HBO's Extraordinary "In Treatment" Drama-Series: 1st in a Series

Read This Buggy Article First 

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

What, a New Series Begins Already?

Yes, Already --- But Not To Worry.  Because, You See . . .

 Prof bug’s unfinished series on Libertarian thought --- what it is and what its strengths and weaknesses are: especially in the international realm --- will continue in a few days, its fifth and last installment already written and in need only of a little more single-minded reflection and donkey-work to be brought to fruition and published here.  

In the meantime, current buggy visitors, you need to shift mental course and zero in on a radically different topic . . . not just today, but for a couple of weeks or more.  It has nothing to do with politics or economic, this new topic --- not by a stretch; rather, with an edgy, emotion-pounding TV-drama of head-spinning creativity . . .  a crackling psychological thriller, if you want, which has nothing to do with what many of you first imagine when you see or hear the word thriller evoked. 

With what then?

With a Remarkably Brilliant TV Drama-Series, Most Likely the Greatest in TV History

An exaggeration?  Not in prof bug’s view. 

Produced by HBO, In Treatment is the title of this glittering artistic achievement . . . in a dozen different ways, and maybe more than that, an extraordinary breakthrough in dramatic creativity on television.  Yes, anywhere.  Well, to be more exact . . . in the USA and Britain, the two countries that consistently produce the best televised drama, and most likely, too, elsewhere in Europe.  There’s one exception: Israel --- where the original series on which In Treatment is based first appeared a year or two ago, with the entire Israeli nation, it has been reported, glued to their TV sets through each of its emotion-blasting episodes. 

Does that detract from HBO’s artistic triumph? 

Not much, if at all.  In its setting, its strikingly sharp idiomatic language, and its startling ability to capture the inner strife and self-deceptions of 8 complex, wholly believable, up-to-date Americans, In Treatment has been thoroughly Americanized.  Then, too, several of its gripping episodes are entirely original, the creation of the American writing team --- as are the brio and stunning virtuoso acting and direction.  For that matter, none of the actors or the two directors watched any of the Israeli series, and quite simply because they didn’t want to start preparing their demanding character-roles with any preconceived notions of what their Israeli predecessors had done. 

Posted by gordongordomr @ 05:16 AM PST [ continue ]

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Why Are Americans Pessimistic These Days about Our Country?

                                 INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Prof bug is grappling mightily still with two cumbersome books on psychoanalysis and its varieties, the struggle a good 10 days old now --- contrary to what he had expected: not least, because he knew a fair amount about the subject from earlier research and writing.  Alas, as with almost everything written by psychoanalysts or their insight-oriented spin-offs --- the latter conducted by Ph.D. or M.A. holders in clinical psychology, and not the graduates of psychoanalytical institutes --- the writing is chock-a-block with endless abstract neologisms that serve as theoretical concepts and that then, in turn, sub-divide the arguments into endless classificatory sections.  All of it very long on claims and assertations, with little or no concern for empirical evidence above and beyond some clinical observations by the writers of their own patients or, no better, the countless footnotes to writers who share their opinions and theoretical orientation. 

Any Exceptions: Only One Comes to Mind

Much of what's called object-oriented psychotherapy --- now really merged with the broader relational-therapy (which looks mainly at the interaction of a patient with the therapist or with initimate persons in his or her life) --- was based on observations by clincians at the Tavistock Institute in London of infants and young children.  What they found was revealing: contrary to Freud and his followers --- including his daughter, Anna, and Melanie Klein --- infants and children have "drives" to be accepted, loved, and nurtured, rather than ego-centric drives of dominance, pleasure-seeking (erotic or otherwise), and self-centeredness in general, all of which, in Freudian terms, had to be blunted and repressed if the child, as it passed through pre- Oedipal, Oedipal, and post-Oedipal dynamic stages of personality development, were to fit into the world of the family and society, however much it might cost the child in neurotic symptoms.  And so relational therapy as it evolved shifted the thrust of much psychoanalytical therapy from intra-psychic phenomena toward inter-personal relations . . . with later schools of that sort adding their own theoretical approaches to it.  Whatever core empirical work existed in the early Tavistock group got buried under more and more neologisms and the disputes among this school or that school.

No wonder academic psychology became suspicious early on of psychoanalysis and, later, non-analytical insight-therapy . . . endorsing, instead, cognitive-behavioral approaches that concentrate on learning-theory and efforts to change the harmful thoughts that are closely linked to emotional distress.  Feelings, after all, are very difficult to change.  Thoughts are easier to recognize and deal with.  Anyway, more of this for later buggy articles.

                       TODAY'S BUGGY ARGUMENT

Instead, FOR today, here's a post the buggy prof left at one of the best economic web-sites around, Mark Perry's Carpe Diem, a liberatrian site.. 

Prof bug, remember, is no libertarian.  He has criticized its atomistic reductionism of social life into distinct independent individuals, its inability to distinguish among different kinds of democratic government --- all politicians are regarded as equally suspect, disohonet, wasteful, or corrupt --- and above all its failures to understand the institutional and power-base of both domestic economies and the global system of exchange: flows of goods, services, investments, multinationals, and technologies.  Still, what distinguishes Perry's site is his impressive daily efforts at providing his readers with commendable empirical data to back up his libertarian arguments.  You might not agree with each of them, but you then know why you disagree and can offer both theoretical and empricial counters. 

The subject: Mark Perry's endorsement of a Wall Street Journal op-ed that bemoans the widespread pessimism plumbed in recent public opinion surveys regarding the state of the US economy and the thrust or drift of the Bush administration (as well as the Democratic Congress).  As prof bug notes, such pessimism has been found off and on for decades now in studies by political scientists, and the attitudes they uncover are --- well, just that: attitudes, not deep beliefs.  And they are definitely subject to a variety of changing infuences. 

                                MARK PERRY'S VIEW

"What a difference a century makes:
'1888: America excites an admiration which must be felt upon the spot to be understood. The hopefulness of her people communicates itself to one who moves among them, and makes him perceive that the graver faults of politics may be far less dangerous there than they would be in Europe. A hundred times in writing this book have I been disheartened by the facts I was stating; a hundred times has the recollection of the abounding strength and vitality of the nation chased away these tremors.
~"The American Commonwealth" by Britain's Lord Bryce'

"2008: There is something both startling and disturbing about the gloom that has settled over Wall Street and the country in general. In fact, looking back over the past century, it would be a stretch to rank the current problems as especially notable or dramatic. Something else is going on - namely a cultural rut of pessimism that is draining our collective energy, blinding us to possibilities, and eroding our position in the world." --- Mark Perry  Click here.  The WSJ article he is referring to is the following:

~Who Stole the American Spirit? by Zachary Karabell, WSJ

                                   WHY SUCH PESSIMISM?

