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From Brix Smith Start of The Fall's autobiography, when describing her childhood karate class in California:

"I was the only girl in my class and was expected to spar with boys and men.  I soon worked my way up to yellow belt and then to orange.  One of the boys in my class was the chubby, shy son of Carl Wilson, the lead guitarist in the Beach Boys.  Of course, growing up in Southern California meant the Beach Boys were akin to God.  Everyone got excited when Carl came to watch the sparring.  Every time I had to spar this boy, I'd kick the bejesus out of him to the tune of Good Vibrations running through my head."

 :lol That is a great story.

You've made my day by posting this!

Hold on...

Let's cut Jonah and/or Justyn some slack here.   Brix Smith doesn't mention that she is quite a bit older than Carl's sons.  Wikipedia says she was born in '62, making her ~7-9 years older than the Brothers Wilson.   Is, say, a 17-year-old Brix 'kicking the bejeesus out of' an 8-10 year old Wilson lad really anything to brag about?  I'm getting visions here of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer's karate success is the result of him being in a dojo with little kids.

:lol I was JUST about to reference that Seinfield episode!

Agreed. Why is this a great story? I've met both Jonah and Justyn (quickly in passing) and they were both very kind. Has somebody had some bad experience with them that would make them relish either of them getting their "butt kicked"?  Strange. Anyway, good for her "dominating the dojo"

They should have called in Rocky or one of the Love brothers to kick her ass

Stan love whoopin ass

Women beating up on boys seems acceptable here. Mods ok with this? Where are the feminist social justice warriors?

That would be cool if Brix Smith kicked your ass, Joe!

It's likely that Jonah and Justyn are, like their dad, pacifists.  It's also likely that the brothers are/were gentlemen and much too nice to try to kick a girl's butt, even if she was basically a grown woman and they were both little boys.

So, go ahead Brix and brag about your conquest over one of Carl's sons.  I'm sure Carl Wilson taught his sons to never hit a girl, even a doofus like the one who bragged about beating a child at karate.

NO it's not acceptable. What's up with the "feminist social justice warrior' comment, though?

Ugh. :-\

Brix Smith is a fucking amazing badass goddess and this is just a silly anecdote in her rad book. CHILL, Y'ALL!

Well ofc it isn't OK for bigs to beat littles but you must rmbr that 1) this is karate class, not street fight & 2) Carl agreed to his son attending that class & obviously wasn't against it when he watched her beating Jonah (iir Justyn was skinny as a boy). Besides, she did what you see in many celebrity autobios - namechecked the other celebrity. That's it.

If it were genders reversed, it would be a hot topic.

That's a load of crap.

Actually, I agree with Joe 100%.

The extract as quoted by the OP has tidbit "...Carl came to watch the sparring". It seemed acceptable to *him* to see his son being beaten by the 17-year-old. What the hell's the gender got to do with it? It's just little short story, for god's sake.
Edit: if anybody would like to discuss gender privileges (F vs. M), start thread in the Sandbox. The main point behind the OP was to share sth. BBs-related with fellow BBs fans. Let's not ruin this nice thread with serious things not germane to it.

We'll agree to disagree in this case. It just bothers me that I always hear/read things like "well if it was a woman/black person/whatever "....it is so tiring. Many of the bigots I have the misfortune of dealing with in this sh*t hole known as Texas love to toss that out

I'm confused.  I confess I didn't know who this Brix Smith person was so I looked her up.  Apparently, she and her mother moved to Chicago in 1972 so I'm a little unclear how she beat up Carl's son when she was 17?  Also, wasn't Jonah born in 1969? 

 Brix apparently moved back to LA as a teen to live with her father, an unnamed psychiatrist who resided in Malibu Canyon.  From the placement of the anecdote in her book, her karate career seems to have taken place at some point after August 1977.  Brix says that she was enrolled in 9th grade at Paul Revere Jr High in LA, and after allegedly encountering threatening behavior from some Latino classmates, her father enrolled her in Ed Parker's School of Karate.  We don't know exactly when, but based on the year maybe she was 15 to Jonah's 8, or 16 vs 9.  The point about the Krameresque dojo-domination still stands.  In any case, we're spending way too much time on this inane little anecdote that may or may not have much basis in reality.

You can't help but feel bad for Carl's son, or anyone in that position. But geez, this was a karate class. The kid didn't corner Carl's son in an alley and beat him up and take his lunch money. In the class, they make you spar.

