Rich Engle

Excellent and so funny. Bien fait. Your dad's "possibly disgusted" look was probably suppressed hilarity. Rich: Good story. One of the better attachments was a "suction cup type" perfectly shaped I might add. I was lucky enough to have two girls of the same age as I, to experiment with in addition to the device. Ahh, wonderful memories. Adam just an innocent participant in human sexuality and its advancement - bringing pleasure to each corner of the world! Sir, I was complimenting Mr Engle on his fine writing yet I feared further posters would rush in with their own sordid reminiscences. To No Surprise you are the first - is there no corner of Respectability left on this site? Carol mother of two sons who were either less precocious or more wily than you two Hey, you two, can I cross post this on my blog. And get over there more. Thanks. Adam, it is nice to find a fellow user. Yes, the suction cup thing was always problematic, yet strangely contoured and inviting. I found that one to be a bit too much for me. I think in the end, I went for the hard plastic knob, you know, the one for taking out back knots. Make what you will of it. rde

So, somebody called him (in Norwegian, of course) a fag in high school, which of course made him want to kill. rde Fag.

We needed this like we needed more chain letters and game award pendants. Minka. Latest annoying FB craze.

This one is an amalgam from an OL thread, and a part of "Girls, Guitars, and Typewriters" (or whatever the heck I called it). I had to get that condensed. I mean, if you are writing something this humiliating, you have to at least attempt concision. rde I ain't never joinin' the Cub Scouts Again WAHL Advice: Never Use Any Power Tools On Yourself Over, Say, 1hp.

Well, reeling the thread, Mr. B, if I am mistaken, forgive, but I had to track down the particulars of your reference, and I am a Harlan fan, but for sure have not revisited him any time recently. Did you mean when he wrote like so? {The story includes many related threads, starting with a man named William Sterog who goes on a killing spree after talking with a pest control man. In the next thread, an expedition discovers a new planet with a 37-foot-tall (11 m), beatific statue on it. The statue has the face of Sterog. Next, a violent and insane seven-headed dragon is captured and "drained" using a technique invented by a man named Semph. Another thread involves Semph discussing ethics with a friend. Finally, Djam Karet (roughly translated as "the hour that stretches"[7]) investigates a field that pulses with violence and madness and it is revealed that a race of advanced beings have been "draining" madness from their world and dumping it on ordinary humans.} That's what I remembered from it. Regards! rde Beyond Even Bat Country

Blessed Be. This one got to me pretty strong. Thanks, Selene.

Talking heads, Bill. Talking heads. Feasting on the misery, and doing the twirling spin. Sickening as usual, keyword "use." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1N6We7W3IY rde

I've been an Ellison fan for what seems like forever. He's from Painesville, Ohio. He came back a few times to talk and sign books and danged if I didn't have a conflict each time. His non sci-fi stuff is outrageous-- "The Glass Teat," "The Other Glass Teat," "Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled," etc., as well as his stunning editing (and introductions) in "Dangerous Visions," and "Again Dangerous Visions." And then of course any of his tele- or screenplays. rde

Good shot, Rich. Your picture is confusing enough by itself, however, so you don't need to include the guy wearing shades with his arm around you. Ghs I agree with George on this, and would also caution Rich that, with the recent heat wave, he may want to ditch the formal summer suit with red neckware and don a tank top or something. Keep the baseball cap though. This theory is what I look for. It is better than when it brings up requests for DNA testing--the ugly truth of it. rde I done told you, yo Honor: I don't got no black babies.

