Who the hell is this Crumb bum anyway?
It’s been slow in the pit since this pay-to-post shit. The pitters and pittees neeeeeed bloooood, Seymor!
Sam
He may not care, but the rest of the world does. You don’t see many CEOs or congressmen with sloppy grooming. There was one slob congressman, but they threw him in the pokey.
You dont **have ** to feel anything - you choose to feel guilty b/c you care what strangers on the street think of you. Why do you assume that no one gave a second glance to the disheveled guy with the beer gut? You did, so there were probably others who did as well. I find that people generally don’t discriminate in their disgust for people who dress like slobs.
Before I ever clicked on your link I knew you had to be talking about Traficant. I used to live in Ohio, near his district. And frankly, he was such a total nut job that I was pulling for him to retain his seat. He couldn’t have been more of a waste than the rest of the politicians, and he had entertainment value. My point is not whether buddy with the gut was ever going to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Nobody thinks it’s the least bit strange that he would walk around like that. They may have mentally assigned him to some particular walk of life, but they wouldn’t say a thing if instead of the street he was hanging on the beach. Nobody ever hears a thing about men hating to wear a bathing suit. Because looks aren’t supposed to be what it’s all about for men. They are expected to look just as bad in their leisure time as they like. They are off duty. Don’t shave, wear your oldest, most torn, stained clothes, and run to the store when you run out of something, no biggie, it’s your day off. I want my day off! I want the day when nobody thinks twice about my looking like a slob because I’m off duty. Up to and including wearing next to nothing because it’s too damn hot, and nobody gives a damn that I’m middle-aged, plump and stretched marked. Cause it’s too damn hot to care. Thank you, I feel better now.
Ya know, usually I’m one of the first people to flip about “Fat people are grooooooooooos” threads. However, this doesn’t seem to be one. Seemed like kind of an innocious observation from a guy that’s been looking for ladies recently.
Sort of a “Huh - chicks are getting bigger.” Personally, it seems like people are projecting a bit.
YMMV.
Please. Of course slobbish men get attention - negative attention, at that. Your own posts are an example of this. When I see a man wearing a torn, dirty t-shirt, I wonder to myself why he doesn’t buy a three-pack of clean fresh ones just like it for $5 at Whatever-Mart. When I see hanging, hirstute beer-bellies, I cringe. And as for swimsuits, I personally know plenty of men who make an effort to find trunks that they look halfway presentable in.
If I saw your beer-gutted example walking down the street, then stepped into the grocery store and saw you in your stained and tattered ‘leisure clothes’ [how one can be comfortable in dirty and torn clothing I may never fathom, but YMMV], I can say with all honesty that my reaction towards both of you would be about the same: “Well, I sure as hell wouldn’t leave home like that, but if he/she is comfortable that way more power to 'em.”
Have your day off. Really. I guarantee most people don’t give you a second thought, or think any worse of you than a disheveled looking guy.
Women are getting chunkier because we’re all congregating in ice cream parlors while we hide from the OP, obviously.
No, no, Crazy Cat Lady, it’s because we’re all in our non-UK cars, driving around…
Instead of walking…which has caused us all to be gasp chunky!
'Course, judging from his creepy post in the “wimmen” thread about looking for 13 year-olds, I don’t know that it’s so much chunky that’s not attractive to him, rather sounds like he doesn’t like the secondary sex characteristics of post-pubescent women. :rolleyes:
FaerieBeth -size 12, and proud bearer of some serious T&A
Amen to that. (Can I say that without being beaten on with that enormous thing wielded by either you or Stonebow?)
I’m pudgy and my husband thinks I’m the cutest thing on two feet. Ha!
NonPolar
I take it you’re not a long-time lurker.
If you were, you would be aware of what others have alluded to: several people have started threads not unlike this one, and the ferocity of the response was truly awesome to behold. However, for some reason (possibly your Yakov Smirnoff literary style), people have been (so far, anyway) pretty benign.
To quote from the great movie History of the World, Part I:
“Get off the fat jokes!!!”
I think the reason people have been “benign” with **nonpolar ** is his entertainment value on a board that otherwise tends to be so darned earnest.
Perhaps that’s why most non North Americans are welcomed here. We function as a kind of Shakespearean fool, saying the kind of things that Americans would like to say but are too prudish to say.
Dons helmet and hunkers down into shelter
My interpretation, could be wrong:
He was waiting for someone his brother said shared his interests, had been the same places, etc.
A black man came up to him and said “Hello, you must be…”
He just looked at him blankly, until further explanation was given.
The damage, then, may be that he did not immediately think the man was the one he was waiting for. After all, what are the chances some other man would come up and say “you must be (name)”, besides the man he was meeting? Perhaps unconsciously the fact that the man was black made him not see it immediately, and this was noticed by the man, and soured any possible friendship.
The brother could have prevented this simply by saying that the man was black. But politcal correctness has gone so far that some people avoid even saying something as harmless (and in this case helpful) as that.
Was I not supposed to answer this seriously?
Nightime, you have a great mind! Right on the money.
I was alluding to Kallessa’s story about the grief she was given for calling someone a ‘blind guy’:
“It’s like the time some idiot chided me for identifying the person I was talking about as “Jim, you know, the blind guy”, because it devalued him as a person to be referred to by his lack of sight. Bullshit. It was something people noticed about him, so it was a good way of letting someone know who I was talking about.”
Full post at #52 above.
There’s room for all sorts and all types of views, DT - or should be.
Nonpolar might appear to be a basket case, but can anyone who says he likes 13-15 year old girls - who comes out and says that - be so bad? There are many men (and not a few women, I would guess) who are attracted to young women of this age. Acknowledging as much might be shocking but it is hardly a precursor of a likely Humbert Humbert in our midst. Rather the opposite, I would have thought.
I’ve never been a one for glib phrases like “walk the walk”, but one I coined myself a long time ago was “If you expose it, you depose it”, meaning that if you talk about something, it usually loses any negative power it might have.
That’s how I read it, and I would’ve thrown in the projection observation had I felt like getting myself involved in some shitstorm.
Of course the guy’s gonna notice the girls. He’s a heterosexual male (from the sounds of it.) It’s totally natural. While the caveat about guys may seem like an afterthought, I think it was meant in earnest. There’s no indication to me that the OP is trying to be an asshole. If he is a foreigner, which it seems he is, it’s a perfectly normal observation. Our men and women here are a lot bigger than most other places in the world. Having lived in Europe for the five years, let’s just say it’s been a bit of an adjustment period since I came back in November of last year. Everything is bigger in America. Whether it’s good or bad, hey, that’s up to your tastes.
OK, I’ll make an honest attempt at an answer.
Yes we’ve got an obesity problem in this country. And no it’s not just young girls, it’s all of us.
However perhaps it’s a bit more noticeable in young girls because over the last couple of years fashion trends have moved to hiphugger jeans, tight midriff-baring shirts and so on. Girls could have stayed the exact same size but there’s a lot more visible, and they are packing themselves into clothes that are designed to squeeze flesh out in all directions.
Britney Spears with her battalion of personal trainers, dieticians and exercise gurus will look very different in that outfit than a normal, developing 12 year old girl.