This is why casual pink clothing on men looks really bad:

https://twitter.com/RitaPanahi/status/1215793056072421377

The "Popeye" question on Family Feud:

https://www.today.com/food/family-feud-contestant-s-hilariously-wrong-answer-about-popeyes-goes-t171609

SPOILERS:

Given her apparent youthfulness, I expected her to say she'd never seen a Popeye cartoon - or that she never really knew anything about the character.

Excerpts from Today:

...A few people actually thought that the question was a little bit unfair.

Timothy H.S Wessel
@THSWESSEL
Replying to @FamilyFeudCa @CBC
To be fair.... he could have said what is Popeye the sailor man's favorite food.

Though the majority of respondents (54 out of 100) said "spinach," many people on Twitter pointed out that meant dozens of people would have also gotten the question wrong.

(snip)

How to debunk the bumb blonde myth:

https://mobile.twitter.com/dthmath/status/1215752791542697989

Everybody: Cool sick moves.

A project manager: If this guy has time to learn to dance this good, that means I can make him work even longer hours.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Crazyinnasia/status/1215676578434375683

"From a cafe wall in Essex."

Reminds me of "You're a screenwriter? I've got a great idea for a movie. You can type it up and we'll split the profits."

Royalty— Coney & Lenona, see the comment @ January 10, 2020 7:14 PM.

And this is precisely on point. Adoration of royalty appeals to the most childlike part of the human heart, the daydream which needs & deserves to be outgrown as soon as possible.

Americans know that better than anyone in the world! We should be proudly blunt about this. More than anyone else on the planet, Americans know you have to build and earn your own happiness, and we're not intimidated by the challenge.

…And that's part of why those two ninnybunnies are moving to the United States, of all places, in order to escape racism.

The United States is the place for people who want more from their lives than what others tell them they were born for. We'll trade the comfort of being told who we are for the pleasure of finding out for ourselves.

Flappy birds:

https://mobile.twitter.com/johannperezz/status/1215534443055611906

And this is precisely on point. Adoration of royalty appeals to the most childlike part of the human heart, the daydream which needs & deserves to be outgrown as soon as possible. ~ Crid at January 11, 2020 11:22 AM

Interesting, and definitely on point.

Most little girl fantasies are just that, little girl fantasies - to be the princess rescued from the tower or awakened by a kiss from the handsome prince.

And little boy fantasies? They're about gaining power; about being the hero, being strong enough to slay the dragon.

While both need to be outgrown, it's the little girl fantasies that seem to do the most long-term damage to the fantasist.

To be fair.... he could have said what is Popeye the sailor man's favorite food.

As opposed to Popeye the electrician's favorite food? When you say "Popeye" who else springs to mind? (Bonus points if it's Popeye Doyle)

Did you READ the article?

Granted, Gerry Dee did NOT ask "what is Popeye's customers' favorite food?"

But it was still an easy mistake for a young millennial - and for plenty of people in general, as suggested above.

Crid, I can't get past the paywall at the WaPo right now, but I got curious about this (from 1997):

“It is the rare little girl who wants to grow up to be queen. To wish to be a princess is ... to aspire to perpetual daughterhood.” —Marjorie Williams.

I'd never thought of that - and the only girl I ever heard of who DID want to be a queen was...the fictional Lucy van Pelt, from the pen of Charles Schulz. (This gets spelled out, hilariously, in the musical "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown." Btw, she does not aspire to MARRY into royalty!)

Anyway, I looked up Williams' piece and found more:

http://julessearchforvirtue.blogspot.com/2011/05/do-you-really-want-to-be-princess.html

There are three links within, in this paragraph:

"An essay from the time of Princess Diana's death by a writer named Marjorie Williams has gotten some attention lately. There is some praise of it here and a particularly good take down here."

And after that, the poster says:

"...The part about Princess Diana not growing up is right. She was always a little girl. But an aspiration for shelter? What does that have to do with a woman who was, if you'll pardon my bluntness, the very worst sort of attention slut. The road from Princess Diana to Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan is a very short one.

"A fairy tale princess doesn't live a sheltered existence. She lives in a world where shelter isn't necessary because she is after all a princess. It's a world where the princess is the star and everyone else is just playing a supporting role.

