For awesomest animal ever: the blanket octopus. I'll let you read about it yourself if you like but there are five points that stand out:
1. They are immune to man'o war stings, so the immature ones will rip the tentacles off of the men'o war and carry them around to use themselves
2. They don't defend themselves with ink - instead the female has a great big blanket-y looking thing (hence the name) that she can unfurl to make herself look way bigger
3. The males are around 100 times smaller than the females
4. The males get the females pregant by drifting around until they manage to meet one; he fills up one of his tentacles with jissom, rips it off, hands it to her, and dies
5. They can out-weird Japanese television:
Visualizzazione post con etichetta pop science. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta pop science. Mostra tutti i post
domenica, marzo 28, 2010
lunedì, dicembre 07, 2009
The joys of being middle class on a fast train to Paris
Had a smashing weekend in Paris. There's a sentence I never thought would come out of my brain but I guess eventually things just stop doing your head in, which is a good thing to know in the present context. La New Yorkaise is moving home definitively on Wednesday, and like a good former fellow inmate of the fucking madhouse that is Pars when you're underemployed, I swanned down on the Thalys and helped her pack. Which translated into about two actual hard slog hours - she's already shipped most of her stuff - and me getting some really great castoffs that wouldn't fit in her hold luggage, like a camping chair and an awesome sleeping bag and enough good quality acrylic paint to make the F-word's eyes light up. So the time spent with her was lovely and the time spent with Miss C, whose loft we stayed in once more, was even lovelier, in a way. She starts a year-long treatment programme for hepatitis today, and has no idea how it will go, so I suppose she drank her last few glasses of wine for a long while with us . . . both of those women are so dear to me in such different ways.
And discovered my theory about Paris is correct - if you have lots of money, it's actually a great place to be.
And read two books on trains - well, finished one, read the other - Bad Medicine by David Wooton and Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. Decline and Fall - well. Brideshead Revisited was such a nasty little downer (in a good way, though) that I was not expecting that surreal little romp. I enjoyed it a great deal though. Very talky, very visual. I've written before about how awful I think authors like Ian McEwan and that guy who wrote The Hours are, in that their shitty books read like script treatments instead of novels and it's an abuse of the medium. But besides me hating Ian McEwan et al, I think that also has something to do with the way I hate most movies. Because Decline and Fall reads a bit like a treatment for an exceptionally good stage show - very dialogue driven - and I still loved it. But then the narrative voice was still awfully good, so not completely. Anyways. It was ace.
Bad Medicine was alright too but sometimes the argumentation was a little laboured. Wooton keeps so busy reminding you that he has an argument that it can get quite distracting from the actual elements of the argument. He was fitting so much into such a small book that I have a feeling a few conjunctions ended up on the cutting room floor when a few too many protests from Wooton about why he should be allowed to write about progress as a historical fact stayed in when they shouldn't have.
I get it. Progress. You like it. It exists. You wrote about it in your fucking introduction. Please, write a history of medicine, and write a history of the history of medicine, but if you're going to splice them don't do it in a mere 320 pages (though I understand it fits nicely onto the bestseller list at that length, but that's no more excuse for writing an insufficiently readable book than the fact that 'novelists' like McEwan make the big bucks from actually selling their books as film treatments), not unless you've got Darrin fucking McMahon level expressive finesse. And I'll tell you - Bad Medicine isn't a bad book, but Wooton does not have Darrin Fucking McMahon-level finesse.
It's a valid comparison, even if I'm only making it because I got the F-word Happiness for Christmas. McMahon, when he wrote about happiness and the history of happiness, forswore historical accounts of people who didn't write much or who wrote outside of the 'canon' (ie everybody post-Bhagavad Gita in Asia) as it was called back in my undergrad days. Wooton restricted himself similarly. Obviously that still leaves you with rather a lot of material, so if you're going to spend 15% of your words explaining to the reader that you're picking a fight, and if you lack McMahon-type finesse - honestly it's a wonder the book is readable at all. But it is, almost despite him.
And discovered my theory about Paris is correct - if you have lots of money, it's actually a great place to be.
And read two books on trains - well, finished one, read the other - Bad Medicine by David Wooton and Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. Decline and Fall - well. Brideshead Revisited was such a nasty little downer (in a good way, though) that I was not expecting that surreal little romp. I enjoyed it a great deal though. Very talky, very visual. I've written before about how awful I think authors like Ian McEwan and that guy who wrote The Hours are, in that their shitty books read like script treatments instead of novels and it's an abuse of the medium. But besides me hating Ian McEwan et al, I think that also has something to do with the way I hate most movies. Because Decline and Fall reads a bit like a treatment for an exceptionally good stage show - very dialogue driven - and I still loved it. But then the narrative voice was still awfully good, so not completely. Anyways. It was ace.
Bad Medicine was alright too but sometimes the argumentation was a little laboured. Wooton keeps so busy reminding you that he has an argument that it can get quite distracting from the actual elements of the argument. He was fitting so much into such a small book that I have a feeling a few conjunctions ended up on the cutting room floor when a few too many protests from Wooton about why he should be allowed to write about progress as a historical fact stayed in when they shouldn't have.
I get it. Progress. You like it. It exists. You wrote about it in your fucking introduction. Please, write a history of medicine, and write a history of the history of medicine, but if you're going to splice them don't do it in a mere 320 pages (though I understand it fits nicely onto the bestseller list at that length, but that's no more excuse for writing an insufficiently readable book than the fact that 'novelists' like McEwan make the big bucks from actually selling their books as film treatments), not unless you've got Darrin fucking McMahon level expressive finesse. And I'll tell you - Bad Medicine isn't a bad book, but Wooton does not have Darrin Fucking McMahon-level finesse.
It's a valid comparison, even if I'm only making it because I got the F-word Happiness for Christmas. McMahon, when he wrote about happiness and the history of happiness, forswore historical accounts of people who didn't write much or who wrote outside of the 'canon' (ie everybody post-Bhagavad Gita in Asia) as it was called back in my undergrad days. Wooton restricted himself similarly. Obviously that still leaves you with rather a lot of material, so if you're going to spend 15% of your words explaining to the reader that you're picking a fight, and if you lack McMahon-type finesse - honestly it's a wonder the book is readable at all. But it is, almost despite him.
mercoledì, ottobre 07, 2009
The land where nerds make their point through song and dance
This came in from two different people within twelve hours, who I think are both happy for me, in that I'm moving to such a dicky country:
I'm happy for me too. (CSIRO, BTW, is an institution even my art-school educated 6-year-expat Antipodean knows about and respects. I guess the Canadian equivalent would be . . . errrrm . . . I'm stuck on that one actually. Probably Neil Young or something.)
