Mr Grizzle Blues: Sunday, October 19th!

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. -Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910) 

Hi Patrice, I did phone and leave a message or two at the island Inn but obviously you and Coriandre are too too busy with freeloaders to answer or get back to me !.

Anyway glad to see that you have been having some nice riding of late, I was very envious particularly of the riding through the whirlwinds of falling leaves which I love so much too. I have lapsed in my riding of late and really need to get back in the saddle so may do a circuit around the Lake today.

We very much appreciate the offer of the sideboard as it is a beautiful piece of furniture. I was wondering if you could provide the dimensions and when I go up later this week I will look at a couple places I have in mind and see if it will work. One more thing, did you have an idea of who else may want to go to the tasting so I can let Paul know and get tickets for us? . When do you head out on your trip? ttys. Cheers, Al 

Hi Big Al: Great to chat and catch up. Let me know about tasting after you contact Paul. Lovely day here so I must away to take advantage of it. Plan to go for a long ride. Unfortunately, forecast calls for rain for most, if not all, of coming week. Feel badly for VWF as it will not be as pleasant strolling from one venue to another around Granville Island. Cheers, Patrizzio!

Hi Trivia Team People! Thanks to everyone for coming out and helping make event the success it was! We had a hoot so trust same went for everyone else.  Thanks, as well, for lovely fridge magnets and card, S/D! As soon as I have time to rearrange fridge, former will be featured! Cheers, Patrizzio!

Tks. it was great fun, we should play trivia when our whole group is together. As you can tell, I need a smart partner!!! Joanne.                  Great idea!


Managed to go for a decent ride today. Knew it would probably be last chance before heading south, given VWF and gloomy forecast! Quite remarkable how warm it was in spite of pretty furious gusts whenever heading east. Made my way out to UBC and then on Marine to Kent, making Glenlyon Industrial Park my destination. Can't believe how much more new development is going on there.

Sans domestiques, back up Cambie and managed to be home before rain started. Was a bit annoyed with myself for not setting out sooner as I had to cut ride short at 93 km as I ran out of time. Cora Lee and I had been invited out to dinner, in Burnaby, at the home of Mr Grizzle, former colleague at UBC, so I was on a very, very tight schedule, as you can well imagine! Stats for ride:

http://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/616393834#.VESfemkElVQ.email 
"Throughout most of human history, men and women have seldom been treated as equals where sex comes into play. In the Old Testament, when Sarah could not bear children for Abraham, Abraham took a maidservant for a mistress. King Solomon not only had hundreds of wives but had hundreds of concubines, too. In imperial Rome, a woman guilty of adultery was exiled from her home and banned from marrying again. Roman Catholic doctrine declared that sexual intercourse was only for procreation and that thinking or acting otherwise was a sin. 

Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung; back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, promiscuous women were burned at the stake. In Victorian England, women were told they were not supposed to enjoy sex, and men were encouraged to visit prostitutes rather than defile their own wives. To discourage promiscuity, birth control and abortion were outlawed in many countries, including the United States, and women were often forced to rely on illegal abortions to control family size. Not until the early twentieth century did anyone dare suggest that sex should be accepted and even embraced as healthy or something to be enjoyed by both men and women."
 

"American attitudes toward sex took a big turn in 1909, when Sigmund Freud gave a series of lectures at ... Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
 
"Born in 1856 in the Austrian town of Freiberg, in what is now the Czech Republic, Freud studied medicine and specialized in nervous and brain disorders. He was influenced by the work of a Viennese colleague, Josef Breuer, who found that he could help deeply troubled patients by getting them to speak openly about the earliest occurrence of their symptoms. Freud theorized that many neuroses were rooted in trauma that had often been forgotten and hidden from consciousness. If patients could be helped to recall their experiences, he suggested, they could rid themselves of their neurotic symptoms.

"In 1900, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. The unconscious mind was a powerful force, he proclaimed, and sexual drive was the most powerful of all determinants of a person's psychology. Sexual urges required gratification, Freud wrote; abstinence was both unnatural and potentially harmful. In Europe, critics complained that Freud was making too much of sexuality, and the good doctor came to be despised. But upon arriving in America he found a welcome and influential audience. 'Don't they know we're bringing them the plague?' Freud asked his fellow analyst Carl Gustav Jung as the two men stood on the deck of their ship, staring down at the cheering throngs awaiting their arrival.