"And it's probably a harmless little fantasy most of the time. Fantasies tend to be harmless no matter how much some moralists claim otherwise. But it is something women should be much more embarrassed of than they apparently are."

(end)

FWIW, I can't remember fantasizing about being a princess, if I did - and as I got older, I would have been embarrassed to have been in any situation where there was a full-time maid or housekeeper. As Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in "Nickel and Dimed": "I have never employed a cleaning person or service...this is just not the kind of relationship I want to have with another human being."

(Not to mention that aside from the idea that getting one's hands dirty regularly is good for the soul, doing so helps to keep one independent in general. Someday, after all, the oil will desperately need changing and no one else will be available to do it - and what happens if you never learned how to do it?)

From the third link-within-the-link (this is by Simcha Fisher - clearly a very religious woman, to judge from her profile):

https://www.ncregister.com/blog/simcha-fisher/someone-to-watch-over-me

"...I’ll never forget a scrap of conversation I heard on the radio. A young couple with a new baby found themselves in a terrible fix, jobless, homeless, rejected by family. The young woman, overwhelmed, cried out, 'I just wish you could fix everything!' and her boyfriend responded not with anger, but with a postmodern whine: 'That’s totally unfair—what a sexist construct!' And the woman wept, 'I know, I know.'

"But she didn’t want to be pampered—she just wanted, as a mother and wife, to be sheltered for a moment, even if only by words of comfort. She wanted to know that he would at least try to take care of her and the baby—and surely he wanted to believe that he was capable and strong, a real man. But the world had taught them both that what they wanted was something foolish, artificial, and archaic. And so they did not know what to do—neither one of them.

"My husband and I depend on each other equally, but in different ways—why is that so terrible to admit? Women and men alike have been robbed of a very basic human understanding of couplehood—but the longing doesn’t go away. Women long to be cared for. This is not wrong.

"When I am pregnant, I know my husband will care for me. When I’m tired, he will help. When someone insults me, he will defend me. When I spend time caring for babies and the house, I’ll be met with gratitude, not mocked and belittled. I’m no shrinking violet, but sometimes I just plain need him—and he needs to be needed.

"Women walk a fine line: It’s tempting to surrender to lazy ninnihood—to confuse femininity with feebleness, and to let our minds and our wills atrophy. And so women lash back against this feebleness, squashing any signs of softness under their executive high-heeled maternity shoes. Let’s be clear — feminism brought many necessary goods to the world, and I don’t want to go back to the fifties. But neither do I want to pretend that I can do it all by myself.

"Here’s my advice for a woman looking for that middle road between harsh feminism and stunted daughterhood: Be strong, be smart, take responsibility for yourself—and never, never bind your life to a man who doesn’t want to care for you."

Popeye's chicken is pretty common. The fact that 46% of their survey came up with a different answer shows how much the sailor man has faded from general consciousness.

I'm just confused why getting this one wrong is particularly embarrassing or noteworthy. People on that show say all kinds of crazy things. I think there was one guy asked to 'name a color' and he responded 'James'.

> it's the little girl fantasies
> that seem to do the most long-
> term damage to the fantasist.

Well, the fantasies of boys, whether for power or tail or whatever, can't survive the competitive humbling of middle and late adolescence: Put up or shut up. But Princess-y idiocy can smolder silently for a lifetime.


> Be strong, be smart, take
> responsibility for yourself—
> and never, never bind your
> life to a man who doesn’t
> want to care for you."

The discontinuity in that passage is apparent to you, right?

Completely agree about the Ehrenreich thing, though I must say the path has been smoothed by being too poor to afford help (and too antisocial to want to give others continuing & chatty instruction about my intimate quarters).

I'm old-ing, and if the money's there, might soon feel entitled to switch sides.


The Comfortably Smug twitterer is have a good and properly sarcastic time with all this.

Ninety-three. Do you see a seat belt?

Listen, I seriously admire the woman. She plays ponies and drinks like a fish, as did her mother. She's been disgraced by a cheating husband, incompetent sons, demented in-laws, and just about every human being she might have hoped to count on.

She's a seriously hard-ass western personality. If you have to have a queen, she's the one you want.