I'm happy for me too. (CSIRO, BTW, is an institution even my art-school educated 6-year-expat Antipodean knows about and respects. I guess the Canadian equivalent would be . . . errrrm . . . I'm stuck on that one actually. Probably Neil Young or something.)
martedì, ottobre 06, 2009
The long pigs forage
There's a special joy in foraging. You mushroomers know it. And I'm going to forage the fuck out of Europe until we leave, it's one of my resolutions. Last weekend in Neuss, for example, we foraged for chestnuts, and then when I went out for my morning constitutional yesterday, they were just lying there in the Dudenpark. And it turns out harvesting those fuckers is irresistible. All you do is step on them and they pop out of their horridly spiky casings and there they all, all shiny and begging to be picked up. And for whatever reason, there's a bumper crop this year, so there are great crowds of people pawing and foraging away all over the place. It reminds me, in a rather nice way, how like pigs we are as a species, pawing and foraging away. But those poor fuckers have to use their faces to pick up food, and we have opposable thumbs.
I wonder where we deviated from pigs on the tree of life, considering we have so many of the same eating habits and we can use their organs and apparently we taste just like they do. That never seems be something writers on evolution point out. I wish they would, it's shit like this I want to know, not having it be proved for the umpteenth time that birds are actually dinosaurs. I fucking know that already. Just listen to these fucking birds and tell me they don't sound like fucking dinosaurs:
It's very pretty though.
Less foragey and still foody is the balcony garden. On Monday the remains of all but two of the cucumbers came out with a few mini-ones for the salad that night; yesterday, I ripped up one finished tomato plant and the peas, which were finished ages ago of course, but whose skeletons one of the cucumber plant had been using for support (it's so fucking frustrating to have so little space, but patience, Spliffe, patience, your back garden will come). The rest of the tomato plants are still going fairly strong; up until this weekend we'd been having an unseasonably warm and sunny fall so they're actually peaking just now - don't know if they can pull through without a frost though. The pepper plants are going gangbusters but I don't think the F-word gave them enough container room so I don't know how they'll wind up.
Small sense of panic . . . when the plants are all finished, we have to tape the balcony back up for the winter to keep out the brutal Art Nouveau drafts. Fuck, I hate winter. Oh well, I'll find a way to enjoy it. Next year, baby - sub-tropics.
I wonder where we deviated from pigs on the tree of life, considering we have so many of the same eating habits and we can use their organs and apparently we taste just like they do. That never seems be something writers on evolution point out. I wish they would, it's shit like this I want to know, not having it be proved for the umpteenth time that birds are actually dinosaurs. I fucking know that already. Just listen to these fucking birds and tell me they don't sound like fucking dinosaurs:
It's very pretty though.
Less foragey and still foody is the balcony garden. On Monday the remains of all but two of the cucumbers came out with a few mini-ones for the salad that night; yesterday, I ripped up one finished tomato plant and the peas, which were finished ages ago of course, but whose skeletons one of the cucumber plant had been using for support (it's so fucking frustrating to have so little space, but patience, Spliffe, patience, your back garden will come). The rest of the tomato plants are still going fairly strong; up until this weekend we'd been having an unseasonably warm and sunny fall so they're actually peaking just now - don't know if they can pull through without a frost though. The pepper plants are going gangbusters but I don't think the F-word gave them enough container room so I don't know how they'll wind up.
Small sense of panic . . . when the plants are all finished, we have to tape the balcony back up for the winter to keep out the brutal Art Nouveau drafts. Fuck, I hate winter. Oh well, I'll find a way to enjoy it. Next year, baby - sub-tropics.
lunedì, agosto 10, 2009
On no longer being in Portugal
Portugal was so great I nearly cried when we got on the plane out of there. And then I cried on the plane when the engine started making funny noises. Panic Attack! I kept it quiet though. Thank god I've finally got my driver's license. My lifestyle will always involve areoplane rides, and probably many more than the vast majority of the world's population, environmental direness notwithstanding, because that's simply the nature of love and of oceans - but I would like them to involve less than they currently do, because flying continues to scare the living shit out of me.
Moving on. Whilst on trains, planes, lying on the beach, et cetera, I read The Mill on the Floss, which put me into quite a poopy mood briefly, though it was very good, and now I can't wait to get to Middlemarch. Floss was rather uncanny in its depiction of a child's mind via Maggie, but even more uncanny in its depiction of the inevitability of destructive sexual love from bored women who don't believe in themselves enough to do anything else with their stagnating brains.
Maggie was suffering through societal constraints the likes of which my generation can't imagine, but we can recognize bits and peices in our own situation - and constraints from the outside aside, during my years of spreading it around it was evident to me even at the time that there were hundreds of better things for me to be doing than nailing a bunch of guys whose names I don't remember anymore. And now, I don't regret the sex, some of which was definitely beyond worthwhile, but I regret the attention I paid to it. Floss reminded me of that regret, and put me in a poopy mood because enduring societal constraints notwithstanding, it looks like there was something wilful about my propensities to orient my life, to a certain degree, around a generalized notion of cock, when the whole world is just bristling with cocks anyways, and with many other things besides.
Also reading more Stephen Jay Gould and adoring it more than before, it that's possible. But more on that later.
Moving on. Whilst on trains, planes, lying on the beach, et cetera, I read The Mill on the Floss, which put me into quite a poopy mood briefly, though it was very good, and now I can't wait to get to Middlemarch. Floss was rather uncanny in its depiction of a child's mind via Maggie, but even more uncanny in its depiction of the inevitability of destructive sexual love from bored women who don't believe in themselves enough to do anything else with their stagnating brains.
Maggie was suffering through societal constraints the likes of which my generation can't imagine, but we can recognize bits and peices in our own situation - and constraints from the outside aside, during my years of spreading it around it was evident to me even at the time that there were hundreds of better things for me to be doing than nailing a bunch of guys whose names I don't remember anymore. And now, I don't regret the sex, some of which was definitely beyond worthwhile, but I regret the attention I paid to it. Floss reminded me of that regret, and put me in a poopy mood because enduring societal constraints notwithstanding, it looks like there was something wilful about my propensities to orient my life, to a certain degree, around a generalized notion of cock, when the whole world is just bristling with cocks anyways, and with many other things besides.
Also reading more Stephen Jay Gould and adoring it more than before, it that's possible. But more on that later.
lunedì, maggio 11, 2009
Death, flu, and zombies
Last week Yankee HR sent us two or three messages about how we should wash our hands and not come to work if we were feeling ill. Fine with me! I didn't make an effort when I woke up yesterday to parse a headache and an iffy throat (stress? dehydration? allergies? cholera?) and instead wrote my manager to explain I'd be working from home, for fear of infecting my office with my zombie pig germs. And then she mentioned that she'd be the one with the zombie germs because she'd just been in an aeroplane from Asia and God knows that's where every illness comes from. Even the Mexican ones that are actually from feedlots in the States. And oh, how we laughed.
