Did you know that the President of the Republic of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, is an atheist? ITALY. In case you’re not aware, that’s the country that surrounds the Vatican City, which is the country that surrounds the Pope. Here are some other non-Communist heads of state, both current and former, who don’t believe in god:
Clement Attlee – Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1945 – 1951)
James Callaghan – Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1976 – 1979)
Nick Clegg – Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (2010 – present)
Georges Clemenceau – Prime Minister of France (1906 – 1909 and 1917 – 1920)
Aleksander Kwaśniewski – President of Poland (1995 – 2005)
Dimitris Christofias – President of Cyprus (2008 – present)
Julia Gillard – Prime Minister of Australia (2010 – present)
Jawaharlal Nehru – Prime Minister of India (1947 – 1964)
Your move, America.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Gotta love 'em!
I spend a great deal of time fantasizing, mostly about cake – chocolate with inch-think vanilla frosting, in case you were wondering. On those rare occasions when my mind isn’t occupied by dessert, I also like to imagine what it would be like to be stinking rich and have absolutely no responsibilities. Oh, the things I would do with my money. I wouldn’t spend it on cars or houses or jewelry or caviar or vintage wines. Money is meant to be blown creatively. To that end, I’ve been doing some research in preparation for my future as a rich person, and in the process have uncovered the biographies of some of history’s greatest men, eccentric British aristocrats. They never contributed to the general welfare, I grant you, nor did they produce great works of art or thrive as amateur scientists. They did, however, know how to squander their inheritances with panache. Here are a few of the notables…
William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck (1800 – 1879)
William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, the name by which all other aristocrats’ names must be measured, was a fabulously wealthy recluse. When I say recluse, I don’t mean a little shy or introverted. He lived in an enormous mansion, but relegated himself to about a half dozen unfurnished rooms, all painted pink; his valet had the distinction of being quite literally the only other person ever allowed in these quarters. And here’s where things get for-real crazy. Our wacky aristocrat commissioned a whole slew of laborers, who were incidentally instructed in writing by their employer not to acknowledge his existence should they inadvertently run into him, to construct a vast and elaborate system of subterranean tunnels and rooms. He had this new addition to his estate painted – what else? – pink. Just to top it all off, the guy dined exclusively on freshly-killed chickens, conveyed to him in his underground bunker by a rail system.
John Mytton (1796 – 1834)
Like Lord Byron, an eccentric British aristocrat excluded from this list for having accomplished something, John Mytton kept a bear as a pet. Unlike Byron, Mytton would periodically utilize his furry friend as a means of transportation, riding the wild animal around his estate. On one occasion, the bear responded to this indignity by taking an enormous bite out of Mytton’s leg, but Mytton, undeterred, refused to have the bear put down until it ferociously attacked one of his servants. Mytton also enjoyed a good prank. One particular evening, when entertaining friends, he waited for them to leave before dressing up like a highwayman, catching up with their carriage, and robbing them at gunpoint. The greatest thing of all is that this is really just the tip of his lunacy iceberg. He died aged 38 in a debtor’s prison, his intake of port, which came out to an almost unbelievable 8 bottles a day, likely being a contributing factor.
Robert Coates (1772 – 1848)
Unlike many other aristocrats, Robert Coates aspired to a career, that of an actor. Like many other aristocrats, Robert Coates had no discernable talent. In fact, he was by all accounts one of the worst actors to ever grace the stage. Fortunately, he had enough money to finance his own plays, invariably casting himself as the male lead. Although audiences jeered, laughed, and generally made clear their feelings regarding his acting chops, as well as his absurd, self-designed costumes, Coates’ inevitable infamy actually attracted theater-goers curious to see one of his catastrophic performances. They were not disappointed. Coates’ memory was almost as bad as his acting, so he would often make up dialogue, which somehow failed to live up to Shakespearean standards, a problem since Romeo was his trademark role. Needless to say, he often had difficulty finding actresses willing to portray Juliet. Best of all, if Coates felt a given scene had gone particularly well, he would halt action and repeat it, often more than once. Like the film director, Ed Wood, a little over a century later, Coates heroically soldiered on in the face of ridicule, convinced of his own genius.
Jemmy Hirst (1738 – 1829)
Jemmy Hirst was a gentleman farmer whose lunacy was so notorious that he was invited to tea by King George III, himself no stranger to insanity. Hirst, when first summoned by the King, demurred, offering as his excuse that he was busy teaching an otter to fish. Eventually he relented, ensuring his visit would be unforgettable by pouring water on the head of a nobleman whom he believed to be hysterical. As you may have gathered from Hirst’s adventures in otter-training, teaching animals to do unusual, maybe even unnatural, things was something of a passion for him. When fox-hunting, he rode a bull that had been trained to behave like a horse; in place of hounds, he used pigs. His version of philanthropy was to summon the poor to his home where they would be fed for free, the catch being that the food would be served in a coffin. Intriguingly, Wikipedia refers to this coffin as his “favorite” implying that he had something of a collection. Sartorially he was no slouch either, owning a hat with a nine-foot brim and choosing to be married in a toga.
Some honorable mentions:
Phillip Thicknesse (1719 – 1792) in his will asked that his right hand be cut off and sent to his estranged son.
Sir Benjamin Slade (1946 – present) is currently best known for his attempts to find an heir to his estate, as he is childless. Much more interestingly, he recently offered up his dog to serve as best man at same-sex weddings performed at his country home, explaining that the pooch is, “a bit gay.”
Chris Eubank (1966 – present) is a British boxer who trained in the South Bronx. While not exactly an aristocrat, he did squander a small fortune, at one point purchasing the title of Lord of the Manor of Brighton for the express purpose of appointing a town crier. He’s also a monocle enthusiast.
John Christie (1882 – 1962), founder of an opera festival, decided at one performance to remove his glass eye, polish and replace it. This was wildly inappropriate as he happened to be seated next to the Queen at the time. What really makes the story, however, is that after popping the eye back into its socket, he turned to the Queen to ask if he’d put it in straight.
William Buckland (1784 – 1856) would deserve a longer entry if I believed the almost-certainly apocryphal tale which states that he, upon seeing the preserved heart of King Louis XIV of France, scooped it up and ate it.
William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck (1800 – 1879)
William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, the name by which all other aristocrats’ names must be measured, was a fabulously wealthy recluse. When I say recluse, I don’t mean a little shy or introverted. He lived in an enormous mansion, but relegated himself to about a half dozen unfurnished rooms, all painted pink; his valet had the distinction of being quite literally the only other person ever allowed in these quarters. And here’s where things get for-real crazy. Our wacky aristocrat commissioned a whole slew of laborers, who were incidentally instructed in writing by their employer not to acknowledge his existence should they inadvertently run into him, to construct a vast and elaborate system of subterranean tunnels and rooms. He had this new addition to his estate painted – what else? – pink. Just to top it all off, the guy dined exclusively on freshly-killed chickens, conveyed to him in his underground bunker by a rail system.
John Mytton (1796 – 1834)
Like Lord Byron, an eccentric British aristocrat excluded from this list for having accomplished something, John Mytton kept a bear as a pet. Unlike Byron, Mytton would periodically utilize his furry friend as a means of transportation, riding the wild animal around his estate. On one occasion, the bear responded to this indignity by taking an enormous bite out of Mytton’s leg, but Mytton, undeterred, refused to have the bear put down until it ferociously attacked one of his servants. Mytton also enjoyed a good prank. One particular evening, when entertaining friends, he waited for them to leave before dressing up like a highwayman, catching up with their carriage, and robbing them at gunpoint. The greatest thing of all is that this is really just the tip of his lunacy iceberg. He died aged 38 in a debtor’s prison, his intake of port, which came out to an almost unbelievable 8 bottles a day, likely being a contributing factor.
Robert Coates (1772 – 1848)
Unlike many other aristocrats, Robert Coates aspired to a career, that of an actor. Like many other aristocrats, Robert Coates had no discernable talent. In fact, he was by all accounts one of the worst actors to ever grace the stage. Fortunately, he had enough money to finance his own plays, invariably casting himself as the male lead. Although audiences jeered, laughed, and generally made clear their feelings regarding his acting chops, as well as his absurd, self-designed costumes, Coates’ inevitable infamy actually attracted theater-goers curious to see one of his catastrophic performances. They were not disappointed. Coates’ memory was almost as bad as his acting, so he would often make up dialogue, which somehow failed to live up to Shakespearean standards, a problem since Romeo was his trademark role. Needless to say, he often had difficulty finding actresses willing to portray Juliet. Best of all, if Coates felt a given scene had gone particularly well, he would halt action and repeat it, often more than once. Like the film director, Ed Wood, a little over a century later, Coates heroically soldiered on in the face of ridicule, convinced of his own genius.
Jemmy Hirst (1738 – 1829)
Jemmy Hirst was a gentleman farmer whose lunacy was so notorious that he was invited to tea by King George III, himself no stranger to insanity. Hirst, when first summoned by the King, demurred, offering as his excuse that he was busy teaching an otter to fish. Eventually he relented, ensuring his visit would be unforgettable by pouring water on the head of a nobleman whom he believed to be hysterical. As you may have gathered from Hirst’s adventures in otter-training, teaching animals to do unusual, maybe even unnatural, things was something of a passion for him. When fox-hunting, he rode a bull that had been trained to behave like a horse; in place of hounds, he used pigs. His version of philanthropy was to summon the poor to his home where they would be fed for free, the catch being that the food would be served in a coffin. Intriguingly, Wikipedia refers to this coffin as his “favorite” implying that he had something of a collection. Sartorially he was no slouch either, owning a hat with a nine-foot brim and choosing to be married in a toga.
Some honorable mentions:
Phillip Thicknesse (1719 – 1792) in his will asked that his right hand be cut off and sent to his estranged son.
Sir Benjamin Slade (1946 – present) is currently best known for his attempts to find an heir to his estate, as he is childless. Much more interestingly, he recently offered up his dog to serve as best man at same-sex weddings performed at his country home, explaining that the pooch is, “a bit gay.”
Chris Eubank (1966 – present) is a British boxer who trained in the South Bronx. While not exactly an aristocrat, he did squander a small fortune, at one point purchasing the title of Lord of the Manor of Brighton for the express purpose of appointing a town crier. He’s also a monocle enthusiast.
John Christie (1882 – 1962), founder of an opera festival, decided at one performance to remove his glass eye, polish and replace it. This was wildly inappropriate as he happened to be seated next to the Queen at the time. What really makes the story, however, is that after popping the eye back into its socket, he turned to the Queen to ask if he’d put it in straight.
William Buckland (1784 – 1856) would deserve a longer entry if I believed the almost-certainly apocryphal tale which states that he, upon seeing the preserved heart of King Louis XIV of France, scooped it up and ate it.
Monday, December 6, 2010
You know it when you see it.....
My Kindle had to remain at home today, charging, so I was forced to entertain myself on the train with an old-fashioned book made of paper and the shattered dreams of the publishing industry. The book plucked from my personal library this morning was “Hip: The History,” which I purchased after reading a review in my college newspaper, but heretofore failed to tackle. Now, I’m only a semi-awake hour into the book, but it’s got me thinking about what it means to be cool. Why are some things obviously hip (e.g. Lou Reed) and others obviously unhip (e.g. Phil Collins)? More importantly, why would someone like me care?
I’m sure I’m not the first to define hip the way the Supreme Court defines pornography: you know it when you see it, and we have a sort of intergenerational, possibly innate cultural understanding that some things are hip (or pornographic) and others are not. Few would disagree with my decision to consign poor Phil Collins to the desperately unhip column, while placing Lou Reed on the other side. This isn’t a judgment of their respective musical achievements – when it comes right down to it, they’re both tedious and obnoxious – but a commonly-understood fact. The question is, why?
Well, Phil Collins is bald and that never helps matters, but on the other hand Lou Reed is a Jew which is the albatross he has to bear, if you’ll allow me to mix metaphors. It’s true that Lou Reed is more avant-garde, in that he will shamelessly release 4 sides of grating noise, not punctuated by anything as pedestrian as music, but then again Phil Collins got his start in progressive rock, which retains to this day a certain cachet among geeky hipsters. Phil Collins has written songs for Disney movies, but Lou Reed performed for the Pope, and we all know the only thing less cool than Judaism is Christianity. When it comes right down to it, I have no idea why Reed is hip and Collins is not, but I know it to be true.
By all rights I shouldn’t be giving this matter more than a calorie or two of brain energy. After all, I completely understand the allure of the suburbs, rarely venture out past 9PM, and talk shit about smokers behind their backs. I recognize that this is not hip, but I can’t help myself. Just like I genuinely prefer Nancy Sinatra to her abysmal father, I prefer tree-lined streets, daylight, and nonsmokers, and I suspect that, at least on some level, this has always been the case. I periodically ventured out of the box in my early 20’s, but with age comes the realization that a life spent trying to impress people you don’t actually like is no life at all.
Maybe the reason I’m still interested in hip, interested at least enough to blog about it, is that I fear I’m coming dangerously close to losing touch with it entirely. I have absolutely no idea what kids these days are up to. Presumably the bulk of them are sexting and listening to the Justin Bieber, both of which are completely alien to me, but I suspect not especially hip. So what are the odd kids doing, apart from dreaming about moving into the city, staying out all night, and smoking? Maybe, just maybe, they’re doing what their counterparts did 15 years ago, namely watching “La Dolce Vita” in an attempt to understand what people mean when they describe things as “Fellini-esque” (Hint: They don’t really mean anything, but are trying to make stupid people think they’re smart.) If I’m right, there may be hope for me yet.
I’m sure I’m not the first to define hip the way the Supreme Court defines pornography: you know it when you see it, and we have a sort of intergenerational, possibly innate cultural understanding that some things are hip (or pornographic) and others are not. Few would disagree with my decision to consign poor Phil Collins to the desperately unhip column, while placing Lou Reed on the other side. This isn’t a judgment of their respective musical achievements – when it comes right down to it, they’re both tedious and obnoxious – but a commonly-understood fact. The question is, why?
Well, Phil Collins is bald and that never helps matters, but on the other hand Lou Reed is a Jew which is the albatross he has to bear, if you’ll allow me to mix metaphors. It’s true that Lou Reed is more avant-garde, in that he will shamelessly release 4 sides of grating noise, not punctuated by anything as pedestrian as music, but then again Phil Collins got his start in progressive rock, which retains to this day a certain cachet among geeky hipsters. Phil Collins has written songs for Disney movies, but Lou Reed performed for the Pope, and we all know the only thing less cool than Judaism is Christianity. When it comes right down to it, I have no idea why Reed is hip and Collins is not, but I know it to be true.
By all rights I shouldn’t be giving this matter more than a calorie or two of brain energy. After all, I completely understand the allure of the suburbs, rarely venture out past 9PM, and talk shit about smokers behind their backs. I recognize that this is not hip, but I can’t help myself. Just like I genuinely prefer Nancy Sinatra to her abysmal father, I prefer tree-lined streets, daylight, and nonsmokers, and I suspect that, at least on some level, this has always been the case. I periodically ventured out of the box in my early 20’s, but with age comes the realization that a life spent trying to impress people you don’t actually like is no life at all.
Maybe the reason I’m still interested in hip, interested at least enough to blog about it, is that I fear I’m coming dangerously close to losing touch with it entirely. I have absolutely no idea what kids these days are up to. Presumably the bulk of them are sexting and listening to the Justin Bieber, both of which are completely alien to me, but I suspect not especially hip. So what are the odd kids doing, apart from dreaming about moving into the city, staying out all night, and smoking? Maybe, just maybe, they’re doing what their counterparts did 15 years ago, namely watching “La Dolce Vita” in an attempt to understand what people mean when they describe things as “Fellini-esque” (Hint: They don’t really mean anything, but are trying to make stupid people think they’re smart.) If I’m right, there may be hope for me yet.
Friday, November 19, 2010
What Not To Watch
Is it just me, or does television get worse by the day? Here’s a little rundown of some of the more appalling programs and genres that have recently come into existence.
Hole in the Wall
“Hole in the Wall” was cancelled almost immediately after its first airing, which gives me some faith in our national intelligence. Anyway, this was a game show in which contestants, preferably fat contestants, would be dressed in skin-tight jumpsuits and stood in front of a series of colored walls, each containing a cut-out. I’m sure you can see where this is going. Our pathetic, obese players would be expected to amuse the masses by contorting their fat rolls into ridiculous positions in order to jump through each wall’s cut-out. I’m not sure when exactly it became socially acceptable to lose one’s dignity on national television in exchange for a modest payout, but I consider it evidence of the human race’s devolution.
Little People, Big World, et al.
Television executives appear to have learned a valuable lesson over the past few years, and that lesson is that everything’s better with midgets. Want to film some run-of-the-mill family buying groceries and paying bills? If they’re midgets you’ve got a hit on your hands. Then there are those Animal Planet midgets who rehabilitate Pit Bulls. The beauty of this format is that even if the dogs themselves are a little raggedy-looking, the show’s teensy-weensy humans can pick up the cuteness slack. God, there are so many more. Midgets baking cakes, midgets getting married, midgets having babies, midgets, midgets, midgets. Can someone explain to me why this isn’t viewed as the egregious exploitation of an oft-maligned group?
Pawn Stars, et al.
Pawn shop proprietors are hot right now. Again, this isn’t a genre I’m into, so don’t really know what these shows are about, but I picture a white trash Antiques Roadshow. A junkie walks into the shop carrying a Glock he inherited from a friend who OD’d. The junkie managed to hang on to the gun for about a week since it had sentimental value, but now he’s broke and needs to score. He and the shop’s owner have the sort of altercation that makes nice, middle-class people exceedingly uncomfortable before the junkie is given $20.00 and ordered out of the store. At this point, the camera cuts to the owner who says, “It’s sad what these people do to themselves, but we have a job to do,” or other, similar words that sound like they mean something but don’t. Cut to a commercial for the endless buffet at Golden Corral.
New Jersey
Enough with these orange assholes. Here are some things I’m not interested in seeing on TV: Guidos binge-drinking, pumping iron, or contracting herpes.
Here’s something I would be interested in seeing on TV: Guidos jacked up on anabolic steroids, murdering each other.
The Real Housewives of Detroit
OK, this show doesn’t exist yet, but it’s only a matter of time before they run out of other cities.
