Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: Or It's Who We're Drinking With..., in reply to Tom Beard,
I was brought up a bit like that, with middle-class English stiff-upper-lip detachment.
I've never really thought of it as resulting from my upbringing. It's the general social environment as I recall it. It's not like I was hugging and kissing my Pacific Island and Maori mates, or the Chinese, either, nor can I recall any skew in terms of university faculties. But it's hard to say, memory is colored by perception, which is formed early. Yet even the peer group of my first girlfriend, who was an actress, were not much touchy-feely.
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This place is choice. Happy Anniversary PA, PAS, and Capture. Just realized I forgot to say all that.
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Up Front: Or It's Who We're Drinking With..., in reply to Emma Hart,
But I'm allowed to full-body hug my friends (except those who don't like it, and that's personal not social) but I can't hold their hands walking down the street.
I can't do either one, not for male friends. An overlong handshake is about where it ends. Putting arm around shoulders, sometimes. And any number of jocular male touches - friendly arm punches, pushes, seizing, back patting, high-fiving. Not so much with women.
I think it's telling that our stand-offish physical culture has as it's iconic male sport a game involved a huge amount of body contact, and for the females, a game in which contact is a foul.
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Up Front: Or It's Who We're Drinking With..., in reply to Bart Janssen,
The idea that every touch is interpreted as a sexual overture is just wierd.
My elderly grandmother (since passed) said a few years ago to me that one of things she most missed since granddad died (over 30 years ago) was physical contact. She reckoned it was a big part of why old ladies get their hair done so frequently - it's a legitimate excuse to be touched by someone. It could also be a big part of the reason grandparents love grandchildren so much - it's like a touch bonanza.
I made a point of touching her more frequently after that. I held her hand for a long time, the last time I saw her alive. I was certain she was dying at that point, despite Mum keeping a brave face, and my grief began then, a few weeks before she actually passed. Touch was almost the only communication that was meaningful - she couldn't hear too well, and certainly could not concentrate. I felt she was terribly frightened, knowing that she had reached a point where the degradation was no longer gradual. She held on back like a child, and listened and smiled, even though I could tell the words weren't really getting through. It didn't matter.
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Up Front: Or It's Who We're Drinking With..., in reply to Emma Hart,
Or at least, 'holding hands' in our culture seems a bit fucked up.
Dunno, it's just how it's done. Is there any right or wrong about it? Doesn't seem any more fucked up than, say, the rule that you should never touch a Thai on the head. It sends a particular signal in this country.
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Hard News: Party on, dudes, in reply to Chris Waugh,
How many words does 3 Kingdoms have? And translation or original?
The source I saw said 800,000, in translation. Is it even a meaningful thing to count, in original? Presumably such counts are very hard to make, since the number of characters per idea is not fixed, and ideas are not the same as words.
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Hard News: Party on, dudes, in reply to Russell Brown,
Total words in Public Address posts in 10 years: 4,006,730
..
It terrifies me to think how much of my life has been spent typing comments and reading PAS. Well done, Russell and everyone.
Off a measly sample of 4 random pages out of the 660 I've written, I derived an average page word count of 1034 words per page (after weeding out all the stuff I didn't write). Which leads me to conclude I've written around 683,000 words here. Which is more than War and Peace but less than The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. No wonder that novel has never got out yet.
Will look for some data viz love for more.
Does the word count have the smarts to exclude quoted sections?
ETA: What really scares me is that in the last 3 or so years, I've deleted at least 3 times as much as I've written.
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Hard News: Crossing the line into idle bigotry, in reply to Angus Robertson,
Islam is a fundamentalist religion.
This is not a claim without controversy. At heart, the term "fundamentalism" came into being in reference to Christians. It's a lot less meaningful when applied elsewhere.
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Hard News: Party on, dudes, in reply to Sacha,
not necessarily a good sign :)
It's definitely eating into your coffee drinking time :-)
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Hard News: Party on, dudes, in reply to David Cormack,
So chur for helping me grow up
Word, and enough said from me.
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