My.

But is it an oreo sandwich or a nutter-butter?

We don't care!

Inquiring South Carolingians want to know.

Of course, most of those terms are silly anyway.

But I am at risk for Clintoning, so I shall let that one lie.

Challenging the verb be is never going to make people happy.

Ah, I never understood this whole fad of putting people in specific sexual orientation boxes.

That’s what I meant.

Anyway, is there a difference between queer and gay? Apart from the obvious historical one, that is.

People are just people. Some people do some things at one time or another, while others do not. That doesn't mean anyone “is” “something”.

@terdon I have no clue.

I associate queer with Brits of one or two generations back but I wasn't aware of any subtle distinction between queer and gay

Perhaps queer is political, whereas gay means you have at at least one single point in your life contemplated or even executed an erotic encounter with a member of your own sex, no matter how drunk, fleeting, insincere, passionate, or remunerated. It's like white + black = black, and white + white + white + black = black in that a single drunken fling at 16 tars you gay for life, no matter what your wife says.

Indeed, apparently being gay is a sexually transmitted disease.

You know, two nights ago I told a fellow and his wife who revealed that he has four gay siblings that it's obvious contagious. :)

:)

On a different note, my Dad just stumbled upon this guy. He's hilarious:

Then again, the two of them are also in a long-term "trouple" relationship with a third individual (raise kids together, ten and twenty years together).

Holy shit, the neighbor's party just segued from Jailhouse Rock to Macarena. WTF?

@tchrist Really? Is it working out?

For more than ten years.

Well, good for them!

5 kids.

Great, I love hearing about non standard relationships. It's a shame they're not, well, more standard.

And the guy never thought he would ever have anything at all but with his wife until the third fellow came into their lives and both he and his wife fell in love with the new guy. That's when I said he must have caught it from his siblings. :)

Heh. So an equilateral triangle? Everyone's into everyone else?

The queerest thing is that most of his gay siblings disapprove of their threeway marriage.

@terdon How could it be otherwise?

She claims to be an anti-Mormon.

:)

She collects husbands.

@tchrist Bob likes Harry, Harry likes Mary, Mary likes Bob. Or, more likely, Bob and Harry like Mary and get on with but are not sexually attracted to each other.

Man, the Mormons must really hate her :)

I don’t see that working out long-term.

Nope, but you never know.

Then again, I was never in it for the long-term when those have happened to me. :)

Dunno, I've thought of it. I've been with my lover and my best friend and that was fine. I could imagine it for longer term, it's just never really come up.

Yeah, that.

My girlfriend and my best friend at the time.

Later, other scenarios.

Yes, that is a beautiful thing. There's affection on all sides of the triangle.

The older I get, the more publicly blasé I get about all the dumb labels. I mean, I’ve always thought they were dumb, but I largely kept that opinion under wraps because it just attracts lightning bolts.

Depends on the company and how much I care, for me. I won't react too much if I'm talking with a cab driver during a ten minute ride but I can grind a dinner conversation to a halt over this kind of thing.

Despite being relatively straight.

I cannot adequately convey what a little island of thought I grew up in, not just divorced or in opposition with conventional viewpoint, but genuinely and sincerely 100% ignorant of it.

Hippies?

Essentially.

Was that a good thing? In retrospect? Would you have chosen it given the chance?

These weren’t dirty druggies. These were hardworking organic food / no-advertising types.

So yes.

@tchrist Didn't think they would be, I was just curious if the adult still approved.

And I have nothing against hippies. I was kind of obsessed with that movement as a kid.

I don’t think I would like myself if I had all those society-bigotries hammered into me.

Yup.

This includes racial ones and socio-economic ones.

Grandma always said that anybody who’s fit to sweep your floor is good enough to sit down to the dinner table with you, no matter how poor, no matter how colored or whatnot they were. To think otherwise disgusts me.

Absolutely.

Or cut your grass or whatever. People are people.

The weirdest thing of all is perhaps this: I didn’t learn about heterosexuality until I was like 14 or 15.

I don’t mean I didn’t have sex with girls until then.

Hm, although I think that's probably about the right timeframe.

I NEVER KNEW IT WAS A THING!!!!

Hang on, how come?

I don’t know.

