Fucking International Herald Tribune. Put together a potentially awesome article about the evolution of sight and lunar triggers for coral orgies and then throw in an absolutely twat-faced paragraph like this:
'People have known about the moon's romantic possibilities for a long time. Shakespeare in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" relies on moonlight to set the mood. The 1987 movie "Moonstruck" features a love story centered on "La Bella Luna."'
It better have been an intern or a daughter on a Daddy/Daughter Day that put that shit together. I mean, if it was in the Metro or something, fine, but the IHT? Do you ever get the feeling everybody is dumbing down everything? And bringing up Moonstruck, indeed. Moonstruck was the rape of a culture. Did anybody buy those people as Italian besides fat bone-white troglodytes who pronounce it 'Eye-talian' and 'lazag-nee'? And they bring it up in the same sentence as Shakespeare. What a joke. What a fucking world.
You must excuse me - the first news item I saw today wasn't that, but the news 126 people were just blown up in Pakistan. So I have the feeling the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I feel like that more and more these days. I can give myself pause, think about world wars, colonialism, concentration camps, Inquisitions, sown epidemics, potato famines, and lots of things like that, and try to convince myself the world is no closer to getting to hell than it's ever been, but I find that technique works less and less at abating my feelings of impending doom.
I guess as people get older they tend to stop thinking things like "the Tudor period was hard, the Second World War was awful, Colonialism was a massive international disaster that benefited a tiny fraction of the people involved - why, things are quite good now in comparison!", because they realize that you can Capitalize and categorize historical events or periods of time in a textbook, but in real life history has a sloppy way of leading up to the present. And all the shit in the world gets to feeling cumulative instead of episodic. Or maybe they don't realize that and that's why people are so shitty at understanding each other when it counts. I don't know.
Anyways, that sort of culmination might only be on my mind because we watched 2001: A Space Odyssey last night. Stanley Kubrick obviously had a thing for sandy blue-eyed blondes who look like The Ex. Besides noticing that I have to say I lost most of my interest once there were no more monkeys.
The monkey bit, however, was awesome. I totally bought it. That was a great discovery of how to bash things, and it was one hundred percent believable to me that the monkey was inspired to bash by looking at the pretty smooth alien thing. Hollywood should make more caveman movies, that's a genre they've left pretty fallow since the 70's, which means it's due as God forbid they should think up something original. It'd be so cheap too - just dress a bunch of actors up in rags, get them to grunt, carry on, and invent the adjective or something. Get some big trained cats and some bears in to add tension, and film all the love scenes doggy-style. There. Done.
giovedì, ottobre 18, 2007
mercoledì, ottobre 17, 2007
Mistress La Spliffe is shrewish
You know, the bloody Economist. I've said it before and I'll say it again - it's my favourite magazine ever, and if I was stuck on a desert island with a reliable subscription I'd only wail and gnash my teeth half as much as I would have otherwise. But only they could do something as egg-headedly chauvinistic as comparing hidden female oestrus to an 'evolutionary arms race between the sexes'. No, scratch that. Only they would find such a snarky huge metaphor to elaborate on what the mainstream attitude to evolutionary biology amounts to: a five-million year version of Taming of the Shrew. Fuck me, people are tedious.
(Just to go off course for a moment on how tedious people are - have you noticed? Complaining endlessly about how fucked up, complicated, baffling, infuriating, evil, inferior and all the rest of it the opposite sex are, and yet still devoting thousands of hours of brain power and billions of dollars to being noticed, accepted and loved by that same opposite sex when they could be painting or reading a book or something. Fucking tedious. Like a poisonous spiny fish that desperately wants to be cuddled by a grizzly bear. Make up your mind, you pack of twats, or just shut the fuck up and go home and jerk off. Bleeding Jeebus, it gives me the shits. Okay, digression done.)
