BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: April 2007
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Male vs. Female Psychology
This post stems from the same source as the last one, but it's going in a very different direction. As I (tried to and intially failed) linked in the last update, I just finished reading Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice. The bit about Greek myth was basically an aside in the book, and had no real relevance to the overall topic, of male vs. female psychological development. Gilligan's book was published in 1983 and was groundbreaking at the time. It's a relatively slim tome, clocking in at just under 200 pages, including bibliography and notes. Her basic premise is that girls and boys develop very different psychologies from their youngest age, and that their ways of thinking continue to diverge during development, especially around the time of puberty. This continues as adults (as anyone reading this who is a man or woman realizes) and often seems almost intractible. Men see issues in one way, women see them in another, and it's sometimes impossible to understand the other person since they're coming from such a different POV.
This isn't just a male/female issue, of course. It's true for almost any basic belief system, whether atheists vs. religious, religious vs. other religious, liberal vs. conservative, sports fan vs. non-sports fan, or pretty much anything. Just as a quick example; I spent years during my teens thinking that other people who liked "wimpy" music would like the hard, heavy metal stuff I liked if they just heard it. I heard bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana and others, at the height of the grunge-style "slow, then fast and heavy, then slow and brooding" music, and loved the hard/fast parts, and yawned through the slow and brooding, "Billy Corgan sings a lullabye" parts. I wanted the whole songs to be hard and fast, or at least heavy, and kept thinking that people who heard these grunge songs would surely like the hard part and then get into music that was like that all the time.
Needless to say, they didn't, and my tastes have evolved over time as well. The point though, is that from my POV, people who didn't like the kind of music I did just hadn't heard it properly, or needed to be introduced. I figured the hard and soft stuff on the radio would work like a gateway drug and lure them in, and of course it did nothing of the kind. They'd heard hard music, and they didn't like it, except in very limited doses, such as during the chorus of a Linkin' Park song.
That wasn't the best metaphor in the history of metaphors, but to return to Gilligan's book, she delves into this issue from a psychological angle. I won't summarize her entire book (that would be like, work) but her conclusions essentially boil down to boys evaluating ethical issues as though they were math problems to be solved right then and there, and girls considering them from a framework of relationships that extend over time. This evolves to adults seeing issues in similar fashion. Men define issues in terms of separation and individuality and non-interference, and women look at them as connected to others, and try to solve problems so they don't harm or abandon others.
Obviously not every person fits neatly into this description, and not every problem can be boiled down so neatly, but overall I thought Gilligan's analysis was pretty incisive. The first 50 pages or so, at least. The last 2/3 of the book is a lot more tedious, with many detailed analyses of how individual case studies (women) deal with ethical issues such as abortion and love and family concerns. I enjoyed the start more since her conclusions were broadly applied and there was a constant male/female comparison.
Anyway, while thinking the book over, I ventured to Amazon.com to check out the reader reviews, and found them enlightening. They're largely positive and generally insightful, but it's the negative reviews that are the most interesting. As usual. A few people complain that Gilligan didn't do proper statistical analysis or publish her categorized findings, which may be true, but I think is largely irrelevant. She didn't survey 5000 people and tabulate their replies into forms and boxes and charts. She talked to individuals and analyzed what they said, then applied those conclusions to society writ large. Gilligan can certainly be criticized for overgeneralizing and extrapolating too much from a limited sample size, and a few reviewers do, but to make her sound like some kind of John Lott, busily inventing stats and falsifying results (and sock puppeting) to make a pre-determined point, is a very misleading critique. She doesn't post any stats to falsify!
The other negative reviews mostly come from defensive males reacting to an issue, and not the book itself, and I found their POV fascinating, in that it essentially nutshells every sweeping generalization Gilligan made about the male psyche in her book. This one, by Bob, is the best example:
...Furthur, the subjects presented in this work do not respond to the ethical problems presented to them, but rather seek to change the conditions of those problems. In given a situation where one's loved one is ill and he does not have the money to buy the medicine without which she will die he must chose if he will steal the medicine. The subjects in this study seek to change the conditions of the test; well, gee, if the person with the medicine REALLY understood how sick she was maybe he would give it or perhaps a fundraiser could be held. If these were viable options than there would be no ethicial problem. Eventually, one must face the black and white choice. I would assume that some men also thought of these possibilities but, given the conditions of the test, understood that they were not options ( perhaps already having been attempted). The responses that Gilligan relies on in her study seem to say nothing about how to respond to ethical challenges as much as how to avoid them or put them off as long as possible. Had she attacked the validity of the test as unrealistic, biased, whatever, perhaps her work would have had more impact.