The buggy response to his query: Is such pessimism really a surprise: it happens every time there is a recession near-by, and the US is led by a weak president. Survey data have brought this out clearly for decades in American opinion, with especially the decline in respect for politicians, including Congress and the Presidency, back in the 1960s.

The nadir was in the Carter period. Under Reagan, the country bounced back, and opinion surveys showed a clear upsurge in optimism, even though it never approached the 1950s period.

Same cycle in the early 90s. Germany and Japan supposedly won the cold war, the economy was rotten, employment turnover was at an all time high in public opinion (funnily, economists couldn't find this in the stats), and Bush Sr couldn't have cared less except for the presidential race.

Then it changed in 1996. Until then, the US economy was supposed to still be tanking, Made-in-Japan (like Made-in-China) was on the verge of controlling the US economy, etc etc. By 1999, all that had changed in opinion surveys again --- though still short of the 1950s.

So What's Going On?

Essentially, several influences are at work here, none of them new --- other than the discouragement caused by the Bush administration's policies at home and abroad, with the president nearing an all-time low in public opinion support. 

1)A decline in respect for traditional authority, now documented for decades.

 

Posted by gordongordomr @ 05:54 PM PST [ continue ]

Monday, May 12, 2008

More Declinist Nonsense about the US Global Role

                                         Introductory Comments 

Today's buggy article, dashed off in about 10 minutes as a post at another web site --- The Marginal Revolution, a libertarian blog ---  is reprinted intact, except for some headings and several clarifying remarks; nothing more.  No need to dig deeper, especially since the post was inspired by the blog-writer (Tyler Cowan) citing a sentence from a book by Newsweek's chief editor of world news, Fareed Zakaria (a Harvard Ph.D. in political science) who has written one more work in the long, long line of declinist literature on the global position of the United States.  The only difference? Unlike the previous declinists, who were either historians or journalists or radical this or that, Zakaria was a specialist in International Relations and actually knows something substantive about IR theory and the rise and fall of great powers . . . even if, alas, he knows very little about economics, political economy, and economic growth theory and how they relate to diplomatic clout, military power, and something some IR specialists like to daddle in --- soft power (AKA, the alleged moral stature of a country in the eyes of others). 

Anything New?

Zakaria's book, The Post-American World,  isn't a bad book, and it has the advantage of being clearly written and easy to follow.  Otherwise, it is generally wrong about almost all the important points . . . including the alleged rise of new potential giant great powers like India and China. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was to be the turn of Japan and Germany or maybe the EU under German influence.  In the 1970s, amazingly, some European publicists convinced themselves the US had lost its great power status and only the Soviet Union remained as the major super-power . . . this, amazingly, about a decade before the Soviet Union self-destructed and passed into a historical trash-bin. 

Oh, almost forgot.  Click here and you'll be taken to a lengthy Newsweek summary of Zakaria's book.  The video there is worth listening to --- an interview with Zakaria, where (unlike the naive declinists in the past) he recognizes that the US will still remain a great power, only with a need to share power and influence with the rising giants and others.  At least, that's a noticeable improvement over the earlier declinist claptrap.

One Exception Not Emphasized by Zakaria Enough, On the Contrary 

Even so, as you'll see in these buggy remarks, that is nothing new.  The US has been a "dominant hegemonial power", first in the non-Communist world during the cold war, then world-wide since then, only in one clear sense: its huge rich domestic economy, the indifference of its (private) central bank, the Federal Reserve, along with the US Treasury and political policymaking, to running current account deficits --- with virtually every other country in the world eager for export-led growth --- and the widespread role of the dollar as a reserve and exchange currency have combined to make the US the indispensable rule-upholder of the existing institutionalized global economy.  The institutions that comprise that open, liberal global economy and through which rule-based economic exchange is filtered --- flows of goods, services, portfoilio capital, investment capital (multinationals), and technology transfers --- are well known: the World Trade Organization, the IMF, and the World Bank, plus some regional free-trade groupings like the EU and NAFTA (so far, generally in line with the global rules-of-the-game).

The key question that remains then is this: will the dollar continue to be by far the biggest reserve currency in the world?

So far, the euro hasn't replaced it very much around the world, and for a couple of reasons: 1) all the EU countries, for good or bad, try to depend on export-led growth, and since the rest of the world aside from the US does too (to varying degrees), the only way for the euro to move even near to the dollar as a reserve currency is for the various EU governments to shift toward domestic-led growth.  There is no sign of that whatsoever.  2) And the last thing the EU governments and those elsewhere want would be for the US itself --- whose economy is richer than the EU's 25 countries combined and is much more open to manufacturing imports out of India, China, and the rest of Pacific Asia --- to switch toward efforts at export-led growth . . . which means running a curent account surplus.

                                                   DECLINIST LITANIES

A Tired Old Mantra 

Every two decades or so, starting with Sputnik in the late 1950s, there seems to be a surge of declinist thought about the United States global role. In that first decade, it was all about the missile-gap and Johnny-can't-read fretful worries. In the late 1970s, in the Carter era, the US was said to have lost its super-power status: Raymond Aron, France's leading IR theorist and a pro-American, went so far as to say there was only one super-power left, and that was the USSR! At existing exchange rates, the EU-10 were said to have already surpassed US per capita income. Then, in the wake of the cold war's ending in 1989-90, it was argued that Japan and Germany were the winners of the cold war: their economies, state-guided, were supposedly superior to the US's, were growing much faster (actually Germany's catch-up growth with the US fizzled out in the early 1980s, Japan's in the early and mid-1990s), and were boosted by superior educational systems.