Hole in the Wall
“Hole in the Wall” was cancelled almost immediately after its first airing, which gives me some faith in our national intelligence. Anyway, this was a game show in which contestants, preferably fat contestants, would be dressed in skin-tight jumpsuits and stood in front of a series of colored walls, each containing a cut-out. I’m sure you can see where this is going. Our pathetic, obese players would be expected to amuse the masses by contorting their fat rolls into ridiculous positions in order to jump through each wall’s cut-out. I’m not sure when exactly it became socially acceptable to lose one’s dignity on national television in exchange for a modest payout, but I consider it evidence of the human race’s devolution.
Little People, Big World, et al.
Television executives appear to have learned a valuable lesson over the past few years, and that lesson is that everything’s better with midgets. Want to film some run-of-the-mill family buying groceries and paying bills? If they’re midgets you’ve got a hit on your hands. Then there are those Animal Planet midgets who rehabilitate Pit Bulls. The beauty of this format is that even if the dogs themselves are a little raggedy-looking, the show’s teensy-weensy humans can pick up the cuteness slack. God, there are so many more. Midgets baking cakes, midgets getting married, midgets having babies, midgets, midgets, midgets. Can someone explain to me why this isn’t viewed as the egregious exploitation of an oft-maligned group?
Pawn Stars, et al.
Pawn shop proprietors are hot right now. Again, this isn’t a genre I’m into, so don’t really know what these shows are about, but I picture a white trash Antiques Roadshow. A junkie walks into the shop carrying a Glock he inherited from a friend who OD’d. The junkie managed to hang on to the gun for about a week since it had sentimental value, but now he’s broke and needs to score. He and the shop’s owner have the sort of altercation that makes nice, middle-class people exceedingly uncomfortable before the junkie is given $20.00 and ordered out of the store. At this point, the camera cuts to the owner who says, “It’s sad what these people do to themselves, but we have a job to do,” or other, similar words that sound like they mean something but don’t. Cut to a commercial for the endless buffet at Golden Corral.
New Jersey
Enough with these orange assholes. Here are some things I’m not interested in seeing on TV: Guidos binge-drinking, pumping iron, or contracting herpes.
Here’s something I would be interested in seeing on TV: Guidos jacked up on anabolic steroids, murdering each other.
The Real Housewives of Detroit
OK, this show doesn’t exist yet, but it’s only a matter of time before they run out of other cities.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
What Do Women Want?
I do not understand the behavior of women in public restrooms. I’m an in-and-out kind of girl, because public restrooms are fucking gross. They smell weird and tend to be covered with mysterious liquids and pubic hair, and they’re not especially interesting unless there’s some pretty excellent graffiti. Not only that, peeing isn’t a really involved activity. You pull down your pants, take a seat and let loose. After a quick wipe and a flush, it’s over. This process should take no more than 30 seconds, even if you’ve recently consumed coffee or beer, and yet women routinely pass the one minute mark.
Propriety makes gaining insight into the potty habits of other women somewhat challenging, so all I really have to go on is what I hear in public restrooms. This is what I’ve deduced:
1. Women’s pants are complex enough that the average woman doesn’t possess the technical skills required to remove them quickly and easily. I personally have not found women’s pants to be particularly tricky, but I might just be good with zippers.
2. Women have yet to realize that the act of adorning a seat with toilet paper is futile. Not only are public bathrooms universally stocked with useless ¼-ply toilet paper, but you can’t get AIDS from sitting on a toilet to begin with. This particular female compulsion eats up somewhere between 10 and 30 seconds, variations in time being accounted for by variations in compulsivity.
3. Women are messy pissers. I base this on the average amount of toilet paper I hear being pulled from the roll, as well as the vigor with which I hear it used. You might think that peeing would require nothing more than one quick wipe, but this is clearly not so.
Other things I don’t understand about women:
Their attraction to flowers; jewelry; shopping; movies starring Julia Roberts; girl-talk.
Their poor map-reading, math, and driving skills. A stereotype, but absolutely true. Sharpen up, ladies.
Their inability to quickly and purposefully approach the point-of-purchase at a store, pay, and get the fuck out. Retrieve your wallet from the depths of your massive bag while you’re in line, NOT once you’re at the register. By the same token, don’t hang out at the register post-payment. I’m not suggesting you forgo putting change in your wallet, replacing your credit card, and rearranging the contents of your purse. I’m suggesting you do it elsewhere.
On a related note, their obsession with purses is positively baffling. Purses are nothing but a means of transporting your shit from one place to another. They need not coordinate with your outfit.
Their drive to create real or imagined dramas. Why strive for a life of pain and hardship? Isn’t the world nasty enough as it is?
Propriety makes gaining insight into the potty habits of other women somewhat challenging, so all I really have to go on is what I hear in public restrooms. This is what I’ve deduced:
1. Women’s pants are complex enough that the average woman doesn’t possess the technical skills required to remove them quickly and easily. I personally have not found women’s pants to be particularly tricky, but I might just be good with zippers.
2. Women have yet to realize that the act of adorning a seat with toilet paper is futile. Not only are public bathrooms universally stocked with useless ¼-ply toilet paper, but you can’t get AIDS from sitting on a toilet to begin with. This particular female compulsion eats up somewhere between 10 and 30 seconds, variations in time being accounted for by variations in compulsivity.
3. Women are messy pissers. I base this on the average amount of toilet paper I hear being pulled from the roll, as well as the vigor with which I hear it used. You might think that peeing would require nothing more than one quick wipe, but this is clearly not so.
Other things I don’t understand about women:
Their attraction to flowers; jewelry; shopping; movies starring Julia Roberts; girl-talk.
Their poor map-reading, math, and driving skills. A stereotype, but absolutely true. Sharpen up, ladies.
Their inability to quickly and purposefully approach the point-of-purchase at a store, pay, and get the fuck out. Retrieve your wallet from the depths of your massive bag while you’re in line, NOT once you’re at the register. By the same token, don’t hang out at the register post-payment. I’m not suggesting you forgo putting change in your wallet, replacing your credit card, and rearranging the contents of your purse. I’m suggesting you do it elsewhere.
On a related note, their obsession with purses is positively baffling. Purses are nothing but a means of transporting your shit from one place to another. They need not coordinate with your outfit.
Their drive to create real or imagined dramas. Why strive for a life of pain and hardship? Isn’t the world nasty enough as it is?
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Another poor soul not destined to become a famous artist....
Not long ago, my mother sent me a link to a wikipedia page. Wikipedia being my bible, I opened the link immediately and came upon something that pretty much summed up my entire life: the Dunning-Kruger effect.
This theory postulates that the more stupid, incompetent, and generally annoying you are, the less able you are to realize it. It means that an idiot is able to disregard any and all objective measures of himself, thereby maintaining high self-esteem in the face of near-universal scorn. Getting a 700 on the SAT – which I believe may be the number of points you get for correctly bubbling in your name – doesn’t make the idiot question his intellectual abilities. He doesn’t consider his degree from an online diploma mill to be in any way inferior to a degree from an accredited university. When he gets fired, he blames not his poor performance, but his boss’s inability to truly understand his unique genius. Doesn’t the idiot ever wonder why he continually fails in every aspect of his life? The answer, evidently, is no. He simply doesn’t recognize his setbacks as the personal failures they are.
An unfortunate corollary of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that just as the incompetent tend to overestimate their abilities, the competent tend to underestimate. The person with a 700 on the SAT is pleased as punch with his score, and would be more than happy to share it with the world, unaware that the world is not impressed. On the flip-side, I went to a prep school where the average SAT score was 1300, and if you didn’t score well above 1400, you kept that shameful secret to yourself. The idiot expects to conquer the world with his diploma-mill degree; my classmates and I had full-blown nervous breakdowns at the thought of winding up at one of the lesser Ivies. The smarter you are, the higher the expectations, and the more susceptible you are to self-doubt and self-loathing.
Perhaps even more importantly, this corollary implies that intelligent people are unable to accurately gauge the intelligence of others. If you’re smart, you likely assume that everyone around you is equally smart. When you get an award or accolade, you might be under the impression that the people not getting it have other great talents that you don’t possess. This is probably not the case. They could just be dumb and untalented. And probably ugly.
I guess what I’m trying to say in a roundabout way is that we are not all endowed at birth with the same potential. It’s insane to presume that all people born without obvious physical or mental disabilities have an equal capacity for success. We don’t. Growing up in an absolutely ideal environment isn’t going to turn someone with an IQ of 93 into a world-class physicist. Conversely, growing up in a terrible environment isn’t going to turn someone with an IQ of 137 into a bumbling fool. I could not, with all the practice in the world, become a singer or an athlete or an artist; not only do I not excel in music and sports and art, I’m actively BAD at them. Like, significantly below average. Truly, truly godawful. But now, aged 28, I’ve acknowledged and mostly come to terms with that. It’s high time people who are bad at thinking did the same.
This theory postulates that the more stupid, incompetent, and generally annoying you are, the less able you are to realize it. It means that an idiot is able to disregard any and all objective measures of himself, thereby maintaining high self-esteem in the face of near-universal scorn. Getting a 700 on the SAT – which I believe may be the number of points you get for correctly bubbling in your name – doesn’t make the idiot question his intellectual abilities. He doesn’t consider his degree from an online diploma mill to be in any way inferior to a degree from an accredited university. When he gets fired, he blames not his poor performance, but his boss’s inability to truly understand his unique genius. Doesn’t the idiot ever wonder why he continually fails in every aspect of his life? The answer, evidently, is no. He simply doesn’t recognize his setbacks as the personal failures they are.
An unfortunate corollary of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that just as the incompetent tend to overestimate their abilities, the competent tend to underestimate. The person with a 700 on the SAT is pleased as punch with his score, and would be more than happy to share it with the world, unaware that the world is not impressed. On the flip-side, I went to a prep school where the average SAT score was 1300, and if you didn’t score well above 1400, you kept that shameful secret to yourself. The idiot expects to conquer the world with his diploma-mill degree; my classmates and I had full-blown nervous breakdowns at the thought of winding up at one of the lesser Ivies. The smarter you are, the higher the expectations, and the more susceptible you are to self-doubt and self-loathing.
Perhaps even more importantly, this corollary implies that intelligent people are unable to accurately gauge the intelligence of others. If you’re smart, you likely assume that everyone around you is equally smart. When you get an award or accolade, you might be under the impression that the people not getting it have other great talents that you don’t possess. This is probably not the case. They could just be dumb and untalented. And probably ugly.
I guess what I’m trying to say in a roundabout way is that we are not all endowed at birth with the same potential. It’s insane to presume that all people born without obvious physical or mental disabilities have an equal capacity for success. We don’t. Growing up in an absolutely ideal environment isn’t going to turn someone with an IQ of 93 into a world-class physicist. Conversely, growing up in a terrible environment isn’t going to turn someone with an IQ of 137 into a bumbling fool. I could not, with all the practice in the world, become a singer or an athlete or an artist; not only do I not excel in music and sports and art, I’m actively BAD at them. Like, significantly below average. Truly, truly godawful. But now, aged 28, I’ve acknowledged and mostly come to terms with that. It’s high time people who are bad at thinking did the same.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
It Appears I'm Pissed-off Today
Grievance # 1
Why, when I buy a cup of coffee in the morning, do people always try to give me a napkin with it? How unskilled could I possibly be at consuming beverages? It’s an act I’ve practiced on a daily basis for my entire life. I could drink a cup of coffee with my eyes closed; in fact, most mornings I do. That’s why I’m buying the coffee in the first place. Save your company some cash and the environment some trees, and keep your napkins to yourself. Anyone with an Airplane!-style “drinking problem” can suck it up and make a special request.
Grievance # 2
I don’t have a choice of cable provider; it’s Time Warner or nothing where I live. Back when I lived in Ann Arbor, MI, it was Comcast or nothing. This is not good. These companies, aware that their customers have no choice but to be loyal, have no incentive to provide good service. I pay an astronomical cable bill every month, and here’s a quick rundown of a few of the problems I regularly encounter:
*At least once during any given hour, the sound will deviate and no longer match the image. I have to change the channel, and sometimes shut off the box entirely, in order for things to return to normal.
*The image freezes constantly. I suspect this is somehow related to the sound issues, but is annoying in its own right.
*The cable box resets itself daily, and this is not a quick process. It shuts off unexpectedly (it seems that it always happens in the middle of one of my favorite shows, but that’s not possible, right?) and then takes roughly 10 minutes to reset itself. It’s important to not that the resetting does nothing to improve other aspects of the service.
If everyone is so into capitalism, why aren’t they calling for the dissolution of these companies? We should have a competitive market of cable providers. He whose service is best wins.
Grievance # 3
It’s a fact that the slower a person moves, the more central his location. For example, if I’m rushing down the subway steps to catch a train, I can count on there being someone, generally an individual of substantial size, sauntering down the middle of the stairs, clogging up the works. When I miss my train because of these retarded behemoths, it’s VERY hard to refrain from punching them in their fat little faces. Have a little consideration. If you’re old, enormous, or otherwise enfeebled, stay to the right of the sidewalk or stairs and let the rest of us pass you. We shouldn’t have to be late to work just because you’re not dead yet.
Why, when I buy a cup of coffee in the morning, do people always try to give me a napkin with it? How unskilled could I possibly be at consuming beverages? It’s an act I’ve practiced on a daily basis for my entire life. I could drink a cup of coffee with my eyes closed; in fact, most mornings I do. That’s why I’m buying the coffee in the first place. Save your company some cash and the environment some trees, and keep your napkins to yourself. Anyone with an Airplane!-style “drinking problem” can suck it up and make a special request.
Grievance # 2
I don’t have a choice of cable provider; it’s Time Warner or nothing where I live. Back when I lived in Ann Arbor, MI, it was Comcast or nothing. This is not good. These companies, aware that their customers have no choice but to be loyal, have no incentive to provide good service. I pay an astronomical cable bill every month, and here’s a quick rundown of a few of the problems I regularly encounter:
*At least once during any given hour, the sound will deviate and no longer match the image. I have to change the channel, and sometimes shut off the box entirely, in order for things to return to normal.
*The image freezes constantly. I suspect this is somehow related to the sound issues, but is annoying in its own right.
*The cable box resets itself daily, and this is not a quick process. It shuts off unexpectedly (it seems that it always happens in the middle of one of my favorite shows, but that’s not possible, right?) and then takes roughly 10 minutes to reset itself. It’s important to not that the resetting does nothing to improve other aspects of the service.
If everyone is so into capitalism, why aren’t they calling for the dissolution of these companies? We should have a competitive market of cable providers. He whose service is best wins.
Grievance # 3
It’s a fact that the slower a person moves, the more central his location. For example, if I’m rushing down the subway steps to catch a train, I can count on there being someone, generally an individual of substantial size, sauntering down the middle of the stairs, clogging up the works. When I miss my train because of these retarded behemoths, it’s VERY hard to refrain from punching them in their fat little faces. Have a little consideration. If you’re old, enormous, or otherwise enfeebled, stay to the right of the sidewalk or stairs and let the rest of us pass you. We shouldn’t have to be late to work just because you’re not dead yet.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Swarthy Young Men Reciting the Constitution
I suppose I feel it’s somehow incumbent upon me to weigh in on the whole Ground Zero mosque “controversy.” First off, I’d like for everyone to stop referring to it as the Ground Zero mosque. It’s not at Ground Zero, which, by the way, is nothing but a hole in the ground. If we really had such reverence for that particular location, we probably would have gotten our shit together enough to erect at least a fucking statue or a hut or something. As it is, we should really stop patting ourselves on the back for having survived a relatively small-scale terrorist attack almost a decade ago, at least until we’ve managed to make something positive come of it. All we’ve done thus far is start a couple wars and park some extra cranes in downtown Manhattan. As you may have gathered by now, and probably could have guessed, I’m siding with the liberals on this one.
It’s a scientific fact I just made up that conservatives have a lot of wet dreams. On TV they only talk about the one where the swarthy young man recites the Constitution, clad in nothing but a stars ‘n stripes loin cloth, kindly donated by Ted Nugent. What they don’t tell you is that the tanned hunk only memorized the 2nd Amendment. Not that conservatives would admit such a thing, even to themselves. Their perpetual avoidance of honesty means they can’t just call a spade a spade and say, “We don’t like Muslims so we’d like to suspend their 1st Amendment rights.” Instead, they’ve come up with all sorts of other inane reasons to shit all over America.
I fear I’m starting to sound a little earnest, and I would hate for that to happen. Patriotism has always struck me as pretty goofy, so I really have no problem with people shitting all over America. What I do have a problem with is people shitting all over America while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, emphasis on “under God.” You’re either blindly devoted to the Constitution or you’re not. I’ve never really understood how blind devotion to anything came to be considered a positive attribute, but there you have it. I don’t understand a lot of things.
I also don’t especially have a problem with people not liking Muslims. I personally don’t like anyone, Muslims included, but if you’re not ready to spew bile at Christians and Jews, you’re not ready to spew it at Muslims. I’m not saying there’s no difference between the three religions. It’s undoubtedly true that Muslims are, by and large, more interested in killing Americans than are Christians and Jews, but then again Christians and Jews get treated pretty well around these parts; the construction of a church or synagogue a few minutes away from Ground Zero wouldn’t even make the papers.
To conclude, unless we’re going to halt the construction of all religious buildings, an idea whose time has come, Muslims can put mosques and community centers in any location that’s properly-zoned for non-residential facilities. Ta-da. Problem solved. Now if we could only have Glenn Beck put down…
It’s a scientific fact I just made up that conservatives have a lot of wet dreams. On TV they only talk about the one where the swarthy young man recites the Constitution, clad in nothing but a stars ‘n stripes loin cloth, kindly donated by Ted Nugent. What they don’t tell you is that the tanned hunk only memorized the 2nd Amendment. Not that conservatives would admit such a thing, even to themselves. Their perpetual avoidance of honesty means they can’t just call a spade a spade and say, “We don’t like Muslims so we’d like to suspend their 1st Amendment rights.” Instead, they’ve come up with all sorts of other inane reasons to shit all over America.
I fear I’m starting to sound a little earnest, and I would hate for that to happen. Patriotism has always struck me as pretty goofy, so I really have no problem with people shitting all over America. What I do have a problem with is people shitting all over America while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, emphasis on “under God.” You’re either blindly devoted to the Constitution or you’re not. I’ve never really understood how blind devotion to anything came to be considered a positive attribute, but there you have it. I don’t understand a lot of things.
