Cosplay Girls

Cosplay, or costume play, is a pasttime in which participants dress up and role enact like their favorite fantasy characters, whether they come from space epics like Star Wars or Star Trek, anime characters, Disney characters, popular fiction, or others.  This is just a sampling of some of the more spectacular ones that might be encountered at Comic-Con or other gatherings where cosplayers might be in evidence.

Why cosplay?  Well, it's a holiday from the dailyness of everyday life, where the rules of dress and decorum are relaxed to some degree.  It's also a way of identifying with your favorite fantasy figures, be they astronautic, superheroine, mysterious, or even coyly sexy.  It's a setting that is relatively permissve, without being or being seen as tawdry.

Next time you see something on cosplay, check out the imagination of the participants.



Royalty

An appealing space costume

Sailor Moon and Other Sailor Senshi

Princess Lum

Fran



Nice costume

Yoko

Princess Leia

Arita Shion

Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus

The Good, the Bad, and the Tacky: Strange Team Mascots and Sportswear

First, the good and the bad (you pick what it is in both cases):

Amid a sea of lions, tigers, bears, and other sports teams with charismatic mascots, there are a few with unique or charming ones,  Here's a selection of the more unusual ones:

South Dakota Tech HardRockers

University of Delaware Blue Hens

Webster University Golorks

Centenary College Gentlemen

St. Louis University Billikens

Fayetteville Fire Antz (pro hockey)

University of Akron Zips

Idaho Vandals

Montgomery Biscuits (baseball)

University of California at Santa Cruz Banana Slugs

Willow Creek (MI) Nimrods

And now the tacky:

 

Several academic institutions have licensed sportswear that include string bikinis.  While team logo swimwear are excessive, wearing one on game day or to the game itself is over the top!

 

Go to this site to see certain examples:

 

http://www.totallycollegiate.com/clothes/swim.html

How Do You Know If He Loves You So . . . .?

Guys are different.  But especially preteen guys.  Here's a little romantic story involving preteens.  No, nothing objectionable, just sweet.  Indulge me, you all.

Despite concentrated efforts, sometimes children do have free, unorganized time, and they fill it in pretty much the same way that their parents and grandparents and others filled: now and then with a game involving several other kids based on who's available.  And, things being the way they are, they have a fair amount of admixture in who gets to participate: both boys and girls, varieties of ages, ability levels, anything to get a full team out on the field.  And if there isn't enough available, they knock on doors and ask.

This is how I managed to make the summons, otherwise, I would have been content to watch She-Ra or Xena or other fine televised fare for kids.  The game in question was softball; and at 12 I was not celebrated for my batting or fielding skills.  Yup, it's "You can play right field, Angel!"  I knew my place.  Any typically I was the last one chosen.

And the teams were formed by having the honchos take turn choosing, first deciding who gets first choice by catching the bat and grasping it in turn, then measuring whose hand is higher on the bat.  (I'm sure there's a sports-related term for this method, it seems steeped in sports tradition.) 

The team leaders typically choose who they think the best players are, and as they alternately go through the kids available, the remaining ones are increasingly forcibly reminded of their diminished status. while the earlier-chosen ones get to preen.  [Note: when pre-teens preen, it isn't pretty.]  It's particularly shaming to be the last one chosen, and some last-chosen decamp and run for home due to the ignominy instead of sucking it up and playing.

That's a reality of playground-driven teams.  There's a Darwinian subtext there.  To be the last one chosen is utterly shameful.  And both before and after the game, there's the solitary post-selection Walk of Shame for you!  No less for girls than for boys!

Anyway, the designated team captains were midway through the choices, and I was waiting to being called last, and ready to blush with mortification when that happened.  To my surprise, however; I heard my name called, right smack in the middle of the choices.

I took that as a sign that the boy liked me.  Or even loved me.  And it dawned on me that he seemed to show more interest in talking to me beforehand. 

Guys like that deserve a kiss,  But maybe privately.  I know enough about guys to know that he would be hooted by the other boys for getting a PDA!

Ecdysiastaphobia and a Community College's Answer to It

The strip-tease show, while tacky, seems to unduly upset some people whether for moralistic or aesthetic reasons.  While I can understand the negative response to the term "gentlemen's clubs" in terms of its unwarranted assumption of quality in the attendees there, the typical entertainment that they have is of a low variety.  Still, the stripper is part of the scene.  This was not always  case: some ecydsiasts, to use the term coined first by Henry L. Mencken, were of first-rate talent, seductiveness, and entertainment quality: think of Gypsy Rose Lee, Blaze Starr, Linda Brigette, Lily St. Cyr, and others of the catwalk.

As a former mayor Martin Behrman of New Orleans once observed with regard to prostitution, "You can make it illegal, but you can't make it unpopular."

Anyway, Dr. Chauncey L. Tiddle, President of Swampland Community College in Florida, realized that stripping was a high-paying, seemingly recession-proof job, and he envisioned* this as a possible major to be developed and first offered by his community college.  Certainly, it would earn Swampland CC considerable publicity; even if some of it would come in the form of tut-tut-tuts from the Gray Strumpet in NYC or Faux News.