...I have great respect for woman and to not denigrate the way that they look at the world, however, I think that an analysis of them on such paltry evidence weakens her argument and that of all those who came after that use her as a source.
The ethical problem he refers to is a classic one in psychology. Gilligan presents it to numerous boys and girls of various ages, as well as to men and women. The problem is a simple one: Heinz has a sick wife. She needs medicine that he can't afford or she'll die. The druggist refuses to lower his price. Should Heinz steal the medicine?
The question doesn't have a right or wrong answer; it's an ethical dilemma, and the key is how people answer it. The boys Gilligan cites usually work on it like a math problem. How much does it cost, can Heinz earn the money, will he get caught if he steals it, etc. The girls, as Bob alludes to, see it in an entirely different way. They see the problem not as a financial or criminal matter, but as one of caring and empathy. They want Heinz to make the druggist understand how important the drug is to his wife, and feel that if the druggist can only be made to understand, surely he'll agree to a compromise. The girls also consider what will happen to the wife if Heinz steals it and gets caught and sent to prison, what the knowledge that he's stolen will do to their long term relationship, etc.
As Bob says, they change the equation... but that's the whole point! Of course they change the question around, and that's where the insight into the female vs. male psyche comes in. What Bob (and many other men, I suspect) fail to understand is that women see the issue in a fundamentally different light, with different values and priorities. Boys see the question as black and white and something to resolve right then and there. Girls see it as one step in a long journey, with past issues affecting this one, and this one sure to impact the future.
I can't begin to count how many discussions I've had with Malaya that boiled down to this. She had a problem or concern, she voiced it to me, and my automatic thought was, "What advice can I offer that will solve this?" I'd try, she wouldn't take to my proposed solution, so I'd try another solution, and she wouldn't like that one either and would get frustrated and feel that I wasn't listening to her. I would also feel frustrated since she wasn't valuing my solutions, and I didn't know what she wanted from me, since my replies were how I'd deal with the issue, and she had no use for them. It's not in tractible, but it's tough, since it's not just that the woman wants the man "to listen." She wants him to understand and empthasize, but when the man frames the entire issue in such a different way, how can he?
An interesting exercise would be to reframe Gilligan's ethical scenario into a women-centric POV, and then pose it to boys and girls. I suspect the results would be reversed, with the girls answering it outright, and the boys reframing it or essentially cutting the Gordian knot as they went straight for a solution. Just for the hell of it...
Heinz has a wife who is sick and needs medicine to live. They can't afford the medicine, and the druggist won't listen when Heinz explains why he needs it. What should Heinz do?
That's not very good, but it kind of gets the point across. Girls would probably (I'm hypothesizing dangerously here, I realize) answer that Heinz needed to make the druggist understand the gravity of the situation, while boys would say Heinz should steal the drug. But by Bob's definition, the boys wouldn't be answering the question, since the option to steal wasn't included in the dilemma.
I'm hardly scratching the surface of Gilligan's work, since there are lots of other issues and ethical dilemmas, and the reasons behind our male/female mindsets are plumbed, and the mental changes during puberty are examined, and questions are posed to adults as well as children, and the male tendency to see violence in situations is discussed, etc. But I'm not covering the entire book here, I'm just talking about one aspect of it and condensing a lot of what Gilligan says and reveals in other related questions. I just wanted to quote Bob's review since it so perfectly encapsulates the male mind. Not only does he not "get" the female replies in the book, he discounts them since they don't fit into the matrix of his thoughts. Better yet, he then includes an, "I have great respect for women..." section in his review, reminiscent of the de rigueur "I have plenty of black/gay/whatever friends" introduction that prefaces every condemnation from a self-oblivious racist/homophobe/whatever. He's not a misogynist, but he's clearly a sexist, in an unconscious, "I respect women even though they usually disagree with me and are therefore wrong." sort of way.
