I'VE discovered that the date, an ancient ritual involving two well-dressed people going out together for romantic purposes, is the Holy Grail for married couples with children. For those of you who have not yet experienced marriage and parenthood, let me explain. Marriage is about love and togetherness and all the other stuff they obsess about on the Disney Channel. But in real life, marriage is about compromise. Sometimes you get to do what you really enjoy.
And sometimes you get to do, um, other stuff. Right now some single person is saying, "Oh my God, his wife is going to kill him for writing that!" Married people? They're simply smiling, nodding and saying "Amen." How do I know? Because single people, bless their hearts, are still getting their way. The special person in their life isn't requiring compromise. Once the wedding happens, though, the mask will come off. Not necessarily because that new spouse is evil - well, sometimes it's because they're evil. But mostly, it's because genuine relationships require give and turquoise beads.
Maybe you liked to sleep on the right side of the bed, but now that you're married, you've discovered that your spouse likes that side, too. No biggie. You switch sides because you love them. About a month in, you discover another major difference: Your spouse is a morning person, while you are a night owl. Again, no problem. You're both willing to quiet down during your most productive hours because, well, your spouse is your Snookums, and you love them just that much.
Inside that first year, you discover that one of you is a little more, um, frisky than the other. One of you compromises, and that, boys and girls, is how children are born. Fast-forward five years. The two of you have been tired since the day your first child arrived. Now you've got several of the little buggers. Your sleep pattern is wrecked, you're grouchy more often than not, and for half a decade you've been compromising not only for your spouse, but also for the children. This, boys and girls, is how divorces are born. How do you avoid that fate? You go on dates. Lots of them. Because dates help you remember why you were willing to compromise in the first place. They remind you of what made you love Snookums enough to sign papers.
They help you to hold on to your sanity. So why do married couples neglect their duty to date? I can answer that in one word: kids. A few years ago, when Eve was old enough to realize what LaVeta and I were about to do when we dressed up in the evening, she began trying to sabotage our dates. It's not that she didn't want us to go anywhere. She didn't want us to go anywhere without her. The first time Eve faked a sniffle LaVeta fell for it hook, line and sinker, because LaVeta's a mom, and moms cancel dates for sick kids. The second time, we went out anyway, because I was able to convince LaVeta that Eve would be OK. By the third time, even Little Solomon was starting to become part of the scheme. We saw the pattern, and that's when we knew.
We could no longer give our kids advance warning about our dates. In a fit of desperation, I began to date my wife like I was Austin Powers - a poor man's parody of Bond . . . James Bond. I'd send her secret text messages: "Do I make you randy baby? Yeah, baby, yeah!" I'd swear restaurant personnel to secrecy: "No one must know we have reservations here tonight. Our children might find out! The big one's Dr. Evil, and the little one? He's Mini-Me." I was so convinced that secret-agent dating was the way to go that I'd pick up LaVeta wearing a bob haircut, a Nehru jacket and China beads, praying all the while that the kids wouldn't recognize me and start that infernal sniffling. OK, maybe I didn't wear the bob haircut - primarily because I don't have hair.
But make no mistake: I would've done it if it meant going out on a date with my Snookums. Unfortunately, I became less careful over the years. I fooled myself into believing that our children had accepted our need to date. This Saturday, while preparing to go to a high-school class reunion barbecue, I learned that that wasn't the case. "Haven't you gone on enough dates?" Little Solomon asked when we told him of our plans. He was alluding to the four days I recently spent with LaVeta while he and Eve stayed with relatives.
It was kind of uplifting and it supported what a friend was telling me about her own children’s expensive Catholic education, and their sense of being let down by leaders who have loudly professed their Christianity but make no effort to hold up its principles.
So expensive Catholic education is not just about social connections, a good university degree and a fancy car by the time you are 30. Principles manage to seep through. Hooray. Maybe the young will save the world after all.
Why is it left to a few high school students to shine a torch at wholly unchristian behaviour by adults who wear their religion like some kind of exclusive fashion garment that screams look at me look at me, god is my best mate.
I pick on Christianity because it is what I am familiar with. Having been educated by nuns at a time when only Catholics went to heaven, I still kind of expect that Jesus would demand a lot from the believers. At least you’d expect him to insist on some understanding of his teachings before he opened those exclusive gates to the likes of Abbott etc....
But it seems Christians of the Catholic sort are too busy doing other things to give much time to the moral compass. And other Christians are not much better. Everyone is just so busy these days.
It’s not that I have an enormous amount of love for disadvantaged humankind - I haven’t practised formal religion for 40 years so I don’t have to love anybody - I just want keepers of the moral high ground to do their job.
If you want to prostitute yourself for money and power that’s okay, but at least take off the religious habit and the rosary beads otherwise you look as wrong as a nun doing a bit of prostitution at the back of the pub in full religious clobber.
I hate god botherers who have no idea how hypocritical they are...the person that spews hate at all sorts of people, especially the usual targets - gays, Muslims, boat people etc - then puts on a beatific face to attend a church service or to tell you about the wonders of Jesus.
