New Orleans from a Distant Shore
|
Posted:Sep 4, 2005 12:49 am
Last Updated:Mar 5, 2006 9:27 pm
16240 Views
|
I write from another country, thousands of miles away. Everyone I know shares this sentiment.
It is heartbreaking to watch the tragedy of New Orleans unfolding. The human consequence of nature at its remorseless worst.
I don’t want to weave words and shape ideas about it. The destruction of a city that has shaped the world’s culture, that through jazz and carnival is close to all our hearts, is beyond all that. On its impact on lives and experiences I cannot even find words, only emotion.
All I can do is extend my deepest sympathies to all touched by this terrible disaster.
My thoughts and prayers to you all.
|
|
|
0
Comments
|
|
Why Champagne?
|
Posted:Sep 3, 2005 1:21 am
Last Updated:Mar 5, 2006 9:27 pm
16632 Views
|
Yesterday we celebrated our success, as we always do, with champagne. With the promise of posting it back on the e-mail, but being very discreet about this forum, I asked my colleagues why are we celebrating with champagne. There are very palatable australian sparkling chardonnays at half the price. So why champagne?
For a start there was a gender difference. A lot of the men raised a glass in the toast, then shot off to the pub to knock back pints of stella artois, have a good, back-slapping, male-bonding time, and no harm in that. Those that remained were pretty matter of fact about champagne. They liked it as tradition, as a ritual we have evolved. They liked the fact that their women friends were enjoying the champagne. One understood how champagne gave an alcohol rush, referring to bubbles, alcohol vapour and the palate. One woman said in response with a look of revelation, “so that’s how I get so heady so quickly.”
So I’m presenting you with a deeply flawed survey. Many of the men had fled, seriously but nicely skewing my sample. I enjoy talking to women and I was, I confess, using an unstructured interview technique, while drinking champagne myself. I didn’t count my interviewees, but I guess I enjoyed spending time with about twenty. But enough of methodology ‒ you want to know what was said.
“It’s expensive.”
“It’s elegant.”
“It’s about luxury.”
In a mock South London accent: “Sue drinks it, ‘cos she’s a posh bird.” And she is, dearest Sue. Oxford first class honours, well-connected, not just fluent but fully articulate in at least two other languages, naturally sophisticated and stylish. She’s a woman who doesn’t need to try ‒ she’s got it, and it’s become unthinkable not to drink champagne when Sue’s around.
“It’s a tradition.”
“It’s stylish.”
“It’s fun.”
“It’s sacrilege, spraying a jereboam all over the place at the end of a Grand Prix. Michael Schumacher ought to be shot, for wasting all that bubbly.”
“What a delightful thing to talk about.”
Some mentioned the effects.
“It makes me feel all warm.”
“The fizz makes me all bubbly”
“I wish you’d asked me earlier ‒ it’s gone to my head already.”
Champagne dependency was a recurring theme in about a quarter of the women I spoke to. In the UK decent champagne costs twenty to thirty pounds, say thirty five to fifty US dollars a bottle. It was frequently the drink of choice, even on a casual basis.
“I’m not the woman to ask,” was one reply. “I’m addicted to the stuff.”
“It’s the only drink you can have at breakfast, lunch, dinner, even four-o’clock, and you don’t get a hangover.”
“Still wine just doesn’t do anything for me … any more.”
And then, of course, the legendary sensuality of champagne. Its visual imagery is erotic, but it goes deeper than that.
“It’s romantic.”
“It makes me feel appreciated.”
“It’s flirtatious.”
“It’s very sexy.”
Three women told me (independently) that it was delicious drunk from a shoe.
“I love having it dribbled all over my body and then licked off. Just like with chocolate,” was one revelation.
In contrast I was told that it doesn’t mix well with sweat. Tastes and preferences ‒ aren’t people different?
So, why champagne? A good sparkling wine was certainly better than a poor champagne. “Cheap champagne is only fit to clean my ring.” There were those champagnes, at the fringe of the appellation, whose only claim to the name was regional. Avoid them. With champagne you get what you pay for, allowing for taste here and there. Here in London Taittinger is very popular. It has smaller bubbles I was told.
“It’s more than getting pissed. A bottle or two of bubbly lambrini will get you pissed. But no more than that.”
“But who’d drink lambrini? Teenagers hang round off-licences (liquor stores) with bottles of lambrini.” Sadly true in London. “And they’re drinking it warm!” Youth, eternally, have much to learn!
Eighteen out of twenty maintained that champagne was a must for an occasion. However good quality, the Australian or Italian alternative just wasn’t the same. With champagne emerged associations, symbols and a unique iconography. Drink champagne and you are adding layers of cultural references, meanings and myths. Champagne might get you drunk, but will add so much more.