"Most Americans never bothered to read Freud, but they came to understand, correctly or not, that he had endorsed sex as a desire equal in importance to hunger or thirst. His followers argued that sexual satisfaction was essential to happiness and mental health. Young women in particular, recalled the writer Malcolm Cowley, 'were reading Freud and attempting to lose their inhibitions.' Freudians did not worship Freud; they worshiped intercourse and orgasms. Among the believers, nothing satisfied desire and made the world a better place more than a mind-blowing, spine-shivering orgasm, or 'la petite mort' (the little death), as the French called it, suggesting a mystical quality to sex. 

"Margaret Sanger took up the cause, and so did Wilhelm Reich, another disciple of Freud. In 1923, [Wilhelm] Reich told the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society that he believed orgasm was the key to curing neuroses. 'Genital stagnation,' he warned, would lead not only to emotional problems but also 'heart ailments ... excessive perspiration, hot flashes and chills, trembling, dizziness, diarrhea, and, occasionally, increased salivation.' Women and adolescents were particularly vulnerable, he said, because they were expected to remain abstinent (at least until marriage, for women) while men were free to satisfy their sexual appetites. 

Reich believed that everyone needed orgasms -- and lots of them -- to discharge their sexual energy and remain healthy. What's more, he said, unless that energy was released, the world would never achieve progressive political or social reform. It would take nothing less than a sexual revolution -- a term of Reich's creation to create a truly free society. Reich was the prophet of the orgasm. He even devised a special box -- the Orgone Energy Accumulator -- to help harness orgasmic energy, which he believed circulated in the atmosphere and in the human bloodstream. Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, William Steig, and many other intellectuals later sat in the box (Albert Einstein considered it but politely declined). Eventually the federal government labeled Reich a fraud, but by then it didn't matter. He had already inspired a generation of believers who would become central players in the sexual revolution." 

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution, Jonathan Eig, W.W. Norton & Company, 2014

G’day Patrick and Corinne from the big brown land down under. Nice to hear from you, it seems like a very long time since we were in Canada. The additional six weeks in Europe seems to have crowded out most of our great memories from Canada. That’s the problem with having a mature brain that’s reached its capacity; you can’t fit anymore in without losing something. We will just have to come back and refresh them in the near future. 

Sorry about the slow response but we are still having some minor technical issues with the internet connection to our new place. The best minds in the country have apparently agreed it’s probably the copper wire running to the house which is clearly somebody else’s problem to fix not the service provider. Despite the fact we have been back just over two months we still can’t get a reliable service.

While we haven’t corresponded I have kept abreast of your epic bike tours around beautiful Vancouver and near countries. I’m still astounded at the distances you travel daily for fun and exercise. I’m still walking everyday but I think I may have to take it to the next level and jump on the bike to keep up with you mob, although I don’t think I will be adopting the form fitting Lycra shorts.

We have just had an email from Claire indicating they are now in Denver and ready to do some work, can't holiday all the time I suppose. I’m sure they enjoyed Corinne’s and your hospitality as much as Elly and I did. I notice in your Email you don’t make any mention of taking Greg and Claire to the “Long Table Gin Distillery”, why was I the only one to suffer the ill effects of strong liquor and live to tell the tale? In future I would like to see more bike riding and less drinking.  

I also noticed you visited the fishing village at Steveston. Did you remember to pick up my Nike cap I left at the restaurant on the wharf(pier) where Wayne took us for drinks before Fish and Chips for lunch on the floating kiosk?(just joking) Sarge wouldn’t go back just a few kilometres at the time to retrieve it, but I’ve moved on. I also lost the replace cap I brought New York somewhere in France; it was much easier to deal with the loss a second time.

I hope Wayne is feeling a lot better after his operation. It certainly caused me to pause and think about my own health. Especially when the same thing happened to our friend Murray, who had a heart attack two weeks after we stayed with him in Zürich. I began to think it had something to do with me as neither Wayne nor Murray appeared to be candidates for such events. I even thought about letting Neil know who we stayed with in France to have a check-up just in case. Elly and I also have taken the precaution of having stress tests to reassure ourselves everything is OK. Apparently we are likely to outlive our retirement funds (Joke). All the best for now Tony&Elly