Personal Daily Horoscope of Sunday, 1 March 2009
Intellectual withdrawal
Valid during several weeks: This is a time of intellectual withdrawal, but not in a negative way. You aren’t withdrawing to avoid a confrontation with reality but to reflect and think about all the ideas you have encountered recently. It is a good time to examine your personal and domestic life and to make plans or evaluate whether it is meeting your needs. This is an excellent time for discussions with your immediate family about matters that are important to all of you. Your thoughts may drift continually back to events that occurred in the past, and you may wonder why you cannot focus on the concerns of the present. You are able to voice your innermost thoughts at this time, and you should if you feel that something must be said. Do not allow pressures to build up within you that you do not express toward the people around you.
I was told something really stunning yesterday.
There is a medical clinic in Dublin city center who think that the Cervical Cancer Vaccine is so important that every woman should have it that they are
offering the course of the 3 injection at cost.
Meaning they are refusing to make any profit on it and are not adding stipulations about a woman having to be a virgin to receive it.
So the vaccine will then cost 300 euros rather then the 600 which is being charged by other providers.
http://www.chartermedical.ie/cervical-cancer-vaccinations
Cervical Cancer Vaccinations
Charter Medical Group
is an approved
Cervical Cancer Vaccination Centre.
Phone (01) 6579000 to arrange your appointment.
Charter Medical Group Health & Wellness Department is now offering Cervical Cancer Vaccination on a not for profit basis.
Charter considers this vaccine to be one of the most important vaccines developed recently and we believe it should be available to the widest population of young women. With this in mind Charter Medical Group will be providing this critical vaccine on a “not for profit” basis with a full course of Cervarix®, consisting of three injections administered for €300.
Charter’s offer is available to girls over ten years of age. Our Clinical staff will happily answer any queries when booking your appointment. Cervarix® vaccination requires three consecutive injections over a six month period.
Finally people who know how important this is stepping forward.
A vaccine against cancer which saves lives should be put in the reach
as much as possible for every woman.
Please pass this info on to every woman you know.
Porn, porn, porn.
Porn used to be so hard to come by in this country.
Pre internet films, books and magazines were often smuggled into the country and some were legally sold in special interest clubs and stores. This is still the case when it come to what is called hard core porn. Which basically boils down to if there is a female genital image
or an image of an erect penis.
It’s funny that the powers that be will say oh we aren’t banning a film it’s just not certified for sale as it hasn’t been classified. Playboy was banned here for 35 years and only went back on sale in 15 Dec 1995 and that was the start of more ‘adult’ publications. A lot of the censorship is the soft kind were things just are not available, that they were not brought into the country as there didn’t seem to be a market for it.
There were always dodgy ads in the back of some of the ‘adult’ publications but you never really knew what you were buying or who from, or else it was a trip to one of those tiny, ill lit, seedy shops which had heavy curtains and you needed to ring the door bell to be let in and try and browse what limited goods they had, all the while you were scrutinised by some guy who was either looking at you or flicking through a magazine at the till.
Hardly a comfortable way to to shopping for ‘personal’ items or those which reflects your personal tastes or interests.
The internet changed that dramatically.
It started when images could be easily uploaded and embedded.
You no longer needed to buy a magazine and then video, both pay sites and free ones with amateurs with now porntube and redtube patterning themsevles after youtube. Shopping became so much easier as well, with online shopping offering discretion and guarantees.
I would say that many of the leaps forward in regards to sex and sexuality in this country have been due to the access which the internet offers us.
And at the moment that is under attack due to the pressure being put on Irish I.S.P. by the music industry lobbyists to suspend service to any one accused of downloading music torrents.
Well I hope for this to be an informative, fun, diverse, sex positive blog.
Sex has always interested me from a very young age, having been precocious and nosy when matters relating to sex would come up in adult conversations and I was told to leave the room or conversations stopped it only made me more curious.
I found that once I started reading and researching the more there was to sex and sexuality.
A lot like how when you start to learn about the clitoris and you find how much more is lurking below the surface.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWRO0IIN_QE
Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star ‘*’ those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
5) Tag your bookish friends including the person whose list you saw!