Anyways, I got an awful lot of work done. I get tonnes done when there's no office around me reminding me I'm an office worker. Not just work things either, but washing our embarassingly filthy kitchen floor, and making a fucking lovely wild rice casserole, and listening to a bunch of ABC podcasts. One very interesting one about the big influenza, the 1918-1919 one that killed all those millions of people around the world so quickly. I do reccommend it, it's quite good - Rear Vision is a nice series generally. But for me the most striking part of it was its discussion of the WWI front as the flu vector - that the virus may have started elsewhere, but the front was what gave it a chance to evolve into a killer - spreading in a very, very, very concentrated stew of all those fit, distressed young men in the trenches. A mutation that thrived in such hosts outsurvived the others - and then spread across the world like wildfire, even through the strongest members of the population.
Even more of a mindfuck was the mention of the idea that mustard gas may have contributed to the spread, as low concentrations of mustard gas actually seem to encourage the growth of simple organisms (like viruses, possibly) - with the implication being that the life cycle can be accelerated or the virus's reproduction sped up, increasing the opportunities for the genesis of a successful, super-virulent mutant strain . . . But a nice mindcigarette was the poor progress of the flu in Japan by Asian standards, where the doctors told everybody who got ill to fuck off to bed and drink lots of green tea, replacing the liquids and avoiding the dehydration that's the big killer when things get complicated. Dehydration, and drowning in your own fluids. Ugh. Death is gross. And the depressing thing is that drowning in your own liquids or swollen lungs or something is the way so many of us go. I expect I'll cling to life with undignified alacrity myself when my time comes, but reflecting that drowning in your own liquids is the way so many of us go makes me convinced the right to choose your time of death should be enshrined in law.
Speaking of death, and zombies, this weekend the F-word made me watch a Japanese rock-and-roll/zombie flick called Wild Zero which was easily the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life. I don't know what the hell it is with boys and zombies and young Japanese men screaming 'Lock an Lolllllllllll!' It wasn't bad, but fuck me, am I missing the reefer.
Here's the trailer:
Anyways, I got an awful lot of work done. I get tonnes done when there's no office around me reminding me I'm an office worker. Not just work things either, but washing our embarassingly filthy kitchen floor, and making a fucking lovely wild rice casserole, and listening to a bunch of ABC podcasts. One very interesting one about the big influenza, the 1918-1919 one that killed all those millions of people around the world so quickly. I do reccommend it, it's quite good - Rear Vision is a nice series generally. But for me the most striking part of it was its discussion of the WWI front as the flu vector - that the virus may have started elsewhere, but the front was what gave it a chance to evolve into a killer - spreading in a very, very, very concentrated stew of all those fit, distressed young men in the trenches. A mutation that thrived in such hosts outsurvived the others - and then spread across the world like wildfire, even through the strongest members of the population.
Even more of a mindfuck was the mention of the idea that mustard gas may have contributed to the spread, as low concentrations of mustard gas actually seem to encourage the growth of simple organisms (like viruses, possibly) - with the implication being that the life cycle can be accelerated or the virus's reproduction sped up, increasing the opportunities for the genesis of a successful, super-virulent mutant strain . . . But a nice mindcigarette was the poor progress of the flu in Japan by Asian standards, where the doctors told everybody who got ill to fuck off to bed and drink lots of green tea, replacing the liquids and avoiding the dehydration that's the big killer when things get complicated. Dehydration, and drowning in your own fluids. Ugh. Death is gross. And the depressing thing is that drowning in your own liquids or swollen lungs or something is the way so many of us go. I expect I'll cling to life with undignified alacrity myself when my time comes, but reflecting that drowning in your own liquids is the way so many of us go makes me convinced the right to choose your time of death should be enshrined in law.
Speaking of death, and zombies, this weekend the F-word made me watch a Japanese rock-and-roll/zombie flick called Wild Zero which was easily the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life. I don't know what the hell it is with boys and zombies and young Japanese men screaming 'Lock an Lolllllllllll!' It wasn't bad, but fuck me, am I missing the reefer.
Here's the trailer:
martedì, marzo 31, 2009
Berlin took me
Probably what I love most about Berlin, and this includes having porn there when you get home all sozzled, is how you can just start walking and suddenly everything is so fucking awesome. For example, I was staying at a hotel in Charlottenburg, so on Saturday morning, once I'd had breakfast (which was quite nice, despite the dingy cheapness of the hotel - Germans have mastered the art of brekky) I decided to start my day by moseying towards the nearby palace. On the way, there was a park. It had a rappel swing. Or at least a thing I'm choosing to call a rappel swing. I had never seen such a thing before in a children's playground and it took up about 20 minutes of my time. Later on in the trip I saw several more. Germans rock.
So I kept walking to the palace, realized it was right next to the Deutsch Oper, where I was going the next night, turned around - and there was a fucking exhibition of Surrealist and precursor art, opening with a bunch of Goya etchings, and there was Ensor there too, more than in his stupid fucking home city Ostende. I could have cried with the awesomeness but instead I spent a few hours at the exhibition. So fucking ace. There were no real revelations there in terms of artists who I now love who I'd never known or loved before, and while it was all very well put together by the end I was getting annoyed by what appeared to me as the whiny masculine cluelessness of it all. Okay, existence is a series of inarticulable questions with unverifiable answers, and I know that's frustrating. But I find that the emphasis was on suggesting life's fundamental unknowableness was something to whine about and not something to gloat over and play with - not like I always like to imagine a good Surrealist would do - but then I walk through a floor full of them and realize they had run away so pell-mell from what they thought was their consciousness that they'd ended up wedged too tight up Freud's ass. It was still a fantastic exhibition.
Anyhoo. I walked slowly over to the Altes Museum then. It was farther than I expected but the weather was fine, and I was going through the Tiergarten most of the time, so it was pleasant. I had chosen the Altes Museum for Nefertiti. That bust was the first classical human representation that had ever piqued my interest so I figured it was time to gawk at it from a couple of feet away. In a way it was more beautiful than I had ever imagined. In another way, she had had Obama ears until someone broke them off, and that was amusing.
