There were nekkid wimmen in my dreams Friday night, and that didn't make sense at all. Any guy who thinks he has the endurance to keep up with even one woman is a conceited jerk, and if he thinks he can keep up with multiple women, he's Charlie Sheen.

What's more, these nekkid wimmen were really girls, and while I find athletic bodies to be nice to look at, whether they are of deer, porpoises, or men, young wimmen scare me, as anyone under the age of, uh, about 27 or so, strikes me as looking too much like jailbait.

And Then A Guy's Voice

And then I heard a guy's voice, and I cracked open my eyelids, and realized that it was free HBO/Cinemax weekend on DirecTV. TiVO was plugging away, recording recording whatever dirty movies it could find for me.

I used to really enjoy porn, but it just seems to have lost its salt. I don't know if porn has changed or I have. To be fair, most of it was always pretty crappy. Zalman King could be counted on to do good stuff - he was the one behind "Red Shoe Diaries" and "9 1/2 Weeks" - but most other porn was pretty poor.

You know, when the Supreme Court of the United States struggled to define porn, one of the phrases then genned up was "prurient interest". Pruritis is a medical term, meaning "causing an itch." Seems to me that most porn over the years has had nudity, but it wasn't really porn, for lack of itching powder.

Guilty? Not Me!

I don't feel particularly guilty about the boobiage, as one reader identifies it, that comes on display in The Canthook every so often, because there's no itching powder here, either. It's about laughing. There's a little about warmth as well; snuggling with someone you like is one of the nicer activities of life. Raunchy sex is a lot of fun, too, but since I can't write that well, I choose not to write it at all.

I took a look out the bathroom window Saturday morning, and the colors were saturated. So, might I say, was all the vegetation. I didn't notice it letting up, not all day, and it's still raining at 3 AM. I've always loved rain, especially the rain with the really huge drops that really go splat. Just looking out the window, though, the temperature reached in and grabbed me by the, well, this sounds funny, but it grabbed me by the toes of my feet.

My Tootsies HURT

Daggonit, my tootsies are frozen. And though I spent most of Saturday in bed, they never warmed up. At suppertime, Blondie commented on how cold she was, and that's a woman who feels comfortable with her feet soaking in a tub of salted ice. I've been back in bed for several hours right now, and my feet covered by several warm blankets, and they just won't warm up.

My late first wife Em used to tell me that if I was cold in bed, I should stop putting my feet under the covers, because they were inevitably cold, but this ain't funny. As opposed to, say, the Dan Patrick Show. There's nothing much on HBO/Cinemax, but The 101 seems to be my favorite channel these days.

On the Dan Patrick Show, they were talking to Kobe Bryant. Apparently, Kobe was fined $100,000 for calling an official what was referred to as a "anti-gay slur", and from what Dan and the Danettes were saying, Kobe admitted using the slur, and not for the first time.

Googling For Slurs

I tried to google for it, and the best I could find was a reference to "the other f-word", and it didn't explicitly state that Kobe had used the term "faggot", but I'm guessing here that was the word, anyway.

Is that really an anti-gay slur? If you want to piss off a gay guy, you'd call him a Santorum. Call him a cocksucker, and he'll likely say, "Yes, and a good one, too!" Faggot used to be slang for a cigarette, which you suck on, and as a non-slang word, means a bundle of sticks used for kindling.

This whole thing is silly. They fine players $100,000 for expressing themselves orally, but players get elbowed, tripped, and otherwise physically battered and there ware no real penalties for that. I think they have their values out of whack.

Costas Weighs In

Bob Costas also talked to Dan this morning. They were talking about perjury and steroids, and Barry Bonds' conviction for obstruction of justice.

Was there any possibility that someone was going to go to prison for dealing in anabolic steroids? No. In the real courts, they have a rule of thumb that in order to be convicted of perjury, you must not only make a misstatement of fact under oath, but you must knowingly make that misstatement of fact, and it must be a material of fact.

Barry Bonds defended himself by stating that he did not knowingly take steroids. I wonder if his lawyer might not have been better off arguing that the misstatement was not material, since nobody was really facing prison.

Between 'Roid Rage' and testicular atrophy, Barry is losing his wife, his daughter Aisha, and half his stuff, but his testimony doesn't change that one bit.