Anyways, it's this sort of mainstream opinion that gives mainstream opinions a bad name, because it starts from an assumption about our nature which I think is assuming too much. And that is that the fundamental nature of human sexual relations is that a woman tricks a man into staying with her and sharing his resources with her, which a man will only do if he's convinced her children are also his. And hidden oestrus helps with this by only letting a man be sure her children are his if he stays with her nearly constantly and fucks her all the time. And this is why today we all get married and only nail other people on the down-low. It seems like all evolutionary theories in the Western world start from this point, to either reinforce or modify it but never to reject it and admit that maybe marriage is just a construct.
There are countless indications to tell us stay-and-fuck-constantly marriage model is flawed - societies where marital-type situations are of no importance compared to avuncular or matrilineal blood ties, societies where women select their mates out of line-ups, polyandrous societies. But perhaps most damningly for the the stay-and-fuck-constantly model, there's the fact that men never stay and fuck their women constantly, even in the most monogamous of monogamous societies, because it's their job to chase and kill animals and each other. Marriage is just one breeding model of dozens and dozens, and there's no evidence at all it was some sort of original, instinctual or 'right' model. It just happens to be ours so that's what everybody works with.
But oh wait - come back to it - because now we have a really important indication of how the stay-and-nail-constantly theory needs adjusting to make it right. Dr. Wilson has announced the results of his Albuquerque study: strippers make more money when they're ovulating and less when they're infertile, which means men must be able to perceive fertility on some level, which turns all this back into a slightly more complicated evolutionary Taming of the Shrew instead of the glorious and varied pageant that human sexuality is. This means the men can fuck their women when they're fertile and go off killing animals and each other when they're not, and still be pretty sure any kids popped are theirs. Huzzah! Marriage makes perfect evolutionary sense again! We're right! Africa, etc., is wrong!
Never mind that if he had actually spoken to the strippers, his sister, mother, wife, granny, or, like, any chick ever, he could have found out that women have more energy and sexual interest in men when they're ovulating and less when they're on the pill or on the rag. And possibly, possibly that might make strippers dance a little bit more energetically and engagedly, and possibly that might result in the punters giving them more money. But noooooo. That's far too simple. It must be about an evolutionary arms race between the sexes and the marriage model must be just plain simply fucking right.
Holy fucking tittyfuck. I can't believe people get funding to make this shit up when I have to work for a living. Did I mention people were tedious?
(Just to go off course for a moment on how tedious people are - have you noticed? Complaining endlessly about how fucked up, complicated, baffling, infuriating, evil, inferior and all the rest of it the opposite sex are, and yet still devoting thousands of hours of brain power and billions of dollars to being noticed, accepted and loved by that same opposite sex when they could be painting or reading a book or something. Fucking tedious. Like a poisonous spiny fish that desperately wants to be cuddled by a grizzly bear. Make up your mind, you pack of twats, or just shut the fuck up and go home and jerk off. Bleeding Jeebus, it gives me the shits. Okay, digression done.)
Anyways, it's this sort of mainstream opinion that gives mainstream opinions a bad name, because it starts from an assumption about our nature which I think is assuming too much. And that is that the fundamental nature of human sexual relations is that a woman tricks a man into staying with her and sharing his resources with her, which a man will only do if he's convinced her children are also his. And hidden oestrus helps with this by only letting a man be sure her children are his if he stays with her nearly constantly and fucks her all the time. And this is why today we all get married and only nail other people on the down-low. It seems like all evolutionary theories in the Western world start from this point, to either reinforce or modify it but never to reject it and admit that maybe marriage is just a construct.
There are countless indications to tell us stay-and-fuck-constantly marriage model is flawed - societies where marital-type situations are of no importance compared to avuncular or matrilineal blood ties, societies where women select their mates out of line-ups, polyandrous societies. But perhaps most damningly for the the stay-and-fuck-constantly model, there's the fact that men never stay and fuck their women constantly, even in the most monogamous of monogamous societies, because it's their job to chase and kill animals and each other. Marriage is just one breeding model of dozens and dozens, and there's no evidence at all it was some sort of original, instinctual or 'right' model. It just happens to be ours so that's what everybody works with.