In fact, from 1991 on, Japan and Germany were vying to see which country could register the worst growth performance in the industrial world since the Great Depression of the 1930s. By 1998, in contrast, 75% of the Fortune 500 big companies hadn't even existed before 1975 in the US. There was no change in the equivalent ranks of Japan or Germany (save for SAP, a good and globalized German business software company). In contemporary PPP terms, the US has a per capita lead of about 40-45%, and the gap has continued to grow throughout the current decade. These state-dominated economies --- despite their differences --- continue to stagnate, lack entrepreneurial vigor, and are experiencing a continued erosion of their work ethos . . . especially in Germany and almost all the rest of the EU-15 save for Britain, Ireland, and astonishingly a reinvigorated Sweden and Denmark (well done, guys!)

The Reality of the Former Potential Giants?

To make sure you understand how wrong-headed this earlier decliinist thought was, consider that if Germany, Japan, Britain, Italy, or France joined the US federal union, each would rank among the bottom 5 of the poorest US states in per capita income: Mississippi, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Montana, and Alabama . . . all sparsely populated, rural, non-industrialized, and with little by way of advanced information-technology firms operating there.  The EU isn't a unified polity, and it is likely never to be one, quite apart from its very diffuse membership with no widely shared national identity or effective decision-making in foreign and security policies.

As for the great Soviet Union, it has simply disappeared . . . unable, after slaughtering tens of millions of its citizens under Communist rule, to compete with the advanced capitalist countries.

The New Potential Great Powers According to Zakaria

Now it's the turn of big populated countries, China and India, as the new touted potential giant rivals of the US in power and influence.  Never mind that no country has ever become wealthy in per capita income, advanced in industrial and post-industrial prowess, and able to innovate notably at the technological frontier without the following institutional framework:

     *solid democratic politics,

     *extensive freedom of speech

     *a rule of law generally, with independent courts and accountable police and an ability to investigate and remove anyone in political power who is found guilty of crimes . . . including in the US the right of impeachment

     *limited corruption among the political, bureaucratic, and economic elites

     *a considerable amount of transparency and accountability in the political, bureaucratic, and economic realm

     *extensive decentralization in the economic realm, with decision-making diffused among competitive firms

     *vigorous entrepreneurship, with new start-up business firms needed to bring new technologies and products to the market place

     *first-rate universities, institutes, and business firms structured for research and considerable interaction among them

The upshot?  Neither China nor India are remotely near to fulfilling these conditions, and they are unlikely to do so in the next 20 or 30 years . . . roughly as far as anyone can speculate reasonably into the future. 

 

  

Posted by gordongordomr @ 10:46 PM PST [ continue ]

Saturday, May 10, 2008

HBO's In Treatment: 9th in a Series

Prof bug is putting the last touches on his two follow-up posts about the different kinds of psychotherapy --- insight-oriented and cognitive-behavioral --- with, please remember, those articles inspired by HBO's In Treatment, a creative breakthrough in televised drama. If you're new to the buggy site, you'd do well to read the initial article on that series. Found at the top of the buggy home page, it ranges widely and sets out the multiple reasons for prof bug's thumping praise.

In the meantime, you'll find a new follow-up on psychotherapy in the bugged out comments that follow . . . adapted word-for-word by prof bug from a lengthy post he left at the HBO forums on the drama. The topic? Paul Weston, the chief character in IT (In Treatment) --- played by Gabriel Byrne --- as a man and as a psychoanalyst who appears in all 43 episodes of the drama.

 

                 PAUL WESTON, PSYCHOANALYST, HUSBAND, AND FATHER

1) Paul Weston . . . yes, certainly a complex character and a difficult role for Byrne play: 1) full of insight and empathic help for his patients --- his therapeutic slant, criticized by Gina, is essentially relational psychotherapy, with a danger that empathy can erode boundaries between the therapist and the patient; and yet 2) totally at sea in his personal life, as full of self-deception as any of his patients and lacking emotional engagement with his wife or his children.

2) In both capacities, Weston's character required Byrne to limit his emotional range. In his personal life, he emerges as a drained, dissociated man, cut off from strong feelings and swept up in a mid-life crisis (AKA, existential crisis) that he hasn't the slightest insight into. In his professional life, he's more engaged, but lives indirectly by means of his empathic projections of his own mind into the minds of his patients.

His total confusion about Laura underscores something else about his inner life: he is lost in fantasies about her. Not just sexual ones, mind you: if anything, he shows himself incapable of any passion whatsoever in her presence, either when she's in treatment and sitting on a couch a few feet from him or when he's at her residence for a show-down in which, no sooner does he arrive, than he starts launching dissociated patter about abstract art and whatever else might distract from his presumed motive for being there: his professed love and yearning for Laura in all senses of the term.

3) Weston's fantasies don't stop with Laura, or a desire for her body and her adulation for him (he hopes). His mind is crammed with kinetically charged fantasies of a marked escapist sort: he wants to shove off his patients onto Gina, then run off with Laura to the Caribbean, where he will scuba dive during the day, drink cocktails with her on the beach in the evening, and fuck and suck her all night long until the imagined paradise repeats itself the next morning and the morning after.

These are the fantasies of a troubled adolescent boy, whose maturity is roughly equal (as In Treatment shows) to Weston's.

In the end, whether fully intended by the writers of IT or not, Weston emerges as a laughing-stock of sorts, a figure of fun.

    ALL OF WHICH LEADS TO SOME REFLECTIONS ABOUT PSYCHOANALYSIS

4) Note, for one thing, that Weston is the only patient who repeatedly appears in IT who's left stuck in psychotherapy at the end of the series. All the others have taken responsibility for their lives, for good or bad, and left: Laura, Kate, Alex, Sophie, Jake, and Amy (reluctantly maybe: the dramatic series is ambiguous here).

Posted by gordongordomr @ 05:11 PM PST [ continue ]

Sunday, May 4, 2008

HBO's In Treatment: 8th in a Series and A New Divertimento

 

The book on relational psychotherapy --- entitled, strangely enough, Relational Psychotherapy (Patricia A. Young the author) --- arrived Friday night, and prof bug is reading through it, prepratory to finishing the two follow-up articles on psychotherapies . . . divided roughly into insight-oriented and cognitive-behavioral therapies, with each of these two major categories divisible in turn into sub-schools. Meanwhile, as further entertainment, here's another divertimento I just posted at the HBO forums on In Treatment for the benefit and delectable pleasure of the frothing in-tizzy girls and guy-girls there: one and all, convinced prof bug is off his rocker.