The girls in Gilligan's book didn't answer the question in the way Bob thought they should, so they're wrong and invalid. This is chunk-of-gold rich, since a major theme of Gilligan's entire book is that historically speaking, psychological evaluations of girls and women, going all the way back to Freud and continuing on through the work of numerous other (male) psychoanalyists, are flawed since the models were designed from observation of boys or men, and then applied to women. Which is, of course, exactly what Bob's doing as he evaluates the female replies to the ethical question Gilligan cites. His review could (almost) be read as very dry satire, skewering himself by functioning as a palimpsest, with the incomprehending male on the surface and the subversive counter-meaning beneath.
But it's not.
It is, however, a valuable lesson to the rest of us, male or female. This is why people argue about issues. (I speak of arguments by intelligent people in good faith; not drunken screaming matches.) It's not that the events in dispute are so polarizing; it's that the people in the argument see them from such radically different points of view. If my black is your white, not only is agreement impossible, even a basic understanding of your POV is unlikely.
While enjoying some light reading Friday afternoon, I had an interesting, and undoubtedly unoriginal, thought. What if there were Greek Mythology creationists? People who not only believed in and worshipped Zeus and Apollo and Aphrodite and all the rest, but who insisted on the literal truth of the legends in which they star? Here's the example that spurred this thought.
Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, while playing in a meadow with her girlfriends, sees a beautiful narcissus wich she runs to pick. As she does so, the earth opens and she is snatched away by Hades, who takes her to his underworld kingdom. Demeter, goddess of the earth, so mourns the loss of her daughter that she refuses to allow anything to grow. The crops that sustain life on earth shirvel up, killing men and animals alike, until Zeus takes pity on man's suffering and persuades his brother to return Persephone to her mother. But before she leaves, Persphone eats some pomegranate seeds, which ensues that she will spend part of every year with Hades in the underworld. (Pg. 23)
Gilligan uses this myth to illustrate one of her concepts about female psychological development, and obviously doesn't mean it to be taken literally, but just suppose that some modern day believers did? Can you imagine the faux-scientific discussion of how earthquakes could actually be caused by Satan Hades to pull people down to his domain? Searching historical records for evidence of a worldwide drought that caused horrible famines? The strange amd mystical properties of the pomegranate fruit and the seeds thereof? Of course all such endeavors would be ludicrous, but how is that story any more outlandish than any number of popular Christian myths? Humans building a tower into the sky and failing when they all started to speak different languages? Oceans parting to allow escaping slaves to escape their pursuers? A whale swallowing a guy for some days and horking him up unharmed? Two of every animal on earth journeying to a forty-day Middle Eastern cruise?
How would a Christian literalist even argue this? "See, some of those things really did happen. Because my book of ancient writings says they did, and it's the truth. Those other books of ancient writings are just telling stories. It would be silly to believe those events actually took place."
I'd agree with part of that. It would be silly. And yet plenty of people spend much of their adult lives doing just that.
If your browser had a junk mail filter that worked on blog posts, this one would be toast, huh? Disengenuous title aside, I just got my credit card bill for the month, and as I stuck in the check and prepared to seal the envelope, I did my usual cursing and muttering about the junk mail insert. Every month, I get ads for the cheapest fucking crap along with my credit card bill. Garbage! Seriously, I'm insulted that they send me ads for this stuff. This month it was some kind of customized stamp; like you can put Cancelled! with a box border around it, and then thunk the stamp down on old checks, or whatever. And it's not even a good stamp; there's no mother of pearl handle, or filagreed inlaid base or anything. It's a brightly-colored piece of plastic; it looks like something a nine year old would pay a quarter for from a machine at the front of the dollar store.
Every month is the same too. It's always relentlessly cheap, sub-Wal-Mart quality plastic junk. Five karat cubic zirconium tennis bracelets and collectible plates and no-name cartoon figurines and other stuff like you see advertised on the inside pages of that Parade magazine they stick in the Sunday paper. Every month I'm offended by the offer, and worst of all, there's a perforated order form attached to the back of the envelope, which I have to carefully tear off before I can seal my check and payment receipt and mail the bill back. Several times I've ripped it and torn the back of the envelope, necessitating some invisible tape repair before I can send them money.
I could understand this if I had one of those debit credit cards where you can only spend the money you've got in an account, or some other cheap ass, Tijuana National Bank bullshit. But I'm using a platinum MasterCard from a major financial institution with a credit limit far higher than I'll ever need or be able to afford. On the other hand, I've had the card for over a decade, I'm set with no annual fee for life, and I always pay it off my balance that month and never give them any interest, so I guess they've got to try to gouge me somehow.
