November 21, 2010

• This article sure puts the photo editors at Playboy under a microscope. Like Frank Zappa would say to them: "What is the ugliest part of your body...I think it's your mind." But thanks for the view, Queso :)
• No stern left untoned?
• dear ladies beware whose skin is not elastic they'll touch and touch you up until you look quite plastic
• were I a Playboy Model a gross of pens they'ed need they would photoshop most everything except, perhaps, my knee . . . . burma shave
• That's pretty good, Islander.
• I blame Playboy. It's this mentality that has turned young women into airbrushed Barbie dolls. I don't like the look. Unnaturally smooth skin, identical noses, lipstick that is lighter than their faces, so on and so on. If you don't know what I mean just go outside and look at a random 18- to 28-year-old. I am tired of the plastic women. I am tired of people who don't look like themselves, who would be unrecognizable without the base layer of Revlon spackle and Max Factor lashes or whatever the hell brand kids are using now, I don't even know. People have pores. Freckles. Lines. Blemishes. Bumpy noses. People get older and nobody looks 18 forever, sometimes not even when we are 18. My wife is beautiful. She has all of these things. The little crinkly lines around her eyes when she smiles - dear lord why would you botox those away? They add so much life and delight to her face, they make her who she is instead of some anonymous idealized plastic simulacrum of a woman-thing. She can smile at me with just her eyes, trying to keep a striaght face, and the tiny crinkles of her eye-smile give her away every time. Her freckles slowly and almost imperceptibly wax and wane with the annual changing of the day length (I swear to god it's true, our baby has a single freckle that completely disappeared last winter only to reappear with the spring sunshine, just like his Mom's freckles!). Her bumpy nose, the result of a childhood accident, just a wee little imperfection on the bridge of her nose but perfectly placed to hold her glasses from sliding off like mine do, how I envy that beautiful accident of hers! Moles and weird spots and wrinkles and veins that show like hidden blue milky lines just under her skin. Her scattered streak of gray hairs just off-center above her brow, still masked by her blonde hair but there if you are close enough to notice the thin streak that gives away her age despite her youthful face, her years of accumulated life experience (happiness and joy and stress and sorrow and all the rest) showing in those silver strands. If you can't look at yourself or your spouse or your kids or your significant other and see the beauty that makes us human - if all you see are problems that need to be surgeried away or airbrushed or glossed over or eliminated or hidden - well, you can blame Playboy too, but really maybe we ought to blame ourselves for buying into this line of bullshit wholesale in the first place.
• Thank you frogs, for ranting the rant I wanted to rant!
• Well-said, frogs!
• It's been many years since I looked at PB for fap. These days, I start at oldandfat.com. For the very reasons that frogs elucidates here. Physical quirks among individual characteristics are sexy!
• a quirkish smile will more beguile and a sprinkle of freckles always sparkles
• Lines On My Face J. D. McClatchy Decades now of looking back at it— in some old satellite’s rearview mirror, say— has something to show beyond the folds and feeders, the volumes of magma risen into native rock or the buried flow of old fires cooling in ocean beds. The damage has been memorized. Tool marks left by loose doubts dragged across a certainty. Tongues of river sediment slumped but still flickering in the eye. And how pale the surfaces are! From miles above what even to others is familiar, the erosion—tears that freeze and crack the heart, small habits a wind blasts against whatever’s exposed—seems apparent: all’s worn down, weathered, notched, seeping, yet eerily polished, as if at last defined. Your map of me? Let your pencil trace the old quarries and splintered outcrops, let it analyze the faults, describe their throes, let it reveal how the light is laid over them all.
• I like pertness! What is wrong with pert nipples? Babies don't like flacid nipples all that much either, do they? Even these editors when they were babies... Oh. They were cow's milk bottle babies. Carrying on with this desperate thought to pump up the volume, I do wonder how they would photoshop cows... But wait, I myself was a cow fed baby. Yet I like human pertness. Truth will out! These editors must have some kind of bizarre edict to live up to. Some robot, or machine vision, to placate.
• Dan, we expect pert from you, too, Here, use this:
• I'll look for it, but Dr. Bronner's Rabbinical (he says) pure Castile Soap shampoo serves well! *Where's my Kicback? That's alright, I really do love the stuff :)
• Where's my reset button?
• What's this about Neil Peart? Are they playing Rush AGAIN?