After receiving a cease and desist letter from attorneys representing Playboy magazine, attorneys retained by Feral Living have advised us not to proceed with the Zona Nuda Naked Blogger Project.

However, on the slight chance that we will someday go ahead with the project after all, or find a compromise solution, feel free to keep those non-pornographic nude pictures coming!

Bahahahaha. I have two daughters, they both look like me (short grey hair, squinty eyes) so you know it happens. But #2 in the search? I’m flattered.

I’ve been getting the usual interesting search requests. I guess I could do a public service and respond to them, except, eh, that’s been done. But sex between americans and europeans? How weird! Is it even possible? I mean, don’t you need an adapter? Some sort of 120/240 transformer? Some two-prong-into-three-prong thing? PAL/NTSC? Leaded-unleaded?

How should I know? And who cares, ultimately? Sex between americans and europeans, big deal. Nowadays people manage to have sex with anything.

What I find more interesting are arguments between americans and europeans. Especially after more than 20 years. I mean, in the beginning, anyone can argue. And Americans and Europeans have plenty of extra issues. But after 20 years you can either go the dysfunctional circular route, arguing about the same thing over and over and over and over. And over and over.

Or you can metaargue © Feral Living 2002. There are many kinds of metaargument. You can argue about the rules of argument, including fine points of debate, discourse and rhetoric. You can argue about metaphors:

Alpha: I can’t bear catastrophes like that plane crash where so many children our children’s age die.
Miguel: Mm hmm. It’s terrible.
Alpha: They were being rewarded for getting good grades!
Miguel: I know. [blah blah about Swiss air traffic controllers being to blame] But innocent kids die every day.
Alpha: Yes.
Miguel: And it’s everyone’s fault. We’re all involved.
Alpha: ["not again" look]
Miguel: For example, anyone who burns gasoline in their car, or heats with oil contributes to the problems in the middle east, gives incredible power to the oil companies to disrupt things there. We’re ultimately not without guilt.
Alpha: [Looks at yogurt looks at Miguel] So why don’t you take the train to work anymore?
Miguel: I got tired of getting bronchitis in the winter. I’m part of the problem. We all are. We’re all flies caught in the gigantic spiderweb of evil.
Alpha: Uh-uh. We’re the spiderweb. The children are the flies.
Miguel: And George Bush is the spider. Him and the rest. No, we’re all the flies.
Alpha: No, we’re the web, connecting everything. Fly-die, hey it rhymes.
Miguel: Fly.
Alpha: Web.
[etc etc]

Kids: try this at home when you run out of things to argue about.

[ps I also notice FL is #1 in this yahoo search for "cunigulis". Must get spell-checker.]

Adam Blust of lucky8ball web design is now publishing the perfectly-titled Web Common Sense, a down-to-earth newsletter on web design issues. Go subscribe now.

PS HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ADAM.

Why didn’t anyone tell me about them?

Maybe I need a testosterone patch. I’ve heard that falling hormone levels make middle-aged men cranky. But 43 isn’t middle-aged, is it? I’m still so young! Maybe I just need a vacation. We’ll be in the Seattle and Portland area for a couple weeks starting next week, visiting the relatives. Maybe that will do the trick.

Until then, do any of you have any questions? I’ll answer anything, but reserve the right to be facetious. This occurred to me a couple days ago during an IM conversation with someone in France, that there’s a lot I never talk about, about daily life here. Like, Austrian drivers’ licenses are printed on pink card paper, folded several times, and never expire. So you get old people with pictures of themselves at 18 on their licenses. 18 used to be the minimum age for driving here; it’s since been lowered to 16 or 17, but you only get a restricted license until you’re 18, whatever a restricted license is. Also you are required to attend an expensive driving school in most cases; and cannot simply transfer your American license (at least not from most states; a few individual states have agreements with Austria, most don’t).

Today, though, I wanted to mention a reason for Americans to be glad they don’t live in Europe: Euro-shite. Euro-shite is the bad European pop music played on the radio here. Every country in Europe produces it, but a few small countries such as Holland, Sweden, France, and to an extent Italy seem to be the main offenders.