You have a point there. And Neil smiles too much and Wendy not enough. Bad choices. I made an interesting psychological experience when studying the two pictures. Since we happen to know a lot of private info about those two individuals, I find it very difficult to be objective in looking at the pictures, i. e. what I personally associate with both Wendy and Neil strongly flows into my interpretation of their facial expressions. Since I never perceived Wendy as having much angst (I see her as an extreme risk taker not afraid to transgress boundaries), I find it difficult to detect angst in her expression. Wariness and distrust, yes. Also hardness, and an attitude of calculation by someone who does not want to put her cards on the table. But like I said, it is all colored by what I personally connote with Wendy. (The bitterness I also "see" in Wendy's face is not influenced by what I have read about her though). The same goes for Neil: "ebullient", "wears his heart on his sleeve", "a good hearted-guy, but very impulsive and too trusting", "not having enpough inner distance to his own experience" - again, all that I connote with Neil flows into my interpretation of his photo. That's why you have to be careful (and/or creative) when you put out pictures. For my guitar practice, I have just what they would expect. When they ask me for a writer shot, I just give them something confusing, lately it has been this: It do work real fine in the Southern Market., by crackie'. rde

You can thank Nixon for putting that last nail in the coffin. Weed is on the same schedule as LSD and heroin, which is preposterous. r

Rachel is getting ready to publish a second book, and she has a blog that is starting to get interesting; she even put two of my stories on it , "The Sock Guy," of all things, and then "Her Wonderful Dream", both of which first appeared here on OL. Romance Forever with Rachel Cron rde

Woah. And I haven't even smoked any dope today. I like the idea, sort of. I think I do. I'm going to go smoke some dope now and watch "Searching For Bobby Fischer." You don't have to be good to enjoy and play chess. I have found that the real pleasure from it is the unique experience of playing with each person. I've had awesome games playing with little kids. But how many adults truly know how to have fun, right? No Woman No Chess, but speaking of bishops - Rich, ecumenical musical friend, how do you like my Anglican compatriot's Youtube "Straight Outta Compline?" Rev Kyle is the real deal. For Rich from Carol: Straight Outta Compline Not from Russia with Love, but from Toronto with Liturgical Lust? Adam How can you not appreciate good entertainment, right?

I got close the other day when I went to my dentist, David Robb, near Rincon HS. He graduated from that school in 1968. They recently fired all the teachers and hired back half. I'm sure your old home has been turned into a dope den, burnt down or gone into foreclosure, maybe all three. --Brant I was never there I'd think George probably managed to make that happen when he was living there. . . Ghs--I am very much enjoying the discussion about jazz, etc. Not much to add at this point. Gosh, I hadn't thought about Dave Allen or that album in ages. One of my guitar teachers turned me onto that many years ago. Also, to increase the mission creep--I just got the new music service Spotify (www.spotify.com) and it is beyond excellent (and free). The way they have it working is that you send in a request, and then a couple days later they send you an invite. This is a tailbusting archive (like 15 million), and you can even incoroporate your own mp3s with it, use it in standalone mode, etc. The application is non-intrusive and boy oh boy can you dig up some tunes. This is a fairly new thing and if you are a music head, jump on yonder bandwagon. I use things like Pandora and Grooveshark as well, but this has much more breadth and depth. r

Chris, Of course he got sympathy. OL is full of good people. The problems started when Andre rejected the sympathy, started explaining to people how wrong they think based on boneheaded presumptions that are only in his head and not in theirs (which I base on what they have posted over months), and explaining to them what Objectivism really is and what it isn't--when it's obvious that he has wedded some weird ideas of his own to his understanding of it. (The guy even spells Objectivism with a lower case "o.") At first I thought this was a sincere attempt to discuss things and open up and find new people to relate to, and (I hope) there still might be some element of that. But his mind games and arrogant presumptions with people who try to be nice to him--which to me signal nothing more than a cry for attention and the wish to scratch a neurotic itch at the expense of others--are as thick as molasses. You mostly get what you give in life. That generally holds true even with good people. I have the feeling there is a hidden script operating here. And I have a feeling Mr. Andre will try to push people into his hidden plot line even when they don't fit. From what I see, he has already started. But I ain't going to be an actor in that play. This ain't like what you went through with the Randroids, either. You ran into some serious cult mentality issues. You won't find that here--not in reality--no matter how much the call to repeat the pain clamors. Michael Agree 100%. I should have never touched my toes in the water. Once again, I distrusted my gut, and that's the only time things go South for me. As far as I'm concerned, Mike, they can all go wallow in this one and put on little look at me shows. If you edit that down, I am saying "Fuck this." rde Fuck this.