They could at least custom tailor my ads a bit. I'm so not in the demographic for the cutesy crap they send out. If they had cool, practical, classy stuff like oh... replica samurai swords, or porn star trading cards (do not eat the gum) I might give them some of my money.
I've been using Firefox and You Tube for months, but until recently I hadn't bothered to combine those tools to begin happily Borging copyrighted material. I don't know what specifically spurred me, but I got a Firefox extension that enabled one click downloading of embedded flash movies, and I've since snapped up a good 50 or so music videos from You Tube. I don't really watch them, I just use them for the music as they play in the background while I'm working on other things. It's not much different than just keeping one of my tabs open to YouTube.com, but I don't have to wait for videos to load, or be inconvenienced by occasional YouTube downtimes or videos being deleted for copyright infringement.
If you want to play along and you're using Firefox, just go to Tools > Extensions (or Alt T E) and then click the link for "Get More Extensions." The Mozilla site has tons, and along with the highly-recommended AdBlock Plus you can find lots of others, and a quick search for You Tube will find you any number that let you seamlessly steal Flash and other embedded file types.
You might need a flash player too, and I got a crappy freeware one called FLV Player from Downloads.com, since the Adobe/Macromedia player wouldn't properly install on my machine (It kept saying I needed more free disk space and that I should clear 5 meg. I have over 80meg free.) The player works, but it's not very good; I can't cue multiple files to play, and it doesn't allow FF or RW options. At some point I'll care enough to get a file converter and turn the .flv files into mp3s so I can just stack them up in WinAmp along with the rest of my music. Whether this is easier than hunting up some file sharing forums/IRC channels and getting bit torrents for the actual HQ videos and mp3s is open to debate.
Interesting article about the phenomena created by Alanis Morisette's parody video of the Black Eyed Peas' My Humps song/video. I saw it some weeks ago when it hit and thought it was either brilliant or idiotic, and my opinion has not changed. Though I think I'm leaning towards brilliant, if only slightly. (The original song/video remains squarely between "loathesomely catchy" and "idiotic.")
Actually, I have to amend that. I just You Tube'd up the Peas' My Humps video, and realized I'd never actually watched the video before. The rating needle is definitely leaning towards "idiotic" now, though at least I now understand why Alanis is lying on suitcases and a bunch of random guys are sitting around on a car during her video.
Anyway, the article is from the LA Times entertainment section, and here's a quote:
At first glance, it simply looks like another pass-along parody, a takeoff on the original "My Humps" hit by the Black Eyed Peas. But Morissette's video is armed with a provocative subtext that has people abuzz with debate. It's a fascinating piece of video art, an inspired combination of satire, social criticism and career reinvention that is a signature artifact of today's viral Web culture.
On one level, "My Humps" is a commentary on dim-bulb pop. The Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps," though a huge smash, was widely mocked for its vapid, suggestive lyrics. (Sample: "The boys they wanna sex me, they always standing next to me, always dancing next to me, tryin' a feel my hump, hump.") The video, featuring Fergie, the group's lead singer, was, if possible, even tawdrier. Full of nonstop teasing and thrusting, it's the kind of hip-hop booty porn that would make great torture material for Muslim prisoners at our Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Dressing herself Fergie-style, with baubles and bling, surrounded by black-clad male dancers, Morissette retained the original's visual sluttiness but replaced the Peas' thumping rhythm track with a pensive solo piano. By removing the intoxicating bass line and clearly enunciating the crass lyrics, she gave the song's sexpot swagger a new tone of sadness and desperation while simultaneously parodying her own artistic tendencies toward self-absorbed angst.
It's a striking performance, functioning as both social criticism and self-criticism.
The article goes on to say that one reason Alanis' version is creating so much buzz and debate is... that she's not doing any press about it, and not using it as a viral thing to promote a new album/tour/whatever. It's amusing and depressing that in this day and age, someone creating something interesting and entertaining simply for the sake of being interesting and entertaining is in of itself newsworthy.
