When an artist dies young, it is typical to hear analyses like, "He was just too smart for this world."
You know the cliches: He was like a comet who shot across the sky for a moment and disappeared. The brightest stars burn out fastest. How could someone so brilliant endure such a mediocre world?
This begs the question, should brilliant people be expected to die young?
Einstein lived into his 70s
Bohr - 77
Newton lived into his 80s
Tesla, who neglected to invent any health-boosting smoothies, survived until 86. (once again beating Marconi, who despite his own burdensome brilliance managed to live into his 60s)
Edison - 84
Aristotle - 60s
Galileo - 77
Confucius - 70s
al-Khwarizmi - 70
Curie - 66 (the radioactivity her brilliance allowed her to study did her in, and she still lived more than six decades)
Schopenhauer - 72
Copernicus - 70
Buddha - 80ish
Kepler - almost 60
The people who figured out what comets are managed to live long and prosper, but not the people that are compared to comets? Speaking of burning, the inventor of the Bunsen burner died at 88.
Am I clouding matters by not focusing exclusively on artists? No problem, let's focus on those sensitive folks with the artistic temperament. After all, we know they're destined to flame out early.
Michelangelo saw 88
Frank Lloyd Wright saw his 90s
Matisse - 80s
Kurosawa - 88
Michelangelo - 88
Rembrandt - 60s
Tolstoy - 82
Franz Liszt, who lived like a rock star before there were rock stars, lived into his 70s.
Da Vinci - 60s
Picasso hit 91
Miles Davis - 65
Dante - 56
Donatello...79 or 80
Dumas - 68
Many of these people lived in eras where life expectancy was well lower than it is today, and they still lived far beyond what could be called their youth. Several dynamos who died youngish, Austen, Mozart, Chopin, Raphael, died of natural causes. Inconveniently, Mozart was not found dead in a whorehouse surrounded by opium and quill-penned suicide notes. Chopin didn't throw himself in front of a horse-drawn carriage because some asshole in a bar failed to "get" him. The evidence shows these gone-too-soons wanted to carry on.
Pythagoras dulled his brain enough to make it to 75, but Sid Vicious, a man so untalented the band stopped plugging in his bass, burned too brightly? Goethe suppressed his genius enough to fight through 30,000 days, but James Dean, a Keebler Elf who plodded through all of three movies, was too special to cut it in this world? Plato resisted the temptation to hang himself with his toga and died at 80, but Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose paintings are indistinguishable from a infant's bib after a spoonful of Gerber, had no choice but to call it a day at 27? Sounds a little fishy to this genius.
The average age at which Nobel Laureates receive their awards is 59. There is no 27 Club in the Nobel club (even if Nobel Laureates did die young, they still wouldn't leave good looking corpses).
The "brilliant people die young" idea seems a very rock 'n' roll, youth culture idea. We take for granted how much easier it is to survive nowadays, making early death more romantic. As recently as the 19th Century, an open window during the wrong season could snuff one out. When staying alive isn't a given, a person who dies at 27 is just an unlucky stiff, not an automatic Canon Enhancer.
It is poetic to quote Lao Tzu, "The flame that burns twice as bright lasts half as long," (Lao Tzu lived to be 74, by the way), but the myth doesn't hold up under scrutiny. The famously dead weren't too brilliant to endure. They were too damaged to endure. Not all damaged people are brilliant. If that were true, Mensa and Alcoholics Anonymous would simply merge.
"Hi, I'm Fred."
Hi Fred!
"I'm an alcoholic. And my IQ is 152."
Showing posts with label misanthrope with a microscope. Show all posts
Showing posts with label misanthrope with a microscope. Show all posts
Sunday, December 11, 2016
Thursday, November 3, 2016
The Biggest Conspiracy Theory of My Lifetime? Saddam has WMDs
The New York Times is bemoaning "conspiracy theories" generated by the Internet Age. It is true that technology makes it easy and cheap to spread the fraudulent and the half-baked. Trouble is, the NYT and other establishment media spreads steady misinformation too, and even uses the Internet to do it (Tom Friedman has a Twitter account, need I say more?).
The Iraq Invasion was built on conspiracy theories promulgated by esteemed outlets like the NYT (plus WaPo, WSJ, the Economist, etc.). Did the NYT's Tom Friedman, Bill Keller, and David Brooks or WaPo's Richard Cohen, or any of the other conspiracy spreaders get fired once everything they said was proven untrue? No. Other than the NYT's Judith Miller, no one took a fall.
Joe Scarborough was on MSNBC then, is still there now, and is probably a bigger celebrity today than he was when he was spreading conspiracies about Iraq's weapons program. The list of misinformers is long enough to fill six Wikipedias. I think Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert owe much of their success to the spectacular failure of the "respectable" media with respect to Iraq.
The legacy media loved social media and the Internet in '08 when it helped their candidate win. The very idea that Obama was an "outsider" organically foisted to prominence via grassroots Internet support is itself misinformation spread by outlets like the Times.
The mostly imaginary "Arab Spring," with its goofy narrative of a grassroots, democratic Mideast revolution largely ignited by social media - was another Internet-focused conspiracy theory spread by the establishment press. I am not aware of any establishment hacks getting the boot for promoting that turkey-on-wheels.
Amazingly (but unsurprisingly), the traditional press was too clueless to recognize that the same tools they claimed were behind their preferred brand of popular movement could also be used to abet popular movements anathema to them. Such anopia might help explain why so many of them have been unprofitable for years.
On Twitter: @greatmikepayne
The Iraq Invasion was built on conspiracy theories promulgated by esteemed outlets like the NYT (plus WaPo, WSJ, the Economist, etc.). Did the NYT's Tom Friedman, Bill Keller, and David Brooks or WaPo's Richard Cohen, or any of the other conspiracy spreaders get fired once everything they said was proven untrue? No. Other than the NYT's Judith Miller, no one took a fall.
Joe Scarborough was on MSNBC then, is still there now, and is probably a bigger celebrity today than he was when he was spreading conspiracies about Iraq's weapons program. The list of misinformers is long enough to fill six Wikipedias. I think Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert owe much of their success to the spectacular failure of the "respectable" media with respect to Iraq.
The legacy media loved social media and the Internet in '08 when it helped their candidate win. The very idea that Obama was an "outsider" organically foisted to prominence via grassroots Internet support is itself misinformation spread by outlets like the Times.
The mostly imaginary "Arab Spring," with its goofy narrative of a grassroots, democratic Mideast revolution largely ignited by social media - was another Internet-focused conspiracy theory spread by the establishment press. I am not aware of any establishment hacks getting the boot for promoting that turkey-on-wheels.
Amazingly (but unsurprisingly), the traditional press was too clueless to recognize that the same tools they claimed were behind their preferred brand of popular movement could also be used to abet popular movements anathema to them. Such anopia might help explain why so many of them have been unprofitable for years.
On Twitter: @greatmikepayne
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
History repeats, historians are parrots
A historical work of any value should have more question marks than periods. Even then, its scope will be overstated.
Historians, who not coincidentally are often wannabe fiction writers, speak with bottomless confidence about figures who died centuries ago in countries that no longer exist. If historians stuck to recreating the simple, everyday details of those distant, sparsely chronicled lives, it would be daunting enough. That challenge isn't enough for them, however. They seem more driven by a desire to credential themselves as all-knowing psychiatrists, affording them license to assert the precise motivations, impulses, and fetishes of every King Tom, Queen Dick, and Emperor Harry.
With many historical figures, we can't even piece together all the bits of their outer lives (birth dates, birth places, burial spots, etc.), yet historians speak with clinical certainty about their inner lives. A historian will confidently gives us 500 straight pages on Columbus's innermost thoughts, meanwhile, we're not even sure about the color of Columbus's hair (possibly ginger, poor sod - he probably hoped he'd fall off the edge of the Earth). If these goofy suppositions stayed within the circular Hell of tenured hackdom, the collateral damage would be minimal. Alas, this all too assuredly composed historical half-fiction not only gets repeated by other hacks; it trickles down to the masses, sometimes helping shape contemporary opinion on how modern situations - allegedly analogous to past ones - should be handled.
Today some polls show just 6% of Americans trust the media. People don't even trust those reporting in real time on contemporary events. Why then do they trust the reporting on events of foregone millennia?