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen x +
2 The Lord of the Rings x +
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling x+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee x+
6 The Bible x
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman x+
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens x
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott x+ ( wanted to grow up to be Jo March )
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare x+
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien x+
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger x+
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot x
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell x
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald x+
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens x
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy x
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams x+
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll x+
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis x+
34 Emma – Jane Austen x+
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis x+
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres x
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne x+
41 Animal Farm – George Orwel x
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery x+
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy x
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood x+
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding x
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert x+
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons x + ( there always be starkadders at cold comfort farm. )
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens x
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov x+
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas x
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac x
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding x
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville x
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker x+
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett x+
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce x
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath x
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome x+ (Duffer don’t drown )
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray x+
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker x+
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert *
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White x+
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton x
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery x+
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks x+
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute *
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas x+
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare x+
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl x+
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo x
I’ve read 69 of them ( stop sniggering, honest I have )
Loved 30 of them and there are 3 I want to read, if any you really recommended I have not
expressed an interest in reading then then tell me why I should read it.
A dead woman’s books sit on my desk, the smell of her now emptied home, clinging to the pages.
Her second best white china tea set sits on on counter top, waiting for a home in my kitchen.
Her little elegant round dinning table and matching chairs nestle in the far corner of the room,
enticing those who look at it’s curves to come sit at it.
Her name was Catherine but as it was the name of her Grandmother, her father always called
her Josie, which was taken from her second name and that it was that name that all knew her by.
Except the nurses when her husband lay dying of a heart attack calling for her and they were
afraid it was the name of his mistress and never called her into the room to be there in his last moments.
He died leaving her a widow with five children, the youngest being but a babe in arms.
She had a hard time of it then, with Ireland being how it was in the early 60s, but she
never stopped being a lady and did her best to pass that on to her children.
First time she visited here, I made a point of having her over to take Tea.
Tea not tea one being a beverage, the other an afternoon filled with the best tea set,
fresh homemade warm scones and conversation which ranged over topics from family
past and present and other topics. It was a delight to listen to her tell tales which either
her own family had grown tired to listening to or were never told due to them being
her flesh and blood, where I was family but adopted by her.
It’s a year from when she passed on and the two years before that were not kind to her.
She lost her dignity and most her memories but I shall be endeavoring to make sure
that my own children do not forget her and will tell those tales of her family which are
their family to them so they pass them to the generations to come and maybe
the little round table and chairs as well.
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Maybe, maybe it’s the clothes we wear,
The tasteless bracelets and the dye in our hair,
Maybe it’s our kookiness,
Or maybe, maybe it’s our nowhere towns,
Our nothing places and our cellophane sounds,
Maybe it’s our looseness,But we’re trash, you and me,
We’re the litter on the breeze,
We’re the lovers on the streets,
Just trash, me and you,
It’s in everything we do,
It’s in everything we do…Maybe, maybe it’s the things we say,
The words we’ve heard and the music we play,
Maybe it’s our cheapness,
Or maybe, maybe it’s the times we’ve had,
The lazy days and the crazes and the fads,
Maybe it’s our sweetness,But we’re trash, you and me,
We’re the litter on the breeze,
We’re the lovers on the street,
Just trash, me and you,
It’s in everything we do,
It’s in everything we do…
Right this second article was referenced in the one which I read about ‘Nice Guys’.
It was bound to have eventually with the rise of nerd/geek/gamer culture with how we can manage to
find each other and interconnect and even *gasp* get together and socialise, that someone
would take the time to see certain patterns and id differnt dysfunctions which are imho
not limited to geek socail dynamics but some are certainly due to the nature of being a geek
esp growing up.
http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
Five Geek Social Fallacies
© 2003 Michael Suileabhain-Wilson. All rights reserved.
Within the constellation of allied hobbies and subcultures collectively known as geekdom, one finds many social groups bent under a crushing burden of dysfunction, social drama, and general interpersonal wack-ness. It is my opinion that many of these never-ending crises are sparked off by an assortment of pernicious social fallacies — ideas about human interaction which spur their holders to do terrible and stupid things to themselves and to each other.
Social fallacies are particularly insidious because they tend to be exaggerated versions of notions that are themselves entirely reasonable and unobjectionable. It’s difficult to debunk the pathological fallacy without seeming to argue against its reasonable form; therefore, once it establishes itself, a social fallacy is extremely difficult to dislodge. It’s my hope that drawing attention to some of them may be a step in the right direction.
I want to note that I’m not trying to say that every geek subscribes to every one of the fallacies I outline here; every individual subscribes to a different set of ideas, and adheres to any given idea with a different amount of zeal.
In any event, here are five geek social fallacies I’ve identified. There are likely more.
Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are Evil
GSF1 is one of the most common fallacies, and one of the most deeply held. Many geeks have had horrible, humiliating, and formative experiences with ostracism, and the notion of being on the other side of the transaction is repugnant to them.