I just loved the reply from a dear, dear friend. “If it’s not champagne you are having the experience but missing the meaning.”
That summed it up nicely for me.
|
|
|
3
Comments
|
|
Affairlook - The Great Masked Ball
|
Posted:Aug 30, 2005 1:31 pm
Last Updated:Jan 6, 2007 5:52 pm
17275 Views
|
I like honesty in another person. I like self-disclosure. But to achieve this level of trust there needs to be a quality of friendship.
The big issue I have with Affairlook is that I’ve walked into a masked ball. There are a very few people who lower the mask, and they only do so, understandably once a level of trust has been earned. I will lower my mask too, and there is always the issue of first-call.
As a male there is a pressure, through sheer numbers, to shape a mask that is believed to be competitive, and this drives about seventy percent of males to endow their mask with a mighty fine phallus design, regardless of whether this motif attracts a similar proportion of female members, of whom about five percent carry the yoni signature, despite the well-documented tendency of males to be voyeuristic. There are some interesting research opportunities here for anyone who can pick up the grant, or if you are after the money, consultancies on market research (Affairlook, however, would more than likely kick you out before you earned your first cent).
Competitiveness creates inscriptions on male masks that describe the kinds of lovers women must have always dreamed about. Where have they all been hiding all your life? But, oh yes, I forgot, they’re masks. Truth is, Mr Perfect is a construct to raise expectations. It’s hard to be too honest when shaping a mask. It’s almost impossible to declare weaknesses as well as strengths, virtuous though this may be. After all it is to be looked at and possibly chosen from a list of alternatives. Yet it settles well with karma, if somehow it is you.
It can’t be easy for women members of Affairlook, being the centre of attention, being surrounded by all these masks. Over-attention can be more problematic than inattention. Eager to get started on the network a strong come-on mask-motif invites a huge crowd, the genuine, the fake, the troubled, the desperate … the whole kaleidoscope of male humanity, all masked, some cleverly-masked, some deceptively so, some both. So the discovery comes through interaction, trial and error and I guess experience. Men have to live through the behaviour of rejection, women the behaviour of acceptance. The former is much easier than the latter.
Practically all our other roles ‒ our working role, our role as a friend, as a partner, as a parent, as a family member are face to face. We make contact, shaking hands, hugging, kissing affectionately and so on. There are behaviours guided by social codes developed over millennia of human history. We read each other’s facial expressions and body language, and even then we sometimes get it wrong. In a person’s role in cyberspace the computer screen itself is another layer, a mask if you will.
And once the mask is on the social codes become challenged and we enter the world of topsy-turvey, as in an eighteenth century Venetian carnival. Let the masquerade begin!
|
|
|
14
Comments
|
|
Is Free Flying Better than Sex?
|
Posted:Aug 29, 2005 1:35 am
Last Updated:Jul 21, 2006 12:49 pm
16691 Views
|
There’s a slim chance that someone reading this will have experienced free-flying, sometimes called foot-launched flight ‒ hang gliding and paragliding. I’m what you’d call a pretty average paraglider pilot, a weekend flier, and certainly no sky god. In Britain something like one in ten thousand people are regular free fliers. Now I know that loads of people ‒ maybe most these days in the western world - get into metal tubes and are carried all over the place thousands of feet up, but it’s not really flying ‒ not the same as flying like a bird. At best, you’ll be driving the tube, and I don’t deny that’s great fun, but it’s still not Peter Pan.
I’m relieved there aren’t any more free-fliers, because all our flying sites would get horribly overcrowded, and being constantly aware of avoiding mid-air collisions would spoil freedom and fun, but I’m really puzzled. It’s not unusual to have dreams about flying as a and experience the thrill and freedom ‒ and real free-flying is better than that because those people far below, those birds that occasionally come alongside and those clouds are real. Think of all the songs ‒ ‘come fly with me, you are the world beneath my wings, I believe I can fly, learning to fly’ and so on. Why use these evocative metaphors, fantasise about flying and then stop short? To me it’s as logical as watching a porno movie and deciding to be celibate.
Now I really enjoy sex, am easily aroused and have never needed viagra to kickstart the engine. Well not yet. But the sheer feeling of well-being after a good day’s soaring and thermalling is really hard to beat. A couple of weeks without leaving the ground leaves you with a feeling of being deprived. Familiar parallels? It got me wondering and from that wondering came what might be a heretical thought that there are some things in human experience that might just challenge the delights of sexual excitement as the ultimate human experience. Sex might simply be too mainstream, to ordinary to make that claim any more, even with fetish accoutrements. I wondered in my virginal inexperience of free-falling, base jumping, kite surfing and other ‘extreme sports’ (doers prefer the term ‘adventure sports’ that nagging at the back of those people’s minds lurks a similar heresy.
