Male Stripping, A Fortune Cookie T-Shirt, And The Evil Food Industry

A friend of mine invited me to an acquaintance’s stagette on Thursday night, and since I have never been to a stagette before, I thought it might be fun to see what it was all about. The bride-to-be had insisted that she wanted a stripper, which was met with much reluctance by her friends, but they obliged anyway. We ended up forking over $150 for some guy named Dean who had to have been the worst stripper ever. He was supposed to be twenty-eight, but he could not have been less than thirty-five. When he entered the house, he seemed not to know how to make an entrance. He just peeked his head around the corner and said quietly “Is this the right house?” We, of course, did not help to make his arrival smooth, because we weren’t quite sure how you are supposed to greet a man you’ve never met who is about to take off all his clothes in your living room. He took his shoes and socks off right away before he even started. I don’t know why it seemed strange to start out barefoot, but it did. Maybe he had never figured out how to remove his socks seductively. He put his cd in the cd player, selected the first song, and started to dance in a truly unsexy, 1980s fashion for the bride-to-be. He would step from side to side with each foot and then wiggle his hips back forth, being careful not venture into any dangerous areas involving arm movements are alternative footwork. He removed his shirt during the first song, and then his routine really began to slide down hill. He stopped dancing, walked over to the cd player, and selected a second song. He hadn’t burned his cd so that the songs played one after another, so he had to stop after each one and fiddle with the cd player. During the second song, he undid the fly on his jeans and alternately gave us little peeks at his yellow g-string or his remarkably hairless ass, which he made sure to position about six inches from each of our faces. After the conclusion of the second song, he went to fiddle with the cd player again, and then he did something so awfully anti-climactic – he took off his pants in between songs while standing behind the bride-to-be’s chair. He didn’t even incorporate the pants removal part into his act. That’s the most important part! I found that to be completely unforgivable. At this point, the whole thing was seeming more and more pathetic. He spent the rest of his act gyrating his yellow, g-stringed crotch in our faces. It was awful. We felt kind of bad for him and asked him to stay for a beer and a cigarette afterward. He told us that he had been doing this as a side gig for about seventeen years. Seventeen years, and this lame act was all he had come up with? Sad, sad, sad. The positive thing that came out of this terrible evening is that my curiosity about male stripping has been completely satiated. The negative thing that came out of this terrible evening is that I now have the memory of it set in my brain for the rest of my life.

Oh, and at the stagette, the hostess’ t-shirt read “Confucius Fortune Cookies.” Enough already.

Here’s a piece on Marion Nestle, a great critic of the food industry in America.

Stripping Facts and Links:
* Take this “Amateur Male Strippers: Would You Do It?” poll.
* I didn’t know that a lot of people equate belly dancing with stripping, but I guess they do.
* Daryl Hannah will be appearing in the November issue of Playboy.
* Apparently stripping isn’t cool. I didn’t know you could take pole dancing lessons! I just have one question: where do you practice?
* A strip search in a U.S. prison is when the inmate must remove all clothing stripping completely naked for the guard(s). The guards then go through the clothing and will typically view all external areas of the inmate. This includes a close inspection of the entire nude body including the genital area, which usually entails the inmate having to lift his penis allowing the guard(s) to view the underside of the penis and top of balls, to pull his testicles to the right, left and then up for viewing beneath the scrotum and to view the backside of the balls. When uncircumcised, the guards often ask the inmate to roll back the penis foreskin for inspection underneath and around the head of the penis, presumably looking for small quantities of drugs. Female correctional guards may now freely and routinely conduct full strip searches as well as visual body cavity searches of all male inmates without any male guards being present.
* A review of Naked News, a show where the anchors strip while they deliver the stories.
* The idea of vein stripping revolts me, and I pray that my legs remain young-looking and healthy for many years to come.