I also don’t especially have a problem with people not liking Muslims. I personally don’t like anyone, Muslims included, but if you’re not ready to spew bile at Christians and Jews, you’re not ready to spew it at Muslims. I’m not saying there’s no difference between the three religions. It’s undoubtedly true that Muslims are, by and large, more interested in killing Americans than are Christians and Jews, but then again Christians and Jews get treated pretty well around these parts; the construction of a church or synagogue a few minutes away from Ground Zero wouldn’t even make the papers.
To conclude, unless we’re going to halt the construction of all religious buildings, an idea whose time has come, Muslims can put mosques and community centers in any location that’s properly-zoned for non-residential facilities. Ta-da. Problem solved. Now if we could only have Glenn Beck put down…
Friday, September 10, 2010
Watch out, this one's pretty serious!
In early 1993, two 10-year old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, kidnapped 2-year old James Bulger at a Liverpool, England shopping center. James’ mother had gone into a butcher’s shop, and as she was placing her order, the toddler, as toddlers are wont to do, toddled off. In a time span of what was likely less than a minute, Thompson and Venables approached the child, took him by the hand, and led him away. His mother, panicked but assuming he had merely found his way to another part of the mall, frantically roamed the grounds looking for her son. Eventually the police were called, and a search of the shopping center and its immediate environs was undertaken. By this time, however, the two older boys and their victim were long gone, having embarked on a miles-long journey across Liverpool, which concluded at some railroad tracks. There, Thompson and Venables beat Bulger to death with bricks and an iron bar, leaving his corpse on the tracks. When the little boy was discovered, his body had been severed by an oncoming train.
This case was and continues to be a media-fueled sensation in England, and the sensation inspired public outrage, outrage that I believe was unwarranted. Don’t get me wrong. One can hardly blame the little boy’s parents for wishing the two older boys dead; this is the stuff that parental nightmares are made of and if James’ mother or father hunted down the murderers and did to them what they did to James, it would be perfectly understandable. The rest of the world, however, should be a little more charitable.
We should be charitable because we all know that kids are dicks. Whenever I would come home from school telling tales of the psychological torture inflicted upon me by my classmates, my parents would say, “Kids can be so cruel.” I heard this phrase pretty regularly since my childhood interests – silent films, Agatha Christie novels, and synchronized swimming – were considered highly mockable. I wouldn’t necessarily say I was bullied, but I was daily indicted on charges of unforgivable weirdness, with accusations of corpulence leveled periodically, just to spice things up a bit. I’m providing this background by way of explanation. You see, I’ve never much bought into the notion of children as unspoiled angels. Kids are little assholes. A perfectly normal kid will say and do things a normal adult would NEVER do. Things a normal adult, the sort of adult these normal kids will one day become, would consider immoral and unethical. So when I hear about two kids beating to death another kid, I’m not shocked.
Now I’m in no way likening the verbal nastiness I endured to the grotesque and violent death of James Bulger, but I am suggesting there’s a common source. Kids are not the same as adults. As obvious as that sounds, it’s hard for most of us to grasp. We forget what it’s like to be a child. We forget what a bewildering world this is to the uninitiated. More than anything, we forget how fucking stupid kids are. They’re bad at thinking. That’s why we’re legally obligated to look after them, at least until their brains are mostly developed. So just how sure are we that kids are truly able to grasp the impact of their actions? Probably more sure than we should be.
This case, which was tried in an adult court, was not a whodunit. There was no doubt that Thompson and Venables directly caused the death of James Bulger. Kids, stupid as they are, make terrible criminals. They don’t consider witnesses – 38 people reportedly saw two older boys dragging a tearful younger boy across Liverpool on the day of the murder. In addition to accumulating virtual armies of witnesses, kids also make no attempt to cover up or remove from the scene forensic evidence, tending to leave behind hair, blood, fingerprints, footprints, and basically everything else that could possibly link them to the crime. Finally, youths are easy to break. Police are wildly successful at eliciting both true and false confessions from children, because children can’t lie for shit. Given how often they do it, you’d think they would hone the skill pretty early on, but apparently not. Then again, considering that a good lie requires forethought, a trait not commonly found in the pre-teen set, it’s not surprising that their fairy-tales collapse almost instantaneously. Caught in their lies, trapped in a corner, kids confess.
So went the story of Thompson and Venables. Having been captured with Bulger on security cameras at the shopping center (I told you kids are shitty criminals), they boys were brought in for questioning only days after the murder. Both told a whole slew of fantastically unconvincing lies, both were called out by the cops, and both ultimately confessed; it was reported at the time that Venables was remorseful while Thompson evinced no guilt or concern for the suffering of the victims. Armed with two confessions and all the evidence in the world, all the British criminal justice system had to do was determine the appropriate punishment, the determination hinging on whether or not the kids fully understood that their actions were wrong.
This is where things get tricky. Of course the kids knew that beating to death a baby is wrong. Despite being habitual truants, both Thompson and Venables were regarded by their teachers as bright, and both were academically successful during their detainment. Psychiatrists, when asked whether or not the kids were aware of the wrongness of their actions, unanimously answered that they did. The mere fact that they lied in their police interviews speaks to their awareness, and I have no doubt that, had you asked them if killing a kid is wrong, they would have said yes. The question is whether that’s especially meaningful, and I would argue that it’s not. That a kid by the age of ten has come to the realization that society frowns on murder is not impressive. Even stupid children are cognizant of the major societal mores, but that doesn’t mean they’ve developed an internal sense of right and wrong. That, coupled with a youthful lack of impulse control, can lead an already-troubled kid down a pretty scary path.
Many normal kids are basically mini-sociopaths. They have a scaled-down sense of fear, and believe they’ll get away with all sorts of things no one ever gets away with. Their ability to control themselves is virtually nonexistent. When they’re frustrated they throw tantrums, when they’re sad they cry, and when they’re angry they lash out. Most importantly, they’re only in the concrete operational stage of cognitive development as defined by Piaget, and that’s the best case scenario. If they’re extra stupid, they could still be piecing through the preoperational stage.
What this means is that the level of egocentrism displayed by a normal child is decreasing at age ten, but it could still be playing an active role in his brain. The more egocentric the individual, the less able he is to empathize, and the less able an individual is to empathize, the less able he is to fully comprehend the effect his actions have on other people. A violent youth might not even entertain the notion that his victim is a human being capable of feeling pain, or the fact that death, generally speaking, is permanent. Additionally, even when their childish egocentrism has largely faded, kids are unlikely to be able to apply their newfound powers of empathy to abstract or hypothetical situations. In murdering James Bulger, Thompson and Venables manifestly failed to put themselves in the shoes of the little boy or his family. How could they when such a situation would have been purely hypothetical? They’d never been murdered, nor had they ever had kids who were murdered. Asked after the fact if the little boy’s mother was sad when her son died, I’m sure both would have responded in the affirmative, but I doubt either would have ever considered the possibility without prompting.
The vast majority of kids, like the vast majority of adults, will never commit a serious act of violence, but in the kids’ case this most definitely is not indicative of a strong moral compass or the ability to empathize. They don’t murder because they don’t especially want to, and not because they really GET why they shouldn’t. The only thing that set them apart from millions of other kids their age is that Thompson and Venables wanted to move past schoolyard bullying and engage in extremely violent activities. Both were known to be disturbed long before the murder; Venables, widely considered to be the less evil of the two, once attempted to choke a classmate with a ruler.
That being said, there’s no reason to believe that with the maturation of the brain and all that comes with it (e.g. the increased ability to empathize and control impulses) Thompson and Venables wouldn’t be able to become perfectly non-violent adults. In fact, neither was considered to be behaviorally problematic while in juvenile detention, and neither has been accused or convicted of a violent crime since they were freed in 2001. Venables, who, like Thompson, was given a new identity upon his release, was recently returned to prison on charges of possessing and distributing child pornography. However vile this may be, it’s indicative of a whole other set of problems and could very well be only peripherally related to his violent past.
Ultimately, although I disagree with the court’s opinion that the boys were fully aware of the evil nature of their actions, I think the imposed sentence was fitting. For their own protection, no details of the boys’ period of incarceration have been released; such information could compromise their new identities. However it is known that the boys served time in detention centers vastly different from adult prisons. Such centers provide residents with therapy, schooling, job-skill development, and recreational activities. Through good behavior, kids can earn privileges (e.g. in-room TV, supervised outings, etc.) which are rescinded if the good behavior deteriorates. In essence, troubled juvenile delinquents, many of whom have never known structure and stability, are transferred to an environment conducive to their mental and physical development. The recidivism rate is remarkably low.
The British public by and large disagrees with me. The general consensus over there appears to be that the sentence should have been penal, rather than rehabilitative, in nature. Why they think the world should have given up on a pair of children, I don’t know. Rehabilitation doesn’t do much for adults, but kids are a different story. Their stupidity, potentially harmful in some respects, can work to society’s advantage. Kids are easily manipulated, hugely influenced by their surroundings, and generally able to transform into wholly changed people.
The Brits also seem to be of the opinion that the boys’ 8-year sentences were too short. Although they were released only when their respective parole boards had deemed them unlikely to re-offend, I suppose that failed to satiate a vengeful public. The fact that Venables’ life since his release has been plagued with substance abuse, and that he’s once again incarcerated has been used as proof that the boys were released prematurely. This is patently untrue. Thompson, his location and new identity still unknown, has not been in trouble since his return to society nearly a decade ago. Venables’ case is obviously not so simple. During the trial, it was noted that Venables was deeply troubled by his crime, and anyone who’s ever experienced feelings of intense guilt can understand why a person, particularly one whose guilt is actually and completely justified, would turn to drugs and alcohol. Where the predilection for children came from, I don’t know, but it certainly doesn’t mean he was unfit to be released nearly 10 years ago. It was determined that he was no longer a violent threat to society, and the presence of child pornography on his computer doesn’t render that determination somehow untrue. Does he belong back in prison? Absolutely. Does that mean he should never have been released? No, unless Britain is interested in un-civilizing their society.
And by the way, a lot of this applies to the cognitively disabled (formerly known as mentally retarded). Their reasoning powers are equivalent to those of a child, so they are not as responsible for their actions as the rest of us. If the punishment should fit the crime, executing the intellectually disabled, whether or not it violates the US Constitution, is not OK. I can’t believe that’s a bold stance to take in this day and age, but then again we live in a world that believes criminal children should be locked away for life, so I guess I’m nothing but a bleeding heart.
I told you I had a lot to say about the culpability of children…
This case was and continues to be a media-fueled sensation in England, and the sensation inspired public outrage, outrage that I believe was unwarranted. Don’t get me wrong. One can hardly blame the little boy’s parents for wishing the two older boys dead; this is the stuff that parental nightmares are made of and if James’ mother or father hunted down the murderers and did to them what they did to James, it would be perfectly understandable. The rest of the world, however, should be a little more charitable.
We should be charitable because we all know that kids are dicks. Whenever I would come home from school telling tales of the psychological torture inflicted upon me by my classmates, my parents would say, “Kids can be so cruel.” I heard this phrase pretty regularly since my childhood interests – silent films, Agatha Christie novels, and synchronized swimming – were considered highly mockable. I wouldn’t necessarily say I was bullied, but I was daily indicted on charges of unforgivable weirdness, with accusations of corpulence leveled periodically, just to spice things up a bit. I’m providing this background by way of explanation. You see, I’ve never much bought into the notion of children as unspoiled angels. Kids are little assholes. A perfectly normal kid will say and do things a normal adult would NEVER do. Things a normal adult, the sort of adult these normal kids will one day become, would consider immoral and unethical. So when I hear about two kids beating to death another kid, I’m not shocked.
Now I’m in no way likening the verbal nastiness I endured to the grotesque and violent death of James Bulger, but I am suggesting there’s a common source. Kids are not the same as adults. As obvious as that sounds, it’s hard for most of us to grasp. We forget what it’s like to be a child. We forget what a bewildering world this is to the uninitiated. More than anything, we forget how fucking stupid kids are. They’re bad at thinking. That’s why we’re legally obligated to look after them, at least until their brains are mostly developed. So just how sure are we that kids are truly able to grasp the impact of their actions? Probably more sure than we should be.
This case, which was tried in an adult court, was not a whodunit. There was no doubt that Thompson and Venables directly caused the death of James Bulger. Kids, stupid as they are, make terrible criminals. They don’t consider witnesses – 38 people reportedly saw two older boys dragging a tearful younger boy across Liverpool on the day of the murder. In addition to accumulating virtual armies of witnesses, kids also make no attempt to cover up or remove from the scene forensic evidence, tending to leave behind hair, blood, fingerprints, footprints, and basically everything else that could possibly link them to the crime. Finally, youths are easy to break. Police are wildly successful at eliciting both true and false confessions from children, because children can’t lie for shit. Given how often they do it, you’d think they would hone the skill pretty early on, but apparently not. Then again, considering that a good lie requires forethought, a trait not commonly found in the pre-teen set, it’s not surprising that their fairy-tales collapse almost instantaneously. Caught in their lies, trapped in a corner, kids confess.
So went the story of Thompson and Venables. Having been captured with Bulger on security cameras at the shopping center (I told you kids are shitty criminals), they boys were brought in for questioning only days after the murder. Both told a whole slew of fantastically unconvincing lies, both were called out by the cops, and both ultimately confessed; it was reported at the time that Venables was remorseful while Thompson evinced no guilt or concern for the suffering of the victims. Armed with two confessions and all the evidence in the world, all the British criminal justice system had to do was determine the appropriate punishment, the determination hinging on whether or not the kids fully understood that their actions were wrong.
This is where things get tricky. Of course the kids knew that beating to death a baby is wrong. Despite being habitual truants, both Thompson and Venables were regarded by their teachers as bright, and both were academically successful during their detainment. Psychiatrists, when asked whether or not the kids were aware of the wrongness of their actions, unanimously answered that they did. The mere fact that they lied in their police interviews speaks to their awareness, and I have no doubt that, had you asked them if killing a kid is wrong, they would have said yes. The question is whether that’s especially meaningful, and I would argue that it’s not. That a kid by the age of ten has come to the realization that society frowns on murder is not impressive. Even stupid children are cognizant of the major societal mores, but that doesn’t mean they’ve developed an internal sense of right and wrong. That, coupled with a youthful lack of impulse control, can lead an already-troubled kid down a pretty scary path.
Many normal kids are basically mini-sociopaths. They have a scaled-down sense of fear, and believe they’ll get away with all sorts of things no one ever gets away with. Their ability to control themselves is virtually nonexistent. When they’re frustrated they throw tantrums, when they’re sad they cry, and when they’re angry they lash out. Most importantly, they’re only in the concrete operational stage of cognitive development as defined by Piaget, and that’s the best case scenario. If they’re extra stupid, they could still be piecing through the preoperational stage.
What this means is that the level of egocentrism displayed by a normal child is decreasing at age ten, but it could still be playing an active role in his brain. The more egocentric the individual, the less able he is to empathize, and the less able an individual is to empathize, the less able he is to fully comprehend the effect his actions have on other people. A violent youth might not even entertain the notion that his victim is a human being capable of feeling pain, or the fact that death, generally speaking, is permanent. Additionally, even when their childish egocentrism has largely faded, kids are unlikely to be able to apply their newfound powers of empathy to abstract or hypothetical situations. In murdering James Bulger, Thompson and Venables manifestly failed to put themselves in the shoes of the little boy or his family. How could they when such a situation would have been purely hypothetical? They’d never been murdered, nor had they ever had kids who were murdered. Asked after the fact if the little boy’s mother was sad when her son died, I’m sure both would have responded in the affirmative, but I doubt either would have ever considered the possibility without prompting.
The vast majority of kids, like the vast majority of adults, will never commit a serious act of violence, but in the kids’ case this most definitely is not indicative of a strong moral compass or the ability to empathize. They don’t murder because they don’t especially want to, and not because they really GET why they shouldn’t. The only thing that set them apart from millions of other kids their age is that Thompson and Venables wanted to move past schoolyard bullying and engage in extremely violent activities. Both were known to be disturbed long before the murder; Venables, widely considered to be the less evil of the two, once attempted to choke a classmate with a ruler.
That being said, there’s no reason to believe that with the maturation of the brain and all that comes with it (e.g. the increased ability to empathize and control impulses) Thompson and Venables wouldn’t be able to become perfectly non-violent adults. In fact, neither was considered to be behaviorally problematic while in juvenile detention, and neither has been accused or convicted of a violent crime since they were freed in 2001. Venables, who, like Thompson, was given a new identity upon his release, was recently returned to prison on charges of possessing and distributing child pornography. However vile this may be, it’s indicative of a whole other set of problems and could very well be only peripherally related to his violent past.
Ultimately, although I disagree with the court’s opinion that the boys were fully aware of the evil nature of their actions, I think the imposed sentence was fitting. For their own protection, no details of the boys’ period of incarceration have been released; such information could compromise their new identities. However it is known that the boys served time in detention centers vastly different from adult prisons. Such centers provide residents with therapy, schooling, job-skill development, and recreational activities. Through good behavior, kids can earn privileges (e.g. in-room TV, supervised outings, etc.) which are rescinded if the good behavior deteriorates. In essence, troubled juvenile delinquents, many of whom have never known structure and stability, are transferred to an environment conducive to their mental and physical development. The recidivism rate is remarkably low.
The British public by and large disagrees with me. The general consensus over there appears to be that the sentence should have been penal, rather than rehabilitative, in nature. Why they think the world should have given up on a pair of children, I don’t know. Rehabilitation doesn’t do much for adults, but kids are a different story. Their stupidity, potentially harmful in some respects, can work to society’s advantage. Kids are easily manipulated, hugely influenced by their surroundings, and generally able to transform into wholly changed people.
The Brits also seem to be of the opinion that the boys’ 8-year sentences were too short. Although they were released only when their respective parole boards had deemed them unlikely to re-offend, I suppose that failed to satiate a vengeful public. The fact that Venables’ life since his release has been plagued with substance abuse, and that he’s once again incarcerated has been used as proof that the boys were released prematurely. This is patently untrue. Thompson, his location and new identity still unknown, has not been in trouble since his return to society nearly a decade ago. Venables’ case is obviously not so simple. During the trial, it was noted that Venables was deeply troubled by his crime, and anyone who’s ever experienced feelings of intense guilt can understand why a person, particularly one whose guilt is actually and completely justified, would turn to drugs and alcohol. Where the predilection for children came from, I don’t know, but it certainly doesn’t mean he was unfit to be released nearly 10 years ago. It was determined that he was no longer a violent threat to society, and the presence of child pornography on his computer doesn’t render that determination somehow untrue. Does he belong back in prison? Absolutely. Does that mean he should never have been released? No, unless Britain is interested in un-civilizing their society.
