Define "Glutton for Punishment"

So.... Chinese New Year.

You know, I can't even claim I didn't know what I was getting into this year; 'cause I did it last year and I remember how pretty much every single muscle in my body was aching for the subsequent month.

At least last year, our lion dancing for Chinese New Year was spread over two days.

Not so this year. We did it all in one day. Eleven hours straight of Lion Dancing. Now that may not sound like much, but I was pretty much exhausted by the time we called it a night at 8:00 pm.

But the good news is that I survived. I'm alive and breathing.

Tired, yes.

Sore, hell yes.

Every muscle in my body feels as if it's been beaten with a rubber baseball bat.

Next year, I really can't claim that I didn't know what I was getting into.

Welcome to the Year of the Fire Dog.

I worship whoever invented the RAID array.

So one of my hard drives failed on Wednesday. This was, largely, a non-event for me because I was bright in my assembly of my current computer. The hard drive of this computer is actually two individual physical drives. The two drives have the same data written to them, so effectively, one drive is an identical copy of the other.

So the short version is that a complete drive failure on my computer was a non-issue; the drive was even under warranty, so there was no cost for replacement; and now I have the drive replaced and synchronized with the source disk. Two hours later, and it's as if the failure never happened.

The Aristocrats

So I rented the movie The Aristocrats last night.

The fact that this movie managed to get an NC-17 rating, in spite of having no violence, no sex, and no nudity should tell you something.

Basically, this movie is a documentary of a joke. A joke known as "The Aristocrats" (surprise, surprise). It's a joke which is never told in front of an audience, but has nevertheless been deeply rooted in the consciousness of stand-up comedy.

The joke begins in pretty much the same way: a family walks into a talent agent's office plugging a new act. The punchline is: "wow, that's a hell of an act," the talent agent says, "what do you call it?" The Father replies: "The Aristocrats."

Now, on the face of it, this might not seem very funny, but in between the opening lines and the punch line, they can, and do, put just about anything their warped minds can dream up. We're talking everything from simply crude, to vile, to downright disgusting. As Paul Reiser put it in the film, "I believe in some countries you can be put to death for what goes on in the most tame versions of this joke."

Basically, you shift from laughing so hard you can't breathe, to looking at the screen in complete shock that the comedian they happen to be showing actually just said what you think they said.

And as one who watched Full House in his youth, I will never look at Bob Saget the same way again.

The cast is, in a word, phenomenal. They got over a hundred very famous comedians; George Carlin, Drew Carey (who has the coolest name of all the comedians they got), Hank Azaria, Tim Conway, Carrie Fisher (I will never look at Star Wars the same way either), Matt Stone and Trey Parker, Whoopie Goldberg, Eric Idle, The staff of The Onion, Kevin Nealon, Gilbert Godfreid (who, hands down, gave the single funniest rendition of the joke), Paul Reiser, Chris Rock, The Smothers Brothers, Penn and Teller (The former was actually one of the producers of the film), Jason Alexander... The list literally goes on and on, but I can't remember most of the others. Like I said, they got over a hundred comedians for this thing.

I have here a link to the South Park version of the joke. Be advised, this file is probably not something you should watch at work, and should not be viewed by anyone with delicate tastes. You have been warned.

Definitely worth seeing.

Sex

Okay, now that I have your attention....

Actually, I want to delve a little more in detail on a subject that I touched on a few posts ago. Namely, why is sex such a big issue among right-wingers?

I mentioned that several members of the Family Research Council had proclaimed that making the HPV vaccine mandatory was "sending teens the wrong message."

We're talking about a pro-life, pro-family organization which has it's knickers in a twist over a vaccine which could potentially protect the lives and fertility of thousands of women in the US alone every single year; for the simple reason that HPV is (in 92% of cases) sexually transmitted (those who object to the vaccine tend to studiously ignore the other 8%). They're particularly fond of parading HPV horror stories in front of Teenagers to terrorize them into the "Abstinence is the only option" message because unlike HIV or VD, Condoms are less effective in preventing it (to use baseball parlance; you don't need a home run; first base will do).

Give a Christian Conservative the choice between sex and death, and they'll choose death every single time. No sex for unmarried people, no HPV vaccines, no condoms for gays ('cause it's obviously better for them to get AIDS than to use a condom; God obviously never liked them anyway), no emergency contraception, no birth control pills, no abortions for anyone. When a 13-year-old girl in Florida (identified in the newspapers only as L.G.) was pregnant and wanted to terminate the pregnancy (at her doctor's suggestion), Christian soldiers rose to, quite literally, drag the girl kicking and screaming into the delivery room, tie her to the table and force her to undergo what I understand is an extremely painful process; and yes, I realize that there wouldn't have been much actual dragging, kicking or screaming involved, but I don't think I'm exaggerating by much here. Even when it was proven and accepted by the court that carrying the child to term had a threefold greater chance of killing both her and the child than the abortion would, they still insisted that the child had to be born. Pro-life my ass. Fortunately, a federal judge disagreed and allowed the abortion to proceed. The judge, specifically chosen for his conservative views, was labeled as an activist.

I think we can pretty much give up on the idea that the Pro-life, Pro-family end of the political spectrum has anything to do with the "life of the unborn" (setting aside, for the moment, whether the unborn actually is life). This is about sex; and more specifically, keeping sex firmly coupled to reproduction, at least as far as women are concerned. If they were truly protecting "the life of the unborn," they'd be handing out condoms at street corners, they'd be dishing out birth control pills and morning after pills en masse. They'd actually listen when more "liberal" (if you use the term loosely) elements of society suggest that the way to reduce the number of abortions is to educate people on making sex safer. Instead of making emergency contraception available right next to the toothpaste (which, I can pretty much guarantee, would reduce the occurrence of abortion), they applaud pharmacists who refuse to fill out prescriptions, and doctors who don't tell rape victims about emergency contraceptives. And yet interestingly enough, while they may offer lip service to the "low" (actually over 95%, if used properly) effectiveness of condoms; for some reason they're not interested in reducing their availability in order to keep the boys chaste.

This isn't about abortion. This isn't even about reducing the number of abortions, this is about the possibility that (horror of horrors) sex could be fun. That's why they object to abortion, to any form of contraception other than abstinence, to same sex marriage, and to just about anything that could make sex less risky. If word got out that there are reasons for having sex that have nothing whatsoever to do with producing spawn, women could no longer be forced to assume the role that Christian conservatives seem to believe that they should: a brood mare for the state.

Now, I admit that I don't have much in the way of solid data to back this up. At best, this is a hypothesis; but you have to admit that there is a certain internal consistency in the suggestion that maybe this has less to do with abortion than it does forcing women to produce babies.

Am I gettin' old or something?

So I made it back to Calgary, and in a move of incredible idiocy, I decided to start Kung Fu-ing right away.

Turns out that my body isn't gonna let me get away with that. It turns out that taking three weeks and not doing any physical activity means that I can't just jump straight back into it.

So I'm very, very sore right now.

The thing that bugs me about this is that when I was 18, I probably could've got away with it. I'm not saying that I wouldn't have hurt, but at least I wouldn't be unable to move.

And, no, I'm not exaggerating. It literally took me twenty minutes just to get myself out of bed this morning, and another five to make my way across my room to the computer so that I could type this.

On the plus side, my fingers don't seem to be hurting that much, so typing isn't that high on the torture scale. I do have a few muscles that aren't kiling me. Unfortunately, they aren't located in my back, shoulders, legs, arms, feet, neck or face. Dammit.

Okay. Need to go eat something, then lie down. I hurt.