But you don't have to have a queen. If her endless humiliation weakens the popular enthusiasm for her position, I'm all for it.

> casual pink clothing on
> men looks really bad

I make an exception for certain cuts of formalwear.

But you don't have to have a queen. ~ Crid at January 11, 2020 8:31 PM

In a parliamentary democracy, you almost do. The main weakness of that system is that the government is run by majority rule in parliament only. That makes the system inherently unstable.

Lack of a clear majority can result in two-party coalitions - or, in the case of a country with more than three parties, multi-party coalitions. Should one party in a coalition "lose confidence" in the compromise prime minister, a vote of no-confidence can be called and, if lost, result in a new election.

Britain's primary cause of governmental stability is in having only three major parties. A country with more than three can find itself facing instability and near-constant turmoil in the government (see Weimar Germany).

In addition, the general public does not get a direct say in who gets elected as prime minister under a parliamentary system, so loyalty to the office holder is limited and victory has more to do with back-room connections than with connection to the voters. Boris Johnson did not win the prime minister's office from the voters, his party won a majority in parliament and put him in Number 10 Downing.

In a parliamentary system, the influence of the minority is limited. No chance the minority can capture one house of the legislature and exert is influence, for better or worse. The minority party (or parties) are reduced to carping from the back bench. Little compromise is needed to pass bills or enact laws, so the minority party, once in power, moves to change the preceding government's policies. Only a government that holds power for a long time can ensure that its policies become entwined in the civil structure of the country and are thus difficult to overturn.

The queen offers stability, even with little direct power over the government. She offers a focal point for the public. The prime minister is the head of the government and the queen is the head of the country. Non-monarchical parliamentary democracies usually have a president to perform the functions the queen performs for Britain. An elected office, that president's support base can be fickle, and the president can be caught up in internal politics (again, see Weimar Germany). The US combines both offices in the singular office of the US president, sometimes to our detriment, but the public gets a direct say in who gets the office.

Gail: Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or, what’s that strange thing you British play?

Arthur: Er, cricket? Self-loathing?

Gail: Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves.

~ Douglas Adams (The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)

> Be strong, be smart, take
> responsibility for yourself—
> and never, never bind your
> life to a man who doesn’t
> want to care for you."

The discontinuity in that passage is apparent to you, right?
__________________________________

Yes and no. It's easy to ASSUME she was trying to have it both ways, but maybe it just didn't occur to her to spell it out for those who don't think the way she does. I.e., she could have said: "Never bind your life to a man who doesn’t want to care for you Even When Truly Necessary."

In other words, when you're young, inclined to be romantic, and a bit confused over whether the person you "love" is the right person to marry, you have to ask yourself three questions, whether you're male, female, gay, or straight.

1. Would you want to marry this person even if he/she were in a wheelchair?

2. Are you prepared to marry the perfect person only to see that person get hit by a car the next day and get paralyzed from the neck down, not just the waist? (That's the trouble with the words "in sickness and in health"; the implication is that any "sickness" that might happen would be years later!)

3. Most importantly: Would your beloved say "yes" to the above questions, just because YOU might say "yes"?

I assume that Fisher had #3 in mind, when she wrote her piece.

> In a parliamentary democracy,
> you almost do.

Again, a question is begged... What then is so precious about parlimentary democracy?

Yes: I'm suggesting that all nations should reconfigure government to avoid the ancient and discredited attractions of royalty. (Hitchens was like that about religion, and often described these cultural patterns as indistinct.)

> It's easy to ASSUME she was
> trying to have it both ways,
> but maybe it just didn't occur
> to her to spell it out

Aww, C'MON, Lenona… It's the quintessence of her point, and the awareness to avoid the collision was simply not present in her language, and no assumptions are necessary. Nobody put words in her mouth. "It didn't occur to her"? In redressing youthful confusion, the best sentences are short and clear. There are always contingent outcomes in any life plan, but the whole point of concise principles is to offer guidance for handling them.

What then is so precious about parlimentary democracy? ~ Crid at January 12, 2020 7:50 PM

Who knows. Europeans and Euro-philes seem to love it.

I answered an ad by a singer songwriter circa '04, looking for a female vocalist.

