Posts Tagged ‘culture’

Interviews With Immigrants Lucy from Vietnam (and EWTN’s Daily Mass)

Posted: September 29, 2018 by datechguy in catholic, culture
Tags: , , , , ,
Lucy and me EWTN studios Irondale Alabama 9-6-18 (camera date was off)

The Latest in my series of Interviews with Immigrants is the incredible story of Lucy from Vietnam which I conducted during my trip to EWTN studios in Alabama at the beginning of the month.

If you are a person who regularly watches the Daily mass on EWTN you have seen Lucy in her white alb as she has not missed a mass in ten years.  If you’ve ever wondered who she is and wanted to know her story, here is your chance to hear it.

I had planned to get this interview up earlier but the Kavanaugh stuff ate up all the oxygen on the net

The full Interviews with Immigrants playlist:

Philippe: Haiti

Hanna:  Iraq

Alvin:  El Salvador

Maria:  the Dominican Republic (translated by Christian from Puerto Rico)

Lucine: Cape verde Islands

Donald:  Cameroon

Margaret Mary, England.

Lucy, Vietnam

And the updated map

DaTechGuyBlog.com The Lost Posts: Peter Davison, Doctor Who and the Heroics of Truth

Posted: July 24, 2017 by datechguy in culture, The lost posts
Tags: , ,

One note (3/26/23) I have started listening to the big finish doctor who again because it helps pass the time at my current job I just don’t treat the Whitaker stuff which I haven’t watched as canon

This post is a post lost when I lost my datechguyblog.com domain, it is being recovered via the wayback machine and inserted in my current blog on the date it was posted

What our age mostly does is appropriate the cultural creations of greater talents and make them into something other.

Mark Steyn

The coming of the SJW/Ghostbusters Doctor has radically changed some very ingrained habits of mine

I’ve not gone to the BBC site to check for updates. I’ve not visited Big Finish about upcoming new releases.  I’ve not done my weekly check of Amazon which offers excellent pricing on Bigfinish items if you don’t mind waiting a few months or more to get them nor checked Big Finish to see what new releases I should be looking out for.

In fact I have not bothered to watch a single episode of the series on demand, in repeats, via the VHS tapes that I started recording in 1981 nor listened to any other Big Finish episodes I own.  I haven’t even touched the ones I hadn’t heard or opened yet and I’m still debating if I’m even going to bother to listen to the end of the boxed set I was in the middle of because I’m simply no longer interested in the character called “The Doctor”

So given that lack of interest while I was away at the Catholic Marketing Network Conference (still wearing and bearing 4th Doctor Scarfs because they are MY trademark now) I had heard absolutely nothing concerning the series.  So imagine my surprise when the 3rd sentence out of my youngest son’s mouth when I walked though the door just after midnight Sunday morning after a week in Chicago was the news that at least one living Doctor, Peter Davison, not only gets why Jodi Whitaker as the Doctor is a mistake, but was willing to say so in public in front of a bunch of fans:

Peter Davison said she is a “terrific actress” but that he has doubts that she is right for the role.

He said before an appearance at Comic-Con in San Diego: “If I feel any doubts, it’s the loss of a role model for boys who I think Doctor Who is vitally important for.”

The veteran actor then commented: “So I feel a bit sad about that, but I understand the argument that you need to open it up.”

As you might guess it didn’t take long for the counterpunches to come, led by 6th Doctor Colin Baker.

“They’ve had 50 years of having a role model. So sorry Peter, you’re talking rubbish there – absolute rubbish,” the father of five said. “Well, you don’t have to be of a gender of someone to be a role model. Can’t you be a role model as people?”

Given his gender the use of “They’ve” is a tad odd in this context but in one sense Mr. Baker is right, one can be a role model regardless of gender, but the Doctor wasn’t a “role model” for boys, he was a HERO and it is the nature of men to desire and aspire to be a hero.

River Song:   I posed as his nurse. Took me a week.
12th Doctor:   To fall in love?
River Song: It’s the easiest lie you can tell a man. They’ll automatically believe any story they’re the hero of.

