Suck was a pro-sexuality feminist magazine, founded in Britain in 1969. It’s mission was to rescue sex from the tits ‘n’ ass male perspective. Although hardcore, in prose and pictures, it was not intended as specifically masturbatory material like Screw magazine. Greer’s picture was deliberately unsexy, basically performance art.
She thought all the editors were to contribute such photos but if they did Suck ran only hers, leading her to quit it, sinking the magazine.
Here’s a good article on the fascinating history of Suck, spoilered because it’s most definitely NSFW.
Let’s try a different take that was mentioned before. You’re at the movies and someone in the movie throws a football from one side of the screen to the other. No physical object moved from one side of the screen to the other side of the screen, it was simply a series of static photos projected onto the screen that gives the illusion of something moving.
A laser dot is the same, the dot is a projected image, then we see similar images projected in different places at different points in time, giving the illusion of motion. That illusion of motion is not bound by relativity.
When I first had the concept explained to me, the example used was a gigantic pair of scissors, light years long. When the scissors are closed, the spot where the blades meet moves forward faster than the speed of light, even though no part of the scissors do. That spot, like the dot of a laser pointer, is conceptual, not physical.
Each instance of the dot can be considered a physical object, but a separate and ephemeral one - created by a different bunch of photons. None of the physical dots travel at all, let alone at speed.
YIL (yesterday I learned) that, 30 years before the US Surgeon General’s 1964 report on the dangers of smoking, scientists in Nazi Germany had begun amassing evidence that smoking caused many health risks. And that the German government had a fairly extensive, if not very effective, official campaign against smoking from 1933 to 1945.
The general tendency for anything new that gives us capabilities we didn’t have before is to overdo it. There has often been a considerable lag time between the discovery of a drug and the realization of its drawbacks and problems. This was the case for opium, morphine and heroin, psychedelics, tranquilizers, cocaine, the use of strychnine(!) as a stimulant, and yes methamphetamine as well. Meth was generally regarded as a harmless energy booster; it wasn’t until the 1960s generation began to widely abuse it as a recreational drug that the insidiousness of meth became more apparent.
Der Fuhrer was a well known anti-tobacco … nazi. It was apparently forbidden to smoke in his presence. I think it was probably the Speer book, someone anyway mentioned they knew the end was getting REALLY near, when the close inner circle was like “Fuck it” and smoked anywhere they wanted, the hell with that lunatic.
I was reading an article in Sci-Am many years ago that was examining the relationship between maize and teosinte, primarily from an evolutionary perspective. About maize, the noted “After its discovery in the New World, within a generation, it had spread throughout Europe, within a century, the world. The only other New World discoveries that spread as quickly were tobacco and syphilis.”
Tobacco has been around a long time. It was fairly popular in the 19th century. Granted, health care was less sophishicated back then, and people just hoped to live as long as they could, so tobacco’s health effects were less obvious.
On the other hand, back then we did not have large corporations manipulating the tobacco to optimize its addictiveness. And adding shit like menthol to make it easier to smoke. I suspect that, handled reasonably, tobacco could well be far less damaging than the contemporary product is.
I’d have thought that potatoes would have spread even faster. Today, they’re considered an integral part of “traditional” cuisines across Europe and Asia, while maize is, even if used, still considered distinctively American.
I have a theory that corn didn’t work as a staple in Europe because they weren’t nixtamalizing it, which gives rise to a disease called pellagra, so it was used more for feeding livestock than humans.
Maize travels much more easily (seeds) than potatoes (tubers) on lengthy sea voyages. Also, maize is not part of a family of plants that includes toxic berries – I mean, not that the early explorers were sophisticated taxonimists, but parts of the potato plant are poisonous.
Maize did find a niche in Italy as polenta, which originally was made from any number of different grains.
As for tobacco although the specific connection to lung disease was a 20th century discovery, it had long been considered a “vice”- generally if not specifically unhealthy
In plenty of countries. In northern Spain, they make thick tortillas called talos in the Basque Country and savory empanadas in Galicia. In the latter region and parts of Portugal, they mix it with other grains to make bread. As far as I know, it’s unnixtamalized.
At first you’re lead to think the other people are pulling out suicide pills to join Hitler, who had just suicided. But then you realize that, now that he’s gone, they can finally smoke again.