Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Cheryl Burke is not fat.



Ok, things on here have been a bit rarefied of late as I've been on a poetry kick, but I must weigh in on some of the more important issues as they arise. No,not the swine flu, but dancing with the stars. My wife started me watching this show and I admit I'm mesmerized, mostly by Cheryl Burke. I recently saw some furious bloggingabout how she gained 5 pounds and is now fat. To which I must say, "What?!" Take a walk to any local Walmart and within the first five minutes I am sure you will see someone who truly is overweight. I actually wrote a fairly long report for my master's on the obesity epidemic and have a pretty good appreciation for the dangers of letting weight get out of control, but this young dancer is not one of those people.


I realize there is no accounting for taste and every man and woman has different aspects of the opposite sex (or same sex, if so inclined) that they find attractive, but I still react viscerally to this type of pettiness. Not only is the woman not fat, she is pretty much an ideal for beauty in my opinion, and could probably even stand to gain about ten or fifteen pounds to achieve real perfection. I just have never understood the attraction to thin, stick women who resemble prepubescent boys more than anything else. I think I would be concerned about myself if I was infatuated only with women who look like young boys. Now, I harbor no animosity for any thin women reading this, nor for prepubescent boys, I just don't consider them sexually attractive. And I realize this is just my opinion, just my taste, if you will, but the thing that gets me riled up is how the skinny-women lovers assume their (weird) taste is somehow the universal ideal, and they feel free to level accusations that anyone above 110 pounds is overweight. I tend to find women who are fuller figured attractive, women who obviously look like women, but I don't necessarily assume everyone shares my preference. But most of the men who love rail-thin women do make this assumption, and they call people fat who are obviously not. Give me a break.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

From another time, and another world.

A snippet from "Horatius":

...Then outspake brave Horatius.
The captain of the gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods...
-Thomas Babington Macauley

And an observation on current events from Kipling:

...In the Carboniferous epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled, and they began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold the Glitters, and Two and Two make Four-
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more...
-Rudyard Kipling

Some things are eternal. By the way the "copybook headings" referred to in the poem are those phrases, mostly proverbs and axioms, children used to copy to practice handwriting in the 19th century.