I have been trying to sort out why I randomly surf the blogs. Often I am looking for specific information about a given subject like cataracts or virology or nutrition or chemistry or physics. Surfing the blogs is of no help in that regard. So the question of why I spend a few hours a week looking over chance blogs still remains unanswered, when I could be using search engines in a more focused and directed way.
I guess it has to be the novelty and element of occasional surprise. You just really never know where you are going to wind up. Yesterday I came upon a blog about spanking. Having been spanked frequently and very hard as a young child, it is not a subject which I take to with great enthusiasm. My sons got very few spankings. Even fewer were hard. And each of those give me lasting regret.
So it was a surprise to see this particular blog, which was extolling a variety of benefits to adults spanking adults. There wer a considerable number of pictures. There are even professional spankers who perform for a fee. Apparently there is a significant subculture who engage in the practice. Contrary to what I would have guessed, I don't recall more than a picture or two of women being the recipient. Most were of women administering the spanking to their spouse or boyfriend.
But I think what surprised me the most is how many comments were made on the postings, how favorable virtually all the posts were about the practice, and how basically happy the people involved were with the activity.
A few years ago I saw a movie which rather disturbed and impressed me. It was called "The Secretary" with Maggie Gyllenthaal and James Spader. When I rented the movie, it was on the basis of the stars, not the plot blurb. So I had no idea of the content having elements of sado-masochism. The oddest thing of all is that it was such a happy movie. I went from my initial reaction that this was a disturbed and troubling relationship, to what a happy couple.
Anyway, I thought I would get away from my practice of dealing with things like cataracts, which according to the experts will affect virtually all of us if we survive long enough, but about which practically none of us have any real interest. The same with prevention of viral infections, which affect almost everyone almost every year. Yet these and other scientific subjects of importance to our comfort and survival, do not inspire much interest in the general public.
The other day, one of my chess opponents said that he had taken a look at my blog. He said I talked about too many subjects and used too many words. I had to chuckle over that.
There is some validity to the using too many words criticism. Hemingway believed in brevity, and achieved it in spades with "The Old Man and the Sea." But as his career went on, he found such perfect brevity very elusive. I have a feeling that this might have played some part in his ultimate demise. Writers perhaps take their craft too seriously.
But the other thing that came to mind was what a regent once said to Mozart when straining to find some intelligent critical comment to Mozart about a piece of his music that had just been performed.
"Too many notes." he said.
About Me
- Anthropositor
- Deep South, United States
- Consultant, inventor, mentor, chess coach,. Current projects involve No Till Farming and staving off blindness due to cataracts among other projects. I also do confidential ghost writing (without taking any published credit. My current blindness makes me put this on hold for a while. I should have one eye working again in about four months. Fact, fiction, all subjects considered. I have heard My daughter Jennifer is alive. I would love it if she were to contact me here. I understand she would like to know me. I have sent a message by circuitous route. I can only hope. My posted Email works as well. We have four decades to catch up on.
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2 comments:
Great Blog! Have you ever been to Dailykos.com?
There may be individuals there interested in your subject of cataracts.
Peace.
I just had my first look at Daiy KO's. It will not be my last.
While I try to tone down my own rhetoric with regard to the geopolitical mess we have gotten ourselves mired down in, the truth is, eventually it bursts out of me.
I don't know how useful these outbursts of mine really are when they occur. Of course, I frequently had the same sort of feeling during the decade long struggle to end the Vietnam war. That was a very messy and frustrating time.
A time when the greatest bulk of the population as a whole clearly was not capable of much complex thought. Still, the war did eventually come to an end, and those of us in the propaganda trenches, as diverse as we were, and with our own sets of extremists and scoundrels, got the job done.
A prime piece of evidence in this regard was the general acceptance of a large segment of the public of the ridiculous findings of the Warren Commission on the JFK assassination.
The nation was in shock. Actually shocks. Only the year before the assassination, we had experienced the only event in the history of the world in which the entire world could have been destroyed by human action. It was not statesmanship that averted that. It was luck.
The desire to trust our government is compelling and runs very deep. We really resist the notion that our nation could be run by a cabal of idiots and scoundrels, even when the evidence is quite incontrovertable.
Even with cataracts, things can get pretty muddy. We want to believe our doctors, and believe IN them, even more strongly than we want to believe in our politicians. And the medical establishment certainly presents a more unified front.
Collectively, the consensus of medical opinion is overwhelmingly that surgery is the ONLY recourse. We need not even be looking for any other alternatives.
We do not notice that the surgeons pick up about $3500 in the U.S. for an operation which usually takes much less than an hour. What incentive do the doctors have to find economical means of prevention? Answer: None.
If you own a cash cow, you don't slaughter it. You milk it.
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