Smallhouse Log

Sunday
"Any STDs will be killed by the jalepeņo." -Stan, 05/29/2005

Caesar's Bath, eh? I can tackle this. There are at least five things I don't understand.

  1. Cream cheese. I mean, make up your mind! Do you want cream, or cheese? Neither really belongs on a bagel, and ya'll know it. What are you thinking?

  2. Sciece fiction authors who, rather than writing several books which happen to be in a series, write one very long book, serialised into several long volumes. This is especially strange if the the author is not a proven quality, id est the four-volume-each-of-which-is-the-size-of-your-average-brick-long book in question is their first novel. I might have said "full-length" novel, but that's a bit of an understatement. I mean, one could get away with that if one is writing a history tome, but this is fiction. That's just too long. You think people will still care by the end of the third book? I doubt it. How pretentious does one have to be to even think one can get away with that? Thankfully, this is a problem that seems to be limited to science fiction. For now.

  3. Livejournal. No, I'm serious. What do they think they're doing? Why are they doing it? Especially people that just post chunks of song lyrics, and that'll be the whole post. Now, I don't mean to cut down any of my friends with this, and I'm not saying posting song lyrics is bad, but for cereal, are they just bored? Isn't there some more constructive / less prodigal way to deal with that? Do they think anyone else cares? Do they think that, months or years later, they will be amused to read it? And the comments, always the comments! Like it's some BBS or something. I mean, really.

  4. Anti-polygamy laws. I mean, I know why they're there. They're there to keep the Mormons in czech. But no one has ever made to me a convincing argument that polygamy is bad for the State. What business does the State have, in a free republic, publishing laws that ban something benign to the State? Moreover, it's not like polygamy isn't practiced; look at your average married man with a girlfriend, or college girl with three simultaneous boyfriends. Basically, it's a social taboo, and not one that society bothers to enforce. So, in the first place, if it's a social taboo, it's up to the society, not the State, to enforce it through social, not political, means. And further, since society apparently doesn't care that much, it makes any ban that much more silly.

  5. Drinking bad alchohol in order to assume drunkenness. I love the taste of (fine) alchohol, and enjoy the social element it often carries. I dislike being drunk. My lack of understanding, or rather, its causes, should thus be obvious. Further, most of those same people hate hangovers. Are they just not thinking? This is almost as bad as cream cheese. Sobriety is a state of mind, people! You drink/smoke/whatever because you're too lazy to alter your consciousness manually, or because you want an excuse to act shamefully, or both. All I can say more is "What's the deal with that, yo?"

So then, the last thing is to pass the ball. To the chosen (who are, incidentally, not yet chosen as I write this): Pick five things that are popularly accepted but that you just don't get. It's the Caesar's Bath meme, and I can't or won't tell you why. Now, the movers and shakers themselves: Leah, on account of her love of creamcheese (with her, it's one word); Matt, who is most likely to know the nebulous motives of scifi writers; Joan, who has used her livejournal in more ways than I've ever seen anyone else manage; and Lorange, who knows some people who know a thing or two both about polygamy and about drunkenness and how to get there.

"The penis is evil! Go forth and kill!"

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