Woah. And I haven't even smoked any dope today. I like the idea, sort of. I think I do. I'm going to go smoke some dope now and watch "Searching For Bobby Fischer." You don't have to be good to enjoy and play chess. I have found that the real pleasure from it is the unique experience of playing with each person. I've had awesome games playing with little kids. But how many adults truly know how to have fun, right?

Ah, spoken like a true hard-ass. How many do I know? Hundreds. My wife and I are having fun right now. Jeez, I knew this whole thing was gonna get a stink on it right off the rip. r

There is no such thing as a degree of existence. What you are describing is precisely the hedonistic credo, which states that we should live life "to the fullest", the standard of "fullness" being pleasure versus pain or apathy. Am I mistaken? If yes, how? Well, you can say that kind of stuff, and be confident, but let's look at one fact--you are depressed, and you called in the Big Dogs for some help, right? So, whatever you are doing, thinking, however confident you are in your assumptions, your shit is not working. If it was, you would not be depressed--you would be joyous, which, by-the-way, is an appropriate condition for human living. You are, at the least, portraying misery. Consider your actions, consider your happiness level. All I get from your writing is various forms of logical/philosophical arguments, punctuated by a general tone of misery. Never once have you said anything about what you do, or enjoy. That means that your shit isn't working, and you could find something different. You are hanging on to something that is, apparently, dragging your miserable, sorry ass down. So, you can have that. I have pretty hard skin to read that stuff, and I will help when I can, but eventually I will pull away because I can't stand the fucking drag, drafting. You are very close to becoming an energy vampire. Man up. Choose who you want to be; either a miserable bastard, or maybe a person that loves waking up every morning. rde Good Luck On Your Mission!

Objectivist ethics does not require living beings to be infalible in the maintenance of life, it merely requires them to choose, when the choice is open, life over death. The problem here is that you seem to think this is a range of the moment thing, "do I choose to live for another 15 minutes or not?". It is not, and certainly not in humans. Existence is a pre-condition for continued existence, and as such, the "short term" cannot be ignored. The human being suffering from a so-called "terminal illness" must choose to live day by day, because that is a pre-condition for his long term survival, not because he earns points in the game of life for having lived a few more days, or having experienced more pleasure during those days, or whatever. He cannot make the choice to live once he is dead. The alternative is range of the moment hedonism, because it means man is divorced from past and future. You are stuck in a game mentality. This is a classic psychological process of death (awareness) evasion known as "Terror Management". It is a process which Rand herself struggled with and which is a fundamental part of the human psyche, so I'm not going to pound at you for this. You can choose to be aware of this, or you can choose to evade it. The unspoken truth is that Rand did not regard life as such to be the primary value, but freedom, which means the capacity to choose. Values do not depend on life in the sense of the capacity to exist and have experience, they depend on the capacity to choose between alternatives, to act as opposed to reacting. Planets have a conditional existence, but they have no choice in the matter. It is only within this context that values exist, and thus ethics is possible. Life is simply the primary requirement of this. Ethics is the study of a being's field of choice, and objectivism identifies the things (principles) that expand, sustain, or contract this field, particularly with regards to the human identity, in a long range context. (through megaphone): "Sir, put down the Rand books, and no one will get hurt. Exit the reading room with your hands interlaced on top of your head." And as far as your comments about terminally ill patients, that just flat out made me want to bitch-slap you, because, well, even if you have up-close knowledge of such, that would make you even more clueless. Are you suffering from a terminal illness? If so, that would be a different thing, and I apologize. I know one of the strongest, venerable terminally ill men on the planet, and he would either tweak your nose or just start laughing at what you wrote. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, man. And read something outside of Rand, for fuck's sake. rde wah, wah, wah.

