azraelle

Gee Hoverfly, you're about to get stuck wearing those hideous 6" oxfords. Makes me want to start all over under a new handle just to avoid the things!

YUP! It's not bad--better than the last one that Lindsey Lohan was in. You might want to see it through twice to catch on to everything (or maybe I am just a bit slow!). WOOHOO! 900!!

I wonder if the fascination with "ballet boots" among guys stems from the fact that learning au point in dance and/or ballet was, and if I'm not mistaken, still is a skill unavailable to them. I confess no urge to wear them. I also confess that one of the major things that made me like Michael Jackson, and disbelieve his child molestation philanderings for so long was his ability to do pointe as a real guy. I wanted to take ballet in the worst way as a child, until I found out in the 4th grade that ONLY GIRLS were allowed to do pointe. I am not a particular afficianado of ballet, but I have been to a number of performances, and seen many more on TV, and NEVER have I seen a guy doing pointe. Bottom line: I think that ballet boots represent a counterfeit of something yearned for as a child, but denied, even more unattainable than wearing hi-heels or other femminine attire. After all, you knew that you could secretly go out and BUY the clothing. But how can a child coerce the dance establishment to teach a boy how to dance like a girl?? Especially with his parents looking on. It is doubly damning when he knows that either he gets the training now, while his bones (and brain) are still forming, or he will never be able to--at least that was what was taught 40 years ago. This was one more reason for fascination with Michael Jackson--he was an adult, and he was still able to learn to do it--maybe there is still hope after all. Is there, really??

Oh Lordy, you have a way with words, gene. Had I heeded this advice in a timely manner, in all things, not just heel wearing, I'd still be married today.

I like bijan. I always figured if I could tell the difference between what constituted a female fragrance and a male fragrance, others could too. This may have been true 30 years ago, but now, with CK and others blurring the lines of distinction, it may no longer hold true, unless it is extremely floral or strong (which many perfumes, even some colognes, tend to be).

Trolldeg, figured you might want to know. Your website doesn't work in Mozilla Firefox, for some reason, but does work in Mozilla. Go figure.

I remember attempting to load Zaxxon onto an Atari 800XL but the tape drive kept crashing. I finally gave up and settled for Ms Pac Man, Qix, and Q-bert with cartridges. I wasn't addicted though--the only one that ever came close was solitaire on Win 3.1 running on a Korean-made 80286 clone with 1 MB of RAM!!!

I have several pair of black flared hip hugger jeans that would go quite nicely with them, thank you, as well as a pair of crimson velvet jeans. Did I forget to mention that I didn't buy any of them in a menswear store? I also have a couple of stretch suedecloth shirts in purple and maroon, respectively, and at least 2 black fancy shirts, one that laces up the back. And I'm making a Queen of Swords style Pirate shirt/Poet's Blouse/bodysuit combination. All of which would go quite well with a fancy pair of maroon and black snakeskin boots such as those, even if they are synthetic. Of course the heel could be a bit higher...

If they were my own, I'd keep them as they are!!

Thanx, JinxieKat. I know the answer should have been obvious, but I somehow forgot. Probably due to my erronious assumptions about the motivations (and "purity" perhaps?) of the predominantly Mormon females that go to college here. You've opened my eyes in more ways than one.

There is a special place in hell reserved for men like that. The hell I refer to is in this life, though. While he's in prison, he will be a homophobic redneck no longer--the inmates take special care of child molesters/rapists/beaters/ murderers.

I got my first women's high-heeled boots in late 1978 from Lane Bryant. That would have made me ~26 at the time. They were ~15" knee-hi black leather with a side zipper, plastic "stacked leather" look embossed heels, about 2.75" at the back, ~2.1" at front, size 12. Before that I had a pair of shoes remarkably similar to the "comfy loafer" avatar, and before that, a couple of pairs of decidedly feminine moccasins from Minnetonka (my feet hadn't reached their full length when I was 22--could still, barely, fit into a size 10), and a pair of canvas penny loafers, aka women's deck shoes. I also had access to a pair of my grandmother's "granny-style" wing-tip pumps when I was 12-14, though they grew too small for me as I got older (~size 7.5) and a pair of my older brother's "Spanish boots" that he bought in 1963 (later known as "Beatle Boots") with about the same heel height as the granny's--about 1.5" at front, 2" at back, though they were size 9. Finally, I had a pair of suede mens boots, similar heel height, that I got in 1967, size 10. They eventually got too small also. After they went out of fashion, my parents forbade me to wear them.

http://www.axfords.com/Site/index.cfm/fuseaction/Product.View/ID/C135.cfm?CFID=14571342&CFTOKEN=78055122