Doctor Who the Husbands of River Song 2015

To understand why this is important consider this spectacular piece from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University on what a hero was

The term “hero” comes from the ancient Greeks. For them, a hero was a mortal who had done something so far beyond the normal scope of human experience that he left an immortal memory behind him when he died, and thus received worship like that due the gods. Many of these first heroes were great benefactors of humankind: Hercules, the monster killer; Asclepius, the first doctor; Dionysus, the creator of Greek fraternities. But people who had committed unthinkable crimes were also called heroes; Oedipus and Medea, for example, received divine worship after their deaths as well. Originally, heroes were not necessarily good, but they were always extraordinary; to be a hero was to expand people’s sense of what was possible for a human being.

What a hero is

Today, it is much harder to detach the concept of heroism from morality; we only call heroes those whom we admire and wish to emulate. But still the concept retains that original link to possibility. We need heroes first and foremost because our heroes help define the limits of our aspirations. We largely define our ideals by the heroes we choose, and our ideals — things like courage, honor, and justice — largely define us. Our heroes are symbols for us of all the qualities we would like to possess and all the ambitions we would like to satisfy. A person who chooses Martin Luther King or Susan B. Anthony as a hero is going to have a very different sense of what human excellence involves than someone who chooses, say, Paris Hilton, or the rapper 50 Cent.

And how the concept has been perverted over the years

A couple years ago the administrators of the Barron Prize for Young Heroes polled American teenagers and found only half could name a personal hero. Superman and Spiderman were named twice as often as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Lincoln. It is clear that our media make it all too easy for us to confuse celebrity with excellence; of the students who gave an answer, more than half named an athlete, a movie star, or a musician. One in ten named winners on American Idol as heroes.

Gangsta rap is a disaster for heroism. Just this week, director Spike Lee lamented the fact that, while his generation grew up idolizing great civil rights leaders, today young people in his community aspire to become pimps and strippers. Surely no one wants their children to get their role models from Gangsta rap and a hyper materialistic, misogynistic hiphop culture, but our communities are finding it difficult to make alternative role models take hold.

In a age where there are so few male role model the concept of being a hero is important even in, as Greg Hodge at the Huffington Post notes everyday life

You must empower us to fully devote to you and here’s how you do it.

One word: HERO. It’s that simple. Men want to be heroes. Men project that need and desire onto women in order for them to live out their hero fantasies. Certainly, as men, we all go about it in different ways — we are all very different people — but we share this one unquenchable desire. Let your man be a hero every now and then, even if he is not feeling that heroic, even if you have to act. Remember, it’s that fleeting expression, that look of trust and admiration, that passing gesture, those few words that make us feel like your heroes.

So much is satisfied in men if you empower them to feel like heroes. You will reap the benefits.

To expand on this, think of how the rise of lawlessness and crime in communities paralleled the rise of single motherhood and absent fathers. The first Hero a young boy has IS his father and when that hero is gone he searches elsewhere,   As the strong father figures recede in western culture  it becomes vital that there be a hero for boys who can be defined by a speech like this

Winning? Is that what you think it’s about? I’m not trying to win. I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone, or because I hate someone, or because, because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun and God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works, because it hardly ever does. I do what I do, because it’s right! Because it’s decent! And above all, it’s kind. It’s just that. Just kind. If I run away today, good people will die. If I stand and fight, some of them might live. Maybe not many, maybe not for long. Hey, you know, maybe there’s no point in any of this at all, but it’s the best I can do, so I’m going to do it. And I will stand here doing it till it kills me. You’re going to die too, some day. How will that be? Have you thought about it? What would you die for? Who I am is where I stand. Where I stand, is where I fall. Stand with me

That’s why the Doctor was so important, Colin Baker remarks not withstanding boys need more than “role models”, they need HEROES they can aspire to be, Heroes who will face their fear at the cost of their lives, who will dangle from a cable to save worlds, who will give that last bit of anti-toxin to their friend rather than keep it for themselves, who will absorb energies to save a young girl just at the start of life or radiation to save an old man at the end of his years. It’s no coincidence that Colin Baker himself did not agree to a proper regeneration story until his doctor was given a proper heroic ending.