How many times have you met someone seemingly mousy and tame who said, "You should have seen me in my twenties! I was partying hard, living on the edge, I'm lucky to be here!"
Assuming that person, let's call him Sir John Doe, is telling the truth, had he died in his 20s while partying, a historian would likely profile him as a wild man, then look for clues from his youth about what led to his being a "wild man." If obvious, measurable clues were absent, the historian would simply infer wild leanings from Sir John's Doe's otherwise ordinary behavior.
Assume Sir John Doe survived to become that mousy 30-something and never told anyone about his wild days. Without photographs or arrest records documenting them, what would even cause a historian to dig for evidence of wild days? Unless he stumbled onto folks who knew Sir John Doe then and were forthcoming about his hi-jinks, that wild period would go unreported. The historian would search for other motives for whatever actions Sir John Doe took in his 20s. If Sir John seemed aimless during that time, the historian might assume lack of confidence (after all, he ended up mousy!), when in fact that aimlessness had more to due with being too hungover to accomplish much.
Consider how many different people you've been in your life. Are all those phases equally documented?
When Hillary takes office, the first thing she should do is make it illegal to release a historical film that isn't animated. At least then the viewer might realize the "historical record" is fantasy.
Today some polls show just 6% of Americans trust the media. People don't even trust those reporting in real time on contemporary events. Why then do they trust the reporting on events of foregone millennia?
How many times have you met someone seemingly mousy and tame who said, "You should have seen me in my twenties! I was partying hard, living on the edge, I'm lucky to be here!"
Assuming that person, let's call him Sir John Doe, is telling the truth, had he died in his 20s while partying, a historian would likely profile him as a wild man, then look for clues from his youth about what led to his being a "wild man." If obvious, measurable clues were absent, the historian would simply infer wild leanings from Sir John's Doe's otherwise ordinary behavior.
Assume Sir John Doe survived to become that mousy 30-something and never told anyone about his wild days. Without photographs or arrest records documenting them, what would even cause a historian to dig for evidence of wild days? Unless he stumbled onto folks who knew Sir John Doe then and were forthcoming about his hi-jinks, that wild period would go unreported. The historian would search for other motives for whatever actions Sir John Doe took in his 20s. If Sir John seemed aimless during that time, the historian might assume lack of confidence (after all, he ended up mousy!), when in fact that aimlessness had more to due with being too hungover to accomplish much.
Consider how many different people you've been in your life. Are all those phases equally documented?
When Hillary takes office, the first thing she should do is make it illegal to release a historical film that isn't animated. At least then the viewer might realize the "historical record" is fantasy.
Thursday, September 22, 2016
The Most Sanctimonious Game
I have never shot an animal, which is too bad, because there are many humans I'd like to kill. This means I've never hunted, despite being a meat eater.
I have encountered meat eaters who upon hearing the word "hunt" quiver with more feigned outrage than a white politician running for office in the inner city. In a certain respect, hunters are more honest meat eaters than the rest of us. They're willing to do the dirty work we can't stomach. Not only do we outsource the killing of those tasty vermin, we sometimes throw away meat without even cooking it. "You know, I bought all this chicken, but I just wasn't feeling it this week."
Thanks to your ADD palate, an animal died without even fulfilling the purpose of feeding someone. Talk about senseless violence.
I have sometimes contemplated visiting a farm to slaughter an animal, so that I can at least say I did the dirty work once. I never have, and likely never will, because I love meat and seeing the killing up close would probably turn me off to it forever. So I continue to ignore the means by which that delicious lamb reaches my plate. Pure trophy hunting may be indecent, but otherwise, it is embarrassing for a meat eater to act like hunting is some unfathomable pursuit. Frankly, a deer being hunted in the woods has a much better chance to escape than a captive farm pig grown specifically to complement your mash potatoes.
If you're a meat eater, hunting is not only more honest; it is better sportsmanship.
I have encountered meat eaters who upon hearing the word "hunt" quiver with more feigned outrage than a white politician running for office in the inner city. In a certain respect, hunters are more honest meat eaters than the rest of us. They're willing to do the dirty work we can't stomach. Not only do we outsource the killing of those tasty vermin, we sometimes throw away meat without even cooking it. "You know, I bought all this chicken, but I just wasn't feeling it this week."
Thanks to your ADD palate, an animal died without even fulfilling the purpose of feeding someone. Talk about senseless violence.
I have sometimes contemplated visiting a farm to slaughter an animal, so that I can at least say I did the dirty work once. I never have, and likely never will, because I love meat and seeing the killing up close would probably turn me off to it forever. So I continue to ignore the means by which that delicious lamb reaches my plate. Pure trophy hunting may be indecent, but otherwise, it is embarrassing for a meat eater to act like hunting is some unfathomable pursuit. Frankly, a deer being hunted in the woods has a much better chance to escape than a captive farm pig grown specifically to complement your mash potatoes.
If you're a meat eater, hunting is not only more honest; it is better sportsmanship.
Saturday, April 16, 2016
Black and White Television in HD
Have you heard about that cool new show where the lead character isn't a sociopath indulging all of man's darkest compulsions? How about that hot new sitcom where the characters' social skills don't resemble the Elephant Man on a speed date? If you hear of such shows, please bring them to my attention.
Before "Seinfeld" and "The Sopranos", TV was saccharine in the extreme. Every episode of every sitcom ended with sensitive piano music, followed by someone learning a corny lesson. What flaws TV characters did possess were mostly goofy, and most storylines stayed in ultra benign territory. TV was so sanitized that when a storyline involved something nominally "serious," they advertised it as a "very special" episode. This week on a very special "Blossom", Joey discovers that muscle cars get poor gas mileage. Closeup of Joey saying; "From here to the gas station in is 9.4 seconds? Whoa!"
Now television is a race to the bottom of the ethics barrel. We have moved to the other extreme, where nearly every show is populated with neurotic, amoral losers. Today it wouldn't be "Who shot J.R.?" It'd be "Who sodomized J.R.'s corpse with the murder weapon?" It is fashionable to insist you don't like "black and white" characters. That's fine, except that now all characters are black. The storylines are also uniformly black. Television is as monochrome as ever.
A quick check of the 2015 Emmy Nominees:
Outstanding Drama Series
“Better Call Saul” - Shyster lawyer spin-off of "Breaking Bad", that show about America's favorite murdering, meth-cooking chemistry teacher (the one who became a criminal mastermind in very short order despite no criminal experience)
“Homeland” - "Political" "thriller" where everyone is such a haunted mess they shower by waterboarding themselves
“House of Cards” - Political show focused on nothing but how the political (blood) sausage is made
“Mad Men” - Cynical dispomania soap opera that recreates the Bad Old Days as imagined by someone who finds Bernie Sanders too capitalist. Justifies red meat sex scenes by pretending they are comments on old school infidelity
“Orange is the New Black” - Women's prison drama with episode titles like Tit Punch
“Game of Thrones” - The show most connected to reality on this list is the one with dragons. Still manages to work in rape
Five years from now, these will be the nominees:
"Cunt is the New Bitch"
"Scar Trek"
"The Real Housewives of Auschwitz"
"Coat Hanger, M.D."
"The Guy who Skins 12 People Alive Each Day and Uses Their Flesh for a Slip'N Slide but it's Cool 'Cause He's Gay-friendly"
Contemporary dramas may bulge with cartoon seediness, but at least some are entertaining. Not so with today's comedies. Ivy Leaguers have long dominated TV comedy writing, but they didn't always display a Revenge of the Nerds mentality. Big Nerd has seen to it that even when characters aren't jailbirds or kingpins they have the conversational skills of Robinson Crusoe. The awkward elite are presenting Social Anxiety Disorder as the whole of human discourse. You might say they're bullying us into adopting their worldview.
You know what would be refreshing? A sitcom full of people who don't see a Radiohead song in every aspect of work and dating. Diversity in entertainment is always in the news now; how about some shows written by and about people who can actually speak? Who am I kidding: America isn't ready for a sitcom with complete sentences. Compared to that electing the first black president was a baby step.
One might argue that television is bound to feature exaggerated, uncommon circumstances. The same argument could be made in defense of the exaggerated wholesomeness of yesterday's much scorned tube-tainment.
I expect the next Netflix show to take place in someone's colon. And when the producer is questioned, he'll put on his best Serious Face and declare: "Hey man, everyone has colons, I'm just holding up a mirror."
