The pet food of the future?

I like KFC — Sapientia

That's one thing we can all agree on!

Let's try KFC's Smoky Mountain BBQ! It brings the sweet, smoky flavors of Southern BBQ to Kentucky! Available in tenders, Chicken Littles™, and Extra Crispy™ chicken, it’s crispy on the outside, tender on the inside, and delicious on every side.

Thank you for listening!

I once watched a mockingbird get eaten by a cat. Cats like mockingbird too.

Nobody got flagged. Just checked.

Thanks, Tiff.

It's a combination though isn't it? The last thing you need in a toxic bullying environment is easy availability of guns.

OK, yes, I killed them all.

We've got nice curtains though.

I can dig that.

:pray:

Oh, thanks. We've got one Pom and a Siberian Husky left. After that, it's chickens all the way down.

First was a freak(-ish) accident where the dog got caught under a basin in the heat while we were out and got heat stroke. Second was a virus. Third, the latest, a poisoning of some sort. This is only the last three months. We lost three others to car accidents, one to a self-strangulation, another to another poisoning, one to a disease caused by flea bites, and several puppies.

In short, we're cursed.

I think you're right in general, but education in the US is a cultural battlefield in its self.

Cheers. :up:

I know, I was just joshing. I would hope you'd be able to at least get rid of AR-15 type guns at some point. I think that would help. But the arguments around here do tend to go in circles.

That's an insensitive comment. I'd cut your head off but no doubt you'd still live.

And, yes, I'll get some chickens.

Yes exactly. Now you say "Cool" and we're done.

Just buried another Pom. That's three in three months. Unrelated causes. I feel like the Job of dog owners.

I've come to the conclusion it's more of a cultural thing though and isn't going to change in the foreseeable.

The only ones of any relevance who can't breathe right now are the dead children. You don't need guns that bad.

Thought on Royal Wedding

No. 2. It's God's punishment for TV watchers.

Congratulations to them both.

I think @SophistiCat had it right. It's Kim's show. A combination of "Divide and conquer" and "Delay". All Trump wants is glory and that's the easiest thing in the world to take advantage of.

I got too distracted with politics to write more, but I'm really enjoying reading all this. :up:

His scrapping of the Iran nuclear deal would have ruled him out anyway.

By aggressor, I meant the one who carried out the apparent physical assault. In a sense the mother's act is aggressive too, and I don't condone it, but I don't think she's conscious of that. It's well-meaning in the sense she really thinks the kid is cute and wants to give him something in my view (even the son acknowledges in the text the mother sees all kids, white and black, as more or less the same). There's certainly institutional violence in place as the context for the action though, which she is a part of.

His behaviour towards black people is not so much contemptible because he can't see their faults; rather it is contemptible because he ends up using them to score points against his mother. — Πετροκότσυφας

That too. But don't you think he seems to see black people as more or less all the same person, a symbol of the oppressed rather than individuals? Whereas the author portrays them as just normal people, with both good and bad in them, real human beings in other words.

Also, I don't think that up to the point of the penny incident the author tried to show the son as less contemptible. — Πετροκότσυφας

Well, personally, my sympathies are more with the son at the start. The mother is portrayed as pompous and horribly racist whereas he is portrayed as resentful and bitter to a degree but at least a counterpoint to the racism. But his views towards black people are shown to be more and more superficial as the story goes on, and the penny incident is the most extreme and unreasonable example of his contempt for his mother.

Probably I just got my threads mixed up. I'm going to print the thing out and make some notes. Hate reading off a phone.

There is a linear timeline in the passages — Moliere

I thought it went backwards once or twice but I'll have to double check. I definitely haven't worked out the threads of the different stories yet.

(My guess is he is a pervert, and writing smart stories about perversion gives a kind of cover, even though he means it.) — csalisbury

I like that reading. He's a smart writer who writes like a pervert. But don't be fooled by that, he really is a pervert.

I'd say that the story does say something about the nature of desire, though. — Moliere

For sure. What's most striking is how he lets desire out to play but instead of writing a story about repressed desires where the main characters struggle with themselves, suffer guilt and eventually pursue their dreams/ideals or not over the course of a linear narrative, the fractured narrative landscape itself represents the struggle. The main characters (apart from the babysitter who is the object) are straightforward symbols of drives, desires etc but they have to wind their way through this confusing landscape of mini-scenes where even time doesn't behave itself to try to get their way. And by the end they dissipate in Dolly's fantasy. So, I think it's saying something about the sublimination of drives and desires through entertainment particularly and how this creates fractured selves in which drives/desires/fears fight and die while our only means to resolve the struggle is to subliminate more, watch more "late night movies", and start the cycle over again no matter how "horrific" the consequences.

So, I agree with csal it's about Dolly and I think what we're seeing is a picture of her psyche, and we're given hints throughout about how the picture is created. In this way, it's like we're invited to construct Dolly from her disparate parts and in doing so reconstruct the culture that created her and look on it critically. I don't see a particular "message" as yet except "this is the way we live now".