I don't like talking about people on this blog but the friend of the F-word who I dined with Saturday was illustrative of Berlin's awesomeness first by bringing me to a sushi bar - I hadn't had raw fish since I don't know when, it's just not done here in a quality way at prices I can afford - and secondly by describing in some detail a psychotherapeutic process he's going through with some doctors in Berlin who use mescaline, MDMA and acid in their work. Speaking of running pell-mell away from your consciousness. It was interesting enough for me to want to try it but I'm pretty sure that's just because I want some really good mescaline. And I suppose I distrusted the enthusiasm of the F-word's friend a little bit - I like him very much but having grown up with them I can recognize men pretty readily who're defined by their appetites, and I don't think it's any coincidence his psychotherapy of choice chimes so well with his appetite. He seeks to be one big, articulate id, and while I tend to laugh at appetite-driven men, I found myself wishing him good luck with that. At least it's a goal.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure from a psychotherapeutical perspective I don't need to take mescaline with a German doctor supervising and sort myself out that way when all I actually want is some really good mescaline. But maybe I just feel that distrust, etc, because I'm one big articulate shadow-complex, who's clutching the reins of must-must-appearances too tight to even throw myself the bone of some medically supervised tripping. Just alcohol, weed, and porn for me, and once I get pregnant, that dwindles down to porn. Sigh. At least there's always porn. And if my shadow-complex ever changes its mind, there's always Berlin.
More tomorrow, with pictures if I can find the cable.
So I kept walking to the palace, realized it was right next to the Deutsch Oper, where I was going the next night, turned around - and there was a fucking exhibition of Surrealist and precursor art, opening with a bunch of Goya etchings, and there was Ensor there too, more than in his stupid fucking home city Ostende. I could have cried with the awesomeness but instead I spent a few hours at the exhibition. So fucking ace. There were no real revelations there in terms of artists who I now love who I'd never known or loved before, and while it was all very well put together by the end I was getting annoyed by what appeared to me as the whiny masculine cluelessness of it all. Okay, existence is a series of inarticulable questions with unverifiable answers, and I know that's frustrating. But I find that the emphasis was on suggesting life's fundamental unknowableness was something to whine about and not something to gloat over and play with - not like I always like to imagine a good Surrealist would do - but then I walk through a floor full of them and realize they had run away so pell-mell from what they thought was their consciousness that they'd ended up wedged too tight up Freud's ass. It was still a fantastic exhibition.
Anyhoo. I walked slowly over to the Altes Museum then. It was farther than I expected but the weather was fine, and I was going through the Tiergarten most of the time, so it was pleasant. I had chosen the Altes Museum for Nefertiti. That bust was the first classical human representation that had ever piqued my interest so I figured it was time to gawk at it from a couple of feet away. In a way it was more beautiful than I had ever imagined. In another way, she had had Obama ears until someone broke them off, and that was amusing.
I don't like talking about people on this blog but the friend of the F-word who I dined with Saturday was illustrative of Berlin's awesomeness first by bringing me to a sushi bar - I hadn't had raw fish since I don't know when, it's just not done here in a quality way at prices I can afford - and secondly by describing in some detail a psychotherapeutic process he's going through with some doctors in Berlin who use mescaline, MDMA and acid in their work. Speaking of running pell-mell away from your consciousness. It was interesting enough for me to want to try it but I'm pretty sure that's just because I want some really good mescaline. And I suppose I distrusted the enthusiasm of the F-word's friend a little bit - I like him very much but having grown up with them I can recognize men pretty readily who're defined by their appetites, and I don't think it's any coincidence his psychotherapy of choice chimes so well with his appetite. He seeks to be one big, articulate id, and while I tend to laugh at appetite-driven men, I found myself wishing him good luck with that. At least it's a goal.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure from a psychotherapeutical perspective I don't need to take mescaline with a German doctor supervising and sort myself out that way when all I actually want is some really good mescaline. But maybe I just feel that distrust, etc, because I'm one big articulate shadow-complex, who's clutching the reins of must-must-appearances too tight to even throw myself the bone of some medically supervised tripping. Just alcohol, weed, and porn for me, and once I get pregnant, that dwindles down to porn. Sigh. At least there's always porn. And if my shadow-complex ever changes its mind, there's always Berlin.
More tomorrow, with pictures if I can find the cable.
lunedì, settembre 01, 2008
Lovely as a sleepy lizard
Like everybody, I could complain about my job. Really only about the hours - I'd like to work as hard as a rentboy at a televangelists' convention three days a week and then have four day weekends. I suppose I could also complain about the fact that my office is in Brussels, but that's not my office's fault, and if it was in a better city where apartments aren't so cheap they'd have to pay me more, or else I'd be complaining about my salary. So there you are. And my job has great benefits, like the way I'm being paid to fight with people on the company blog - I gave up looking at comment sections of anything a long time ago because of the contribution it makes to my misanthropy, but hey, if it's my job, cool - and knowing about what's happening in Mozambique and the way I get to go sea kayaking in Marseille in a couple of weeks.
And yesterday my job benefited me by teaching me, in the course of research for one of my articles, that Abu Dhabi has a falcon hospital. And it's one of several in the region. Can you believe it? That little scrap of information took my breath away - slapped me across the face with the fact that not only do people live so differently from me, but people love birds in an absolutely different way from me. There are so many wonderful things in the world. Obviously I shouldn't have had to look all the way to Abu Dhabi to realize that, but you know how things jump out at you from time to time.
Also varied and wonderful is something the F-word got for me, Life in Cold Blood, narrated by the mighty Attenborough. I don't know the last time I've seen something so pretty, though there're so many reptiles and amphibians making it that from time to time I feel like I'm watching porn that's missing my horny mark. It's all the relationships within a species that really gets me though, not just the jissoming relationships, or not just the jissom in the jissoming relationships. Like the je t'aime moi non plus of Australia's sleepy lizards, who spend two months together a year, and then split up, and then get back together, and who mourn their partners if they die. Or the ritual combat of king cobras, who can kill a large animal with a single bite but whose menfolk content themselves with wrestling and pinning each other down to settle territorial disputes. I swear the more we learn about animals, the more mysterious they get.
And yesterday my job benefited me by teaching me, in the course of research for one of my articles, that Abu Dhabi has a falcon hospital. And it's one of several in the region. Can you believe it? That little scrap of information took my breath away - slapped me across the face with the fact that not only do people live so differently from me, but people love birds in an absolutely different way from me. There are so many wonderful things in the world. Obviously I shouldn't have had to look all the way to Abu Dhabi to realize that, but you know how things jump out at you from time to time.