HBO MEMBERS' FORUM

Some Outraged Lather

"I've been thinking tonight and I've decided that not only is his academic life a fake, but I'll bet that any photo of his wife he may post is really one of those that you get when you first a wallet... the kind of people that only exist with an airbrush. "I'm still sticking with this idea.......he's actually a bloated, balding dishwasher who lives in a trailer park. His wife is toothless and plays the banjo."] DiamondCat

"You know what you are Gordo? A sick indistinguishable phallus symbol in the permant relaxed position. As in flaccid? His brain is flaccid" Orwellian 1984

"Solong, darling, what's going on in this thread? I was away for couple of days, by coming back I found this freak gordongordo troll here jamming all the good posts. Is there a way we can get rid of this nightmare? Solong, I trust you will find a way! One disturbed gordon troll sinking such a good thread...love, 40bee" 40Bee

From Flilppo Rat-Man to Freakish Buggy Guy

Prof Bug Explains Himself

Ouch! Ouch! Gotta hand to you, guys and girls: now that you've caught on to me, I have to fess up --- I'm a hopelessly loose-in-the-bean mental wreck. Want proof?

Then go lickety-split to the latest updated edition of the papers of Sigmund Freud --- lovingly, yea worshipfully, kept fresh up to the day by cult-member disciples --- where you will find, next to one of his most famous case studies, "RatMan", a long case study entitled "Bugged-Out- ProfMan". No need to remind someone like you with your psychiatric genius what ailed poor RatMan . . .. the pioneer freak in psychopathology whose DNA slipped stealthily into my great great grandfather bor in 19th century Vienna at about the time our Tail-Length Rodent Blaze-setter entered analytical history.

Who?

For the benefit of the laymen and lay-women in this forum --- not to mention quite a few Skinnerian behavioral conditioners who carry certified Learning-Theory credentials to treat us all, but who purposefully ignore Freudian case-studies --- it's necessary only to say that Rat-Man, an obsessive type convinced he would be devoured by sewer rats one day, was persuaded by Sigmund in analysis to face manly his rodent-repulsions, dress up in Mickey Mouse guise, jump into the sewers, and spend some quality time with the little four legged guys.

Alas, as Ruby, 1974, and 4Bee obviously know by heart, one lonely slime-covered night Rat-Man was chewing the rag with some alligator pets of his rat friends when who should slither by ---- of course! of course! Mickey's mini-skirted Main-Squeeze, Minnie Mouse herself. Poor RatMan! It was heads-over-heels amour in seconds.

And within seconds, he ran off with Minnie down a connecting sewer where, for 12 hours straight, they sucked and slurped and screwed like bunnies (if you'll pardon the reference to another rodent species). But, but . . . in his passion, Rat-Man had forgotten to bring along more than 16 condoms. For a sex-mad rat, usually enough, no? But not for Minnie; no sir. And so when Minnie --- her brain floating and spinning in a tidal pull of orgasmic bliss after 16 pokes in various orifices--- insisted that such a paltry number was only foreplay for her, and challenged RatMan to show exactly what kind of Real-Man Rat he was, what could he do?

Electrified with renewed passion, the poor RatGuy returned to his screwfest with --- OH OH, unprotected sex!

Poor Poor Rat-Man and His DNA Inherited by Prof Bug

Found dead with slime-ridden plague the next morning by a sewer-crew, RatMan's body was covered up, put in a casket, and sent to UCSB, my university, to be examined by Willy Wankalana, my great great grandfather who was a pioneer specialist in dissecting the DNA of rodents. And wouldn't you know, cutting his finger one day in RatMan dissection, his blood got infected by RatMan's DNA, and the rest if history: down through the ages into the genes of baby gordongordo.

A Sad Sad Story, No? And How Poor Buggy Boy Became Flippo

And not made any happier because I was aware of being off my rocker as early as age 5.

You see, boo-hoo, I got screwed up in my Oedipal phase when I thought I was supposed to act out my fantasies and actually fuck mom, not just lecherously visualize it with some wet-dream squirts. Fortunately, mom was very understanding. Then too she hated dad . . . an ultra-macho type, actually (truth to tell) the trainer of Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the 1950s and early 1960s; guy always cheating on her, much like David with Gina. Boy, did she teach me a lot! We moved from her blow jobs to simple coitus and then 69 --- well, actually, what with my three-foot height, 34.5 . . . but soon, within weeks, mom assured me that I now qualified for 45.2 in oral sex. Wow! Was I ecstatic!

 

Posted by gordongordomr @ 01:50 PM PST [ continue ]

Friday, May 2, 2008

HBO's In Treatment: 7th in a Series and A Divertimento

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Not to Despair, Buggy Visitors:

Yep, no need to despair or fret. Prof bug, you see, is still busy writing the two follow-up articles in the buggy mini-series that began on April 27, 2008 --- four days ago --- on various kinds of psychotherapies, roughly divided into two major categories: insight-oriented therapies and cognitive-behavioral ones. Most of the two-follows have been written, any delay in posting them due to a recent intrusion: tersely put, in his wanderings around googled cyberspace, the bugged-out prof chanced two days upon a fairly recent book on relational psychotherapy . . . a form of insight-oriented therapy, originally conceived by an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Henry Stack Sullivan in the middle of the 20th century, and increasingly popular in insight-oriented circles --- psychoanalytical or not.

No need to mention the book's title or author yet. After prof bug read a few of the pages available at Amazon, he ordered a copy; it just arrived; he will read through it tonight --- maybe tomorrow if need be; and see what's what by way of additional material for the two follow-up articles.

In the Meantime, Some Teasing Waggery for Your Enjoyment

Yes, by way of enjoyment and titillation --- and perhaps a little insight into what's going on at the HBO forums --- here's some joshing fictional banter that prof bug banged out in about 40 minutes a day or so ago and posted at one of the threads there. In that new, off-the-wall thread, which was started by one of the brighter Gabriel-Byrne adulators --- with, prof bug quickly adds, some natural writing talent that she's working hard on to improve: hopeful even that she might find a publisher sooner or later --- the posters are supposed to imagine scenes in which that adulator and GB strike up a relationship, sexually charged of course, but not just that, and then these same posters project their half-lecherous, half-infatuated projections of their own libidinal-charged fantasies onto both the original poster and GB.

Oops, prof bug just guffawed several seconds at the whole thing. Can't help it!. Couldn't breathe; had to stop for a good minute or so. Seems silly, no?

