TIL: Today I Learned

[Hrothbern]

Meh. My gf calls me dad more often than she uses my name because she speaks for our dogs. "C'mon dad, give them some snacks" is probably the most commonly spoken line of dialog in the comedy that is our daily lives.

But you can break out any time you want.... correct ?

 

[Farm Boy]

From being Dad?

 

[Hrothbern]

Well, at least this time we have something clean to disagree about.

I don't agree with this as a consequence of my title at all. I am Dad. Dad has a name, was a boy, is a man, and more. Mom has a name, was a girl, is a woman, and more. These are not diminishing or limiting terms. Thinking of them such is disturbingly, I dunno. I'm looking for something non-offensive. But it seems self-centered and small when interpreted otherwise, I guess?

My parents would have said the same as you say
Getting positions and arguments clean, and everybody free and entitled to weight the importances and relevances, what more can we aim for in a discussion ?

 

[Farm Boy]

Well, why on earth would they be limiting terms? I don't get it. Change for change sake? People aren't so small. I guess they can choose to be. But why would that be an empowering choice? Why would that be goodness? Seems like that's putting the premium back on "unattached virginhood" or whatever it's dressing up as. It's a step back? Mom is always mom. Mom is also other things, including competent, professional, and shmexy. I mean, that's sort of tied in with the whole concept of mom. Somebody can be shmexy and you can still not want to pork them, you know, like the mom that one was begat by.

 

[Hrothbern]

Well, why on earth would they be limiting terms? I don't get it. Change for change sake? People aren't so small. I guess they can choose to be. But why would that be an empowering choice? Why would that be goodness? Seems like that's putting the premium back on "unattached virginhood" or whatever it's dressing up as. It's a step back? Mom is always mom. Mom is also other things, including competent, professional, and shmexy. I mean, that's sort of tied in with the whole concept of mom. Somebody can be shmexy and you can still not want to pork them, you know, like the mom that one was begat by.

My mom was mostly my mom for me. And then my father died at 83 when she was 75. She is now 93 with light dementia and since a year living in a centre with other older people.
When my father died she wanted to go back to her birth town (200,000 inhabitants) in a rural northern part of the Netherlands. So we moved her.
What happened with her, was that she became much more the girl, the teenager she was long time ago. She started to make drawings again, a lot of correspondence with old girlfriends again, her character changed from someone always caring for others to much more herself. Which she never really had in her youth.
When her mother got a stroke when she was 16, in 1941, half-sided lamed in bed for many years, my grandfather took it for granted that she would take over the role as wife regarding the household, and my grandfather, primary school teacher, had many social contacts and visitors. A sister of 8. The occupation by Germany in WW2. Hardly time for a social life for her own sake. She still managed to get her grammar school done, get her law degree with some delays, but when applying for a vacancy at that level was denied because of wearing her engagement ring.
And "after all" women will get pregnant in their role as mother. Junk jobs ok but not at the Children Police department for a serious job.
It was a combination of casual societal limiting and self-limiting.
And yes, when you are inside that tredmill, why not make the best out of it. She was never unhappy about it.
But how she flourished in those 15 years after my father died.

 

[Farm Boy]

So you would surmise that my wife and I, we're less while we're rearing and partnered, because we aren't free? I'm glad your mom is/has/was doing great man, that's a goodness. But the mom in my household wields immense power. She's not trapped, she's in charge. The dad isn't shackled and limited, he roars with pride. She's not less, she's more. I'm not less, I'm more. Times are different and we've made a lot of good changes in how we treat people. I'm not arguing against those, but I would argue against the smallness of language. I don't think it's that smallness that made the goodnesses in how we treat professonal women(as an example) happen. I think it was largenesses elsewhere.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Come to think of it, my gf and I seldom if ever use each other's names. It's not like we need to identify who we are talking to. When she says "Get off that couch! What the heck are you thinking?" I know she isn't talking to me. When she says "What's for dinner?" I know that she is talking to me, because the dogs always have kibbles so there's no point asking them.

 

[HoloDoc]

Come to think of it, my gf and I seldom if ever use each other's names. It's not like we need to identify who we are talking to. When she says "Get off that couch! What the heck are you thinking?" I know she isn't talking to me. When she says "What's for dinner?" I know that she is talking to me, because the dogs always have kibbles so there's no point asking them.

My ex and my mother had the same name. I also have the same name as my cousin's boyfriend. This has created some awkward conversational moments in the past.

 

[Takhisis]

Farm Boy, without trying to derail the conversation,I have to point out that women remain ‘girls’ until, at the very least, the age of 80.

 

[brennan]

The missus and I became 'mummy' and 'daddy' and we're very pleased about it. People who find such words threatening are too, too fragile.

 

[Synobun]

Y'all are missing the forest for the trees. Christ. It's not about your kid calling you daddy or mommy. It's about having your value as an individual assigned to a cycle. Women were largely expected to be stages of this cycle instead of just that, women.

