how to deal with glass half full, glass half empty

UPDATE on the philosophy of the glass
containing 50% liquid, from Twitter:

The Dude! ‏@AhmedAllabidy 8 Aug

Dear Optimist & Pessimist,

while you were arguing over the glass of water;

I drank it … Sincerely, the Opportunist.

--
I'm sure you can recall how some people
use cod psychology to try to convince
normal people to accept their bullsh*t.

They try to say, you've got no choice
by instead attacking your way of
looking at life. You're supposedly viewing
the glass as half empty, while it is
in fact, half full.

Now, you can confidently tell those
bastards that the glass is always
full, but unlike the glass, your
smart-ass friend is full of sh*t.

badideastshirts

bridge falls under weight of neglect

while the alt media is railing against this,
and sometimes pussy-footing around it,
many countries are crumbling, literally.

The US is in serious need of infrastructure
funding, but the government is running out
of money. So bridges go boom.

the reason? rich people and big companies
send their electronic money overseas. No see
no tax

here's a pick of massive bridges that need
to be replaced soon, and won't until ...

a little trim around the edge. oops

in simple pictorial terms, here's why austerity is stupid.

You go around trimming stuff you hate, like healthcare
education and other stuff that people need to survive and
thrive, because you're a conservative.

But you think you're trimming that, and you end up trimming
your tax take and your GDP.

Freudian analysis of the lowly crapper

as a continuation of my recent Freud story,
here's an analysis of the anal stage of life.

So many of us are stuck up our own butts.
That makes this discussion of the toilet, the
ceramic part, such an "eye" opening event.

Zizek treats us to some Slovenian scatology.
Drop that sh*t on a shelf and look at it!

BTW, I've got a bit of toilet talk myself. Did you
know the crapper is named after its inventor,
Thomas Crapper?



this is followed by a new work in the German
dictionary. The hallowed "shitstorm" has been
honoured with a place in the Deutsches good book.

scheise, I don't speak Slovenian

checkit:  guardian

A shitstorm in a dictionary

Germans are not obsessed with faecal matters, just very reluctant to use sexual metaphors in a negative way

Philip Oltermann
.co.uk, Wednesday 3 July 2013 17.39 BST
Jump to comments (496)


The announcement that the word "shitstorm" has entered the most commonly used German dictionary, the Duden, after being used by Angela Merkel has triggered the usual wave of cliches: that Germans are darkly obsessed with pooping, farting and bottoms, psychologically stuck at the anally retentive stage.

As the great German linguistics blogger Anatol Stefanowitsch has shown in this excellent blogpost, the "Germans love shit" meme can largely be dated back to a 1984 book by the US anthropologist Alan Dundes, called Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder. Dundes claimed that German folklore was riddled with an "inordinate" amount of shit-related riddles and proverbs, and that Scheiß (or Scheiße) was "the most often used word in Germany today". But, as Stefanowitsch impressively shows, it's just as easy to think of shit-metaphors that litter English speech, a "shitstorm" being what can happen when the shit hits the fan, someone serves you a shit sandwich, talks bullshit or beats the shit out of someone, or when things generally end up up shit creek without a paddle.

Arguably, the tendency to psychoanalyse the German attitude to bodily functions goes back even further. In 1973, the American novelist Erica Jong's novel Fear of Flying claimed that the architecture of German toilets revealed something sinister about the psyche of those who sat on them:

"Go into any German toilet and you'll find a fixture unlike any other in the world. It has a cute little porcelain platform for the shit to fall on so you can inspect it before it whirls off into the watery abyss, and there is, in fact, no water in the toilet until you flush it. As a result, German toilets have the strongest shit smell of any toilets anywhere ... German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything."

Slavoj Zizek has elaborated this into a wider critique of German metaphysics.
Pathologising linguistic tics can lead to precisely the kind of ethnographic generalisations the Nazis practised to excess, but – and here I would disagree with Stefanowitsch – that doesn't mean that the predominance of poo-talk is a complete myth. Linguist Hans-Martin Gauger spent several years comparing swearwords in 15 different languages and concluded not so much that Germans were inordinately obsessed with faecal matters, but that there were inordinately reluctant to use sexual metaphors to express negative sentiments.

Look up "motherfucker" in the Langenscheidt dictionary and you get Arschloch (arsehole). In German you don't say: "Verfick dich (fuck off)," but "Verpiss dich (piss off)"; you don't feel "fucked off" but "beschissen (shat upon)". Even Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was happy to use the filthy German equivalent of "kiss my arse" in his 1773 play Götz von Berlichingen: "Er aber, sag's ihm, er kann mich im Arsche lecken!" Only the Swedes share a similar reluctance to use sexual metaphors as swearwords.

