JSngry

Well then, not only am I flattered and honored, I am genuinely humbled. Thank you.

Man strong, woman weak? Woman no can hurt man? Dude, that is wrong in so may ways. Nothing at all wrong with recognizing and protecting weaknessess, that's the right thing to do. But that works both ways, and in a lot of different ways as well. And to look at it from a purely biological POV is so....MALE! Really, what you're looking at as a "weakness" is such in some ways. But in others, it's a tremendous source of power. And like any power and power-holder, not everybody who possesses it is going to use it benevolently, and not everybody who's on the receiving end of it is going to be able to handle it with a balanced enough perspective to keep from gedtting blinded by it. There are going to be situations where exploitation occurs. No way around that. Now, are you sanctioning exploitation based on your perception of a power as a weakness? Bottom line as I see it - in any "personal" relationship, there has to be something that can at least superficially pass as trust, which in turn requires vulnerability. And to think that "a" woman will not or can not exploit that vulnerabilty and betray that trust if "that" woman has malevolent intentions is just plain wrong. It's something that men are "famous" for doing, but there are women who can play the game far better than most men even thought about playing it. And there are men who are just as naive and, yes, helpless against it as any stereotypically "fragile" female. All I'm saying is that "equal protection under the law" that is based solely on gender is not going to provide truly equal protection. No way. Life is nowhere near that simple.

Yes, women have babies, but they don't make them all by themselves. They need sperm, which, last time I looked, comes from a man. Barring artificial insemenation, that requires a partner. There's lots of ways to get a partner, and not all of them are "ethical". And when it comes to ethics, nature is most assuredly not one-sided. Is it right that the law be? Relationships are all about power and vulnerabilty, in ever-shifting roles and proportions. To think that there are some (and I stress, some) women who do not seek to exploit the vulnerabilities of a man in order to gain power for themselves to the extreme point of using pregnacy as a weapon to accomplish their ends is just not an accurate assumption. Now, yes, we're getting into a very sticky area here, because men are supposed to always be "tough", and if they get suckered by a woman, it's supposed to be a "failure" on their part. They're supposed to jsut admit that they got suckered, take their lumps, and move on. But is that really the way we want to play this game? Don't we already have enough cultural woes engendered by both genders' fears about the other? Show me anybody of either gender who doesn't have some deep-seated hangups somewhere deep inside, and I'll show you somebody who's the exceptiont that proves the rule. So, yeah, we got us some problems already. What are we going to do to make them better, maintain the status quo? Legally, it's an even stickier path. How do you prove intent, anybody's intent? Hell if I know. But I do know that in matters of child custody and child support, the playing field is not level. The closest we have to a levelling mechanism is the laxity in pursuing men who do not follow through on their legally mandated responsibilities, and that's a damn piss-poor way of levelling anything except a child's chances at a fair shake out of life. Far better, I should think, to have the initial decisions and judgements be rendered fairly and equitably, even if it does (and surely it sometimes will) sometimes necessitate defying the current "conventional wisdom". Because a wrong on top of a lie just buries the truth that much deeper.

If people only did things that make sense, we'd not have much need for laws, would we?

Well, yeah. But one of the prerequisites of being betrayed/trapped/played/whatever is a lack of such concern due to the engendering of trust. And trust betrayed is not something that should automatically be rewarded, I should think. There's plenty of predators out there, and not all of them have penises. Are the child-support laws "genital-neutral" when it comes to such people and their victims? Not really. Look, the guy in the article seems pretty much like a sleaze to me. Not much doubt about that from what I read there. But the scenario that he finds himself in is one that you don't have to be a sleaze to find yourself in. I've personally know 2-3 guys, decent guys, who have gotten themselves so-trapped by women who blatantly lied about both their fertility status and their relationship "intentions". These women's intents were entirely predatory. Once pregnancy became a reality, the men didn't have any choices but to either get married, pay out the wazoo, or else run away. Legal recourse to force the woman to accept full responsibility for her deceit was not an option, nor is it one today. Of course it's a complicated subject. But "simplifying" it by a de facto assumption that any and all men who find themselves in such a situation doesn't solve anything. If anything, it makes it worse, because such predatory women have no real fear of being held accountable. And yes, the child suffers, even if the man stays and/or pays. Women such as this don't really want the child, they want what they think they can get with the child - either a man or a payout. And with the laws as they are now, why shouldn't they think this? Make no mistake - in my experience, there are far more sleazy, opportunistic men than there are women. Far far more. But if you're just going to say that it's okay for a man to be victimized by a predatory woman but not okay for a woman to be victimized by a predatory man, then I don't see how that does anything other than reinforce the very same tendencies that create the problems in the first place. Insecure men will still run at the first sign of true intimacy, and insecure women will still seek to inflict damage before having it inflicted on them. Gots to be a better way.

Paul, I'm flattered and honored. Just curious - did you already have the CD before reading the post?

I'm all for that, but otoh, aren't there laws against bait-and-switch on the books to protect the gullible from the predatory?

So, nobody's ever known of an instance where a woman has deliberately lied about her "fertility status" & gotten pregnant in order to "trap" a man, either personally or financially? To use the fender bender analogy, what if somebody deliberately involved you in an accident just to collect on your insurance? Would you then feel an obligation? If the driver was giving every indication that he was about to turn right and then at the very last second accelerated into a left turn, how is that in any way your fault, other than that you were on the road? Are you expected to base every single driving decision on the assumption that every driver is going to do the exact opposite of waht they signal? Apples and oranges, perhaps, but only to a point. This particular guy might not be a good example, and of course a child is a lot more important than a car, but I'm not about to say that the laws don't need some, shall we say, "refining" when it comes to cases such as this.

The frog's on his way to a gig!

The way that Billy pushes the bridge on "Ballin'"!

Jabbo Smith Jabbo Starks Jabbo Ware

Clyde McPhatter Ben E. King Johnny Moore

Lou Grant Mel Cooley Mr. Dithers

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...ndpost&p=240083 So...not exactly.

Freddie Green Bennie Green Benny Green

And the people who heard them are still talking about them. I kid you not.

Dan's alive, well, chilling out/redirecting his time & energies, and occasionally lurking.

Ooops.

Eric Schmidt Rod Schrock Terry S. Semel

I hear ya' about No Problem. I've gone so far as to play "Joyous Lake" in an R&B band, and believe it or not, people would dance to it. But only early in the evening. Tony's duet w/Sonny at the beginning of "Silver City" on the live Don't Start The Carnival side is on my hypothetical Sonny Desert Island Disc.

Ozzie Smith Osie Johnson O.C. Smith

Again I ask - is that LaWanda Page on the cover? I do believe it is.

Side Two of The Cutting Edge is weak, but Side One is just dandy. I've got the LP, so I only listen to Side One. Sonny could have been up in the mix more, though. Sounds like he's off-mike or something. Not fully miked, maybe. But that Masuo/Cranshaw/Mtume/Lee foursome gets into some pretty badass grooves to my ears, especially on the title cut - you could bounce a feather offa that bad boy! Horn Culture? I dunno...I know some people who really dig it, but it's never really hit me. Different strokes, I guess.

http://www.hardedge.tv/order.html

It was simply a project never completed. There is no "other half". Perhaps our erstwhile colleague is referring to the unreleased Lacy Trio session done for Atlantic?