dom; the slavering fanboy inventing his perfect naked dreamgirl.

I'm shocked, shocked.



Getting away from Dejah for a moment her creator ERB was kind of a piece of work, a 20th Century writer with deep roots in the 19th Century, a wanna-be soldier and a vicarious adventurer. After I watched John Carter the first time through I went out and picked up Princess of Mars from our fine Multnomah County Library and tried to read the original story.

I gave up about halfway through.

A big part of the reason is ERB's prose style. It's hopelessly 19th Century, full of the sorts of romantic and heroic conventions that 20th Century wars knocked the stuffing out of. At the time it was written the notion of the hero wearing a "fighting smile" while dueling furiously probably seemed rakish and admirable; with a better understanding of how frightening and stressful fighting for your life really is it seems ludicrous, almost parodic. All the description is florid to a Baroque degree and the way the people interact just seems ridiculous; you can't imagine people, any people, even imaginary people in an invented world, acting like that.

The other is that ERB's values were straight out of his times, and those times are so gone that they might as well be the Paleolithic. His good men are all parfit gentile knights and his good women all chaste and gentile ladies - who are kidnapped again and again and threatened again and again with rape - including our gal Dejah. Not that anybody actually gets raped; it's all good fun and our hero always wins. So the whole notion of making the rape of your heroine a plot device kind of slides by, and that kind of squicks me out; I got the feeling that ERB kinda liked the idea of rape.



He also has a rock-solid certainty that Race is Destiny, and there's no confusing who the White Men are. Even the backstory of the protagonist as a Confederate veteran of the Lost Cause seems kind of skeevy in retrospect; ERB obviously intended it to help establish John Carter as a cavalier, a kind of American aristocrat but the effect is, instead, to loop back to the nasty racism that saturated his timeperiod. You can almost hear the happy darkies crooning spirituals down in the slave shacks in the background.

Gah.

So the original book is kind of a wash.

But Collin's movie Dejah isn't; she's fiery and smart and tough. And funny. And, of course, a total babe; this isn't real life, fergawrshsakes.

Her costume, while more voluminous than a Burroughs original, is skimpy enough that a genuine fighting princess of Helium would have spent most of her time worrying that one of her opponents was liable to snip off a dangly bit or two.



But, here's the thing I kept thinking about watching the film again.

The film stays fairly close to the ERB canon, from the radium pistols to the Thark jezails to the nefarious Therns and so on and so on. So the assumption is that the other aspects of the original story are in there. We see the Thark egg-incubator in the opening Barsoom sequence; the Tharks hatch from eggs, K? That's important.

Because on Burrough's Mars everyone and everything hatches from eggs.

Martian women, regardless of species, are oviparous.

So why the hell does Dejah have one of these;



Nothing that hatches from eggs has a navel.

(Update 5/15: In the comments section Jack Saint raises a good point; some of the non-mammals of Jasoom DO have navels, specifically, some birds have a sort of small scar from the chorio allantoic duct that connects the yolk sac to the embryo. This at least gives our gal Dejah a shot at having a navel, though (as I discuss in the comments as well) the chance of her sporting anything like Lynn Collins' cute little innie is fairly low. Still - at least the possibility's there. Proof, if we needed it, of the awesomesauce of Nature in all Its Works...)

But regardless of the biology of navels, there you have it; the fanboy in me comes out not drooling over naked space babes but niggling over ridiculous petty plot details like who has or hasn't got a bellybutton.

But, damn, Disney...how hard would it have been - how tiny an amount would it have cost amid the ginormous CGI budget - to spackle over Lynn's bellybutton? Nobody but us fanboys would have even noticed it but we'd have nodded knowingly and appreciated the gesture.

Silly? Sure, but then so's making a multimillion dollar picture of a sort of ragtime-era sci-fi version of the Prisoner of Zenda.

Call me nitpicky. But there you go; I can't be other than I am. I'm the sort of person who looks at a gorgeous woman playing an alien princess in a sci-fi action movie and notices Dejah Thoris' navel

Universal Bearing

OK, this is just odd.