Ok, boys (only because so far no girls, right?), a couple of updates: I'm going to wait around a bit longer until we get more players together. Unless you guys want to play in two-man teams, it will be random pairings, best of three. Everyone will have to exchange email addresses right before we launch it. Also, there is a nice site for printable score sheets and other goodies here: Chessville rde

Before I umpire in the violent sexual lesbian jello wrestling tournaments, I always soak my watch in cider, starting with my index finger and immersing up well past the wrist line. rde huh huh i made a funny

Always on the lookout for incidental segues, I would like to say that the Beat Generation of the 1950s was more cuturally significant and interesting than the "Hippie Counterculture" of the 1960s, much of which was an intellectual wasteland. My bias, if that is what it is, may be partially owing to the significant role that jazz played during 1950s. Jack Kerouac, for example, paired with the tenor sax players Al Cohn and Zoot Sims for his 1959 album, "Blues and Haikus," and he once called a SF-based tenor saxophonist (whose name I cannot recall offhand) the perfect embodiment of the Beat movement. For the huge influence of jazz on some leading writers and poets of the Beat Generation, see: http://www.litkicks....opics/Jazz.html Ghs There is no doubt about what you say. Now, there were of course a great many things that came out around, but not always necessarily directly "from" the hippie movement, such as it was. It changed art and music around in a big bad way. Writing, not so much, I think. With few exceptions, the writers of note during that period were really more experiencing the psychedelic generation than making it--they were observing. These writers very, very often can have their influences traced back to the Beat writers. Hunter Thompson is a perfect example--he first came into large recognition by writing "Hell's Angel's," which was an investigative journalist piece and definitely not so much about hippies (although there are parts of it where he was with the Angel's at Kesey's house). It is difficult to find substantive stuff in the hippy lit world. I can't even barely stomach Ginsberg, and he was already established before it. Who do you read, Kesey? I'm not saying it was goose-eggs, just saying that most of it was already in motion. If anything, you could see the effects rendered in journalism, but journalists had a real hard time doing accurate portrayals. I stand outside of a lot of conventional opinion on this though--for instance I think Bob Dylan sucked. He was not "The greatest poet of our Generation." Fuck's sake no. One genre that continued to develop beautifully was folk. Even in spite of Dylan, if you're me. Here, Ghs--you might find this a treat if you haven't run into it . . .this is a song the latter-day King Crimson (Adrian Belew, Robert Fripp, Tony Levin, Bill Bruford) did off an album called "Beat," which was part of a trilogy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA4IAMlREcs

Yes, for sure. And one thing you can say about her is that she does not feel the need to state a point and then follow it by a nasty personal zinger. She explores in a Germanic fashion, that is right, Maestro. rde

Hi, and welcome! David's work is very, very striking. We don't do opposing camps here. There are simply excellent folks from all walks of life. If one of us doesn't have it, usually someone else will. I think we've talked about the lack of impact that Rand's work had in the U.K. It's kind of an interesting topic and if you look around here you might find some good discussions about it. Looking forward to your posts! Mike K. is a really great site host and I can't imagine you would have anything but enjoyment here. Oh, we get into some bitter sparring matches, but don't all families? Best rde

One of the primal thoughts most people have is the issue of mortality, whether they choose to admit it, or not. Joseph Campbell had a lot of comforting things to say about it--if you look at his series "The Power of Myth" (with Bill Moyers interviewing him). This was done in the last couple of years before Campbell died. "Find your own bliss." Also, my buddy Michael Dowd has some very good things to say about it in his books and other writings. He talks about how you can come to peace with it because it is a natural cycle within the universe's growth, more or less. It helps you lose the fear. Michael Dowd website Now, no need to go running just because he is a Christian. He is a very scientific person and the things he says about this topic are very astute and warming. I don't have the tract right here but if you look around in his stuff you can find all kinds of things by him, and other esteemed authors that address this topic. If that is a part of it, Andre. I think it is always a root of it. Namaste, rde