Ray Davies

Ray Davies, formerly of the Kinks, is on tour in the U.S. promoting his latest solo album. Reading an article about him in a local newspaper, I found this interesting tidbit:

Davies often strolls through his London neighborhood undetected, notebook in hand. “The only formal training I’ve really had is as a painter, and in trying to pick up emotions within pictures,” he explains. “And I guess I’ve learned to do that. … I can look at people, and they say something, then everything goes into slow motion and it registers inside me. I can pick up on that vital element, that significant visual, and paraphrase it. So I’m still in awe of great art, because something inside me still wants to be a painter,” he says. Like his songs, “There’s something about great art, where that moment can only exist as one thing. You can do reproductions, but there is only one original.”

19th century on the ropes

Hollywood actor and writer Ben Stein, perhaps the lone conservative there, takes on Darwinism. This is going to be fun to watch. Read about it here.

The properties of words

Have you ever seen an animal shrug, asks Tom Wolfe in this fascinating interview published in this morning's newspaper.

GFE

I had to look it up. Euphemisms and acronyms, in which the American culture revels so much, have a way to invading one's mind that after a while, seeing one over and over, you start thinking that you are the last person on the continent who doesn't know its meaning. And so you look it up. It's a relatively easy task these days, what with the Internet, the search engines, discussion forums where you can ask, etc.

I figured out myself what 'TS' meant. Trans-sexual, or tranny, or in earlier times hermaphrodite, except that 'hermaphrodite' refers to the time before surgeries made it possible to become a tranny. The acronyms were all in the ads. Two inch by one inch advertisements in the backs of weekly "alternative" tabloids, three such newspapers in this area. The ads support these, often radically left wing rags, that I (and everyone I know) pick up free to read restaurant, film and record reviews, that often are quite good, and not the feverish and loony political rants and crusades. Sitting at a bar and scanning through the pages I cannot avoid seeing the three or four pages of ads for prostitutes and massage parlors, with their fuzzy photos, telephone numbers, business hours (24x7 often enough!), and keywords such as "Incall", "Outcall", "TS" and of course, "GFE", or "NO GFE". What? Hold on a minute.

As I learned this past week, the ads may be entrapments set up by the police who don't have enough to do chasing the rare street crimes, so they ensnare men to solicit prostitution, which is a crime everywhere in this country except in some Nevada counties. Whenever the cops shut down a prostitution ring in the area, one often managed by East Asian immigrants, they keep running the ring's ads in the weekly rags for a spell, for the purpose of entrapping potential customers and making the world a safer place for the rest of us.

Back to GFE. Thinking that I was the last person in the 49 continental states who didn't know what it meant, I researched and found out. Still thinking that everyone knew, following the recent news of the Governor of the State of New York being caught in a prostitution related scandal, I asked around if the $4100 per hour fee he was paying included the GFE. No one I asked knew what I meant.

It's time to explain. 'GFE' stands for 'Girl Friend Experience'. The prostitute will (or will not) provide it. Or she'll provide it for an additional fee. If she provides it, she'll act during the encounter like the client's girlfriend instead of like a cold, contemptuous clerk at the government tax office. Who wouldn't want it?! Everything is for sale, even the GFE!

Vaclav Klaus

"It is not about climatology. It is about freedom," says Vaclav Klaus in an interview published this morning by the Wall Street Journal. Choice quotes:

The world, he argues, is full of risks, and the risk of catastrophic climate change is just one of them.

"if you are afraid that there are risks to something, you may prohibit everything."