November 20, 2008

Underwear supermodel Karolina Kurkova has no belly button.

I read it at BBC.com, where I went to look for some serious news to enlighten you. You may think I post the lowest drivel, but I actively bypassed this story last night. I started a draft, titled "They called him the 'Screamer.' He was very noisy," but then, I though, no, I'm not going there.

Yet, here is a much nicer place, the blank mid-torso of a skinny pretty woman who's done nothing more evil than prancing about in a bra and underpants. It's an interesting mystery. It's not like we know Kurkova left her navel on some battlefield in Europe (or Albert Hall).
Some have no belly button as a result of the surgery needed to correct abdominal problems at birth, often either an umbilical hernia, or a condition known as gastroschisis - born with the stomach and intestines poking through a hole in the abdominal wall.
I know all about that, having watched the "Hottest Chick, Ugliest Scar" episode of the Howard Stern Show. (It's "Megan" at the link, which has photos of women in bikinis.)

Bonus religious question: Did Adam and Eve have navels?

59 comments:

Bissage said...

Without a belly button the champagne must slosh all over.

Joe said...

Did Adam and Eve have navels?

I say no, since they didn't exist.

Assuming they did, then yes, since they were created in God's image.

Joe said...

BTW, the bonus religious question link is bad, at least on my end.

Ann Althouse said...

Fixed.

By the way, Adam and Eve had no babyhood, no childhood, no rearing from trusted adults, no mother or father to love them and show them how to act. They were essentially babies in adult form when they were tested and punished. It's so unfair! What a terrible story to cling to!

Cling... hmmm....

Paddy O said...

They were essentially babies in adult form when they were tested and punished. It's so unfair! What a terrible story to cling to!

Not necessarily. I think CS Lewis gives a good portrayal of adult innocence and ignorance in his Perelandra.

Plus, following the story, A and E had jobs, such as naming animals (akin in earlier cultures to understanding their being), and gardening. They also had a sense of right and wrong, as the temptation was a temptation because of their moral sense. They knew what it meant to choose selfish desire over peaceful community.

They had rearing, from God himself, who apparently hung out with them in the cool of the evening, showing them how to act, and bringing them to complete maturity.

Ungrateful brats. They gave all that up for a bit of premature delights and made us all have to learn good and evil the hard way. Then we all make the same kinds of stupid decisions that break apart peace and community all so we can assert our own grand being upon a world that really doesn't care about us anymore.

I'm Full of Soup said...

Tease us with the lead of "Underwear supermodel"? And that is the best picture you can share with us?

ricpic said...

Did Adam fail the test?

Peter Hoh said...

Genesis 1:26-27 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Does God have a belly button?

Roger J. said...

Joe--If A and E were created in God's image, are you suggesting God had a belly button? That has some MAJOR theological implications, I think.

save_the_rustbelt said...

Cling, huh?

Out here we are definitely clinging to our guns, although the guns shops are running low on inventory.

Best investment strategy, canned food and extra ammo. Plus a Bible of course.

Please post a better supermodel picture, my pacemaker needs wound up.

And what Bissage said. Reminds me of a story..........

Paddy O said...

"Does God have a belly button?"

According to orthodox Christian theology, absolutely he does.

Scars too.

Paddy O said...

Did Adam fail the test?

Yep. Then blamed the woman for not living up to his own responsibilities.

Typical man. Blame the woman for his own weakness.

Got him a bunch of hard work, though, and detention.

Anonymous said...

A friend of ours, old enough to be our dad, doesn't have a belly button, lost to surgery. When we were at the lake, and the kids noticed he was missing a belly button, we told them that he was Adam.

Anonymous said...

It's so unfair!

I think God's concept of fair differs from humans'. That might explain why the world isn't the way we would like it to be.

Meade said...

Alright. That settles that. But what I want to know is: If God created Adam in His image and God gave Adam nipples, wouldn't that mean God has nipples? Why in the world would God need nipples? Adam didn't even need nipples. I'm beginning to wonder if the entire project was somehow mismanaged.

Christy said...

So I guess Botticelli got it wrong with Venus, born of the sea?

Roger J. said...

After this thread is closed. all participants will be eligible for a Master of Divinity degree

BJM said...

I read it at BBC.com, where I went to look for some serious news to enlighten you.

The Beeb? News? *snort* *titter* *chuckle*

*BUHWHAHAHAHAHAHA!*

Roger J. said...
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Widmerpool said...

Ya Baby!

Triangle Man said...

It looks Photoshopped. She clearly has a naval here.