Mojo and I found ourselves watching the Miss Universe broadcast the other night, which speaks volumes of how bored we were with whatever else was on the idiot box that evening.

We both agreed - having consented to go along with the silly premise of the magilla - that the young lady from the Philippines seemed head-and-shoulders smarter and more together than the other four gals posing decorously for the delectation of the ridiculously-coiffed Donald Trump, who really is an astonishingly enormous dick in case I haven't mentioned what an astonishingly enormous dick he is lately. But that given that the whole shebang was being filmed from Vegas that the gal from the U.S. would probably get the nod, the fix obviously being in.

And so it proved.

Upon which we laughed heartily and went to bed, forgetting the entire forgettable incident.

Until, while searching the World's Worst Newspaper Website I came across this:

"Monnin, of Cranberry, Pa., wrote on her Facebook page last week that her father had recently pointed out a clause in the Miss USA contract gives top pageant officials the power to pick the top five finalists and the winner. "I was not aware of the clause in the Miss USA contract which says that the Miss Universe Organization, Donald Trump and others have the legal right to choose the top five and winner...irrespective of any publicized selection process."

Gee. I'm shocked, shocked!

So this young lady has been socked with a ginormous fine, and I'm just left with one slightly cynical bit of snark; "Miss Universe"?

It may just be my biased opinion, but it would truly serve the people who put up this pageant, and the other people who actually spend time and money taking this pageant seriously, right if a beauty queen from one of the other sentient species (which presumably inhabit some far portion of our universe) turned up to chastise these jumped-up hairless monkeygirls and -boys for the arrogant assumption that their pathetic little species was, in fact as it seems to be in their overheated imaginations, the crowning glory of the stars.

Along with a cookbook, perhaps?

Carmen

I really have no excuse for this other than a) it's a truly miserable rainy day, and b) Rita Hayworth - Margarita Carmen Cansino - was an exceptionally lovely actress.

(Although let me pause for a moment, however, and just grouse: what the fuck was wrong with the official female "dress code" of the Forties through the early Sixties? Specifically, the red granny panties that come up to Rita's waist. Gah! Was a woman's navel some sort of mid-century erogenous zone, or what? Whatever it was, women in pictures and films had to wear these awful Depends^TM well until the surf films later in the Sixties introduced the notion that you could appear in public with your belly showing and not corrupt the children. Sorry. /rant.)

The saddening part of the combination of beauty and rainy days is that poor Rita's personal life was a dreary as the day today; she was a drunk with serious emotional issues and a career of finding lovers and husbands who were weapons-grade shitheels.

She also suffered from Glamor Girl Syndrome; "[M]en fell in love with Gilda, but they wake up with me." she said, and might well have been speaking for every public beauty whose partners take the parts that they played for the women they are. While it's very human to see what you want to see, when you do that with another person there's no real alternative but unhappiness.

So here's to the happy laughing Margarita of her glory years in the Forties when she was young and strong and lovely - awful swimsuit panties and all - who floated across our lives as a pair of legs long enough to bestride a chasm of troubles and a smile bright enough to lighten a gloomy day. If only you could have turned that brightness inwards, Doña; "Multa ferunt anni venientes commoda secum, Multa recedentes adimiunt"

I served...

...in the wrong damn Army.

I worked with some fine female soldiers. Many of them were terrific people. Several of them were very physically attractive, as well. But never in my craziest dreams would I have described them as "better than professional model."

Let others make war; you, happy China, make gorgeous troopers better than professional model!

(h/t to Fallows)

The Lifeguard's Revenge

I admit to watching "Baywatch" back in the day to a) ogle the scantily-dressed babes and b) revel in the utter doofiness of The Hoff. At the time, the actress in this video, someone named Nicole Eggert, was just another skinny California blonde. And apparently even California blondes put on a few pounds when they pass 40. Hence the subject of this...

