I am struggling to understand what stands in the way of female nudity.

I spent the day priding at Pride 09. I’ve probably seen a gazillion guys naked. Yes, I'd say that's a fair estimate. And not a naked boob in sight and I am not even mentioning The Full Monty (The Full Anette?).

Why is that?

I don’t think those girls I saw today are what one might call ‘conservative’: I did see girdles, net stockings, bikinis, leather, serpents, chains, etc. Nope, those girls were not exactly Chador clad, chastity belted, or Amish attired. In fact, many of the girls I’ve seen today are what some circles would dub ‘exhibitionists’. So, why didn't they show some nipple?

Y pointed out that there is less female nudity in Nudist beaches. True. But this is trying to say that women just don’t have the urge to walk around naked. Do you buy that? I don’t. I don't believe women fail to appreciate the unconquerable physical pleasure of having the wind caress the entire body, on all its nooks and creivces.

I am starting to think this is a worthy feminist goal – to start preaching nakedness. Seriously, it was hot today. Men took off their shirts because they were hot. Hot. Don’t females ever get hot? I know I was hot. (in fact, I am always hot ;) but that’s not what I mean). What is it then? In today’s environment I am pretty sure that women could pretty safely walk around completely naked.

Why don’t they? Why don’t we? Is it some type of morality which is poured down our throats throughout childhood which we just cannot get over? How come? We get over so many other things... Is it fear? I don’t think women have a reason to be afraid in broad day light among a zillion homosexuals. Is it duck skin? Come on, it was 90 degrees today! It isn't duck skin, or at least, duck skin is not the rule.

I’d love to hear an explanation. Or better yet, I’d love to have the guts to organize my own group of stark naked ladies to walk around bare-bottomed in the midst of the throngs. Maybe then women would be able to take their shirts off, drinking beer after a long day of working the fields. Ok. Maybe not the fields, maybe just after a strenuous paper-grading spurt.

I don't have the energy to start thinking about what it means (women being the odd ones out a-la-de beauvoir?, women still feeling uncomfortable?, etc. etc. etc.) I just think a nipple is a nipple is a nipple is a nipple. Let them march on.

Mother to Baby, overheard in Café Gratitude:

“You should try and savor the cookie”

“Treat it as though it were your last”

“the red” is now “the green”?

I realize that I shouldn’t be surprised. Did I think that only in America the venerable “airs of change” have been filterized into “let’s get the air clean”?

Berkeley’s admirable youths who labored to create a better world have become what can only be called environmental fascists, so why not Cohn-Bandit? Makes perfect sense.

Only I think it is lamentable. Our radicalism, its tools and subjects is being blunted. We are satiated revolutionaries. Is it possible that there is nothing else worth our (green) fighting energy?

Yet that’s not exactly the thing that bothers me. What bothers me is that Fascism – yes, I am exaggerating to make the point – is hiding behind a tree.

“pants dry trees die” doesn’t just exemplify that we are not operating in the right arena in order to make humans better inhabitants of the world. On top of that it illustrates how we treat one another. One coffee-shop patron is eyeing with suspicion the other patron’s pants for signs of dampness so as to see whether he is sitted next to a tree murderer. One neighbor polices another’s recycling habits by following him on his way to the trash can and looking in there to see his produce. Smokers can be terrorized on the street by wayfarers. Etc. In other words, our former social movements were not only much more diverse, but they had a side effect of cohesion. This one green social movement – the one and only – has one social side effect, decomposition. Maybe after it is decomposed it can be recycled. Who knows.

* from home. noon and a bit. sun. birds. deck. the whole shebang of pleasure

It wasn’t us, it was the stage.

We came over, rackets, balls and all feeling very professional performing our roles as serious players who have come to play a serious, albeit friendly, game. As soon as we got there we were notified by the doubles players playing the other court that ours is notoriously crooked. Pretty soon they realized why we embraced the crooked court. Obviously, under such condition I can neither serve, run nor answer any backhand balls. Wistfully I think of the glorious days in Europe where I played clay and consequently won the Roland-Garros. I told them, just so they know who they are talking to.

But what’s better than playing tennis at the Rose Garden in perfect weather!

* Inner Richmond, Bazaar Cafe'. Nice philosophy for a coffeeshop. I don't know if I haven't grown tired of ideological Americanos. Still, you have to appreciate the pretension.

I was glancing through the numbers of the Obama Poll.

Usually, I don’t have to poll myself. Usually, I know exactly what I think and I usually read the poll in order to comment out loud about the misleading nature of the way the questions are framed.

But this time was different. And it was different with regard to an issue tthat goes all the way down to “my trade”. In short, this is something that I should have more than the dilettante’s interest in, and yet I found the question to be very hard and marveled at the fact that people were able to offer a reply.

So, I am almost embarrassed to put this on paper: I don’t know what I think about “whether it is important that the congress know what Sotomayor’s views on abortion and affirmative action are”. Actually, you could put any other specific topic inside those ideological placeholders “abortion” and “affirmative action” and I wouldn’t know what I think.

Answering 'yes' means that we are not even shy about the fact that ideology is indiscernible from judgemanship. Do we truly thrust our hands over this idea unabashedly? Don’t we believe, somewhere, that the judicial arm is indeed an arm of government, but a critical arm, one that can sometimes rap the head in exasperation? Isn’t it important to extend the judiciary with at the very least a part time job of reviewing?