Now that the Bourne Identity/Supremacy (or whatever the first 2 movies are called) films have become staples of cable programming (Bourne 1 is on TBS or USA or TNT every other time I turn on the TV), and I've seen them several times on DVD, I must admit to having grown quite fond of them both. I didn't want to like them in advance, since after all, it's Matt Damon. Or possibly Mark Whalburg -- like anyone can tell them apart (a fact the movie company is clearly banking on by casting Whalberg in the new Bourne-looklike action flick that no one is going to see).
The source material is dreck as well, at least based on the bit of Ludlum's purple prose I read (and cited in my review) on Amazon.com, but however it improbably happened, the two Bourne movies (and there's a third coming this summer) are very smart, fast, exciting, well-acted, and no-nonsense. And I think that's what I like about them.
I loathed the last few James Bond films, until they successfully reinvented the series in Casino Royale. They were bloated and ridiculous, with totally over the top plots, mugging villians, laughably future-tech inventions, horrid female costars (Denise "Nucular Scientist" Richards), and had basically become almost as ridiculous as the Austin Power's parody of them. They were just one long, absurd set-action-piece after another, and could not be salvaged no matter how many wryly-arched eyebrows Pierce Brosnan turned loose.
The Bourne films have taken a very different approach, and that's what I initially liked about them, and what keeps them interesting to me through multiple viewings. They're very streamlined and quick and realistic, and they feature lots of smart characters who talk fast, know what they're doing, and get the job done. Bourne doesn't win because the bad guys monologue instead of just shooting him, or are in love with their own cleverness, or because he's got gadgets that more successfully prove Clarke's third law. He wins because even though they're very good, he's better. And that's inspiring to me, and enjoyable to watch. I sat through most of Bourne 2 over the weekend, and I found myself rooting for the CIA people even as they were hunting Bourne. They're not evil, in the film. They're just doing their jobs, and doing them pretty well. They're furiously pulling surveillance tapes and spotting their needle in a train station quarry, they're putting out manhunts with local authorities, they're sending in the SWAT team when necessary, and they're all highly competent, both in action and in verbal skills. It's comfort food for my mind, in a way -- just seeing people who know what they're doing and are highly-articulate and skilled in word and deed.
I like it perhaps because it's so very unlike real life.
I've lately been in unfortunately close proximity with two human adult males who remove years from my life when they begin speaking. One guy isn't especially dumb, he's just remarkably inarticulate, perhaps due to his constant pot smoking (I've never seen it, but my god does he reek of the herb.) When he talks, which is mercifully-seldom, he has a strong voice and if he's directed to remain on topic he can make some points... he just has no presence and uses "like" after literally every sentence, if not more often. I've never been able to follow the meaning of his words for more than a sentence or two, since roughly every fifth word is "like." And it's not an affectation, Valley Girl style, he just uses it when he pauses to "think" and since he does that a lot: yeah... I want to record him someday and then post the audio file online just to provide an example to every teenager on earth how not to talk. (Or perhaps how to talk if they want to cause intelligent adults to not retain any approximation of their meaning.)
"Well, my project was like focusing on like the ways in which, like, people, like, study other like cultures and like ideas, and like their methods of like coping with changing societal conditions and like, attitudes."
That is not an exaggeration, I assure you. I've found myself counting the likes several times while listening to him talk, since I can't get past his inarticulateness to make sense of what he's saying. I should have written down the tallies, but he easily liked into the 30s during several short discourses.
The other guy's worse. He doesn't "like" you to death, but he is so mumbly and muttery that I think it has to be at least somewhat intentional. This sounds both cruel and hyperbolist, but swear to you that it took me a good two months of seeing him once a week before I could safely conclude that he wasn't mentally retarded. I don't mean he talked like it, I mean I honestly thought he might suffer some LMR, and I wasn't sure if I was allowed to be so annoyed at his hemming and hawing, if I should feel sorry for him, or be inspired by his nearly-normal functioning despite his handicap.
I've since accepted that he lacks mental or chromosomal aberrations, and that it's me, not him. Other people don't seem to mind so much when he tries to talk, but I have to grip myself to keep from beating my head into a wall, or shaking him like a crying baby. I wonder if a smack to the back of the head would unstick the words, and I wonder if he's ever won an argument in his life. Can he get in a word edgewise in a group of more than four people? (There's plenty of time to ponder these issues while waiting for him to try talk, I assure you.)
