Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Sex! Hot SEX!

A note from the publisher of SEX and the American Male

   (The Thurber Brigade was approached by the owner of BIG BEN BOOKS who wanted to make a public statement about the book. After he made a large contribution to The Brigade Retirement/Party Fund we relented)      

So, did the title of this article excite you? Of course it did! You are a warm-blooded human and so you love SEX. Who wouldn't? That's the power behind the great book I published: SEX and the AMERICAN MALE.

Hello, I am Benito "Big Ben" Cantolini, and I just wanted to set the record straight about this hot, lurid book. I know that many readers have complained because the author of SEX and the AMERICAN MALE keeps declaring that there is no SEX in his book. Nonsense!


There is a ton of lurid, raunchy SEX in the book and also plenty of explicit photos to go along with the ribald words. Pictures like this:

Of course this picture is not as explicit as in the book because the author won't let me show that in his blog, but trust me, the pictures are twice as hot as this one.

This is another example of the hot sex you will encounter in SEX and the AMERICAN MALE (but again because of the author this one is relatively tame).
People have also told me that they were disappointed that the author didn't use graphic descriptions and evocative language in describing the incredible SEX acts in the book.  Bull pucky (dang author won't let me use expletives)!

I can't believe the number of times he uses the words penis and vagina (but of course the more lurid versions) in SEX and the AMERICAN MALE!
(the author insisted I add this)
And the penises in the book are huge! Not wimpy like that certain businessman running for president, but gigantic! The author goes to extremes describing the male SEX organ and how it interacts with the female genitalia (darn author won't let me describe that either).
Now, some folks keep saying that I came up with the title of the book to stimulate more sales. They also say it is a cynical allusion to how advertisers use SEX and erotic images to lure unsuspecting customers to their product. These are atrocious lies! The title is purely a declaration of the blatant and plentiful SEX scenes in the book.

Because of the lurid SEX in the book, similar to this photo but much more graphic, book sales are through the roof!
I especially don't want you to be fooled by some of the reviews of the book you'll find on Amazon.com. Ones like:
 Reviews
✯✯✯✯  Sex and the American Male by Jay Williams has absolutely nothing to do with sex, but everything to do with advertising and the messages it sends you.

✯✯✯✯ The twists are unexpected as exemplified case and point in the notion that sex sells, and Williams finds a clever way of reminding us of this throughout.

No the real reviews were censored by Amazon because they too were too graphic! They said things like:

✯✯✯✯ "Man when Zack ---- to Mist ---- and repeatedly ---- the ----"
✯✯✯✯ "I can't believe the author was allowed to describe ---- and ---- ---- not to mention the time he ---- a---- ----"

As you can tell, that's some lurid, steamy and maybe illegal SEX.
So I hope this clears things up about SEX and the AMERICAN MALE and the gargantuan amount of SEX in the book.
Get yourself some SEX at these HOT websites:
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble
Kobo
BookBaby
Scribd.
Copia
Ciando
iTunes
GoodReads

Also, be on the lookout for these future steamy books from Big Ben's Publishing:
SEX at Sea
SEX on a Plane
SEX and the American Female
SEX, SEX and more SEX

The Thurber Brigade apologizes to those readers offended by the above comments from the publisher as well as those offended by the repeated and blatant use of the word SEX since we know there are a ton of angry feminists out there who already think that we are SEXist pigs and too often use SEX to make a point or stimulate readers through the arbitrary use of that word and SEXual imagery. We also want to apologize if we continue to imply you are wimble-brain prudes who have the sense of humor of a sea slug and the intellect of Donald Trump supporters and wouldn't recognize satire/parody if it kicked you in a SEX organ. Sorry.
Ahhhh, James Thurber!

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

A Not So Close Shave


Like most male children I loved to watch my father shave when I was a tyke. He was an engineer and so when those newfangled electric shavers came out, he got one to be a modern guy. So as I was growing up it was fun to stand outside the bathroom listening to that loud buzz early in the morning as he got ready for work.