Gauger admits that, with the globalisation of German, that reluctance is starting to wear off, but he insists that Germans should, at any rate, not be ashamed of their linguistic habit, but proud of it. "I find it much more troubling when we use sexual organs as terms of abuse." In fact, even shit can sometimes be used to connote positive feelings in German. When I was a little baby, my grandmother used to call me "mien lütten Schietbüddel", "my little shit bag" – "Scheißerle" is a similarly affectionate Swabian term for a toddler.

Erich Maria Remarque's great first world war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, recalls communal military latrines as one of the few positive experiences of the conflict:

"The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavour to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation. It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so clearly and pithily."

The question remains why the German language would, in any case, need to import an English word such as "shitstorm" if it already suffered from such a surfeit of faeces-related metaphors. The answer may be that "shitstorm" in German actually means something very different from what it means in English. The Duden defines it as "a storm of outrage on the internet" – highlighting how social media have increased the speed and reduced the length of our daily outrage. The Urban Dictionary, on the other hand, defines it as a disaster in a much broader sense (and Collins doesn't recognise the term at all).

Personally, I wouldn't have put "shitstorm" in the dictionary, but its much lovelier antonym, the "candystorm" – an example of "globish" if ever there was one. Only yesterday, the German Green MEP Volker Beck was calling for a "candystorm for Edward Snowden". No shit.

NSA world view

this is a simplified world view that helps the NSA
rule over everybody it wants to.
If nobody can, or wants to, fight this system, then
we deserve what we get.
So far, Spain Portugal Austria Italy and France have
all participated in air piracy on behalf of the NSA.
It's not looking good folks

Ritholz.com

Real life-size samurai warriors

I think they were guarding the local corner store.
I don't know for sure, but it sure looks like these
guys were the real deal.

I think it's mindblowing seeing photos from a time
when it was rare, looking at something that is long
gone.

These guys look nuts enough to kill. 1870 was wild

ceci n'est pas un blog

i don't know what he's talking about. I swear this
is a blog. I wrote it myself.
Figures. Magritte's French. can't read the English

from badideatshirts

Charles Schultz re-united the Eagles

I know it sounds crazy considering the
fact that Charles Schultz has long been
dead.

I mean in the 1970s. The Eagles, a
band from California, broke up after
another reefer-induced scrap, for
a number of days.

Their neighbour heard the ruckus and
brought the boys together over a
barbecue.
He played the following song, and put
a smile on their faces.




and they said "what the F4^&%$^K. Let's get back
together"

woulda shoulda coulda kept all the money

The sickest part of capitalism is that people
(who have probably broken laws to get rich)
think that they got there on their own.

No parent, no teacher, no town, no church,
no policeforce ever helped you to amass and
 keep your filthy lucre?
That's why capitalists are always trying to
kill public goods, like schools, hospitals
and infrastructure. Capitalists don't need
infrastructure. They float on air as do their
imported Chinese products.

Sometimes you have to realise that you
cannot do it on your own and you should
team up with somebody who has the skills
you lack.



One case in point is the creation of one
of my favourite tunes in high school. The
guy who had the original idea did not, or
could not made it into a hit. The way it
happened made it a hit.

checkit:  Guardian

How we made: Jiggs Chase and Ed Fletcher on The Message

The producer and MC of the hip-hop classic recall trying to persuade Grandmaster Flash to grow a social conscience

        Interviews by Caroline Sullivan        

        The Guardian, Monday 27 May 2013 17.18 BST      

 

The Message

Instant hook … Grandmaster Flash in sunglasses with four of the Furious Five in the early 80s; only Melle Mel, centre, actually had anything to do with the track

Jiggs Chase, co-producer

One night, I was over at [rapper] Ed Fletcher's house and I said: "We need to write something." He was lying on the couch smoking a joint with one leg over the edge, and he said: "Don't push me, 'cos I'm close to the edge, I'm trying not to lose my head." And I said: "Oh my goodness – whoa!" We knew he'd just come up with the hook for a song.

Sylvia Robinson [head of Sugar Hill, Grandmaster Flash's label] had had this concept of The Message: she wanted a serious song to show what was happening in society, but hadn't been able to get it together. So we told her what we had and added: "It sounds like a hit." Then all we had to do was come up with some music and write the verses. Ed did all that except for writing the final one, which was done by Melle Mel: he was the only member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five who actually had anything to do with the song, even though the band got the credit. Melle was the best rapper in the group, too, but Ed still had to show him how to do it. "You should rap on it, too!" Sylvia said. And he did.

I knew we had something. I knew it would make some noise. But I didn't know it would be quite so big. Ed was talking about what was happening out there. Rap was music for boasting and bragging, but he took it in another direction. He took a chance – and it broke the mould. The Message got hip-hop taken seriously. There were always lots of rap groups, but they couldn't get record deals. The Message also helped hip-hop get a white audience. In Europe, we had more of a white audience than a black one.

