The Old Tübingen Steak

Last night I got dinged (quite rightly) in my Comments section on the Rickie Lee post for having implied that women are uniquely ruled by their emotions. I was shooting for a rationality-versus-intuition deal, a Yin-Yang opposition, and took it one step too far and got into cases. Set off the old fire-alarm, I did. Ah, well. Sorry, Anonymous Reader, I'll try harder next time.

So what am I to make of these two events from this morning?

First, a pal emailed me, alerting me to the discovery of what is being interpreted by anthropologists as the earliest known Personal Massage Device, some 28,000 years old, in a cave in Tübingen, Baden-Wurttemberg. When I read that it measured 20 cm long by 3 cm wide, I did some very quick (and very wrong) mental calculation and imagined something rather unprepossessing in the old Trouser Snake department. Scoffing back to my correspondent, I made a joke about the low expectations of Stone Age Womanhood. Not until I entered "20 cm in inches" at Google Calculator did I realize that the thing is actually rather Digglerian, measuring in at a quite respectable 7.87401575 inches. (Yes, that last 0.00001575 of an inch makes all the difference. You think the old Peter-Meter doesn't measure that fine? Think again.)

Bet that sucker's cold. ("Warm it up for me, darling Glogg!" "Yes, but how...? Suppose I mastered...fire.... It might be just crazy enough to work!")

But the greatest thing about it, the thing that makes me just cackle like a hyena, is the BBC's caption: "It may also have been used to knap, or split, flints." Let's see you try that with your tallywackers, boys. At least you guys over 40. (Why, in my teen years I bet I coulda....)

You just know that in another few years if they keep digging in that same cave they're gonna find a blowup sex doll made of tanned mammoth hide and boars' bladders, complete with vibrating mouth feature (you shake it real hard). And the anthopologists are gonna tell us it doubled as a food locker. A life of privation enforced an admirable economy.... I imagine a hapless Stone Age would-be swinger begging his mate to do a three-way with it, and getting clocked with the family flint-knapper for his impertinence.

This whole instruments-of-self-abuse-doubling-as-household-implements thing brings us neatly around to the second strange event of this morning.

Lance Mannion erected put up a post in which he notes that two of BlogSpace's more august presences, Michael Bérubé and PZ Myers of Pharyngula, had each had a tree branch come down in their yards during heavy weather and had both wimped out when the time came to man up and use a chainsaw to clear the mess. Once long ago in a context far, far away I had whispered -- apparently quite amusingly -- to Lance that he need not fear the chainsaw, that the chainsaw is well worth allowing into one's life.

Lance remembers this advice to this day, apparently.

What I didn't mention was that I've been told that if you hold an 18-inch Husqvarna 346XP juuust right while you're cutting up that fallen branch -- well, you ain't gonna want to go back to your silly old vibrating bikini-razor is all I'm sayin'. That Husky'll get your attention. And knap a flint into the bargain.

I'm just passin' on the info. Just relayin' what I've been told.

Now I'll leave it up to greater minds than mine to work out the connections here, why the Howlingly Obvious Phallic Symbol suddenly thusts itself into my morning not once but twice. Yesterday Yoni, Lingam today, I guess.

I'll be over here on the floor, playing with my Lingam Logs.

(Yes, that is a photograph of me. That is exactly what I look like.)