There's not enough bitching

[Yuthirin]

I am attempting to salvage it, but am unsure how.

[Anastasia]

There are days you don't really salvage, per se. You survive them, suppress the memory and bury them in a mound of shit. That's one of those days.

[Brian]

Home internet connection is so bad it's useless for anything but IRC.  Even gmail times out half the time. :|

[Dracos]

Hum, dinner at work.

Some mixture of vegetables, meat, peppers under rice.  A stir fry.

Who the heck puts meat with bones still attached in a stir fry?

@_@

[Yuthirin]

oh that's gross

[Anastasia]

All three of the boxing fights tonight have been boring. Bleh.

[Arakawa]

Having to explain the gender-bending trope (as used e.g. in Ranma 1/2) to a straitlaced conservative Anglican professor without coming across as a pervert.

Mrg.

Edit: to make things more messed up, this was during a discussion on whether human souls (as considered separate from bodies) have gender or not. Bleh.

[Anastasia]

So how'd you tackle it, anyway?

[Arakawa]

So how'd you tackle it, anyway?

Short answer: I didn't.

Long answer: In a roundabout manner, using classical mythology (Tiresias &such) rather than Ranma. The whole argument was whether gender is an essential (unchangeable) attribute of the soul, whether it was possible to assert as such outside of the assumptions used by Mormonism (he's a Mormon-leaning straitlaced conservative Anglican professor); he was arguing that he can't conceive of a humanoid entity lacking a definite sexuality, I brought up genderbending as an example that there are other conceivable possibilities outside the dichotomy (entity with eternally immutable gender / the amorphous genderless entity he can't imagine), he responded that the ancient Greeks were perverts and that this kind of story is not universal across cultures, and moreover Tiresias opted to become a man again when he had the opportunity, so there must have been a soul-body 'dissonance'....

...

The whole conversation was inconclusive, but hopefully I got across the point, at least, that 'metaphysically inconceivable' and 'kind of perverted' are two different things. If not, I'm not exactly willing to pursue a further line of argument that would probably require me to explain by way of example not only Ranma 1/2 but Ozzalos, to a Mormon-leaning straitlaced conservative Anglican professor.

I get into the oddest conversations.

Thankfully, I'm pretty sure he already thinks of me as a weirdo who is capable of stimulating discussion, so that aspect of my reputation is undamaged.

[Yuthirin]

the ancient Greeks were perverts

I very much want to have a physical confrontation with this professor.

[Dracos]

The Modern Human Beings were perverts.

[Ergoemos]

The Modern Human Beings Were Perverts.

That's the name of my B-52's tribute band!

[Yuthirin]

The B-52s have enough fans to form a tribute band?

[Brian]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjxBns7U9Fo

[Yuthirin]

I saw 0.5 seconds of a man in tight white tiger-stripe pants and closed the window. I was askurrd.