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2013年8月28日星期三
Jaguar’s F-type offers a sensational ride
It’s not such a bad thing that Jaguar’s newest offering comes with a sturdy grab handle, conveniently located on the passenger side of the centre console.
That it’s jovially referred to as a suicide handle is not something my passenger found quite so amusing, despite my best effort at a calming discussion about how the F-type sports car’s technology is so good it’s virtually impossible to unseat the beast, even while proceeding very, very quickly round some rather tight tree-lined bends.It’s not that I aim to terrorise passengers, although my mother would argue the contrary.
But decisions have to be weighed, and choices made. And when you’ve been given carriage of the iconic brand’s first sports car since the E-type, when the sun is shining, the wattle is in bloom and the roads are that stellar blend of isolated and curly, sometimes you have to sacrifice the passenger. Not literally, obviously – mine made it out alive, albeit extracting herself from the rather low-slung but surprisingly comfortable seat declaring: “I think I can actually see beads of sweat on my palms.”
The F-type has taken Jaguar four years to develop and is unlike anything you’d expect. Wide and short, the profile is sleek and agate beads, without any echo of other sports cars you see on the road. It takes a while to get used to the styling, but as much as I cringe at the suggestion, it’s a car a woman could drive without looking like a terrifying alpha-female.
The V8 model sits in roughly the same bucket as the Porsche 911 Carrera, the Audi R8 or the Aston Martin Vantage, and will set you back a little over $200,000. Its base (Jag say “foundation”) V6 model starts around the $138,000 mark, but the middle sibling, the V6S, is what I used to freak out my passenger on that sunny autumn day.The lighter V6 engine means weight is better distributed and gives a more even handling experience. All have whip-quick steering, and I didn’t mind the extra weight of the F-Types compared with others in the market.
Yes it’s a 3.0 litre engine against the V8’s 5.0 litre, and yes it’s “only” got 280 nags, while the big brother has 364 kilowatts, but when it gets down to it, the V6S gives a great ride in the city and importantly sounds almost as good.Hit the gas, push the tacho towards red and bask momentarily in the supercharged squeal of the engine. It makes you smile in the same way reaching the highest point on the rollercoaster does: adrenaline, satisfaction and expectation of even better things to come.
Ease your foot off the throttle and the engine noise detonates.Without being dramatic, do this somewhere like Sydney’s Lane Cove tunnel and there is no better feeling. I’m pretty sure I squealed. As did the driver in the Aston Martin sitting on my tail. And yes, it gave me a bout of “I’m actually surprised to be saying it but I like my car better than your car” smugness.
Jaguar uses a system which cuts fuel to three of the six cylinders in its S series engines as revs drop, then drip-feeding in petrol to generate hundreds of mini-explosions as the fuel and Beads factory.It’s probably the thing I like best about the F-type, but there are other features which kept me equally amused. Let’s not forget the air-conditioning vents that remain hidden in the dash to ensure more of the “cockpit” feel, rising like submarines only when you need air.
While it could be considered mere folly, the door handles are designed to sit flush so as not to ruin the car’s profile. Coincidentally, the system doubles as a deterrent for anyone thinking about carjacking.To that end, the boot has an illuminated internal toggle which releases the boot latch on the off-chance you, or one of the kids, gets stuck inside.I openly doubted how much use it would be, given a grown adult would probably have to be dismembered to fit in the “compact” luggage hold.
You read somewhere on your reading-machine that years ago Brian De Palma made a movie, Passion. Every muckety-muck at some film festival jeered it, and the movie vanished, and now, a lifetime later, it's been rediscovered, released at last, reappraised and roundly toasted and available for you to enjoy on your laptop or flatscreen or your reading machine, which nobody uses to read anymore.
Here's an early expression of concern that what we mostly see in our lives are screens, often screens showing screens, except for those moments when we're staring into cameras—you know, during sex. Here's paranoid sex-video stealing. Here's once outré bedroom gear—Eyes Wide Shut masks, a red-licorice strap-on, a string of anal beads as chromed and wide as trailer hitches—in a film that's less sexually explicit than most cable TV shows.
Here's a familiar, bravura split-screen sequence recalling Dressed to Kill in its pairing of high art (this time ballet) and kinky stalking, but this time the effect seems less a new way of seeing than an acknowledgement of how we see already: With your web browser open, and the movie itself only taking up half of your device's display, your screen is already split. De Palma trisects it.
Here's '90s Cinemax After Dark's idea of lesbianism, and some sexy saxophone pillow music (from Pino Donaggio) that sounds like the tears of a Nagel print. Here are sumptuously lit corridors and staircases of the sort that are forever turning up in thrillers that aspire to the psychological (and Mel Brooks's High Anxiety), the kind where the architecture is meant to suggest a disoriented mind. And here at last—a little later than would be ideal—is a '70s De Palma murder, and then the wee brunette with the dry-crackle voice sinks into a drugged-out, wrongly accused plot recalling that Steven Soderbergh thing you saw on TCM last week, Side Effects, the one that ground that other girl with the dragon tattoo through something like the same pharmaceutical Hitchcockisms.