I bought this model over a year ago from Axfords of London, and it has held up fairly well--a couple of the "bones" eventually forced their way out of the fabric, but since they were on either side, it made it more comfortable, so I never bothered to sew them back in. I ordered it online (from the USA) and received it in a little over 2 weeks. I weighed about 245 at the time, and ordered the largest waist size it came in (34"); my waist at the time was at least 42", so it was tight, even with ~3" lace gap (although the outside circumference was about 40"). I now weigh ~210, I can put it on tightly laced and knotted with no difficulty--I need a 32, or maybe even a 30. The external measurement when tightly laced is about 36.5". I did alot of reading about what was the best (custom made/measured) versus what I could afford, and decided that Axfords represented the best compromise between the two. They also have a nice glossy catalog they will send you (free with an order) for a small fee.

From my own experience with relatively miniscule platforms, the boots would probably be INCREDIBLY comfortable--the kind that some lucky well-heeled lady would wear all day at a trade show. Oh Well...

I did 3000 recently. I only just noticed. Come on guys, get posting to beat that!

But I don't LIKE your 6" avatar. The board is showing its age. I'm more than well-acquainted with the why's and wherefore's of the present stock of avatars. But I have an idea--with each passing grade, why not increase the number of choices available within a given heel height category??

I'd even volunteer to find and photoreduce the BW gifs so they would continue to be of neglible bandwidth (using Photoshop/Illustrator and Irfanview).

An example: Give those who have earned the (current) 2" cowboy boots, a choice of 3 images with 2" heels. I can remember my first pair of women's boots--they were knee-hi, black smooth leather, with a stacked-look 2" heel, that make your current selection look like the "Steply UghSister" it actually is. Even my properly manly water buffalo skin cowboy boots that I had back in the early 90's looked MUCH more stylish than these critters. And the heels were, if anything, lower. The same goes for the ghastly 3" mule wedgies.

An example of my abilities: Right click on my current 5.5" image, then click "properties". The 5.5" pump takes up 2408 Bytes of bandwidth. Do the same for my over-the-knee zappos serving as my moniker. Even though it occupies at least twice the screen space of the pumps, the bandwidth of the gif is virtually identical--2436 Bytes.

Whaddya say, FireFox??

The important thing, Tesa, is how they make you feel about yourself.

Do they make you feel more feminine, or in control, or both? If they do, scratch your eye with your middle finger the next time some jealous guy or girl offers criticism, and drive on. If they don't, then quit wearing them--it's that simple.

I turned up a link to this gem of a product on a site listing the projects of some fledgling freelance web designers. Oh the possibilities...

http://www.rentacop.tv/index.php

It appears that the majority of people posting so far have a great dislike for flip-flops. If that is the case, how come that they are still being sold and not languishing on the counter tops covered with cob-webs??? Cheers---

Because the majority of critics here on this website are...(drum roll please)...male, and the majority of those wearing them are...(another drum roll)...female. Funny how that is. I myself, going and finishing up at a college that has, probably, a girl/guy ratio of at least 3:1, find myself letcherously enjoying the view of the foxes in their low-rider jeans, and bare midriff tiny tees, and my eyes wander down, and.... and.... nothing but thongs, although usually at least a step up from the all-rubber variety--the kind that you would expect to find at WalMart for ~$5-7. Its not...a complete letdown, but there now is less to enjoy. How some of them manage to continue to walk gracefully, mimicking the normal hip and leg movements with higher-heeled footwear, I haven't figured out yet. It must be a girl thing--perhapsTabascoTesa can shed some light on the subject.

I picked this up off my webmail today:

Phil Lucas, Panama City, Florida News Herald Executive Editor, wrote this article published in the Sunday April 4, 2004 edition. His email address is plucas@pcnh.com. The News Herald web site is found at http://www.newsherald.com/

Up Against Fanaticism

If straight talk of savagery offends you, if you believe in ethnic and gender diversity but not diversity of thought, or if you think there is an acceptable gray area between good and evil, then turn to the funny pages, and take the children, too. This piece is not for you.

We published pictures Thursday [April 1] of burnt American corpses hanging from

an Iraqi bridge behind a mob of grinning Muslims. Some readers didn't like it. Mothers said it frightened their children. A woman who works with Muslim physicians thought it might offend or endanger them.