"Talk faster!" I want to shout, and this is exactly why they don't let me around children or old people. I have zero patience with people who can't articulate themselves, and I don't much care whether they don't know the words or can't find them or are lost in their memories. Life is short, your point isn't that good anyway, and it's getting worse every extra second you spend stammering your way towards it. Of course I do wait; I just seethe or laugh inside meanwhile.
The irony is that I can easily see the first guy becoming the second guy. He can't be aware of how ignorant he sounds with all his likes and dis-likes. He just can't. If he was he'd have to do something to change it, or at least try to control it, unless all the pot he's smoked has burnt out his mental motor skills -- a possibility I'm not entirely ruling out. Imagine that someday some friends of his stage an intervention (I'd help, but my intervention would be a lot like the one the villagers with torches staged for Frankenstein's monster.) and make him listen to himself talking. He's not bright enough to formulate his points faster than his mouth can deliver them, but he could learn not to use like as a constant crutch. Perhaps he could incorporate pauses, or just speak more slowly to allow his mind time to catch up and move ahead... just like the second guy, who I find even more annoying!
So, to reduce this to the element most blogs focus on... what does this tell me about me? I've often commented that what we most dislike about others is usually a reflection of something we dislike in ourselves. I know I dislike it when I can't get a point out, or can't articulate myself, or when I'm feeling mentally slow. I don't often have those problems, but it drives me crazy when I do. On the contrary, my verbal weakness is excessive haste. I've always got so many points to make or ideas to express that I talk way too quickly, and only Malaya can understand me (almost) all of the time, since her mind is in tune with mine, her ears are good, and she knows me very well. I have to remind myself, when speaking with other people, to slow down, to enunciate, and to sometimes belabor a point since they're probably not on my mental wavelength. And I still talk way too fast.
Interestingly, I do the same thing with words. Not so much on the keyboard, but when I'm writing by hand I get so frustrated at the sloth-like pace of word formation, and the imprecision of my motor skills and the medium of ink on paper that I can't stand it. As a result I form the first few letters or words adequately, before inevitably descending into a series of squiggles that no one, including myself, can later decipher. I write the squiggles very quickly though, I must admit.
The other realization this prompts is that I overvalue verbal ability, especially of the glibly-eloquent style. I judge anything said quickly and clearly far more highly than its content might deserve, while lacking the patience to wait out slower speakers who might have better points. The "like" guy might actually be brilliant in some fields, but I'll never realize it since I can't filter out his annoying verbal ticks. It reminds me of l33tsp33k. Most adults online can't tolerate that stuff, and immediately disregard anything said in it. I know I get snobby, and if someone's writing a forum or blog post and using "u" and "2" and "ur" in something other than a the caption on an amusing cat photo, and disregarding punctuation and sentence structure, they pretty much vanish into my mental junk filter. They might have a great point to make, but I'm not going to get it. Just as a general rule; if you're not typing with one thumb on a phone, you need to use real words if you expect anyone older than about 14 to read them.
Finally, this analysis also makes me realize that I, like most everyone else, judge others by my own standards. I think I'm smart, and I talk fast and think fast and can make jokes and jump from one point to another without losing my train of thought. Therefore I think other people who speak in similar fashion are also smart, and that people who talk really poorly, or really slowly, aren't smart. I realize that plenty of idiots can machine gun out words, and that a smart person might not be verbally articulate, or may be struggling to elucidate a difficult concept, but unless English is clearly not their first language, I have trouble waiting and not letting my thoughts wander to fill the time.
Likewise, I figure that while I'm grinding my teeth at the second guy's ponderous attempts at discourse, he thinks he's being thoughtful and insightful. And when I'm talking he probably winces at my glib tongue and thinks I'm a superficial chattering mynah bird.
Just a pointless and short observation, but what's with being hungry when you're awake, but not when you're sleeping? I was up very late and had to get up early for a thing, and despite being fed when I went to sleep, when I woke up 4 hours later I was hungry, and having now returned home from the thing, I'm starving. Yet it's still less than 7 hours since I went to bed. In a perfect world I'd still be sleeping, and when I woke I wouldn't likely be very hungry. But because I've been awake for 3 hours I'd prefer to have spent in bed, I need more food? It's not as if I've been carrying heavy things.
Amusing article on Yahoo about bad (or are they good?) book titles:
The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification was named winner of the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for oddest book title.