No matter how much the SJW warrior class feels otherwise, no matter how “established” the concept of time Lords switching gender is (and for the record it was only “established” because the show runner about to depart choose to establish it) these boys looking for heroes understand that no matter what face he carries the Doctor is One Single Person and no matter how much the media culture, the hollywood culture, the LGBT culture and the BBC culture wants to pretend otherwise, Jodi Whitaker’s “doctor” will not be a “role model” or an inspirational hero for boys because while the Russell Davies of the world are predominant in those cultures, out there in the actual world for every Russel T there are 100 or more boys who, while they might aspire to win or save a 35 year old woman they do not aspire to BE one.  Until the casting of Ms. Whitaker those boys could see themselves as the Doctor, now  even if the role goes to a man after Ms. Whitaker they can not.

Thus the Doctor, who was once a British institution, passes from the pantheon of male heroes who will inspire those boys who will become men and becomes just another character on just another TV show.

Peter Davison gets this even if Colin Baker does not and he will doubtless pay a price for it in media scorn (likely not enough to put him below Mr. Baker on the most popular doctors list) and perhaps even lost income from work not offered and convention invites unsent.  The elite media in England and the US  will doubtless such a result as Mr. Davison and those like me who agree getting their comeuppance It’s a final irony that the willingness of Mr. Davison’s to speak an honest truth against the grain is, dare we say it, heroic.

I suspect in those smug celebrations this those given by Mr. Hodge is well made

Don’t get me wrong — taking men down a peg or two is necessary on occasion; my wife has needed to do just that over the years, and she does it very well. But remember the stop button, ladies — cutting us off at the knees is not helpful to you. You don’t want to break us; if we are broken, we don’t work.

I’ll give the last quote to Scott Lafarge the professor who wrote that piece on heroes I’ve quoted

the ideals to which we aspire do so much to determine the ways in which we behave, we all have a vested interest in each person having heroes, and in the choice of heroes each of us makes.

The need for heroes is never more apparent than when they’re gone

Woody Allen to the Porn Industry…Faster Please (Content Warning) UPDATE Answering a 2022 question

Posted: February 4, 2014 by datechguy in culture
Tags: ,

Ick is just an argument about culture. It is the same argument that one would have heard concerning gay marriage less that 20 years ago.

DaTechGuy Richard Cohen Narcissist or Bigot 2008

Martin Rittenhome: Young man I sell over $14 million dollars a year worth of Geritol, Geritol, that’s the kind of businessman I am. That show twenty-one, cost me 3 1/2 million dollars year in and year out. Sales went up 50% when Van Doren was on. 50%! So the very idea that I was unaware of every detail or aspect of that show’s operation, well frankly it’s very insulting.

Quiz show 1994

UPDATE Oct 2022: The question has been raised as to how we’ve reached a point where so many people don’t see a problem with drag queens in schools, or sexualizing kids. This post from 2014 explains and to some degree predicts it:

Any smart advertiser will tell you the secret of establishing brand loyalty starts at an early age.  For example the Radio Shack Ad at the Superbowl is effective because it brought a bunch of faces that people remembered that they enjoyed from their youth.  If you want to animate a person bring them thoughts from their youth and watch them light up.

As the years go by a familiar label, a particular taste will trigger the pocketbook more even that quality.  The fact that humans are creatures of habit builds on this.

Bottom line if you want to get a generation to like, want or accept something you want to get them to be thinking it at an early age and you’ve likely got them for their entire life.

The same is true with cultural changes creating heroes and villains.  Change comes slow.  If you want to move the ball of the culture or values, you have to get the ideas into kids heads when they are young.  Get em while they’re young and you’ve got em.

Which brings us to a rather disturbing trend in the pornography industry that favors Woody Allen.

You might recall a while back I did a post on Tami Erin the Pippi Longstocking actress who has decided to rebrand herself as a sex star at age 40 and noted where that career path leads.

There are already plenty of younger more voluptuous women ready and willing to carry themselves more provocatively than Ms. Erin. It won’t take long for the novelty to fade and then the stray lesbian kiss, topless shot or swing around a pole will not be enough to retain the interest and procure the monies of the MichaelDick73′s JDogg77′s and Machette42′s of the world.

