Fond memories of bare-breasted women in ancient Crete

& a bonus tweet poll featuring the f-word

As I told Picayune Plus readers Tuesday, I’m mostly off the grid this week at a traditional music and dance camp in Southwest Tennessee, so issues will be skimpy. The Tweet of the Week poll is a selection of the top entries from 2014, the first year of the poll, for instance, and the bonus poll is a collection of tweets that deploy the f-word in a way that I, anyway, found amusing.

July 6, 2023, Issue No. 95

• The erotica of my childhood — bare-breasted women in history books. Oo la la!

• Results of the “Forever” stamp poll — Just a little more than 1 in 4 people know what it costs to mail a first-class letter these days.

• Tweet of the Week

• Tune of the Week — The amazing Roger Netherton’s sinuous version of “Whiskey Before Breakfast.”

The erotica of my childhood

In sorting some of my belongings still stored at my parents’ home not long ago, I came across “Life in the Ancient World,” a heavily illustrated 1961 history from Random House that I have vivid memories of poring over when I was in the early primary grades, with this particular double spread repeatedly attracting my attention.

Bare-breasted women! Just sitting around the queen’s suite in the royal palace in Crete! One of them, presumably the queen herself, nekkid, about to get into the bath! I was 9.

The image, meant to be dryly historical — “Some historians believe that these ancient women (on Crete) went topless only during religious rituals,” writes classical historian David Meadows in his online article,“On Bare Breasts in Ancient Greece,” “but some of the artworks depict everyday activities, suggesting that bare breasts may have been commonplace” — but to me it was a window into an adult fantasy.

I read this book somewhat before I saw my first Playboy centerfold and long before one of my junior high school buddies showed me his older brother’s hidden copy of a hard-core pornographic magazine that shocked yet educated and, yes, stirred me. I was 14.

I’m certain that even mildly curious 9- through 14 -year-olds today are far more jaded and have no need of inadvertently or even deliberately arousing printed material to satisfy their budding interest in — *ahem* — the private areas of others. Vivid, graphic, unrealistic images and videos are just a web search away, and I doubt parental controls and safe-search options are particular impediments to satisfaction. “Must be 18 to enter this site” is a fig-leaf that doesn’t prevent children from entering the land of no fig leaves.

The site GuardChild reports that, “The largest group of Internet porn consumers is children ages 12-17, (and) 90% of children ages 8-16 have seen online pornography.”

I’m not sure I buy the first statistic — it’s not footnoted — but the second seems accurate and in line with assertions on other sites that decry the desensitizing, sometimes traumatizing effect on kids of exposure to pornography.

I do love the internet, but I remain very glad that it wasn’t around when I was a child, when even a textbook illustration could scramble my imagination.

Forever confusing. But fair

After 440 votes had been cast in my pop-quiz reader survey on the current price of “Forever” stamps, we saw that only 28% of respondents knew it was 63 cents (and about to rise to 66 cents on Sunday):

My ignorance on this point was so pronounced that I screwed up the survey the first time I posted it and did not include the actual price as one of the options! But just 23% of respondents clicked the closest option, 65 cents. The results were similar to what I found in January when I simply asked for an honest answer.:

I suspect this lack of awareness is directly related to the pure convenience of the “forever” stamp, which, for a reason you will see in the summer rerun below, I argue should be known as “The Zorn stamp.”

In Decemer, 1994, I wrote a column following the announcement that first-class postage was soon going to rise by 3 cents (to 32 cents from 29 cents) in which I made the following argument:

It bothers me how unnecessarily clumsy it's going to be over the next several months to add extra postage onto envelopes in order to use up the leftover 29-cent stamps.

The Postal Service has printed 2 billion "make-up rate" stamps to help us through the transition. … I collect such issues against my will. I still have a few odd-lot four-centers left over from the last rate increase, in February 1991, and it was only last Christmas that I finally divested myself of the last of my 25-cent first-class stamps, vintage 1985-88. They never come out even.