Well, we sure don't want to frighten, offend or endanger anybody, do we? That's just too much diversity to handle. I mean, somebody might get hurt. We could fill the newspaper every morning with mobs of fanatical Muslims. They can't get along with their neighbors on much of the planet: France, Chechnya, Bosnia, Indonesia, Spain, Morocco, India, Tunisia, Somalia, etc. etc. etc. Can anybody name three ongoing world conflicts in which Muslims are not involved? Today, where there is war, there are fanatical Muslims.

We might quibble about who started what conflicts, but look at the sheer number of them. One thing is sure. Muslim killers started the one we are in now when they slaughtered more than 3,000 people, including fellow Muslims, in New York City. Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state and feckless appeaser who helped get us into this mess, said last week Muslims still resent the Crusades. Well, Madam Albright, if westerners were not such a forgiving people, we might resent them too.

Let's recap the Crusades. Muslims invaded Europe, and when they reached sufficient

numbers, they imposed their intolerant religion upon Westerners by force. Christian monarchs drove them back and took the battle to their homeland. The fight lasted a couple of centuries, and we bottled them up for 1,000 years. [not entirely accurate, but it will probably suffice]

Now, a millennium later, Muslims have expanded forth again. Ask France. Ask England. Ask Manhattan. Two-and-a-half years ago fanatical Muslims laid siege to us. We woke up to the obvious. Our president announced it would be a very long war, then took the battle to the Islamic homeland. Sound Familiar?

Let's consider the concept of a "long war." Last time it was 200 years, give or take. Anybody catch Lord of the Rings? You know, the good part, the part that wasn't fiction, the part that drew us to the books and movies because it was the truest part: the titanic struggle between good and evil, between freedom and enslavement, between the individual and the state, between the celebration of life and the worshipping of death.

That's the fight we are in, and it never ends. It just has peaks and valleys. There may be a silent majority of peaceful Muslims - some live here - but that did not save 3,000 people in the World Trade Center, the million gassed and butchered in the Middle East, the tens of thousands slain in Eastern Europe and Asia, the hundreds blown to bits in the West Bank and Spain, or the four Americans shot, burned and hung like sausages over the Euphrates as a fanatical minority of Muslims did the joyful dance of death.

Maybe we are so tolerant, we are so bent on "diversity," we are so nonjudgmental, we are so wrapped up in our six-packs and ballgames that our brains have drained to our bulbous behinds. Maybe we're so addled on Ritalin we wouldn't know which end of a gun to hold. Maybe we need a new drug advertised on TV every three minutes, one that would help us grow a backbone.

It doesn't take a Darwin to figure out that in this world the smartest, the fastest, the strongest, and the most committed always win. No exceptions.

Look at your spouse and children. Look at yourself in the mirror. Then look at the pictures from the paper last Thursday. You better look at them. Those are the people out to kill you. Who do you think will win? You? Or them? Think you can take your

ball and go home and they will leave you alone? Read a little history. Start with last week, last month, last year, and every other year back for half a century. Then go back a thousand years. Nobody hides from this fight.

Like it or not, that's the way it was and that's the way it is. But many Americans don't get it. That's why we published those pictures. If they jarred you off the sofa, if they offended you, if they scared your children and sent you into a rage at mass murderers or heartless editors, then I say, it's a start.

Sunday, April 18, 2004

Enough to make you sick

By Phil Lucas

Executive Editor

The stories we tell define the nation. Stories poorly told can destroy it.

It works the same with children. If you tell 10 stories a day to a lovely child and nine of them say she is weak, ugly and stupid, she will come to believe it. She may be pregnant by 15, a meth addict by 17, join a cult by 19, then elope with the family cat to get married in Massachusetts.

So it goes with the country. Consider our national storytellers: the media.

Ten days ago, American and coalition forces engaged Iraqi “insurgents,” as the national press politely calls them. Sane Americans know them as the enemy, gunmen of an Islamic religious leader. An American brigadier general gave a televised briefing on the battle for several cities. As he explained the fight for Fallujah and how we had taken three bridges at Kut, suddenly across the bottom of the screen appeared a Fox News Alert: EXPLOSION HEARD IN BAGHDAD!!!!!

Fox immediately switched to a camera shot of a Baghdad skyline. The voice of a reporter came on, urgently speculating about an explosion, perhaps caused by a car bomb or a mortar or an RPG (rocket propelled grenade, to the unwashed) or whatever else the reporter could think of. Then the camera zeroed in on a hole in some concrete, perhaps a parking lot or sidewalk. The hole appeared to be about the size of a wheelbarrow, the evident location of the EXPLOSION HEARD IN BAGHDAD!!!!!

They got an expert on the phone. The TV guys keep a herd of experts handy for just such an event. The reporter asked the expert what could have happened.

