Snoqualmie

Who woulduh thunk it. Well ya I was at West Oakland BART today for about 10 minutes. A fremont train came first and I figured I'd like to wait for my train outdoors instead of underground so I went to west oakland. I enjoyed my 10 minutes of fresh air and summeryness as well as a really cute pair of shoes this chick was wearing on the platform.

Cute shoes? I'm always curious what qualifies in a straight male's mind as cute shoes. Do elaborate.

were they sugar shoes?

I'm hoping for big stompy boots, myself.

ummm, that won't be what gene thinks is cute. he's got a foot fetish and stompy boots don't really do much to aesthetically display the foot itself as they're mostly concerned with covering it all up for the stomping.

Okay, now I'm concerned. Most shoes that people say aesthetically display feet are heinous violations of comfort and mobility. Tell me you weren't ogling some awful pinchy fragile heely thing...?

Anyway, people who ride motorcycles should appreciate big boots. They go together like, well, boots and motorcycles.

maybe gene's appreciation of shoes could be compared to the madonna/whore complex. as in hard-leather booted madonnas on motorcycles and comfort-violating 5 inch spiked heel wearing whores on a runway.

he always likes the whore even if he pretends to favor the madonna.

i think my analogy fell apart before i even started. stupid 'shrimp' book is influencing me. kim knows what i mean.

Yeah, that analogy was totally doomed. Sorry.

I just ask you, if you find that someone's ass needs kicking and you're wearing tiny beaded heeled sandals, what are you going to do? Stand around wringing your hands until someone comes along with the right equipment for the job?

are you kidding? do you know how much it hurts to have one of those heels shoved into your flesh?

I dissapoint. They were high heeled sandals, like these ( http://shopping.com/xPO-Fornarina_High_Heeled_Sandals ) but black not pink.

i can't even begin to tell you how delighted i am that you included a picture link.

I don't think it's uncommon for straight males to appreciate women's footwear, is it? Especially open-toed shoes.

Gene's also sort of gay for a straight guy, which I mean in no way to be disparaging.

"Heinous violations of comfort and mobility" is a good description of what's often appealing. It's like peacock feathers - part of the appeal is the lack of function, the aesthetic display simply for its own sake.

*sigh*

aren't peacock feathers for mating? that's functional. like a big cock. or lots of money. or a healthy head of hair.

"Charles Darwin was one of the first scientists to argue that female peacocks prefer the males with the boldest and most attractive ornaments, and subsequent work has shown that brightly decorated males enjoy greater mating success. Studies have also shown that the quality of ornamentation in peacocks is an accurate reflection of the state of the immune system, so females are picking those males genetically predisposed for tip-top health."

Wait, that's kind of a circular argument. They're useful for mating because they're appealing; it's not that they're appealing because they're useful for mating. Right? And you could argue that having the money for hurty shoes is a good indicator of economic status in the same way that feathers are a good indication of health status. Right? So they're totally unuseful except as a coincidental indication of something desirable.

no. they're appealing because they are useful for mating. evolution has forced them to be more appealing in order to be mated with because otherwise the girls are like, "la, sir!" and whap the men peacocks with fans made out of the male's own inferior tail feathers and then go get busy with a super-bright-feathers peacock with whom they're also all "la, sir!" but the subsequent slapping noise isn't a fan and it goes on and on and on.

this is only true of peacocks. shoes are a whole other thing.

and maybe the second 'la, sir!' is more like 'laaaaaaaa, siiirrr, oh my god do it again right there oh my god oh my god!' and then some breathy peacock panting.

Missy, show me a picture of peacocks using their feathers to fuck. I just dare you.

Also, I have to point out my own hypocrisy here: my boots weigh five pounds and need to be worn with an additional pound of socks, making them as impractical in their own way as the dainty things Gene likes. I'll put up with one and not the other only because I find the boots hot. I'm just a fetishist too.

NOT a peacock fetishist. Will you cut it out with the peacock porn here?

she's all like, "la, sir, your feathers suck! i refuse to suck you off."

this one, on the other hand, expresses herself in more syllables.

and this one has got the idea of what feathers should be down pat.

and, lastly, these peahens know what they want in a cock.

go approve my comment! it's banning me again!

The question about sexual selection characteristics and things like the peacock is fairly large. John Maynard Smith wrote about it in his book The Ant and the Peacock : Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today which I haven't yet read. Dawkins talks about it in his book The Selfish Gene in which he makes fun of Maynard Smith's ideas on the "handicap principle" (page 160) as well as A. Zahavi's "Fox, Fox" theory (page 159).

I guess my only point is, we're not going to figure this one out here in the Snoqualmie comment forum.

Hey, stop discouraging people. I like it when my entries provoke 22-comment-long discussions, even if they're mostly unproductive discussions about peacock sex and half of the comments are from me. People, keep commenting.

it would be longer if you would check your email!

I did! See? You're approved. See how approved you are?

Movable Type is just threatened by you and your, um, I have no idea actually what's making it want to ban you. It's probably the cleavage again.

it was apparently because i posted a comment with 5 internet links in it to peacock related porn images. which still isn't approved by the way. but thank you for blaming my cleavage. it was feeling left out again.

Whoa! Those comments are showing up in my comment list as already approved! What the hell? Why aren't they here? Wait, I said no peacock porn, so I shouldn't be upset about this.

OMGWTFBBQ.

This is curious

so i've manually fixed it in the database. not sure why this happened. must be a bug in the software.

To clarify, I was trying to say that peacock feathers aren't functional for survival, or for kicking another peacock's ass; their appeal is (arguably) for mating.

I think the shoe question isn't so much, "I'm rich enough to afford painful shoes"; it's more like, "I'm sacrificing functionality and comfort solely for aesthetic appeal". It's not the wealth; it's that the girl is specifically putting herself out there.

For me, it's not like the shoes *have* to be painful; it's just good that they demonstrate effort.

I love spoiler alerts in reviews of Episode III: Spoiler alert! Anakin Skywalker turns to the dark side! He becomes fuckin' Darth Vader! OMFG!

Shush, you. I put that in there because when the transition happened actually was a surprise to me. I'm pretty sure everyone who reads my page ignores spoiler warnings anyway, so basically it was just an HTML exercise for me in remembering how to make the text red. Wheee!

Mmmmm.

Attractive plumage #1.
Attractive plumage #2.

I am a woman of simple tastes, so on a real live leg my favorite boot from that site has to be either the shirley boot (rowr) or the saloon boot, which is exactly what the floozies will be wearing to dance on my bar, and is available in red. Double rowr.

However, in purely non-sexual/aesthetic terms, I am delighted by the "smegg elevators". They're whimsical. As architecture, they're fascinating, grounded in a heavy, fortresslike base, and then becoming more and more skeletal as they taper to the sky. I want to work in a building that looks like that.

a shoe which is both romanesque and gothic. i like your thinking, katie.

Yes, well, if you worked in a building like that, you'd really need the elevators. You wouldn't want to be taking the stairs every day, would you? Zing!

I'll grant you the saloon boot. That's a hell of a hot shoe, and perfect for bar-dancing floozies. They say it's a granny boot, and you know which granny I think would wear it? Granny Weatherwax. That makes it good, because, see, she could totally kick anyone's ass.

i kind of like the ones that aren't boots at all. though also the storm elevators.