Also varied and wonderful is something the F-word got for me, Life in Cold Blood, narrated by the mighty Attenborough. I don't know the last time I've seen something so pretty, though there're so many reptiles and amphibians making it that from time to time I feel like I'm watching porn that's missing my horny mark. It's all the relationships within a species that really gets me though, not just the jissoming relationships, or not just the jissom in the jissoming relationships. Like the je t'aime moi non plus of Australia's sleepy lizards, who spend two months together a year, and then split up, and then get back together, and who mourn their partners if they die. Or the ritual combat of king cobras, who can kill a large animal with a single bite but whose menfolk content themselves with wrestling and pinning each other down to settle territorial disputes. I swear the more we learn about animals, the more mysterious they get.
lunedì, agosto 04, 2008
Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser
To follow up on yesterday's banana bread recipe, adding a smashed-up bar of rich dark chocolate worked as well as it sounds like it would have worked. It pleased a birthday table of 6 different nationalities so I'm going to recommend it.
Anyways, I've found the strangest little book in a bargain basementy used bookstore shop here, from a series I'd never heard of before, Teach Yourself, which I suppose is the British answer to Whatever for Dummies, except the little thing I found was published during the second world war, so it's vice versa. I boldly splurged 50 centimes on Teach Yourself Geology not because of an overwhelming interest in geology - I just wanted to see what a self-ed book published in the middle of one of the most brutal conflicts in human history is like. The answer is fucking brilliant.
It's so excited about what it's about and, since it was only 1943 and I suppose no one had told them that the world is a fucking terrible place where men are no better than vicious, murderous tomcats with opposable thumbs and revolting imaginations, that kill babies in factories by the thousandweight, it's so excited about progress. About evolution and the aging of the planet as a progress towards - what? - something bigger and better - as well as about the expansion of human knowledge.
That caught me off guard a little bit. Does anybody still believe in this idea of progress? Of natural evolution, or of the evolution of human knowledge, as a process that's going somewhere, from a modest place to some sort of abstract but obviously much better - what? Conclusion? Surely not. Just to something obviously much better, I suppose. What beautiful optimism. I don't think it exists anymore. Was it just so obviously wrong, in the face of the Nazi, Soviet and Maoist hecatombs? In the face of war photography? Or have decades and decades of advertising campaigns for everything from cars to breakfast cereal simply inured us to it, until the idea that tomorrow will be better than today just rings in our head like a fatuous jingle?
The Teach Yourself series was and is published by these people - religious types back in the day - and apparently each Teach Yourself book they published back in the day had the title of this post, Proverbs 9.9, printed in the frontispiece. It reminds me that old optimism, that blind, enthusiastic faith in progress - in the idea that natural evolution and the evolution of human knowledge was an ever upwards and onwards type thing - was the natural reaction of a Christian society to the theory of evolution. The Christian society could accept that things hadn't happened like in Genesis when faced with the evidence, but it still needed to believe there was something profoundly God-y about existence - maybe even believe there is no God, but still clinging to the belief that somehow everything makes sense, and everything is getting better. Things 'evolve'. Things 'progress'. Things, in general, are couched in the language of a people who earnestly believe, without necessarily making it explicit and without thinking that it must mean they have some sort of abstract mystical faith, that there is a direction for existence.
Anyways, I've found the strangest little book in a bargain basementy used bookstore shop here, from a series I'd never heard of before, Teach Yourself, which I suppose is the British answer to Whatever for Dummies, except the little thing I found was published during the second world war, so it's vice versa. I boldly splurged 50 centimes on Teach Yourself Geology not because of an overwhelming interest in geology - I just wanted to see what a self-ed book published in the middle of one of the most brutal conflicts in human history is like. The answer is fucking brilliant.
It's so excited about what it's about and, since it was only 1943 and I suppose no one had told them that the world is a fucking terrible place where men are no better than vicious, murderous tomcats with opposable thumbs and revolting imaginations, that kill babies in factories by the thousandweight, it's so excited about progress. About evolution and the aging of the planet as a progress towards - what? - something bigger and better - as well as about the expansion of human knowledge.
That caught me off guard a little bit. Does anybody still believe in this idea of progress? Of natural evolution, or of the evolution of human knowledge, as a process that's going somewhere, from a modest place to some sort of abstract but obviously much better - what? Conclusion? Surely not. Just to something obviously much better, I suppose. What beautiful optimism. I don't think it exists anymore. Was it just so obviously wrong, in the face of the Nazi, Soviet and Maoist hecatombs? In the face of war photography? Or have decades and decades of advertising campaigns for everything from cars to breakfast cereal simply inured us to it, until the idea that tomorrow will be better than today just rings in our head like a fatuous jingle?
The Teach Yourself series was and is published by these people - religious types back in the day - and apparently each Teach Yourself book they published back in the day had the title of this post, Proverbs 9.9, printed in the frontispiece. It reminds me that old optimism, that blind, enthusiastic faith in progress - in the idea that natural evolution and the evolution of human knowledge was an ever upwards and onwards type thing - was the natural reaction of a Christian society to the theory of evolution. The Christian society could accept that things hadn't happened like in Genesis when faced with the evidence, but it still needed to believe there was something profoundly God-y about existence - maybe even believe there is no God, but still clinging to the belief that somehow everything makes sense, and everything is getting better. Things 'evolve'. Things 'progress'. Things, in general, are couched in the language of a people who earnestly believe, without necessarily making it explicit and without thinking that it must mean they have some sort of abstract mystical faith, that there is a direction for existence.
mercoledì, luglio 23, 2008
Periodic adventures
Whilst on vacation, got sick of the Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing on trains. Introduced me to some nice people but I don't like Richard Dawkins, and I started having a hard time stomaching his ubiquitous introductions to the authors, particularly the ones he disagreed with. Okay . . . a lot of them are loons, no doubt . . . but I don't need to be told that by the father of something as looney as the Memeplex. And I don't think it was quite the thing for Oxford to issue what's supposed to be a broad writing compilation that's been edited by a pompous goof whose core ideologies are increasingly being challenged but who's got no hesitation in letting his opinionation shine through unobstructed.
The really good thing about it is that it's convinced me I have to read The Periodic Table. That looks great. And the other really good thing about it is that it convinced me to buy a new book in Barcelona for the train ride back, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I haven't read very many things by Mark Twain, in fact nothing besides The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His writing gives me the same feeling as a friend of a friend back in Toronto who I always had a feeling I was meant to have an epic sexual encounter with, but something always came up to stop it, like J*Fish (the fucking master of the cockblock - maybe it's just as well he doesn't talk to me anymore) being there, or like me reuniting with my true love and forswearing all others. The feeling, in both cases, is just a sort of disbelief I haven't had that yet.
But while there is now basically zero chance of me ever having that friend of a friend, I can read all the Mark Twain I want . . . it's just that I keep forgetting. I mustn't, and this blog entry must stand to remind me of that. Tom Sawyer was totally charming and I think I have to move into Mark Twain very much big time. The writing is graceful and witty, which is a rare combination.