Trooper York said...
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I'm Full of Soup said...

Doris is gonna sue you Trooper.

Unknown said...

Triangle Man: is your tongue in cheek? You expect us to believe a Victoria's Secret page isn't photoshopped? :-) Seriously, my understanding is that they add bellybuttons to a lot of her pictures.

Trooper York said...
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Chip Ahoy said...

Hang on, let's see about this.

"God, do you have a belly button?"

Ooooouuuuuummmmm.

God says, "None of your business, but no. Neither did Adam nor Eve whilst on Earth. Think about it now, why would they? Why would I? We were not born of woman and your navel is the remnant scar of your maternal connection. According to your legend, an amalgam of several preexisting legends, Cain would be the first born with a navel, but all these legends of yours are patently false, a condensation of the factual truth which is more complicated than that, created in the days of oral history when uncomfortable and difficult to accept complicating facts interfered with stories told around the campfires of that age. Carry on."

"Thanks, God."

Well, there you have it.

Trooper York said...
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George M. Spencer said...

And not only that-- the Dow fell 427 yesterday and 444 today to 7,552, down 43 percent for the year!

Christy said...

We females are born with all our eggs. I choose to believe we are all Eve because of this. Life everlasting. A part of me has existed for over a million years (or 6009 years if you prefer.) Take that, Oregon Fungus!.

Trooper York said...
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TMink said...

No parents? You say that like it is a bad thing!

My shrink friends and I sit around and hope that we were good enough parents that our kids go on Oprah to diss us rather than one of the lesser and more sensational shows.

I mean, all parents give their children issues! So Adam and Eve had it lucky, but they blew it!

Trey

bwebster said...

My wife had a tummy tuck some years ago, and the plastic surgeon had to create a 'fake' belly button for her, since the surgery itself removed her original one.

I told her that if I were ever to have a tummy tuck, I would insist that I be left without a belly button at all, just to freak people out. ..bruce..

Beth said...

I don't know why you bypassed Hitler's testicle story.

My favorite spin on that one is that, while on a tour of Germany, Bette Midler had the German audience singing along to the British satirical tune "Hitler had only one big ball; Goerring had two but they were small. Himmler had something similar, but Goebbels had no balls at all."

Kirby Olson said...

The Beat poet Gregory Corso also did not have a belly button.

He was found on the steps of the Catholic church of Brooklyn at age 6 months, and never knew his mother until he was about 70 when she was finally tracked down (she was 87).

Corso thought that perhaps he was a child of angels, or perhaps some kind of Greek god, and used the non-existent belly button as evidence to that effect.

Triangle Man said...

mcg, Yes, tongue in cheek. Is there an emoticon for this?

Geoff Matthews said...

There is a species of mite that is born pregnant.

http://www.trivia-library.com/a/the-insect-that-is-born-pregnant.htm

I'd hate to imagine any correlation to humans on this.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

By the way, Adam and Eve had no babyhood, no childhood, no rearing from trusted adults, no mother or father to love them and show them how to act.

Althouse subliminal support for gay marriage?

Not bad. but i need more than the other "position" sucks ;)

AllenS said...

Originally, Adam had a good life. Nice garden, lots of domestic animals to eat. Then, he fell asleep and God took one of his ribs and made a woman! Gads! Then God invented the belly button because it was a lot easier on the men. When women leave a man after a long relationship, sometimes a belly button is the only thing a man has left.

Heywood Rice said...

There's something about Drudge that makes us want to look at it all the time.

It’s something about you, it’s called stupidity.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

When women leave a man after a long relationship, sometimes a belly button is the only thing a man has left.

Not if you've married in a half & half state ;)

AllenS said...

"half & half state"

North and South Dakota, North and South Carolina?

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

half & half state

Michael Jackson and his family

DaveW said...

The Catholic Church teaches that the creation story is not literal. I'm not sure many people know that, or even many Catholics for that matter.

Catechism of the Catholic Church

362 The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. the biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language when it affirms that "then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being."229 Man, whole and entire, is therefore willed by God.

What did God do to make man, well, man? He breathed a soul into him (and her).

364 The human body shares in the dignity of "the image of God": it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit:232

The soul is what makes man unique. It is the soul that is in the image of God, not our body.

366 The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents...

370 In no way is God in man's image. He is neither man nor woman. God is pure spirit in which there is no place for the difference between the sexes. But the respective "perfections" of man and woman reflect something of the infinite perfection of God: those of a mother and those of a father and husband.