And by the way, a lot of this applies to the cognitively disabled (formerly known as mentally retarded). Their reasoning powers are equivalent to those of a child, so they are not as responsible for their actions as the rest of us. If the punishment should fit the crime, executing the intellectually disabled, whether or not it violates the US Constitution, is not OK. I can’t believe that’s a bold stance to take in this day and age, but then again we live in a world that believes criminal children should be locked away for life, so I guess I’m nothing but a bleeding heart.
I told you I had a lot to say about the culpability of children…
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Shaken, not stirred
I have so much to say, mostly on the degree of culpability of criminals who are, or have the mental capacity of, children. Sadly, my time recently has been spent preparing for an audit at work, to say nothing of preparing for applying to law school in the coming months, so I’m going to keep this brief. What inane thought process resulted in a hurricane named Earl? Hurricanes should not sound avuncular; they should sound terrifying. From here on out, and in what I hope will become a trend, I’m going to name hurricanes and other tropical storms after Bond villains. Hurricane Earl has therefore been retitled, “Hurricane Ernst Stavro Blofeld.” Not only that, but in determining an explanation for the spate of hurricanes we’ve faced in recent years, we should no longer blame global warming, which sounds kind of nice and, as such, has failed to inspire the appropriate level of fear. Because shadowy groups of super-villains never fail to capture the public imagination, “global warming” will now be called “SPECTRE.” I hope you’ll join me and my ever-loyal Moneypenny (previously known as my dog) in our bid to make the world a better place.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Your Parent's Pants Are on Fire!!
More and more people are getting on board with the legalization of marijuana, which is certainly a positive development. There was a time not too long ago when the legality of pot was a marginal issue at best, supported only by neo-hippies and Dennis Kucinich. In the 1990’s, my hometown of Ann Arbor, MI was filled to the brim with Phish enthusiasts, lackadaisically asking University of Michigan students to sign petitions to be sent to some unreceptive senator or whatever. No one took them seriously, in part because it’s always best to ignore strangers holding clipboards, but also because they couldn’t have chosen a worse city in which to fight for their cause. The penalty for marijuana possession in Ann Arbor is a $25.00 fine; when I was a kid, it was $5.00, but inflation’s a bitch. In any case, it’s still cheaper to be caught with an ounce of weed, a bong, and some rolling papers than to get ticketed for parking your car in a lot without the appropriate sticker, and a stoner facing essentially no penalty is not going to take time out of his busy schedule (I use the term loosely) to sign your fucking petition. He wants a donut and he wants it now.
Then we all went broke, and being poor changes everything. Suddenly average people realized they were financing the war on drugs, and given that we were all unemployed it began to seem like a waste of precious resources. After all, everyone who’s been to college has smoked pot, and very few of us are hanging out in alleys, doling out hand jobs in exchange for heroin. For the most part, whatever fun we had as young adults in no way impeded our path to gainful employment, homes, partners, and children. So why are we paying a bazillion dollars a day to punish kids? No one seems to know. Here’s a list of reasons to legalize marijuana.
1. It’s fun, a fact we’re all aware of because almost everyone has done it. If your parents attended high school or college after 1966, and claim to have never smoked, their pants are on fire.
2. It’s waaaaaaay less harmful than alcohol. Alcohol is poison. It may be safe in moderation, but there’s no doubt it’s a toxic substance. A 50-year old alcoholic looks like he’s about to keel over and die. A 50-year old pothead looks like he could have done a little more with his life had he not followed the Dead for 30 years.
3. It’s waaaaaaay less harmful than cigarettes. Did you know there’s never been a single recorded case of lung cancer attributed to pot-smoking? Just a little tidbit from me to you.
4. If it’s legalized, it can be taxed. We need money. We need money real bad, and this is a cash cow waiting to happen. A 10% tax on pot sold at the pot store would bring in an almost unbelievable amount of revenue, and potheads would be more than willing to pay the premium for the convenience of being able to drop by the corner store to pick up an eighth.
5. If it’s legalized, it can be regulated. I don’t necessarily think it’s important to regulate it, but I’m sure that’s an appealing notion to some.
6. Legalization would make the world a safer place for your kids. As it is, your friendly neighborhood pot dealer could very well be peddling coke and Oxycontin on the side. You don’t want your otherwise well-adjusted kid getting mixed up with unsavory characters just because he wants to smoke a little dope. If weed were legal your kid could just pay a homeless guy outside 7/11 to go in and get it for him, no exposure to hard drugs necessary. This strategy has always worked for beer, and it will work for pot.
7. This is related to reason 6, and it’s something I never hear people mention, but I think it’s vitally important. Lumping pot together with other drugs gives the false impression that all drugs are created equal. Once you’ve smoked pot, why not eat 60 mushrooms and trip at Disneyland? They’re both illegal. And once you’ve eaten 60 mushrooms and somehow managed not to be institutionalized, why not try a line of coke? I’m of the mind that the legalization of marijuana would put it in a different category, and make your kid less likely to experiment with other drugs.
Lastly, I would like to say fuck medical marijuana. It’s a stupid joke. This is not a drug with tremendous therapeutic value, and we should stop being so disingenuous as to claim it is. Sure, it will make sick people who’ve lost their appetites hungry, and it might make you care less that you’re at death’s door, but it’s not going to do much else. Let’s call a spade a spade. Pot is a drug that people enjoy using. Its harmful effects are negligent, and adults can and should be trusted to decide for themselves whether or not to use it.
Then we all went broke, and being poor changes everything. Suddenly average people realized they were financing the war on drugs, and given that we were all unemployed it began to seem like a waste of precious resources. After all, everyone who’s been to college has smoked pot, and very few of us are hanging out in alleys, doling out hand jobs in exchange for heroin. For the most part, whatever fun we had as young adults in no way impeded our path to gainful employment, homes, partners, and children. So why are we paying a bazillion dollars a day to punish kids? No one seems to know. Here’s a list of reasons to legalize marijuana.
1. It’s fun, a fact we’re all aware of because almost everyone has done it. If your parents attended high school or college after 1966, and claim to have never smoked, their pants are on fire.
2. It’s waaaaaaay less harmful than alcohol. Alcohol is poison. It may be safe in moderation, but there’s no doubt it’s a toxic substance. A 50-year old alcoholic looks like he’s about to keel over and die. A 50-year old pothead looks like he could have done a little more with his life had he not followed the Dead for 30 years.
3. It’s waaaaaaay less harmful than cigarettes. Did you know there’s never been a single recorded case of lung cancer attributed to pot-smoking? Just a little tidbit from me to you.
4. If it’s legalized, it can be taxed. We need money. We need money real bad, and this is a cash cow waiting to happen. A 10% tax on pot sold at the pot store would bring in an almost unbelievable amount of revenue, and potheads would be more than willing to pay the premium for the convenience of being able to drop by the corner store to pick up an eighth.
5. If it’s legalized, it can be regulated. I don’t necessarily think it’s important to regulate it, but I’m sure that’s an appealing notion to some.
6. Legalization would make the world a safer place for your kids. As it is, your friendly neighborhood pot dealer could very well be peddling coke and Oxycontin on the side. You don’t want your otherwise well-adjusted kid getting mixed up with unsavory characters just because he wants to smoke a little dope. If weed were legal your kid could just pay a homeless guy outside 7/11 to go in and get it for him, no exposure to hard drugs necessary. This strategy has always worked for beer, and it will work for pot.
7. This is related to reason 6, and it’s something I never hear people mention, but I think it’s vitally important. Lumping pot together with other drugs gives the false impression that all drugs are created equal. Once you’ve smoked pot, why not eat 60 mushrooms and trip at Disneyland? They’re both illegal. And once you’ve eaten 60 mushrooms and somehow managed not to be institutionalized, why not try a line of coke? I’m of the mind that the legalization of marijuana would put it in a different category, and make your kid less likely to experiment with other drugs.
Lastly, I would like to say fuck medical marijuana. It’s a stupid joke. This is not a drug with tremendous therapeutic value, and we should stop being so disingenuous as to claim it is. Sure, it will make sick people who’ve lost their appetites hungry, and it might make you care less that you’re at death’s door, but it’s not going to do much else. Let’s call a spade a spade. Pot is a drug that people enjoy using. Its harmful effects are negligent, and adults can and should be trusted to decide for themselves whether or not to use it.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Mary Poppins, where are you when we need you?
Earlier today, a friend of mine emailed me a link to a website, promising laughter and gaiety. Before getting into the horrors this website revealed, I should point out that, although my friend has lived the majority of her life in the United States, she was born and presently resides in Europe, conferring upon her a certain detachment when it comes to all things American. In short, whatever makes me ashamed to be an American makes her proud to be an American who emigrated.
The portion of the website of particular interest to my friend, and by proxy to me, was a gallery of photos taken at Wal-Marts across the U.S. I’ll level with you, and cop to not knowing a much about Wal-Mart. As the scion of a bleeding-heart, upper-middle-class family, odds are I’ve never set foot in one, which is probably for the best since all of their products have been crafted by Laotian infants, who, let’s face it, are useless when it comes to making sneakers. If the Laotian infant thing has been the prime factor keeping me out of Wal-Mart for 28 years, it’s been supplanted by a horror which defies reason: back tits.
Back fat is something we’ve all seen, and something many of us have experienced first hand. I for one am always concerned about arching my back in such a way as to create rolls, because back fat is, and I think there’s a general consensus on this, gross. Excess fat on the arms, legs, and even stomach is obviously not desirable, but it’s socially acceptable to a point, and there are enough excess butt fat enthusiasts that it doesn’t even deserve a mention. But back fat is just plain icky, and as icky as back fat is, back tits are so much worse. You may never have seen back tits. I’ve never seen them up close and personal, but this website displays a photo of some poor, unsuspecting Wal-Mart shopper, who had just stopped in looking for bargains on Twinkies and lard, sporting full-on back tits. I’m not super busty, but I am something of a fat person, and this lady’s back tits were at least twice as big as my front tits. No joke.
Now I’m sure someone who’s never seen me has no idea what it means when I say I’m something of a fat person. This is because over the past couple of decades, our notions of fatness have become demented. Back in the old days, fat people were extraordinary. These days, not so much. My BMI indicates that I’m borderline obese, but when I tell people that they’re shocked, not because I carry the weight well (I don’t) or know how to dress for my size (I can’t dress for any size) but because we’ve redefined the word “fat.” For the most part, if you’re below 200 lbs, you’re thin enough. You won’t break into showbiz, an industry in which everyone appears to summer in Ethiopia, but in regular life no one will give your weight a second thought. Not when you’re walking next to a 35-year olds who has to use a cane because his legs alone can’t support the 400 lbs he’s hauling around.
So what do we do? Well, first we should remove Laotian babies from factories and put in some 8 year olds or something. Second, we need a nanny state. Conservatives don’t like that idea, except as it applies to drugs or abortion, and that makes it by definition the way to go. Someone from above has to bar restaurants from serving appetizers that contain an entire day’s worth of calories. Someone has to outlaw the deep-frying of macaroni and cheese. Someone has to ban junk food advertisements, particularly those aimed at children. Someone has to save us from ourselves.
Here in New York, the government has tried to take some steps in the right direction. The estimated calorie counts of menu items in chain restaurants must be displayed, but your neighborhood mom and pop ice cream store, the one that’s busily serving you those delicious cones of diabetes, is exempt. Governor Paterson proposed a tax on all non-diet sodas, a good idea if I ever heard one, but the beverage lobbyists lost their shit and started airing commercials arguing that such a tax would put an undue burden on working families. I have yet to see a follow-up commercial reminding everyone that soda, being nothing but sugar water, is hardly a necessary component of the human diet, and stating in no uncertain terms that if an extra 10 cents puts Pepsi out of your price range, you have more important things to worry about. Having been on a personal mission to lose weight over the past 6 months, I’m now interested in forming a “Let’s stop being so fucking morbidly obese” lobby. I’m accepting applications.
The portion of the website of particular interest to my friend, and by proxy to me, was a gallery of photos taken at Wal-Marts across the U.S. I’ll level with you, and cop to not knowing a much about Wal-Mart. As the scion of a bleeding-heart, upper-middle-class family, odds are I’ve never set foot in one, which is probably for the best since all of their products have been crafted by Laotian infants, who, let’s face it, are useless when it comes to making sneakers. If the Laotian infant thing has been the prime factor keeping me out of Wal-Mart for 28 years, it’s been supplanted by a horror which defies reason: back tits.
Back fat is something we’ve all seen, and something many of us have experienced first hand. I for one am always concerned about arching my back in such a way as to create rolls, because back fat is, and I think there’s a general consensus on this, gross. Excess fat on the arms, legs, and even stomach is obviously not desirable, but it’s socially acceptable to a point, and there are enough excess butt fat enthusiasts that it doesn’t even deserve a mention. But back fat is just plain icky, and as icky as back fat is, back tits are so much worse. You may never have seen back tits. I’ve never seen them up close and personal, but this website displays a photo of some poor, unsuspecting Wal-Mart shopper, who had just stopped in looking for bargains on Twinkies and lard, sporting full-on back tits. I’m not super busty, but I am something of a fat person, and this lady’s back tits were at least twice as big as my front tits. No joke.
Now I’m sure someone who’s never seen me has no idea what it means when I say I’m something of a fat person. This is because over the past couple of decades, our notions of fatness have become demented. Back in the old days, fat people were extraordinary. These days, not so much. My BMI indicates that I’m borderline obese, but when I tell people that they’re shocked, not because I carry the weight well (I don’t) or know how to dress for my size (I can’t dress for any size) but because we’ve redefined the word “fat.” For the most part, if you’re below 200 lbs, you’re thin enough. You won’t break into showbiz, an industry in which everyone appears to summer in Ethiopia, but in regular life no one will give your weight a second thought. Not when you’re walking next to a 35-year olds who has to use a cane because his legs alone can’t support the 400 lbs he’s hauling around.
So what do we do? Well, first we should remove Laotian babies from factories and put in some 8 year olds or something. Second, we need a nanny state. Conservatives don’t like that idea, except as it applies to drugs or abortion, and that makes it by definition the way to go. Someone from above has to bar restaurants from serving appetizers that contain an entire day’s worth of calories. Someone has to outlaw the deep-frying of macaroni and cheese. Someone has to ban junk food advertisements, particularly those aimed at children. Someone has to save us from ourselves.
Here in New York, the government has tried to take some steps in the right direction. The estimated calorie counts of menu items in chain restaurants must be displayed, but your neighborhood mom and pop ice cream store, the one that’s busily serving you those delicious cones of diabetes, is exempt. Governor Paterson proposed a tax on all non-diet sodas, a good idea if I ever heard one, but the beverage lobbyists lost their shit and started airing commercials arguing that such a tax would put an undue burden on working families. I have yet to see a follow-up commercial reminding everyone that soda, being nothing but sugar water, is hardly a necessary component of the human diet, and stating in no uncertain terms that if an extra 10 cents puts Pepsi out of your price range, you have more important things to worry about. Having been on a personal mission to lose weight over the past 6 months, I’m now interested in forming a “Let’s stop being so fucking morbidly obese” lobby. I’m accepting applications.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
HELP!! My Future Depends on Learning How to Bullshit
The most unfortunate aspect of law school admission is not, as some claim, the LSAT. With a decent brain and some practice, you’ll do well enough on any standardized test to get where you want to go in life. No, the most unfortunate, pathetic, miserable aspect of law school admissions is the personal statement. Now you might think that, as someone who regularly drafts personal statements for this blog, I would be at an advantage. You would be wrong. You see, a personal statement for law school admissions is effectively a single-spaced page brimming with bullshit, and bullshit is not my forte. This may be an indication that law school isn’t the right place for me, but that’s neither here nor there.
The problem is that I was a late-bloomer. When I was in high school, bullshit was completely anathema. I had some silly, adolescent principle that one should be honest, irrespective of whatever trouble such infantile behavior might bring. What this means is that while everyone else was being nice to teachers’ faces, saying and doing the right things to ride out their teenage years as smoothly as possible, I was busily sharing with anyone who would listen my overwhelmingly negative views on just about everything. I missed out on years and years and years of bullshitting practice, and have never quite caught up. So, however easy writing may come on non-bullshit topics, I’m fucked when it comes to bullshit.
So what do I say? That from the time I was a little girl I dreamed of being a lawyer? That’s patently false. Since I knew I was going to be a rock star or a roller coaster designer or a member of some royal family, lawyering didn’t deserve a moment’s consideration. Sadly, at about age 6 I was discovered to be so musically untalented that it’s almost contagious, and after failing to construct so much as a cube out of Legos, it became abundantly clear that, in the interest of protecting human life, I should not be responsible for the construction of anything, thrill rides most definitely included. Then came the final blow: I learned that, as a non-royal, I have no shot at entry into any monarchical family. It seems they eschew outsiders, preferring instead to just fuck each other and pop out little retarded hemophiliacs to take their place.
I didn’t settle on law school until I finally came to terms with the fact that my adult dreams of cake-testing and elf-hunting would not come to fruition, and that’s not the kind of statement that’s going to grab an admissions officer and guarantee me acceptance. So I need help. I need help because I have to construct a work of non-fiction fiction, and I don’t even know where to begin. Here are some key words I think might play well:
Asthma
Economics
The EU
Social change
Synchronized swimming
Theodore Roosevelt
If you can dream up a way to combine these words into one kickass piece of bullshit, I’m open to suggestions.
The problem is that I was a late-bloomer. When I was in high school, bullshit was completely anathema. I had some silly, adolescent principle that one should be honest, irrespective of whatever trouble such infantile behavior might bring. What this means is that while everyone else was being nice to teachers’ faces, saying and doing the right things to ride out their teenage years as smoothly as possible, I was busily sharing with anyone who would listen my overwhelmingly negative views on just about everything. I missed out on years and years and years of bullshitting practice, and have never quite caught up. So, however easy writing may come on non-bullshit topics, I’m fucked when it comes to bullshit.
