Harry Roberts - He's our man;
he shoots policemen, bang, bang, bang.
Harry Roberts is our friend, is our friend, ist our friend,
Harry Roberts is our friend, he kills coppers
Let him out to kill some more, kill some more, kill some more
Let him out to kill some more, Harry Roberts

Thank you; I'm glad you liked that little exposition. However, to address your comments on who consumes all of those things - magazines, etc - the real question is - who makes, markets, and creates them? Gradually it may change as we become more gender balanced in our culture, but the idea is - create the appetite, then feed it. Just like the tabloids.

Women may be consuming that crap, but ask them how they feel after a Vogue binge.

And as for Stone-Age art - we will never know who did what and why. Those images such as Woman of Willendorf depict not a pregnant woman but an obese one, and as obesity is a modern disease, it's unlikely they were self-likenesses, especially as the entire concept of "self" and individual is also modern. As for women having more time in that period - it's extraordinarily unlikely that they had 'leisure' time that would allow them to 'sit around' and carve. If you're interested in this topic, you may enjoy the work of Marija Gimbutas.

Excellent exchanging ideas with you.

There are all sorts of things that people want that are bad for them and often it's b/c they're conditioned. We are trained or rather acculturated towards certain things. Often when asked why we do what we do - we're clueless.

There's a great book on critical thinking written by a guy named Ruggiero (I forget his first name now), and he talks about this sort of thing. He cites a personal example that blows my mind.

He has a friend he visits, and she's cooking dinner - a pot roast - and he's in the kitchen helping or hanging out, and he sees her snip a bit of the meat off. He asks her why she does that, and she says b/c her mom did. He asks her why her mom did, and she is astonished to realize she never thought to ask. So, he suggests she does when next she speaks to her mom.

She talks to her mom shortly after that, and her mom says she does it, b/c her mother always did. So, the woman calls her grandmother and asks her why she always snipped off a piece of meat from the pot roast before thrusting it into the oven, and the grandmother responds - 'b/c it never fit right in my pot.' *laughing*

Amazing, right?

My sister is addicted to those magazines, and when I ask her why, she really has no clue. She's a gorgeous girl too, but like all girls - she feels like shite after reading through one. I'm sure you've read the studies or at least heard about them.

There's another theory about those stone pieces and it's that they were made as part of a ritual. It's believed by many, in the Western world anyway, that the first artists were the shaman. It's interesting to think about and then to consider cave paintings and so on. But w/o written documents the best we can ever do is speculate, I think.

That would be fan bloodytastic!

I encountered slim to no anarchists during my 5 years at college... but then again I scarcely left my room, and anarchists tend not to be populating engineering majors.

[Edited on Jan 03, 2006 2:15AM]

"On the one hand, I was impressed by how much could be learned from such a relatively small pile of bones. On the otherhand, I kinda mentally extrapolated that all the physical evidence on human origins in the world could probably be stored in a WalMart."

Scary and funny thought!

"So, is anthropology science or fancy?"

That's a good question. I wonder about that myself. My work is in the funerary end of art history - iconography specifically, and it's a fascinating way to learn about people. However, speaking of social conditioning - we always have to be careful about what we read and accept too, as there have been some sloppy forays into anthropology that would be deemed as neither science nor fancy but folly.

Another book recommendation, if you can bear it - Richard Rudgley's Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age. Do you know it? He deals with some of that question in his intro, and it's really well done and very readable too. He's from that new world of scholarship where the scholar doesn't bore the readers to death by lauding his knowledge over them.

Hey, Jake. No, I'm sorry I don't know any full-text online resources for Cendrars. Your friend can find some reprints at amazon (Moravagine, poems, etc), and if s/he's lucky, he should try powells, abebooks, and alibris.

hehe, for a second there i read that as "fucking Christ’s Sake" ;o

No, it was the almost the size of an average wine bottle, Sawanotsuru. I will have a look for what you're talking about, sounds interesting