What Catholicism teaches in that the creation story in Genesis is allegory. Yes God created everything, but when God acted to creat man in His image what he did was imbue him with a spiritual image of God, a soul.

I know, Catholicism doesn't represent the beliefs of all Christians. Jerry Falwell might have thought the creation story was literal, or not, I dunno. But Catholicism is the oldest and largest Christian denomination.

Normally I wouldn't say much about this but I just went through a class on the subject.

So yes they had belly buttons and no God does not. ;)

Mark O said...

How can God be perfect and have no belly button? Or, is Karolina God?

Oh, and Trooper, would you post the sections on Nixon and Clinton? I can't seem to download those from Doris's thing.

Joe said...

Christian theology states that we were created in the image of God. That would mean a) God looks like us and b) there is a Mrs. God.

Of course, most Christians don't take their theology seriously let alone examine the logical implications of that theology. (In this one point, Mormons do take the next logical step and believe there are heavenly parents and that they got there by going through the same testing process as we are now.)

Geoff Matthews said...

I believe that the Eastern Orthodox churches would claim to be older than Catholicism.

Trooper York said...
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Paddy O said...

I believe that the Eastern Orthodox churches would claim to be older than Catholicism.

Yes, and they use an older liturgy to prove it. It's really a silly point. There was only one church for the first thousand years. So the Orthodox and the Catholics are equally old. Problem is the Catholics are used to arguing with Protestants, and don't really know what to do with the Orthodox, what with their bishops-from-churches older-than-Rome and all.

most Christians don't take their theology seriously let alone examine the logical implications of that theology.

That's true. But those who do take it seriously know that this is a kind of silly and naive explanation of 'image' that was pretty much addressed like 1800 years ago. There's no Mrs. God, cuz Women are God's image too. And he doesn't look like us (the Father at least) because physical attributes is not the meaning of 'image'. They didn't write in our English after all. All kinds of very, very established meanings behind these words besides the literal meaning of our particular translation.

Stephen said...

True, Doris Kearns Goodwin has devoted her career to the study of the Executive Branch, but isn’t it a bit suspicious that she has suddenly become so knowledgeable about a different hole area? Urology and umbilicology are pudendal opposites. The Goodwin text has uncanny similarities to passages from the “Influence of Navel Power Upon History”, a tome that has been in Vogue since it was issued. The Taft and Buchanan parts seem lifted, and her Nixon is not to be trusted.

Trooper York said...
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Paddy O said...

I heard Doris Kearns Goodwin give a lecture at an important lecture series a couple years ago. Very weird. She speaks without paragraphs. I didn't know paragraphs were part of speaking until I heard her speak, and leave them entirely out. Her points just flow one into the other, with nary a break or pause. She's a good speaker, mind you, except for that lack of paragraph thing.

jimbino said...

The trees had no rings and the rocks had no strata. The kids had incestuous relationships.

Beth said...

I didn't know paragraphs were part of speaking until I heard her speak, and leave them entirely out.

Our early writing doesn't have paragraphs. The fact that, once we start setting things in type, we develop them, makes me think that they're part of our speech pattern, along with other punctuation and mechanics of writing, and that we developed them to organize our pages the way we organize our thoughts, and spoken words.

Unknown said...

Christian theology states that we were created in the image of God. That would mean a) God looks like us and b) there is a Mrs. God.

You're kidding, right? Neither of those two conclusions follow from the premise. I mean, if you're gonna mock someone for believing a religion, a proper use of basic logic might bolster your case.

Unknown said...

(Continuing...) Your primary source of error is that you're interpreting "image" exactly backwards. God doesn't "look" like us, we "look" like him. (In fact, even the use of the word "look" is questionable; the term "image" need not refer solely to a three-dimensional visual image. But I'm focusing on your primary error.)

The directionality is important because as finite beings we would necessarily be an incomplete image of God. Thus the fact that we were created male and female in no way implies a Mrs. God; rather it implies that God has both male and female characteristics, and each of us reflects only a portion of them.

howzerdo said...

My grandniece was born with an omphalocele (which is similar to gastroschisis, except the organs protrude through the umbilical cord and are enclosed in a sac) and after five surgeries, she has no navel. She is now 2, and will have plastic surgery when she is older to minimize the terrible scars, and create a cosmetic navel.

Mark O said...

Troop, you're way good.

dee said...

Howzerdo - a question for you!

A friend also had an omphalocele when she was born. She has not had any plastic surgery and is very conscious of the scar. I was wondering if you could share any information regarding doctors/hospitals who would perform such a procedure. Thanks!
Dee

dee said...
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