Some of the envisioned classes could also serve as electives for bored housewives or mistresses-to-be:

Introduction to the Strip Tease

Elementary Poledancing

Selecting the Stripper Wardrobe

Elementary Bump and Grind Techniques

Effective Clothing Discard Techniques

Effective Customer Relations

Encouraging Costume Money Inserts

The Stripper's Gaze as a Performance Feature

It was further felt by Dr. Tiddle, that with the establishment of a coherent curriculum for Professional Ecdysiast Specialists, it would lend a boost of respectability to the profession!  Already the regional academic accreditation association is studying the proposed curriculum, and they are planning to send a visiting team to several strip joints in the Miami area to evaluate the possibilities for a Professional Ecdysiast Specialist major!.

 

The new major served an additional purpose: Persons suffering from ecdysiastaphobia could get over their fear by taking the introductory course, whether they were viewers or performers.

 

*Only college presidents, business CEOs, and national-level politicians can envision; the rest of us just have ideas or notions.  Sorry.  Visions are left to those possible users of hallucinogens.

Waxing Indignant Over Trivia

"Don't sweat the petty things; and don't pet the sweaty things" is equally apropos. 

Anyway, since few people are showing proclivities toward fondling perspiring objects, I thought I would comment on the other.

There are real things out there to worry about.  Some are obvious; and I can give you a detailed list of what I think should be worried about that may not completely fit in with any list that you generate.  And there are some things only in the distant future, like the next ice age or are improbable, like the Presidency of Tila Tequila!  Oh, I don't know:  we might someday elect poorly-tattooed attention-craving idiots, I guess.  Do Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann have tattoos?

We're realistically limited as to what we can do with real problems.  Hell, the President and other world leaders have only so much control over things, and events don't always go according to plan.  That's life.  That's the way it is.  Uhh-huh.

Well, here's where getting one's knickers in a knot over trivia comes in.  Let's look at the things that make some people hot and bothered lately: vuvuzelas, Twilight, Lady Gaga, Kate Gosselin, the Octomom, NBA player salaries, dumb things that pols or radio shock jocks say.  Is there a little overreaction here?  Seriously, other than the unpleasant sound of those horns, these are all tiny acne spots in the course of life.  It was the same with other things: how many people got incensed over Britney Spears?  Or other things.  I'll bet you can think of a song or two or a movie that generated controversy at one time, and now, retrospectively, seems inconsequential. 

A quick quiz? Whose breast did Justin Timberlake expose during that infamous 'wardrobe malfunction' at halftime in the Super Bowl?  Okay, now was it the left or right one?  Finally, which teams played in that Super Bowl?  I'll bet that you can answer the first one, and maybe the second one, but not the last one.  Do you see what I mean?

My theory is that people use these trivial things as a means of focusing their anxieties and attention on to something that is more manageable, rather than something really scary, like a pandemic.  In that way, we navigate haphazardly through life using maps that say that in some places "There be dragons here," and studiously avoid sailing in those uncharted waters.  But why should we go into the extreme South Atlantic, when we can loll on Ipanema or cruise Alaska's Inside Passage while drinking Margaritas?  Getting exercised over trivia takes out some of the worry of being. 

 

 

 

A Rose Could Smell as Sweet



Brigitte Bardot rose

It's interesting that rose cultivars are sometimes named after celebrities.  In addition to these depicted, there have also been roses named for Dolly Parton, Queen Elizabeth, Audrey Hepburn, Julia Child, LeeAnn Rimes, Rosie O'Donnell, John F. Kennedy, Christian Dior, Sylvie Vartan, and others.   Here's a pretty full list, if you're curious:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rose_cultivars_named_after_people

A complete omission in rose nomenclature are roses named for Vice-Presidents and other politicians.  Can you deal with a Joe Biden or a Don Quayle rose?  And would it smell as sweet?  Somehow, any rose named after a politician might be dubious in this case.  Maybe, if there are cultivars of the Ginkgo tree, described as a living fossil that produces seeds that smell bad.  That species could be reserved for politicians.  Or even better, some of our current Members of Congress!

I couldn't pass up the metaphor.

 

Reba McEntire rose

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The Expectation of Privacy

The recent publication of topless pictures of Princess Kate have launched a lot of comments regarding her advisability for not wearing her bikini top, whether her privacy was invaded, and whether the pictures should have been published.

They were.  The photographer violated her privacy grossly, zeroing in on the couple by using a long distance lens.  And the magazines, by publishing them, were complicit.

Probably she was too comfortable that the setting was private, and that she was beyond lens range.  Not so, it turned out.  Still, there is the generally accepted expectation of privacy that seems to have been violated.  It's no different than if one of us elected to sunbathe nude in one's own yard behind an 8-foot high privacy fence.

So, we have a princess who made a bad call, a weasel of a photographer (my apologies to any weasels who might be offended), and some sleazy publications.  But what's else?

Well, the readers of the publication and the internet users do have a place in this sorry story, too.  If they feel that those pictures were obtained improperly, and that Princess Anne's privacy was violated, then they should not buy the magazine that published them ever or click on any internet links leading to the pictures.  And if there's less of an audience for this sort of stuff, the value of the pictures like this diminishes and the paparazzi will need to find some other disreputable pursuit.

And, a special comment for the Brits:  She's a Royal Princess.  She might be your Queen someday!  Do you really want people to look at your Queen semi-naked?

Tara Reid below seems to be spoofing the sense of privacy; or possibly ironically commenting on it being a forelorn hope.  But this sense of privacy is real and important.