 

[brennan]

I wasn't talking about what our little one says. We refer to ourselves like that now, it became a new identity overnight. And it doesn't trouble us at all.

 

[Farm Boy]

Farm Boy, without trying to derail the conversation,I have to point out that women remain ‘girls’ until, at the very least, the age of 80.

I'd remove the "until," it might take an artist, but it's there!

Y'all are missing the forest for the trees. Christ. It's not about your kid calling you daddy or mommy. It's about having your value as an individual assigned to a cycle. Women were largely expected to be stages of this cycle instead of just that, women.

No. We're very much talking about referring to each other, alone and in front of people other than our children, in those terms, without being demeaned or belittled. I think we're hitting this right on the head of the language issue. It's the smallness of the concept being rejected. I'm not buying how the term is being sold here, it doesn't seem like progress. A virgin's value is/was in availability, in not being tied down by obligation and weighed by experience. We may have obligation, but we aren't tied to the limitations of the past in the same way. The world has progressed and we've not missed it. My wife is no less competent, no less a woman, no less herself for being Mom. She's terrific in all the ways she was terrific before and she grows every day. In my better moments, I just may too.

 

[Synobun]

Nah. Y'all are missing it.

 

[Farm Boy]

No, I'm not missing the judgement of others. I salute it proudly, with one finger held high(my wife has more class). If I am not belittled or demeaned or lessened by what I have chosen to do, nor is she, yet others find it to be belittling or demeaning to us, then I daresay it is not our judgement that is regressive and a problem.

 

[brennan]

In my experience the judgement of others is quite positive on the subject.

 

[Farm Boy]

Yeah, mine too. It's mostly a friendly sort of exasperated salute up there. I mean seriously. Don't walk up to me, fart, then comment about how I eat too many beans.

 

[Kaitzilla]

TIL Disco was a hoax.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/why_was_disco_ever_popular_blame_fake_news.html

It was never popular, it had 1 movie made about it, and a few bands made the mildly popular songs that defined it in the late 1970s.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2...co-nik-cohn-tribal-rites-saturday-night-fever

The rest is cinema history: film rights were sold to producer Robert Stigwood, who had just signed a three-picture deal with a young TV actor called John Travolta. Screenwriter Norman Wexler transformed Vincent into Tony Manero. So unprecedented was the fanfare that when Stigwood’s 23-year-old assistant Kevin McCormick traipsed through Los Angeles looking for a director, one agent, according to Vanity Fair, told him, “Kid, my directors do movies. They don’t do magazine articles.” Director John Badham had no such qualms, and in December 1977 his movie took $11m in its first 11 days and Travolta became an overnight sensation.

Twenty years later came a bombshell. In December 1997 New York magazine published an article in which Cohn confessed that there never was a Vincent. There was no “Lisa”, “Billy”, “John James”, “Lorraine” or “Donna” either. While 2001 Odyssey existed, it wasn’t the way the writer described it in 1976. The whole scene of disco-loving Italians, as mythologised in Saturday Night Fever, was exaggerated. The most bizarre detail was that his disco protagonists were in fact based on mods Cohn had known in London. The writer was “painfully aware” that everything Fever had brought him – the fame, the fortune – was the result of a lie.

The real story went like this: in 1976 Cohn met a disco dancer named Tu Sweet, who introduced him to the clubs of New York, including one in Bay Ridge called 2001 Odyssey. One night the two trawled through the underbelly of New York – a land of auto shops, transmission specialists and alignment centres – to find the place. A drunken brawl was in progress and as Cohn opened the cab door one of the guys reeled over the gutter and threw up over his trouser leg. So he just upped and returned to the safe comforts of Manhattan.

One image stayed with the writer, though, that of a figure in flared crimson pants and a black body shirt standing in the doorway of the club and calmly watching the action. There was a style about him, Cohn said, a sense of his own specialness that reminded the writer of a teen gang in his hometown of Derry and a mod named Chris he’d met in London in 1965.

When Cohn went back to Odyssey he didn’t see the young man in the doorway again. “Plus, I made a lousy interviewer,” he wrote. “I knew nothing about this world, and it showed. Quite literally, I didn’t speak the language. So I faked it. I conjured up the story of the figure in the doorway, and named him Vincent. Taking all I knew about the snake-charmer in Derry and, more especially, about Chris the mod in London, I translated them as best I could to Brooklyn. Then I went back to Bay Ridge in daylight and noted the major landmarks. I walked some streets, went into a couple of stores. Studied the clothes, the gestures, the walks. Imagined how it would feel to burn up, all caged energies, with no outlet but the dancefloor and the rituals of Saturday night. Finally, I wrote it all up. And presented it as fact.”

The backlash quickly became apparent in 1979 and the whole thing was done by the time the 80s started.
@4:05 for the money shot.
It got so nuts that Harry Caray at 6:28 was begging people to go back to their seats.

 

[Takhisis]

mildly popular songs

Tell that to Gene ‘humble’ Simmons.

 

[HoloDoc]

We all know that Roger from American Dad invented Disco.