The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day. In the midst of the electronic age of software, of instant information movement, we still believe we're living in the mechanical age of hardware. At the height of the mechanical age, man turned back to earlier centuries in search of "pastoral" values. The Renaissance and the Middle Ages were completely oriented toward Rome; Rome was oriented toward Greece, and the Greeks were oriented toward the pre-Homeric primitives. We reverse the old educational dictum of learning by proceeding from the familiar to the unfamiliar by going from the unfamiliar to the familiar, which is nothing more or less than the numbing mechanism that takes place whenever new media drastically extend our senses.

Because I thought it was my fault. I thought it was because I couldn?t be honest with you, because I couldn?t share my feelings. I felt that I drove you to it.

"'Gillian?' Sabrina said as if amazed that I would ask. 'Gillian had the best of everything. I enrolled her in a fancy Swiss school from day one.'

'You sent your daughter to the first grade in Switzerland?' I exclaimed.

'What's wrong with that? Little Swiss children go to the first grade in Switzerland.'

'They live there, Ms. Wright.'

'My daughter lived there, Mr McNally. You don't think she got on a little yellow jet every morning toting a lunch pail.'

The woman was insufferable, but I have to add, infectious."

"In the morning the grasses were frosted over, glittering in the sun, and we could see the snow-covered ridge of the Tetons in the southern distance. A bull moose was trotting alongside of the meadow, near a fringe of trees. Moving out ahead, a female was running rapidly away and not about to just give it up at all. The male animal was making a series of revolting sounds: it started with a kind of eh-eh-eh, followed by a tormented swallowing, and then a noise like someone seriously vomiting ('Mate with me! Oh God I'm sick. Mate with me!')."

"By the time lunch was over, I had heartburn and finger-shaped bruises on my thigh. Between the soup and the salad, he grabbed me and squeezed hard. I pried his fingers off my thigh, then reached between his legs and squeezed equally hard. Steve's face drained white with shock. Maybe where he comes from, nice girls don't give what they get, but I've always believed that no expression of affection should go unreturned. As everyone at the table stared at him he slithered sideways off his chair and fell to the floor curled up like a ball."

1. Word noodles galore

an expression of ultimate approval. evolved from: cool beans-cool noodles-word up-word noodles-word noodles galore.

my weekend was fun. word noodles galore.

El Chupacabra, "The Goat Sucker" in Spanish, received its name because it reportedly sucked all of the blood out of some goats in Puerto Rico in the mid-90s. Even those who haven't heard of El Chupacabra have heard of instances where animals, often cattle, are mysteriously drained of all their blood.

In most parts of the U.S., gray aliens get the credit for sucking these beasts dry but in certains places where Hispanics are the majority, El Chupacabra is known to be the blood letter of cattle.

The monster's appearance is the bizarre combination of "gray" aliens, monkeys, and lizards. The combination adds up to large black although sometimes red) eyes, huge fangs, spikes of some sort running the length of its back, sharp claws, and often (but not always) short, chimp-like hair over most of its body.

Aside from a few blood lettings of cattle in Texas during the 70s, the first verifiable sightings of "Chupa" took place in Puerto Rico during 1994 and 1995. The first account describes "little grays" being found under a bed and then chased out of the house with a broom. By the following year though, Chupa had developed a taste for blood and seemed to get mighty thirsty.

My favorite theory stems from the interesting possibility that aliens might have such things for pets or perhaps created them for experimental purposes. Or, equally intriguing, Chupa might have escaped from an alien lab (the product of gene-manipulation?) and quickly adapted to our world in the only way it knew how: sucking blood from earthly beasts of burden.

Its Western name is taken from a Himalayan language, possibly Nepalese, but its meaning is uncertain. One theory is that "panda" is an anglicization of "poonya", which means "eater of bamboo". Its Chinese name means "little panda," named after the Giant Panda. It is also commonly known as the Firefox and, because of its distinctive cry, the Wah.

"I want to first stress that her show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is complete and utter girlie crap. I've tried, several times, to watch this without having to change the channel in utter disgust - but instead, I would hit the mute button and watch her hop around in her tight little outfits (boobs bouncing about, etc) and play with all the wood. But I do want to stress that this show is intended for all the girls that really think that stupid UNREALISTIC romance crap really does happen in reality.

Which of course, it doesn't, and then they put this 'hey, maybe I can get this guy to be like Angel from the WB Network and treat me like an Goddess' crap into their minds. The end result? Hatred of men, and forced lesbianism. Which creates the great lesbian sex scenes found on naughty websites around the internet. Carry on, WB, carry on."

"See, it's just as arousing as normal porn, but you don't have to put up with some guy in the shots, or worry that you enjoy looking at the naked guy TOO much. Instead, there's a whole extra girl for you to look at! It's, like, two for one!"

I found this on a thing on some anime site somewhere (written by people a long long way away, in a far distant galaxy a hundred years ago). The amazing thing is, I was talking sometime, and some friend was trying to explain to me his (and just about every other guy's) fascination with lesbian porn. And he came up with something almost exactly the same, word for word, only longer and more confused. But you get the point they're trying to make. I just thought he was being stupid at the time, but look! Proof!

I have therefore come to the conclusion that no matter how stupid it looks, chances are that it really is the way All Guys Everywhere think.

feral_pixie(11/9/04 5:50 PM NST): Or, maybe it's just some mass pop-culture pressure to prove their manliness. Whatever.