Yes, there are fresh batches of Death Wish, Retiro, Colombia, and Mundo Nuvo up to tell you about and the Ambassador of Greater Los Angeles is resupplied, but I want to have a bit of a rant and it starts six years ago with a chocolate bar in England. Let’s see how many people I can piss off here…
Yorkie – The Candy Bar I Couldn’t Believe I Was Seeing
After a very long walk toward the Thames that ended at Regents Park, our feet were aching and we were starving. Don’t ask how we achieved this fundamental geography failure, I blame all the crescents. We popped into a corner shop and I was lusting for a Bounty bar but the thing that drew my eye was a candy bar I’d never seen before, the Yorkie. I called Joe over to make sure that I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing.
Obviously, I also brought a bar home so that I could taunt my little sister with it as the Chocolate She Could Not Have. This is what big brothers are for after all. And because I am a nice big brother, I brought her plenty of other chocolate home from the land that didn’t change the definition of chocolate for economic reasons.
You may call this bar a manifestation misogynistic “laddie” culture. You may see this as a rather blatant flag waving for a war between the sexes in the interest of making a profit, the same as any arms merchant looking to sell bullets to both sides in the Central African Republic for a few diamonds.
If you ask me, it isn’t nice. It also seems a rather loud declaration that you don’t like sex with women. I’d be damn surprised to hear a tale of a lady swooning at the sight of you with a Yorkie hanging out of your mouth and that wrapper waving in her face.
Why do I bring this up?
A Test Subject with a keen eye sent me these words that came with a link to Black Blood of the Earth:
Men should grow a pair and brew their own. It’s not a woman’s job.
This is what happens when man makes coffee, and it is glorious.
Yes, I am a man. Yes, the coffee I have made is glorious. It is because it is made with SCIENCE, not because I have a penis. I’m pretty sure you don’t want penis coffee.
It is a twisty, backhanded statement in reply to a video compilation of 1950s commericals about wives ruining their menfolk’s coffee because the wives weren’t using Maxwell House, if I remember the commercial archive correctly. I like to always keep in mind the historical contexts because so many things don’t make sense if you can’t imagine the world they happened in (a skill that really helps as Eternal DM For Life). That said, it’s good to always remember when doing this that you live in the Now.
Some people are fond of the ironic misogyny for humor value. If you do this, and I’m not sensing humor in the comment I was sent, doing it in the written word is asking for trouble. It needs to be done face to face, to the female friend in question (do not play this game with strangers), with the full recognition that you are being an ass and don’t believe this (which is why you don’t do this to strangers), AND you have to be quite willing to accept the corporal punishment for having been unable to resist saying the horrible thing you just said.
I can get away with saying horrible things because I don’t believe in them. Because friends know damn well that this is coming from a diseased mind that has spent far, far, FAR too much time in the dark corners of history. I have a firm belief that you need to pull the history we don’t like to talk about out from time to time to look at it, to get a feel for that history, to realize how very recent some of it is, because we start to forget what it was and may not recognize Bad Things in progress now. But, damn, be careful lest you accidentally bring the Bad Things back.
Yes, I’m an ass. But I’m a cognizant one with poor impulse control and I happily take my lickings for being an ass. So, to the young lads reading this old man’s words, you don’t know enough to be an ass properly. And when you do it improperly, in the words of the Caffeinatrix of PDX, you are a brodouche. It takes an awful lot of education to do it right, so for the sake of your mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, and special lady friends you probably shouldn’t. I’m sure they’ll educate you, if they care to stick around.
Besides, Yorkie bars didn’t even taste all that good.
ADDENDUM: To the brodouche that happily threw my own safety recommendation back at me as proof of women being the weaker sex, I had to do the *MUST NOT KILL AGAIN* rub of the temples to quiet the soothing voices of unwise action. Let us review that safety recommendation.
Also by the back of the envelope calculations, 1 liter consumed in a fairly short time period might hit the LD50 acute dose for caffeine for a 160lbs male hairless ape. And, just for the record, women are generally somewhat more caffeine sensitive. Use your BBotE wisely.
This is not proof that men are “better” than women because we, on average, can safely consume more caffeine. It makes me a little bit sad when someone compliments BBotE strictly on it’s caffeine jolt rather than the taste. I can tell you from my “So you weren’t kidding about that 100ml/day” email file that the overwhelming majority of people that decided to start their consumption at 100ml and had a bit of an oopsie are men of the gaming persuasion, the alpha geeks… theoretically, My People. So, while you may be able to consume more caffeine than a similarly BBotE-armed lady, please don’t try to claim that you’re better on that basis.