Before "Seinfeld" and "The Sopranos", TV was saccharine in the extreme. Every episode of every sitcom ended with sensitive piano music, followed by someone learning a corny lesson. What flaws TV characters did possess were mostly goofy, and most storylines stayed in ultra benign territory. TV was so sanitized that when a storyline involved something nominally "serious," they advertised it as a "very special" episode. This week on a very special "Blossom", Joey discovers that muscle cars get poor gas mileage. Closeup of Joey saying; "From here to the gas station in is 9.4 seconds? Whoa!"
Now television is a race to the bottom of the ethics barrel. We have moved to the other extreme, where nearly every show is populated with neurotic, amoral losers. Today it wouldn't be "Who shot J.R.?" It'd be "Who sodomized J.R.'s corpse with the murder weapon?" It is fashionable to insist you don't like "black and white" characters. That's fine, except that now all characters are black. The storylines are also uniformly black. Television is as monochrome as ever.
A quick check of the 2015 Emmy Nominees:
Outstanding Drama Series
“Better Call Saul” - Shyster lawyer spin-off of "Breaking Bad", that show about America's favorite murdering, meth-cooking chemistry teacher (the one who became a criminal mastermind in very short order despite no criminal experience)
“Homeland” - "Political" "thriller" where everyone is such a haunted mess they shower by waterboarding themselves
“House of Cards” - Political show focused on nothing but how the political (blood) sausage is made
“Mad Men” - Cynical dispomania soap opera that recreates the Bad Old Days as imagined by someone who finds Bernie Sanders too capitalist. Justifies red meat sex scenes by pretending they are comments on old school infidelity
“Orange is the New Black” - Women's prison drama with episode titles like Tit Punch
“Game of Thrones” - The show most connected to reality on this list is the one with dragons. Still manages to work in rape
Five years from now, these will be the nominees:
"Cunt is the New Bitch"
"Scar Trek"
"The Real Housewives of Auschwitz"
"Coat Hanger, M.D."
"The Guy who Skins 12 People Alive Each Day and Uses Their Flesh for a Slip'N Slide but it's Cool 'Cause He's Gay-friendly"
Contemporary dramas may bulge with cartoon seediness, but at least some are entertaining. Not so with today's comedies. Ivy Leaguers have long dominated TV comedy writing, but they didn't always display a Revenge of the Nerds mentality. Big Nerd has seen to it that even when characters aren't jailbirds or kingpins they have the conversational skills of Robinson Crusoe. The awkward elite are presenting Social Anxiety Disorder as the whole of human discourse. You might say they're bullying us into adopting their worldview.
You know what would be refreshing? A sitcom full of people who don't see a Radiohead song in every aspect of work and dating. Diversity in entertainment is always in the news now; how about some shows written by and about people who can actually speak? Who am I kidding: America isn't ready for a sitcom with complete sentences. Compared to that electing the first black president was a baby step.
One might argue that television is bound to feature exaggerated, uncommon circumstances. The same argument could be made in defense of the exaggerated wholesomeness of yesterday's much scorned tube-tainment.
I expect the next Netflix show to take place in someone's colon. And when the producer is questioned, he'll put on his best Serious Face and declare: "Hey man, everyone has colons, I'm just holding up a mirror."
Friday, August 7, 2015
Joining the Mile High Club is Less Risky than Joining in Holy Matrimony
I think most of us have points where we act as though statistics alone should conquer all fears, when the truth is they seldom do. If simple standalone stats convinced people, no one would have fallen for the War on Terror - no politician would get elected if voters took stats to heart.
Which brings me to the fear of flying, the only fear guaranteed to get you pelted with smarm-covered stats the moment you bring it up. When you confess you're scared to fly, not only do you get the shopworn "It is much riskier to travel by car and here are some stats I haven't verified and couldn't calculate if my life depended on it," but you're forced to endure this condescension from people who blissfully pursue risks with much worse odds, all the while denying how much risk they're taking. People who get married, for instance.
Almost half of all marriages end in divorce, so the married person claiming that stats should persuade you is himself ignoring the very ominous stats stacked against him. He should be much more worried about his wedding than the flight he'll take to get there. Yes, maybe it is stupid to get nervous on a plane given how low the disaster odds are, but it is far stupider to enter into something with nearly even odds of disaster, where total financial ruin is just a coin toss away.
The odds against a marriage working are a lot like the safety demonstrations you receive at the beginning of a flight - no one pays attention.
Which brings me to the fear of flying, the only fear guaranteed to get you pelted with smarm-covered stats the moment you bring it up. When you confess you're scared to fly, not only do you get the shopworn "It is much riskier to travel by car and here are some stats I haven't verified and couldn't calculate if my life depended on it," but you're forced to endure this condescension from people who blissfully pursue risks with much worse odds, all the while denying how much risk they're taking. People who get married, for instance.
Almost half of all marriages end in divorce, so the married person claiming that stats should persuade you is himself ignoring the very ominous stats stacked against him. He should be much more worried about his wedding than the flight he'll take to get there. Yes, maybe it is stupid to get nervous on a plane given how low the disaster odds are, but it is far stupider to enter into something with nearly even odds of disaster, where total financial ruin is just a coin toss away.
The odds against a marriage working are a lot like the safety demonstrations you receive at the beginning of a flight - no one pays attention.
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Mike Payne overstays on JL Cauvin's podcast again
If you hate Ted Cruz, enjoy hour one. If you hate Cosmo, enjoy hour two.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
China Even Bootlegs American Laws!
Remember all the (often libertarian) China bulls who were telling us about a decade ago that China is more business-friendly than the U.S. Remember hearing them say the Chinese had observed and learned from the mistakes of the fading West, "money goes where it is treated best" and all that? Yeah, about that...
China’s securities regulator took the drastic step of
banning shareholders with stakes of more than 5% from selling shares for the
next six months in a bid to halt a plunge in stock prices that is starting to
roil global financial markets.
It almost reminds me of something...oh right, that time in 2008 when America did the same thing.
I thought vibrant China had learned from calcified America's mistakes and was doing an Opposite George on all things red, white, and blue. Apparently what they learned is how to repeat them.
Monday, May 11, 2015
Fast Times at Living Room High
I am biased in favor of parents who home school their kids. Government schools have always been suspect, and with their having become part prison, part social engineering petri dish, now there is truly nothing to recommend them.
However...
The way home school advocates tout the superior results of home schooled kids is a little simplistic. The very act of home schooling is a vote of no confidence in public schools. And while public schools may be incompetent, even if they weren't - of course a home schooled kid is likely to perform better. He is being tutored one-on-one.
Even the most strident pro-government school zealots tout smaller classroom size as an advantage. What could be more advantageous than having a classroom consisting of your kitchen table and (maybe) your siblings?
One-on-one instruction is better for most everyone. Just ask anyone who has taken a foreign language class vs. someone who hired a personal instructor. I bet some of those underperforming public school students would see their results improve too if their teachers focused on them alone.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Alcohol - Mankind's Best Friend
Ever notice that when people quit drinking, they always replace it with something grandiose; martial arts, crazy adrenaline sports, zealous religion (including zealous AA religion).
People don't do this with other addictions. No one takes up MMA just to keep from getting beaten up by Joe Camel.
Drinking is so great it is nearly impossible to replace it with anything else. Certainly there is no replacement as cheap, convenient, or quick.
It is cheap: whether it is Dom Perignon or PBR, you still get a buzz. Even expensive whiskey or wine is still cheaper than therapy (and more likely to improve your mood).
It is convenient: you can buy it almost everywhere.
It is quick: only takes a few small sips to feel better about problems at work, your flight being delayed, the person who dumped you. Talk about instant gratification. A counseling session lasts 45 minutes. You can down two life affirming Smirnoff sips in 45 seconds.
Booze is the gift that keeps on giving. You can't go skydiving every day. You can drink a glass of wine every night.
I saw Bobby Dall, bass player for Poison and former drunk, talking on Behind the Music about replacing drinking with playing for 10,000 people. That's great when that's your alternative, but for the rest of us, to get a rush the choice is either drinking and feeling invincible or riding an exercise bike for an hour. No surprise that Guinness wins that battle.
This irreplaceability is the greatest possible advertising for alcohol. You don't need all those beer commercials with hot chicks and Jeeps. All you have to say is "Budweiser - You'll miss it so much you'll climb Everest."