That’s the point when she is going to have to go a bit farther and then a bit farther again until a search for Tami Erin will turn up results on a niche category of older woman doing X, Y and Z on porn sites around the world

and in a later post I brought up 50 something performer Magdalene St. Michaels and her business model as savvy noting that she not only pushed and linked fan site but followed fans on twitter but promoted their tweets to make them feel included.

However business models aside in an age where practically no men under 30 have not seen online porn and a increasing amount of young women are fans of people like Ms. St. Michaels. Her pornographic films career can tell us a lot about where the culture is heading..

A quick glance of Ms. St. Michaels IMDB credits shows her primary work is in lesbian films. Now there is certainly no shortage of guys interested in,  as Brian Doyle Murray’s character in the Goode Family called it “hot lesbian action”,  one can presume that as a person who’s primary output is lesbian films would have a following among women. This is key to my point.

“But DaTechGuy”, you ask,”what does that have to do with Woody Allen?” Plenty.

Let’s start by looking at the list Ms. St. Michaels performances per her IMDB page. We find a set of titles beginning in 2007 with a particular theme

2011 Lesbian Seductions: Older/Younger 35 (Video)
2010 Lesbian Seductions: Older/Younger 32 (Video)
2010 Lesbian Seductions: Older/Younger 31 (Video)
2009 Lesbian Seductions: Older/Younger 27 (Video)
2009 Lesbian Seductions: Older/Younger 26 (Video)
2009 Lesbian Seductions: Older/Younger 25 (Video)
2008 Lesbian Seductions: Older/Younger 20 (Video) (as Magadalene)
2007 Lesbian Seductions: Older/Younger 17 (Video) (as Magdalene)
2007 Lesbian Seductions: Older/Younger 14 (Video) (as Magdalene)
2007 Lesbian Seductions: Older/Younger 13 (Video) (as Magdalene)

The series of movies began according to IMDB in 2005 for we basically had nearly a decade the last movie in the series #43 came out in 2012.

Ok so we have a theme of older women seducing younger women for sex and it’s a theme that    has been in play for a decade apparently selling enough to warrant 43 variants.

I wonder if Tonya Drueppel was a fan of the series?

However even a successful series like that one eventually runs into a brick wall, basically it gets boring over time, after all if you seen one woman seduce a younger one for sex you seen all 42 of them. So given the competitive nature of the industry a new hook was found and Ms. St. Michaels found gainful employment in it:

2012 Mother Daughter Exchange Club 24 (Video)
2011 Mother-Daughter Exchange Club 21 (Video)
2011 Mother-Daughter Exchange Club 18 (Video)
2010 Mother-Daughter Exchange Club 10 (Video)
2009 Mother-Daughter Exchange Club 6 (Video)
2008 Mother-Daughter Exchange Club 3 (Video)
2008 Mother-Daughter Exchange Club 2 (Video) (as Magdalene)
2008 Mother-Daughter Exchange Club 1 (Video) (as Madgalene)

As you might have guessed by the title the “plots” are pretty much a pair of lesbian mothers meeting socially, bringing their daughters and trading them off sexually. And of course all of these things take place place in nice houses with the most reasonable looking women talking about the most normal jobs and careers before paring off.

You would think that something like this might cross a line that it would not be all that popular. After all the idea of pimping off one’s daughter to a friend in order to have sex with that’s friends daughter isn’t something that you would expect to see in the now mainstream porn industry but their producer Girlfriend films which proclaims themselves on twitter to they’re nearly 57,000 followers as the #1 leader in lesbian films. is according to wikipedia set to release the 30th in the series this year.

Furthermore the series is packaged and set to specifically appear totally normal and totally acceptable to the average person that has had been taught by the prevailing media culture for two generations to divorce themselves from Judeo Christian values & norms that once prevailed.

I wonder if the series was a favorite of Kate Hunt?

But people being people and the sex being sex it gets old until after half a decade even the concept of trading off your daughter for sex becomes old hat.  So how do you keep the customer interested?

Fortunately for those trying to get people to buy once you’ve crossed the line on pimping out your daughter the next step is really easy and painfully obvious as per some of Ms. St. Michaels latest credits.