Needless to say, when I was getting ready to go to college, and right as I had enough peach hair, my dad gave me his old Schick shaver. Pure elation describes my feelings as I would run that thing over my meager few hairs on the chin in the dorm room. It probably ticked my roomy off, since he had to settle for a razor, but I didn't share.
Of course, when I stopped out of school for a few years and headed to the army, the shaver went with me. I fearlessly stood in the crowded, noisy bathroom of the barracks and while all the other new recruits scraped their faces with a razor blade, I happily buzzed away with my old Schick shaver.

However, on the second week of boot camp at Fort Polk in Louisiana (not so lovingly called little Vietnam) I stood at ridged attention on the front row of the formation as the drill sergeant inspected the platoon. Sgt. Fisher looked at me as I tensely stood in 1st squad and then he slowly sidestepped to the next worm. It seemed like slow motion as he turned his head my way again then stepped back in front of me.

"Williams, did you shave his morning!" He shouted. He always shouted I should point out. In fact, I had doubts he was capable of quiet, reflective conversation.
"Yes Drill Sergeant. I used my electric shaver and..."
"It doesn't look to me like you shaved at all!"
He then yelled at me to get out of formation and stand facing the platoon. He also yelled at a fellow terrified newby to go get his razor from his footlocker (a small wooden chest where we kept our few possessions).  When he returned, Sgt. Fisher had him dry shave me right there in front of the rest of the maggots. The drill sergeant then gave all of us a high decibel account how we must shave every day or we'd rot in hell for the rest of eternity—and he'd be there right behind us kicking our butts.

So from that day on to the present I have always shaved with a razor blade instead of an electric shaver. My cherished shaver now was a traitor to me and I gave it away to a fellow scumbucket who wanted to use it to somehow give himself and others tattoos.

It wasn't the pain of being dry shaved—and yes, it was and old razor and yes quite painful—it was the humiliation of standing in front of my fellow dirt balls and made an example. I guess the drill sergeant did this to teach us wimpy rejects an important point about army life. However, all I got from it, besides further hatred of Sgt. Fisher, was that you should never trust that your cherished notions will be regarded the same way by others.

Someday I'll tell you about the agony of getting care packages from mom while in basic.

(I know, I know. Those of you who have "Liked" any of my books' FaceBook pages—
• https://www.facebook.com/SexAmericanMale
• http://tinyurl.com/taxbreak-facebook
—are saying to yourselves, "what a l
azy guy" because you saw that I posted this story there as a "FaceBook short story."  Well, I apologize, but right now I'm wrapping up my taxes and haven't had time to come up with any other clever content. So as soon as I file I'll get with it and come up with something witty and clever to add to The Brigade. By the way, remember you can still get a TAX BREAK for just 99¢ at: http://tinyurl.com/taxbreak-amazon  Yes, more shameless self-promotion. Sorry.) 

James Thurber served in the Army from 1918-20 encrypting/decrypting messages in Paris, but due to the loss of eye didn't have to serve during WWI
 

Friday, February 12, 2016

In(k) Excess


Back in the 80s a great bar to hit in Austin was The Back Room. A gigantic place divided into two halves. One side a game room with pool tables, video games, air hockey, etc.; the other a music venue. The bands that played ranged from headbangers to blues. I saw all sorts of groups from The Genitorturers, Anthrax and The Cramps, to Al Stewart, The ThunderBirds and Tragically Hip. For the most part though, I'd say the flavor was hard rock. The Back Room was popular with bikers after all.
I mainly hung out on the music side, but between sets or if I didn't want to pay the cover I'd hang in the game room. Although it could be loud in there too, it was the place I often tried to pick up women because I could hear them.

One night I stood along the wall, slowly drinking a beer while scouting out the night's targets. At The Back Room women often dressed much more provocatively than at some of the other haunts of mine, such as Liberty Lunch or Steamboat. This night I spotted a really hot female with painted on latex pants and a backless blouse. Her Pat Benatar-esque eyes and shapely body drew a lot of attention, including me.