Childhood And Those Damn Fortune Cookies

Betty Botter bought some butter,
But, she said, the butter’s bitter;
If I put it in my batter
It will make my batter bitter,
But a bit of better butter
Will make my batter better.
So she bought a bit of butter
Better than her bitter butter,
And she put it in her batter
And the batter was not bitter.
So t’was better Betty Botter
bought a bit of better butter.

This tongue twister is not very old, considering the age of many nursery rhymes, showing up first around 1899 in The Jingle Book by Carolyn Wells. I was surprised to find this particular rhyme, because it was one of my favourites when I was younger. I used to read it over and over, insisting to myself its perfect repetition. The words are so similar in look and sound that the syncopated phrasing would roll out of my mouth with the regularity of a drumbeat, the words rendered nearly meaningless by the uniformity of their sounds. Speed also became important in the delivery of this rhyme, and I remember repeating it in less than twenty seconds and feeling quite proud of my accomplishment. If I am remembering correctly, I think my teacher at the time even gave me some kind of award for this achievement. If only accomplishments such as these were recognized in adult life! I would be considered brilliant beyond all expectation. How many of your own footsteps can you count before you forget to count them? 257. Good show! If you stare at one square foot of a stippled ceiling to discern how many human faces appear in it, and you multiply that by the number of square feet of ceiling, how many faces are staring down at you? 1200. Marvelous! How long did you manage to stick it out in dodgeball without having your glasses knocked off your face? I was the fifth last person standing. Impressive, to say the least! No, I am not wishing for the return of that wretched stage of life called childhood, but I do sometimes long for that time when we had not yet been taught to be so self-critical of our thoughts and behaviours, when it was enough to have completed a thing, when a task was begun and its journey enjoyed so thoroughly that the end of it provided a small rush of excitement, as though its completion had rushed up to greet you and you had not expected to see it so soon. I do still get those little rushes of self-satisfaction when I’ve managed to wrestle some html code into creating a decent-looking weblog, or when I’ve made a particularly smashing batch of roasted rosemary-crusted potatoes, but nobody else cares to caress my ego the way they used to. I grew up in the suburbs where teachers and relatives congratulated children often for things like running fast, spelling well, reading a whole book, and being good. When you grow up, other grown ups don’t care so much if you can run fast, but they are impressed if you run at all. Nobody notices if you are a good speller, but they assume you’re a moron if you’re not. They could care less if you do any reading outside of work, and we all assume that nobody is good, just subtle and varying shades of positives and negatives. The way we view behaviours and success obviously must change as we grow older, but our desire for recognition and joy in small things remains the same. Maybe I will choose to become more self-indulgent, committing more and more small, happy, satisfying acts, and maybe I will take more time to tell people that they have done a good job or they are smart or they have a refreshing personality. That sounds good. Indulgence can be good. I’ll stroke your ego if you’ll stroke mine.

The fortune cookie thing just will not stop following me. Ever since that entry on September 14th, fortune cookies show up in my searches in the most unlikely places, like in a "joy in small things" google search.

Childhood in History Facts and Links:
* The ancient Greeks considered their children to be "youths" until they reached the age of 30.
* In ancient Rome, parents had the right to sell their children into slavery in order to pay off their debts.
* A few ideas on the history of childhood from Ariès, de Mause, Locke, and Rousseau.
* In amassing his psychohistories, Lloyd de Mause has found not one life of a child dating from before 1690 in which the child had not been physically abused. Here is de Mause’s most famous quote: “The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awake. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused.”
* A few great pictures of children taken between 1890 and 1925.
* The legal working age in the UK is 13. A study was done of 1000 children in the north-east of England, and it was found that 25% of working children were below the legal working age. What is England’s government thinking? (See the BBC News).
* I love the pictures that go with old children’s literature. One of my favourites is the picture accompanying The Children’s Theatre by Franz Bonn.
* Ever the shoe junkie, I have to include these pictures of chinese children’s shoes. If I ever have a child, I’m heading straight to this site for a baby shoe shopping extravaganza.
* The Museum of the City of New York has a wonderfully broad collection of pictures from its 2001 exhibit called “Dressing for a New York City Childhood.”