But oh wait - come back to it - because now we have a really important indication of how the stay-and-nail-constantly theory needs adjusting to make it right. Dr. Wilson has announced the results of his Albuquerque study: strippers make more money when they're ovulating and less when they're infertile, which means men must be able to perceive fertility on some level, which turns all this back into a slightly more complicated evolutionary Taming of the Shrew instead of the glorious and varied pageant that human sexuality is. This means the men can fuck their women when they're fertile and go off killing animals and each other when they're not, and still be pretty sure any kids popped are theirs. Huzzah! Marriage makes perfect evolutionary sense again! We're right! Africa, etc., is wrong!
Never mind that if he had actually spoken to the strippers, his sister, mother, wife, granny, or, like, any chick ever, he could have found out that women have more energy and sexual interest in men when they're ovulating and less when they're on the pill or on the rag. And possibly, possibly that might make strippers dance a little bit more energetically and engagedly, and possibly that might result in the punters giving them more money. But noooooo. That's far too simple. It must be about an evolutionary arms race between the sexes and the marriage model must be just plain simply fucking right.
Holy fucking tittyfuck. I can't believe people get funding to make this shit up when I have to work for a living. Did I mention people were tedious?
martedì, ottobre 16, 2007
I'm only blogging because I haven't got a Wii yet
I'm eating polenta for breakfast and it's slightly less gaggable than the porridge I generally choke down to stop me from getting hungry before one. Yep, my life has devolved to blogging about my breakfast. That's what happens when you have a nine-to-five job, or in my case a nine-thirty-to-six job. I can't complain. Other people work more, other people work harder. But someday I'll only work when I want to. Someday . . . Not today.
Still reading The Old Patagonian Express and starting to get sick of it. The bastard has got all the way to Guatemala and doesn't seem to have found a place or person he likes yet, unless you count the highly erotic silhouette of a girl or woman in a backlit doorway he passes on the train, and even that seemed to make him more uncomfortable than happy. But it's still beautifully written and still engaging enough to keep going, at the least to see if he does find a place he doesn't grumble about before getting to the tip of the continent. And it makes me want to read Pudd'nhead Wilson.
One way it's beautifully written is its evocation of a more civilized time on trains. Being back in Europe, I'm back on trains in a way that wasn't really possible in Canada, as without fail driving is more reliable there and adjusting travel plans by a couple of weeks means someone can give you a ride between cities. Here it's cheap and fast, cheap and fast enough to generally compete with low-cost airlines or the coach (though we're coaching it to Berlin - booooo - but the night train is more than twice as expensive, a really absurd price, and there's no other direct option from Belgium) and certainly cheaper and faster than driving over longish distances.
But it's not as I remember it. Every year the trains get faster and more efficient, and they get less and less comfortable. When I was living in Italy just a few years ago, the oldish espresso trains had compartments in all the classes where, if you were alone, you could lock the door, pull down the six passenger seats into one double bed, and make sweet love with your sweetheart. ALL classes. Now making love sitting plum upright on these horrible open trains with nothing shielding you but the seatbacks, even if you spring for first class, is liable to net you an obscenity charge.
One day speed and efficiency will get a little less fashionable and people will realize we're refined creatures and that we have aesthetic needs, and that a 12 hour train journey without at least a little head is contrary to our higher nature. In the meantime, I'll still take trains because at least they're not aeroplanes, which scare the lust straight out of me.
Still reading The Old Patagonian Express and starting to get sick of it. The bastard has got all the way to Guatemala and doesn't seem to have found a place or person he likes yet, unless you count the highly erotic silhouette of a girl or woman in a backlit doorway he passes on the train, and even that seemed to make him more uncomfortable than happy. But it's still beautifully written and still engaging enough to keep going, at the least to see if he does find a place he doesn't grumble about before getting to the tip of the continent. And it makes me want to read Pudd'nhead Wilson.
One way it's beautifully written is its evocation of a more civilized time on trains. Being back in Europe, I'm back on trains in a way that wasn't really possible in Canada, as without fail driving is more reliable there and adjusting travel plans by a couple of weeks means someone can give you a ride between cities. Here it's cheap and fast, cheap and fast enough to generally compete with low-cost airlines or the coach (though we're coaching it to Berlin - booooo - but the night train is more than twice as expensive, a really absurd price, and there's no other direct option from Belgium) and certainly cheaper and faster than driving over longish distances.