The book, written by Buffalo, N.Y.-based artist Julian Montague and published by Harry N. Abrams, beat How Green Were the Nazis? a study of the environmental policies of the Third Reich.
...
Runner-up for the prize was Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan, by Robert Chenciner, Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie (Bennett & Bloom).
The other finalists were Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: Di Mascio of Coventry: an Ice Cream Company of Repute, With an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans, by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher and Alan Wilkinson (Past Masters); Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium (Kluwer); and Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, by David Benatar (Clarendon Press).
Past winners of the 29-year-old prize include People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It.
These selections seem to be judged like man a man regards his penis, with attention to excessive length, but I suppose that does make the books odd and unusual. I'd like to see some with just three or four words make the cut; anyone can make a wacky book title if they've got twenty words to do it.
In that light I approve of this year's 1st and 2nd prizes; they're real books about real things, and the oddness of their titles is just due to the oddness of their subjects. I'd enjoy looking through a book about lost shopping carts or the Nazi's environmental practices; not so much the unnecessarily long titled one about ice cream trucks, or the others torn from the same page.
Personally, I'm terrible at book and story titles. Maybe I should use more words and go for the wackiness/attention-getting concept? There's a reason I usually refer to my long-since-completed, in-need-of-revision-come-summertime, hopefully soon-to-be-published fantasy novel as... The Fantasy Novel. And it's not because the title is so cool I'm saving it to spring on the would-be agent and would-be publisher as a secret weapon.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The number of morbidly obese Americans, those who weigh 100 pounds (45 kilograms) over normal weight, is rising much faster than the rest of the obese population, said a study released Tuesday.
The number of severely obese people rose 50 percent from 2000 to 2005, reaching three percent of the US population, or 6.8 million adults, according to a study by the Rand Corporation.
That rise was twice as fast as the gains registered in the moderate obesity, it said.
In order to be considered morbidly obese, a five-foot-ten-inch (1.77 meter) man would have to weigh 300 pounds (136 kilograms) or more, and a five-foot-four-inch (1.64 meter) woman would weigh 250 pounds (113 kilograms) or more.
You have to tip 40 BMI to qualify, while 30 is just "overweight." Calculate yours here if you wanna, but, as they always say, include logic with your check. If you're one of the miniscule fraction of humans with significant added body musculature you'll obviously weight more than average for your height, and will creep up the BMI scale, but you're obviously not overweight or obese in the way this sort of simple calculator means. (I'm right at the upper edge of "normal weight," but I wear the same size pants I did in high school, when I weighed about 140 and couldn't put on a pound to save my life, and a look in the mirrror is enough to tell me most of the 25-30 I've put on since then is due to lifting heavy things.)
It can be kind of petty/gloating to poke news items about people who are just overweight or obese (the majority of Americans at this point) but this morbidly obese setting is both tragic and dangerous. This article doesn't go into it, but I think I've read that this level of porkitude is more dangerous than being a smoker, in terms of added health risks. (Though plenty of people manage both.) High blood pressure, diabetes, heart attack, stroke, circulatory problems, etc. And jokes about Hostess aside, you need to eat a lot more than dessert snacks to double your ideal weight, and no one's doing that with salads and vegetables and fresh fruit. Fried chicken, steak, biscuits, gravy, french fries... damn, now I'm hungry.
Anyway, this kind of disregard for your body's health takes a decade or more off of your life, causes constant illnesses and depression, and it's expensive! I blogged about it a couple of years, back when this blog was worth reading, ago after a Vegas vacation (scroll down to the 3rd Dec 29th update), where we were around a woman who was borderline morbidly obese at the time, and in a week we never left a store without her buying a snack; M&Ms, soda, muffin, giant 800 calorie Starbucks coffee, etc. I figured she was spending $10 a day on that garbage, this was on vacation, when she didn't have her own pantry or a car to indulge in independent midnight snack runs. I hate myself when I give into late night urges for corn chips, or peanut butter pretzel bites, or an extra Dr. Pepper, when I could/should have just had an apple. Imagine how unhappy people are when they do that every day, several times a day, and see the results steadily mounting on their waistline?