Sucky Pets And Fortune Cookies

So, I have succumbed to the cuteness that is bunnies. I am wondering if this is a terrible thing or not. I have never liked rabbits. I have known people with rabbits and thought their pets sucked, and now I am a bunny-owner. Here’s how it happened: The Fiery One, another couple, and I were out for breakfast yesterday, and I had this brilliant idea that we should all go look at the pile of bunnies before parting ways, because I have been privy to rumours that the humane society was coming to exterminate the critters this coming week. We drove over to find that all the bunnies but one were missing. The mother and her nine babies were all gone, and this little grey one was huddled up alone in the back of the cardboard box, shivering from the wet and cold. After a few minutes of trying to think rationally and pretending to be weighing this decision logically in my mind, and with help from the Fiery One, I ended up spending the next few minutes chasing this little ball of fuzziness through the bushes and attempting to coax him out from under a metal protuberance with a stick. I jammed him into my coat, and our friends drove us over to the pet store to spend too much money on a rabbit cage and accessories. The ladies at work have been watching these rabbits for months and believe that the father is half jackrabbit, so that makes tiny Diego three-quarters cottontail and one-quarter jack. I am imagining him growing to some ungainly size, and that one morning I will wake up to a cage filled with a monstrous rabbit. (My pet history is a terrible one overall, so I am always filled with worst-case-scenario thoughts with the arrival of a new dependent until things have settled down). The crazy things that made me grab Diego and stuff him in my coat were: 1) the humane society was the most probable culprit in the theft of nine members of his rabbit-family, 2) his life was unfairly in danger if they came back for him, and 3) little Diego was the only one left out of all of them, and he was the one that I had kind of grown attached to and molested every day. It was fate. Now he’s in my living room, happily hopping about in his cage. Actually, I am not sure what sex it is yet, and I think I will wait a while before attempting to find out. I still don’t know if I like rabbits, but Diego is the cutest bunny-wunny dat ever did wiv.

The Fiery One and I have been out for asian food twice this weekend already, and both times my fortune cookie gave me multiple fortunes. This happens to me more often than not. Does that mean anything? My five fortunes read as follows:

Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded. (But what if my talent isn’t very good, and is in fact offensive? Do I want a suitable reward?).

You will be awarded some great honor. (Is that like the honour of committing hara kiri?)
You will have gold pieces by the bushel. (This one I like).

A liar is not believed even though he tell the truth. (This is the boy-who-cried-wolf thing. I could not decide whether this statement referred directly to me or to the Fiery One. I chose to take it as a general wisdom type of statement).

You will attract cultured and artistic people to your home. (Yay for me! I have friends in my future. Either that, or cultural revolutionaries that will one day be responsible for having my home raided and my head put on a pike).
One of the strangest fortune cookies that I ever opened told me that I would take guitar lessons. I never did.

Fortune Cookie Facts and Links:
* The predecessor to the fortune cookie was biscuits with messages inside, consumed by Chinese labourers working on the railroads in the mid-1800's. They ate them during the annual autumn Moon festival, since the traditional Chinese festive food, mooncakes, weren't available.
* The Moon Festival and its mooncakes.
* Hankering for the homemade variety? Here's how to make fortune cookies.
* Fortune cookies are not even Chinese! The fortune cookie was invented by Los Angeles noodle manufacturer David Jung in 1919 if you go by some sources, or by Makota Hagiwara, manager of Golden Gate Park's Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco in 1909 if you go by others. The true original inventor of the fortune cookie is lost to history.
* The first fortune cookie factory opened in China in 1993.
* The nutritional value of the fortune cookie.
* One version of fortune cookie history.
* There is little question about the intention of these fortunes.