Evidently, there could have been much more moderate personifications of the same ideas. For example, that it is ok to care about the general political affiliation of the judge, but just the general affiliation. But to go to specifics, that is radical! It means that nothing but complete alignment, or at the very least, the tempered alignment achieved through the congressional bargaining is accepted.

I understand that this isn’t even a question from the viewpoint of Americans. I don’t see that this idea is criticized, and obviously it means exactly that that congress will inquire and expect a direct response from Sotomayor about all of these specific issues. Still, I think that general affiliation is the only legitimate information that doesn’t pertain to the professional expertise and that can be collected. In fact, perhaps I would agree that it must be submitted so that the judicial appointee doesn’t undercut the will of the people as is reflected by the congressional structure.

I think I think.

• Alameda. Noon. I had to restart my computer because of Babylon’s new technique – which they ought to be sued for – that is intended to persuade me to get Babylon 7.0 where I paid for a lifelong license to Babylon 6.0. Anyhow, while waiting for my computer to reinstate itself I glanced at the New York Times and saw this preposterous column in the business section, telling us about a first amendment challenge to the new tobacco regulations.  I just had to respond and so I am;

Tobacco regulation is expected to face a free speech challenge? Really? Is that what’s wrong with it? How about being afflicted with fascism? I have to be clear: I am not concerned that government is intervening too perniciously in the lives of individuals by adopting these regulations. It’s not the concern of a libertarian. I embrace any attempt by government to protect the public’s health, really I do. It’s just that I have a conspiracy theory about this: I believe that this is an initiative that originates from the same social trend that I find so noxious  which is the tendency to meddle in other people’s business under the pretense of promoting the greater good. Let my clarify: I am talking of the aggressive “suggestion” to recycle the rug we threw away, the disapproving cough you hear from the person standing behind you at the grocery shop when you decide you need a plastic bag instead of a paper one, the encouragement you receive from coffee-house toilets to wipe your hands on your pants instead of drying them on a paper towel, etc.

Now the violent regulation of smokers is that, only tenfold. People feel they truly have a right to aggressively regulate smokers because, quote on quote, they “endanger our children”. No less. And thus, we not only can, but must be rude to them, demand that they recline into closed confines, that the rest of the world won’t know that they exist. This is the true face of these regulations and it is far more pernicious than what it is made out to be. Let’s not get blinded by the sand casting of those 1^st amendment claims. It’s not rights that are being trampled, it is the entire social texture.

Is it possible that Judith Butler drives a Mazda MX Convertible?!?? I find it extremely hard to believe and yet in my courthouse we rely on eyewitness evidence, especially when it’s the court’s own (mine).

I am 70% sure:

ð  Subject Looked like Madame Butler. (funny, that sounds like i am discussing Vivian Leigh and actually, it would be less surprising to me to encounter Scarlet O'hara driving a Maz MX Conv through the streets of Berkeley)

ð   Subject was witnessed in Berkeley.

ð  Subject’s car had the Pride flag for a bumper sticker.

I am 30% baffled:

ð  How could it be that the revered scholar drives a Mazda MX?

ð  Witness viewed subject while making the long and strenuous bike drive from Milvia to the JSP program house. Witness may have been so exhausted as to lose control of her senses.

 I do believe that even suggesting that this is possible is as nefarious as to merit a libel suit.

* late evening. from soon to be not-my-home.
I have now come to understand the urge some people have (academia folk especially suffer from this malediction) to use their blog to share their recipes. We made Fried Plantains!

Hi. I am Tal and I am addicted to Fried Plantains. I feel a person who is a Fried Plantain addict, especially an Israeli who spent her entire morning slaving over Chinese grammar, can officially call herself a cosmopolite. (By the way, the word cosmopolite comes from French)

* started working on this in a place called Cuve'e in Denver. Nice wine bar. Had wine. Watched fortunates  gulping down cheese from their cheese plate. Yes.... There's always somebody extracting more intestinal pleasure than me. A poster of my life's story.

Have you ever noticed somebody who was too keen to end stuff on time?

Today I realized how it is when you have a wont that cannot be carried out everywhere and all of the time. I am talking about cases where one is too attached to a certain praxis which is looked down on by society, even if not in the severest way as some types of substance abuses – like drugs, but enough so he can’t carry it out freely. Examples are nose picking, masturbating, smoking and the like.

Today I’d like to talk about smoking.

Smoking is not as directly harmful as what society made it out to be. The harms of smoking are now much worse than those to the lungs of the smoker, the lungs of the smokee (i.e. passive smoker) or the pocket of the smoker and his dependents. Indirectly smoking has become as indirectly detrimental as to recast all of the latter, indirect  results of smoking, objectively substantial, into marginal abrasions, not even worthy of the name injuries. The vast damage from smoking is now the constant itch. The itch which made my soon to be ex-brother-in-law incapable of watching a film outside of his own home, the itch which made Prof. R.S. incapable of sitting out his own panel, even though the reason it was prolonged for a couple of minutes was in order to celebrate his own ingenuity. He wanted the fumes so bad that he was uninterested in the exaltation of extoltion.

Unless we decide that this is too costly for society to handle and quit this oppression of compulsives of all shapes and sorts, or rather unless we become more selective in our decisions which are directly detrimental as to merit such suppression, I’d say that this is the cost that should be underlined in no-to-X public service broadcasts – the cost of the itch. Just so we know what is truly at stake.