The single strangest reaction I’ve seen thus far to the devastation of Sandy comes from Laura Wood, the genteel bigot and feminism-hater who blogs as The Thinking Housewife. After looking through a gallery of photos on the Daily Mail showing some of the damage in New York city, Wood suggested that the real problem is that New Yorkers aren’t wearing cheerful enough clothing:
THESE Daily Mail photos of New York City after the hurricane remind me of just how ugly the streets of Manhattan are, with almost everyone dressed in drab, uninteresting clothes that rival the uniforms of Maoist China for their homogeneity and lifelessness. America is one of the most aesthetically impoverished nations in history. I wonder how many thousands of people are on medication because they are depressed by their own clothes and their ugly, hostile environments, surrounded as they are by impersonal denim, sneakers with tire treads, plastic-covered down jackets, billboards with oppressive smiles, and the austere, chilling cliffs of modern skyscrapers. This is the environment of a people that idolizes equality and sameness. The only way to survive amid such poverty is to possess an interior castle, a place of tapestries and mahogany where denim and sweat jackets are nowhere to be seen.
Just make sure this castle of yours isn’t reduced to rubble by 85 mile-an-hour winds and flying debris.
Speaking of New York, here’s an interesting (if a bit shaky) video of a walk through that city’s dark streets after the hurricane hit.
@katz
I’m pretty sure it’s in the noted Hebrew holy book of “Trivia that Might Interest Weird People in the Future”
@Cassandra The whole area around Hangzhou is awesome, and kind of off the foreign tourist track. I’d really recommend it.
There’s such a long list of places I want to visit in China that I don’t know where to start, honestly. I recently added Harbin to the list, which seems fitting given my own childhood travels. My Dad absolutely loves Shanghai.
That’s cool- why Harbin? I’ve always kind fo thought of it as a cold industrial city. I’ve been to Shanghai once, it was pretty cool, I mostly just went to bars and drank though to be honest.
No comment.
Still have my doubts, but whatever. And the difference between a theorem and a theory? The reason that this one Aramaic text tells us everything about bum wiping until the invention of toilet paper?
Did you know, for example, that the Romans used sponges, which they washed with vinegar? Wild, huh? Also public toilets. The Vikings, on the other hand, didn’t have private toilet areas, they’d just drop trou and go wherever. The earliest flushing toilet was invented by Queen Elizabeth I’s godson. Louis XIV took two long shits a day, and courtiers would pay for the privilege of attending on him when he was in the can because, hey, one-on-one time with the king.
To put it another way, toilet habits – even looking purely within the context of ‘the West’ – they were highly variable over the at least the last two thousand years. No single primary text is going to tell you all about it. Yes, even if it is Aramaic.
To be fair to Dio, I think’s he’s geniuinely a casualty of the extremely shitty way we teach history. Even in undergraduate world history programs it’s usually like “We’re teaching the entire history of the world, from ancient Greece to The Western Front! If we have time at the end, we’ll do one lecture on how China and the Middle East responded to the West.”
It’s Harbin’s position as a crossroads that interests me, gateway to other regions and all that. Also it has a really cool ice sculpture festival – I want to go in the middle of winter (though I’m not great with cold weather, so I’d have to be bundled up like I was going skiing).
I’m not really all that interested in visiting the Great Wall and stuff like that, I’m far more interested in visiting cities and just hanging out for a while. And following the trail of tea (my favorites is Yunnan).
Katz, the rule is that the older editions of anything are always more authoritative.
http://www.dailygemara.com/Default.asp?DayInCycle=143
Always try to learn from original sources.
It’s not Dio’s ignorance that grates, it’s the combination of ignorance and arrogance. The ignorance isn’t really his fault, but the arrogance is.
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So you’d agree that the Zend Avesta is a good authority on when the left hand/right hand rule developed?
So…which bit of that document is the ass-wiping part?
So would you say that a 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica is better than a current edition?
Because we’ve already got a troll that thinks like you, and he is pig-ignorant.
Cassandra, when you call him “Dio,” I think of the dearly departed heavy metal midget, not the mental midget we have here.
Ugh, absoutely!
Remember what I said above though. Mohammed wasn’t above viewing the world from the culture he grew up in either, which is why bits and pieces of Judaism, Christianity, and paganism ended up in the Koran.
Ask a modern Muslim about the left hand/ right hand though and they wont mention the Zend Avesta. They’ll say its because Mohammed said so.
Yeah, as convenient as it is to shorten the name it really isn’t fair to Dio as in Ronnie James.
I’m still waiting on the citation on that.
And now we have a new piece of stupidity! If a group of people aren’t aware of the historical context that their current traditions came from, it means that that context doesn’t matter and isn’t important.
Dude, seriously, just stop. Your constant attempts to make yourself look clever and avoid admitting that you were wrong are embarrassing to watch.
I’m still waiting on the citation there.
Hellkell, I bet the coverage of then-contemporary events in Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 would actually be pretty damn good.
Here’s a place to start since you seem to be curious. I’m sure there’s an Imam that will enlighten you.
http://islamqa.info/en/cat/262
Yep, and there are rules of codes of conduct in a lot of holy books. However, your assertion was that you could ask any Muslim and they would say it was because of Hadith. So, unless you have a survey of 1 billion plus people, I don’t really know where you’re going with it.
Me: Question whether religious authority is the sole or primary cause of a hygiene practice.
You: Note that religious authorities support that practice.
Me: Confused.
Because all Muslims think and act according to the opinions of a given imam, amirite?
I would be pretty impressed if Diogenes had surveyed a billion people.
Because that would take a long time and while Diogenes was doing that, we would not have to listen to the nattering of this nabob.
The Diogenes Great Toilet Survey Findings
“A majority of Muslims responded to the question ‘why and how do you wipe yourself’ with regional variants of ‘Fuck you.'”