My proposed solution is for the Postal Service to sell stamps marked simply "first class" for the going first-class rate. Such stamps would be good forever (emphasis added later) on any letter weighing up to one ounce, and, when used in combination with other stamps on heavier mail, good for the first-class rate at time of use.

Sure, people might stock up on cheap stamps, the way commuters hoarded Chicago Transit Authority tokens before the price jumped to $1.20 from 90 cents in December 1991. But it would be a silly investment. The rate of return, in this case, would be 10.3 percent (the CTA payoff was 33.3 percent), but stamps would be an awkward and illiquid commodity, and if the Postal Rate Commission made rate hikes more frequent, but just a penny at a time, the incentive would totally dry up.

The Postal Service always ignores my ideas — in the past I've suggested that it make money by deliberately producing defective stamps and then gouging collectors for them, and that it not spend $122 million to be an official sponsor of the Olympics in a year after they showed a $1.6 billion annual loss — and this time was no exception.

The officials to whom I floated my "first class" idea reacted with tolerant lack of interest even though they do use a very similar idea — non-denominated stamps that survive rate hikes — for bulk-rate mail.

They wouldn't take my two cents', and next week they'll get my three. They win again.

Some 13 years later — on April 12, 2007 — USPS began selling “forever” stamps for 41 cents.

The inflation calculator at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that 41 cents in April, 2007 has the same buying power as 60 cents today, and that the 32 cents we began paying shortly after that 1994 column was published is worth 65 cents today.

Seems fair.

Re: Tweets

I culled the new nominees for Tweet of the Week poll from my list of favorites of 2014, the year this poll started:

1. Guys, if a girl invites you upstairs for “coffee,” first make sure she has coffee. You don’t want to get up there and there’s no coffee — @Jake Vig ‏

2. The sequel to “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” is just a series of horrified people finding parts of missing kids in their chocolate bars. — @robfee

3. The two types of people are the ones who know what I’m saying and people who don’t know what I’m saying. That’s why I always ask. — @andrewti

4. I want to lose weight, but I don’t want to get caught up in one of those “eat right and exercise” fads — @GerryHallComedy

5. Welcome to the Simon Says club, please take a seat. Wow, okay. You three who sat down, Simon says go home. Unbelievable. — @staynobody

6. I try to explain to my kids during the movie that, in reality, even a cowardly lion would eat a girl and a little dog. — @cheeseboy22

7. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve visited Chernobyl. It’s 14. — @DanMentos

8. Just how hairy was the dude who invented a shampoo called Head & Shoulders? — Samuel H. Lowe

9. When the inventor of the USB stick dies they’ll gently lower the coffin, then pull it back up, turn it the other way, then lower it again. — @Cluedont

10. This movie has “adult situations”? So, they’re gonna, like, get acid reflux and try to set up direct deposit? — @Caissie

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

I tend to stay away from tweets that use the word “fuck” or variations on it. Probably a vestigial bit of family-newspaper discretion that, as some of you have noted, has not really stopped me from sprinkling the word now and then into this publication.

So I have created a separate poll this week that features only f-word tweets. I will not print the finalists here — not because the Picayune Sentinel is a family-friendly newsletter, but because there are a few of you who’d rather not be barraged by the word.

Does it add to the joke in each entry? I think so, otherwise I would have gently expurgated the tweet and used it in the regular weekly poll. You may feel otherwise.

I did not include this one because tweets with political themes tend to dominate others, but I enjoyed it very much:

I wrote a haiku for Trump, to help him through this difficult time: 
HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA 
HA HA HA. Fucker.
-- @elle91

Effin’ vote here. And for instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Tune of the Week

In the spirit of traditional music in which I’m marinating this week, I’m going to share a video I shot late one night on the campground at the Indiana Fiddlers’ Gathering outside of Lafayette the last weekend in June. Nearly everyone in old-time string band music plays this particular classic, but no one plays it quite as smoothly and cleverly as the amazing Roger Netherton of St. Louis, here just jamming with friends.

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

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