Nicole Eggert is BACK IN BAYWATCH! from Nicole Eggert

But y'know the real odd thing to me about the thing?

Nicole is NOT fat.

Nowhere CLOSE. She's got a little belly, and is a little soft around the hips. Does she have the truly unhealthy dewlaps of flesh, in the sagging gut or under the arms or on the thighs, of the dangerously obese? C'mon. She's a gorgeous woman in her middle forties. How the hell is that fat? Add to that the fact that the woman has apparently had a serious back injury, is still in some lingering pain and probably can't maintain her the kind of fitness you need to stay actress thin.

And she's had a baby.

So this little vid doesn't work for me; you have to start from the concept that a couple of extra pounds makes you...FAT. That a woman who is a little extra curvy is disgusting because of that. Not me, Giacomo; that's not a bug, it's a feature. I'm with her; let 'em drown, the dumb bastards.

No, y'know what does kinda squick me out?

The tramp stamp. Ewwwww. Sorry, ladies. Tats look good on bikers...no, wait, they don't. Tats are tough; they have to fit you and your personality, they have to be part of you. The strange little butterfly or whatever that is you wear over your right kidney, Nicole. Ick. It just doesn't work for me.

Strange, isn't it, what the human eye and mind finds to delight in or reject? The makers of the video apparently think that Nicole's weight is unpleasant. For me, it's the scrimshaw on her skin; it's like painting grafitti on Venus di Milo.

La Chatte

Strange little post. Here goes.

I was fiddling around on "I Can Has Cheezburger" when I came across the panda snapshot that went with the post below. Then I ran into this one:and loved it so much I had to build a post around it.

The conceit of "woman as cat" is too stereotypical to discuss. And, although I know that fur color in cats is gender related I have no idea what gender is associated with white; indeed, being, in essence, no color at all but all colors together white may transcend the "color = gender" cat rules.

But.

Is this cat be anything but female?

In fact, she reminds me of nothing so much as

this woman right here.

And that isn't to say that Barbara was catty, or cat-like. But the look on the cat's face is perfectly Stanwyckesque. You can imagine that after Fred MacMurray went home for the night she sat on the couch looking just exactly like this. Just exactly.

I like to call her: "La Repose du Chatte de Mort".

Which reminds me: I need to talk about women in general.

Random Thoughts, Sticks and Stones

Slow day at work today, so my mind has wandered a little amongst the CAD drawings.

Is it just me, or were the late 1940s through the early 1960s really terrific for the look of women's fashion. And yes, I understand about the tyranny of the patriarchy and the discomfort of foundation garments, pumps and crinolines. But the Dior "New Look" of 1947, or the trim look and clean lines of the women's dresses of the late Fifties and early Sixties are, to me, stunning.

It helped to be Audrey Hepburn, sure. But I've seen the pictures of women in the street scenes of the time and the styles were tremendously flattering on the average Jane, too. I like jeans for the comfot but, really, you've got to have one of those legendary walnut-cracking butts to make a pair of jeans look anything but baggy.

Just sayin'. And speaking of good-looking, I had to throw this in just because:

1. Ava Gardner was a gorgeous woman and a hell of an actress,

2. The Little Hut is a fun bit of silly fluff worth catching for watching her, David Niven and Stewart Granger at the top of their game, and

3. EVERYthing in the movies during the height of the Studio System was "designed" by someone. Ava's grass skirt here is "designed" by Christian Dior.

Ummm. Yeah.

What was the deal with navels, though? Look at where Ava's grass skirt is hiked up to - would YOU want your waistline up under your short ribs? I didn't think so. So I'm assuming that the point of that portion of the outfit is to hide Ava's tummy and that naughty navel.

Wierd what gets people - and censors - worked up...

Anyway, this was taken while out at a CO/CM job this week. I was watching the contractor's guy run the roller while perching on the T-handle of my footing probe. It's a quick way to get off your feet, sort of like one of those folding seat-stick things. Not stylish, but comfortable.I perch this way enough that I didn't think anything about it until my kid looked at the picture and asked: "Dad, why is that stick thing up your butt?"