The really good thing about it is that it's convinced me I have to read The Periodic Table. That looks great. And the other really good thing about it is that it convinced me to buy a new book in Barcelona for the train ride back, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I haven't read very many things by Mark Twain, in fact nothing besides The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His writing gives me the same feeling as a friend of a friend back in Toronto who I always had a feeling I was meant to have an epic sexual encounter with, but something always came up to stop it, like J*Fish (the fucking master of the cockblock - maybe it's just as well he doesn't talk to me anymore) being there, or like me reuniting with my true love and forswearing all others. The feeling, in both cases, is just a sort of disbelief I haven't had that yet.
But while there is now basically zero chance of me ever having that friend of a friend, I can read all the Mark Twain I want . . . it's just that I keep forgetting. I mustn't, and this blog entry must stand to remind me of that. Tom Sawyer was totally charming and I think I have to move into Mark Twain very much big time. The writing is graceful and witty, which is a rare combination.
giovedì, giugno 19, 2008
Your love is like false premises, false premises I don't wanna read
I'll send a nice new shiny 2 euro coin to every newspaper in Britain if they'll only stop writing about evolutionary psychology. Women don't love self-obsessed, lying psychopaths better than they love any other sort of man. Obviously, painfully obviously, self-obsessed, lying psychopaths seduce more women because they devote more time than normal men to seducing women, in an effort to re-enforce their insecure or unclear sense of self. And they'll lie about their circumstances and their intentions in aid of said seduction, over and over again with an indefinite series of patsy ladies because, as psychopaths, they feel no guilt about any hearts broken in this desperate quest to re-enforce their insecure, unclear sense of self.
Maybe Steve Connor, the writer, was trying to be jokey, which goes to show English people shouldn't try to be funny when they're sober. But what it comes off as is Steve Connor being one of those shitheads who think they're really, really nice, and don't understand why women reject them in favour of men who aren't really, really nice, when actually the problem is that Steve Connor is probably not really, really nice at all, and is in fact the sort of cunt who hates women for being more attracted to other men than to him. I've known a lot of really, really nice men, and they've had no problem getting chicks, often including me. I've written about this before and before and my feelings have not changed. God, I'm tired of unattractive men blaming their unattractiveness on women. Why can't they just blame themselves, like unattractive women do?
Speaking of unattractive women, what the fuck's the matter with French feminists? Do the indignantes protesting the outcome of a court case that was satisfactory to both parties really think that French women have it so good in terms of domestic non-violence (they don't), pay equity (they don't), political and professional glass ceilings (they don't), and the social right to leave their homes without spending a retarded amount of time and money dolling themselves up (they don't) that now the country's feminist class can relax and concentrate on informing private citizens what is and isn't an 'essential quality' in their now-undesirable marital contract? Motherfuck, those people piss me off. 'Fatwa against women's liberty' indeed. Go to my old working-class neighborhood and see if all the white women with white husbands and black eyes were the target of a fucking fatwa. Go get a fucking job, punks, and then tell me if the people paying you less and promoting you less than your male colleagues are Muslim. Holy fuck.
Excuse the pottymouth but my Mum is coming to visit for a few days, which is fantastic. But until Tuesday morning, I cannot pop a nasty word unless I accidentally hurt myself. I may explode. It may also mean no post Monday. To tide you over, here's an excerpt from Rudolf Nureyev's appearance on the Muppet Show which I first saw, in reruns I suppose, when I was a young, young thing and which may have impacted my sexual persona more than I'm wholly comfortable with:
I remember how curious I was about the consequence of that towel slipping. If only I'd had Google Image search then - no, actually, I'm very pleased I didn't. Best to let the surprise build up awhile longer, until I could get my hands on one. Man, cock is awesome.
Maybe Steve Connor, the writer, was trying to be jokey, which goes to show English people shouldn't try to be funny when they're sober. But what it comes off as is Steve Connor being one of those shitheads who think they're really, really nice, and don't understand why women reject them in favour of men who aren't really, really nice, when actually the problem is that Steve Connor is probably not really, really nice at all, and is in fact the sort of cunt who hates women for being more attracted to other men than to him. I've known a lot of really, really nice men, and they've had no problem getting chicks, often including me. I've written about this before and before and my feelings have not changed. God, I'm tired of unattractive men blaming their unattractiveness on women. Why can't they just blame themselves, like unattractive women do?
Speaking of unattractive women, what the fuck's the matter with French feminists? Do the indignantes protesting the outcome of a court case that was satisfactory to both parties really think that French women have it so good in terms of domestic non-violence (they don't), pay equity (they don't), political and professional glass ceilings (they don't), and the social right to leave their homes without spending a retarded amount of time and money dolling themselves up (they don't) that now the country's feminist class can relax and concentrate on informing private citizens what is and isn't an 'essential quality' in their now-undesirable marital contract? Motherfuck, those people piss me off. 'Fatwa against women's liberty' indeed. Go to my old working-class neighborhood and see if all the white women with white husbands and black eyes were the target of a fucking fatwa. Go get a fucking job, punks, and then tell me if the people paying you less and promoting you less than your male colleagues are Muslim. Holy fuck.
Excuse the pottymouth but my Mum is coming to visit for a few days, which is fantastic. But until Tuesday morning, I cannot pop a nasty word unless I accidentally hurt myself. I may explode. It may also mean no post Monday. To tide you over, here's an excerpt from Rudolf Nureyev's appearance on the Muppet Show which I first saw, in reruns I suppose, when I was a young, young thing and which may have impacted my sexual persona more than I'm wholly comfortable with:
I remember how curious I was about the consequence of that towel slipping. If only I'd had Google Image search then - no, actually, I'm very pleased I didn't. Best to let the surprise build up awhile longer, until I could get my hands on one. Man, cock is awesome.
domenica, maggio 04, 2008
Bonntastic
No time to write as I'd like to, but I'll try to gradually get everything I would like to get out over the week, including a little blogasm over the May Day Bad Seeds concert, whose imperfections only rendered it more lovable. We went to Bonn and had a lovely time over the long weekend - I relaxed muscles that I thought had turned into bone by this point, I've been so tense, and I feel like I got a bit of perspective on my high-pressure yuppie life and how to end it without physically destroying myself.
It's hard to pick out a high point for a quick Monday morning bloggery, as so much of it was so damn nice. It's a lovely little tourist city, absolutely built for geeks like me; lots of spacious, pretty parks to smoke joints in without feeling like you're setting a bad example for the children, interspersed with some of the best museums and galleries ever. We went to three, which were all awfully good one way or another: the Arithmeum, the Kunstmuseum Bonn (full of wierdo modern art), and the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the post-Nazi German history museum. Of the three, the history museum was certainly the most impressive - it really must be seen. From the archive footage of little kids who were looking for their parents after getting seperated from them in air raids to the deliciously dry, informative accounts about each successive federal election, it was all so much better than PBS and the BBC rolled into one. All the signage is in German, so either bring some Germans with you or buy the English guidebook at the beginning.