You mean exclusive heterosexuality?

Yes.

Ah, OK

I didn’t know it existed.

But you were aware that heterosexual sex was a thing, right?

Then when I started to mix socially more, I was pretty sure that these people were crazy.

@terdon Well, duh.

I was as much a dabbler in it as anybody.

I just didn’t know the other was off-limits.

OK, that's what confused me.

Nobody ever told me.

Maybe it was hippie parents.

As for people are people, I grew up in a time and social surrounding where most of my peers had live-in maids. It always shocked them when I would introduce myself to them just like I did to their parents and would talk to the maids in the plural.

I mean, I was a 13 year old kid and here was this woman who'd left her life and family behind to work her fingers to the bone serving my food and I was supposed to ignore her or treat her like my inferior?

We had ideas about right and wrong, but I swear by all that anybody would ever swear on that the gender of who you “played” with simply never entered that. They never mentioned it!

I may have spent all my high school years thinking most everybody else was nuts.

That's really great. I was lucky, my sister who's 10 years older, had explained to me that she was bi when I was quite young. Prejudices never stood a chance, I idolized her.

Whether I’ve improved, I’m not even sure.

I don't think that has anything to do with your childhood. That's pretty much the norm, really.

Either that, or you are nuts, just like the rest of 'em.

My folks of course talked to us about sex. They just never talked about it in some opposite-sex-only way. They never presumed so much.

That does take some linguistic calisthenics with respect to pronouns though.

I already knew that a lot of other kids were full of shit.

Ah, but how old were you when you figured out that you were, as well?

So when after I’d already been sexually active for a couple of years, maybe three, I started to learn there were such things as exclusive heterosexuals, I thought they were either confused or lying or sad.

@terdon No teenager ever thinks themself full of shit.

@tchrist Did most people settle down in one direction or another after a few years?

Yes, most did.

Including playmates, and of both genders, and not always the same direction.

I refuse to take responsibility for any of my liaisons’ eventual coming-out as lesbians, however.

Especially one, sigh.

:)

So the night out with the throuple also was out with an old acquaintance who has gone through some serious life changes. Was super religious. Married a church girl. Had three kids. She left him for another woman. He lost his religion. He is much happier now, and has a long-term female SO with a child from a previous father.

The thing is, people keep asking him isn’t he upset that he was dumped for a woman instead of for a man. And that's the dumbest of all questions.

@tchrist Yeah, I never got that either.

If it were to make a difference, it would make me less upset, no more. She could offer things I couldn't.

I doubt it would make much of a difference though.

Your SO has left you for someone else. Why the fuck should that other person’s gender matter one stinking bit?

Point is, she left.

I mean, getting dumped is hard.

Exactly.

And that is all that mattered.

Yup.

dailymotion.com/video/…

Funny how much easier it is to understand them once they start singing.

It's the other way around for me. But I love that song, the lyrics are excellent.

Maybe I like the southern r's.

Dunno

But yeah, Brassens enunciates quite clearly.

When singing at least.

Exactly.

@tchrist Clintoning?

@Robusto Blown by an intern.

oh

Worse things could happen, I suppose.

Dammit, I thought I had fixed my PC but I hadn't.

I found a big wad of dust under the CPU fan and thought it to be the smoking gun. Alas, no such easy fix.

OS?

Win 7

@Robusto Debating what is means.

Error Code 124

@tchrist Ah. Yeah, as someone said, Clinton wasn't just a liar, he was the best liar.

He raised the bar for all the others.

I'm sick of computers. They are less reliable than people, when you get right down to it.

They betray you at the drop of a byte.

So too men.

@Robusto I don't think his wife is quite as good at it.

Las computadoras y la gente son las herramientas del diablo.

la gente

@tchrist No. I wish Elizabeth Warren were running.

@tchrist Thanks, I couldn't remember.

Ambas putas son, to put a Latin turn on the word order.

Hmm.

So your car got broken into?

Normal word order is "Ambas son putas".

Yes.

"Normal", huh, che?

@terdon Well, I know.

I’m trying not to lead him into sounding too fancy or poetic.

What got taken? Stereo, etc.?

But yeah, Spanish word order isn’t very strict. Or rather, it is regularly played with to alter nuance.