I'd hate to be so big that I couldn't go in all the way. In porn, the guys with the biggest dicks rarely go more than halfway in, even though the women they are with are presumably well-experienced and well-stretched-out.

For me and most men, it's a fantasy to be hugely hung, but just that. Fun to think about though.

1. The "militia clause" is now meaningless. Under the new ruling, the Second Amendment means exactly the same as it would if the clause were snipped out.

2. For all the talk about protecting the home, it remains a fact that people in high-crime areas are overwhelmingly in FAVOR of gun control.

You go, girl!

. . . you have no right to complain.

And unless you vote for Obama, you have no right to complain about President McCain.

Pretty amusing idea for a book. He's talking about left-leaning white people who grew up "comfortable". Basically a gentle soul and not deserving of hate.

Two things:

The bit about law school rings true. When I got out into the work force as a lawyer I wondered why there was so much mediocrity. A friend pointed it out to me: if you're from a cushy background, law school is where you go if you have no talent and no ambition. It's the path of least resistance.

David Sedaris: The only thing I've read by him was a short piece in the New Yorker last year, about his refusing to change seats on a plane so that a wife could sit next to her husband, and his observations as to their subsequent behavior as they went back and forth on the plane to talk to each other. Totally missing was any acknowledgement or awareness that by refusing to change his seat, Sedaris was being a creep.

I don't know if you read these comments,GK, but this was a great essay on old, old age. I want to get to 96, like you do, and I wouldn't mind at all being like the Wonder.

This does not describe the viewpoint of many people who call themselves "feminists". It's not as bad as it was in the 1980s and 1990s, when "difference feminism" was in vogue, but it's still noticeable.

In 1987, a housemate of mine, a 22-year-old female living in a progressive town, said, "I'm not a feminist. I'm an 'equalist'."

You're Jewish.

You and your Jewish friends are laughing at an over-the-top caricature of a hook-nosed, money-grubbing Shylock in a prayer shawl, stained with the blood of Christian babies. It's so ridiculous it's funny.

But now you're in a room full of non-Jews, many of whom you know are anti-Semitic.

They're laughing.

Are YOu still laughing, Gary?

I realize Gary's from the other side of the tracks, and I shouldn't be provincial, but we've never been able to afford overseas travel, and reading the giddy musings of his SEVENTH visit to Italy is not what I want to hear in this gloomy summer of no money and stay-at-home vacations.

Full-screen mode is an option in most word processing programs. It certainly helps.

But for me the greatest distraction is the internet and all the other apps on the computer. So I stick with my 1989-era Poqet. It runs DOS 3.3 and has a card for WordPerfect 5.1 (the best word processor ever made). I type and save on a PC series I card (holding 512K) which I then pop into my laptop PC slot to print or transmit. The Poqet runs on two AA batteries that last for weeks. It also has no boot-up time: press the "on" button and you are exactly where you were.

Of course, the Poqet was discontinued soon after it was introduced. Fujitsu bought it and then killed it. It was too good!

. . . or a conference of blogs specifically, by design, representing only part of the population (women) *should* get less coverage than an inclusive conference like Netroots. Because at an inclusive conference no one would think about identity -- they'd focus on what blogs *do*.

Would a conference of only male bloggers -- *specifically* designated as such -- also be marginalized and taken less seriously, as BlogHer was? It might surprise you but I think the answer would be *yes*.

Good for you, Tracy.

Sounds like you got out there and learned a lot. Similar, in some ways, to my own experiences your age (in the 1970's). Women do have it better, even now, because:

1) the slut/stud dichtomoy is a false one (very few grown-up men criticize women as "sluts"; it's someone women say about each other)

2) it's still a buyer's market for women; women get to pick the men, and the men have to impress them (one can see this from Tracy's vignettes of her encounters)

But my respect for Tracy, always considerable, increased a great deal after reading this self-disclosure.

1977: in her dorm room, trying not to look at her breasts which were almost falling out of her partly unbuttoned blouse, very nervous, I told Caroline:

"I don't want my motives to be misconscrewed."

You just can't recover after that one.

. . . expressed in these letters is why I say, it took a lot of guts for Tracy to write this article.

. . . back when Republicans were pro-choice and in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. That was a *long* time ago.

Yuck! Bleaccchhhh!

My wife, a size 34DD, wanted a Wonderbra. So she got one, and looked like Pamela Anderson (in her silicon incarnation).

It was effective for going out, a nice evening "in", it definitely improved the view during blow-jobs (can I say this?), and in the supermarket it was a sure-fire advantage. All she had to do was ask where the corn flakes were and she had about five stockboys helping her out.