I'm catching up on the Bleats for the week. Wednesday's offering speaks for me, except I don't drink or curse. I generally don't mind that other people do. I just wish they wouldn't drink, get drunk and drive. Having never had the fine experience of a glass of wine with dinner, I don't miss it. It must be the epitome of pleasure, though, because we are willing to accept all the damage caused by people who can't stop at one or two beers or a glass of wine so that we can enjoy it.

The point I think Lileks is making, that there have to be some standards and there has to be a difference between adult fare and what we expose our children to.

Thinking about it further, I think that there is way too much "adult" labelling of material that really isn't adult either. It's an insult to maturity, much of the time, to suggest that the horny teens who flock to the current crop of B movies are adults. Since when does a mature person really waste time on dreck? Maybe we need a new rating, S for Sophomoric. Adult movies would be those like Sophie's Choice, Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List. It's not the nudity or the language that makes it unacceptable, it's the fact that we don't want to dump the really horrible stuff of life on little people like Gnat. And there's the further point that if something is too crude and embarrassing to take a child to, what business do adults have seeing it? Of course, that implies that Blazing Saddles is out of the question. So forget that. I guess I'd say that we don't have to Disney-fy everything, in the original sense when it didn't mean Blitzkrieg marketing and tie-ins, but can't we just agree that we want to live in a Culture, instead of the Last Days of Pompeii?