In its non-pathological form, GSF1 is benign, and even commendable: it is long past time we all grew up and stopped with the junior high popularity games. However, in its pathological form, GSF1 prevents its carrier from participating in — or tolerating — the exclusion of anyone from anything, be it a party, a comic book store, or a web forum, and no matter how obnoxious, offensive, or aromatic the prospective excludee may be.
As a result, nearly every geek social group of significant size has at least one member that 80% of the members hate, and the remaining 20% merely tolerate. If GSF1 exists in sufficient concentration — and it usually does — it is impossible to expel a person who actively detracts from every social event. GSF1 protocol permits you not to invite someone you don’t like to a given event, but if someone spills the beans and our hypothetical Cat Piss Man invites himself, there is no recourse. You must put up with him, or you will be an Evil Ostracizer and might as well go out for the football team.
This phenomenon has a number of unpleasant consequences. For one thing, it actively hinders the wider acceptance of geek-related activities: I don’t know that RPGs and comics would be more popular if there were fewer trolls who smell of cheese hassling the new blood, but I’m sure it couldn’t hurt. For another, when nothing smacking of social selectiveness can be discussed in public, people inevitably begin to organize activities in secret. These conspiracies often lead to more problems down the line, and the end result is as juvenile as anything a seventh-grader ever dreamed of.
Geek Social Fallacy #2: Friends Accept Me As I Am
The origins of GSF2 are closely allied to the origins of GSF1. After being victimized by social exclusion, many geeks experience their “tribe” as a non-judgmental haven where they can take refuge from the cruel world outside.
This seems straightforward and reasonable. It’s important for people to have a space where they feel safe and accepted. Ideally, everyone’s social group would be a safe haven. When people who rely too heavily upon that refuge feel insecure in that haven, however, a commendable ideal mutates into its pathological form, GSF2.
Carriers of GSF2 believe that since a friend accepts them as they are, anyone who criticizes them is not their friend. Thus, they can’t take criticism from friends — criticism is experienced as a treacherous betrayal of the friendship, no matter how inappropriate the criticized behavior may be.
Conversely, most carriers will never criticize a friend under any circumstances; the duty to be supportive trumps any impulse to point out unacceptable behavior.
GSF2 has extensive consequences within a group. Its presence in substantial quantity within a social group vastly increases the group’s conflict-averseness. People spend hours debating how to deal with conflicts, because they know (or sometimes merely fear) that the other person involved is a GSF2 carrier, and any attempt to confront them directly will only make things worse. As a result, people let grudges brew much longer than is healthy, and they spend absurd amounts of time deconstructing their interpersonal dramas in search of a back way out of a dilemma.
Ironically, GSF2 carriers often take criticism from coworkers, supervisors, and mentors quite well; those individuals aren’t friends, and aren’t expected to accept the carrier unconditionally.
Geek Social Fallacy #3: Friendship Before All
Valuing friendships is a fine and worthy thing. When taken to an unhealthy extreme, however, GSF3 can manifest itself.
Like GSF2, GSF3 is a “friendship test” fallacy: in this case, the carrier believes that any failure by a friend to put the interests of the friendship above all else means that they aren’t really a friend at all. It should be obvious that there are a million ways that this can be a problem for the carrier’s friends, but the most common one is a situation where friends’ interests conflict — if, for example, one friend asks you to keep a secret from another friend. If both friends are GSF3 carriers, you’re screwed — the first one will feel betrayed if you reveal the secret, and the other will feel betrayed if you don’t. Your only hope is to keep the second friend from finding out, which is difficult if the secret in question was a party that a lot of people went to.
GSF3 can be costly for the carrier as well. They often sacrifice work, family, and romantic obligations at the altar of friendship. In the end, the carrier has a great circle of friends, but not a lot else to show for their life. This is one reason why so many geek circles include people whose sole redeeming quality is loyalty: it’s hard not to honor someone who goes to such lengths to be there for a friend, however destructive they may be in other respects.
Individual carriers sometimes have exceptions to GSF3, which allow friends to place a certain protected class of people or things above friendship in a pinch: “significant others” is a common protected class, as is “work”.
Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship Is Transitive
Every carrier of GSF4 has, at some point, said:
“Wouldn’t it be great to get all my groups of friends into one place for one big happy party?!”
If you groaned at that last paragraph, you may be a recovering GSF4 carrier.GSF4 is the belief that any two of your friends ought to be friends with each other, and if they’re not, something is Very Wrong. The milder form of GSF4 merely prevents the carrier from perceiving evidence to contradict it; a carrier will refuse to comprehend that two of their friends (or two groups of friends) don’t much care for each other, and will continue to try to bring them together at social events. They may even maintain that a full-scale vendetta is just a misunderstanding between friends that could easily be resolved if the principals would just sit down to talk it out.
