OddNow

Friday, February 8, 2008

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I apologize to those who expected the conclusion to the Hotbodypeebed story today. I just finished writing it and then I lost my internet connection -- stupid blogger didn't save! I don't feel like rewriting it tonight, so please come back in the next couple of days . . .

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

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Hotbodypeebed -- unabridged

This is the story of my most memorable date. When I tell it in person, I spin it to make myself look good, and/or I adjust it for the audience -- but, I'll try to recount the complete version here.

A good friend of mine had a contract job where he met a guy named Rudy. Rudy is a lawyer from New York who moved to Denver in order to break into legislation. That move doesn't make a ton of sense. That's like thinking: "I'd like to get good at riding horses, so I think I'll eat more M&Ms" -- random. (Ooh -- Bob Dole is on Steven Colbert . . . I'll be back . . . I lean leftish, but Bob Dole is a funny man. Okay -- it's over.) Okay, so Rudy . . . Where Rudy's professional instincts were a little haywire, his instincts for finding shallow sex were top flight. Which is all the more impressive because he had a vibe that could creep girls out. Maybe those traits go together -- I don't know. I liked Rudy, don't get me wrong, and I was intrigued by his method.

See, Rudy would go on myspace and find a girl he thought was cute. He'd read the page and learn some fact about her. Then he would write a message and challenge her. (i.e. if she liked old Nintendo games, he would tell her that he was better than any girl at any Nintendo game.) The girl would usually write back, they'd go out, and he'd try to get her in bed. The closer he got to sleeping with a girl, the higher he would place her among his friends on his myspace page. So the girls he was sleeping with would be at the top and the girls he was just meeting for the first time were at the bottom. When girls hear about this method, they tend to think Rudy is scuzzy. I don't know why that should be inherently true -- but that's a different story. Ultimate shallow sex notwithstanding, no matter how the guy interacts with a girl once they have started dating, the WAY that Rudy MEETS women doesn't have any ethical problems as far as I can tell. So, I decided to try it.

I found a hot red-headed girl who said she was smart. As a rule, I tend to like people who think they are smart. It makes life easier. You don't have to dumb anything down. If you disagree with them, you don't have to worry that they will take it personally -- a person who is secure in his or her own wattage is generally willing to hear other points of view. There is a weird taboo in our society about acknowledging ones own intelligence. You can be proud of physical strength. You can be proud of physical appearance. You can be proud of professional success. But, if you SAY that you are smart, people will take that as an insult. Somehow the popular translation of "I am smart" is "you are dumb." People are sensitive about "smart." But, if you say that you are smart to a person who thinks that he or she is smart -- that person doesn't care what you think of your own intelligence. So, I wrote to this girl and I said "Oh yeah? How smart?" And, dig it -- Rudy was right -- she wrote back.

To be continued.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

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Sunken continents are great.

Atlantis is fairly well known, but there are others. Lemuria and Moo (sometimes Mu) were cool too. Lemuria was the original home of the ring-tailed Lemur (best animal ever) and connected India to Madagascar. It was destroyed because its pseudo-human denizens got into animal sex and pissed off the gods. I'm not saying that I advocate sex with animals, but just because the inhabitants had some unsavory habits doesn't mean that the place wasn't interesting. It had lemurs in abundance! And, frankly, back then, gods were really flood happy, so until I hear both sides of the story, I don't think it's crazy to think that they overreacted. (Similarly, I think we can all agree with the luxury of hindsight (ha!) that Sodomy, got a REALLY bad rap.) I don't know much about Moo, but come on, it's called MOO -- the people living there MUST have been funny.