But it's not as I remember it. Every year the trains get faster and more efficient, and they get less and less comfortable. When I was living in Italy just a few years ago, the oldish espresso trains had compartments in all the classes where, if you were alone, you could lock the door, pull down the six passenger seats into one double bed, and make sweet love with your sweetheart. ALL classes. Now making love sitting plum upright on these horrible open trains with nothing shielding you but the seatbacks, even if you spring for first class, is liable to net you an obscenity charge.
One day speed and efficiency will get a little less fashionable and people will realize we're refined creatures and that we have aesthetic needs, and that a 12 hour train journey without at least a little head is contrary to our higher nature. In the meantime, I'll still take trains because at least they're not aeroplanes, which scare the lust straight out of me.
lunedì, ottobre 15, 2007
I found Jesus; he switched his cellphone back on
So. Jesus Camp. You can pretty much imagine how it went. The ongoing indoctrination of a bunch of devoted Pentecostal kids of the non-compassionate type - you know, the sort that's more about glossolia performance art, how demonically wrong everyone else has it, and not being stuck on this iniquitous floating rock when God decides it's curtains than it is about taking Jesus's life as some sort of example and struggling to alleviate the burdens of your fellow man in a very practical feeding-the-crowds sort of way or healing-the-blind sort of way. Christianity as unmitigated self-centredness.
And that's all. I didn't feel good watching the movie. It didn't add anything to what I know about Pentecostals or do anything else useful. There was an amusing five minute cameo by Ted Haggard - probably one of his last before the meth'n'manwhore bust - and a strong feeling that adults who involve themselves with children's ministry are prrrrrrobably perverts - one pro-life rally organizer took the time to tell a little girl she looked good with the "life" duct tape over her mouth as he pressed it on. . . uhm . . . yeah.
I think the film caused some talk when it came out because all this was done without commentary from the documentarians - it's mostly just footage of the Pentecostals. But then there were five or so insertions of blathering from some Air America guy who didn't serve any purpose except to remind us what we were watching was INSANE. Fine. But I went out with the same conviction I had going in - children love to perform the way adults congratulate them for. Until they hit puberty, which of course the documentarians couldn't show us, because teenage rebellion against Christian fundamentalism wouldn't be INSANE enough. Bah. Skip it. No thumbs up. Just go to a zoo and watch the monkeys jerk off, it's about as edifying.
And that's all. I didn't feel good watching the movie. It didn't add anything to what I know about Pentecostals or do anything else useful. There was an amusing five minute cameo by Ted Haggard - probably one of his last before the meth'n'manwhore bust - and a strong feeling that adults who involve themselves with children's ministry are prrrrrrobably perverts - one pro-life rally organizer took the time to tell a little girl she looked good with the "life" duct tape over her mouth as he pressed it on. . . uhm . . . yeah.
I think the film caused some talk when it came out because all this was done without commentary from the documentarians - it's mostly just footage of the Pentecostals. But then there were five or so insertions of blathering from some Air America guy who didn't serve any purpose except to remind us what we were watching was INSANE. Fine. But I went out with the same conviction I had going in - children love to perform the way adults congratulate them for. Until they hit puberty, which of course the documentarians couldn't show us, because teenage rebellion against Christian fundamentalism wouldn't be INSANE enough. Bah. Skip it. No thumbs up. Just go to a zoo and watch the monkeys jerk off, it's about as edifying.
domenica, ottobre 14, 2007
Ranking the weekend
Fucking awesome: the Wii. Oh god it's so good. A work couple who I'm going to have to find a pseudonym for if I keep liking them as much as I do got one last week and invited us over to play with it. We played until five in the morning and it was only overwhelming physical exhaustion that could persuade me to put down the console . . . I spent hours the next day trying to rationalize buying one for our household (cheaper than a gym membership! More likely to be used than a gym membership!) and did a great job, though I always ran up against the hurdle of knowing it would be the end of my intellectual life, until I got sick of it at least, which just might not happen.