So what do I say? That from the time I was a little girl I dreamed of being a lawyer? That’s patently false. Since I knew I was going to be a rock star or a roller coaster designer or a member of some royal family, lawyering didn’t deserve a moment’s consideration. Sadly, at about age 6 I was discovered to be so musically untalented that it’s almost contagious, and after failing to construct so much as a cube out of Legos, it became abundantly clear that, in the interest of protecting human life, I should not be responsible for the construction of anything, thrill rides most definitely included. Then came the final blow: I learned that, as a non-royal, I have no shot at entry into any monarchical family. It seems they eschew outsiders, preferring instead to just fuck each other and pop out little retarded hemophiliacs to take their place.
I didn’t settle on law school until I finally came to terms with the fact that my adult dreams of cake-testing and elf-hunting would not come to fruition, and that’s not the kind of statement that’s going to grab an admissions officer and guarantee me acceptance. So I need help. I need help because I have to construct a work of non-fiction fiction, and I don’t even know where to begin. Here are some key words I think might play well:
Asthma
Economics
The EU
Social change
Synchronized swimming
Theodore Roosevelt
If you can dream up a way to combine these words into one kickass piece of bullshit, I’m open to suggestions.
Friday, August 6, 2010
I've been giving this whole god thing some thought...
As you may have discerned from my previous post, I’m not a big fan of god. I’ve been assured he’s a lovely guy if you get to know him, but I don’t see myself jumping on board anytime soon. This is largely because no one’s ever given me a good reason to think he’s out there, but also because the god of most major religions has always struck me as being a dick. I mean, what kind of insecure maniac would punish a person with eternal hellfire for no other reason than that the poor sucker questioned the maniac’s existence? Isn’t god supposed to be above such petty bullshit? An image just passed through my head of god floating in the clouds, damning nonbelievers to hell with a thunderbolt and an intonation of “Nah nah nah boo boo.” I suppose thoughts like that are why I have trouble taking churchgoers seriously.
My goal here isn’t necessarily to shit on religion. I am perfectly willing to concede that religion may have been beneficial to human civilization in previous millennia, and it may have even facilitated some of our great advancements as a people, but contemporary religion has been perverted beyond all recognition. God and god’s laws were initially tools used to keep hoi polloi in line. Don’t fuck your sister, don’t fuck a sheep, don’t steal shit, don’t murder people, etc. This is all good advice if your goal is a functional society. These days, however, the emphasis seems to be on developing a personal relationship with Christ and converting queers. These values being dominant, the best case scenario is that our civilization will stagnate; the worst case scenario is that our civilization will cease to be civilized. Any reasonable person who’s seen those “God Hates Fags” signs outside of soldiers’ funerals would have to admit we’re headed down the latter path.
It’s not just religion that bugs me, but the whole idea of god. My skin crawls whenever I hear some cretin say, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” I suppose what they really mean is, “I don’t go to church, but I believe crystals can cure cancer,” but mostly I think it’s just a nonsense turn of phrase people use because they’re hesitant to write god off entirely. The problem is that belief in god is the default mode, but this setup is preposterous. Belief is active, while a lack of belief is passive, which puts the burden of proof squarely on the believer. No one would think of asking someone to provide evidence showing that toys don’t come to life at night. Because there’s no reason to assume they do, the default is to not possess an active belief in the consciousness and animation of toys. The onus is on the aberrant who believes that toys are people too; this guy has to prove to me the validity of his demented conviction.
I would argue that there’s similarly no reason to believe in the existence of god. You’d be hard-pressed to find any physical evidence of him. Some people would say that the universe itself is evidence enough, but that’s just because some people can’t follow a thought through to its logical conclusion. If the universe came from god, where did god come from? Did he spontaneously come into existence, spawned from nothingness? In that case you can cut god out of the equation entirely, and just say that the first particles in the universe came from nothing. Either way you’re left wondering how nothing becomes something.
The argument that god didn’t spontaneously come into existence, but rather has existed for all of time, isn’t much better. Again, god is an unnecessary complication since the nonbeliever could effectively counter by asserting that the matter involved in the big bang has existed for all of time. Both explanations allow you to opt out of the messy “something from nothing” quandary, but you’re still left to determine the nature of infinite time, which is well out of the realm of human conception.
Everyone is looking for answers, but the questions we’re asking are presently not answerable. If you don’t give it too much thought, god is a good resolution; if you give it a lot of thought, you have to come to the conclusion that god, whether or not you believe in his existence, is not a necessary component of the universe. If the capricious god of organized religion exists, I’m sure he’ll send me straight to hell for saying this, but god is irrelevant. George Carlin was an atheist who believed in the power of Joe Pesci. I’m an atheist who believes in the power of cake.
My goal here isn’t necessarily to shit on religion. I am perfectly willing to concede that religion may have been beneficial to human civilization in previous millennia, and it may have even facilitated some of our great advancements as a people, but contemporary religion has been perverted beyond all recognition. God and god’s laws were initially tools used to keep hoi polloi in line. Don’t fuck your sister, don’t fuck a sheep, don’t steal shit, don’t murder people, etc. This is all good advice if your goal is a functional society. These days, however, the emphasis seems to be on developing a personal relationship with Christ and converting queers. These values being dominant, the best case scenario is that our civilization will stagnate; the worst case scenario is that our civilization will cease to be civilized. Any reasonable person who’s seen those “God Hates Fags” signs outside of soldiers’ funerals would have to admit we’re headed down the latter path.
It’s not just religion that bugs me, but the whole idea of god. My skin crawls whenever I hear some cretin say, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” I suppose what they really mean is, “I don’t go to church, but I believe crystals can cure cancer,” but mostly I think it’s just a nonsense turn of phrase people use because they’re hesitant to write god off entirely. The problem is that belief in god is the default mode, but this setup is preposterous. Belief is active, while a lack of belief is passive, which puts the burden of proof squarely on the believer. No one would think of asking someone to provide evidence showing that toys don’t come to life at night. Because there’s no reason to assume they do, the default is to not possess an active belief in the consciousness and animation of toys. The onus is on the aberrant who believes that toys are people too; this guy has to prove to me the validity of his demented conviction.
I would argue that there’s similarly no reason to believe in the existence of god. You’d be hard-pressed to find any physical evidence of him. Some people would say that the universe itself is evidence enough, but that’s just because some people can’t follow a thought through to its logical conclusion. If the universe came from god, where did god come from? Did he spontaneously come into existence, spawned from nothingness? In that case you can cut god out of the equation entirely, and just say that the first particles in the universe came from nothing. Either way you’re left wondering how nothing becomes something.
The argument that god didn’t spontaneously come into existence, but rather has existed for all of time, isn’t much better. Again, god is an unnecessary complication since the nonbeliever could effectively counter by asserting that the matter involved in the big bang has existed for all of time. Both explanations allow you to opt out of the messy “something from nothing” quandary, but you’re still left to determine the nature of infinite time, which is well out of the realm of human conception.
Everyone is looking for answers, but the questions we’re asking are presently not answerable. If you don’t give it too much thought, god is a good resolution; if you give it a lot of thought, you have to come to the conclusion that god, whether or not you believe in his existence, is not a necessary component of the universe. If the capricious god of organized religion exists, I’m sure he’ll send me straight to hell for saying this, but god is irrelevant. George Carlin was an atheist who believed in the power of Joe Pesci. I’m an atheist who believes in the power of cake.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Why I'm Not a Dick
I’m sure my six followers are all wondering what in this world terrifies me the most, and even if you’re not, I’m going to share. Have you ever said anything along the lines of “How do you know what’s right and wrong if you don’t believe in god?” If the answer is yes, I’m scared of you.
To accuse everyone who’s ever posed such a question of being a sociopath might be slightly hyperbolic, but it’s also not far off. You can’t come up with any reason to be nice to your fellow living creatures except that, if you’re not, god might get pissed? On the bright side, we’re dealing with a person who knows he’s not supposed to rape and murder; I’ll put myself out there and argue that the more people we can get on board with that message the better.
That being said, there are better and worse reasons for not doing wrong. A good reason to refrain from rape and murder is that you yourself would rather not be raped and murdered, and can therefore extrapolate that others feel similarly. A good reason is that you know acts of violence devastate victims’ families and you take no pleasure in the devastation of others. A great reason is that you don’t want to. A bad reason is that god says you’re not supposed to.
For reasons I can’t fathom, people continue to cling to religion and feel it confers upon them a moral compass. If your belief in god stops you from raping and murdering, at least you’re not out there raping and murdering, but I do firmly believe that we’ve come far enough as a people to more deeply consider our system of ethics. If you’re going to insist on keeping god in the equation, why not ask your imaginary friend why he doesn’t want you to be a dick? Maybe there’s more to it than eternal damnation.
My brain is feeling fuzzy, so this post is a little disjointed, but I’m just sick of good behavior being considered the domain of the believer. I have no investment in the existence or non-existence of a higher power. I’m invested in things like cupcakes, Australian eccentricities, and my beloved doggie, Moira, but I’m also a pretty good person. It may hurt Jesus’ feelings that I don’t believe in him, but I can honestly say that today I chose not to do wrong for all the right reasons.
To accuse everyone who’s ever posed such a question of being a sociopath might be slightly hyperbolic, but it’s also not far off. You can’t come up with any reason to be nice to your fellow living creatures except that, if you’re not, god might get pissed? On the bright side, we’re dealing with a person who knows he’s not supposed to rape and murder; I’ll put myself out there and argue that the more people we can get on board with that message the better.
That being said, there are better and worse reasons for not doing wrong. A good reason to refrain from rape and murder is that you yourself would rather not be raped and murdered, and can therefore extrapolate that others feel similarly. A good reason is that you know acts of violence devastate victims’ families and you take no pleasure in the devastation of others. A great reason is that you don’t want to. A bad reason is that god says you’re not supposed to.
For reasons I can’t fathom, people continue to cling to religion and feel it confers upon them a moral compass. If your belief in god stops you from raping and murdering, at least you’re not out there raping and murdering, but I do firmly believe that we’ve come far enough as a people to more deeply consider our system of ethics. If you’re going to insist on keeping god in the equation, why not ask your imaginary friend why he doesn’t want you to be a dick? Maybe there’s more to it than eternal damnation.
My brain is feeling fuzzy, so this post is a little disjointed, but I’m just sick of good behavior being considered the domain of the believer. I have no investment in the existence or non-existence of a higher power. I’m invested in things like cupcakes, Australian eccentricities, and my beloved doggie, Moira, but I’m also a pretty good person. It may hurt Jesus’ feelings that I don’t believe in him, but I can honestly say that today I chose not to do wrong for all the right reasons.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Turns out I have something else to say about Avatar...
I’ve decided that, contrary to my previous post, I DO feel the need to rehash Avatar’s inanities. The following are two emails I drafted to my parents shortly after those lost hours spent watching this travesty:
ME: I was cajoled into going to see Avatar over the weekend. I actually hated it even more than I thought I would. It was just unrelentingly retarded. It employed every worn-out Hollywood trope you can imagine. The "intense" scenes are in slow-motion with new age chanting music in the background, and the villains look like they just stepped out of a Bond movie, only they left the irony behind. Its pseudo-science is pseudo to the point of distraction. The action takes place on a planet with water whose atmosphere supports plant and animal life more or less identical to that found on earth, yet humans not only have trouble breathing the air, they can't breath it at all and die without oxygen masks. Plus, it was tedious and boring. Even if you're willing to suspend disbelief and just accept all of the stupidity on screen, it's a completely un-enjoyable movie experience. Do you remember that children's movie, Fern Gully from some time in the 90's? This is Fern Gully with profanity.
DAD: Who cajoled you into going?
ME: A friend of mine wanted to go and he had an extra free pass so I said I'd go since it would only cost me the $600 they charge for a barrel of Diet Coke. When I told my significant other that I was going, he and another friend jumped on board since they were willing to pay the price of the ticket. Anyway, my companions were pretty disappointed, and I only exacerbated their disappointment by rattling off the litany of problems I had with the movie as soon as we left the theater. In the previous email, I forgot to mention the ham-fisted attempts at social commentary. There were lines about how humans had destroyed the earth and had been reduced to mining for resources on other planets, there were lines about pre-emptive strikes against savages, and at one point someone actually uttered the line, "We have to fight terror with terror." Oh, and I forgot to mention that they were mining the planet in question for a resource called, and I swear this is true, UNOBTAINIUM! Part of me still thinks that has to be a joke, but it definitely wasn't presented as such and I was the only one in the theater who laughed.
Firstly, I now realize that UNOBTANIUM is such a stupid name that I can only accurately transcribe it using all caps. I would also like to amend my remarks about Fern Gully. Similar though they are, Fern Gully is neither the most apt nor the funniest imagined Avatar analogue. An episode of South Park later re-titled Avatar, calling it Dances with Smurfs, and this is right on. Indeed, it occurs to me now that the best thing about Avatar is that it didn’t star Kevin Costner.
ME: I was cajoled into going to see Avatar over the weekend. I actually hated it even more than I thought I would. It was just unrelentingly retarded. It employed every worn-out Hollywood trope you can imagine. The "intense" scenes are in slow-motion with new age chanting music in the background, and the villains look like they just stepped out of a Bond movie, only they left the irony behind. Its pseudo-science is pseudo to the point of distraction. The action takes place on a planet with water whose atmosphere supports plant and animal life more or less identical to that found on earth, yet humans not only have trouble breathing the air, they can't breath it at all and die without oxygen masks. Plus, it was tedious and boring. Even if you're willing to suspend disbelief and just accept all of the stupidity on screen, it's a completely un-enjoyable movie experience. Do you remember that children's movie, Fern Gully from some time in the 90's? This is Fern Gully with profanity.
DAD: Who cajoled you into going?
ME: A friend of mine wanted to go and he had an extra free pass so I said I'd go since it would only cost me the $600 they charge for a barrel of Diet Coke. When I told my significant other that I was going, he and another friend jumped on board since they were willing to pay the price of the ticket. Anyway, my companions were pretty disappointed, and I only exacerbated their disappointment by rattling off the litany of problems I had with the movie as soon as we left the theater. In the previous email, I forgot to mention the ham-fisted attempts at social commentary. There were lines about how humans had destroyed the earth and had been reduced to mining for resources on other planets, there were lines about pre-emptive strikes against savages, and at one point someone actually uttered the line, "We have to fight terror with terror." Oh, and I forgot to mention that they were mining the planet in question for a resource called, and I swear this is true, UNOBTAINIUM! Part of me still thinks that has to be a joke, but it definitely wasn't presented as such and I was the only one in the theater who laughed.
Firstly, I now realize that UNOBTANIUM is such a stupid name that I can only accurately transcribe it using all caps. I would also like to amend my remarks about Fern Gully. Similar though they are, Fern Gully is neither the most apt nor the funniest imagined Avatar analogue. An episode of South Park later re-titled Avatar, calling it Dances with Smurfs, and this is right on. Indeed, it occurs to me now that the best thing about Avatar is that it didn’t star Kevin Costner.
UNOBTANIUM???!!!???)
I used to go to the movies a lot. It passes the time, and I find the darkness, frigid air, and quasi-futuristic seating to be conducive to napping. Several years ago, however, it occurred to me that paying $12.00 to sleep through the latest Harry Potter movie was not a good use of my resources, and so I all but ceased movie-going. I would periodically accept invitations from friends seeking a cinema companion, but those invitations were few and far between; my vocal hatred of whatever movie happened to be playing seemed to rub people the wrong way.
Avatar changed everything. I didn’t even pay to see it; my friend had an extra ticket. In fact, had the theater not been so loud and crowded, I would have snoozed for a few hours and gone home happy. Sadly, circumstances were such that I watched, and subsequently decided to boycott the movies.
It takes a really shitty film to destroy the theater-going experience forever, and an even shittier film to accomplish that feat while being essentially free of cost. Avatar was just such a film. I don’t feel the need to rehash all of the inanities (UNOBTANIUM???!!!???) and the trauma they caused, but I do feel the need to explain myself in a public forum. Well, a public forum that is for all intents and purposes private. In any case, my boycott is the reason I don’t want to go see a movie with you. It’s not because I don’t like you, although there’s a good chance I don’t. It’s because of James Cameron. Fuck that guy.
Avatar changed everything. I didn’t even pay to see it; my friend had an extra ticket. In fact, had the theater not been so loud and crowded, I would have snoozed for a few hours and gone home happy. Sadly, circumstances were such that I watched, and subsequently decided to boycott the movies.
It takes a really shitty film to destroy the theater-going experience forever, and an even shittier film to accomplish that feat while being essentially free of cost. Avatar was just such a film. I don’t feel the need to rehash all of the inanities (UNOBTANIUM???!!!???) and the trauma they caused, but I do feel the need to explain myself in a public forum. Well, a public forum that is for all intents and purposes private. In any case, my boycott is the reason I don’t want to go see a movie with you. It’s not because I don’t like you, although there’s a good chance I don’t. It’s because of James Cameron. Fuck that guy.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
More News from Down Under
Let’s keep the Australia theme alive with a little discussion of Mel Gibson, shall we? What a crazy fuck. Here’s a quick rundown of his preferred targets:
Jews
We first learned about Mel’s aversion to Jews upon the release of the Passion of the Christ, which didn’t exactly put a positive spin on the Chosen People. Cut to a few years later, and we find a soused Mel fingering the Jews as the root of all evil. He tried to excuse his behavior through the strategic use of the old dipsomaniac gambit (“I was drunk and didn’t mean what I said”) but the billions of people who’ve been drunk and managed to refrain from denigrating an entire race didn’t buy it.
Blacks
Mel seemed so friendly with Danny Glover in those halcyon Lethal Weapon days, but he must have just been a better actor than we thought. As we all now know, he was recently caught on tape likening black men to pack animals and implying that they’re roving rapists, albeit in language richer than mine. Oddly, despite the appalling and overt racism in this career-ending comment, black people were actually little more than an ancillary target. In making this statement, the real butt of his rage was…
Women
Yes, women. Although Mel’s insinuation that black men are animalistic sex offenders is admittedly strong enough to stand on its own, the real kicker is his follow-up assertion that his ex and the mother of one of his children in fact deserves to be a victim of the imaginary “pack of [rapist] n*****s.” In another choice threat, Gibson reportedly told his ex, "I am going to come and burn the fucking house down...but you will blow me first." Oh, and she also claims that he knocked out her two front teeth while she held their infant in her arms. Lovely.
Hispanics
His use of the word “wetback” in order to refer to his nanny seems to have been little more than an afterthought.
