Thought That Came Unbidden

Ah, springtime in Washington…It means a lot of things: predictions about when the cherry blossoms will be at peak bloom, the transition from cold and rainy to warm and rainy, and it also inevitably means gallons of ink and hours of TV news air time devoted to whether or not the pandas at the National Zoo are getting it on. (Cue the Barry White music and light the bamboo scented candles.)

I know they’re endangered, and I know the National Zoo has, lately, had a spotty record in animal care but there’s just something vaguely creepy about so many people thinking about pandas having sex. Next thing you know that woman from the Levitra commercial will be on my TV talking about the “quality” of the male panda’s “experience.”

I shudder to think.

Isn’t femslash fan fiction about The L-Word sort of pointless?

Where do body image standards come from?

In America we have this fixed idea that a woman should only have hair in two places on her body, and if you judge by our pornography that narrows down to one place. Where did this idea come from? Surely Puritan women didn’t spend a lot of time scraping hair off their legs and underarms. So who decided this and when?

Random thoughts as I prepare for the coming spring.

Jim Carson sent me a fabulous link from PRWeb about the way blogging could potentially be changing the human brain. Jim’s got me thinking lately about why to blog.

I have to say that I’m fascinated by real-world analysts who are just now getting the idea that online communication tools are not merely tools for moving bits of data from one place to another but can, in fact, create completely different types of communities in an environment that doesn’t really “exist.”

I’ve been thinking about this a bit myself, as people have added links to my blog and I’ve added links back. I’ve got one link over there in the blogroll that was one of the first two sites to ever link back to me. And while the site was an interesting read, its owner hasn’t updated in months, and it was months between that update and the one immediately preceeding it.

So what are the morals and ethics of blogrolling? Is it blogsphere courtesy to link to someone simply because that person is linking to me? Are the rules different for bigger blogs? For blogs that exist as the sole or primary source of their author’s income? Is all of this published somewhere in the diary of the blogsphere’s equivalent of Miss Manners or Emily Post?

All questions for which I have no answers. All that said, go read Jim’s blog or any of the others in my blogroll. They’ve all got something interesting, intriguing, or unsettling to say.

…say that someone is “a well-known speaker and author” is the person really well-known?

It’s really a very interesting question. Most advertising these days doesn’t tell you how good a product is at doing something, it associates itself with a particular set of “lifestyle cues” (e.g.: guys who drink Budweiser can date hot Swedish girls).