(Consider the title. I’m about to show you dildos by the bushel and talk about them rudely, so this posting is definitely not for kids or the sexually modest)
An e-mail summer sale offer from Fort Troff on 8/23 with the mail header:
For Ur D!ick Fix
What does my d!ick need for its fix? A boost from behind, in the form of dildos, acres of dildos:
46 total shapes + sizes
Each cock in 4 tones
Firm INNER core
184 different dildos, all soft on the outside, firm on the inside!
The Fort Troff ad, showing a happy young man luxuriating amidst acres of dildos:
(#1) This cascade of assorted dick simulacra is of course entertaining for a phallophiliac like me; but if there’s an attractive face in there, especially a male one, especially a smiling one, that’s where my attention goes
#1 is a step up from my earlier posting on massed dildos, in AZBlogX on 8/1/16, “The forest of dildos”, about a C1R sale on its 2016 pornstar dildos, with this illustration:
(#2) As opposed to the multitude of generic play-cocks in #1, this display is a curated selection of lifelike cock-simulacra for specific pornstars — not that I think I would recognize any pornstar by his cock; once again, for me it’s his face, plus the general build of his body (in a few cases, I’d recognize their voices)
“Acres of Diamonds”. The famous lecture, essay, and book by Russell Conway, from roughly 140 years ago, whose title served as the model for the title of this posting.
The central idea of Conway’s work is that one need not look elsewhere for opportunity, achievement, or fortune; the resources to achieve all good things are present in one’s own community. … dig in your own backyard! (from the Wikipedia entry on Conway)
In your own backyard, where you’ll find acres of diamonds. For my title, I’ve borrowed the idea of vast swaths of riches (diamonds for Conway, dildos for us), but his idea that treasure is already in your own backyard doesn’t quite carry over to the dildos; those, you’ll have to have shipped in.
More of the story, from Wikipedia:
Russell Herman Conwell (February 15, 1843 – December 6, 1925) was an American Baptist minister, orator, philanthropist, author, lawyer, and writer. He is best remembered as the founder and first president of Temple University in Philadelphia, as the Pastor of The Baptist Temple, and for his inspirational lecture, “Acres of Diamonds”.
… The original inspiration for “Acres of Diamonds”, his most famous essay, occurred in 1869 when Conwell was traveling in the Middle East. The work began as a speech, “at first given,” wrote Conwell in 1913, “before a reunion of my old comrades of the Forty-sixth Massachusetts Regiment, which served in the Civil War and in which I was captain.” It was delivered as a lecture on the Chautauqua circuit prior to his becoming pastor of the Grace Baptist Church in Philadelphia in 1882 and was first published in book form in 1890 by the John Y. Huber Company of Philadelphia. Before his death in 1925, Conwell would deliver it over 6,152 times around the world.
The central idea of the work is that one need not look elsewhere for opportunity, achievement, or fortune; the resources to achieve all good things are present in one’s own community. This theme is developed by an introductory anecdote, credited by Conwell to an Arab guide, about a man who wanted to find diamonds so badly that he sold his property and went off in futile search for them. The new owner of his home discovered that a rich diamond mine was located right there on the property. Conwell elaborates on the theme through examples of success, genius, service, or other virtues involving ordinary Americans contemporary to his audience: “dig in your own backyard!”
In A People’s History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn comments that the message was that anyone could get rich if he tried hard enough, while implying that Conwell held elitist attitudes by quoting the following from his speech:
I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich … The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community. Let me say here clearly … ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men. … I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins … is to do wrong. … Let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings…
Conwell’s capacity to establish Temple University and his other civic projects largely derived from the income that he earned from this speech. The book has been regarded as a classic of New Thought literature since the 1870s. After Conwell’s death, proceeds from this speech were dedicated to the Sunday Breakfast Association, a homeless shelter in Philadelphia.
(I find the passage on the rich and the poor at first merely offensive and then shockingly wicked.)
On not needing to look elsewhere for opportunity, achievement, or fortune. Conwell was born and raised in Massachusetts and served in a Massachusetts unit in the Civil War. He attended Yale, in Connecticut, as an undergraduate. Then from Wikipedia:
After the Civil War, Conwell studied law at the Albany Law School [in Albany NY]. Over the next several years, he worked as an attorney, journalist, and lecturer first in Minneapolis, then in Boston. … In 1880, he was ordained as a Baptist minister and took over a congregation in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Alexander Reed, a leader of the Grace Baptist Church of Philadelphia, heard Conwell preach when he visited him in Lexington, … and recommended that Conwell become a pastor for his congregation. The official “call” was made on October 16, 1882. Conwell’s first sermon at Grace Baptist was on November 30, 1882.
And he was based in Philadelphia for the rest of his life. No doubt there was a soft spot in his heart for Massachusetts, but he followed opportunity where it took him, and that was, eventually, to Philadelphia.
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