However, she turned to look at someone playing pool and I noticed that she had a gigantic tattoo on her back. I casually moved a little closer and discovered that it was a panther. It's head on her right shoulder and its tail snaking off somewhere below her waist underneath those latex pants.

Although she had seemed intriguing, that gigantic tattoo turned me off.  Back in those days most women didn't have much in the way of ink. Well, unless they were biker chicks.
I also had a double-hit mindset against it because I had grown up as a youth in the middle-American Midwest. Us God-fearing whitebread kids were taught by our elders that men who had tattoos were either old sailors (which was deemed acceptable but you could still smirk) or else criminals or carny folk (not acceptable).  Obviously, to these people, it was impossible to think that a female would sport a tattoo.  Tsk, tsk was the phrase used when you passed a person such as this (people back then were PC—not prone to being jerks—before that became a way of behaving).
However, besides my youthful brainwashing, I had another reason I didn't like the idea of tattoos. Way back then a horrible man named Richard Speck butchered eight young nurse trainees in a dormitory. I distinctly remember the police saying we'd be able to identify him if we saw him because of a “Born to raise Hell” tattoo on his shoulder. Oh, it wasn't the tattoo that caught my attention, it was that a tattoo was a way for you to be found.
Now before you say that I obviously had been thinking about a life of crime and so didn't want to give myself away, it really was because I was slowly getting radical ideas. I also realized that ideas often scared people, and so radical ideas could get you into trouble no matter that we lived in the "land of the Free."  Yeah, the Vietnam years.  My ideas weren't really anti-war thoughts though, but that's for a later discussion.
(Yes, a youthful Jay at a civil-rights protest looonnnngggg ago)
This anti-tattoo concept also followed me into the army.  There was tremendous pressure to get a tattoo or two if you were in the military. I had a friend who went nuts about them, even had a contest of sorts with another of his friends to see who could get the most. This was before the day when you could get full arm tats. They were all individual things. So I got a lot of pressure from him as well as my other army buds. On several drunken nights I almost succumbed to the most common (in my unit) "82nd Airborne" insignia tattoo. But I resisted.
In the army I really had become a big radical threat to the establishment because I dared to advocate for enlisted people's rights. I figured that any day some general would decide I must be incarcerated on some trumped up charge, so no way would they ID me by a tattoo.

So I escaped the military tattoo-less and carried those same concepts well into the 80s, 90s and 00s. A gigantic Panther tattoo could only mean trouble and just didn't spur my sexual desires enough to give me the courage to throw a line her way.

Nowadays tattoos are the rage with today's hipsters. It's a common sight to see men AND women sporting complete arm/leg/body ink. Where in the old days even a peek of ink under the shirtsleeve could result in the job applicant getting shown the door, now it's accepted—or at least tolerated.

Even I have slowly come around to accepting some tattoos on women. I often get involved in rousing discussions over beer with male friends about what is acceptable. They usually have absolutely no qualms about any ink on a prospective date (okay, a lot of my friends are younger and avoided that middle-American brainwashing), while I argue for discretion.
 
I still would prefer to just see a small butterfly above a breast (an homage to "Papillon"), and even find it a little seductive to see a small sun barely peeking above the back of the belt. Ironically, this latter one is called a “Tramp Stamp” which got its name through similar brainwashing/stereotyping as what I experienced but in later decades.
However, it will take some major adjustment to ever get me excited about a prospective date who has tattooed her entire life's history on her back; or have a dragon shooting fire on one arm toward a knight on the other; or a gigantic cobra slithering up one leg and a mongoose on the other. Yes, a little too much ink for me.

Some brainwashing just can’t be undone.


(okay, you young readers may not have gathered that the title of this blog is a play-on-words referring to INXS. Yes, another 80s band; yes, I know I'm in a rut. No, they have nothing to do with tattoos although I'm sure they had one or two).