Weighing The Asterisks

The discussion, however, was whether the records of such baseball superstars as Sammy Sosa should have an asterisk. Blondie is of the opinion that they should be, since those who took steroids cheated.

Bob argued that the Commissioner ought to put a page in the front of the record book pointing out that different conditions prevailed in different eras, not just steroids in the 1990s, but things like live ball / dead ball, the difference in ball gloves and athletic shoes over the years, and the height of the pitcher's mound, it's hard to compare anything in one era to another era.

At lunch, I pointed out to Blondie that today's ball players travel in quiet jets, and they used to travel in DC-3s, and before that, in trains and busses, and that affects their performance on the field. She said that with today's screeners, it's not like today's travel is easy, but then she realized that it's a different experience if you travel on a private jet.

All The World's A Stage

And it's all just a game, and even at that, it's not an important game, like between two organizations that do something else, like colleges that educate people, but it's all just exhibition, between teams that do nothing but play ball. Watching professional athletes play baseball is about as satisfying as watching actors screw. It's a sorry substitute for doing it yourself.

Eventually It's Complicated with Meryl Streep came on HBO, and it was sort've amusing. It wasn't like something from Nora or Delia Ephron (think: "When Harry Met Sally" and "You've Got Mail") or from the Coen Brothers (think: "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski") but it was adequate, which is to say it's better than 95% of what's out there.

Theodore Sturgeon

That's Sturgeon's Law in action. Ted Sturgeon, an excellent science fiction writer, got up in front of a convention and proclaimed that 90% of all science fiction is crud. The fans were aghast at that proclamation. They fell silent. Then he proceeded to declare that 90% of everything is crud.

Some would argue that is an incredibly pessimistic point of view, but I instead prefer to think that it says something optimistic about people. Most scientific laws, one of my chemical engineering profs used to proclaim, are restatements of the obvious, if you only look at what they actually say.

Nature Compensates

His favorite law was "Nature always compensates. If someone is born with one leg shorter than the other, the other leg will invariably be longer to compensate." The thing is, if you have one leg shorter than the other, that's just another way of saying your legs are of different length, which is another way of saying that you have one leg that's longer than the other.

If you apply that logic to Sturgeon's Law, it becomes obvious that we are spoiled by excellence, and come to expect it, so that we are disappointed by the merely average, terming it crud.

And as we talk about crud, perhaps we ought to discuss the latest person to talk loudly about running for President on the GOP ticket.

An Unusual Ritual

In one of his wife's books, she writes that when their baby died, they took it home, slept with it, and introduced their other children to the dead baby as their brother before taking it back to the morgue so it could be buried. A lot of people find that creepy; I don't.

When my youngest daughter was stillborn, we were in a hospital about 150 miles from home. I had plans for that child. We had worried for most of the prenancy, because of prior stillbirths, and when the baby passed the mark of entering the third trimester, we knew that the child could survive on its own outside the womb. We were home free. We finally could breathe. Except that something that never happens, happened. She died of a true knot in the unbilicus.

Yeah, It Happens

That's what happens. Relax for just a minute and shit happens. But if I couldn't teach her how to ride a bike, couldn't dance with her in her prom dress, couldn't walk her down the aisle to give her to her husband, I could at least take her home. Swaddled in a blanket, nested in an ice chest, accompanied by papers, she rode in the rear of my car from the hospital to the funeral home.

Yes, papers. I can't imagine what would have happened if I'd have been stopped with a corpse in the car and no papers. And I started at 3 AM, because I was bawling all the way, and I didn't want anyone to see me.

A Blessing From Mama

I got to the farm at 6 AM, and I didn't want to wake anyone at the funeral home yet, it could wait until 9, but Mama wanted to see the child. I remember her caressing the face, saying that the girl looked like Em, and she held the baby's hands, pointing out the long, graceful fingers. It was a religious experience.

And that's the one redeeming characteristic I find in Mr. Santorum. He is a cruel, ugly, selfish man, but maybe he cares about babies. That's not a good reason to vote for him, but maybe I need not verbally consign him to the depths of hell.

Or not. We as Republicans used to be the good guys.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Barry Bonds - Bob Costas - Cinemax - Coen Brothers - Dan Patrick - HBO - Kobe Bryant - Meryl Streep - Nora Ephron - prurient interest - Rick Santorum - Ted Sturgeon - Zalman King