Ummm...I...errr...I don't really have a stick up my butt...do I?

Yipe!

Arrgh! (Redux): Who Wants Some?

Interesting little news item:

The "hero" captain (IMO, frankly, just another goddam statistic in the loathesome "everybody is a hero!" sweepstakes the American news media seems to be running) of the Maersk Alabama testified today in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (although why Foreign Relations and not Commerce, I can't fathom).

"Commercial ships working pirate-infested waters should be protected by an armed corps of senior officers backed by the government, Maersk Alabama Capt. Richard Phillips told Congress Thursday"

Okay.

But here's what I found interesting. His boss, the CEO of the Maersk Line, did too.

"Arming merchant sailors may result in the acquisition of ever more lethal weapons and tactics by the pirates, a race that merchant sailors cannot win," Maersk Inc. Chairman John P. Clancey said in his prepared remarks."

When we had this discussion over at "buggieboy" earlier this month, I said:

"Other potential issues with the Q-ships would be the immense potential for liability in arming the sort of crews that sail a lot of these vessals. The old days of the Western merchant marines is long gone. Most of the deck crews of these ships are what a Victorian Briton would have called "lascars": Sri Lankan, Indonesian, or Korean contract sailors - basically coastal villagers with a couple of weeks training. Handing out rifles and grenade launchers to these guys? Lloyds would scream like a wounded eagle.

The alternative would be for the shipping companies to hire contract gun crews. But picture the problems and expense that would entail. You have twenty container ships that transit the Horn every quarter. You lose one a year; 0.25 ships/quarter. The ransom is 10 million dollars, or $2.5 million/quarter.

Meanwhile, you're hiring 20 gun crews a quarter, four men at $1,000/day; $360,000 per ship per quarter, roughly $7 million per quarter or $28 million a year.

This makes no sense, economically. They're financially better off paying the ransoms, and the pirates probably know that as well as we do."

And here's the proof; confronted with his own employee talking about getting armed guards on merchies, the operators of the merchant shipping lines would rather encourage their engine room crews to take up juggling live torpedoes on their break time.

What I think this points up is the problem with taking complex real-world socio-polito-military problems and trying to reduce them to news-bite talking points. The Somalis involved in this stuff aren't one-dimensional movie villians. Their reasons for freebooting are complicated and difficult to solve; a couple of bombing raids, an Ethiopian invasion...these not solutions are, young padawan, Master Yoda would say. The bottom line here is there probably IS no single simple, elegant solution; political, military or otherwise. The best answer may well be a combination of guile, force, bribery and avoidance.

But you can't put that on a bumper sticker, or get a blow-dried newsreader to put it across to a viewing audience full of Diet Pepsi and Chee-tos. So chances are we will never have any sort of sensible debate on what, if anything, the U.S. should do about it.

Whatever.

The real bottom line is that talking about pirates lets me post pictures of sexy pirate wenches. Arrrgh! There's a sight to shiver me timbers, eh, buckos?

And not just for the lads - here's an equal opportunity cheese-and-beefcake cover for all comers.

As an aside, I've always gotten a bit of a chuckle out of the latter-day romantic image of the buccaneer. Back in the day they were categorized as what they are, the seagoing equivalent of a mugger or a carjacker. Dangerous, violent waterborne vermin that were the lawful prey of every decent sailor or traveller who objected to robbery, rape and wanton destruction. The contemporary accounts from the great Age of Piracy in the mid-17th to the late 18th Centuries were almost exactly the same as our tabloid press coverage of crime: fascinated but horrified, a sort of violence voyeurism for the safe in bed.

It was only AFTER the sea lanes were tamed that piracy became romantic and writers (and later filmmakers) started penning odes to the jolly roger.But isn't that the whole idea? I've always loved this definition of "adventure": "Someone else having a frightening, dangerous, difficult ordeal several thousand miles away."