And yet . . . well, the girls there are trying hard to work themselves into a fiction-writing mood, and the bugged-out prof not only can't object to that effort, he has been propelled by his pedagogical obsessions to encourage them in their struggle to improve their writing skills.

In short, it'st just the sort of mental-tripping adventure an old lecherous pedant like yours truly can't resist throwing himself into . . . his unconscious tugs, intellectual and cock-wise, leaving him no choice. Hence the daft, half-waggish, half-pornographic story that he left at the thread there for the eroticized GB infatuates to do with it as they wish.

The Setting and the Four Main Characters:

The cognoscenti in the HBO forums --- whether the adulating girl/girls or guy/girls (not to forget the lesbian girl/guys and the bisexuals), with prof bug now down to the last of the dumbo Neanderthal-heteros who haven't been driven off by those still hoping to plunge their faces into GB's fab-ass and, they hope, bazooka-packed pecker --- naturally know who the characters featured in this not quite Nobel prize-winning literary piece are . . . three of them, you see, featured prominently in the HBO In Treatment series, with the fourth, Ms. Tushy-by-the-Poet, obligatory according to the rules set by Flirty-Legstrom. Flirty is the chief writer in that thread, though Tushy writes a lot in other threads, fiction and non-fiction. Both are good natural writers; just need a lot of discipline and hard work, plus encouragement, to become adept professionals . . . like four or five other posters there. They also have to learn how to concentrate their reading on talented short-story writers in the contemporary era, like Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, John Updike, and Flannery O'Connor . . . four names and links to their collected stories that prof bug left in another thread there. Yep: concentrate, read a lot, notice the different styles, and . . . well, prof bug will just quote what he left there in that thread;

 

These are good stories, a nice start --- all of you posting them have natural talent. Really. It does need to be nurtured and worked on diligently by all of you; and the best way is for you to study carefully some outstanding contemporary short-story writers. Look at all they start their stories; look at their styles --- simple or complex --- and their characters (which are entered into by the writer from what perspective?); the settings, and how they're sketched in; the dialogue as reflecting each character's personality; the plot (which has to be simple compared to a novel), with the characters revealing something important about themselves --- but unable to change fundamentally as is often the case in novels. And the emotionally charged insights and revelations about life you come away with from the stories: whether about one or two individuals or a community or a country or the human condition.

 

 

Posted by gordongordomr @ 09:59 PM PST [ continue ]

Sunday, April 27, 2008

HBO's In Treatment: 6th in a Series

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

With this buggy article on the various kinds of psychotherapy in wide use these days --- especially insight-oriented therapies and their diversity as compared with the large varieties of cognitive-behavioral therapies ---the buggy series on HBO's In Treatment continues to chug along on various tracks . . . some of them aesthetic in destination, some intellectual, and others just plain hilarious.

Meaning What, These Hilarious Tracks?

Well, believe it or not --- just this: crammed with rollicking, hard-to-believe celebrity-worship, these bugged-out data-rails lead directly to the HBO forums on In Treatment, where the posters, virtually one and all, are ultra-horny, in-heat adulators of Gabriel Byrne, the actor who plays the series chief character, Dr. Paul Weston . . . these adulators, note quickly, all either girl-girls in their 30's, 40's, or 50's or guy-girls or girl-guys/guy-girl bisexuals in the same age range. The number of hetero/heteros like prof bug far, far less numerous . . . a tiny assemblage, nothing more: maybe, at most, three or four ---unless a few fellow Neanderthal-humanoids were hiding out in the closet.

Alas, one of these hetero primates was a man full of rage, mainly directed at women or any hetero or girl-girl or girl-guy or bisexual who criticized the slightest buffoonish thing he managed to say.

Eventually, the inevitable happened: the site managers got his number and quickly shut him down.

Trust Me, No Great Loss To Anybody --- Uh-Uh.

No, not at all. Not a loss either to the intellectual levels of the guffaw-a-second posts left by the girl-girls and guy-girls, all without exception swept away by their carnal-infested hots for Gabriel Byrnes' lavishly fantasized bod . . . including, as some of the guy-girl posters noted, his fab-ass. Yeh, lots of stuff about his ass. No, the buggy prof isn't making this up! See the nutbin parody published at this buggy site a few days ago on this fab-ass, big-bazooka-packed fatuities that got both the girl-girls and the guy-girls all worked up in a lather of sexual ardor. Or, to go on, not a loss to the raucous, bursting-with-laughter delight that enthralled prof bug at that site off and on for a few weeks, as, one after another, he read the loony, trembling-with-erotic-expectation-filled posts at the HBO site and, in reply, left several posts of his own. Some of these bugged-out posts wry and bantering; others half-humorously barbed or biting; and yet others clownish digs at the expense of these sex-starved, starry-eyed infatuates in those forums . . . their on-display carnal adulation of GB, as his admirers obsessively refer to him, of crazy-house extravaganza.

Whatever, take it from me --- the whole shenanigan-laden hokum added up to an ongoing madhouse spectacle to behold for those who weren't and aren't in urgent sexual need to fantasize down-and-dirty foreplay followed by kinetically charged orgasmic coupling with Gabriel Byrne. Think prof bug's exaggerating? No sir; not on your life. Want proof? Then just wander over to those online forums --- try, when you do, the most popular thread of all, thousands of slavishly eroticized infatuation entitled "I Could Lick Gabriel Byrne All Over!" --- and you'll have a hard time crediting your eyes . . . at any rate, if you aren't a recent escapee from a padded-cell crazy-house somewhere in Southern California.

Si Monumentum Requiris, Circumspice, no?

"What? Is it possible? " you'll start wondering the instant you log on at the HBO forums. "Ye gawds! " You'll pause, rub your eyes; maybe twice. Won't help. Because look . . . you'll be face to face with the hard evidence: hundreds of women posters, many with college degrees and almost all in their 30's, 40's, and 50's, behaving like teeny-bopping girls at a rock concert flushed with erotic fever and high on pot and booze. "Oh my! Can't be! Is so!"

Still think the bugged-out prof has been exaggerating? Then continue your little mental tripping and read on a few minutes more, nothing longer. No need to.