But, Atlantis gets the press . . . and for good reason. We've all had successes in our lives. Graduations. Promotions. Certificates. One night stands. But, very few people have had the kind over-the-top-of-the-food-chain success that Atlantis enjoyed at it's height. Wizard kings. Advanced technology. Lovely vistas. Shiny buildings. So, when the whole descent into the brine happened, conventional wisdom tells us that Atlantis was going to take it hard. (The best American example of this sort of absolute drop off that I can think of is Mike Tyson: I just watched a youtube about his best knock-outs . . . that guy was awesome; now he's really sad and spends most of his time with pigeons.) Ancient Rome wasn't even as amazing as Atlantis, but when Rome fell, what'd we get? Dark Ages. When the irresistible tides came for Atlantis though, Atlantis didn't get down -- not figuratively anyway -- Atlantis got better! That civilization didn't give up. It learned to breathe underwater. Or, alternatively, it learned to build a big bubble that mimics the atmosphere of the earth's surface. Either way, it did the impossible, and it did it fast. (Not to mention the taming of giant sea-horses and marine life telepathy.) THEY say that we should take lemons and make lemonade -- but, that's not a very ambitious platitude. Lemons aren't THAT bad in the first place and lemonade isn't THAT much better. But, taking an overwhelming natural catastrophe and making a utopia that challenges our perception of what is possible . . . much more impressive.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

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I don't really believe in childhood -- or, anyway, not the conventional understanding of childhood. But, that said, the 80s were the best decade to be a "kid" in the history of the world. My contemporaries and I are not part of the most culturally powerful generation living right now, but we are the beneficiaries of the most powerful generation.

The baby-boomers have been everything -- they were the baby-boomers to start in the 50s, then they were the hippies in the 60s, then they were the yuppies in the 80s -- by the 90s they ruled the world. One might argue that this pattern applies to every demographic over the course of a century -- except it doesn't. My cousins who were born in the early 70s didn't get a title. (eventually they were generation X, but that's not REALLY a designation, it's just a recognition of their angst over not having an identity -- and that doesn't count.) The children of the 80s aren't really anything either, but when the all-powerful baby-boomers were focused on little-kids, we WERE those little kids. So, our cereal was filled with marsh-mellows, our mornings were filled with cartoons, and ninjas were everywhere.

So, there was the baby-boomer thing. Also, there was a lucky confluence of media forces. The Production of cartoons transitioned from studios with strict codes of morality to toy companies who just wanted to sell toys. The result was that creators had almost unchecked freedom so long as they kept the toy brands front and center. Cartoons got really weird and violent and awesome. But, because the creators had, themselves, grown up thinking about stories with strong narratives, the commercial aspect of their programs was just the McGuffin. (By contrast, the people who were writing Pokemon grew up watching Transformers, so they were much more comfortable with the shilling aspect of cartoons than they were with the story part -- they didn't bother with heart or content . . . so Pokemon sucked.)

I have more to say about the 80s, so in that spirit, I'll have a sequel . . .

Sunday, January 27, 2008

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We are not ready for time machines. Before anyone even tries to rev up a time machine, he or she had better have a working teleportation machine. It's imperative that the teleportation technology has all of the bugs worked out. (Ha! That was a totally accidental joke! Honest, I didn't intend that . . . See, cause the Fly was about a "bug" in a teleportation -- get it?) I got in a big nerdy argument about this with a friend of mine a few years ago. He didn't think that a teleportation machine was necessary. I never have understood his point of view. Let me explain my thinking . . . Okay, so say you are sitting in your time machine on January 27th 2008; the flux capacitor is blinking; if you have the kind that looks like a big clock, then maybe you are winding it up; you haven't used it before, so you are just going to do a short test run -- not ancient Egypt or anything -- just 24 hours in the future; you don't want to end up getting hit by a car when you appear in the future, so you're out in the great salt flats or something like that; you turn the ignition or put coal in the furnace or meditate or whatever you have to do, and you plan to appear in the exact same spot, but one day in the future -- January 28th . . . You have made a terrible miscalculation. If it works, if you go 24 hours forward in time, but remain in the exact same spot, you would appear IN SPACE. In 24 hours THE EARTH would have moved. So, if you go to the same spot -- trouble. Thus, I think that in addition to a time machine, it's necessary to have a teleportation machine that zaps you to a safe location. That seems so obvious to me, but people disagree with me about stuff like that all the time. Am I missing something? (You know, other than science I mean.)