They call drinking a disease, but really, the disease is life. Drinking is the cure.
People don't do this with other addictions. No one takes up MMA just to keep from getting beaten up by Joe Camel.
Drinking is so great it is nearly impossible to replace it with anything else. Certainly there is no replacement as cheap, convenient, or quick.
It is cheap: whether it is Dom Perignon or PBR, you still get a buzz. Even expensive whiskey or wine is still cheaper than therapy (and more likely to improve your mood).
It is convenient: you can buy it almost everywhere.
It is quick: only takes a few small sips to feel better about problems at work, your flight being delayed, the person who dumped you. Talk about instant gratification. A counseling session lasts 45 minutes. You can down two life affirming Smirnoff sips in 45 seconds.
Booze is the gift that keeps on giving. You can't go skydiving every day. You can drink a glass of wine every night.
I saw Bobby Dall, bass player for Poison and former drunk, talking on Behind the Music about replacing drinking with playing for 10,000 people. That's great when that's your alternative, but for the rest of us, to get a rush the choice is either drinking and feeling invincible or riding an exercise bike for an hour. No surprise that Guinness wins that battle.
This irreplaceability is the greatest possible advertising for alcohol. You don't need all those beer commercials with hot chicks and Jeeps. All you have to say is "Budweiser - You'll miss it so much you'll climb Everest."
They call drinking a disease, but really, the disease is life. Drinking is the cure.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Medicine, Media, and Monogamy don't Mix
Thanks to the safer world in which we live, life expectancy keeps climbing. Once the world goes Kurzweil, who knows how long we'll hang around.
This spike in life expectancy doesn't bode well for the already stooped, arthritic, and tremoring institution of marriage. In the old days, loving someone forever meant loving him/her until about 65. Now you have to limp through it until at least 85. It's true that people aren't getting married as young, but getting married at 32 instead of 24 still means today's married folk have to tolerate their "soulmate" for 12, 13, 14, 15 extra years to make it to "forever." Not strangling someone for 40 years is a lot easier than keeping your hands off their throat for 55.
Modern medicine has also greatly improved quality of life. Today a man of 55 can physically er, perform in ways he couldn't a generation ago, and thanks to the ubiquity of divorce, he now has a deep talent pool of divorcees to target. When you're a vigorous 55 and can pull a 40-year-old eager to have someone lie to her about how beautiful she still is, that "forever" vow you made to your now musty 55-year-old bride feels like a belly flop into the River Styx.
A lot of women talk about liking older men. That's acceptable when you're 28 and he's 40. But what happens when you're 53 and he's 65. Suddenly the allure of an older man isn't so alluring, particularly when you know you're going to be watching him decay for a couple more decades. Forever suddenly feels like the kind of forever you complain about at the DMV.
Thanks to dating sites and Facebook, it's never been easier to meet someone new. A 55-year-old divorced person can hop back in the game with a few mouse clicks; no embarrassing 50+ dance nights at your local community center. You can point and click at a wide range of partners your age and start the second (or third or fourth or fifth) stage of your romantic life.
The power of that very media is another marriage killer. There are now so many forms of communication; texts, email, constant cell phone access, which means non-stop opportunity for marital misunderstandings, words said in heat, and just plain overexposure to your now never disconnected lover. Everyone is just one unfortunate auto-complete away from relationship oblivion.
Medicine is only getting better, and technology is putting us in touch with ever more people (potential sex partners). None but a very select few can tolerate a sixty-year marriage. Given that the only people who left who take their religion seriously are Mormons and Muslims, the "forever" marriage vow will soon make even priests laugh out loud. In the future, the only way a couple will be able to last until death do us part is to hire a hitman (probably through social media).
This spike in life expectancy doesn't bode well for the already stooped, arthritic, and tremoring institution of marriage. In the old days, loving someone forever meant loving him/her until about 65. Now you have to limp through it until at least 85. It's true that people aren't getting married as young, but getting married at 32 instead of 24 still means today's married folk have to tolerate their "soulmate" for 12, 13, 14, 15 extra years to make it to "forever." Not strangling someone for 40 years is a lot easier than keeping your hands off their throat for 55.
Modern medicine has also greatly improved quality of life. Today a man of 55 can physically er, perform in ways he couldn't a generation ago, and thanks to the ubiquity of divorce, he now has a deep talent pool of divorcees to target. When you're a vigorous 55 and can pull a 40-year-old eager to have someone lie to her about how beautiful she still is, that "forever" vow you made to your now musty 55-year-old bride feels like a belly flop into the River Styx.
A lot of women talk about liking older men. That's acceptable when you're 28 and he's 40. But what happens when you're 53 and he's 65. Suddenly the allure of an older man isn't so alluring, particularly when you know you're going to be watching him decay for a couple more decades. Forever suddenly feels like the kind of forever you complain about at the DMV.
Thanks to dating sites and Facebook, it's never been easier to meet someone new. A 55-year-old divorced person can hop back in the game with a few mouse clicks; no embarrassing 50+ dance nights at your local community center. You can point and click at a wide range of partners your age and start the second (or third or fourth or fifth) stage of your romantic life.
The power of that very media is another marriage killer. There are now so many forms of communication; texts, email, constant cell phone access, which means non-stop opportunity for marital misunderstandings, words said in heat, and just plain overexposure to your now never disconnected lover. Everyone is just one unfortunate auto-complete away from relationship oblivion.
Medicine is only getting better, and technology is putting us in touch with ever more people (potential sex partners). None but a very select few can tolerate a sixty-year marriage. Given that the only people who left who take their religion seriously are Mormons and Muslims, the "forever" marriage vow will soon make even priests laugh out loud. In the future, the only way a couple will be able to last until death do us part is to hire a hitman (probably through social media).
Saturday, January 10, 2015
The Many Colors of the Hypocrisy Rainbow
US Sen Rubio Sees New Hope for Venezuela Sanctions
[T]he lawmaker said more action is needed to punish President Nicolas Maduro's government.
Republican (and Democratic pundits) have been in love with Florida Senator Marco Rubio for a long time. He can bring new voters to the party. He can show the nation that the Republican party can be a party of inclusion! His last name ends in a vowel!
You'll notice no one blazoning Rubio bothers highlighting his policy platform. That's because his platform is a carbon copy of the pinker Republicans he is supposed to be the antidote to.
Rubio tows the party line on abortion.
Tows the party line on minimum wage
Tows the party line on domestic surveillance.
Tows the party line on gay marriage.
Same foreign policy as rich old Anglo Romney. As you've seen with his views on sanctioning Venezuela, or with staying tough on Cuba, his, uh, roots haven't softened his tone on engagement with Latin America.
So what makes him so different and refreshing? He's olive-ish. It is as cynical as that. Take a candidate who regurgitates everything Romney says, give him a tan and suddenly The Content of His Character takes a backseat (several rows behind Rosa Parks) to The Color of His Skin.
If the difference isn't race, what is the difference? A losing platform said in Spanish is still a losing platform.
As much as the Establishment Left accuses the Establishment Right of using racial whistle words, when it comes to unambiguous ethnic chauvinism, the Establishment Left talks more tribalism than a Jerry Springer Klan guest. The only reason Rubio, a clone of the "too white" Romney is a darling is because of his ethnicity.
The Left regularly asserts (with sometimes hilarious accuracy) that fierce "family values" advocates are secretly gay. You don't need x-ray vision to see that the fiercest "anti-racism" police are often the most race obsessed people of all.
[T]he lawmaker said more action is needed to punish President Nicolas Maduro's government.
"I hope we can achieve something much stronger than what the White House has done so far," Rubio, speaking in Spanish, told journalists.
Republican (and Democratic pundits) have been in love with Florida Senator Marco Rubio for a long time. He can bring new voters to the party. He can show the nation that the Republican party can be a party of inclusion! His last name ends in a vowel!
You'll notice no one blazoning Rubio bothers highlighting his policy platform. That's because his platform is a carbon copy of the pinker Republicans he is supposed to be the antidote to.
Rubio tows the party line on abortion.
Tows the party line on minimum wage
Tows the party line on domestic surveillance.
Tows the party line on gay marriage.
Same foreign policy as rich old Anglo Romney. As you've seen with his views on sanctioning Venezuela, or with staying tough on Cuba, his, uh, roots haven't softened his tone on engagement with Latin America.