Friday, February 5, 2016

The Smirk of Reality—A Thurber Brigade Sidestep


Congress became enraged the other day during a committee hearing about how Martin Shkreli raised the price of an important drug by about 5000% (Daraprim went from $13.50 to $750 per pill). He had the audacity to smirk at those asking him questions. Often he would not even pay attention while they spoke. Just as often, he scoffed when he was called upon to answer them.

To further inflame them, after leaving the hearing, he tweeted that the inquiring congress folk were imbeciles.

I suspect their outrage wasn’t influenced so much on how the most hated man in the US raised the price of vital medicine as much as they hated the way he treated them.

How dare he not show this august group of people the respect they believe they deserve!

However, the truth is he just treated them the way all of Big Pharma perceives them. He treated them like the bought and sold patsies they have become. He treated them like the people who take millions of dollars in their money to do their bidding. He just didn't show the reverence for them that the other Big Pharma honchos do to present to the public a contrite face and therefore hide their true feeling for these pawns.
 
In other words, Shkreli treated them exactly the way Big Pharma would really like to treat them, but doesn’t so that congress people can keep their façade of being the people’s representatives alive.

The United States has the highest cost for medical drugs in the industrial world. For example Seroquel, which is used for insomnia, is $33 in Canada vs. $124 in the US.  Also, for the cancer drug Campath here is the price in various countries: United States: $2,400; France: $760; Sweden $660; Britain $570; Italy $500.  The cost of Nexium (used for acid reflux) is only $23 in Holland, while if you buy it here you pay $215.
The reason for this disparity is because congress refuses to regulate Big Pharma. In fact, they’ve even passed legislation that makes it against the law for the government (yes, the entity they work for) to shop around for cheaper prices for US Medicare recipients.  This way congress keeps Big Pharma happy and they keep getting big bucks from lobbyists for their political campaigns.
So congress will continue to ignore regulating Big Pharma (as well as Big Oil, Wall Street, etc.) so they may continue to get the largess they adore.  However, they will also continue to express their anger at Shkreli and may even level a “contempt of congress” fine of several thousand dollars. By my reckoning, that will be equivalent to about three or four of those pills he sells.

**The Thurber Brigade apologizes for once again veering off the road of the War Between Men and Women and assures everyone that it will return to the straight and narrow soon. We had really planned to write about something else (and will shortly publish it) but couldn't miss the chance to not only make fun of this evil man, but also get a stab in at congress. I know, too easy of a target. Sorry. 





Friday, January 8, 2016

Raison d'être


Believe it or not this blog has been going on now for four years. Or I should say irritating women for four years. I began it for two reasons. One because once on Facebook a woman didn't like that I had an opposing view about something she posted (I think it was about how she felt sorry for the negative reaction to a 400 pound woman; I mentioned that it was the woman's fault for a lack of discipline/discretion). She told me she deleted my post. When I protested she responded by saying I should just write my own post. Instead I started a blog. Second, when I began exploring blogs to determine a focus for The Brigade I discovered that there were about 1,000 female blogs to each male blog.
So I thought why not be a lonely voice calling out from the desert? Of course it has it's perils. As I've stated before, if a man says something about a women he's a misogynist but if a female says something about a man, well, that's just biting social commentary. I really pissed some feminists off with my driving blog.
Also, I've been told that my blog is sexist because I post pictures of scantily clothed females. It doesn't matter if I don't say they are incapable at some occupation or only good for sex. To some angry feminists, I'm not being sexual, I'm being sexist. It doesn't matter if females make sexual comments or post pictures of Justin Timberlake, as they are just expressing their inner sexual being. In other words, there seems to be a double standard here.

Therefore, here are a few examples of female blogs/articles that encourage me to wither the storm of feminine anger.

