Saturday, July 24, 2010

One of the Many Reasons I Love Bill Hicks

Relentless

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Sarah Palin The New Shakespeare?


HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa*Snort*HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa*fart*HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa*wipetears*HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa...Ha...Ha......Shit that's funny.


refudiate - /ri'fud/iate/ verb. to refud something
Origin - Alaska: from middle ages Alaskan for fud (incredibly stupid) + iate (I am).
Derivitives refudulicious, refudify.

Monday, July 19, 2010

The Man-Girdle is Here!

The latest fashion essential for men has finally hit North America. The Man-Girdle promises to not only slim that pesky mid-section, but also fix a host of ailments. Developed in Australia and widely sold in Europe, the man-girdle, or 'Core Precision Undershirt', is the latest fashion must-have for men who want to wear more form-fitting clothes and improve their shape. No longer meant be kept hidden like a dirty little secret, shapewear for men is functional and attractive with not a flesh tone in sight. But will men wear it? Yes, and the reason is language.



How Girdles are Sold to Women

Advertisers are very good at tapping into hidden desires and fears. The promotional language marketing girdles to women has long operated on the premise that female consumers think of their bodies as a problem that needs to be fixed. Women, it is assumed, want and need help to look better, so for years they have been squeezing into shapewear because it will slim, shape, cover problem areas, hide extra weight, and hold everything in.
Marketing the Man-Girdle

The marketing campaign directed toward men makes no such assumption about male vanity and consequently employs very different language. To relieve male consumers of any suggestion that the garment is a self-indulgent purchase or remotely feminine, advertisers of the man-girdle emphasize health promotion and performance. The new undershirt for men not only streamlines and slims, it also improves posture, supports core muscles, controls body temperature and promotes circulation.

Couched in pseudo-scientific jargon, the makers claim the undershirt was 'developed in conjunction with physiotherapists, ergonomic consultants and athletic garment engineers', and was created using a 'unique body-mapping system that builds physio taping techniques into every garment to reinforce and support the body's natural structure from the core'. Wow, that's some underwear.

The use of phrases such as 'athletic technology' and 'high performance', and 'compression clothing' market the girdle as a sport enhancing device much like a weight lifting belt or powershake, while terms such as 'precision' and 'engineered' bolster its scientific credentials. This language also means that the man-girdle will not look or sound out of place next to the car or athletic drinks adverts in men's magazines.

But will men buy it? Of course they will. The sales pitch combines the ideal of male health and fitness with the contemporary interest in design and technology. But men will also wear a girdle for the same reasons women do, to fit into their clothes and to hold in the flab. It is not only women who need and want help to look their best, nor it is only men who want to feel like top athletes in their high performance, scientifically engineered underwear.

Gothic Fiction - An Introduction to Terror Writing

The term "Gothic" first appeared in the 17th century as a derogatory term meaning barbarous and uncouth especially in relation to the Goths (Germans) and their language (McCalman et al, 526). By the 18th century, the term had taken on additional meanings including medieval, unenlightened and superstitious. At the height of the neoclassical age, anything Gothic was decidedly anti-Roman, irrational and backward.
Gothic Revival

Yet toward the middle of the century, a revival was underway. A new found interest in medieval architecture and ancient romance culture resulted in the first Gothic novel: Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). A keen participant in the Gothic resurgence, Walpole had already built his own Gothic castle, Strawberry Hill, before writing what he described as the first "attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern" (9).

Walpole's novel established the popular formula for the Gothic romance which was emulated by authors such as Mathew Lewis (The Monk, 1796), Anne Radcliffe (The Italian, 1797), Samuel Taylor Coleridge ("Christabel", 1816), John Keats ("Eve of St Agnes", 1820), and John Polidori (The Vampyre, 1819), and Mary Shelley (Frankenstein,1831) among others.

Gothic Machinery

The Gothic is characterized by a set of conventions or "machinery". Events often take place in a gloomy medieval castle or Abbey and generally include a heroine trapped or pursued by a mysterious villain through labyrinthine passages. Much of the action occurs at night and involves supernatural events, dreams, prophecies, or psychological disturbances. The frame of the "discovered manuscript" is also common and functions to lend authenticity and antiquity to the story.

Some of the themes of Gothic fiction include: sexual fantasy, subversion of authority or convention, parent/child relationships, nobility and servitude, rationality and nightmare. The interest in the supernatural, in particular, is often viewed as a reaction to the hyper-rationality of the scientific Enlightenment and Romantic writer's growing interest in nature and the inner self.

Horror Fiction

Anne Radcliffe, one of the most famous of all the gothic romance novelists, was also the first to distinguish the difference between terror and horror. For Radcliffe, terror "expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life." Horror, on the other hand, "contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them" (643). Terror, in other words, is pleasurable because it is cloaked in obscurity and mystery while horror is graphic and unequivocal.

In a review of Radcliffe's Udolpho, Coleridge notes this distinction: calling the novel "wonderful and gloomy," he writes, its "mysterious terrors are continually exciting in the mind the idea of a supernatural appearance...and the secret, which the reader thinks himself every instant on the point of penetrating, flies like a phantom before him, and eludes his eagerness till the very last moment of protracted expectation" (361).

But not everyone was as enthusiastic and the dangers of reading Gothic fiction, especially for women, were widely debated. Excessive consumption was thought to distract young people from their duties, to plunge them into a fantasy world that promoted unrealistic expectations and stirred forbidden desires. Famously satirized in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, women who read too much Gothic fiction were deemed irrational and false.

While many of these early examples no longer attract the readership they once did, they established the conventions of horror and supernatural fiction and film that are still popular today. From Dracula to Twilight, Frankenstein to Halloween, the Gothic's concern of a barbaric past returning to haunt the present still manages to delight and chill. To appreciate terror and supernatural fiction and to understand its continuing appeal, these early texts are well worth another look.



References

Colderidge, Samuel Taylor. Review of Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Critical Review, August, 1794, pp. 361-372.
MacCalman, Iain et al. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Radcliffe, Anne. The Mysteries of Udolpho, Jacqueline Howard, ed. (London: Penguin, 2001).
Walpole, Horace.The Castle of Otranto, Emma Clery, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).