Really Good Quotes

Greetings, Quotaholics:

A new Criminal Justice Bill, about to become law in England, attempts to regulate what is being called extreme pornography.

According to a BBC article the bill came about, in part, because of the efforts of the mother of a murder victim. The murderer was found to have been accessing violent porn on the internet. “Supported by her local MP, Martin Salter, she found a listening ear in then home secretary, David Blunkett, who agreed to introduce legislation to ban the possession of ‘violent and extreme pornography’.”

“Under the new rules, criminal responsibility shifts from the producer - who is responsible under the OPA (Obscene Publications Act) - to the consumer.”

This seems to be the same type of regulation that currently applies to child pornography in most countries. It would continue to be illegal to produce this type of material in England but it would now be illegal for an individual to own it.

I suspect that, like me, it’s hard for you to understand why someone would want to look at porn depicting women being raped, tortured, or murdered. However there are apparently people who do, so there are people producing it and websites displaying it.

I would think that most of us would agree that having these “producers” put out of business would be a good thing. But is it a good idea to criminalize the possession of this stuff by the individual? We’ve seen cases of child porn being downloaded onto someone’s computer without their knowledge. Won’t the same problem exist with illegal extreme pornography?

According to the article the new bill defines extreme pornography this way;
1) An act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life
2) An act which results in or appears to result in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals
3) An act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse
4) A person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal

Well, it’s hard to argue with that list! Except for the fact that examination of mainstream motion pictures would find pretty much all these topics depicted.

The one that jumps out at me is the first one, “An act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life”. This pretty much describes at least one scene in every action, mystery, thriller, and horror movie ever made.

When politicians write bills like this, don’t they run the risk of criminalizing far more than they intend to? If we criminalize ownership of films that “appear” to show these acts, might we all find ourselves facing charges for mainstream movies we currently own?

Is this law needed? Is it workable? Do you think that viewing violent porn leads to violent acts being committed? Do you think that it might be true that violent people may own violent porn, but all people who own it are not violent?

Only watching Disney,

Isn’t it worth $1 a month to you to keep RGQ going?  Please click the link and direct your contribution to reallygoodquotes@yahoo.com.

"I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member." - Groucho Marx

"I intend to live forever, or die trying." - Groucho Marx

The E-Mail
[Thanks to Dora in Denver]

An Illinois man left the snowy streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick e-mail. Unable to find the scrap of paper on which he had written her e-mail address, he did his best to type it in from memory. Unfortunately, he missed one letter, and his note was directed instead to the wife of an elderly preacher who had passed away only the day before.

When the grieving widow checked her e-mail, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor dead.

At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen: "Dearest Wife, Just got checked in. Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Your Loving Husband. P.S. Sure is hot down here."

E-Mail the Imp

Once again a reputable scientific journal, Science News, has published an article that predicts a possibly starving population in a few years. They don’t state flatly that we will be facing starvation but they do point out the tremendous increase in meat protein consumption world wide in the past 55 years.

Rib eyes on the hoof and pork chops wallowing in the mud bring to mind calm pastoral settings with lush green pastures and cool running streams. Think about that fish steak or fillet that adorns your dinner plate and you can envision hordes of salmon swimming upstream or schools of tuna frolicking in the sea.

In actuality it’s more like death row in a maximum security prison for the bovines and swine; packed together and force fed to fatten them up with toxic waste running off to foul the ground water and the oceans downstream. As for fish, those not caught in the open ocean are farm raised as deplorably as their land brethren; being crammed together to fatten up, with the same problems of fouling the environment.

Raising livestock for the table also uses up resources that are becoming scarcer, raising the cost of meat nearly as fast as the cost of fuel. Grain for feed is becoming more expensive as much is being diverted for conversion to bio fuels. Water is disappearing from aquifers to grow the grain faster than rainfall can replenish it. The changing climate patterns are forcing more artificial irrigation than ever before. The land and energy needed to produce 1,000 calories of grain and legumes (like soy), is a fraction of what it takes to produce 1,000 calories of beef or catfish.

So the author of the article, Janet Raloff, is once again sounding a clarion call for humans to turn to mini livestock for a protein source. That’s insects by golly! She writes, “There was a time and place where the arrival of hordes of locusts blackening the skies was a period for rejoicing. Hungry farmers would see this as a smorgasbord of animal protein that could be gathered by the bucketsful.”