Mel, if you’re reading this, and you’re obviously not since you’re probably pretty busy with damage control at the moment, I have a suggestion. Given the unexpected success of the dipsomaniac gambit several years ago, this time try a variation. The Tourette’s defense works every time…
Jews
We first learned about Mel’s aversion to Jews upon the release of the Passion of the Christ, which didn’t exactly put a positive spin on the Chosen People. Cut to a few years later, and we find a soused Mel fingering the Jews as the root of all evil. He tried to excuse his behavior through the strategic use of the old dipsomaniac gambit (“I was drunk and didn’t mean what I said”) but the billions of people who’ve been drunk and managed to refrain from denigrating an entire race didn’t buy it.
Blacks
Mel seemed so friendly with Danny Glover in those halcyon Lethal Weapon days, but he must have just been a better actor than we thought. As we all now know, he was recently caught on tape likening black men to pack animals and implying that they’re roving rapists, albeit in language richer than mine. Oddly, despite the appalling and overt racism in this career-ending comment, black people were actually little more than an ancillary target. In making this statement, the real butt of his rage was…
Women
Yes, women. Although Mel’s insinuation that black men are animalistic sex offenders is admittedly strong enough to stand on its own, the real kicker is his follow-up assertion that his ex and the mother of one of his children in fact deserves to be a victim of the imaginary “pack of [rapist] n*****s.” In another choice threat, Gibson reportedly told his ex, "I am going to come and burn the fucking house down...but you will blow me first." Oh, and she also claims that he knocked out her two front teeth while she held their infant in her arms. Lovely.
Hispanics
His use of the word “wetback” in order to refer to his nanny seems to have been little more than an afterthought.
Mel, if you’re reading this, and you’re obviously not since you’re probably pretty busy with damage control at the moment, I have a suggestion. Given the unexpected success of the dipsomaniac gambit several years ago, this time try a variation. The Tourette’s defense works every time…
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Put Another Shrimp on the Barbie...
Australia is a pretty fucking cool country. Here are a few of my favorite things about it:
1. Australia mislaid a Prime Minister…I’ve been rereading Bill Bryson’s Australian travel book, In a Sunburned Country, and in it Bryson writes that an Australian Prime Minister in the 1960’s went out for a swim and was never seen or heard from again. In any other country on earth, this would be noteworthy, but it’s easy to go missing in Australia, which brings me to my second favorite thing about Australia.
2. So many ways to die…
You could meet your maker after meeting a riptide; this is a pretty likely explanation of the PM’s disappearance. Your vehicle could break down in the outback, leaving you to die of thirst. A kangaroo could box the shit out of you. One of Australia’s 750 gazillion deadly snakes could bite you; one of the 800 gazillion deadly insects could do the same. You could be eaten by a crocodile in an inland body of water. You could be eaten by a shark in the ocean. Your tourist boat could head back to shore, leaving you to fend for yourself at the Great Barrier Reef. In fact, it’s kind of amazing that only the one PM vanished; I would have thought at least 2 or 3 others would have become dingo munch.
3. Still British after all these years…
For reasons unknown, Australians retain certain British attributes we Americans did away with years ago. They enjoy cricket, and don’t consider tea-drinking to be gay. They haven’t tossed the Queen off of their money, but then again neither have our shifty neighbors to the north, Canada. Also they drive on the wrong side of the road, but in the southern hemisphere that could actually be correct; I don’t fully understand the intricacies of our planet’s equatorial division.
4. It’s like America only different…Vestigial British-ism aside, Australians are Americans’ evil twins; we’re Captain Kirk and they’re Captain Kirk with a mustache. They spend dollars, live in states, and their male inhabitants wear shorts without compunction. They are by all accounts outgoing and friendly, and they love a good barbeque. There’s a preponderance of pre-fab subdivisions from the middle part of the 20th century, antipodean Levittown’s if you will. Like Americans, Australians made off with a country by murdering and dehumanizing its original inhabitants, a people far better equipped than Europeans to cope the vicissitudes of life in the new world, which conveniently segues into my fifth point.
5. Aboriginal Australians are more awesome than Native Americans…Here’s how Native Americans became Native Americans: a long time ago, they wandered over a land-bridge from Asia to what is now Alaska, and spread out over North and South America. How dull. Here’s how Australian Aborigines became Australian Aborigines: we’re not really sure. We do know that, since it has never been connected to a landmass north of New Guinea, the Aborigines must crossed the ocean to reach Australia via New Guinea. Strangely, despite having been a seafaring people at some point in their history, the Aborigines were land-bound at the time of the first European colonization of Australia. Although genetic evidence suggests that aboriginal Australians are descended from the first human migrants out of Africa, their isolated existence has meant that their languages and cultures are essentially unrelated to any others on earth. As for their beliefs, good luck understanding “dreamtime,” an aspect of Aboriginal religion and mythology that refers to both the time of creation as well as a separate spiritual timeline running concurrently with our own.
6. I declare this land…Australia is home to a bizarrely high percentage of the world’s micro-nations. In essence, Australians, more so than other people, are prone to declaring their own homes to be sovereign states. I don’t think I can articulate just how or why this is cool, but I also don’t think I need to. Clearly, Australia (and Aeterna Lucina, Atlantium, Rainbow Creek, and any other independent nation therein) is a kickass place.
1. Australia mislaid a Prime Minister…I’ve been rereading Bill Bryson’s Australian travel book, In a Sunburned Country, and in it Bryson writes that an Australian Prime Minister in the 1960’s went out for a swim and was never seen or heard from again. In any other country on earth, this would be noteworthy, but it’s easy to go missing in Australia, which brings me to my second favorite thing about Australia.
2. So many ways to die…
You could meet your maker after meeting a riptide; this is a pretty likely explanation of the PM’s disappearance. Your vehicle could break down in the outback, leaving you to die of thirst. A kangaroo could box the shit out of you. One of Australia’s 750 gazillion deadly snakes could bite you; one of the 800 gazillion deadly insects could do the same. You could be eaten by a crocodile in an inland body of water. You could be eaten by a shark in the ocean. Your tourist boat could head back to shore, leaving you to fend for yourself at the Great Barrier Reef. In fact, it’s kind of amazing that only the one PM vanished; I would have thought at least 2 or 3 others would have become dingo munch.
3. Still British after all these years…
For reasons unknown, Australians retain certain British attributes we Americans did away with years ago. They enjoy cricket, and don’t consider tea-drinking to be gay. They haven’t tossed the Queen off of their money, but then again neither have our shifty neighbors to the north, Canada. Also they drive on the wrong side of the road, but in the southern hemisphere that could actually be correct; I don’t fully understand the intricacies of our planet’s equatorial division.
4. It’s like America only different…Vestigial British-ism aside, Australians are Americans’ evil twins; we’re Captain Kirk and they’re Captain Kirk with a mustache. They spend dollars, live in states, and their male inhabitants wear shorts without compunction. They are by all accounts outgoing and friendly, and they love a good barbeque. There’s a preponderance of pre-fab subdivisions from the middle part of the 20th century, antipodean Levittown’s if you will. Like Americans, Australians made off with a country by murdering and dehumanizing its original inhabitants, a people far better equipped than Europeans to cope the vicissitudes of life in the new world, which conveniently segues into my fifth point.
5. Aboriginal Australians are more awesome than Native Americans…Here’s how Native Americans became Native Americans: a long time ago, they wandered over a land-bridge from Asia to what is now Alaska, and spread out over North and South America. How dull. Here’s how Australian Aborigines became Australian Aborigines: we’re not really sure. We do know that, since it has never been connected to a landmass north of New Guinea, the Aborigines must crossed the ocean to reach Australia via New Guinea. Strangely, despite having been a seafaring people at some point in their history, the Aborigines were land-bound at the time of the first European colonization of Australia. Although genetic evidence suggests that aboriginal Australians are descended from the first human migrants out of Africa, their isolated existence has meant that their languages and cultures are essentially unrelated to any others on earth. As for their beliefs, good luck understanding “dreamtime,” an aspect of Aboriginal religion and mythology that refers to both the time of creation as well as a separate spiritual timeline running concurrently with our own.
6. I declare this land…Australia is home to a bizarrely high percentage of the world’s micro-nations. In essence, Australians, more so than other people, are prone to declaring their own homes to be sovereign states. I don’t think I can articulate just how or why this is cool, but I also don’t think I need to. Clearly, Australia (and Aeterna Lucina, Atlantium, Rainbow Creek, and any other independent nation therein) is a kickass place.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Vicarious Drug Addiction
I used to be completely obsessed with the show “Intervention.” For about two years, this was absolutely my favorite television program. I’m no longer a devoted viewer; watching pathetic drug addicts engage in self-destructive behavior gets a little dreary after awhile. There are, however, some pretty great episodes, the highlights of which I would like to share.
Betsy
This woman was an unemployed former kindergarten teacher who, despite drinking five bottles of wine a day in order to avoid withdrawal, denied being an alcoholic. And we’re not talking your run-of-the-mill withdrawal. Not only would this lady shake and vomit, she would also shit uncontrollably. If you need alcohol in order to be in charge of your own bowels, it’s time for rehab. Betsy’s intervention was a success in that she got on an airplane to go to treatment, and a failure in that she flew back home before setting foot in the facility.
Cristy
This bitch was a seriously deranged meth addict. Her residence looked like a garage, except filthier. Additionally, she was in the process of writing a book which inexplicably involved a lot of arithmetic and talk about her own divinity. She stripped to earn her keep, but appeared to genuinely enjoy it inasmuch as she chose to be naked more or less all the time. Cristy’s intervention was a success in that, after being *tranquilized*, she boarded an airplane to go to treatment, and a failure in that she was tossed out after 30 days due to disruptive behavior.
Jennifer
This episode was nothing to write home about, but Jennifer had an absolutely charming habit that deserves a mention: she would drink, vomit, and then drink her own vomit. I shit you not.
Miriam
This is scheduled to air on July 12, 2010. According to the A&E website, Miriam, a reverend at a wedding chapel, is addicted to PCP. Although I too am named Miriam, I’m sadly not the subject of this episode. At least I don’t think I am. With all the PCP I ingest, it’s hard to know for sure…
A Public Service Announcement:
I’m a nerd, so my experience with hard drugs is basically non-existent, but I feel confident in saying that whatever the government and anti-drug people tell you about pot and cocaine and ecstasy, they’re exaggerating. Obviously drugs aren’t healthy, but your D.A.R.E. officer was completely full of shit.
Meth, on the other hand, is terrifying. Your teeth fall out, you become emaciated, and then completely lose your mind. Remember a few years ago when that guy went berserk, driving a tank through the streets of Los Angeles? Meth. The rampage only ended when the LAPD killed him.
Betsy
This woman was an unemployed former kindergarten teacher who, despite drinking five bottles of wine a day in order to avoid withdrawal, denied being an alcoholic. And we’re not talking your run-of-the-mill withdrawal. Not only would this lady shake and vomit, she would also shit uncontrollably. If you need alcohol in order to be in charge of your own bowels, it’s time for rehab. Betsy’s intervention was a success in that she got on an airplane to go to treatment, and a failure in that she flew back home before setting foot in the facility.
Cristy
This bitch was a seriously deranged meth addict. Her residence looked like a garage, except filthier. Additionally, she was in the process of writing a book which inexplicably involved a lot of arithmetic and talk about her own divinity. She stripped to earn her keep, but appeared to genuinely enjoy it inasmuch as she chose to be naked more or less all the time. Cristy’s intervention was a success in that, after being *tranquilized*, she boarded an airplane to go to treatment, and a failure in that she was tossed out after 30 days due to disruptive behavior.
Jennifer
This episode was nothing to write home about, but Jennifer had an absolutely charming habit that deserves a mention: she would drink, vomit, and then drink her own vomit. I shit you not.
Miriam
This is scheduled to air on July 12, 2010. According to the A&E website, Miriam, a reverend at a wedding chapel, is addicted to PCP. Although I too am named Miriam, I’m sadly not the subject of this episode. At least I don’t think I am. With all the PCP I ingest, it’s hard to know for sure…
A Public Service Announcement:
I’m a nerd, so my experience with hard drugs is basically non-existent, but I feel confident in saying that whatever the government and anti-drug people tell you about pot and cocaine and ecstasy, they’re exaggerating. Obviously drugs aren’t healthy, but your D.A.R.E. officer was completely full of shit.
Meth, on the other hand, is terrifying. Your teeth fall out, you become emaciated, and then completely lose your mind. Remember a few years ago when that guy went berserk, driving a tank through the streets of Los Angeles? Meth. The rampage only ended when the LAPD killed him.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
For Your Consideration ....
I’m full of good ideas. Here are three of the best:
IDEA I
Disclaimer: As with many of history’s great ideas, this one presupposes a level of wealth that is most assuredly out of your reach.
As a rule, people prefer clean and tidy to filthy and squalid, the only exceptions being those poor people who exploit themselves on reality shows about hoarding. Unfortunately, cleaning is no fun. The solution since time immemorial has been for the poor to clean up after the rich in exchange for food scraps, but it’s so hard to get good help these days. In those heady years just prior to the French Revolution, members of the court at Versailles would relieve themselves in palace corners, knowing that some unfortunate soul would be dispatched to properly dispose of the royal poo. That kind of domestic staff devotion just doesn’t exist anymore.
The solution? Build a house and destroy it. Don’t do dishes, don’t do laundry, don’t even buy a vacuum cleaner. Poo wherever you’d like. It doesn’t matter, because in a month you’ll be moving house. As you’re busily destroying your current abode, a second house is under construction and will be ready by the time the stench becomes overwhelming. Pack up the kids, if they haven’t yet become wards of the state, and get out of Dodge. Repeat in one month’s time.
IDEA II
La-Z-Boys for everyone. The destructively uncomfortable chairs in public places, particularly in offices and airports, need to be ripped out and replaced with La-Z-Boys. I’m shocked that this idea hasn’t already taken off. Obnoxious coworkers and flight delays are so infuriating, and a cozy armchair would really soften the blow. As a corollary, pajamas should be considered acceptable public attire, particularly in the workplace.
IDEA III
Environmentally speaking, public transportation has an edge over cars. Sadly, public transportation is a great source of misery for all who use it. In New York, the trains are filthy, unreliable, and full of homeless people who want to talk to you about Jesus. In Japan meanwhile, public transportation perversion is rife. If the gaze of a female commuter drifts downward, she’s likely to discover rubbing up against her, the exposed penis of a stranger. Clearly we should replace all current subway and bus routes with roller coasters.
Turning urban centers into giant fun parks is a sure-fire way to increase morale. Riding a roller coaster to work may not be clean and it may not be reliable, but it will be fun. Additionally, the screams will drown out any of that silly Jesus talk and the seat restraints will reduce the incidence of sexual assault. Taken to its logical conclusion, this plan will result in goofy animal costumes for transportation workers and the peddling of cotton candy at every stop.
IDEA I
Disclaimer: As with many of history’s great ideas, this one presupposes a level of wealth that is most assuredly out of your reach.
As a rule, people prefer clean and tidy to filthy and squalid, the only exceptions being those poor people who exploit themselves on reality shows about hoarding. Unfortunately, cleaning is no fun. The solution since time immemorial has been for the poor to clean up after the rich in exchange for food scraps, but it’s so hard to get good help these days. In those heady years just prior to the French Revolution, members of the court at Versailles would relieve themselves in palace corners, knowing that some unfortunate soul would be dispatched to properly dispose of the royal poo. That kind of domestic staff devotion just doesn’t exist anymore.
The solution? Build a house and destroy it. Don’t do dishes, don’t do laundry, don’t even buy a vacuum cleaner. Poo wherever you’d like. It doesn’t matter, because in a month you’ll be moving house. As you’re busily destroying your current abode, a second house is under construction and will be ready by the time the stench becomes overwhelming. Pack up the kids, if they haven’t yet become wards of the state, and get out of Dodge. Repeat in one month’s time.
IDEA II
La-Z-Boys for everyone. The destructively uncomfortable chairs in public places, particularly in offices and airports, need to be ripped out and replaced with La-Z-Boys. I’m shocked that this idea hasn’t already taken off. Obnoxious coworkers and flight delays are so infuriating, and a cozy armchair would really soften the blow. As a corollary, pajamas should be considered acceptable public attire, particularly in the workplace.
IDEA III
Environmentally speaking, public transportation has an edge over cars. Sadly, public transportation is a great source of misery for all who use it. In New York, the trains are filthy, unreliable, and full of homeless people who want to talk to you about Jesus. In Japan meanwhile, public transportation perversion is rife. If the gaze of a female commuter drifts downward, she’s likely to discover rubbing up against her, the exposed penis of a stranger. Clearly we should replace all current subway and bus routes with roller coasters.
Turning urban centers into giant fun parks is a sure-fire way to increase morale. Riding a roller coaster to work may not be clean and it may not be reliable, but it will be fun. Additionally, the screams will drown out any of that silly Jesus talk and the seat restraints will reduce the incidence of sexual assault. Taken to its logical conclusion, this plan will result in goofy animal costumes for transportation workers and the peddling of cotton candy at every stop.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Shhhh.... I'm Studying!
Because my significant other and I realized that an in-ground pool will be vital to our future happiness, we have to get rich. I’ve thusly determined that law school, preferably at a university that is both elite and stifling, is in my future. Because studying for the LSAT is taking up most of the time previously devoted to drafting these splendid blogs, I had to come up with something quick and easy to write. So here are two of my favorite items from this week’s free morning papers.
The NYPD is on the lookout for a female shoplifter who has been targeting beauty shops and making off with pricey cosmetics. She has managed to elude law enforcement by concealing her identity prior to engaging in any illegal activities. Because ski caps and Richard Nixon masks are so overdone, our lady criminal prefers to disguise herself as a cat.
A gentleman was overheard on the Staten Island Ferry explaining to tourists that Staten Island is home to the smartest people in the world. As hilarious as this conceit is, it gets better. The gentleman then pointed to a nearby landmass and referred to it as the home of the stupidest people in the world: New Jersey-ites. Sadly, he was pointing at Brooklyn.
The NYPD is on the lookout for a female shoplifter who has been targeting beauty shops and making off with pricey cosmetics. She has managed to elude law enforcement by concealing her identity prior to engaging in any illegal activities. Because ski caps and Richard Nixon masks are so overdone, our lady criminal prefers to disguise herself as a cat.
A gentleman was overheard on the Staten Island Ferry explaining to tourists that Staten Island is home to the smartest people in the world. As hilarious as this conceit is, it gets better. The gentleman then pointed to a nearby landmass and referred to it as the home of the stupidest people in the world: New Jersey-ites. Sadly, he was pointing at Brooklyn.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
I'd Rather Be.....