However, I must say I enjoyed the Arithmeum the most. This is despite the fact that numbers are my enemy and I wish we, as a race, could drop Indo/Arabic numerals altogether and just go back to 'one, two, lots'. It was full of cunning machines and devices from the last three or four millenia for calculating things - originals under glass, and then reconstructed models with instructions that you could fool around with until you understood. It was so fucking awesome, and we went there first thing in the morning so I wasn't even high yet. I learnt how to use a Japanese abacus! They look like this:
The counters on the bottom are units of one (so there are four), and the counter on top is a unit of five. Starting from the right, you stick numbers in, first rod for the ones, second for the tens, third for the hundreds, etc. - so for 84, you'd stick up four bottom counters on the farthest-right rod, and then three bottom counters and one top counter on second-farthest right rod - then you do things to add and subtract. You can use them to vastly simplify multiplication and division, too, if you know your multiplication tables, which is essentially all I know when it comes to math.
Anyhoo, the beautiful, lovely, kind F-word bought me my very own abacus, and while I was fooling around with it on the train back to Brussels I suddenly realized what my Korean students in Paris had been doing every time I'd asked them to reckon a number, and they'd done it in record time by counting in some way absolutely impenetrable fashion to me on their hands - they were using their hands as little Japanese abaci. They'd tried to explain it to me at the time, but between their difficulties with English (which is why they were seeing me) and my utter incompetence with figures, I hadn't understood a fucking scintilla of a notion of what they were doing. Until I got my own Japanese abacus. I have to say, I'm fucking pissed off I wasn't given one of these as a child. They're so fucking smart, and they re-contextualize arithmetic as a physical, visual thing instead of an ever-lengthening and ever more wrong series of numbers stretching down a page in a slow, desperate rightwards diagonal.
It's hard to pick out a high point for a quick Monday morning bloggery, as so much of it was so damn nice. It's a lovely little tourist city, absolutely built for geeks like me; lots of spacious, pretty parks to smoke joints in without feeling like you're setting a bad example for the children, interspersed with some of the best museums and galleries ever. We went to three, which were all awfully good one way or another: the Arithmeum, the Kunstmuseum Bonn (full of wierdo modern art), and the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the post-Nazi German history museum. Of the three, the history museum was certainly the most impressive - it really must be seen. From the archive footage of little kids who were looking for their parents after getting seperated from them in air raids to the deliciously dry, informative accounts about each successive federal election, it was all so much better than PBS and the BBC rolled into one. All the signage is in German, so either bring some Germans with you or buy the English guidebook at the beginning.
However, I must say I enjoyed the Arithmeum the most. This is despite the fact that numbers are my enemy and I wish we, as a race, could drop Indo/Arabic numerals altogether and just go back to 'one, two, lots'. It was full of cunning machines and devices from the last three or four millenia for calculating things - originals under glass, and then reconstructed models with instructions that you could fool around with until you understood. It was so fucking awesome, and we went there first thing in the morning so I wasn't even high yet. I learnt how to use a Japanese abacus! They look like this:
The counters on the bottom are units of one (so there are four), and the counter on top is a unit of five. Starting from the right, you stick numbers in, first rod for the ones, second for the tens, third for the hundreds, etc. - so for 84, you'd stick up four bottom counters on the farthest-right rod, and then three bottom counters and one top counter on second-farthest right rod - then you do things to add and subtract. You can use them to vastly simplify multiplication and division, too, if you know your multiplication tables, which is essentially all I know when it comes to math.
Anyhoo, the beautiful, lovely, kind F-word bought me my very own abacus, and while I was fooling around with it on the train back to Brussels I suddenly realized what my Korean students in Paris had been doing every time I'd asked them to reckon a number, and they'd done it in record time by counting in some way absolutely impenetrable fashion to me on their hands - they were using their hands as little Japanese abaci. They'd tried to explain it to me at the time, but between their difficulties with English (which is why they were seeing me) and my utter incompetence with figures, I hadn't understood a fucking scintilla of a notion of what they were doing. Until I got my own Japanese abacus. I have to say, I'm fucking pissed off I wasn't given one of these as a child. They're so fucking smart, and they re-contextualize arithmetic as a physical, visual thing instead of an ever-lengthening and ever more wrong series of numbers stretching down a page in a slow, desperate rightwards diagonal.
martedì, marzo 18, 2008
Reading television
Last night I finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, and then I watched most of it, after Hilts let me know it existed in television form. I know that points to an obsession with the book or with Jared Diamond, but nobody has replaced Steven Mithen in my pop-science affections. The thing is that the F-word is on a huge Russia kick at the moment and about to wade into the Gulag Archipelago, and he reads slowly so he'll be in there forever, but he was jealous that I was reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, so I figured if the documentary was halfway decent it'd get the points across to him without him having to break his Russia run.
Also, I was curious to see how it had been televised. The last documentary vs. pop science book thing I'd experienced was The Root of All Evil? vs. The God Delusion, and while I found a great deal to dislike about both it was interesting to see that the book looked like it had been lifted from the documentary. The book had all the same interviews and subjective Dawkinsian experiences, with a few absolutely unsatisfactory caveats inserted about how pantheistic and polytheistic religions were basically the same as Judeo-Christianity so it was alright that he ignored them - the documentary went to no such trouble. The book was just a tarted-up version of the documentary - a bit counter intuitive, but interesting.
Guns, Germs, and Steel was the more expected opposite; the documentary was certainly a dumbed-down version of the book, to the degree that even though I wasn't crazy about the book I'll still advise the F-word to read it when he gets out of the Gulag. The book was interesting and a little annoying, and the documentary was less interesting and more annoying. The thing is, I have a hard time with the concept of cultural evolution (I think I came to Guns, Germs, and Steel too fast after reading the way way better Full House, by Stephen Gould, a man who was convincingly hostile to applying evolutionary terms to culture) and I think Diamond equated technological advancement with cultural evolution. And I think his eagerness to make that equation made him make mistakes like unnecessarily glossing over things that weakened, though didn't contradict, his big picture, such as the fact that syphilis almost certainly spread from the Americas to Eurasia.
It just wasn't necessary for him to put his arguments in terms of cultural evolution, though I imagine it made the book easier to write, and probably read. It's a simpler, more graspable version of the world, simpler to structure an argument around the central pillar that we're all in a race towards one semi-inevitable destination that any given group of humans would have got to first giving the right tools, but it's also kind of bullshit. All post-modernism aside. It just doesn't make any sense unless you're somehow religious.