When the price of beef gets too high, I can see a lot of people taking up hunting as a way to put meat on the table. Instead of buying Savage .270’s and Winchester .30-30’s to go out and shoot Bambi, they’ll be buying butterfly nets to round up locusts and grasshoppers. Back yards will be full of scrap lumber piles to raise termites for Sunday dinner. City dwellers will have butterfly farms on their roofs instead of pigeon coops so they can harvest caterpillars. The Bubba’s of the south will stockpile road kill to raise maggots for the markets up north.

It will be a major blow to the economy however, when companies like Terminex and Orkin go out of business.

The Bad Sied 

Email Kirsten

“When angry, count to four. When very angry, swear.”
~ Mark Twain ~

When I was a kid, I used to go on grocery shopping trips with my grandma. It used to take all day, not because my grandma was unreasonably slow, but because things were just done differently in those days. We would go to the greengrocer for fruits and vegetables, and the baker for bread and pastries. We would get headache tablets from the pharmacy, meat from the butcher, and chocolate bars from the confectionary. Then we would go to the grocery store for everything else. At some point during the outing, we would go to the post office, where my grandma would go up to the counter and talk to an actual person, who would give her whatever mail had come in for her over the previous week. We would stop at the bank where a bank teller would give my grandma a cash withdrawal from her account. With all of these stops, it is no wonder that the shopping took all day. It is also no wonder that my grandma’s dog, an annoying Fox Terrier named Charka Charlie, would sit in the car howling the entire time.

By contrast, when I went grocery shopping this afternoon, it took less than an hour. I went to a drive-thru bank machine to get cash out, then I went to the grocery store to get fruit, vegetables, bread, meat and all other groceries. My only other stop was Wal-Mart, to get some nutrition shakes that aren’t carried by the grocery store. After that I went to the Tim Hortons drive-thru to get coffee for myself and cookies for the kids, and I arrived home a little more than an hour after leaving.

Things happen a lot more quickly these days than they used to. We have mastered the art of one-stop shopping; we can get a burger or a cup of coffee or some cash without getting out of the car; credit card transactions are instantaneous; if we need to make a phone call or send an email we can just whip out a Blackberry instead of pulling over to the nearest payphone or Internet cafe. Instead of writing letters and mailing them we can just send an email.

The business of daily living is undeniably fast and convenient. This same speed and convenience, however, is being blamed for the fact that people are getting a lot angrier these days. We as a society have lost the capacity for patience. If our grocery order is not rung through fast enough, we get mad at the cashier. If the car in front of us fails to move fast enough when the light turns green, we experience an episode of road rage. When our Internet connection goes down, we go into a flat panic because we cannot get anything done.

We all know that anger can be detrimental to our health. Unresolved anger in women can lead to depression; in men it can lead to aggression. In both men and women, anger is a risk factor for stroke and coronary heart disease. Health care professionals agree that anger just isn’t worth it. If something makes us mad, the best thing for us to do is simply let it go. But we are all human, and we cannot always avoid getting ticked off. And if we do get mad, the thing to do is vent and let it out, rather than suppressing it. Studies show that men who suppress their anger are twice as likely to have strokes and heart attacks as those who let off a bit of steam.

The top ten list of Canadian pet peeves is as follows:
1) Queue-jumpers
2) Dog-walkers who do not clean up after their pets
3) People who disrespect their elders
4) Telemarketers
5) People who ignore greetings
6) People who don’t turn off their cellphones in movies
7) Bank machine fees
People who use cellphones while driving
9) People who swear in public
10) Racist jokes

So if you are a bad-mannered telemarketer who cuts into line and drives while using a cellphone, tells racist jokes that include profanities, and leaves dog poop lying around, you’re not going to be too popular in Canada.

Kaleidoscopically yours,
Kirsten

If dear Bonnie hadn’t come through,
We’d be in a hell of a stew,
‘Twas only she who wrote
It’s not a great boat
To be in…but she wrote, how about you?!

Next opening line…
My paycheck last week was so low…

Hints:  There’s a great rhyming dictionary at http://www.rhymezone.com/
Limerick rules.  http://freespace.virgin.net/merrick.sheldon/limerickrules.htm 

Submit Opening Line
Submit Limerick

Questions? Comments? Want to contribute a joke or a quote or an image? Feel free to e-mail at reallygoodquotes@yahoo.com. We’d love to hear from you! We’ll even publish your comments, if they make any sense!

If you’d like to receive RGQ by email, please send a blank e-mail to reallygoodquotes-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

We can’t imagine why you’d want to, but if you choose to unsubscribe, please send a blank e-mail to reallygoodquotes-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com. Should you choose to unsubscribe, please e-mail us and tell us why. We listen to what people say, even if they’re leaving us.