"Whew! Wow! What a scream!" you'll hear yourself say out loud at the end. "I tell you, buggy guy, you've not been bull-shitting us. No sir; what a riot! I mean . . . hard--- no, no; outright impossible to say who's more in hilarious sexual heat. The screaming mini-boppers I've seen at rock concerts, their eyes bright and excited and squirming their little bottoms with urgent need on their seats . . . anxious as hell to bury their faces in the drugged-out rock-star's jean-covered crotch that he's thrusting and jerking at them up there on stage, the raucous music blaring away. Or --- you pause momentarily, shaking your head at the screwball stuff you're reading . . . or, bluntly put, these physically older but no more mature girls and girl/guys posting their totally in-heat fatuities; and, no less anxious" --- you halt again, overcome with roars of laughter ---"yeah . . . no less anxious as hell to bury their own faces in Byrne's fab-ass and unzipped bazooka-packed pecker.

Or so they say, no hesitation whatever."

Crazy! Crazy! . . . all right! Once again, prof bug has emerged as a candid, no-bullshitting guide to the rife fatuities of contemporary mass culture.

 

All of Which Brings Us To Today's Buggy Topic

To wit: . . . the different kinds of psychotherapy on tap for those of you who --- too clinically depressed even to laugh at the girl-girls or guy-girls or demoralized by your life's stresses or just bewildered by things --- would benefit from some therapy. Starting with a few transitional comments about Byrne's portrayal as a psychoanalyst and the contrast with his own analyst, who uses a different variant of psychoanalysis. (Note: there will likely be three or four buggy articles on this topic, with the current one just the first installment.)

Posted by gordongordomr @ 06:05 PM PST [ continue ]

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

HBO's "In Treatment" Drama-Series: 5th in a Series

For all their obsessively bedazzled infatuation with Gabriel Byrnes, the chief character-actor in HBO's In Treatment, not all the female and guy/girl posters in HBO's forums on that drama-series' masterly creative breakthrough have been silly girlish stuff . . . far from it.  Here, by way of a buggy effort to bring some rounder perspective on the intelligence and decency of most of the posters, is what he said just a few hours ago: 

"After my trip to NY, I will reschedule my basic training and try to regain a little bit of my sanity. What am I saying, I am joining the Army Reserve at t 33 1/2, can't be too sane can I?"  --- Taken from a post by PMungle

The bugged out reply:
All Americans who volunteer for service in our military have my instant respect and admiration, and doubly so when they are women. I wish you success in your alternative career --- and your willingness, given the need for our reserve units to move into battle areas around the world, to risk you life for the rest of us. Thank you
........
For decades now, women have shown that they can be the equal of men in any battle situation, even though they are generally not used in front-line combat units. Doesn't matter. In the kinds of warfare we're engaged in --- whether in Iraq or Afghanistan or a dozen other countries or regions --- the battle lines are always fluid, always unpredictable, always shifting with such speed that even a unit of women soldiers (or mixed units) to guard a transport depot or a hospital can suddenly find itself under fire from three or four directions. And always --- without exception, our women soldiers fight with the courage, cool-headedness, and disciplined aggressivity that inspire the respect of their male colleagues up and down the line of command.
......
Even the Israelis --- a tiny population of 5 million Jews and 1.3 million Arab citizens --- have been hesitant until recently to train women soldiers for front-line combat. Until the last couple of years, they have always drafted and trained women for military service, and as in Afghanistan or Iraq, certain support-units have suddenly found themselves in flaring fire-fights. Yet despite the overwhelming superiority of those Arab countries in population that the Israelis have had to fight --- about 400 million Arabs (plus 70 million Iranians) --- the general command has been reluctant to train and introduce women soldiers into front-line units.

Posted by gordongordomr @ 08:12 AM PST [ continue ]

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Unglued Madhouse Lechery "In Treatment:" 4th in a Series

The buggy series on In Treatment continues to chug along today with another article drawn from prof bug's madcap postings at HBO's forums dedicated to the masterly dramatic series: this one, which elicited more than the usual frenzy of screwball assaults from enraged forum-members who demanded his execution --- first in cyberspace, then (if possible) in down-to-earth blood-terms with a guillotine --- mischievously intended, of course, to provoke these bursting surges of wickedly funny ripostes.  Shoot, couldn't help it!  What could be better?  Prof bug having a ball!  Non-stop; and for weeks now.  Ever since, a good seven weeks ago, he stumbled onto the forums only to find thousands of girls --- or more specifically girl/girls and guy/girls, plus some guy-girl/girl-guy bi-sexuals and  three or four out-of-the-closet hetero/heteros like yours truly --- acting like horny, in-heat teeny-boppers full of bottom-squirming infatuation with Gabriel Byrne, the very gifted Irish lead-actor in HBO's series.

Faced with this rabid, comically unglued carnal-furor, what did prof bug do? 

Right! Overcome with delight, roaring in pleasure and naughty-boy mischief, he has ragged and hooted at this unleashed lecherous bedlam ever since  --- spearheaded by this naughty little teaser that follows.  Enjoy! 

                                       Sistas: Distressing News about GB!

Sistas! Half-Gay Sistas! Fellow Bisexuals! and the Two Hetero/Hetero Dumbos in These Forums!

All excited, like the rest of you girls, by my imagery of GB's fantastically shaped ass --- a walking wonder male-backside as reported with joyously trembling revelations yesterday in this thread --- I was up late last night and on the look-out for more hot-stuff news about our little leprechaun darling's assets.

Around about 1:30 in the morning, half-crocked on Irish whiskey and humming Danny Boy obsessively, I was about to give up when, all at once, a new post came in from inner Borneo with tom-tom news that a head-hunter cannibal --- just back from a four-day stint in Manhattan (he sells shrunken heads to a real estate magnet with weird-looking hair, or so Chief Sliceitnicely told our regular Borneo-correspondent)--- had brought back with him some wowee low-down about our little Mick dreamboat.

Guess what? Guess what?

Seems that GB, a jogger, buys only jumbo-size jockstraps when he needs some support for his running on the streets of Brooklyn. Yoweeee! You hear that? The super-size, jumbo-cut jockstraps for our little Big-Pecker Stud-boy.

And get this. According to our Borneo poster, the manager of the sports store where GB shops exclusively reported that in his entire career, three decades log, the store had sold only one other pair of jumbo-size jocks, and that --- get this, girls! hold onto you panties! --- was to Shaq O' Neal back in 1998" .

God, did you hear that everybody, GB's cock is as big as Shaq's!