I'm not a karate training expert, but I would hope/assume that at some point if two are grossly mismatched and/or someone is getting seriously injured, they do something about it.

Read Scott Wilson's (son of Dennis) book. *That's* an unfortunate and continuous series of stories. I'll bet he would have loved to suffer simply getting emasculated in a karate class by someone way older than him.

It may bother you,but it happens. I guess I understand that you are for double standards. Got it.

Excuse me? I am not for double standards.  You don't know two things about me if you think that. 

I think you're dealing with a sort of invented straw man argument, and a jump to exaggerate and assume things.  

An anecdote about Carl's son in karate class turns almost *immediately* into first an assumption about presumably some, most, or all of the people on the board:

"Women beating up on boys seems acceptable here."

Then before long it turns to:

"I guess I understand that you are for double standards. Got it."

I'm sure we've all dealt with this before. You say something relatively innocuous like "Mom, I think the meatloaf is pretty good!", and it's immediately met with "Oh, so what you're saying is you don't like my meatloaf as much as someone else's!"

Geez, if someone had jumped into the thread and said, "You know what I think is totally okay? Girls beating up boys", then maybe the assumptions/accusations would have some grounding.

But what *actually* occurred was a citation of a quick anecdote about Carl's son's apparent sub-par performance in karate class. The girl didn't shiv Carl's son in the parking lot after the match. As far as I know; I haven't actually read her book I guess.

And this is why most of this crap goes into the Sandbox.  AGAIN something that was tangentially on topic gets redirected to the same old, same old.

You sound like quite the bigot yourself. Are you not free to leave Texas? Unless legal issues are involved, I doubt that anyone would block your exit.

excuse me?!  I am planning to move in a few years. it costs money to do so.I do not currently have enough of said money. For your information,  I am not a bigot by any means and take a huge amount of offense at being called one.you do not know jack sh*t about me.

You might be a bigot if  . . .  you refer to a state 25 million people call home as a "sh*t hole". Of course I'm assuming that you believe it's the Texan's who are responsible for making the state what it is in your view.  Maybe you have a problem with the geography, not the millions of people who live there.

Anyway, I wish you the best in your efforts to leave the state.

Let me make this clear now that I've calmed down a bit...until I lost my home, I lived in a small-ish town named Alvin. During my time there, I did have the misfortune of dealing with quite a few people who came in to my then-place of employment were were quite prejudiced, and made no secret of it. That was *hell*. When Obama got elected, a co-worker made a comment on how in the old days, "people like him" would be lynched. I said something, and was told that "down here" this is "how folk do things". So yeah, I have a very valid reason for wanting to leave here...too many bad memories. The fact that I'm a liberal in a staunchly conservative state isn't the only reason.


Not everybody here, not by a longshot. I don't fit in here, but that doesn't mean I lump everybody together. Read my initial post again. I do however despise the state government, and feel my family and I would fit in better elsewhere.

For the record, there are  groups of people that I am prejudiced against....I don't like racists, homophobes, pedophiles, spousal and/or child abusers...ect.

 Are there any non-bigots in Texas? Other than you, of course?  :3d

Of course. Majority aren't.

 :o Thank goodness.

I'm just gonna say one more thing, as this is turning into a Sandbox thread...my main issue these days since leaving Alvin is not fitting in politically and in some other ways...I don't hold the entirety of the population at fault, but the ones that are, though, well....yeah.  Also have other reasons...as I've gotten older, the heat and humidity has become unbearable.

Looking at Ft Collins, CO.  as my job is building a new call center there, and it's been my dream to live in CO since I was a kid.

Exactly. Said the same thing page ago. good to be backed up. :police:
Billy, Bill Ed, joe_blow, Moon Dawg: with respect but the last few posts don't belong in this thread. Is there function to clear up irrelevant posts from the thread? Some boards got it.

there's not but I think entire thread is going to sandbox if I can't figure it out

A big clue that you might be making a lot of assumptions that you shouldn't is when your three-line post contains all of the following words: "might", "bigot", "I'm assuming", and "maybe."

A *lot* of assumptions and ridiculous leaps in logic. Someone could easily take *your* post and make a lot of insulting assumptions about you, too.