So what makes him so different and refreshing? He's olive-ish. It is as cynical as that. Take a candidate who regurgitates everything Romney says, give him a tan and suddenly The Content of His Character takes a backseat (several rows behind Rosa Parks) to The Color of His Skin.
If the difference isn't race, what is the difference? A losing platform said in Spanish is still a losing platform.
As much as the Establishment Left accuses the Establishment Right of using racial whistle words, when it comes to unambiguous ethnic chauvinism, the Establishment Left talks more tribalism than a Jerry Springer Klan guest. The only reason Rubio, a clone of the "too white" Romney is a darling is because of his ethnicity.
The Left regularly asserts (with sometimes hilarious accuracy) that fierce "family values" advocates are secretly gay. You don't need x-ray vision to see that the fiercest "anti-racism" police are often the most race obsessed people of all.
Saturday, November 8, 2014
Three Guarantees in Life: Death, Taxes, and Ostracism of Anyone who Points this Out.
Remarks commonly made when something goes wrong:
That's life.
Such is life.
No one ever says THAT'S LIFE when great things happen. They're much more likely to utter something like "For once in this life something went my way!"
This should make us examine how we look at pessimists. If we all subconsciously accept that life is more tragedy than triumph, to the point where the word life is common shorthand for negativity,
we're being rather inconsistent when we reflexively accuse folks of being "glass half empty" people simply because they highlight life's non-stop struggles.
We're all legal experts when it comes to Murphy's Law. As a consequence most of us seek affirmation, which is why there are legions of calendars, greeting cards, and self-help books, to reassure us that somehow it's all gonna be okay. Seems to me the person who buys such a calendar is already admitting the pessimist's point. The pessimist doesn't need a calendar to remind him life is a downer. All he has to do is wake up in the morning.
That's life.
Such is life.
No one ever says THAT'S LIFE when great things happen. They're much more likely to utter something like "For once in this life something went my way!"
This should make us examine how we look at pessimists. If we all subconsciously accept that life is more tragedy than triumph, to the point where the word life is common shorthand for negativity,
we're being rather inconsistent when we reflexively accuse folks of being "glass half empty" people simply because they highlight life's non-stop struggles.
We're all legal experts when it comes to Murphy's Law. As a consequence most of us seek affirmation, which is why there are legions of calendars, greeting cards, and self-help books, to reassure us that somehow it's all gonna be okay. Seems to me the person who buys such a calendar is already admitting the pessimist's point. The pessimist doesn't need a calendar to remind him life is a downer. All he has to do is wake up in the morning.
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Death has a funny way of improving musicians
Any time an artist "dies too soon" - Amy Winehouse, Tupac Shakur, Jimi Hendrix - everyone assumes the artist would have gotten better. There is always the assumption of something great on the horizon: "He died at his peak." "He died just as he was truly finding his voice."
How come no one ever assumes they would have gotten worse? Why doesn't anyone proclaim that artistic burnout was just around the bend? Think about it, when people discuss musicians, they almost always say:
"I liked his early stuff better."
"They had that one good album..."
The common term for a disappointing album is a "sophomore slump," not a "seventh album slump."
With all the examples of artists who had one or two good records and then a lifetime of failing to replicate them, does it really make sense to always give dead young artists the benefit of the doubt?
Plus the posthumous stuff is nearly always a mixed bag (at best). Granted, the work may be unfinished or edited in ways the artist wouldn't have chosen. But still...if we're so assured that genius was just around the bend, why isn't the proof ever in the pudding?
What's funny is that we're just as forceful in our ridicule of artists who do keep going! How many times have the Rolling Stones had to answer for wanting to do another tour? Apparently they never learned the marketing lesson of dying early to keep folks pining for what could have been (not that Keith Richards didn't try).
If Axl Rose had died in '92, we would have been saved the cornrows. If Dylan had died at the release party for Blood on the Tracks, we wouldn't have had to suffer through his "Christian period."
Almost no artist gets better with age, so it seems like a hell of a coincidence that every single artist whose "fire burned out too soon" was just about to give us a triple album of gold. In his farewell letter, Kurt Cobain apparently quoted Neil Young: "It's better to burn out than to fade away." By burning out, Cobain probably saved us the agony of watching him muddle through a twenty-year "experimental phase."
How come no one ever assumes they would have gotten worse? Why doesn't anyone proclaim that artistic burnout was just around the bend? Think about it, when people discuss musicians, they almost always say:
"I liked his early stuff better."
"They had that one good album..."
The common term for a disappointing album is a "sophomore slump," not a "seventh album slump."
With all the examples of artists who had one or two good records and then a lifetime of failing to replicate them, does it really make sense to always give dead young artists the benefit of the doubt?
Plus the posthumous stuff is nearly always a mixed bag (at best). Granted, the work may be unfinished or edited in ways the artist wouldn't have chosen. But still...if we're so assured that genius was just around the bend, why isn't the proof ever in the pudding?
What's funny is that we're just as forceful in our ridicule of artists who do keep going! How many times have the Rolling Stones had to answer for wanting to do another tour? Apparently they never learned the marketing lesson of dying early to keep folks pining for what could have been (not that Keith Richards didn't try).
If Axl Rose had died in '92, we would have been saved the cornrows. If Dylan had died at the release party for Blood on the Tracks, we wouldn't have had to suffer through his "Christian period."
Almost no artist gets better with age, so it seems like a hell of a coincidence that every single artist whose "fire burned out too soon" was just about to give us a triple album of gold. In his farewell letter, Kurt Cobain apparently quoted Neil Young: "It's better to burn out than to fade away." By burning out, Cobain probably saved us the agony of watching him muddle through a twenty-year "experimental phase."
Saturday, November 1, 2014
A nation of suits
Everyone derides generic execs with hackneyed answers as
"suits." Then an exec talks with a little spice and they take to
Twitter to demand his firing. Case
in point:
Ted Bishop, co-owner of The Legends Golf Club in
Franklin, was ousted as president of the PGA of America over a tweet and
Facebook post comparing golfer Ian Poulter to a little girl.
The TwitterSphere is now the ultimate "suit;" monitoring, policing, and destroying anyone who dares budge an inch from the ever shrinking lilypad of acceptable speech. You can't both bemoan boring suit talk while zealously enforcing a code of speech that leaves people with no option but to use suit talk.
The TwitterSphere is now the ultimate "suit;" monitoring, policing, and destroying anyone who dares budge an inch from the ever shrinking lilypad of acceptable speech. You can't both bemoan boring suit talk while zealously enforcing a code of speech that leaves people with no option but to use suit talk.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Income gaps mean class warfare. Brain gaps mean classroom warfare
Much is made of Einstein's poor academic record. The future scientific giant was a hopeless student, and his even more hopeless teachers failed to recognize his brilliance! This well-worn narrative is a tad exaggerated; when taking his college entrance exam Einstein knocked it out of the park in math and physics. Nevertheless, the Einstein example of classroom failure and subsequent success has been used to offer hope to academic laggards since at least the days of my youth.
It's a nice yarn, but on further analysis, it probably isn't the best story to share with kids who struggle academically. Underlining that the man with the greatest mind since Isaac Newton eventually managed to bring attention to his brilliance doesn't give the struggling student with the middle-of-the-road brain much to hope for: "So even though the strain of pre-algebra has me popping Ritalin like Tic-Tacs, all I have to do to overcome this is prove I understand space and time better than any mortal before me? Uh, what kind of GPA do you need to be accepted into the Crips?"
The subtext to the Einstein example is that grades aren't everything, and by extension, upsetting measurements like SAT aren't everything. The Einstein tale is part of the popular modern "wisdom" that we're all an equally skilled ball of clay waiting to be molded into excellence. The SAT just measures your test-taking ability, not innate cognitive skill, right? Good students are just kids who work harder thanks to the village's loving embrace. Careful teacher: your worst student might be contemplating a sequel to relativity!
Einstein aside, many of the brilliant, accomplished, visionary folks DID have their brilliance recognized by conventional means. It WAS able to be measured in some capacity.
Francis Crick attended Cambridge. Watson attended University of Chicago.
Stephen Hawking studied at Oxford and Cambridge.
Alan Turing...Cambridge.
William Shockley attended MIT and Caltech.
Tesla completed his four years in three years.
Marvin Minsky went to Harvard and Princeton.