Hell, probably pound for pound far bigger yet, and for my money, likely unrivalled in the whole history of male evolution. I tell you, I was so excited that I immediately jerked-off and shot my nuts off right onto my pc monitor while continuing to work my moist three fingers around on my clit. Yeah, you heard me right: on my clit. (The secret girls: inherit a huge fortune when you're parents die, fly to Copenhagen, and you can for a cool $2 million come back to good old America with both a pussy and a prick. Believe me, double-whammy fun when you're in the sack. Yowee!) 

.....................

Alas, girls --- I wish I could stop here, but I've got distressing news that I have to get off my chest. Yeah, brace yourselves, it's terrible. Worst than you can imagine.

You see, after several other double-whammy bananas-and-cream stuff, I cleaned off my monitor and spent the rest of the night on my pc looking for more titillating tid-bits about our Irish cock-swinging champion --- Oh, fooking hawt that little urchin is, no? Long live Eire! --- and . . . well, I chanced upon this horrible puking news just being run on the front page of the New York Observer.

Here's the headline:

 PISSED-OFF ACTRESS AND EX-WIFE, ELLEN BESERKIN, SAYS GB WORST FUCK SHE'S EVER HAD!

"Worst sex I ever had in my life," Ms. Ellen Beserkin said in an exclusive interview with our reporter yesterday in her new penthouse on upper Park Avenue. "The guy has, let's face it, a shrunken prick about the size of a 10-year old little boy's. It took him six months even to find my clit, even after I showed it to him where it was at least 223 times. Worse, yeah worse --- his typical sex performance was over in 31 seconds. Wow, what a loser!  I tell you . . . to come, I had to sit him in a chair and climb onto his knee and rub my mound several minutes around his thigh even to get a flicker of pleasure from our, ha! "love-making.

Did that knee-humping help? 

Are you nuts? You know what it's like to try getting off humping a guy who's humming 121 stanzas of Danny Boy?  Gawd! by the fifth one, I was ready to do a Sharon Stone --- you know, get out a straight razaor, slash off the little prick's wee-wee!  Not that lover-boy would have ever noticed.

"Did you ever talk about it frankly with GB?"

"Sure --- you think I'm some kind of retard afraid to to talk to my husband frankly. You remember that hot-wire reach-around session with Al Pacino in Sea of Love? Hell, even that panicked cop who thought I was a serial killer got immediately aroused and forgot his fears as I starting humping his gorgeous butt. So I'd walk up behind that big flop and try the same thing."

"Did it help, that reach-around tactic"

"Are you kidding! GB tries to hide his small-size ding-dong by buying jumbo-size jockstraps and then fills them with two packages of cotton-wadding as he walks or runs around the streets of Brooklyn. When he plays a movie scene or a TV drama that calls for extra-tight jeans, he uses three packages. Don't wanta disappoint the fans, huh! What a wacko-city screwball! Anyway, after a year or so of frustrating bad-bad sex, I got GB to visit the most famous sexology psychiatrist in New York, a Dr. Paul Easton --- an old friend really, well . . . maybe more accurately a former lover when I was starting out in films (and yeah, a pretty good lay). "

 

Posted by gordongordomr @ 04:19 PM PST [ continue ]

Friday, April 11, 2008

In Treatment: 3rd in a Series

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Guess what follows?  Another wild bug-eyed report on the buggy prof's roaming visit through the weirdo badlands of American mass culture, at any rate as reflected in 90% of the daily posts found in HBO's mass-public forums devoted to In Treatment.  If you'd read the first two reports, all the better.  If not . . . well it's not necessary, but would help, if you take a few minutes and at least glance at the kick-off article for this buggy series that's found at the top of the home-page.  

Who what follows? 

Well, this: two bugged-out posts left recent in those forums unfold their wondrous, laughing-out-loud dismay and disbelief that have been churning away with hilarious intensity in prof bug's mind ever since he registered, logged-in, and thought that soon, in an instant or two, there would be threads galore filled with terse flowing prose and luminous insight into In Treatment's artistic triumphs . . . all that stimulating insight, hopefully a mental prod to prof bug's emotionally charged ruminations about the dramatic series creative breakthroughs, reflecting surely --- surely! surely! --- the thoughtful views of adult men and women who have been immersed in the theater, the arts, film-history, and literature. 

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!  And for several reasons, such . . . . Well, come to think of it, the two posts speak for themselves; no need to elaborate . . .  the-Wonderland trek of a rabid bugged-out sort hard to believe unless you've done what Alice first did and now, to his still disbelieving mind, prof bug --- tumble down a dark tunnel, a rabbit-hole of spiraling madness, and find himself wandering in dizzying world of topsy-turvy irrationality and rollicking logic-gone-fruitcake

FIRST POST, LEFT APRIL 10, 2008

Girls:

Despite the comically manic minds-on-the-fret worries being exhibited here, you have nothing to worry about.  No, not a thing.

Because . . . well because, fellow worry-warts, you post first of all with pseudonyms on this site.  Yes? No? Maybe?  And so even if I were to quote you fully, literally, there'd be no liable involved . . . and quite simply, if I may be simple and to the point, no one could possibly identify you in real life.

And secondly --- assuming you could stop your [i]The-Sky-Falling-In Chicken-Little histrionics[/i] a moment and actually you your noodle --- I have not identified anyone by pseudonym on the web site except 4Bee . . . a name, let us face it, only Wasps, Hornets, and Honey-bees could ever identify as a real hymenopterous insect of the superfamily Apoidea and hence make him buzz-buzz in alarm like --- well, like little Chicken-Littles caught up in a self-made frenzy of alarm.

And thirdly, amid your sudden flare-ups of panic and confusion, why should you be more worried about being cited --- if I did cite you directly --- on the buggy web site than the HBO web site?  True, the buggy site --- which one time was getting 6000 hits a day (almost exclusively from academics, grad students --- will likely display your frenzied mini-bopper carnal-fantasies to more eyes than HBO's forums are getting; but then no one need worry that he or she or she/he or he/see or she/she or --- like me --- the dumbo Neanderthal hetero/hetero here (all three of us!) is being quoted at all, only paraphrased . . . and at that briefly/.

........

Got it girls?  Guy/girls?  Girl/guys?   Guy/Guys --- oops, leaves only two others besides me in these forums.  And, lest I have neglected the bi-sexuals  . . . Girl-guys/Guy-girls?