It’s an unspoken. You can’t say after lovemaking, ‘darling, the earth moved for me, but the sky moved even more earlier today!’ Slap! There goes your love-life, unless you’ve struck lucky on your hotlist. It’s a dark secret that free-fliers sometimes refer to, but only to other free-fliers.
However, free-flying is no substitute for sex. Maybe as a weekend flier I lack the real experience of those hardcore fliers who have dedicated their lives to the sport, but I know of no such thing as an orgasm in flight ‒ the distraction could be fatal. But the experience is deeply intense, from the moment your paraglider fills with air and strains in the wind with superhuman strength, to be guided above your head, not by strength but by synergy, wit and experience. Things have already become elemental in a way that defies description and will stay elemental until your flight is over. And you step into the void, not knowing exactly what the flight will be like, and enjoying the unknowing for what it is. It is a total experience. Your awareness is nothing but what you’re doing in the sky. And despite the fact that some situations might have scared you, you’ve known people who got hurt, even killed riding the sky you will step into the void one more time, every time.
The other day I watched a woman in her twenties flying tandem with an instructor. It was her first ever flight and she squealed with childlike delight right the way through. I smiled. That’s why I fly. That thrill, awe and wonder never leaves you flight after flight.
But what Peter Pan lacked was a close and intimate relationship with Wendy. Flying is a very singular experience. You’re intimately bound to the elements, but even the influence of Tao on my belief system doesn’t convince me that the universe is somehow having a wild and sensuous time as a result of those intimate actions that are needed for me to soar the sky and climb the thermals. Sex, on the other hand, making allowances for masturbation, which has its own story and I’m not going to digress, does offer something different and special ‒ another human soul, who will interact with you, who might well have a wild and sensuous time as a result of those intimate actions … and reactions. And even on those occasions when the fantasy ideals aren’t quite realised, when the chemistry lacks a catalyst, the intimacy is still deeply human, shared with another human. As an aside I can guess one or two readers might think, ‘Less than perfect? I’m really great at sex. What’s your problem?’ If so you’ve missed the point.
Ask me which would I most willingly give up and I would accuse you of punching below the belt. It’s an unfair and unanswerable question.
Some months ago I was talking to one of the most experienced fliers in Britain. He’s been flying hang-gliders then paragliders for three decades. We got talking about this.
“Which is better, sex or flying? God that’s a tough one. Sex, I think.”
He paused for at least ten seconds, then added, “It would have to be bloody good sex.”
|
|
|
4
Comments
|
|
Seven Musings on Natural Selection in Cyberspace
|
Posted:Aug 26, 2005 10:10 am
Last Updated:Nov 24, 2013 7:03 am
17112 Views
|
What I didn’t realise when I joined Affairlook were the simple implications of the statistics. So I did a little ready reckoning. In the USA the ratio of men seeking women to women seeking men is currently 11.5 to one, in Canada it’s 12.2, Australia 14.0, United Kingdom 18.8. Sweden, often thought as very liberal minded, has a ratio of 37.5 to one. Cuba, interestingly enough has a generous 5.0 to one.
But enough of numbers ‒ the reality is that for every female seeking a male there are a lot of fellas - twenty something. Pioneer mining community stuff, I guess. At first glance this is going to be both disconcerting and disappointing for we guys, particularly older guys like early fifties me, who by virtue of age is unlikely to be number one on the hypothetical average twenty something male list. Women, particularly those who post attractive profiles, are going to have lists of cyber-suitors that would require a PA to manage, so non-response, even from members who describe themselves as sensitive to the emotions of others, becomes inevitable. There are going to be a lot of disappointed men, at least if they stop at the first hurdle, wallow in a pool of self-pity and shrink into diminished self-esteem. And that sadly, inevitably, will happen.
The fact is that Affairlook, with its nineteen million members, is hosting arguably the most interesting experiment in social Darwinism the planet has ever seen. You have cyber natural selection at work here big-time. Now you might be thinking, ‘hang on, we’re in this game for the sex (in its many manifestations), not to have ’, but in our sexual behaviour we are presenting ourselves and doing things that have roots way back in our biological past, and embedded deep in our psychological subconscious, and if you take that on board we’re still playing by the same rules, in the same way that chips and binary logic underpin your ability to read this blog at all.
In the great outdoors natural selection is a tough acid test. It endows success unevenly, has no notion of fair play, is uncompromising about failure and can be short-lived in what it offers. There are no guarantees. But there can be great luck. Cyber natural selection is not that different. On a twenty something to one ratio men on average are going to have to work very hard to get working in-boxes.