Brin and Page met at Stanford.
Bill Gates did drop out of college...but it was Harvard. And he got a perfect score on the math part of the SAT.
Salk attended a high school for the gifted.
Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. In prep school he won academic prizes.
Jobs dropped out of Reed College; a virtual Rhodes Scholar factory. Wozniak failed to finish at Berkeley...
Because most people's measurements aren't stellar, they reflexively proclaim that measurements either don't matter or don't measure everything. Well no shit they don't measure everything. But if you look at a list of great achievers, you'll see that A LOT of them had at least some of their talent measured and recognized before their ultimate breakthrough. Einstein was very much the exception. John Q. Average is going to need a hell of a lot of intangibles to outrun Zuckerberg's tangibles (not to mention Zuckerberg's intangibles). And P.S.: Mark Zuckerberg also knows how to work hard.
An Einstein example in athletics - where every nook and cranny is measured to analyze a player's chances at success - is Jerry Rice. You routinely hear that Rice ran a poor (for a receiver) 4,71 time in the 40-yard dash. Great, but here are the times of some other dominant receivers: Randy Moss: 4:25, Terrell Owens: 4:45, Calvin Johnson: 4:35, Steve Smith: 4.39, Marvin Harrison: 4:38. Jerry Rice's "slow" time is a rarity. Most dominant receivers show much more speed in the NFL Combine and Rice's incredible success doesn't alter that. Pointing to the "slow" receiver to give hope to a kid who should probably consider another position (or sport) isn't doing the kid any favors.
This is just as true in school. You can tell a kid to dream without telling him to hallucinate. If he has no grip on calculus, make his dream to be an electrician; better yet, an electrician in business for himself. Incidentally, that will earn him a better living than many of the liberal arts hallucinaters outscoring him in class.
It's a nice yarn, but on further analysis, it probably isn't the best story to share with kids who struggle academically. Underlining that the man with the greatest mind since Isaac Newton eventually managed to bring attention to his brilliance doesn't give the struggling student with the middle-of-the-road brain much to hope for: "So even though the strain of pre-algebra has me popping Ritalin like Tic-Tacs, all I have to do to overcome this is prove I understand space and time better than any mortal before me? Uh, what kind of GPA do you need to be accepted into the Crips?"
The subtext to the Einstein example is that grades aren't everything, and by extension, upsetting measurements like SAT aren't everything. The Einstein tale is part of the popular modern "wisdom" that we're all an equally skilled ball of clay waiting to be molded into excellence. The SAT just measures your test-taking ability, not innate cognitive skill, right? Good students are just kids who work harder thanks to the village's loving embrace. Careful teacher: your worst student might be contemplating a sequel to relativity!
Einstein aside, many of the brilliant, accomplished, visionary folks DID have their brilliance recognized by conventional means. It WAS able to be measured in some capacity.
Francis Crick attended Cambridge. Watson attended University of Chicago.
Stephen Hawking studied at Oxford and Cambridge.
Alan Turing...Cambridge.
Tesla completed his four years in three years.
Marvin Minsky went to Harvard and Princeton.
Brin and Page met at Stanford.
Bill Gates did drop out of college...but it was Harvard. And he got a perfect score on the math part of the SAT.
Salk attended a high school for the gifted.
Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. In prep school he won academic prizes.
Jobs dropped out of Reed College; a virtual Rhodes Scholar factory. Wozniak failed to finish at Berkeley...
Because most people's measurements aren't stellar, they reflexively proclaim that measurements either don't matter or don't measure everything. Well no shit they don't measure everything. But if you look at a list of great achievers, you'll see that A LOT of them had at least some of their talent measured and recognized before their ultimate breakthrough. Einstein was very much the exception. John Q. Average is going to need a hell of a lot of intangibles to outrun Zuckerberg's tangibles (not to mention Zuckerberg's intangibles). And P.S.: Mark Zuckerberg also knows how to work hard.
An Einstein example in athletics - where every nook and cranny is measured to analyze a player's chances at success - is Jerry Rice. You routinely hear that Rice ran a poor (for a receiver) 4,71 time in the 40-yard dash. Great, but here are the times of some other dominant receivers: Randy Moss: 4:25, Terrell Owens: 4:45, Calvin Johnson: 4:35, Steve Smith: 4.39, Marvin Harrison: 4:38. Jerry Rice's "slow" time is a rarity. Most dominant receivers show much more speed in the NFL Combine and Rice's incredible success doesn't alter that. Pointing to the "slow" receiver to give hope to a kid who should probably consider another position (or sport) isn't doing the kid any favors.
This is just as true in school. You can tell a kid to dream without telling him to hallucinate. If he has no grip on calculus, make his dream to be an electrician; better yet, an electrician in business for himself. Incidentally, that will earn him a better living than many of the liberal arts hallucinaters outscoring him in class.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Fashionable Superstitions: Food Allergies
Have you noticed all the new food "allergies" sprouting up; nuts, gluten, wheat. "Allergy" warnings on food packaging are becoming ever more verbose. I just ate some bread that came with a warning that it had spent time in the same hemisphere as tree nuts.
I'm going to be sensitivity-allergic and submit that maybe all these new food allergies shouldn't be classified as allergies. When you eat something, your body does indeed react. Red meat is generally harder to digest than chicken. Some folks are more bloated after yogurt than others. These are reactions that can be unpleasant. But of those two, only dairy is something people claim a distinct allergy to*. You don't hear much about red meat allergies. Given how the slightest unpleasant reaction is now called an allergy, perhaps that should change. Perhaps we should be warning people about foods whose name includes the letter C, O, or W.
If the slightest unpleasant reaction (sometimes imagined) is now termed an allergy, what isn't an allergy?
Spicy food can cause heartburn. Should that now be called an allergy?
Plenty of folks now claim to have celiac disease, obviously unaware of how serious actual celiac can be. Some people are more sensitive to sugar than others; imagine if everyone who couldn't handle intense desserts went around advertising their "diabetes."
What about alcohol? Alcohol is the one ingestible where people gladly look past all the side effects (and unlike many of the foods they do avoid, alcohol has little nutritional value). After consuming booze, even in moderation, people experience headaches, stomach aches, sensitivity to light, etc. Yet no one talks about having a booze allergy. They will however say they can't have beer because of the gluten...
The way popular usage has warped the word allergy, having a hangover should now be classified as a serious allergic reaction. Your body is telling you alcohol doesn't sit well with you. The side effects are much easier to measure than the supposed impacts of many of the foods people are now swearing off.
Everyone has different sensitivities, but as with all things, magnitude matters. Someone who sneezes slightly after spending a day in a dog kennel shouldn't be classed with the same word as someone who can't breath after a few minutes around a poodle. Unfortunately with food, that perspective has fled the stage. Given how perennially fat Americans seem to be, perhaps they are allergic to all that
"health food" they claim to be consuming. Or maybe the allergy labels are what's making us pudgy. There is as much science to that claim as there is to a lot of today's homespun "allergy" wisdom.
*Obviously, I'm not talking about genuine, harsh sensitivity to lactose, etc. Notice that those with that kind of hypersensitivity don't suddenly "discover" it after skimming an allergy article in Cosmo while eating an airport pizza.
I'm going to be sensitivity-allergic and submit that maybe all these new food allergies shouldn't be classified as allergies. When you eat something, your body does indeed react. Red meat is generally harder to digest than chicken. Some folks are more bloated after yogurt than others. These are reactions that can be unpleasant. But of those two, only dairy is something people claim a distinct allergy to*. You don't hear much about red meat allergies. Given how the slightest unpleasant reaction is now called an allergy, perhaps that should change. Perhaps we should be warning people about foods whose name includes the letter C, O, or W.
If the slightest unpleasant reaction (sometimes imagined) is now termed an allergy, what isn't an allergy?
Spicy food can cause heartburn. Should that now be called an allergy?
Plenty of folks now claim to have celiac disease, obviously unaware of how serious actual celiac can be. Some people are more sensitive to sugar than others; imagine if everyone who couldn't handle intense desserts went around advertising their "diabetes."
What about alcohol? Alcohol is the one ingestible where people gladly look past all the side effects (and unlike many of the foods they do avoid, alcohol has little nutritional value). After consuming booze, even in moderation, people experience headaches, stomach aches, sensitivity to light, etc. Yet no one talks about having a booze allergy. They will however say they can't have beer because of the gluten...
