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I thought you'd never write back!

Okay, this is the lady who complained in the chat that there are no worthy, straight unmarriedmid- fortyish men around.  Even at the risk of being hailed as a romantic hero for the ages,  I volunteered to find this person a mate.    We are going to give it a shot.   Chatological Humor will become a dating site, just this once.  Yenta.com, as it were.       

So, here's her resume, gentlemen.    If you would like to be a suitor, mail me an audition at weingarten@washpost.com.    Subject line: Suitor.   As always, humor counts, but in this case it is not essential.    Bare your soul.  Hold back nothing germane.     I alone will be the matchmaker, choosing  exactly one candidate.  

I will not make your auditions public in any way.    You have a guarantee of privacy.   

If this results in a marriage, I will attend the wedding and give the bride away.    

I have to add that I don't know what "medium hair" means.

No, that is not my odious opinion, but I am so pro-choice that I can ALMOST go here.  Almost but not quite. 

I think people's views on abortion -- much like their views on religion -- are based less on logic than on intuition.     I think religious people tend to be people who feel the presence of Something Larger in their lives.    Similarly, I think  people who oppose abortion have an intuitive feeling that a fetus is a person and that terminating it is homicide.    

I'm in the unfeeling group on both issues.    I don't see an early fetus as a life, and -- if you forced me on this issue -- I basically think a baby isn't a baby until it knows it's alive and thinks of itself as an entity.   So, basically, I define the beginning of life at roughly  three months out of the womb, the point at which the baby realizes that the toes she is biting belong to HER.    Up until then, a non-sentient fetus.   

Do I think you should be able to "abort" a two-month old?    Almost.   Maybe.  Um.    No.   No.   Nope. 

Whew, that was close, wasn't it?  

No, pragmatism and commonsense compel me to draw the line pretty much where most pro-choicers draw the line -- viability, wherever you believe that to be.       

I think there are exceptions.    I think there are times -- rare circumstances -- where late-term abortions are justifiable, most notably late-diagnosed severe fetal abnormality.   

(By the way, my secret opinion is not "odious."   It is, I think, correct, and I am not embarrassed by it.  But it is  one I cannot state because it is judgmental in a way that would cause unnecessary pain to  people who have done nothing wrong.)

I don't have one.   I do have a DVD on the Cambodian genocide that I am 12 years late in returning to its owner.   I could send you that.   It's VERY depressing.

Good point.   Though a spouse, unknowing, could always press for adoption.

Occasionally, a chat master, even a great one such as me, must prostrate himself before his readership.   I looked up the other pirate joke, and here it is:

A pirate comes into a bar, looking very worse for the wear. He has a
peg-leg, a hook for a hand, and a patch over his eye.

The bartender asks, "What happened to you?"

"I'll tell ye (in proper accent - arrrrrrr). I was seeking the great
white whale, and just when I was about to harpoon him, I fell into the water and
he bit off me leg."

Bartender: "And what about your hand?"

"Well, we were attacking a ship, and I had jumped to the deck in a vicious
sword fight, and just as I was about to run me sword through the captain,
someone came up behind me and cut off me hand."

Bartender: "And your eye?"

"I was walking down the street, looked up, and a bird pooped in me eye."

Bartender: "But that wouldn't make you lose your eye."

"It was the same day I got me hook!"

--

I didn't get it.   I had to email Pat the Perfect, who explained it. 

Oooh, very nice.     It's the "Fatboy Slim" scenario, but not invented.    

My mother was friends with a woman named "Blanche Black.

When a bra gets old it gets transparent?  Wow. 

I suspicion that men's equipment is in greater need of support than ladies', being entirely up-down with no horizontal component.   But I acknowledge that I seem to be in the minority, particularly among the yoots.  Plus, this is making me feel like a very old man.   So I am going to stop being crotchety at this moment in time.     Please noted that "crotchety"  was very clever  word usage.

I think HPV causes cancer, a lot of cancer, later in life.   I think the right wing ideologues' real agenda here is that they don't like premarital sex, because it offends their deeply sanctimoniou sense of Family Values, and because it sounds like something poor people and ethnic people do more often than "nice" people.   

I know there is some scientific debate on this about the efficacy of these immunizations, but I do believe the experts align mostly on the side of the shots.   Mostly, what I object to is the phony indignation by the righties, who love to create straw men -- or in this case, straw girls, these poor innocents being forced to undergo a medical procedure that anticipates their future sluttishness.   I see no difference between mandatory HPV shots and mandatory polio shots.   No one was freaking over those.   People were grateful for those, and happily lining up their kids for the shots.     This is just one more science-based issue that should not be political, but is being made political by the righty ideologues.

This includes "and the horse you rode in on."

Krauthammer's views on stem cells are complicated.   He's in favor of harvesting them from discarded fertility clinic embryos.    He's against creating them for the purpose of scientific experimentation.   He has asked many times whether we really have reached a point where embryos are  "the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserve no more respect than an appendix."

See, we have come full circle: We're back to the essential difference created by intuition, which I contend is at the heart of debates about both religion and abortion.

   Charles, when the scientific advantage is so potentially vast, and we are talking about a tiny meass of cells without sentience, conscience, or shape -- yeah, to me, it's no different from a hangnail or an appendix.   Sorry.

Okay, end of update.   Please leave questions for the next chat here.