December 2012
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Fifty years ago I enjoyed arguing with people of religion about the existence of god, but nowadays I find it to be a singularly unprofitable exercise. The believers and the atheists are so entrenched in their positions hat no one ever convinces anyone of anything. Moreover, the faithful are so damned touchy that it's no…
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I doubt that I know any more about strigils than your average man in the street. I had read about them for years, of course, but I had never seen one with my own eyes until yesterday, when I took myself down to the Pompeii exhibit in Denver. There they were, kind of stuck away…
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George Drysdale (1823-1904) wrote, anonymously, Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion (1854), a pioneering guide to contraception and sexual disease that was condemned by the pious as "the Bible of the Brothel." Drysdale arrived at his progressive ideas after an adolescence and young manhood crippled by sexual ignorance and sexual panic. At the age of fifteen,…
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Every year, football becomes harder and harder to watch. When the quarterback is blitzed and has his clock cleaned, or a receiver on a crossing pattern gets his bell rung, I no longer think, brilliant play. Instead, I think, pain and concussion. Not a game goes by but that a lineman leaves the field of…
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The ol' amnesia gimmick plus "screwball" comedy plus W. S. Van Dyke plus Willam Powell and Myrna Loy equals "I Love You Again" (1940). Workaholic, unfun Larry Wilson gets conked on the head and wakes up as an amusing grifter named George Cary. (Hollywood amnesia will do that to you, apparently — completely revise your…
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The ancient Romans did not allow swords to be carried within the pomerium, the sacred central precincts of their city. They were able to maintain the prohibition because they did not have a National Sword Associaion to argue that if swords are banned, only criminals with have swords; or that swords don't kill, people kill;…