God, Nintendo wins. They get the console out underpricing the new PlayStation and whatever that Microsoft Shitbox is called, and they make it fucking awesome. They make it so that everyone will love it - children, chicks, and people over fifty - it's just so . . . so . . . Well. So evil. For the first time, and obviously this is a sign of advancing age, I understand why Christian types usually think fun things are evil - dancing, gambling, drinking, and the Wii (yes, I'm suggesting it's right up there on the Fun-o-meter, though fornication still leaves it behind). It's so distracting. It precludes doing almost anything else if you have one around . . . and it's also interactive, something you can do in a big screaming hearty group, so you don't get the funny feeling that you're turning into a spotty World of Warcraft island of one - there'd be nothing to stop you just playing that shit forever . . . there'd be nothing to stop everybody from playing that shit forever, and then what would happen to the human race? It'd have a fuckload of fun, that's what.
Anyways. The Wii was a nice thing about the weekend. Another nice thing about the weekend was that the weather was lovely and we spent Sunday sitting around the park in the sun, while the F-word painted and I read The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux. It's a non-fiction narrative about the author's attempt to travel from Massachusetts to the southernmost tip of South America by train, and so far it's fucking awesome. The opposite of Bruce Chatwin's wide-eyed, stripped-down prose, but very good in its opposition - a touch mean-spirited, but readable with it. I'll write more when I read more.
Also had a go at Enduring Love by Ian McEwan over the last little while and found the first 38 pages to be interminable shit. I think it's defeated me because just thinking about continuing to read it makes me think "awwwwwwww, fuck, let's just buy a Wii". I just get so fucking annoyed with these modern Big Men of Literature who seem to be absolutely incapable of writing a book that isn't a film treatment in disguise. Okay, maybe that's where the money is - fine. Chase the money. But I'll still think you're jerks who history will forget, or else vilify for trying to bastardize one form of art for another. Go get a contract with Time-Warner, you whores.
Also saw Jesus Camp, of which more later.
God, Nintendo wins. They get the console out underpricing the new PlayStation and whatever that Microsoft Shitbox is called, and they make it fucking awesome. They make it so that everyone will love it - children, chicks, and people over fifty - it's just so . . . so . . . Well. So evil. For the first time, and obviously this is a sign of advancing age, I understand why Christian types usually think fun things are evil - dancing, gambling, drinking, and the Wii (yes, I'm suggesting it's right up there on the Fun-o-meter, though fornication still leaves it behind). It's so distracting. It precludes doing almost anything else if you have one around . . . and it's also interactive, something you can do in a big screaming hearty group, so you don't get the funny feeling that you're turning into a spotty World of Warcraft island of one - there'd be nothing to stop you just playing that shit forever . . . there'd be nothing to stop everybody from playing that shit forever, and then what would happen to the human race? It'd have a fuckload of fun, that's what.
Anyways. The Wii was a nice thing about the weekend. Another nice thing about the weekend was that the weather was lovely and we spent Sunday sitting around the park in the sun, while the F-word painted and I read The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux. It's a non-fiction narrative about the author's attempt to travel from Massachusetts to the southernmost tip of South America by train, and so far it's fucking awesome. The opposite of Bruce Chatwin's wide-eyed, stripped-down prose, but very good in its opposition - a touch mean-spirited, but readable with it. I'll write more when I read more.
Also had a go at Enduring Love by Ian McEwan over the last little while and found the first 38 pages to be interminable shit. I think it's defeated me because just thinking about continuing to read it makes me think "awwwwwwww, fuck, let's just buy a Wii". I just get so fucking annoyed with these modern Big Men of Literature who seem to be absolutely incapable of writing a book that isn't a film treatment in disguise. Okay, maybe that's where the money is - fine. Chase the money. But I'll still think you're jerks who history will forget, or else vilify for trying to bastardize one form of art for another. Go get a contract with Time-Warner, you whores.
Also saw Jesus Camp, of which more later.
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