MechaBarbie(or Bush) Makes Children Cry(and Other Issues)

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This is what my kids are going to be playing with. Aren't you glad I'm not having any?

So I was walking to Trader Joe's today and suddenly felt angry thinking about how men's bodies don't go out of style. Then I realized that this simply was not true. Henry VIII was considered extremely attractive and we've gone through several versions of the "ideal boy" in recent years, from various bad boys and star jocks in the 80's and 90's to Zak Efron and Edward Cullen. And I realized that I actually know a good number of men who have body issues. It just seems to go un-discussed, most likely because of the macho hetero-normative male now dominating our culture. Body issues are for gay people and girls, God.

One of the many reasons guys need a masculist revolution of their own.

We live in a disposable culture. Everything is thrown away with regularity, from trends to toys to paper towels without us noticing.

I am kind of loving this article on the future of books. But I think what a lot of us are experiencing when we profess our undying love to the smell of a library(which I do) is nostalgia. Please keep in mind that nostalgia is what keeps people from having integrated proms and such. The one thing that disturbs me is that, counter-intuitionally, data is much more fallible than paper. What if some large world war took place? I would like to think that information is distributed too far and wide to be lost in the manner of the Library of Alexandria, but there is so much that is not. Books go out of print and are lost in the halls of The Library of Congress.

Books are personal experiences. They affect our mind and soul in a profound way. Games and movies do not move many of us in the same way. Yet for those who movies do, they are content with a flat disk and pretty cover.

Perhaps we can invent something akin to flipping pages and the "permanence" of paper. I'm sure the person who does will be very rich.

Bioastronautics, a scanned book about some of the things that really go into space flight(like spit).

It would be so easy to engineer a fountain using $3.99 plates from Ross, a pump, and a background. But then my parents could justifiably kill me.

Good news: violent crime is down all around the country, even though nobody is reporting on this. One cynical commentor says that this is because "People can't afford bullets anymore".

Picture from Jezebel