So I started musing on this and came out with seven things we guys need to consider. You can probably think of an eighth and a ninth and maybe a tenth ‒ I’m not that smart. The first is that cyber-selection is not a lottery, even if it seems that it is. People are making decisions to contact each other - or not, as the case may be. Those decisions are not neutral ‒ the dice are loaded. Unfortunately they are loaded a little differently in the case of each person.
The second is that women will call the shots, as ultimately they are going to be the selectors. I’ve never met a man who has been God’s gift to all women, although I once had a university friend who was French, wealthy and a one-time ‒ he came quite close, but a lot of that was body language. It’s a truism to remind men that women, even though broadly are different from men, are as different from each other in their exact needs, wants and desires as men are.
The third is adaptation. Men, knowing have to be clear what the niche opportunities are and design strategies for dealing with them. A profile is going to be more interesting if it considers a particular niche, than if it tries to go for a wider field. Imagining an ideal woman and trying to adapt to her, is probably as useful as imagining no woman at all. But adaptation goes beyond that. In some primate communites, including chimpanzees, the ‘cheeky monkey’ who slips his cock in a female when the alpha male isn’t looking, has a strategy to pass on his genes that has its own validity. How many male profiles are playing the alpha card? Quite a lot as far as I can see and certainly more than there are genuine alphas writing them. This is a simple result of competitive tendering, bound to happen, and presenting an erect penis as the prime asset on offer is more about competing with the guys in the world of ‘alphadom’ than it is about attracting the girls. I’ve known many australians in my time. Several pints of amber nectar down I’ve known aussie guys to play the traditional game of ‘knob-out’. Still haven’t met a sheila who got attracted to a guy this way ‒ even when she’s had a few! One trouble with the alpha card is that it presents a limited strategy that is not that different from all the other alpha cards. The other trouble is in sexual behaviour it’s a pretty predictable game play.
The fourth is probability. It’s a long time since I’ve hitch-hiked, but I knew that there was something like a one percent chance of getting a lift. They’re long odds. But on busy roads with a one percent chance, so long as you weren’t standing anywhere really stupid, you’d get a lift in a matter of minutes. The odds in Affairlook are still long, but again it’s not a one-off event, nor is it one that you’ve got no control over, as your profile isn’t static.
Linked to the fourth is the fifth - time. At my age I quite like that. Learning not to be a guy in a hurry, to be patient, to reflect can only be good. I lose when I quit. Up until then everything is pending. So life goes on ‒ better than the alternative.
The sixth is activity. Sitting on a dormant homepage waiting for the world to arrive won’t work for guys. The odds say it won’t. Make those contacts, even if they lead nowhere. Some will get responses, and a proportion of those will be positive.
And the seventh is to think outside the box. In natural selection how many times has a subtle but radical shift in behaviour moved evolution onwards? When the first humans turned animal noises into language, the consequence was radical, and there are so many other examples. So why not reverse the statistics in your favour. Join a local salsa class, for example, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.
|
|
|
5
Comments
|
|
To link to this blog (warmandsexy52) use [blog warmandsexy52] in your messages.
|
|
|
| Sun |
Mon |
Tue |
Wed |
Thu |
Fri |
Sat |
| |
|
|
11
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
6
|
7
|
8
|
9
|
10
|
11
|
12
|
13
|
14
|
15
|
16
|
17
|
18
|
19
|
20
|
21
|
22
|
23
|
24
|
25
|
26
|
27
|
28
|
29
|
30
|
31
|
|
Most Recent Comments by Others
| What Do I Fancy in 2014? (19) | scarletgirl0
Aug 16, 2015 11:45 am |
| So I Clutched It Hard and Burst Into Tears (30) | CampoGirl
Jul 12, 2014 9:31 pm |
| Angel on a Christmas Tree (20) | CampoGirl
Jul 10, 2014 9:51 am |
| Santa's Not Coming This Christmas! (32) | ShyWhisper2006
Dec 25, 2013 7:29 pm |
| Services With A Smile (22) | MyNameIsKay
Dec 24, 2013 6:50 pm |
| Puzzling... (30) | MyNameIsKay
Dec 18, 2013 5:52 am |
| Too Much of a Good Thing....... (22) | MyNameIsKay
Dec 18, 2013 5:49 am |
| Deadly Sperm Buildup (23) | MyNameIsKay
Dec 18, 2013 5:40 am |
| The Irony of Innocence (12) | moonfire2u
Dec 16, 2013 7:50 pm |
| Haiku 69 (18) | sexysixties2
Dec 8, 2013 9:30 am |
| Swimsically Yours (32) | MyNameIsKay
Dec 7, 2013 9:44 pm |
|