Like many of you, I’m not getting any younger. Unfortunately, the passage of time has yet to lead me to professional success. Although I’ll probably just end up going to law school like a nice Jewish girl should, I’ve compiled a list of dream jobs, all of which are well out of my purview.
Futurist
I don’t know a lot about this line of work, but it sounds amazing. Now, I don’t want to do anything dull, like economic forecasting or assessing future health crises. I also don’t want to get bogged down with anything as dreary as “science.” I’m mostly interested in determining the extent to which the future will resemble the Jetsons.
Cake Taster
I have this recurring dream in which I’m trapped inside a giant cake and am forced to eat my way out…
Detective
I don’t mean a police detective. I’m not interested in attending the police academy and spending years as a beat cop. I’m thinking more along the lines of Miss Marple. You know, residing in a quaint cottage in a quaint village in which people happen to be murdered constantly. The inept provincial police would have no choice but to rely on my superior sleuthing skills and reward me handsomely for my troubles.
Modern Artist
Who wouldn’t want to paint a canvas red and sell it for $100,000?
Elf-Hunter
This profession is relegated to Iceland, whose citizens are under the impression that the Lord of the Rings was based on true events. Elf-hunting as a career exists because elves are very difficult to detect with the untrained eye; tracking them down requires the services of a seasoned professional. Note that Icelanders don’t eat elves – they’re a bit gamey – so elf-hunters aren’t out to kill any mythical beings. Rather, if a contractor is concerned that his planned project might encroach on elf territory, he hires an elf-hunter to determine whether the area in question is sufficiently devoid of elf-life so as to be suitable for human development. Alas, the University of Michigan, my alma mater, doesn’t offer degrees in this field.
Futurist
I don’t know a lot about this line of work, but it sounds amazing. Now, I don’t want to do anything dull, like economic forecasting or assessing future health crises. I also don’t want to get bogged down with anything as dreary as “science.” I’m mostly interested in determining the extent to which the future will resemble the Jetsons.
Cake Taster
I have this recurring dream in which I’m trapped inside a giant cake and am forced to eat my way out…
Detective
I don’t mean a police detective. I’m not interested in attending the police academy and spending years as a beat cop. I’m thinking more along the lines of Miss Marple. You know, residing in a quaint cottage in a quaint village in which people happen to be murdered constantly. The inept provincial police would have no choice but to rely on my superior sleuthing skills and reward me handsomely for my troubles.
Modern Artist
Who wouldn’t want to paint a canvas red and sell it for $100,000?
Elf-Hunter
This profession is relegated to Iceland, whose citizens are under the impression that the Lord of the Rings was based on true events. Elf-hunting as a career exists because elves are very difficult to detect with the untrained eye; tracking them down requires the services of a seasoned professional. Note that Icelanders don’t eat elves – they’re a bit gamey – so elf-hunters aren’t out to kill any mythical beings. Rather, if a contractor is concerned that his planned project might encroach on elf territory, he hires an elf-hunter to determine whether the area in question is sufficiently devoid of elf-life so as to be suitable for human development. Alas, the University of Michigan, my alma mater, doesn’t offer degrees in this field.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Drawing Necessary Distinctions - An Exploration of Medical and Legal Ethics
Riding the train this morning, my significant other was perusing the free papers when he came upon a story he knew I’d be all over: a Frenchman by the name of Nicolas Cocaign is being tried for the murder and cannibalization of his prison cellmate.
Cocaign’s guilt is not in question. Not only has he freely confessed to the crime, but he looks like the kind of person who might crave human meat. His patchy beard proves that he’s a sexual pervert, and he’s festively tattooed much of his face, an outré sartorial decision even among sociopaths. Were I to sketch my idea of a convict with an overwhelming compulsion to consume his own kind, this is the guy I’d come up with.
In contemplating Cocaign’s crime, I think it’s important to consider the murder separate from the cannibalization. Murder is a heinous act, whether it occurs within the confines of a prison or in the outside world. That being said, murderers are housed in prisons, so sometimes prisoners get murdered. Had Cocaign, a crazy person previously convicted of multiple violent offences, killed a fellow prisoner and left it at that, this story would not be in the papers. No one would care.
Our interest stems from the fact that Cocaign, who allegedly killed his cellmate for having repeatedly clogged their shared toilet, opted to dine on the dead man’s lung. He ate a bit of it raw, and then fried the rest with onions, French prison cells apparently coming equipped with kitchenettes. I’m more than happy to acknowledge the obvious benefits to be had by sequestering potentially dangerous cannibals away from polite society, but I don’t consider man-on-man snacking to be an inherently evil act on par with murder. Frankly, once you’ve gone to the trouble of killing someone, you might as well get a meal out of it.
It’s the irrational reverence for cadavers that I find so confounding. Dead is dead. If once I’m dead a bunch of flesh-fiends feel compelled to dig up my lifeless body and eat it, so be it. You may be saying to yourself, “That’s fine for her because she’s nothing but a nihilistic atheist,” but even the religious should follow me on this one. If upon death your soul ascends to heaven, leaving behind nothing but a corpse, the corpse itself is meaningless. Anyway, your remains will eventually fall prey to animals. I just see no problem with those animals being human.
Cannibals aren’t necessarily bad people. Several years ago two Germans, both of whom were, to put it charitably, mildly deranged, met on the internet. Man A wanted to eat a human and Man B wanted to be eaten. This was to be an unorthodox love story. A and B met at A’s house, where they both attempted to consume a portion of B’s severed penis. This didn’t quite pan out, so B put away enough alcohol and sleeping pills to lose consciousness, at which point A killed and butchered him, storing his body parts in the freezer. Over the course of the next several months, A consumed B.
A is currently serving a life sentence for murder, and that’s wrong. A is not evil, A is sick. His intent was not malicious. Torture was not a goal, and murder was only a factor because supermarkets don’t sell human meat. All of the available evidence indicates that absolutely everything that happened between A and B was consensual. A isn’t a bad person. He belongs not in prison, but in a psychiatric facility.
As for Cocaign, he’s a violent offender who ended at least one life and destroyed many others. Don’t minimize that by fretting about his taste for human lungs. Punish him for what he’s done wrong, keep a close eye on him, and confiscate his hotplate.
Cocaign’s guilt is not in question. Not only has he freely confessed to the crime, but he looks like the kind of person who might crave human meat. His patchy beard proves that he’s a sexual pervert, and he’s festively tattooed much of his face, an outré sartorial decision even among sociopaths. Were I to sketch my idea of a convict with an overwhelming compulsion to consume his own kind, this is the guy I’d come up with.
In contemplating Cocaign’s crime, I think it’s important to consider the murder separate from the cannibalization. Murder is a heinous act, whether it occurs within the confines of a prison or in the outside world. That being said, murderers are housed in prisons, so sometimes prisoners get murdered. Had Cocaign, a crazy person previously convicted of multiple violent offences, killed a fellow prisoner and left it at that, this story would not be in the papers. No one would care.
Our interest stems from the fact that Cocaign, who allegedly killed his cellmate for having repeatedly clogged their shared toilet, opted to dine on the dead man’s lung. He ate a bit of it raw, and then fried the rest with onions, French prison cells apparently coming equipped with kitchenettes. I’m more than happy to acknowledge the obvious benefits to be had by sequestering potentially dangerous cannibals away from polite society, but I don’t consider man-on-man snacking to be an inherently evil act on par with murder. Frankly, once you’ve gone to the trouble of killing someone, you might as well get a meal out of it.
It’s the irrational reverence for cadavers that I find so confounding. Dead is dead. If once I’m dead a bunch of flesh-fiends feel compelled to dig up my lifeless body and eat it, so be it. You may be saying to yourself, “That’s fine for her because she’s nothing but a nihilistic atheist,” but even the religious should follow me on this one. If upon death your soul ascends to heaven, leaving behind nothing but a corpse, the corpse itself is meaningless. Anyway, your remains will eventually fall prey to animals. I just see no problem with those animals being human.
Cannibals aren’t necessarily bad people. Several years ago two Germans, both of whom were, to put it charitably, mildly deranged, met on the internet. Man A wanted to eat a human and Man B wanted to be eaten. This was to be an unorthodox love story. A and B met at A’s house, where they both attempted to consume a portion of B’s severed penis. This didn’t quite pan out, so B put away enough alcohol and sleeping pills to lose consciousness, at which point A killed and butchered him, storing his body parts in the freezer. Over the course of the next several months, A consumed B.
A is currently serving a life sentence for murder, and that’s wrong. A is not evil, A is sick. His intent was not malicious. Torture was not a goal, and murder was only a factor because supermarkets don’t sell human meat. All of the available evidence indicates that absolutely everything that happened between A and B was consensual. A isn’t a bad person. He belongs not in prison, but in a psychiatric facility.
As for Cocaign, he’s a violent offender who ended at least one life and destroyed many others. Don’t minimize that by fretting about his taste for human lungs. Punish him for what he’s done wrong, keep a close eye on him, and confiscate his hotplate.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
A Musical End to the British Trilogy
I'm not at work today, and I'm not going to disturb my well-deserved idleness by writing anything. For the third entry in the British trilogy, here's a sort of "Northern Soul for Idiots" as compiled by an unenlightened American.
I'm on My Way
The Snake
There's a Ghost in My House
Turnin' My Heartbeat Up
I'm on My Way
The Snake
There's a Ghost in My House
Turnin' My Heartbeat Up
Friday, June 18, 2010
Our Little Secret
For the past few days I’ve been mulling over the idea of writing a post explaining how to commit the perfect murder. I’ve been reticent to do so because I know that, should a loved-one turn up dead under suspicious circumstances, this blog will be dredged up during my trial as evidence of guilt. I would prefer to avoid this, so please let the record reflect that I am not now, nor will I ever be, a murderer. I just think I’d be good at it. So, here are a few tips from me to you.
WHO
Kill a stranger, somehow enfeebled if at all possible. I know it’s tempting to go after someone who’s wronged you, but then you’re such an obvious suspect. You’ll most definitely find yourself under some pretty intense scrutiny, and every flippant remark, every questionable website visited, will be used as evidence against you. Every asshole you’ve ever rubbed the wrong way will be a character witness for the prosecution. Most damning however is that you’re likely to profit financially from the death of a loved one, either because of a life insurance policy or an inheritance. If profit is a motive for you, kill someone rich and steal their shit.
WHAT
Commission of the “perfect murder.”
WHEN
Don’t be cocky. Crimes are best committed at night when you’re unlikely to be seen and even less likely to be recognized. Not only is it dark, minimizing the odds of any eyewitnesses fingering you as the suspect, but many if not most people are unconscious.
WHERE
The victim’s house is ideal. For obvious reasons you should avoid criminal activity in public places. Remember, the perfect murder leaves behind no witnesses.
WHY
Killing a stranger isn’t a crime of passion, but rather a crime of bloodlust. If you’re following these instructions you’re clearly a psychopath, so there isn’t really a “why” to speak of.
HOW
Choose a clean method of dispatch. Stabbing or beating someone to death is invariably a bad idea. Not only is it gruesome, but the person is going to fight back, and that makes it much more likely that you’ll leave behind blood or DNA evidence. As far as the police are concerned, there’s no good explanation for why bits of you are scattered around a crime scene.
I would also throw out the idea of using a gun. Obtaining the gun legally leaves a problematic paper trail, but even an illegal purchase is a gamble; if the gun is somehow traced back to the black-market seller he could easily snitch. Any gun used in a murder has to be stealthily stolen and effectively disposed of, neither of which is easy.
As to the ideal method, I would recommend obtaining a syringe from a needle exchange or stealing one from a hospital. Use this syringe to inject the victim with a common household poison. In order to administer the injection, you could either attempt to catch your murderee unawares or you could threaten him into submission. If you choose the latter approach, bring a gun. You’re not to fire it under any circumstances, but without a weapon, your threats are empty.
My final suggestion might seem like overkill, but you really can’t be too careful. Prior to entering the victim’s home, you should don a full-body condom a la Leslie Nielson and Priscilla Presley in the Naked Gun. You’ll leave behind no fingerprints, no blood, no DNA, and the victim can’t give you AIDS.
One last thing. Although I don’t condone the murder under any circumstances, if you are going to kill someone for God’s sake don’t tell anyone about it. All of this should be our little secret.
WHO
Kill a stranger, somehow enfeebled if at all possible. I know it’s tempting to go after someone who’s wronged you, but then you’re such an obvious suspect. You’ll most definitely find yourself under some pretty intense scrutiny, and every flippant remark, every questionable website visited, will be used as evidence against you. Every asshole you’ve ever rubbed the wrong way will be a character witness for the prosecution. Most damning however is that you’re likely to profit financially from the death of a loved one, either because of a life insurance policy or an inheritance. If profit is a motive for you, kill someone rich and steal their shit.
WHAT
Commission of the “perfect murder.”
WHEN
Don’t be cocky. Crimes are best committed at night when you’re unlikely to be seen and even less likely to be recognized. Not only is it dark, minimizing the odds of any eyewitnesses fingering you as the suspect, but many if not most people are unconscious.
WHERE
The victim’s house is ideal. For obvious reasons you should avoid criminal activity in public places. Remember, the perfect murder leaves behind no witnesses.
WHY
Killing a stranger isn’t a crime of passion, but rather a crime of bloodlust. If you’re following these instructions you’re clearly a psychopath, so there isn’t really a “why” to speak of.
HOW
Choose a clean method of dispatch. Stabbing or beating someone to death is invariably a bad idea. Not only is it gruesome, but the person is going to fight back, and that makes it much more likely that you’ll leave behind blood or DNA evidence. As far as the police are concerned, there’s no good explanation for why bits of you are scattered around a crime scene.
I would also throw out the idea of using a gun. Obtaining the gun legally leaves a problematic paper trail, but even an illegal purchase is a gamble; if the gun is somehow traced back to the black-market seller he could easily snitch. Any gun used in a murder has to be stealthily stolen and effectively disposed of, neither of which is easy.
As to the ideal method, I would recommend obtaining a syringe from a needle exchange or stealing one from a hospital. Use this syringe to inject the victim with a common household poison. In order to administer the injection, you could either attempt to catch your murderee unawares or you could threaten him into submission. If you choose the latter approach, bring a gun. You’re not to fire it under any circumstances, but without a weapon, your threats are empty.
My final suggestion might seem like overkill, but you really can’t be too careful. Prior to entering the victim’s home, you should don a full-body condom a la Leslie Nielson and Priscilla Presley in the Naked Gun. You’ll leave behind no fingerprints, no blood, no DNA, and the victim can’t give you AIDS.
One last thing. Although I don’t condone the murder under any circumstances, if you are going to kill someone for God’s sake don’t tell anyone about it. All of this should be our little secret.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
A Good List
I love a good list. Unfortunately, music lists always seem to take into account what the compiler thinks is “important” or “authentic” or “good.” I prefer to think of music on more shallow terms. Here is a music-oriented best/worst-of list that has nothing to do with music.
Greatest Song Title: “Killed by Death” – Motörhead
Most Hideously Deformed: Joey Ramone
Least Charismatic: Steely Dan
Most Dangerous: Phil Spector
Gayest Song: “Go West” – The Pet Shop Boys
Worst Hair: Art Garfunkel
Silliest Lyricist: Donovan
Fewest Female Fans: Rush
Best Albino: Edgar Winter
Greatest Song Title: “Killed by Death” – Motörhead
Most Hideously Deformed: Joey Ramone
Least Charismatic: Steely Dan
Most Dangerous: Phil Spector
Gayest Song: “Go West” – The Pet Shop Boys
Worst Hair: Art Garfunkel
Silliest Lyricist: Donovan
Fewest Female Fans: Rush
Best Albino: Edgar Winter
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Come the Revolution
Do you remember the welfare queens? An obnoxiously pervasive meme in the 1990’s, welfare queens was a term used to refer to chronically-unemployed women relying on public assistance to support their illegitimate children. While I doubt he coined it, I most closely associate the expression with Rush Limbaugh, probably because of his penchant for gross insensitivity.
So last week at an undisclosed time and in an undisclosed location, I was tacitly participating in a conversation (i.e. eavesdropping) which, in an unwelcome blast from the past, turned to the topic of welfare queens. More specifically, how the government shouldn’t expect good, hard-working Americans to support a bunch of women who function as little more than incubators of future criminals. It must be said that the undisclosed individual who voiced this opinion – far less poetically than I, I might add – is a white person from an admittedly privileged background.
This was the first time I’d thought about welfare queens in years, and with good reason. There’s really no such thing. Here’s a brief history of the welfare queen: at some point in the past 20 or 30 years, a cynical politico got tired of beating off to the collected works of Milton Friedman. As an alternate activity, he perused the papers until he found a story, very possibly apocryphal, concerning one woman in one city guilty of abusing the welfare system. The public, reliably stupid as we are, was only too happy to take this example and extrapolate, transforming the woman in question from a lone fraudster into a symbol of a positively endemic economic crisis.
Make no mistake, this woman, if she ever existed, was nothing more than a fraudster disingenuously presented as a typical welfare recipient. The problem wasn’t that our Jane Doe was collecting checks with no intention of becoming gainfully employed. The problem was that she was a criminal, and welfare fraud is a job in and of itself. Jane Doe is only entitled to one check, so if she’s looking for more than that she’ll need to develop a few aliases and obtain fake identification documents for each. She’s going to have to become an expert forger, able to convincingly disguise her handwriting. She will be obliged to traveling extensively throughout her city and state. Who knows, she might even need some disguises.
The number of people this committed to bilking the government out of taxpayer dollars in order to avoid working is most assuredly negligible. At least 99.9% of people receiving welfare do so legally and legally obtained public assistance is hardly generous enough to facilitate a life in the lap of luxury. Believe me when I tell you that a woman relying on welfare to support herself and her children is not indulging in champagne wishes and caviar dreams; she’s living in Section 8 housing and going without in order to give her kid a toy dump truck next Christmas. Also believe me when I tell you that if economic regulation were such that this woman could make more money performing unskilled labor than receiving a check from the government, she’d be working the fryer at McDonald’s as we speak.
In the interest of full disclosure, I myself am a white person from a privileged background and all I know about public assistance I learned in the pursuit of a fancy economics degree. This means that I do not understand what it’s like to be genuinely poor. I know what it’s like to be college-student poor, and I know what it’s like to be young-adult poor, but for-real poor is way beyond my scope. What I do know is that being for-real poor fucking sucks and nasty remarks from assholes like me are not helpful. The person whose defaming comments inspired this entry is insufficiently empathetic, and that’s not OK.
