Category Archives: Uncategorized
Boys For Pele?
Warren Farrell has a column up on USA Today titled Guns don’t kill people — our sons do.
All but one of the 62 mass killings in the past 30 years was committed by boys or men…
…For boys, the road to successful manhood has crumbled. In many boys’ journey from a fatherless family to an almost all-female staff elementary school such as Sandy Hook, there is no constructive male role model…
…And just while their bodies are telling them that girls are the most important things in the world, these boys are locked into failure. Boys with a “failure to launch” are invisible to most girls. With poor social skills, the boys feel anger at their fear of being rejected and self-loathing at their inability to compete.
All true. The culture has changed from teaching boys how to be men to teaching boys to be quiet, subservient wimps. So how does Farrell propose to fix this? Should fathers reach out to kids in their neighborhoods who don’t have dads and mentor them? Could they be teaching boys how to accomplish things for themselves and discover the self-respect that comes with it? Should adult masculinity once again be seen as an ideal and not something to be avoided at all costs?
With one executive order, President Obama can create a White House Council on Men and Boys to work with the Council on Women and Girls he formed in 2009. Why? No one part of government or the private sector has a handle on the solution.
A coordinated strategy is best developed at the White House level. The mere formation of such a council by the president alerts foundations, companies, families, teachers and therapists that our sons’ “failure to launch” needs to be on their agenda.
Farrell’s answer – fob it off on the gub’ment. Hand it off to the biggest group of hand-wringing manginas in the country. They’ve done so well in telling us what to do about so many other things.
And politically, an effort to go beyond the rote ideological disagreements of the two parties could help build the unity to actually do something instead of fight to a standstill in a closely divided country.
Right. The “boy problem” can be a stepping stone for greater political bedfellow-ry.
New Year’s Day
… and all is quiet as a world in white gets underway.
No, I’m not going to link to that song. Everyone is doing that. Or are thinking about it, at least.
Welcome to 2013, the first year since 1987 with 4 unique integers in the number.
Christmastime Is Here
Merry Christmas! I hope everyone has a safe and happy day.
Just for fun, here are a few of my all-time favorite Christmas songs. Post your own favorites in the comments, the more the merrier.
Someone put a lot of work into this light show.
Weird Al extrapolates how holidays may be celebrated in the future.
And three songs from the perennial classic A Charlie Brown Christmas.
I loved the Charlie Brown specials as a kid, and the Christmas special was my favorite.
12/21/12
Have fun during the world’s last day. The ultimate Black Friday. The End of Days. Here’s some playlists for you rock out with as it all ends.
http://www.spinner.com/2011/05/20/end-of-the-world-judgement-day-songs/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apocalyptic_songs
Blow your eardrums out. It’s not like you’ll need them anymore anyway. I’m going to empty my bank account and blow it on liquor and pizza here at the station while blasting the music. Come on by, but bring snacks.
Business Models
So I’m lying in bed trying to sleep and it suddenly hits me how to make almost any business idea successful. Make it amplify something women do already.
Radio, records, compact discs all took off so women could hear love songs directed at them 24/7.
Coffee shops became a hangout for women to meet, whether with their men in tow or not.
The telephone became a distance-indifferent gossip fence.
The internet was just a place where nerdy guys wrote science articles, downloaded porn, and played games until social media emerged and made the net respectable. Online shopping cemented women as permanent users.
Smartphones combined the telephone and the internet, making it possible for women to communicate and shop anytime, anyplace, without phone lines or cable jacks keeping them stationary. The mobile mall and gossip fence, which could play MP3s of their favorite love songs.
All of these were successful anyway, but blew up hugely once women became involved.
I may or may not be entirely serious with this post. I’ll let you know when my idea for a Facebook-enabled microwave oven either takes off or crashes and burns.
P.S. It’s easy to come up with a male-centered business model too. It either has to blow up or have naked women. But for some reason, people are skittish about shrapnel and social diseases. That’s why no one has tried selling explosion porn.
P.P.S. “Business Models” sounds like some kind of art film you can only buy in the back room of the used CD shop featuring clothing optional board meetings and asset leveraging.
DJ ScratchCat
There’s a new DJ applicant here at Night Sky Radio. Looks like he has mad turntable scratchin’ skillz.
I hope they stick him on the morning shift, or I might be out of a job.
Sticking The Knife
I briefly dated this one woman back in the 90s. Things quickly degenerated into some kind of bizarre power struggles. I always seemed to be walking the razor’s edge in some way I couldn’t articulate. Accommodating but never quite capitulating.
One day I wasn’t jumping through the hoops like I was supposed to. I tried to be calm and reasonable as she got more and more emotional. I don’t remember what it was about, or any of the things we said except for one. At one point during her not-quite-yelling spiel she said “I could be going out with other men and you would never know!”
I was pretty much done with her after that. The stupid thing is that it took me another week or two – and still more crap – before I finally ended it.
The Breeding Police
At Curtis’s sentencing yesterday for bail jumping and failure to pay child support, Circuit Court Judge Tim Boyle told the 44-year-old Racine man that his frequent breeding was to be curbed as a condition of his three-year probation term.
Curtis owes about $90,000 total in back child support and interest to the mothers of his children. Pictured in the above mug shot, Curtis will have to wipe out that debt before he can add heir number ten.
This guy also has convictions for passing bad checks, criminal damage, and burglary. So no, he’s not up for Father of the Year. I agree he shouldn’t have any more kids, and should support the ones he has (through legal means, not selling stolen TVs on a corner downtown or whatever).
But if the courts can order him not to have kids, they can order anyone not to have kids. In fact, it’s been done before.
Previously, a Kentucky judge ordered a deadbeat dad (12 children with 11 women) to refrain from having sex in an attempt to keep him from adding a 13th dependent. The country’s most famous deadbeat dad, Tennessean Desmond Hatchett, has fathered more than 20 children (with 11 women).
And yet, none of the women either of these guys had children with seem to have received any such orders.
Can the court order someone to have children? I wonder if eugenics programs are far behind.
Shooting The Moon
“In a secret project recently discovered, the United States planned to blow up the moon with a nuclear bomb in the 1950s as a display of the country’s strength during the Cold War space race.”
http://rt.com/usa/news/us-moon-nuclear-project-631/
Carl Sagan was almost a moon nuker.
They never wanted to actually blow up the moon. The plan was to create a nuclear flash visible from Earth to scare the USSR. But I guess making it sound like moon rocks would be splashing into the ocean from an empty sky makes for better copy.
nightskyradio 