He said to her, and I paraphrase,“I’ll tell you what happened. This is a war of information. You were showing the general’s briefing, and they wanted you off it, so they set off a bomb in Baghdad.”

The reporter stammered, “Uh, oh . . .” and commenced to get the guy off the phone. He had more expertise than she expected.

A quick flick to CNN showed the same camera shot: a hole in concrete. On MSNBC: a hole in concrete.

No doubt the general continued his briefing, the subject of which was the most intense and costly fighting in a year.

A war of information. Of storytelling. Comically inept, you think? True. But this sort of reporting by the national press is not the exception. When the press reports about Iraq and virtually all other contested issues in the news, ineptitude is the rule. This is true of television and also of print reporting. We zero in on the worst thing that happens, time after time, day after day, the effect of which is to present the worst thing as the norm, even when it is only one-tenth of the whole story. For good measure, we throw in our personal opinions, arrogantly certain they are correct.

We have all noticed that the few stories we get from people who have served in or visited Iraq rarely match the sky-is-falling enthusiasm we get from our press.

Some call this biased reporting. I call it deceitful, or just plain lying.

Four weeks ago the Israelis killed Ahmed Yassin, the Islamic religious leader who founded Hamas, one of the purposes of which is to kill Israelis. Some news reports called him “revered spiritual leader.” Revered by whom? Israelis? Americans? Palestinians? Is there any doubt as to the reporters’ opinion?

Virtually all news reports said he was “assassinated,” which means murder, an illegal act. From the Israeli point of view, is it illegal to chop the head off a snake trying to strike you? Reporters could have written “executed,” a word loaded in the other direction, implying legality and favoring the Israelis. Or they could have just written “killed” and let readers and viewers decide what is right and what is wrong.

Here’s a line from an Associated Press story about the president’s press conference last week. “Bush sidestepped at least two opportunities to say he wanted to apologize or take personal responsibility.”

“Sidestepped?” “Opportunities?” Nobody sidesteps opportunities. You sidestep duck droppings on the sidewalk. Think this reporter has an opinion he wants to share? If he reveals this kind of blatant bias in any part of a news story, it casts a shadow over every word he writes.

USA Today wrote this: “Offered numerous chances to second-guess his approach to Iraq, he rejected them all.”

Nobody “rejects” any “chances” worth taking. It defies human nature. As for “second-guessing,” we don’t need to guess whose opinion that is. The reporters’ two names are in the byline. Assuming perhaps that their readers were too stupid to get it, the reporters used these words a few paragraphs down: “denied,” “argued” and “conceded.” All referred to Bush. These are words for the opinion pages, like the one you are on now, unless you draw no distinction between news and opinion, unless you believe your opinion is the news.

Press folly plumbs new depths when witnessed live, as in the televised press conference itself.

It was enough to raise old editors from the dead, their standards and self-discipline sorely missing from the modern newsroom. Others of us just squirmed with embarrassment, partly for the president, prone to trip over a syllable, but mostly for the profession. Reporter after reporter couched questions in the negative, assuming the worst was true, knowing the worst was true, looking for the kill. They used words like failure, defeat and mistake, time after time after time. That’s not reporting. That’s not seeking truth. That’s an agenda.

Smelling blood, the pack salivated for an apology from the president.

On this point I agree. An apology is in order.

So here it is.

I am sorry our storytellers have us by the neck. We are better than they picture us. We are better than they are.

As an editor, I apologize to Americans for the national disgrace of inept and self-indulgent journalists, who hound after the worst and ugliest to the exclusion of much else, who strut their opinions with conceit, and who spew it all forth upon the public and call it news.

I picked up this link from a low-carbing singles forum. It needs to be viewed within the next 24 hours though--the guy has gotten something like 900,000 hits on his ebay auction. It had the geeks in the computer lab ROFLTAO, and it is appropriate for this site too, in an off-beat kind of way. Take a look and see what you think:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=4146756343

HINT: You need to read ALL of his comments and updates!

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Since you are in USA, go here:

http://www.tandyleather.com/

for lack of a better place, I thought I'd throw this in here (it's not geography, but demographics, sort of. From NY Times today:

Losing Our Edge?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: April 22, 2004

I was just out in Silicon Valley, checking in with high-tech entrepreneurs about the state of their business. I wouldn't say they were universally gloomy, but I did detect something I hadn't detected before: a real undertow of concern that America is losing its competitive edge vis-à-vis China, India, Japan and other Asian tigers, and that the Bush team is deaf, dumb and blind to this situation.

