Re: a comment on The Gospel According to Zodiac by Dovina	zodiac 217.144.7.195	1-Nov-05/10:53 AM
Don't apologize. I hear he's good.
Re: Pathetic by Miggy	drnick 24.176.22.254	1-Nov-05/10:37 AM
I like that you've taken something as sad as being rejected by a girl, and rubbed it into their face. That's probably the only thing I like about this, the rest...truely is, pathetic.
Re: a comment on Racism by Dovina	zodiac 217.144.7.195	1-Nov-05/10:31 AM
One of my specializations in English Lit grad school was African American Literature. Naturally, this required identifying certain writers as black. Still, I think I'll maintain that race is a social construct invented by groups who stand to benefit from it. My other specialization was feminist lit, though, where I learned that gender is a social construct too, so you're entitled to tell me to blow off and stop talking such craziness. Or how about this: If I accept that there are races, I still say the specifics of division are totally social. African Americans (ie, Dovina thinks they're a race) are as a whole much less purely genetically black/African than Arabs and Jews (Dovina thinks they're not a race) are purely genetically Arab or Jew. I'll give Dovina her distinction between the religious group Muslim (ie, mostly Pacifican and not Arab) and Arab, but can't give her Jew as a merely religious grouping. I'll also still say cockneys are a race, if only by the non-meathead standard "most people think they're a race."
Re: a comment on leavetaking by daniella	daniella 200.127.15.173	1-Nov-05/9:48 AM
:) you
Re: a comment on The Gospel According to Zodiac by Dovina	ALChemy 24.74.101.159	1-Nov-05/9:07 AM
I often babysit my niece and nephew. It's either that or Dora The Explorer.
Re: a comment on island nation by skaskowski	ALChemy 24.74.101.159	1-Nov-05/9:00 AM
The worst part is I misspelled cancerous. The best part is your version sounds like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs ("It puts the lotion on its skin and puts it back in the bucket again.")
Re: a comment on Alert me by T. Jonathron Remp	T. Jonathron Remp 128.252.229.185	1-Nov-05/8:59 AM
My aunt says it was a mix-up on my birth certificate, but my birthparents insist the interposed R is reminiscent of the traditional Latvian spelling: Jéuanaethroÿon.
Re: a comment on Racism by Dovina	ALChemy 24.74.101.159	1-Nov-05/8:49 AM
You're right though. This is a silly thing to argue about.
Re: a comment on Racism by Dovina	ALChemy 24.74.101.159	1-Nov-05/8:45 AM
That's all nice and Fiona Apple of you but as long as mankind can differentiate between things (especially animals) than race at some level will be considered into identification. You sound like the priest in the story who thinks he's not racist until a man beats him or rapes his wife or kidnaps his children, then has to describe the man and the first thing he tells the police is he's black. (albeit in the story he uses an old southern bastardized version of the spanish word for black) I dare you to say that you never described anyone as black, latin, middle eastern etc. based solely on exterior traits. No? Then include yourself among mankind and our meatheaded standard.
Re: Lunch with the Beast by D. $ Fontera	zodiac 217.144.7.195	1-Nov-05/4:29 AM
Is there any consensus about the psychology of alien abduction? Prior research has yielded a few insights, some of which are hardly surprising: People who believe they've been abducted tend to be fantasy-prone and eccentric, for one. On the other hand, they don't tend to be crazy. Most abductees are regular Joes, with decent jobs; though they have varying levels of education, they are predominantly white and middle class. In addition to an appetite for fantasy, researchers have identified several mental phenomena that often accompany a person's belief that she's been abducted: One is sleep paralysis, a relatively common experience during which the brain and the body desynchronize briefly before waking up. The body remains paralyzed (as it is during REM sleep) while the mind enters a state between sleeping and waking, in which some people hallucinate. The theory goes that a subset of the hallucinators, primed by popular culture to believe in visits from otherworldly kidnappers, interpret their experiences as abductions. The second contributing factor is the mind's capacity to create false memories, particularly under hypnosis—which is how many abduction "memories" have been retrieved. In fact, it was the study of false memory and trauma that led Clancy to the aliens. She started graduate school in the mid-'90s, as psychologists were duking it out over the validity of "recovered" memories, and signed on to assist two professors with a study of sexual-abuse victims. The professors gave subjects lists of words to memorize—"sugar," "candy," "sour," "bitter"—that were all related to another word, "sweet," that was not on the list. People who had allegedly recovered memories of sexual abuse while in therapy, it turned out, were more likely than a control group to remember "sweet" as having been on the list—that is, to produce false memories in the lab. Of course, this did nothing to prove whether the women's abuse memories were themselves false, and Clancy and her colleagues were roundly attacked by victims' advocates and other scientists. So, the researchers went looking for another set of subjects—people whose memories were assumed by most people to be false—and they wound up with alien abductees. Again, their work revealed that abductees were also more likely to misremember words than a control group. www.slate.com
Re: Stolen Innocence by TLRufener	zodiac 217.144.7.195	1-Nov-05/3:44 AM
Innocence is overrated. And yet, if you think your life's ruined without it, you still have it.