Euro-shite is distinct from that found in the British Islands, usually known as Brit-shite, and your regular shite heard in the United States, as well as other varieties such as Latino-shite and Global-shite aka Ethno-shite, not to mention Celtic-shite, etc etc.

It’s a pervasive and horrible music and I used to think the international success of Abba was to blame but the music is far older. It all started in the late 50’s or early 60’s when Europeans first adopted American pop music, or maybe earlier when they started playing jazz, who knows.

I will not link any of these guys ‘n gals or give a list of names, I refuse to concentrate on them for as long as that would require. Also I’m supposed to be working. It just really sucks, believe me. And if you don’t believe me – and of course you have no reason to – you’ll just have to come over here and listen for yourself.

Falco. Falco is maybe an example of a European pop singer who rose above Euro-shite. Just imagine really bad Falco. Or have someone send you a tape of the Euro-Vision Song Contest participants.

Anyway: send me questions.

Billegible recently posted a couple interesting things about stalkers and molesters. They got a lot of comments so I thought I’d try it here.

It is summer here, and as I drove home it occurred to me that my eyes were scanning the sidewalks and crosswalks classifying the pedestrians into groups. According to some sort of Darwinian triage system, anyone identifiably male was exempted from further scrutiny after the first glance; females were then classified and it was not, “Intelligent/dumb” or “good sense of humor/no sense of humor”.

A man I know who was taking a lot of steroids during a bodybuilding phase told me that during that time, he would, when driving, look at each woman and think, “she fuckable? Fuckable? Mmm, fuckable?” So maybe it is a hormonal thing. His case was an extreme, I think, but maybe all males are like this to a certain degree.

I’m not saying I know. One thing, though, I think that whatever impulses a person has, they have them and they are natural and normal. Trying to be a “good person” and not have these impulses is pointless, I think now. You only end up castrating yourself, or otherwise denying parts of your personality that are there.

What matters, is whether or not, and how, you act on those impulses. Like, don’t grab women’s asses, dude. I asked Alpha if men had ever molested here. She said a lot. It was like, background noise. A week or so ago in Italy, someone pinched her ass and she turned around to slap him, and saw it was a toothless old man.

I was riding in a Tokyo subway at rushhour once, and counted 7 people squished up against me. High season for gropers, who are called “chikan” in Japanese. I made an effort not to grope people on the subway. I got groped once, but was unable to relax and enjoy it because I couldn’t tell who was doing it. Japanese women, at least when I was there, seemed to put up with it rather than make waves; foreign women – I heard lots of stories about “anyone know whose hand this is? I found it on my ass,” and women dragging chikan off to the police.

Stalking, though. My personal curse is unintentional stalking. That is, I find myself, quite often, going the same place as some Lone Woman who is walking in front of me. I have to turn left up ahead, she turns left before me. I have the choice of letting her think I’m following her, or taking a different route.

Once I was going to a music store in Vienna to look at a low whistle they had just gotten in. A woman got off the bus in front of me, and went everywhere I did. Left turn, right turn… I went around some trees in the park to get away from her, but she ended up in front of me again, and it looked as though I’d hurried around the trees to stay up with her. It turned out she was going to the music store, too. To look at the very same low whistle.

I ended up buying the whistle, but I swear to god, not because it had her spit on it. I saw her again too, at a whistle workshop. I felt bad.

Worst was a winter several years ago when I was walking with a pronounced limp because I had fallen on the ice and hurt my hip. I am not huge, but wrapped in an overcoat, wearing heavy boots and a thick layer of winter fat, I’m not small either. Every evening, in the dying light, walking to the train station from work, there they were: Lone Women walking to the train station too. Right in front of me. A little slower than I wanted to walk. Meaning I always caught up with them. But couldn’t pass them easily on the narrow sidewalks piled with snow. I tried everything in my efforts not to scare them – because, imagine a limping (i.e. Mad Hunchback) guy huffing and puffing behind you on a dark, deserted street – crossing the street to get away with them (because at first they were crossing the street to get away from me), taking different routes, anything I could think of. I couldn’t walk slower or I’d miss my train… But everywhere I went, there was another Lone Woman. I finally started taking the bus.