The way popular usage has warped the word allergy, having a hangover should now be classified as a serious allergic reaction. Your body is telling you alcohol doesn't sit well with you. The side effects are much easier to measure than the supposed impacts of many of the foods people are now swearing off.
Everyone has different sensitivities, but as with all things, magnitude matters. Someone who sneezes slightly after spending a day in a dog kennel shouldn't be classed with the same word as someone who can't breath after a few minutes around a poodle. Unfortunately with food, that perspective has fled the stage. Given how perennially fat Americans seem to be, perhaps they are allergic to all that
"health food" they claim to be consuming. Or maybe the allergy labels are what's making us pudgy. There is as much science to that claim as there is to a lot of today's homespun "allergy" wisdom.
*Obviously, I'm not talking about genuine, harsh sensitivity to lactose, etc. Notice that those with that kind of hypersensitivity don't suddenly "discover" it after skimming an allergy article in Cosmo while eating an airport pizza.
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Why do articles about diversity lack diversity?
New York asks: What's the Matter with Connecticut?
Well, New York says Connecticut is an unequal place. Plus it apparently still suffers from a dreaded WASP plague (not to be confused with the locust kind). From the article:
Bridgeport is less than 1/2 white. Hispanics comprise at least 1/5 of the population in four of these towns. And there seems to be a fair bit of OTHER.
Pieces like this also forget or just ignore that the P in WASP stands for Protestant. Yeah, about that: of the Fairfield residents with a religious affiliation, 70% identify as Catholic, which is, you know, sort of what Protestants were protesting by becoming Protestants.
Well, New York says Connecticut is an unequal place. Plus it apparently still suffers from a dreaded WASP plague (not to be confused with the locust kind). From the article:
Representing the R half of the equation is Fairfield County,
home to an extraordinary concentration of money-management businesses and many
of Connecticut’s one percenters. It’s a pretty, Waspy place, Wall
Street’s buttoned-up suburb.
As we all know from years of hackneyed articles like this, WASPy is always shorthand for buttoned-up. When you see WASP in an article, it only has one implication: Those fair-skinned Episcopalians just don't know how to cut loose! It sucks when DEAD WHITE MEN aren't dead.
But predictable anti-WASP inferences aside, let's examine the demographics of Fairfield County. From Wikipedia, here are the demographics of its five most populous towns:
Rank
|
Town
|
Population
|
White
|
Black
|
Asian
|
American
Indian |
Other
|
Hispanic
| |
1
|
City
|
143,412
|
49.8%
|
35.9%
|
3.9%
|
0.6%
|
11.8%
|
36.7%
| |
2
|
City
|
121,784
|
61.0%
|
15.5%
|
8.7%
|
0.3%
|
16.3%
|
24.4%
| |
3
|
City
|
85,145
|
77.2%
|
14.0%
|
4.3%
|
0.6%
|
6.0%
|
20.2%
| |
4
|
City
|
80,101
|
74.2%
|
8.7%
|
6.5%
|
1.2%
|
13.0%
|
25.1%
| |
5
|
Town
|
61,023
|
87.1%
|
2.3%
|
7.6%
|
0.2%
|
3.9%
|
9.0%
|
Bridgeport is less than 1/2 white. Hispanics comprise at least 1/5 of the population in four of these towns. And there seems to be a fair bit of OTHER.
Pieces like this also forget or just ignore that the P in WASP stands for Protestant. Yeah, about that: of the Fairfield residents with a religious affiliation, 70% identify as Catholic, which is, you know, sort of what Protestants were protesting by becoming Protestants.
“Connecticut ranks among the highest, and possibly the highest, in total unfunded pensions and retiree health care per taxpayer in the nation.”
CT may be the “most unequal state in the country,” but not because it’s a tax haven; CT has the third highest tax rates in America. Underfunding is the result of fantastical projections/promises made by sociopathic politicians and bureaucrats (some of whom, it turns out, aren't WASPs!). I wonder if the writer will bother reconsidering the premise that high taxation leads to broader distributions of wealth...
And though this isn't stated in the article, buttoned-up and WASP is typically shorthand for "conservative" (see the 1,000,000^15 articles scrutinizing Orange County's demographics). Probably worth pointing out that Fairfield hasn't gone Republican in a Presidential election since 1996. Connecticut hasn't gone to a Republican presidential candidate since 1988.
Nothing is stuffier and more button-up than articles decrying the perils of the now completely imaginary WASP elite.
Nothing is stuffier and more button-up than articles decrying the perils of the now completely imaginary WASP elite.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Another pop psychology expression goes pop
Today every third woman under 30 talks like a Magic 8-Ball. Far from rebelling (never has rebellion been so necessary!) against the self-help foolishness their parents imbibed and their teachers espoused, they have absorbed it so completely that these Empowered Modern Women don't realize they sound like late '70s housewives.
One daytime talk show truism that seems to have penetrated everyone's IQ defenses: If you don't love yourself, how can you love someone else?
How screwy is it that the generation that has made government recognition of all forms of love the defining issue of their time, that has bravely taken to Twitter to battle "slut shaming," touts such rigid, one-size-fits-all dogma about love.
How can you love others if you don't love yourself is like a palindrome of confused thinking. Let's try some others.
Why not say to a solider: "If you can't kill yourself, how can you kill someone else?" I don't see this increasing enlistment stats.
How can you give someone an orgasm if you can't give yourself an orgasm?
Uh, how many frigid women have gone through life giving orgasms without ever achieving one themselves? The men they were with probably didn't forget how to orgasm in the wake of this climax famine.
How can you make other people laugh if you don't laugh yourself?
The "sad clown" thing has been discussed forever, well before Robin Williams' suicide. But as anyone in the humor business will tell you, comedians are the hardest people to make laugh. Many are dark, brooding buzzkills offstage. Yet they somehow manage to make others laugh...FOR A LIVING.
How can you teach someone else to sing if you can't teach yourself to sing?
Can you imagine how much different the music landscape would be if we actually took lines like this seriously? Same with sports coaching. In fact, we have long had much more accurate expressions for just this kind of scenario: Those who can't do, teach.
One daytime talk show truism that seems to have penetrated everyone's IQ defenses: If you don't love yourself, how can you love someone else?
How screwy is it that the generation that has made government recognition of all forms of love the defining issue of their time, that has bravely taken to Twitter to battle "slut shaming," touts such rigid, one-size-fits-all dogma about love.
How can you love others if you don't love yourself is like a palindrome of confused thinking. Let's try some others.
Why not say to a solider: "If you can't kill yourself, how can you kill someone else?" I don't see this increasing enlistment stats.
How can you give someone an orgasm if you can't give yourself an orgasm?
Uh, how many frigid women have gone through life giving orgasms without ever achieving one themselves? The men they were with probably didn't forget how to orgasm in the wake of this climax famine.
How can you make other people laugh if you don't laugh yourself?
The "sad clown" thing has been discussed forever, well before Robin Williams' suicide. But as anyone in the humor business will tell you, comedians are the hardest people to make laugh. Many are dark, brooding buzzkills offstage. Yet they somehow manage to make others laugh...FOR A LIVING.
How can you teach someone else to sing if you can't teach yourself to sing?
Can you imagine how much different the music landscape would be if we actually took lines like this seriously? Same with sports coaching. In fact, we have long had much more accurate expressions for just this kind of scenario: Those who can't do, teach.
Saturday, August 16, 2014
People who are better than you
Athletes are dumb, right? And sure, doctors may be smart, but all they have is a very specialized intelligence. Am I right, people?
Of course these statements are sometimes quite true, but often I think we shout them to make ourselves feel better about not measuring up. Athletes ("jocks") and high IQ folks detonate our insecurities, so we remind ourselves they MUST be deficient in other areas. Conveniently, the "important" areas where we claim to excel. I mean, you can't be athletic AND smart. No way: every smart kid got picked last in gym class! Haven't you ever watched an A&E Biography?
Unfortunately for those who excel in nothing, these truisms ain't universal. Many people whose talents are in the 1% distinguish themselves in several domains.
David Robinson
Robinson scored a 1320 on the SAT (before you could use calculators), and entered the elite United States Naval Academy, where he majored in mathematics. He couldn't continue in the Navy because he grew too tall for ships and planes. No, really.