Several executives explained to me that they were opening new plants in Asia — not because of cheaper labor. Labor is a small component now in an automated high-tech manufacturing plant. It is because governments in these countries are so eager for employment and the transfer of technology to their young populations that they are offering huge tax holidays for U.S. manufacturers who will set up shop. Because most of these countries also offer some form of national health insurance, U.S. companies shed that huge open liability as well.

Other executives complained bitterly that the Department of Homeland Security is making it so hard for legitimate foreigners to get visas to study or work in America that many have given up the age-old dream of coming here. Instead, they are studying in England and other Western European nations, and even China. This is leading to a twofold disaster.

First, one of America's greatest assets — its ability to skim the cream off the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world and bring them to our shores to innovate — will be diminished, and that in turn will shrink our talent pool. And second, we could lose a whole generation of foreigners who would normally come here to study, and then would take American ideas and American relationships back home. In a decade we will feel that loss in America's standing around the world.

Still others pointed out that the percentage of Americans graduating with bachelor's degrees in science and engineering is less than half of the comparable percentage in China and Japan, and that U.S. government investments are flagging in basic research in physics, chemistry and engineering. Anyone who thinks that all the Indian and Chinese techies are doing is answering call-center phones or solving tech problems for Dell customers is sadly mistaken. U.S. firms are moving serious research and development to India and China.

The bottom line: we are actually in the middle of two struggles right now. One is against the Islamist terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, and the other is a competitiveness-and-innovation struggle against India, China, Japan and their neighbors. And while we are all fixated on the former (I've been no exception), we are completely ignoring the latter. We have got to get our focus back in balance, not to mention our budget. We can't wage war on income taxes and terrorism and a war for innovation at the same time.

Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, noted that Intel sponsors an international science competition every year. This year it attracted some 50,000 American high school kids. "I was in China 10 days ago," Mr. Barrett said, "and I asked them how many kids in China participated in the local science fairs that feed into the national fair [and ultimately the Intel finals]. They told me six million kids."

For now, the U.S. still excels at teaching science and engineering at the graduate level, and also in university research. But as the Chinese get more feeder stock coming up through their high schools and colleges, "they will get to the same level as us after a decade," Mr. Barrett said. "We are not graduating the volume, we do not have a lock on the infrastructure, we do not have a lock on the new ideas, and we are either flat-lining, or in real dollars cutting back, our investments in physical science."

And what is the Bush strategy? Let's go to Mars. Hello? Right now we should have a Manhattan Project to develop a hydrogen-based energy economy — it's within reach and would serve our economy, our environment and our foreign policy by diminishing our dependence on foreign oil. Instead, the Bush team says let's go to Mars. Where is Congress? Out to lunch — or, worse, obsessed with trying to keep Susie Smith's job at the local pillow factory that is moving to the Caribbean — without thinking about a national competitiveness strategy. And where is Wall Street? So many of the plutocrats there know that the Bush fiscal policy is a long-term disaster. They know it — but they won't say a word because they are too greedy or too gutless.

The only crisis the U.S. thinks it's in today is the war on terrorism, Mr. Barrett said. "It's not."

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and who manages to avoid them.

Werner Heisenberg

Apparently, Heisenberg didn't consider himself an expert, then. If memory serves me correctly, when the captured German Nuclear Scientists, of whom Heisenberg was their leader, found out that the USA had set off a successful atom bomb (and therefore had obviuosly been able to construct one) they refused to believe it for nearly 3 months, especially when they found out what it was made from (U-235, as opposed to U-238). They had been trying, unsuccessfully, for 5 years to make U-238 fission. Heisenberg's calculations, primarily done with a "slipstick" (sliderule), showed that the amount of U-235 need to fission was 100 times greater than was actually required, and therefore separating enough of the isotope out was deemed impossible. It seems that, early on, he had "misplaced" 2 decimal points. Since no one on his team ever questioned "the great Heisenberg" or his calculations, the Germans never were able to build a successful reactor. The designs they came up with were later shown to not be able to start, much less maintain a fission reaction--even if the Allies had not been able to bomb the crap out of them.

Frankly, my most comfortable boots are this high. Have never worn HH sandals, tho. I would think you would want a little more support as a beginner--at least something to limit the side-to-side motion of the heel and upper arch area of your foot--for stability while you get used to walking--perhaps a "demi-sandal" (closed heel, sandal straps on lower foot), or an open toed mule (or a mule-like sandal with several straps surrounding the arch area). To sort of simulate the support you get from a pair of glove-tight boots. Unfortunately you need a shoe that really fits--the kind of fit you will only get trying a bunch on in a store (or buying several pairs in succession by mail, and returning them in succession until you, by chance, find one that fits).