I ought to do something about my science/sorta-science credibility problem. Unlike L. Ron Hubbard, I don't strike people as believable. I thought that I had an awesome trivia question, and when I explained the answer AND my Nova program source, I STILL got flack. The question was: from the time it's created, how long does it take light to get from the Sun to the Earth? It's a great question because everyone will say 8 minutes. But, that's wrong. From the time that a photon is CREATED it spends MILLIONS OF YEARS bouncing around in the sun before it actually starts the trip to our planet (which takes 8 minutes). The criticism that I got was that the photon changes forms while it's in the sun, so it doesn't count as light. That strikes me as bullshit. First of all, I'm not even sure if that's true. Second of all, so what if it does change form -- it only counts as light if it's exactly the way it is when it gets to us? How do I know that it doesn't change form at minute one two or three during its journey from the sun to the earth. Also, people always talk about black holes and say that "even light can't escape" -- surely the "light" heading into the black hole is under conditions that are comparable in intensity to its experience during the week before it leaves the sun -- yet everyone counts the black hole stuff as light. I think the truth is that people are very proud of their knowledge tid-bits, and when they don't get a chance to show off, they flip out.

Or maybe people just want to wipe that smug look off of my face. Bitches.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

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Anger is fun! Everyone tries to downplay this fact. (Driving drunk has a similar stigma.) To be honest, I resist the joys of anger myself. But, anger MUST be fun. Huge crowds of people pretend to be really stupid so that they have an excuse to be mad. That's evidence. For example -- several years ago, I was watching the Ricki Lake show, right? (The topic might have been "Drop that Zero and Get with a Hero," or something like that. I think that was a common Ricki topic . . . though, in retrospect, that might have been more Jenny Jones. Maury did the paternity tests, so that wasn't his topic. Montel rarely rhymed. I guess it doesn't really matter.) There was a girl on the stage who was complaining that her boyfriend was exactly like the stereotype of Puerto Rican men. (I didn't know that there WAS a stereotype about Puerto Rican men before watching that episode. Colorado doesn't have a large Puerto Rican community, so the stereotypes related to Latin America that I heard in my youth are more general. Evidently, the Puerto Rican male stereotype has something to do with being lazy.) So, when the girl said that her boyfriend's behavior resembled the stereotype, Ricki responded by asking -- in a really snarky tone -- "Are you saying that Puerto Ricans are lazy?" The woman OBVIOUSLY didn't say that. I heard her. Ricki heard her. The audience heard her. It's not like her words were spun by pundits or taken out of context. She had JUST spoken. But, the audience went CRAZY. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I'm pretty sure that they were pretending to be stupid. They can't ALL have been that stupid. They just liked being mad. The girl on the stage didn't defend herself -- she just sat their looking glum. I think she was playing dumb too out of courtesy -- she knows how much fun being angry is, so she didn't want to deny the audience its opportunity.

This pattern happens ALL THE TIME. I heard a good example today. John McCain or one of his people or someone must have said that he is the Democrats' "worst nightmare". In response, CNN posed the Ricki Lake-like question: "When a country is evenly divided politically, is it wise to call yourself the opposing party's worst nightmare?" The question wasn't super clear, so ironically, anyone who would fall for it probably isn't smart enough to understand it. The gist, of course, is that independent voters wouldn't want to vote for the WORST nightmare of democrats and that, for the purpose of the general election, McCain should be more centrist. The problem is that McCain almost certainly didn't mean that he is THE MOST reactionary conservative on the planet or that his PRESIDENCY would be the worst democrat nightmare . . . he meant that his CANDIDACY is the worst Democrat nightmare because he has a really good shot at winning . . . duh. But, people love outrage, so there you go.

My favorite example ever happened when I was in high-school. My friends and I were in the drive-through line at Burger King. One of my friends thought that he recognized a girl in the car behind us, so he waved. The driver of the car behind us got out, shouted, "what the fuck?!" and threw a penny at my friend's car. (I always kind of wished that the police had shown up: Now, how did this altercation start? -- well, officer, the guy in front of us smiled and waved, so I had to defend myself -- yes, well that makes sense.) Anger is so much fun that people will Rickilakeify friendly smiles. I should really give it a whirl. The next person who, oh I don't know, has ears in front of me is really in for some trouble!