A more serious form of GSF4 becomes another “friendship test” fallacy: if you have a friend A, and a friend B, but A & B are not friends, then one of them must not really be your friend at all. It is surprisingly common for a carrier, when faced with two friends who don’t get along, to simply drop one of them.
On the other side of the equation, a carrier who doesn’t like a friend of a friend will often get very passive-aggressive and covertly hostile to the friend of a friend, while vigorously maintaining that we’re one big happy family and everyone is friends.
GSF4 can also lead carriers to make inappropriate requests of people they barely know — asking a friend’s roommate’s ex if they can crash on their couch, asking a college acquaintance from eight years ago for a letter of recommendation at their workplace, and so on. If something is appropriate to ask of a friend, it’s appropriate to ask of a friend of a friend.
Arguably, Friendster was designed by a GSF4 carrier.Geek Social Fallacy #5: Friends Do Everything Together
GSF5, put simply, maintains that every friend in a circle should be included in every activity to the full extent possible. This is subtly different from GSF1; GSF1 requires that no one, friend or not, be excluded, while GSF5 requires that every friend be invited. This means that to a GSF5 carrier, not being invited to something is intrinsically a snub, and will be responded to as such.This is perhaps the least destructive of the five, being at worst inconvenient. In a small circle, this is incestuous but basically harmless. In larger groups, it can make certain social events very difficult: parties which are way too large for their spaces and restaurant expeditions that include twenty people and no reservation are far from unusual.
When everyone in a group is a GSF5 carrier, this isn’t really a problem. If, however, there are members who aren’t carriers, they may want occasionally to have smaller outings, and these can be hard to arrange without causing hurt feelings and social drama. It’s hard to explain to a GSF5 carrier that just because you only wanted to have dinner with five other people tonight, it doesn’t mean that your friendship is in terrible danger.
For some reason, many GSF5 carriers are willing to make an exception for gender-segregated events. I don’t know why.
Interactions
Each fallacy has its own set of unfortunate consequences, but frequently they become worse in interaction. GSF4 often develops into its more extreme form when paired with GSF5; if everyone does everything together, it’s much harder to maintain two friends who don’t get along. One will usually fall by the wayside.Similarly, GSF1 and GSF5 can combine regrettably: when a failure to invite someone is equivalent to excluding them, you can’t even get away with not inviting Captain Halitosis along on the road trip. GSF3 can combine disastrously with the other “friendship test” fallacies; carriers may insist that their friends join them in snubbing someone who fails the test, which occasionally leads to a chain reaction which causes the carrier to eventually reject all of their friends. This is not healthy; fortunately, severe versions of GSF3 are rare.
Consequences
Dealing with the effects of social fallacies is an essential part of managing one’s social life among geeks, and this is much easier when one is aware of them and can identify which of your friends carry which fallacies. In the absence of this kind of awareness, three situations tend to arise when people come into contact with fallacies they don’t hold themselves.
Most common is simple conflict and hurt feelings. It’s hard for people to talk through these conflicts because they usually stem from fairly primal value clashes; a GSF3 carrier may not even be able to articulate why it was such a big deal that their non-carrier friend blew off their movie night.
Alternately, people often take on fallacies that are dominant in their social circle. If you join a group of GSF5 carriers, doing everything together is going to become a habit; if you spend enough time around GSF1 carriers, putting up with trolls is going to seem normal.
Less commonly, people form a sort of counter-fallacy which I call “Your Feelings, Your Problem”. YFYP carriers deal with other people’s fallacies by ignoring them entirely, in the process acquiring a reputation for being charmingly tactless. Carriers tend to receive a sort of exemption from the usual standards: “that’s just Dana”, and so on. YFYP has its own problems, but if you would rather be an asshole than angstful, it may be the way to go. It’s also remarkably easy to pull off in a GSF1-rich environment.
What Can I Do?
As I’ve said, I think that the best way to deal with social fallacies is to be aware of them, in yourself and in others. In yourself, you can try to deal with them; in others, understanding their behavior usually makes it less aggravating.
Social fallacies don’t make someone a bad person; on the contrary, they usually spring from the purest motives. But I believe they are worth deconstructing; in the long run, social fallacies cost a lot of stress and drama, to no real benefit. You can be tolerant without being indiscriminate, and you can be loyal to friends without being compulsive about it.
Having all of this put so deftly certainly will make dealing with people hopefully a lot easier over the next year.