2012 Seduced by Mommy 5 (Video)
2012 Mommy & Me 4 (Video)
2012 Seduced by Mommy 4 (Video)

Yes you are reading that right, that series is all about mothers seducing daughters and vice versa although many of the scenes come with a disclaimer at the start by the “actresses” stressing they are not in fact related in any way. Given that such behavior would be a criminal felony that would seems a wise precaution.

Now you might think a series of this nature might be on the fringes of the increasingly mainstreamed porn industry, reduced to the “gonzo” category and considered beyond the pale even for them, reduced to rejected independent operators working out of damp & dirty apartments.

You would be wrong.

The list of 2014 AVN Award Nominees for “Best all girl series” include both the Mommy & Me series (now in its 8th edition and going strong) and the mother daughter exchange club series.

And if you react as most people might with “You’ve got to be kidding me” or something a tad more demonstrative for shame. After all who is puritanical old you to critique a series nominated for awards by their peers?

In fact as the company that produces both the “Seduced by Mommy” & “Mommy & me” series proclaims to their 15K strong twitter feed 15k followers that they are a “mom & pop” business “A lesbian company”any such objection might actually be considered a hate crime.

And the various series continue into this year include a new one

Another award winner I’m sure.

But the question still stands: What does any of this have to do with Woody Allen & Dylan Farrow? Just this:

For a solid decade a series of pornographic films explicitly directed toward woman have slowly been breaking down the barriers and moving the bar between what is considered acceptable behavior and what is not.

Young women, who will someday be mothers and the protectors of their daughters will be exposed to the idea of said daughters as desirable sexual objects for them. Something that can legally be advanced, first of course as fantasy to start but and after years of exposure to that type of thing it will go from “beyond the pale” to “just another porn movie” that is seen online.

Consider this line from Dylan Farrow’s piece this weekend:

These things happened so often, so routinely, so skillfully hidden from a mother that would have protected me had she known, that I thought it was normal. I thought this was how fathers doted on their daughters. But what he did to me in the attic felt different. I couldn’t keep the secret anymore.

When I asked my mother if her dad did to her what Woody Allen did to me, I honestly did not know the answer. I also didn’t know the firestorm it would trigger.

If twenty years ago when all of the stuff I’ve written about was WAY beyond the pale, when Porn was not easily accessible to the general public at home,  a young girl actually wondered if this stuff was normal, what will young women think when they’ve been inoculated to this for a decade? Stacy McCain had it pegged:

Popular culture has been so corrupt for so long that many young people are incapable of making any distinction between vice and virtue, categories that sophisticated people are expected to reject as old-fashioned, if not altogether obsolete or, indeed, hatefully oppressive. As for the attitudes of adults, well, they are supposed to strive for eternal youth, to conform both their appearance and their appetites to the fashionable standards prevailing among the most shamelessly adventurous adolescents.

he closes thus.

Welcome to America in 2013. Welcome to the New Abnormal.

And if the New abnormal is where it is today in 2013 where will it be in 2024?

If only Woody Allen had somehow managed to delay this letter from his daughter till that time it might have been a story where he might not even feel the need to deny it and perhaps Cate Blanchett might not even have felt the need to comment at all.

Meanwhile away from Hollywood in America proper the story continues…

Andrea Michelle Cardosa, 40, was arrested Monday in Riverside County, California, and charged with 16 felony counts after two former students accused her of sexually molesting them. One of the victims, Jamie Carrillo, made headlines last month when she posted a YouTube video of a phone conversation in which she confronted the teacher she said began having sex with her when she was only 12:

No word on if she was a fan.

Update: cleaned up paragraph starting with “Young women who will someday be mothers…” to make the point of the acceptance of such behavior more explicit

Update 2:  more grammatical clean up

Update 3: Fixed more grammatical errors and pulled the tip jar pitch and some dead graphics from the original post when I moved it to the new site

Last time I looked Maureen O’Hara and Olivia de Havilland were still alive

Posted: March 24, 2011 by datechguy in culture
Tags: , , , , ,

Only a very ignorant person can call Liz Taylor the last star of Hollywood’s Golden Era while O’Hara and de Havilland are still around.

Oh and I think considering Taylor was sleeping with her husband I think its classless to be interviewing Debbie Reynolds on Taylor.

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