Turns out he wanted me to sing about how much I loved fellatio. Then I was out of town and he threatened to kill my parents if they didn't give him the number where I was at because he needed me there right away for a song contest or something. After I reported him to the cops and blocked off all contact, he sent me a bunch of obscene emails about my boobs.

Why on earth does hiring a cleaning person mean a weird relationship? How is it different from a dry cleaner or waitress? They have a job. It's an honest job, and the work they do is necessary work (of course it doesn't necessarily have to be the cleaning person who does it, but it does have to be done by someone). Why do you think a cleaning person is a shameful job? It isn't.

Conan, how long has it been since you were a little girl?

For the past five years it's been about having icy blast powers that make magic snow castles.

I meant to write "you were around" not "you were" but it won't let me edit

I answered an ad by a singer songwriter circa '04, looking for a female vocalist.

Turns out he wanted me to sing about how much I loved fellatio. Then I was out of town and he threatened to kill my parents if they didn't give him the number where I was at because he needed me there right away for a song contest or something. After I reported him to the cops and blocked off all contact, he sent me a bunch of obscene emails about my boobs.

Sorry about the double post

NicoleK, Ehrenreich never said "weird." Or "shameful."

Did you ever read "Nickel & Dimed"? It's a short, very worthwhile read. She did minimum-wage work herself, for months, as research for the book.

Obviously, there are 60-to-80-hour-working people who would have no real free time at all if they did their own cooking and cleaning, but she wasn't talking about them.

MY point, and hers, very likely, was that having that type of help on a regular basis when a person, couple, or family could easily do the cleaning themselves without too much exhaustion easily leads to the attitude that one is above housework - or unpaid work in general. (It's also interesting how some people seem to think that doing even a tiny amount of unpaid work per week is doing "their share" while their spouses do several hours of unpaid - and very necessary - chores per day.) Also, leaving aside the social problems that come from never giving your kids any REALLY dirty or time-consuming jobs to do, Ehrenreich also pointed out that white couples are fools if they think their kids don't notice when the parents hire mostly - or only - non-white maids. She quoted the poet Audre Lorde: "I wheel my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket … and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid.'”

Crid, all I can say is, I mistakenly sometimes assume people can read my mind too, like her, so I don't make everything clear when I should.

Did you miss the part where she said:

"When I spend time caring for babies and the house, I’ll be met with gratitude, not mocked and belittled"?

In other words, he depends on her too.

I'm reminded of this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/miss-manners-personal-contacts-beat-internet-for-dating-prospects/2012/03/27/gIQA2lPL2S_story.html

April 8, 2012
DEAR MISS MANNERS: I am a divorced woman, 64 years old, extremely fit and healthy for a woman of my age. I have worked since I was old enough to apply for a job.

I have been single for more than 20 years and lately have felt the desire for another relationship, but dating at my age is very difficult. I know it sounds insensitive, but I don’t want to spend (waste) time dating a man, only to find out several months later facts about him that, had I known upfront, I would never have gone out with him.

I am professionally employed. I am by no means wealthy, but I manage my money. I do not have negative baggage and do not want to deal with another person’s problems, personal or financial. Some may say I am not giving a fair chance to a man who might turn out to be a good companion, but I disagree. I have heard every line, every scam and every trick imaginable.

Somewhere in my area, there must be one nice, normal man, who like myself is looking for an honest woman and a quality relationship. How does one kindly and swiftly get the message across right upfront that I don’t want to mend, fix, nurture, counsel, finance anyone? Is it appropriate to ask a man if he is unencumbered, debt-free, no criminal history, etc.? If so, how does one go about this?

GENTLE READER: Surely you realize that you live in the Internet era, when people advertise for romance by stating their demands upfront, and tools are readily available for conducting background checks.

Suppose you had to depend on relatives, friends, and civic, religious and educational organizations to provide prospects?

Oh, that’s right; you remember that from before your marriage. You want to tell Miss Manners how annoying you found all those unappealing prospects they provided. You may have even met your former husband through that system, and you remember how annoying he was.

But you probably didn’t meet jail-breakers, bigamists and indigents that way. For all its creakiness and exasperating inability to gauge attractiveness, the old system was pretty good on character and reputation. No doubt there were ghastly mistakes. In general, however, personal recommendations are probably more reliable than what people say themselves when there are no available witnesses to their misdeeds.

