Tumbling

I have recently discovered the Tumblr series of web sites. My daughter had told me that she 'looks at tumblr' occasionally, and I knew that it was a blogging platform that's more flexible than Blogger (which makes me wonder: when will Google decide this was fun but Sergey says cut it off cause we need the money to fund the next incursion into global privacy, so, BYE!), but that was about it. And I wondered about it. So, yesterday, I started looking for sites with that identifier ( (I did a GSearch with the clever title of "List of Tumblr Sites". And wondered: why tumblr? Tumble what? And why spelled that way?)

I was astonished at the number of sites I came across -- and I'm sure that I haven't seen but a fraction of them. It makes me wonder where these people get all of this spare time. (Which is what I frequently think when I look at web sites for people who cook. Leave the question of where do they get that talent? Where do they get that time? What are they, Martha Stewart?)

One site had to do with underwear. Now, of course, I figured this is going to be a cute way of saying "Here's a bunch of pictures of incredibly attractive women wearing almost nothing", and indeed, that's what it was. (I am convinced that these women are grown in vats. No one, when I was growing up, looked like that. Then again, I was so socially retarded, I didn't know more about girls than that they smelled good and always seemed a lot more composed than I ever was. They could have been offering sex, drugs, and rock n' roll - in retrospect, I think of one or two, and suspect that they actually were -- and I'd have been oblivious.... another reason that I'm glad my daughter goes to a co-educational school. Not because I want her to have that -- okay, sex whens she's thirty five, maybe -- but because I like the idea that the idea of the other sex won't be as strange to her as it was to me. Do people even still use the phrase 'co-ed'?) So yes, this site was, basically, soft-core porn.

There are sites that are dedicated to underwear? Really? So I looked. And yes, there were. Were there ever. One site said "The Underwear King - Fun underwear is something that belongs in every man's top drawer." Really? I never got that memo. I'm being daring when I stray from basic solid colors. I can just see me getting 'fun underwear', though. Yeah. Right. What does that mean, it has bells attached? A picture of Bozo? Please, tell me not "It has Home of the Whopper! printed on it!" And not just underwear, but -- I don't know, underwear as a vehicle for social expression? One site had this comment - "Looking at male underwear models. . . I feel a little homosexual but I'm artistically inspired." And I thought Why does the person - presumably a guy - feel it necessary to say that? But I thought it at the exact same momemt that I thought Looking at pictures of guys in their underwear -- shudder! So I guess in my Catholic upbringing there's a little compartment that says that's wrong! Dirty! One site said "We love girls in boys underwear! " But not the reverse, because that's evil, too, right? Yeah, I think so. (Same compartment telling me this, I suspect. Just thinking about "Why is this true" makes me a little edgy. The closest I get to thinking about that is something that occured to me years ago -- we think that women in men's clothing are fashionable, but men in women's clothes? Ah, no. Which I don't actually think is all that bad, but no one asked me....and if I had a son, I might feel differently. Thank you, Catholic upbringing.)

And I won't get into the question of 'feel a little homosexual'. I won't even touch the obvious pun.

So, tumblr is an ...interesting... series of sites.