He's a great guy, but this woman thinks that he may in fact be a "Wuss."  Another blog says that a guy can be TOO nice, and if so, is probably just a "Wuss" (a popular term women use when talking about men they are not impressed with).  Along those lines, this woman doesn't think her boyfriend makes enough money.  I've actually seen a few blogs that equate the two types as the same. Anyway, a while back I wrote how women complained that men stereotyped women based on looks. I pointed out how women were just as stereotypical, as they often wanted men to be well off (wealthy).
(I still haven't figured out why they used this picture)
Her boyfriend likes to take things slow and also has a habit of doing certain things that seem odd to her, so he must be a control freak.
This blog seems to focus on letters about bad relationships and then the blogger gives advice. I had a blog that points out that no matter what a guy does, he can't win. For some reason, her blog just reinforces my point. 

As I mentioned above, I really caused some feminists brains to explode when I wrote about women drivers. I should point out that first off, I never stated that this related to all women, the angry fems just assumed that. Also, I start off the blog by noting how women often intone various stereotypes about men's driving. That apparently didn't register with them. 
Anyway, as you might expect you can find all sorts of complaints about some woman's boyfriend scaring the shaving cream out of her when he drives, or  really worries her and makes her uncomfortable. These articles/blogs usually have a lot of woman making comments that agree that males are one scary breed when they get behind the wheel. Yeah, we are.

Many women bloggers seem to enjoy pointing out that men are much crazier then women.  Typically, these relate to how a guy may try to get a female's attention or about his commitment to the female. I blogged about how women send out mystical signs to try to let men know they are interested as well as also pointed out that women are more afraid of commitment then men.  Boy, got some angry emails about those.

Of course, sooner or later you'll run across a female blog about trying to find that perfect man.  Sadly, I have never been brave enough to write about finding the perfect woman because I don't want my house burned down. I did write one in which I profess that Pat Benatar is one hot woman.

An odd blog (in my book) tells women about how to determine if they are just being pursued for sex (be sure and check the title, it's hilarious).  Meanwhile, I blogged about how women have strange vision. For example, they will say "ewww" if they see a guy in a speedo—unless that guy is Justin Timberlake. Then they tend to drool.
For some reason, I appreciated the blog about whether to date an older man.  It made it sound like I might have a 50/50 chance.  This one reminds me of my "hunting tips" (really just dating tips for guys).  My blog came about because I had overheard a woman say she was disgusted because she saw an older man with a young female. I tried to stress that the person responsible for first contact (men, of course) should get to pick who they try to hook up with.
Very similar to that is the blog about the worst first date ideas of men. It's alluding that men are all scumbags because they actually do stuff like what she writes about. Oh sure, there are all sorts of guys out there and each one does something that sets a woman off, but the overall thought of the blog is that men are losers. My stereotype and hunting tips blogs weren't subtle enough when I compare it to this which is why they got a much worse reception.

I allude to sex quite often and use pictures of semi-nude females to not so subtly allude to sex. However, if you want an extreme version of a female blog, be sure and see DarkGracie's blog (prudes need not follow the link). If you are annoyed by my pictures of females in bikini's then you should be just as livid at pictures of dildos that seem to populate some women blogs.

As I noted, I often use pictures of women with little on in the way of clothing, well, women do the same thing with pictures of men.

She complains about a date with a guy, including him showing up late, his driving, etc. I have yet to blog about a bad date, but I have blogged about a near miss. Oh, btw, yes, I have a cat.
Although I could go on and on, the last one I want to point out is about a woman who is madly in love with a guy, but won't tell him.  Oh, she talks to him, but she believes he should have ESP and know how she feels about him without giving him a verbal clue.  This is so related to my last blog about First Contact and how women absolutely will not partake. Sigh.
So The Thurber Brigade will continue on its merry way.  Here and there pissing off an angry feminist or two (and take a sidestep or two way off topic) as we discuss The War Between Men and Women. And if one of the blogs irritates you are makes you mad, feel free to comment because as I mentioned in a blog before, I kinda like to rile people (and so enjoy comments). Don't be surprised though if you do make a comment about how I must be the devil's spawn because of my evil writing that more than likely I'll respond by just letting you know that it all came about because some woman started the, er, "discussion" with her clever female blog about us male neanderthals.