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That it’s jovially referred to as a suicide handle is not something my passenger found quite so amusing, despite my best effort at a calming discussion about how the F-type sports car’s technology is so good it’s virtually impossible to unseat the beast, even while proceeding very, very quickly round some rather tight tree-lined bends.It’s not that I aim to terrorise passengers, although my mother would argue the contrary.
But decisions have to be weighed, and choices made. And when you’ve been given carriage of the iconic brand’s first sports car since the E-type, when the sun is shining, the wattle is in bloom and the roads are that stellar blend of isolated and curly, sometimes you have to sacrifice the passenger. Not literally, obviously – mine made it out alive, albeit extracting herself from the rather low-slung but surprisingly comfortable seat declaring: “I think I can actually see beads of sweat on my palms.”
The F-type has taken Jaguar four years to develop and is unlike anything you’d expect. Wide and short, the profile is sleek and agate beads, without any echo of other sports cars you see on the road. It takes a while to get used to the styling, but as much as I cringe at the suggestion, it’s a car a woman could drive without looking like a terrifying alpha-female.
The V8 model sits in roughly the same bucket as the Porsche 911 Carrera, the Audi R8 or the Aston Martin Vantage, and will set you back a little over $200,000. Its base (Jag say “foundation”) V6 model starts around the $138,000 mark, but the middle sibling, the V6S, is what I used to freak out my passenger on that sunny autumn day.The lighter V6 engine means weight is better distributed and gives a more even handling experience. All have whip-quick steering, and I didn’t mind the extra weight of the F-Types compared with others in the market.
Yes it’s a 3.0 litre engine against the V8’s 5.0 litre, and yes it’s “only” got 280 nags, while the big brother has 364 kilowatts, but when it gets down to it, the V6S gives a great ride in the city and importantly sounds almost as good.Hit the gas, push the tacho towards red and bask momentarily in the supercharged squeal of the engine. It makes you smile in the same way reaching the highest point on the rollercoaster does: adrenaline, satisfaction and expectation of even better things to come.
Ease your foot off the throttle and the engine noise detonates.Without being dramatic, do this somewhere like Sydney’s Lane Cove tunnel and there is no better feeling. I’m pretty sure I squealed. As did the driver in the Aston Martin sitting on my tail. And yes, it gave me a bout of “I’m actually surprised to be saying it but I like my car better than your car” smugness.
Jaguar uses a system which cuts fuel to three of the six cylinders in its S series engines as revs drop, then drip-feeding in petrol to generate hundreds of mini-explosions as the fuel and Beads factory.It’s probably the thing I like best about the F-type, but there are other features which kept me equally amused. Let’s not forget the air-conditioning vents that remain hidden in the dash to ensure more of the “cockpit” feel, rising like submarines only when you need air.
While it could be considered mere folly, the door handles are designed to sit flush so as not to ruin the car’s profile. Coincidentally, the system doubles as a deterrent for anyone thinking about carjacking.To that end, the boot has an illuminated internal toggle which releases the boot latch on the off-chance you, or one of the kids, gets stuck inside.I openly doubted how much use it would be, given a grown adult would probably have to be dismembered to fit in the “compact” luggage hold.
You read somewhere on your reading-machine that years ago Brian De Palma made a movie, Passion. Every muckety-muck at some film festival jeered it, and the movie vanished, and now, a lifetime later, it's been rediscovered, released at last, reappraised and roundly toasted and available for you to enjoy on your laptop or flatscreen or your reading machine, which nobody uses to read anymore.
Here's an early expression of concern that what we mostly see in our lives are screens, often screens showing screens, except for those moments when we're staring into cameras—you know, during sex. Here's paranoid sex-video stealing. Here's once outré bedroom gear—Eyes Wide Shut masks, a red-licorice strap-on, a string of anal beads as chromed and wide as trailer hitches—in a film that's less sexually explicit than most cable TV shows.
Here's a familiar, bravura split-screen sequence recalling Dressed to Kill in its pairing of high art (this time ballet) and kinky stalking, but this time the effect seems less a new way of seeing than an acknowledgement of how we see already: With your web browser open, and the movie itself only taking up half of your device's display, your screen is already split. De Palma trisects it.
Here's '90s Cinemax After Dark's idea of lesbianism, and some sexy saxophone pillow music (from Pino Donaggio) that sounds like the tears of a Nagel print. Here are sumptuously lit corridors and staircases of the sort that are forever turning up in thrillers that aspire to the psychological (and Mel Brooks's High Anxiety), the kind where the architecture is meant to suggest a disoriented mind. And here at last—a little later than would be ideal—is a '70s De Palma murder, and then the wee brunette with the dry-crackle voice sinks into a drugged-out, wrongly accused plot recalling that Steven Soderbergh thing you saw on TCM last week, Side Effects, the one that ground that other girl with the dragon tattoo through something like the same pharmaceutical Hitchcockisms.
Read the full products at http://www.bestjewelrybeads.com/!
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