random rants
Re: random rants
- JudasIscariotTheBird
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Re: random rants
Andy wrote:Deer need to go extinct. My first car was destroyed by 2 deer on 2 separate occasions when I was 25. Last night, another deer destroyed my second car.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln1ucGoPvWk
"Sublime was driven by their frontman, who was, quite probably, a musical savant." -RIP Stannis
(Formerly Diceman4221)
Re: random rants
- Derwood
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Re: random rants
Stannis wrote:I renew my objection to the word supper.
Especially when it's used to mean "lunch"
Re: random rants
Derwood wrote:Stannis wrote:I renew my objection to the word supper.
Especially when it's used to mean "lunch"
hahahaha like every meal is supper.
- Splendid Splinter
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Re: random rants
Stannis wrote:Derwood wrote:Stannis wrote:I renew my objection to the word supper.
Especially when it's used to mean "lunch"
hahahaha like every meal is supper.
What about 2nd breakfast?
Re: random rants
- Sammy Sofa
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Re: random rants
From a horsefeathering REVIEW of the book:
https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/b ... oid=902762
Most notably, the Exile nurtures a peculiarly vicious and schizoid attitude toward women. While Russian women are rhapsodically celebrated as long-legged gazelles with loose morals--"the most physically attractive women on earth, and...usually available to the highest bidder," expat women are ridiculed at length as "fat-ankled" and defensively sexless. Self-hating geeky American men are encouraged to take advantage of the perception that all Americans are rich and have oodles of condomless sex (sometimes in the ass!) with drunk, nubile dyevushkas. Ex-girlfriends are held up to public ridicule--Ames at one point chronicles his threats to kill a pregnant ex if she won't have an abortion. The club listings are rated by three factors: how cheap the beer is, how thuggish the crowd is, and how likely an expat male is to score: "Babes with nose-bleeds and their pot-bellied, cell-phone-totin' sugar dyadyas. One of the highest concentrations of beautiful chicks--and heavily armed men--in the world. (If you have an 8-ball of whiff you'll get laid.)"
It's not ironic--Ames and Taibbi explicitly scorn the bourgeois safety net of irony--and it's not just a rhetorical stance. "You're always trying to force Masha and Sveta under the table to give you [expletive]," complains their first business manager, an American woman, in chapter six, "The White God Factor." "It's not funny. They don't think it's funny." "But...it is funny," replies Taibbi. They take particular glee in trashing several former female staff members in print, taking multiple potshots at the aforementioned business manager's "gorilla ass." They're equally nasty to her replacement, who quit in disgust after they went on a four-month "brain-sucking speed binge."
And Ames's treatment of Russian teenage girls is documented with frightening glee. In the book he recounts one evening with an expat investment banker pal and what he thought were three 16-year-old girls:
"When I went back into the TV room, Andy pulled me aside with a worried grin on his face. 'Dude do you realize...do you know how old that Natasha is?' he said.
"'Sixteen?'
"'No! No, she's fif-teen. Fif-teen.' Right then my pervometer needle hit the red. I had to have her, even if she was homely."
After they do it, she tells him she has a three-month-old baby.
"It was hard to imagine that Natasha had squatted out a baby," Ames writes. "Her [expletive] was as tight as a cat's ass....I'd slept with mothers before--they're a lot wider. Sex with them is like probing a straw in a mildew-lined German beer mug."
Later he learns that she's lying--she has no baby, but rather is four months pregnant. After she has an abortion, he writes about her in the Exile, suggesting that she be sterilized and awarded "one of those cheap trophy cups with the inscription 'World's Greatest Mom.'"
Ames and Taibbi rationalize their flaming sexism with the argument that part of the whole expatriate experience is to have one's moral compass come loose. American men have internalized a sexual script that prescribes equality and respect, but "out in Russia," Ames writes, "you gain a little perspective, which can be dangerous. Deep down, even the most emasculated, wire-rimmed glasses, cigar-smoking and martini-drinking American guy fantasizes about living in a world full of...well, I'll let you guess: a) self-reliant, androgynous women who are also your friends, b) young, beautiful sluts."