Oh...and that was before he joined the NBA, where he was a 10-time All Star and league MVP. In fact, one of the criticisms he faced during his career was that he lacked the psychopathic competitiveness of Jordan and Bird because his interests and talents outside of basketball were too wide-ranging.
You'll notice Tony Parker didn't seduce Robinson's wife. Probably afraid Robinson would trap him in a mad scientist torture device (No Mr. Parker, I expect you to die).
Eric Heiden
Won five speed skating gold medals at the 1980 Olympics...before he decided to attend medical school (to became an orthopedic surgeon). And just to keep himself busy after retiring from skating, he also won the U.S. Professional Cycling Championship. So not only did he dominate speed athletics; he dominated endurance athletics. And he became a doctor, a different kind of dream that many have but few can attain.
Heiden probably saves a lot on medical costs; how many athletes do you know who can operate on themselves?
Kris Kristofferson
After being a college athlete who got a mention in Sports Illustrated, Kristofferson became a Rhodes Scholar, and while at Oxford received a Blue award in boxing. Most would have stopped there and spent the rest of their life telling everyone at the local pub that they could beat them in bar trivia and bar brawls.
Not Kris. He joined the military, where he attended Ranger School and became a helicopter pilot.
He wasn't done embarrassing the rest of us.
He took up song writing; writing big hits like "Me and Bobby McGee" and "For the Good Times". Then he recorded some big hits for himself; becoming a heartthrob in the process. Then he became a respectable actor in some big time feature films.
We'd better hope Kristofferson never takes up artificial intelligence or we'll all be replaced by robots within six months.
Michael Crichton
Let's see, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard; later went to med school there. That alone supersedes the achievements of most everyone.
Begins writing novels; several become blockbuster bestsellers whose components - Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park - make their way into the vernacular.
Starts directing films. You know how everyone - actors, writers - talk about directing but it never happens or it happens and ends in tragedy? Crichton actually did it, and one of those films -Westworld (scripted by Crichton and the first feature with CGI) - was a critical and commercial hit that spawned a sequel and, four decades later, a much-watched TV series. Another film, Coma, this time an adapted work, was also a hot success.
In 1994, a TV show named ER hit the airwaves. Crichton created it. The Andromeda Strain was published in 1969. ER came 25 years a later, and was also a sensation. Not only did the man have mega success in print, film, and television; he managed to have mega success in multiple decades. Think about how different the entertainment landscape was in '69 vs. '94. Yet MC threaded the needle.
It's rare for a writer to stay relevant in publishing for many decades*, let alone relevant in several other mediums (did I mention Crichton also created a successful computer game). Anyone remember Peter Blatty? Peter Benchley? Apparently writers named Peter have short shelf-lives...
Crichton's only mistakes: getting married five times and collecting abstract art. I guess he had to do something wrong just to entertain himself.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Not just the most successful bodybuilder ever; the ONLY iconic bodybuilder. I rather doubt my mother has heard of Joe Weider.
Outside of iron pumping, Arnold becomes a prosperous entrepreneur in multiple fields.
Then he tries his hand at Hollywood acting, and becomes one of the biggest actors in the world and sustains it for a couple decades. He manages this despite a thick Austrian accent. How many blockbuster Hollywood actors can you name who have deep continental European accents? Austrian accents do not make people all warm and gooey inside the way British accents do (quite the opposite). So here you have someone with the most hated kind of accent ascending from bodybuilding to acting to...
...politics. He makes his first foray into politics and gets elected Governor of California, the 8th largest economy in the world, AS A REPUBLICAN! Everyone laughs about it...hahahaha, he's The Governator now. Guess what: Governator got reelected. Arnold was such an unstoppable force that the only thing that could stop him was himself.
*Stephen King has stayed relevant and exceptional. But when he tried to direct, the result was Maximum Overdrive; which he has repeatedly ridiculed.
Of course these statements are sometimes quite true, but often I think we shout them to make ourselves feel better about not measuring up. Athletes ("jocks") and high IQ folks detonate our insecurities, so we remind ourselves they MUST be deficient in other areas. Conveniently, the "important" areas where we claim to excel. I mean, you can't be athletic AND smart. No way: every smart kid got picked last in gym class! Haven't you ever watched an A&E Biography?
Unfortunately for those who excel in nothing, these truisms ain't universal. Many people whose talents are in the 1% distinguish themselves in several domains.
David Robinson
Robinson scored a 1320 on the SAT (before you could use calculators), and entered the elite United States Naval Academy, where he majored in mathematics. He couldn't continue in the Navy because he grew too tall for ships and planes. No, really.
Oh...and that was before he joined the NBA, where he was a 10-time All Star and league MVP. In fact, one of the criticisms he faced during his career was that he lacked the psychopathic competitiveness of Jordan and Bird because his interests and talents outside of basketball were too wide-ranging.
You'll notice Tony Parker didn't seduce Robinson's wife. Probably afraid Robinson would trap him in a mad scientist torture device (No Mr. Parker, I expect you to die).
Eric Heiden
Won five speed skating gold medals at the 1980 Olympics...before he decided to attend medical school (to became an orthopedic surgeon). And just to keep himself busy after retiring from skating, he also won the U.S. Professional Cycling Championship. So not only did he dominate speed athletics; he dominated endurance athletics. And he became a doctor, a different kind of dream that many have but few can attain.
Heiden probably saves a lot on medical costs; how many athletes do you know who can operate on themselves?
Kris Kristofferson
After being a college athlete who got a mention in Sports Illustrated, Kristofferson became a Rhodes Scholar, and while at Oxford received a Blue award in boxing. Most would have stopped there and spent the rest of their life telling everyone at the local pub that they could beat them in bar trivia and bar brawls.
Not Kris. He joined the military, where he attended Ranger School and became a helicopter pilot.
He wasn't done embarrassing the rest of us.
He took up song writing; writing big hits like "Me and Bobby McGee" and "For the Good Times". Then he recorded some big hits for himself; becoming a heartthrob in the process. Then he became a respectable actor in some big time feature films.
We'd better hope Kristofferson never takes up artificial intelligence or we'll all be replaced by robots within six months.
Michael Crichton
Let's see, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard; later went to med school there. That alone supersedes the achievements of most everyone.
Begins writing novels; several become blockbuster bestsellers whose components - Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park - make their way into the vernacular.
Starts directing films. You know how everyone - actors, writers - talk about directing but it never happens or it happens and ends in tragedy? Crichton actually did it, and one of those films -Westworld (scripted by Crichton and the first feature with CGI) - was a critical and commercial hit that spawned a sequel and, four decades later, a much-watched TV series. Another film, Coma, this time an adapted work, was also a hot success.
In 1994, a TV show named ER hit the airwaves. Crichton created it. The Andromeda Strain was published in 1969. ER came 25 years a later, and was also a sensation. Not only did the man have mega success in print, film, and television; he managed to have mega success in multiple decades. Think about how different the entertainment landscape was in '69 vs. '94. Yet MC threaded the needle.
It's rare for a writer to stay relevant in publishing for many decades*, let alone relevant in several other mediums (did I mention Crichton also created a successful computer game). Anyone remember Peter Blatty? Peter Benchley? Apparently writers named Peter have short shelf-lives...
Crichton's only mistakes: getting married five times and collecting abstract art. I guess he had to do something wrong just to entertain himself.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Not just the most successful bodybuilder ever; the ONLY iconic bodybuilder. I rather doubt my mother has heard of Joe Weider.
Outside of iron pumping, Arnold becomes a prosperous entrepreneur in multiple fields.
Then he tries his hand at Hollywood acting, and becomes one of the biggest actors in the world and sustains it for a couple decades. He manages this despite a thick Austrian accent. How many blockbuster Hollywood actors can you name who have deep continental European accents? Austrian accents do not make people all warm and gooey inside the way British accents do (quite the opposite). So here you have someone with the most hated kind of accent ascending from bodybuilding to acting to...
...politics. He makes his first foray into politics and gets elected Governor of California, the 8th largest economy in the world, AS A REPUBLICAN! Everyone laughs about it...hahahaha, he's The Governator now. Guess what: Governator got reelected. Arnold was such an unstoppable force that the only thing that could stop him was himself.
*Stephen King has stayed relevant and exceptional. But when he tried to direct, the result was Maximum Overdrive; which he has repeatedly ridiculed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)