Re: a comment on Racism by Dovina	zodiac 217.144.7.195	1-Nov-05/3:39 AM
I'll say. As a race, cockneys are even thicker than mere coloureds. Check out this description of 18th-century Calcutta by eminent historian Stephen Taylor: "Behind the esplanade of the East India Company lay the great maidan, a grassy parade ground almost two miles long and a mile deep where the colony's furbelowed gentry, jodhpured regulars from the cantonment, and even the scantily-drawered Phowdar, the roy royan and Nawab of Bengal themselves, descended by carriage and palanquin for the nightly ritual known as 'the airings'." Tell me, where were the mass airings in London's parks and squares, when the vapours rising from an unbathed chimneysweep's woolens in Cheapside could could be smelt as far as Grosvenor Square? Why weren't they mandatory?
Re: a comment on Racism by Dovina	zodiac 217.144.7.195	1-Nov-05/3:22 AM
Silly, silly. The point is there's no such real thing as race; the only qualification for being one is that racist people identify you as one (by any set of characteristics: color, creed, or piano-playing included) in order to persecute you. Other than that, by any meatheaded standard typically used to identify race (ie, skin color, phrenology, origin, language, creed, customs, geographical concentration, and genetic traits,) both Jews and Muslims are distinct races - even distinct from each other. To not think so is, in fact, racist against Negroes.
Re: a comment on Incommunicado blues (fixed, except for Dovina) by zodiac	zodiac 217.144.7.195	1-Nov-05/3:15 AM
Unfortunately, I live in the Middle East. Even if there were girls in short plaid skirts and Hello! Kitty umbrellas here, I'd get my hands cut off for looking at them
Re: a comment on island nation by skaskowski	zodiac 217.144.7.195	1-Nov-05/3:12 AM
I'm cancer. The best part is "should it is wes Anderson it is."
Re: a comment on The Gospel According to Zodiac by Dovina	zodiac 217.144.7.195	1-Nov-05/3:11 AM
PS-I don't imagine a heaven where my "problems with identity go away". I love my identity. I don't believe it has problems. Only fat people wish to not be themselves in heaven.
Re: a comment on The Gospel According to Zodiac by Dovina	zodiac 217.144.7.195	1-Nov-05/3:10 AM
You can somehow force yourself to not wonder what happens if your identity is annihilated, so you can bother. I imagine it takes something like forcing your entire brain through a drinking straw.
Re: The Gospel According to Zodiac by Dovina	zodiac 217.144.7.195	1-Nov-05/3:09 AM
I live +7 hours from Eastern Time, +2 from Greenwich, which is the time on the comment-clock. I can honestly say I've never seen an episode of Spongebob in my life, so I'm rubber you're glue. I'm not even curious to hear how you figure this is relevant. -10-
Re: a comment on The Gospel According to Zodiac by Dovina	ALChemy 24.74.101.159	31-Oct-05/9:32 PM
Now we must wait patiently for Zod's reply.
Re: a comment on The Gospel According to Zodiac by Dovina	ALChemy 24.74.101.159	31-Oct-05/9:22 PM
Oh you're saying Squidward is Zodiaclike or visa-versa. Hmmm, nope that never dawned on me.