Don't Click on the Link!

I've heard there's a very scary monster at this link! Whatever you do, don't click on this link!

Or this one!

I'm begging you!

Not this one!

OK, I really, really mean it this time. Actually, that's E's new AIM icon. Poor Andrea Dworkin. May God rest her pitiful, rape fantasy tortured soul. My old manager used to live on the same block as she did in Brooklyn, and said every time he saw her he was almost knocked down by these rays of hostility and hate she emitted as she lumbered around the neighborhood in her signature overalls. I said, "But that still didn't stop you from wanting to rape her, did it, you filthy man!"

Spoon is finally getting groomed next week. Doesn't she look like a wookie?

Here's the original book, which was one of my favorites as a child. Come to think of it, it's kind of subversive in that it encourages breaking the rules, which I guess was very au courant in that hippy drippy era. Thankfully, I had plenty of Davey and Goliath to keep me morally centered. How far children's books have come. I'm glad I never was exposed to the famous German 19th century children's book Struwwelpeter, a perennial favorite in that country, which explains a lot. Check out what happens to little Pauline, who pays a high price for her fascination with fire. I mean, no one wants a bunch of little pyromaniacs running around but isn't there a less terrifying way to teach a child not to play with matches?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky believed that you could tell a lot about a society by its prisons, but I believe you can tell more about a society by the stories read and given to its children. In For Your Own Good : Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, Swiss psychiatrist Alice Miller theorizes that German pedalogical practices made Germans particularly vulnerable to Nazism. Child rearing practices at the time, which emphasised discipline and breaking the child's will by means bordering on sadism, created a nation of cruel bullies vulnerable to being held in thrall to a father figure like Hitler. And later, scheisse porn. It's a fascinating book.