You've probably seen the furor over the life-size, chocolate Jesus Christ they were going to display in a hotel in NYC on Easter. It's been in the news for a few days, and after chuckling and ignoring it, I finally gave it some thought today. And it has me puzzled. First of all, here's the Cadbury Creme™ Lord and Saviour himself:
"It is a scandalous carving of Jesus Christ allegedly made out of chocolate. What the Roger Smith Hotel (where the gallery is housed) would hope to achieve by this sickening display, no one seems to know. The Catholic community is alerted to this offense against our faith and sensitivity. This is something we will not soon forget," he said.
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights, also wants blood.
"It's an all-out war on Christianity," he said. "They wouldn't show a depiction of Martin Luther King with genitals exposed on Martin Luther King Day and they wouldn't show Muhammad depicted that way on Ramadan. It's always Christians, and the timing is deliberate."
You can pretty well disregard anything Bill Donohue says; he's just a kook who runs around screaming about this and that trying to get attention. He's not affiliated with any part of the actual Catholic Church anyway. But the Cardinal's words have some weight and value, and they're what puzzle me.
These guys are aware that a substantial percentage of the world's greatest art (Michaelangelo, for example: one, two, three) features Jesus Christ on a crucifix, right? And that in those paintings, statues, murals, stained glass windows, etc, he's frequently naked, and usually dying in agony? On top of that, every Catholic church on earth has statues of Jesus on the cross, wearing a loin cloth at best. Not to mention the whole Eucharist thing; a religious ceremony in which believers eat bread and drink wine, snacks that are meant as literal representations of Jesus' flesh.
So then, how or why is a chocolate Jesus an outrage? If they baked a giant bread Jesus, would that be bad? What about hundreds of holy wafers glued together in the shape of Jesus? What if they'd had chocolate galore in the Middle East 2000 years ago, and (in the apocryphral Last Supper story) Jesus had passed out dark chocolate morsels, and the tradition had been continued? Would Catholic children have spent the last few centuries looking forward to communion a lot more eagerly than they do for a bit of cracker?
Seriously though, why is a chocolate statue of Jesus such an outrage? It's thematically tied to the chocolate aspect of modern Easter celebrations, it's hardly any different than the art we see on the wall of every church on earth, it's not much different than the symbolic Eucharist ceremony, etc. Some of the complaints were about the anatomically-correct aspect of the statue, but honestly, do you think the prudish, professional outrage merchants would have been any quieter if the chocolate Jesus had been draped in a loincloth? He could have worn a suit and tie, or robe and sandals, and they would have bitched just the same. It's all part of reinforcing the ongoing media narrative that Christians (who make up something like 80% of the US population and 99% of US elected officials) are perpetually under attack by the evil, scheming forces of secularism.
And it works; look at the media coverage this most recent bit of stupidity garnered...
So I'm viewing a blog, and I idly click on an ad just to support the site, since that's how the Internet works. It opens in a new tab (since I have new window links set to do that) and I continue reading the page I was on until hear a video start playing. I then click over to see what the hell I opened, and it's an ad... for a Mini Cooper. I'm confused, since I thought it was for a TV show, until I look more closely and see that yes, it's an ad for some comedy on ABC I'll never hear of again... and that when you open up their page, which exists solely to promote their crappy sitcom, you spend your first thirty seconds watching an ad for a car.
Given the attention span of the average Internet surfer, is this a bright idea? I can understand ads on websites people visit intentionally, since you're going there on purpose and have been conditioned to tolerate the ad that gets between you and the content. But ads on a promo site for a summer replacement TV show? Ads that play before anything actually promoting the show plays? Way to squeeze those pennies, Disney.
Highly amusing PG-ified remix of the 300 trailer. With cupcakes. And frosting. Why? Good question.
This reminds me; I did see this movie a couple of weeks ago, and like most everything else I'm not paying to work on, I'm way behind on reviewing it. Overall, it wasn't bad. Some astounding visuals and great sound and music, and lots of really good action porn, especially the slow motion scenes of multiple attackers. The attempts to make it parallel modern day political situations were laughable (the Spartan queen, most notable for her small, firm, delictable, and frequently-bared breasts, gives a turgid speech punctuated by that pithy bit of pickup truck bumper stick wisdom, "Freedom isn't free!") and you'll enjoy it more the less you know about actual world history or battle tactics or physics (a man can not knock over a charging horse with a spear held in one hand), but if you enjoy really bloody movies with lots of fight scenes, you should check it out.