I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to argue that the American lack of empathy is seriously disturbing. “No free handouts” became the rallying cry of the right during the healthcare debate, and it is as heartless a statement as I’ve ever heard, particularly since they’re not committed to the idea of no free handouts as a principle. They’re committed to the idea of no free handouts for other people, but they’ll readily accept whatever the government tosses at them. House on fire? Dial 911. No garden hose can handle that. Kids in public school? Absolutely. Who can spring for a $15,000/year prep school? Affordable healthcare for poor people? Let ‘em die.
It is incumbent upon the fortunate to work to improve the lives of the unfortunate, and it’s heartening to see people, affected by the recession, coming around to this way of thinking. Acquisition is not the basis of a functional society, and greed is not good. You should feel sad when you see a homeless person wearing a thin coat in the middle of winter. You should feel sad when a bright kid can’t attend college. You should feel sad when you come across an emaciated dog in an alley. The well-being of other living creatures should matter to you. If it doesn’t, fine, but don’t be surprised when you find yourself on the wrong end of a proletarian revolution.
So last week at an undisclosed time and in an undisclosed location, I was tacitly participating in a conversation (i.e. eavesdropping) which, in an unwelcome blast from the past, turned to the topic of welfare queens. More specifically, how the government shouldn’t expect good, hard-working Americans to support a bunch of women who function as little more than incubators of future criminals. It must be said that the undisclosed individual who voiced this opinion – far less poetically than I, I might add – is a white person from an admittedly privileged background.
This was the first time I’d thought about welfare queens in years, and with good reason. There’s really no such thing. Here’s a brief history of the welfare queen: at some point in the past 20 or 30 years, a cynical politico got tired of beating off to the collected works of Milton Friedman. As an alternate activity, he perused the papers until he found a story, very possibly apocryphal, concerning one woman in one city guilty of abusing the welfare system. The public, reliably stupid as we are, was only too happy to take this example and extrapolate, transforming the woman in question from a lone fraudster into a symbol of a positively endemic economic crisis.
Make no mistake, this woman, if she ever existed, was nothing more than a fraudster disingenuously presented as a typical welfare recipient. The problem wasn’t that our Jane Doe was collecting checks with no intention of becoming gainfully employed. The problem was that she was a criminal, and welfare fraud is a job in and of itself. Jane Doe is only entitled to one check, so if she’s looking for more than that she’ll need to develop a few aliases and obtain fake identification documents for each. She’s going to have to become an expert forger, able to convincingly disguise her handwriting. She will be obliged to traveling extensively throughout her city and state. Who knows, she might even need some disguises.
The number of people this committed to bilking the government out of taxpayer dollars in order to avoid working is most assuredly negligible. At least 99.9% of people receiving welfare do so legally and legally obtained public assistance is hardly generous enough to facilitate a life in the lap of luxury. Believe me when I tell you that a woman relying on welfare to support herself and her children is not indulging in champagne wishes and caviar dreams; she’s living in Section 8 housing and going without in order to give her kid a toy dump truck next Christmas. Also believe me when I tell you that if economic regulation were such that this woman could make more money performing unskilled labor than receiving a check from the government, she’d be working the fryer at McDonald’s as we speak.
In the interest of full disclosure, I myself am a white person from a privileged background and all I know about public assistance I learned in the pursuit of a fancy economics degree. This means that I do not understand what it’s like to be genuinely poor. I know what it’s like to be college-student poor, and I know what it’s like to be young-adult poor, but for-real poor is way beyond my scope. What I do know is that being for-real poor fucking sucks and nasty remarks from assholes like me are not helpful. The person whose defaming comments inspired this entry is insufficiently empathetic, and that’s not OK.
I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to argue that the American lack of empathy is seriously disturbing. “No free handouts” became the rallying cry of the right during the healthcare debate, and it is as heartless a statement as I’ve ever heard, particularly since they’re not committed to the idea of no free handouts as a principle. They’re committed to the idea of no free handouts for other people, but they’ll readily accept whatever the government tosses at them. House on fire? Dial 911. No garden hose can handle that. Kids in public school? Absolutely. Who can spring for a $15,000/year prep school? Affordable healthcare for poor people? Let ‘em die.
It is incumbent upon the fortunate to work to improve the lives of the unfortunate, and it’s heartening to see people, affected by the recession, coming around to this way of thinking. Acquisition is not the basis of a functional society, and greed is not good. You should feel sad when you see a homeless person wearing a thin coat in the middle of winter. You should feel sad when a bright kid can’t attend college. You should feel sad when you come across an emaciated dog in an alley. The well-being of other living creatures should matter to you. If it doesn’t, fine, but don’t be surprised when you find yourself on the wrong end of a proletarian revolution.
Friday, June 11, 2010
More Musings From Her Majesty's Realm
In yesterday’s entry I implied that I, along with my fellow countrymen, cannot or will not take Britain seriously. This was somewhat dishonest on my part. It’s undoubtedly true that the rest of America remains defiantly apathetic to the British people and their way of life, but I myself have been an avowed anglophile for well over a decade, having greatly enjoyed my trips overseas in spite of the rain, the mad cow disease, and the horsey transvestites. My most recent visit to the UK was about 7 years ago when my parents took me to Yorkshire. While there, I laid eyes on something so strange, so improbable, I have yet to wrap my brain around it: full English breakfast in a can.
All of our previous voyages to the UK had centered around London, where a car would have been little more than a hindrance. This time, however, the plan was to set up base camp in York, and from there to take daytrips to surrounding areas. It was thusly determined that a vehicle would come in handy.
For an American, a car journey in England consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. It doesn’t help that the whole of Yorkshire smells like shit. The primary problem with driving in Britain is obviously their road dyslexia. The secondary problem is that they have no qualms about making their two-way streets wide enough for only one car. They only exacerbate the threat of a head-on collision by erecting quaint stone walls along either side of every country lane, ensuring that no one can pull off the road and into safety.
Terror notwithstanding, in Britain the ordinary trappings of car travel remain. On one of our daytrips, we stopped for gas somewhere outside of York, giving us a fantastic opportunity to stretch our legs and get a good whiff of poop. While my parents got down to the business of filling up the tank, I wandered into the little gas station convenience store to examine their edible wares.
I must say that trolling supermarkets abroad is one of life’s great pleasures, and probably the single best way to come to grips with a country and its people. I thought my previous trips to Tesco and Asda and Sainsbury’s had adequately prepared me for the eccentricities of the British diet, but I was wrong. Really, once you get down to it, British supermarkets are disappointingly comparable to their American counterparts. Sure, they have the audacity to refer to frozen meat nuggets as “faggots,” but the basics are the same – fruits, vegetables, milk, bread, etc.
Not so British convenience stores. They must sell the requisite soft drinks and salty snacks and candy bars, but I really couldn’t say for sure. In my memory, this little store’s shelves were empty, except for a single innocuous-looking can shrouded in a strange and beautiful light. Upon closer inspection, I was positively floored to discover that this can advertised itself as containing a full English breakfast.
The English value breakfast because their other meals are so universally foul, and they consider the full English to be the absolute pinnacle of breakfast treats. Ingredients vary based on personal preference as well as region, but a full English generally consists of bacon, sausage, eggs, fried bread, mushrooms, a grilled tomato, and beans. All this in a can. It blew my mind.
I still wonder about the bread. I get the rest of it. Let me rephrase that. I don’t get why this product exists or why anyone would consume it, but I get that pork products, eggs, and vegetables mixed with beans would form a thoroughly unappealing brown mush whose component parts have been compacted out of all recognition and that this mush could be suitably preserved in a can. The mystery of the bread, however, lives on. My best guess: croutons.
The mystery lives on because we left that gas station empty-handed. I did submit to my parents that it would be a grave mistake to drive off without a specimen, but one of them dismissed my suggestion as absurd. Today, burning with a curiosity no less intense than mine, neither mother nor father wishes to admit guilt. Sadly, lacking the funds necessary to return to England I have little choice but to move on, though I continue to wonder what might have been…
All of our previous voyages to the UK had centered around London, where a car would have been little more than a hindrance. This time, however, the plan was to set up base camp in York, and from there to take daytrips to surrounding areas. It was thusly determined that a vehicle would come in handy.
For an American, a car journey in England consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. It doesn’t help that the whole of Yorkshire smells like shit. The primary problem with driving in Britain is obviously their road dyslexia. The secondary problem is that they have no qualms about making their two-way streets wide enough for only one car. They only exacerbate the threat of a head-on collision by erecting quaint stone walls along either side of every country lane, ensuring that no one can pull off the road and into safety.
Terror notwithstanding, in Britain the ordinary trappings of car travel remain. On one of our daytrips, we stopped for gas somewhere outside of York, giving us a fantastic opportunity to stretch our legs and get a good whiff of poop. While my parents got down to the business of filling up the tank, I wandered into the little gas station convenience store to examine their edible wares.
I must say that trolling supermarkets abroad is one of life’s great pleasures, and probably the single best way to come to grips with a country and its people. I thought my previous trips to Tesco and Asda and Sainsbury’s had adequately prepared me for the eccentricities of the British diet, but I was wrong. Really, once you get down to it, British supermarkets are disappointingly comparable to their American counterparts. Sure, they have the audacity to refer to frozen meat nuggets as “faggots,” but the basics are the same – fruits, vegetables, milk, bread, etc.
Not so British convenience stores. They must sell the requisite soft drinks and salty snacks and candy bars, but I really couldn’t say for sure. In my memory, this little store’s shelves were empty, except for a single innocuous-looking can shrouded in a strange and beautiful light. Upon closer inspection, I was positively floored to discover that this can advertised itself as containing a full English breakfast.
The English value breakfast because their other meals are so universally foul, and they consider the full English to be the absolute pinnacle of breakfast treats. Ingredients vary based on personal preference as well as region, but a full English generally consists of bacon, sausage, eggs, fried bread, mushrooms, a grilled tomato, and beans. All this in a can. It blew my mind.
I still wonder about the bread. I get the rest of it. Let me rephrase that. I don’t get why this product exists or why anyone would consume it, but I get that pork products, eggs, and vegetables mixed with beans would form a thoroughly unappealing brown mush whose component parts have been compacted out of all recognition and that this mush could be suitably preserved in a can. The mystery of the bread, however, lives on. My best guess: croutons.
The mystery lives on because we left that gas station empty-handed. I did submit to my parents that it would be a grave mistake to drive off without a specimen, but one of them dismissed my suggestion as absurd. Today, burning with a curiosity no less intense than mine, neither mother nor father wishes to admit guilt. Sadly, lacking the funds necessary to return to England I have little choice but to move on, though I continue to wonder what might have been…
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Blimey! There's a New Prime Minister
The UK is not part of America. This may sound obvious, but I bring it up because despite knowing better, a little part of me suspects that when America turns its back, Britain ceases to be. I acknowledge that this is a stupid thing to think and thinking it makes me a stupid person, but I suspect my fellow American plebes are with me.
I got to thinking about this because the name of the new British Prime Minister, a name I’ve most definitely seen and heard dozens of times, escapes me. For reasons I never bothered to understand, the most recent election in Britain was so special American news organizations deigned to cover it. The interest was short-lived. Once whoever won, won, buried deep within US papers was a forgettable photo of yet another chinless wonder named Lord Snootinghamtottenshire, and we reverted back to our natural state of indifference toward their political landscape.
Yet even though we’re no longer looking, even though we couldn’t possibly care less, this guy still exists. Not only that, he’s still a major world leader. Did you know that there have been Prime Ministers other than Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher? Neither did I, but there must have been.
In case you’re wondering, Wikipedia reports that the current British Prime Minister is named David Cameron, not Lord Snootinghamtottenshire, and the photo clearly indicates a chin.
I got to thinking about this because the name of the new British Prime Minister, a name I’ve most definitely seen and heard dozens of times, escapes me. For reasons I never bothered to understand, the most recent election in Britain was so special American news organizations deigned to cover it. The interest was short-lived. Once whoever won, won, buried deep within US papers was a forgettable photo of yet another chinless wonder named Lord Snootinghamtottenshire, and we reverted back to our natural state of indifference toward their political landscape.
Yet even though we’re no longer looking, even though we couldn’t possibly care less, this guy still exists. Not only that, he’s still a major world leader. Did you know that there have been Prime Ministers other than Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher? Neither did I, but there must have been.
In case you’re wondering, Wikipedia reports that the current British Prime Minister is named David Cameron, not Lord Snootinghamtottenshire, and the photo clearly indicates a chin.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
True Crime Revisited
I am obsessed with true crime shows. Not casually obsessed, autistic obsessed and I’m pissed because I wouldn’t suffer from this condition had my parents done away with all that vaccination nonsense and just let me die.
Now I have a lot to say about true crime shows and the criminal justice system and how I could probably commit the perfect murder if I weren’t such a pussy, so I could theoretically take this post in any number of different directions, but I have on my mind one thing: the disappearance and subsequent murder of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, her mongoloid son and granddaughter.
For those of you not hip to the true crime scene, Madalyn Murray O’Hair founded an organization called the American Atheists and as such was once dubbed “the most hated woman in America,” a description so good it’s been affixed to her name in print ever since. I’m not sure whether people hate atheists or confrontational women (why not both?), but speaking as a feminist and an atheist I can assure you she was objectively unlikeable. So it came as no surprise when, in 1995, this professional shit-stirrer, along with two creepily devoted family members, went missing.
Of course upon hearing of the family’s disappearance, atheists across the country set to work concocting a whole slew of theories implicating those zany fundamentalists in a variety of intricate kidnapping schemes. Although only a stupid person could have seriously speculated about the Vatican’s possible involvement, the majority of the atheists’ theories seemed pretty plausible. After all, in this increasingly modern society, Americans retain the right to talk shit about non-believers and Canadians with absolute impunity even though all right-thinking people know that only Canadians deserve it.
The theories may not have been crazy, but they were wrong. Theories generally are. Why heed the principle of Occam’s razor when elaborate conspiracies involving sexual perversions and international espionage are so much more fun? In the end we learned that the Pope hadn’t driven off into the sunset with the Murray O’Hairs stuffed into the trunk of the Popemobile, however captivating an image that may be. Rather, a disgruntled former employee of the American Atheists and a couple of henchmen carried out a simple extortion and murder plot. Revenge is a disappointingly prosaic motive I know, but sadly truth is seldom stranger than fiction.
Overall, this particular show was as predictable as the crime itself. It was nothing special, but it stuck with me because I’m ashamed and saddened that my fellow non-believers allowed such a grotesque spectacle of a woman to be our spokesperson. If ever a wholesome godless family existed in the public imagination, it’s been supplanted by the Murray O’Hairs, a godless family of freaks. There’s not a doubt in my mind that these people set back the atheist cause, and I’d like to posthumously cross them off of our roster.
So I hereby officially declare that Madalyn Murray O’Hair has been ejected from the irreligious fold. In the interest of fairness and because I appear to end all of my blog entries with lists, below you will find some excommunication suggestions for a few major world religions. Conspicuous in their absence are the Scientologists, but I’ve excluded them because, as a for-profit religion (i.e. cult), they’re not big on excommunication.
To be dispatched:
Catholics: Mel Gibson
Protestants: Jerry Falwell
Jews: Bernie Madoff
Muslims: Osama Bin Laden
Mormons: Marie Osmond – Prior to excommunicating anyone, however, the Mormons have to divulge the secrets of their special underpants.
Hindus: M. Night Shyamalan
Buddhists: Steven Seagal
Now I have a lot to say about true crime shows and the criminal justice system and how I could probably commit the perfect murder if I weren’t such a pussy, so I could theoretically take this post in any number of different directions, but I have on my mind one thing: the disappearance and subsequent murder of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, her mongoloid son and granddaughter.
For those of you not hip to the true crime scene, Madalyn Murray O’Hair founded an organization called the American Atheists and as such was once dubbed “the most hated woman in America,” a description so good it’s been affixed to her name in print ever since. I’m not sure whether people hate atheists or confrontational women (why not both?), but speaking as a feminist and an atheist I can assure you she was objectively unlikeable. So it came as no surprise when, in 1995, this professional shit-stirrer, along with two creepily devoted family members, went missing.
Of course upon hearing of the family’s disappearance, atheists across the country set to work concocting a whole slew of theories implicating those zany fundamentalists in a variety of intricate kidnapping schemes. Although only a stupid person could have seriously speculated about the Vatican’s possible involvement, the majority of the atheists’ theories seemed pretty plausible. After all, in this increasingly modern society, Americans retain the right to talk shit about non-believers and Canadians with absolute impunity even though all right-thinking people know that only Canadians deserve it.
The theories may not have been crazy, but they were wrong. Theories generally are. Why heed the principle of Occam’s razor when elaborate conspiracies involving sexual perversions and international espionage are so much more fun? In the end we learned that the Pope hadn’t driven off into the sunset with the Murray O’Hairs stuffed into the trunk of the Popemobile, however captivating an image that may be. Rather, a disgruntled former employee of the American Atheists and a couple of henchmen carried out a simple extortion and murder plot. Revenge is a disappointingly prosaic motive I know, but sadly truth is seldom stranger than fiction.
Overall, this particular show was as predictable as the crime itself. It was nothing special, but it stuck with me because I’m ashamed and saddened that my fellow non-believers allowed such a grotesque spectacle of a woman to be our spokesperson. If ever a wholesome godless family existed in the public imagination, it’s been supplanted by the Murray O’Hairs, a godless family of freaks. There’s not a doubt in my mind that these people set back the atheist cause, and I’d like to posthumously cross them off of our roster.
So I hereby officially declare that Madalyn Murray O’Hair has been ejected from the irreligious fold. In the interest of fairness and because I appear to end all of my blog entries with lists, below you will find some excommunication suggestions for a few major world religions. Conspicuous in their absence are the Scientologists, but I’ve excluded them because, as a for-profit religion (i.e. cult), they’re not big on excommunication.
To be dispatched:
Catholics: Mel Gibson
Protestants: Jerry Falwell
Jews: Bernie Madoff
Muslims: Osama Bin Laden
Mormons: Marie Osmond – Prior to excommunicating anyone, however, the Mormons have to divulge the secrets of their special underpants.
Hindus: M. Night Shyamalan
Buddhists: Steven Seagal
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)