And for the record, if someone calls Texas a shithole, I don't immediately assume they're saying it's the fault of everyone who lives there, or that everybody in the state is an asshole or something. If anything, I think someone who *lives* in a place they don't particularly like would be the FIRST person to understand that plenty of people live somewhere they don't like, and therefore you can't assume one thing about everybody who lives there. 

I also have to give Billy a lot of props for not being even more annoyed by being called pretty ridiculous names by people who *rarely* post here and seem to pop up sometimes mainly to just gripe about political threads or call him names.

If you only have 25 posts over the course of the last year, and two of them consist of unfairly leaping to calling someone a "bigot", maybe *you* have the problem. 

thank you...I appreciate that, and really needed it.

The story is just an amusing anecdote. I doubt it was intended to be anything more or anything less.

I think so, too.

I agree that the story about Jonah Wilson getting his butt kicked in the karate class was probably meant to be just an amusing anecdote, even if the storyteller seemed to take a little too much satisfaction telling it.

I have to add, however, that JL was the first poster to use the term "bigot," and that he did so to describe some citizens of Texas, a state he subsequently referenced as that "sh*t hole" state.

Based on his stated opinion of "some" Texans, I am relieved to know he won't be stopping in Oklahoma when makes his exit from the Lone Star state.  ;)

I think saying that there are bigots in a state is a pretty safe and fair assumption. There are surely bigots in every state.

That's far different from calling a specific person a bigot, especially someone on this board that surely the person lobbing the accusation doesn't know.

I also think even making a non-specific claim that there are bigots in a state is more valid when it's based on personal experiences, as opposed to calling someone on this board a bigot based off a hugely exaggerated interpretation of one or a few posts.

I also think, if there are folks in Texas (or Oklahoma, or wherever) that are bent out of shape because someone called their state or region a shithole, then I think you just gotta suck it up. I'm in California. This is the state that elected Jerry Brown *and* Ronald Reagan. I've heard every complaint and insult about California imaginable, from all sides.

If anything, I'd give more weight to someone calling Texas a shithole if they actually live there. Doesn't mean I'm going to use that one opinion to come to a conclusion myself. Nor would I be short-sighted or impuslive enough to assume the person calling Texas a shithole means that everything and everyone in the state for all-time is shitty.

I did use that word, but was referring to a specific group of people that I have had the misfortune of dealing with, not everybody. Also, as mentioned previously, my dislike for living here is based on many factors. 1) The state government 2)How gun happy many are here  3) The fact that one of the reasons for Texas declaring independence from Mexico had to do with Mexico not allowing slavery is completely ignored in the teaching of Texas History (and I actually got a failing grade in 7th grade on a paper for even mentioning it).

More to the point...yes, I feel like I don't belong here. Have felt like that since childhood. That's one thing...what I don't like is being TOLD I don't belong here. Coming up, I was often bullied (for many reasons) but the thing that always got me was being *told* I'm too "different" and I'm not worthy of being here. That adds up. Scars run deep. So yeah, I have reasons for feeling the way I do. Even though there's good things about living here (lower priced gas is a big one), the negatives outweigh the positives for me.

I like how some people only agree that it's amusing story after like 5th poster saying it. What's there to figure out from that little extract? She even mentions Carl watching that karate fight. It's kind of annoying when people don't read carefully & start calling names smb. they don't even know ("doofus"). It doesn't matter that she bragged, it matters that Carl was there & apparently didn't do anything about Jonah getting beaten if he still continued to attend karate.

Could be they were on the same belt and skill level and thus were matched to spar each other, regardless of size/age difference.

 :lol  If "lower priced gas" is the best reason you can find for living in Texas, I would agree that it's probably time for you to go.

And RangeRover:  Perhaps Carl's failure to act when his son was being flogged by that young lady was motivated by the realization that one Wilson getting his butt kicked is exponentially better than two.

That's a possibility.

also means I'd be matched up with a fetus if I participated.

Yeah, gosh, I certainly hope that the karate class would match everyone up with someone who is a fair (and safe) match.

I don't know much about Carl, but he seemed like an intelligent enough guy that he wouldn't have kept his kids in a class where the instructor was insane and matching near-adults up with kids unfairly.

Well, that story only confirms all the bad I think of martial arts classes. On the other hands, no martial arts classes no Chuck Norris jokes, so there's a silver lining.

You'd be surprised. What happened there was nothing. I know of real horror stories.