Don't Make Me Learn Twitter

Because I'm getting too old for these stupid computer toys. This one is about sharing the most pathetic details of your pathetic lives in teeny tiny blog posts. Here's Blogging Tory Stephen Tayler on twitter. He's twittered extensively for the past several days and apparently hasn't jacked off once, or at least hasn't made note of the fact. I've read some of the twitter posts from a few of his "followers". Some are even more obsessive than Steve--"3:47 PM. Sneezed again."--but none of them has mentioned jacking off either.

So do Conservatives never jack off? Or is Twitter simply a Masturbation free zone, like Conservapedia? Or perhaps the weird gaps in some of their twitter blogs mark those spots where they put down their blackberry's to give it a quick wank? Weird. None of these gaps is more than 3 minutes long.

Leonard Sax On Boys Today: They're Wimps And They Jack Off Too Much

This seems to be the take away from this Maclean's interview with the American psychologist/family physician Leonard Sax. And his views are also given some play in the Star today by Jim Coyle.

More generally, Mr. Sax believes that today's primary school system has been "feminized". Boys can't fight and throw snowballs and play with toy guns the way they used to. Furthermore, once out of school they are no longer surrounded by a "culture of men" that teaches them right from wrong etc.. Somehow, this is leading them to poor grades, violence and, when they reach college age, sexual impotence.

Dr. Sax's theory sounds fishy to me, lamenting and calling for a return to the "good old days" when school for boys was like one big scouting expedition, where campfires were sat around and guitars strummed and traditions passed from man to boy via rites extending back to the days of Lord Baden Powell.

But all I can say for sure is, I passed through the school system back during Mr. Sax's Golden Age (roughly 40 years ago), and I don't recall it being that much fun. Even back then you had to sit still in math class, which was boring and sucked, and in most of the other classes too, which were also boring and sucked. I don't recall being allowed to pack fake weapons into class, although maybe some schools were like that. In any case, these days the kids don't need to play with fake guns; they've got real ones, and this has clearly NOT had a salutary effect on overall grades.

I do recall the glory of a good snow-ball fight, especially one particular time when I corked some kid with an ice-ball I'd made up special and he fell plonk! right off the snow bank and we all had to run. I also recall the wooden Pirate Ship our neighborhood built outside of Millstream Elementary School in Langford, B.C. At every lunch hour, the kids would fight over who got to stand on the after deck, and many, many a child cracked their heads open getting fed to the sharks. But I don't really think its presence had an effect on my grades, which were dismal in any event.

Mr. Sax has mistaken nostalgia for science, I think.

Conservapedia On Self-Pleasuring: You'll Go Blind!

A couple weeks ago I had my first encounter with Conservapedia, Andrew Schlafly's (Phyllis' son) attempt to produce a right-wing equivalent to wikipedia. At the time, I wrote:

[Conservapedia] looks like a hoot! I'm waiting for their article on masturbation to appear.

Well, it finally has...or at least it had. Search the term now and you get the following message:

This page has been deleted and protected to prevent re-creation

As you may know, the contributors to Conservapedia are a bunch of "home schooled" teenagers from families with far-right political views. Apparently, when this article first appeared, none of them got any work done for a week. They went all cross-eyed, started walking into things, and made those "ibibibibibibibibibibibibi' noises you make when you run your finger up and down over your lips and blow.

College is going to be a real eye-opener for this bunch.

(Note: a list of Conservapedia's other protected/deleted pages can be found here.)

Well, At Least Albertans Are Normal In THAT Respect

From The Lifesite:

EDMONTON, Alberta, February 27, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - More than one-third of young teenage boys aged 13-14 report viewing pornographic DVDs or videos “too many times to count”, a new study from the University of Alberta found, with boys living in rural areas the most likely to access porn.

[...]

Nearly half the boys from rural regions said they had viewed pornographic videos or DVDs at least once, compared to children from urban areas who reported a one-in-three rate of exposure to pornographic videos.

I guess cow-tipping gets a bit stale after awhile. Whereas city kids can always go to the opera. Sonya Thompson, lead researcher on the study, went on to comment:

“If you’re 13 and you can’t put a number on the times [you’ve viewed porn], that’s a little frightening.”

It's also a terrible indictment of the Alberta educational system, and an opportunity for Kevin Taft and the Alberta Liberal Party. I see a slogan: Vote Lib., And Your Kid Will Be At Least Know How Many Times They've Masturbated.