There's heaps in here though and I've only read it once so far.

It is powerful isn't it? I didn't quite see the ending coming (if I did read it way back I'd forgotten it) but the message was pretty loud and clear from the start. Julian's mother is caught in a cultural straitjacket that has bred in her contempt for the "lower" classes, particularly black people. In a more subtle way, Julian is caught in the same cultural straitjacket, but its mirror image; he's purely a reaction against his culture as personified in his mother. This sets them on a collision course with Julian seemingly having the advantage because he has all the "right" ideas on his side. But we are invited to question how "right" they are as the story progresses. And it becomes apparent that Julian is in a way as blind as his mother; black people to him are dehumanized not by being inferior in the obvious way his mother sees them, but by being all lumped together as the heroic oppressed. Even when the black woman assaults his mother for her well-meaning, though silly and patronizing, action with the penny, he takes the side of the aggressor. He's so far down the rabbit hole of his own counter-ideology, he can't even—in the face of a physical attack on his own kin—give a black person the credit for being able to do wrong. Instead, he lauds her. At this point the author almost has us flipped from seeing the racist mother as the more contemptible figure to the son. The heart attack/stroke is the coup de grace. Empathy is not a political position, it's a way of life, and if you can't apply it to your own mother then maybe you are "too intelligent for success".

If you, Gaelic fellow, haven't read and enjoyed -- actually marveled at -- Ulysses, you are not eligible to call me a Philistine, or a Palestinian, either§ I'll have you know I attended and enjoyed the opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, libretto by Gertrude Stein. En Gard: — Bitter Crank

I have no real doubt about your bona-fides here, BC. And I admit to not finishing Ulysses, so I am suitably hoist by my own petard. :)

I don't really care about what you said about me, but I do care about the homophobic-type vulgarisms aimed at BC and then you lecturing us all on how we undermined you without even acknowledging your bad behaviour in the discussion. Nobody else engaged in ad-homs except you and pretending you are the victim here is not going to fly.

I love porn, but let's have a nice clean story about racism instead of sex. — Bitter Crank

Porn and story don't make much of a cocktail anyhow. ;)

I seem to remember reading this one a while back and liking it. I'll give it another shot and swing back here.

I'll just leave that there as one example of why he has now been banned. Carry on.

Thanks for the intro, Ron, and welcome! :smile:

You've taken HexHammer's angry babble and turned into something more coherent and focused. But to be clear, discussions like his will continue to be closed (or deleted) for low quality.

It's not a farce in my view (like a PJ Wodehouse type thing, an amusing story as you put it) and it's not just a vehicle for the author's erotic fantasies either. No author of this level of skill (as is apparent by how well-written it is) is going to go to all that trouble simply to reveal himself as some kind of a perv. Besides, the relationships and interplay between the cuts show that there's a lot of effort put in to interweave into and mirror the theme of sexuality in just about everything, subtly and not so subtly. There's also a lot of purposeful misdirection here. I'd say it's more a complex deconstruction of modern suburban life than a fantasy vehicle. And though I agreed with you about "Cat Person", I now think you are a complete philistine. How things change! :razz:

The characters seem to be vehicles for the author's masturbatory fantasies, and say really nothing about actual, real people. — Bitter Crank

In order to say something about real people, you don't need characters who act like real people though. You may want characters who seem like real people. But you don't even need that. Watch any David Lynch movie. Are any of the characters anything like real people? Real individuals don't reflect reality on a grand scale very well because they're diluted and messy representations when what you want is distilled characters who play their particular part in the engine of the work. In a story like this, the characters are deliberately 2D, sexually frustrated husband, sexy young babysitter, amoral teenage boys, naughty kids etc. They slot into a particular function and play it consistently. The complexity comes then from the form. Lynch does this too, his characters are often odd and extreme but fairly predictable "types", so in a way are simplistic. But his movies tend to play with form in interesting ways in terms of how they are constructed.

More to say later, but my initial reaction is that I like it and think there's a lot to it.

This is a debate over the merits of a short story. Not all that important. If you feel undermined because someone has a different opinion on it, that's a failure of perspective on your part. And responding by suggesing the reasons other posters disagree with you is due to some personal deficiency on their part effectively ends the conversation as a productive exchange of ideas.

The specifics were the questions I asked that you didn't answer (such as regarding what symbolism you were referring to). Anyway, the editing that I do is mostly of academic English and is as irrelevant as BC's sexuality. You don't need to keep looking for personal reasons outside the text for why people disagree with you on the text. Matters like these often come down to taste, but sometimes there can be a bit of movement after an analysis and that's the only way to come to any agreement, so you just distract from the conversation by making it about me or BC. (And recently I've been spending most of my time doing photography not editing anyway. So, there's another off-topic sentence you made me do.)

I did laugh. Shame on me.

(edit: Maybe even start a new thread so we don't get too far off topic here) — Moliere

Just saw the edit. If you have a lot to say on it and want to start a new discussion I'll join it and try to contribute more.