The second problem I had with Guns, Germs, and Steel is perhaps a personal failing, but the thing is no pop science writer has ever convinced me that modern hunter gatherers are so easily comparable to prehistoric hunter gatherers. Come on, they're honestly not going to think up any new stories in 60,000 years? Or a different, increasingly useful spirituality? Eat a wider range of foods as they build up social knowledge about what doesn't make you die? Treat each other differently? Can we really compare prehistoric hunter gatherers so unhesitatingly with modern-ish ones just because their technology was similar? I think about the Tasmanians a lot in this context because back in the mists of undergrad anthropology time I studied the tiny bit Europeans wrote down about their religious beliefs before their extinction. The religion was fascinating, and different from the other hunter-gathering populations I was comparing them to. And then there's the massive headfuck of Dreamtime in mainland Australia. I don't know. I just find it hard to believe that the people the Europeans found there were culturally similar to people 60,000 years ago. It just seems like a way to simplify matters and permit yourself to read waaaaay too much into the archaeological record.
Anyhoo. The most interesting thing about watching the documentary back to back with reading the book is the sudden realization that complaints about Jared Diamond and GG&S, as explained in this typically craptastic New York Times article Hilts drew my attention to, are in great part based on the documentary rather than book (that Eurocentricism thing especially), or indirectly based on the sort of notions of innate racial superiority whose debunking was the best part of GG&S - frankly, you can't imply that European choices, rather than geographic determinism, are what let Europeans be so internationally dominant without also implying that innate European superiority is what let Europeans be so dominant. Calling them assholes while you make that connection doesn't make it any less racist.
Also, I agree that he oversimplifies unnescessarily - see above. But at the same time, dude, it's pop science. Yuppies like me read it to relax in the evening, and maybe teenagers read it and it makes them interested enough in anthropology that they study it in university. Great - you've got another enrollment, more funding for your department, and now you can spend the next four years convincing the kid how boring and finicky real anthropology is. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth, for fuck's sake. But that touches on some future post about what I feel like the role of pop science is and now I have to go meet deadline for an industry magazine that is not pop or science-y at all.
Oh, and by the way:
"No one visits Stonehenge, she noted, and asks whatever happened to the English."
Yes they do, you stupid American fuck. Holy shit, what's wrong with these people? She's a fucking associate professor, for god's sake, and she trots out a fucking moronicity like that for an international newspaper. Jeebus. Fucking. Fuck.
Also, I was curious to see how it had been televised. The last documentary vs. pop science book thing I'd experienced was The Root of All Evil? vs. The God Delusion, and while I found a great deal to dislike about both it was interesting to see that the book looked like it had been lifted from the documentary. The book had all the same interviews and subjective Dawkinsian experiences, with a few absolutely unsatisfactory caveats inserted about how pantheistic and polytheistic religions were basically the same as Judeo-Christianity so it was alright that he ignored them - the documentary went to no such trouble. The book was just a tarted-up version of the documentary - a bit counter intuitive, but interesting.
Guns, Germs, and Steel was the more expected opposite; the documentary was certainly a dumbed-down version of the book, to the degree that even though I wasn't crazy about the book I'll still advise the F-word to read it when he gets out of the Gulag. The book was interesting and a little annoying, and the documentary was less interesting and more annoying. The thing is, I have a hard time with the concept of cultural evolution (I think I came to Guns, Germs, and Steel too fast after reading the way way better Full House, by Stephen Gould, a man who was convincingly hostile to applying evolutionary terms to culture) and I think Diamond equated technological advancement with cultural evolution. And I think his eagerness to make that equation made him make mistakes like unnecessarily glossing over things that weakened, though didn't contradict, his big picture, such as the fact that syphilis almost certainly spread from the Americas to Eurasia.
It just wasn't necessary for him to put his arguments in terms of cultural evolution, though I imagine it made the book easier to write, and probably read. It's a simpler, more graspable version of the world, simpler to structure an argument around the central pillar that we're all in a race towards one semi-inevitable destination that any given group of humans would have got to first giving the right tools, but it's also kind of bullshit. All post-modernism aside. It just doesn't make any sense unless you're somehow religious.
The second problem I had with Guns, Germs, and Steel is perhaps a personal failing, but the thing is no pop science writer has ever convinced me that modern hunter gatherers are so easily comparable to prehistoric hunter gatherers. Come on, they're honestly not going to think up any new stories in 60,000 years? Or a different, increasingly useful spirituality? Eat a wider range of foods as they build up social knowledge about what doesn't make you die? Treat each other differently? Can we really compare prehistoric hunter gatherers so unhesitatingly with modern-ish ones just because their technology was similar? I think about the Tasmanians a lot in this context because back in the mists of undergrad anthropology time I studied the tiny bit Europeans wrote down about their religious beliefs before their extinction. The religion was fascinating, and different from the other hunter-gathering populations I was comparing them to. And then there's the massive headfuck of Dreamtime in mainland Australia. I don't know. I just find it hard to believe that the people the Europeans found there were culturally similar to people 60,000 years ago. It just seems like a way to simplify matters and permit yourself to read waaaaay too much into the archaeological record.
Anyhoo. The most interesting thing about watching the documentary back to back with reading the book is the sudden realization that complaints about Jared Diamond and GG&S, as explained in this typically craptastic New York Times article Hilts drew my attention to, are in great part based on the documentary rather than book (that Eurocentricism thing especially), or indirectly based on the sort of notions of innate racial superiority whose debunking was the best part of GG&S - frankly, you can't imply that European choices, rather than geographic determinism, are what let Europeans be so internationally dominant without also implying that innate European superiority is what let Europeans be so dominant. Calling them assholes while you make that connection doesn't make it any less racist.
Also, I agree that he oversimplifies unnescessarily - see above. But at the same time, dude, it's pop science. Yuppies like me read it to relax in the evening, and maybe teenagers read it and it makes them interested enough in anthropology that they study it in university. Great - you've got another enrollment, more funding for your department, and now you can spend the next four years convincing the kid how boring and finicky real anthropology is. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth, for fuck's sake. But that touches on some future post about what I feel like the role of pop science is and now I have to go meet deadline for an industry magazine that is not pop or science-y at all.
Oh, and by the way:
"No one visits Stonehenge, she noted, and asks whatever happened to the English."
Yes they do, you stupid American fuck. Holy shit, what's wrong with these people? She's a fucking associate professor, for god's sake, and she trots out a fucking moronicity like that for an international newspaper. Jeebus. Fucking. Fuck.
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