Your rushes of emotionally delirious agitation are . . . well, let's just say overwrought and over-done, and be done with it.

Still, your jolting fired-up worries actually reveals unconsciously a flicker or two of reason for optimism --- I mean, anyway, among the few adults in these forums who aren't just in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and (God help us) maybe 70s and 80s, chronically speaking, but are more or less matched by mental development and emotional maturity.

The transformation of these forums --- whatever the intent of HBO and its management here --- into shameless, backfence blather is what struck me, dumbfounded, full of disbelief, within the first hour or two of my stumbling by accident onto this site back in late February. Yesterday, as I took time off from superficial stuff like (in my consulting mood) what can be done to deal with sectarian militias struggling violently for control somewhere we're involved in, I found Hot4-Gordo posting about a dozen times at the top of each thread. So frustrated was she not to find her gossipy chatterbox chums on line, she-he? asked out loud: Jeez, where is anyone?

Posted by gordongordomr @ 10:59 PM PST [ continue ]

Saturday, March 29, 2008

HBO's "In Treatment" Drama-Series: 2nd in a Series

“ Oh please, Armsley!  People were simply commenting on a fictional character. Since no one truly knows her motives and intentions yet, it's a topic of discussion. You chose to draw conclusions from that and insult real people, while attempting some moral high-ground? Please... Those who can't distinguish fiction from real life are much more disturbing, "  --- KD


Part One:
Fictional vs. Real Characters To Assess Our Emotionally Energized Responses To Them

KD:

I don’t agree with Armsley on any topic --- in effect, a prissy, nagging guy who attacked me with fatuous inanity within seconds of my first innocuous post in this HBO forum a few days ago . . . one of the several touch-testy gays who, along with a handful of women groupies, seem to monopolize about 75% of the posts in every thread, dozens of them.  (The other posters, a couple of hundred or so --- overwhelmingly women, it seems  --- are far more intelligent and thoughtful, just as they are much skillful at expressing their views in good clear writing.) 

Brief Clarification for Buggy Prof Visitors (Added March 29th, 2008)

Hard to say for sure what ailed these guys. Most likely, they couldn't’t stand a confident heterosexual guy horning in on their sputtering tete-a-tetes with the girls; bad bad hetero- boy, right?  Anyway, they quickly became good fodder for some amused teasing on my part. Couldn't help it, they were asking for it! What a riot!  What fun! 

Anyway --- or did I just say that? ---it’s their right, if they want, to struggle with raw identity issues and envisage themselves as women and go around parading their make-believe gender-change on the web for all to see and join in. Or as I was chastised by one of them to my mirth, “Armsley” ---whose avatar photo, please note, made him uncannily resemble a 60 year-old Gabby Hayes of Roy Rogers western-movie fame, stubbly beard and all and tobacco stains on its hairy edges near his toothless mouth --- “is a female, a lady, a dame; got it gordon?”  Similarly , like anyone else, they have a right to lead a life of their choosing and not suffer discrimination. 

Beyond that, though --- what?

Well, they got no free pass from me for their silly priggery and fussy passive-aggressivity that led, for a few days anyway, to my mirthful toying with their grumpy old-maid peevishness.

Apparently, I was seen as their worst nightmare.  Just imagine! . . . a manically fantasized he-man hetero-dumbo had the nerve to bust in on their exclusive girls-night-out yak-yak with one another and their tiny clutch of female groupies: with, to boot, their yacketing stuff full of gossipy tidbits about their personal lives and mutual condolences or congratulations, all depending on what spectacular quotidian trivialities struck them as worth narrating.     Small wonder they all began braying for the buggy prof’s instant cyberspace execution  . . . followed, I imagine, by his hoped for real execution if they could only get the hetero's dumb-ox woman-slurping head under a three-foot long guillotine blade. 

Or as 4 Bee, something apparently of a self-anointed spokesman, put it so effectively in his first post about bad bad buggy boy:

Solong, darling, what's going on in this thread?
I was away for couple of days, and by coming back I found
this freak gordongordo troll here jamming all the good posts.
Is there a way we can get rid of this nightmare?

Solong, I trust you will find a way! One disturbed gordon troll sinking
such a good
thread.

Love  4bee”

And again a few hours later, while I laughed in delight at his persnickety sarcasm, 4Bee followed up with this gem:

Gordon:

By reading your very first post, with the above quoted text, it became quite clear - you've been trolling here--- countless words and little substance.

That's the very nature of a troll. There was no need to bother reading the rest of them. Perhaps you are in a clinic as a recovering drug/alcohol/ sex or a mental breakdown or a psychopath with the access to computer, who knows or who cares.  [Buggy Addendum March 28th, 2008: Hilarious as this all seems, several of these  guy-girls soon got rushes of the heebie-jeebies, started looking into my background, and began posting frantic worries that I was indeed confined to a mental ward for the criminally insane and would presently break out and take horrible vengeance on each and every one . . . presumably in the company of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who (I wickedly hinted at in one of my joshing posts), was my chief attending psychiatrist and gourmet-instructor who explained to me the niceties of eating roasted gay-guy flesh.]

Perhaps it has been therapeutic for you to write the ??professor stuff?? and clever for your doctor to recommend creativity, employ your fantasy etc.; same as for some people it works well while playing with crayons.

That's good. Perhaps it's quite healthy for you as well to squeeze out every bit of stored memories somewhere in your brain and exercise- exercise it, such as remembering Woody Allen films etc. Please, just try to keep it shorter and perhaps we will be entertained. Your doctor must see how hard you have tried, but then again this is what he has been paid for. On the other hand, why should your doctor be punishing us --- this lovely HBO forum crowd, being here for a long time, having had many wars and battles with troll invasions and other crazies.  Please, you tell him/her that  you need to keep it short, write haiku.

Get well, and remember, it's not good to dress up in your doctors white coat pretending to be one, while in treatment. You can get caught and as a consequence spend even more time behind the doors without a knob.

Back to KD's Claim 

Leave aside Armsley's and n1984’s and 4Bee’s silly shallow fluff.  On that score, you’re right.   Concentrate instead on what you said in reply to Lucas, and especially on your key point --- all that stuff about not taking fictional characters seriously ---

Nothing, when you get down to it, I regret to say, could be more wrongheaded . . . and for a couple of solid reasons.

Posted by gordongordomr @ 04:18 PM PST [ continue ]