The song went up the charts and, since then, the cheques have gotten bigger, because people keep using it. It was used in Happy Feet, P Diddy used it, and Ice Cube. I'm still getting paid.

Ed Fletcher (AKA Duke Bootee), co-writer/MC

The neighbourhood I was living in, the things I saw – it was like a jungle sometimes in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Even though we lived in a nice area, I'd sit in the living room and watch things happening across the street in the park. The lyrics were sort of cinematic: I tried to hold a message up to society.

Rappers then were in their late teens and made feelgood, upbeat songs to party to, so this was completely new. Luckily, Sylvia had the force and foresight to put it out. Grandmaster Flash himself wasn't on the song. He didn't think people wanted to hear that shit. Melle Mel was so mad about that.

Musically and lyrically, I wanted to do something different. A lot of thought went into it. I used to call it trance music – the melody has an asymmetric structure, but the bassline stays the same throughout. Usually, a song has one hook and verses, but "Don't push me, 'cos I'm close to the edge" is one hook and "It's like a jungle sometimes" is another. At the time, I was listening to Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, so I used a lot of electronic effects and percussion sounds.

The first inkling I had that it would be big was when we did the mix. Sylvia was into numerology, and The Message ran to seven minutes and 11 seconds, which she thought was lucky for some reason. "I have a feeling about this," she said. That night, she took it to Frankie Crocker, the main radio DJ in New York, and the next day it was on the air. Eleven days later, it went gold. Rolling Stone named it the No 1 hip-hop record of all time. I've always thought: "Shit, if I'd known what it was going to do, I'd have kept it for myself."

Freud put a bit of sex into everything

Probably put some sex into the cocaine that
he snorted nearly to the point that his nose was to
have been amputated.

Anyway, I've passed Freud's ideas through
my head over the years and I think I've now
got a few things to say about his stages of
psychosexual development:

1 oral 2 anal 3 the phallic (ages 3-6)  4 the latent
5 the genital
during which the source of libidinal pleasure is in a
different erogenous zone of the person's body

First problem. What is libidinal pleasure when you're
talking about somebody who is largely incapable of
engaging in procreative sex (stage 1-4)?
Why does pleasure have to be sexual or libidinal,
in the first 4 stages? or was Freud a pedophile?

It's one thing to gain pleasure at understanding the
world around you. You start off realising, rather than
just reacting to, the fact that your mouth is used
for acquiring sustenance, or as I like to call it,
a fresh milkshake. stage 1
Pleasure from a tit. Pleasure from knowledge

[1:25 and 1:55]

stage 2 gaining pleasure from getting your shit
together is good, and you stop making a mess
of yourself. Some pleasure in that, but if Freud
is saying that this is libidinous, then what is he
saying about people who practice anal sex. Are
they trapped in stage 2?
Back to stage 1. My girlfriends that gave me
oral sex. Were they trapped in stage 1?
Are we all partly in love with all stages?
I've watched anal sex on Youporn, and just
about every other kind, except midgets,
hermafrodites, and transexual, gay and inter-
species erotica and fat fetish.

By the way, though I like Kevin Smith's
work, when he went for the bestiality in
Clerks 2, he did it well, but when he explicitly
linked it with the scene in Bachelor Party,
it became like a rip off.
 
you decide

[in Italiano. Bunga bunga in the barnyard. Che catso?]

I can't find the great scene from
Bachelor Party

anyway , back to the libido
stage 3 the phallic. I think that makes sense
because that's the stage where most kids
play doctor for the first time, but not the last.

stage 4- the latent. This gives it away. How can
you get pleasure from something latent?

stage 5- is full physical maturity. Hard to miss.
It's called puberty. Many cultures have rites of
passage involving high-jumping or disco dancing.
People are able to procreate,
and thus pleasure is a normal part of that.
Don't need a theory, just a condom

Freud was also into the Oedipal Complex. I wonder
how he managed to square that with the five
stages. Are you phallic when you want your mother?

I was once told something about Freud, and it made
sense. Freud toldthe world some interesting things,
but he told us less about the developing psyche than
he did about Freud himself. He thought so much that
he climbed up into his own ass and was staring at
himself when he was looking at others' problems.
He projected his problems on them.
Or as we say in my home town: It takes one to know one


I think that the way his ideas have made it into the
common parlance is the way that we are all armchair
psychologists and our pejorative terms reflect
some very Freudian problems because we do not actually
see the psycho-sexual problems of difficult people,
nor do we understand how this problem affects their
brain, but we sense these losers, don't we?
Cuz we're butt-sniffers.

Some choice freudian insults:

1) wanker, jerk-off
2) asshole
3) prick, dick
4) felatio face
5) latent homo
6) cunt
7) cum-bucket