So even if interrogating any prospects were not rude, Miss Manners doubts it would yield the information you want. The number of prospects will diminish if you get to know people in their social or professional circles, but so will the number of scams.

Still, you may have trouble finding what you want. A nice, normal man may have a different idea from you about what constitutes a quality relationship. Although he may not need any kind of emotional support from you now, he may be put off by the idea that it would not be forthcoming if, in the future, he did need it.

There are a lot of problems with the relatives, friends, civic, religious, and educational system.

Once you are out of school the educational option is off the list. I don't know if you've been to a church lately. Under 50, you probably aren't attending. If you are in your 20s and at church you are probably the only one. I don't even know what a civic organization is in this context. So I can't comment there. Lots of people do the friends list. But there usually isn't much depth there. A few months and you've exhausted the prospects. Relatives? Everyone moves. What are the real chances you are in the same city as your parents these days. Also family is complicated. Which dad do you talk to about that. Most people have several.

So yes internet dating is a shit show. But lots of people do it because there really isn't anything better out there.

> Did you miss the part where she said:
>
> "When I spend time caring for babies
> and the house, I’ll be met with
> gratitude, not mocked and belittled"?

No, I saw it, but it didn't seem relevant to topic at hand, which was self-reliance, for which she'd reversed course within a very few words. (Certainly, woman ought not be mocked and belittled: Why would I think otherwise, and what's that have to do with self-reliance?)

On Monday I got into a Twitter exchange with a guy over this same kind of thing. He said…

I'm all for free speech, even offensive speech, however, there is a line. Intolerance, like gay conversion, rests upon a foundation that those people do not have a right to exist as they are. That kind of speech should be illegal.

I don't think so. You believe in self-reliance and free speech or you don't. You're against slavery or you're not. You support women's suffrage or you don't, you believe in legal access to safe abortion or you don't, and on and on.

Crid: Yes, well, I didn't see anything in her article to suggest that "a man who doesn’t want to care for you" automatically meant "a man who doesn't want a stay-at-home wife." (My brother, in the 1990s, ABSOLUTELY did not want a stay-at-home wife, and the woman he married has happily kept her prestigious job to this day, many years later. But from the tone in his voice at the altar, I knew he was ready and willing to do everything she MIGHT need - and then some. She's no slacker, either.)

And regarding Fisher's sentence: "But neither do I want to pretend that I can do it all by myself":

That did NOT necessarily mean that she would whine "I can't be the breadwinner just because he suddenly got seriously ill!" It would just mean, maybe, that she would ask - and/or hope - for housework help from friends and neighbors.

It's been pointed out, elsewhere, that just because one's friends and relatives move away a lot more than they used to, these days, doesn't change the fact that couples with small children, especially, need a great deal of outside help, to manage, and that it's a myth that they don't or shouldn't. Being self-reliant shouldn't have to mean being able to set your own broken leg, either, unless you're determined to live far away from civilization.

I.e., what IS self-reliance, really?

And just in case:

What I'm trying to say is: I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. While one could argue that religious people are ALL in denial, pretty much, I'd like to believe that the average religious adult is smart enough to remember the saying "God helps those who help themselves" and plan for life's emergencies accordingly. Especially after decades of feminists hammering it into girls' heads that it isn't just divorce they have to worry about; husbands die, too.

Btw, regarding my previous post where I mentioned unpaid housework help: There CAN be ways to pay those helpers, even when one is poor. In 1980, Miss Manners had a letter from a single mother of three who wanted to date but sometimes had to turns down dates because she couldn't always afford a sitter. Guess how MM responded?

https://books.google.com/books?id=Q348PWE1p6MC&pg=PA70&lpg=PA70&dq=%22miss+manners%22+%22I+would+not+be+out+this%22&source=bl&ots=LElHJR3Mmo&sig=ACfU3U0ja5SKEiHjac4FOwPEVmETO8ms4w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjO2aG2gobnAhUjTd8KHaYACr4Q6AEwAHoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22miss%20manners%22%20%22I%20would%20not%20be%20out%20this%22&f=false