FunctionalAmbivalent

Taking Porn a Little Too Fur

After exhaustive research that I'm really glad I wasn't part of, scientists have concluded that male monkeys will pay to see photos of female monkeys' butts.

A new study found that male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey's bottoms. The way the experiment was set up, the act is akin to paying for the images, the researchers say.

The research will be detailed in the March issue of Current Biology. 

Creative Destruction

For those of us old enough to remember when there was just one phone company, the impending death of AT&T can not help but be something of a...well...something of...well, I don't know.  Something, anyway.

There was a time when Bell Telephone, which was what we all called AT&T back then, pretty much ruled the world.  You want proof? There's a great story about the early days of the Internet that shows AT&T's power.  The story is featured in the book Where Wizards Stayed Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner.

The Internet was, remember, developed as an alternative, highly survivable communications system for the Department of Defense.  The whole idea was to have lots of different routes through which signals could travel so that if, say, Kansas City suddenly went up in smoke, important government messages could still get through.

So the the guys at DARPA -- a wacky bunch of computer scientists working in the Dr. Strangelove Pentagon -- came up with this idea of computer networking over a web, rather than by the straight-line method of standard telephones. 

To test their idea, they build a couple of routers that were about the size of semi trucks.  They hauled one out west somewhere so they could plug it into the phone lines and see if the two computers could talk to eacho other. 

Great idea, except that AT&T had a rule against anyone else's equipment being attached to their phone lines.  AT&T told the computer scientists to go pound sand.

Well, you've gotta figure: National security, the Cold War...a couple of pretty pleases from the Pentagon and AT&T would climb on board. 

Except that AT&T was a huge monopoly and wouldn't budge, even if it meant nuclear vulnerability.  The whole American Cold War infrastruture had to find a different way to test the Internet.

Now AT&T is being bought by what was, back when, a local phone subsidiary of AT&T.  AT&T will survive as a brand, but as a company it's going to cease to exist.

Wow.

The Value of The Vote

I wrote, a long time ago, a thing about courage and voting.  Someone inside the Bush Administration had leaked a plan to delay the 2004 election if there was an act of terrorism.  Here's what I said at the time:

President Bush and every other public figure in America should stand up and say without equivocation that we are Americans, we are a nation that has paid for freedom with blood, we have courage, and no matter what Al Qaeda or any other band of thugs might think our democracy will not be disrupted. The election will be held.

How brave I am!  Sitting in my suburban home three tidy blocks from my polling place, with streets quiet and a fire in the fireplace.  What courage I have!  What a great warrior for liberty!

Yeah, well, much of today I've been watching pictures of Iraqis voting under the protective gaze of American soldiers.  That's courage.  What I do is moral posturing.  My right to vote...my freedom of speech...my liberty to do whatever I damned well please within the law has never been seriously challenged. 

Quibble if you want about President Bush and his foreign policy.  Lord knows he's got a lot wrong.  But today, Iraqis are voting, and if those who were against this war had had their way Saddam Hussein would still be in power.

This day is what the war was always about.  To get here, the President and his administration and their surrogates in the media lied and obfuscated and did everything they could to bumfuzzle the American people.   

But today Iraqis voted.  That's worth a lot.

What Women Who Aren't Exactly Shaped Like Fashion Models Will Soon Be Wearing or Why I Don't Go to the Mall Anymore

In mid-summer Sao Paulo it's fashion week.  Willowy models are parading up and down fashion show runways.  What used to be called "The Jet Set," back before airline travel became about as glamorous as riding a bus, is stocking up on next summer's glamorwear.  These fashions will, in a year or so, trickle down to unfortunate places like, for example, Kentucky, where I live. 

Causing the biggest flutter in Sao Paulo: Outfits that reveal significant "butt cleavage," which if we had any sense at all we'd stop at the border.  Those outfits look great on six-foot Brazilian beauties, but the same article of clothing will make a five-two Kentucky public high school girl look like a buttock-flesh extrusion robot.

There seems to be an inverse relationship between those-who-have-the-right-body-type-to-wear-this-kind-of-thing and those-who-enthuastically-embrace-public-semi-nudity-without-really-thinking-it-through. 

In other fashion news, Give Me The Spirit Fingers, Dammit! shows examples of revealing (and probably glue-intensive) high-fashion dresses that middle aged suburban divorcees-on-the-make will soon be wearing to country club dances and Ad Club Awards Banquets.

I may never leave the house again.

UPDATE: Ooops!  Spoke too soon.  It seems it's really a prom dress.

Two questions:

1. Do parents of teenaged girls really let their daughters wear something like this to go out with teenaged boys?
2. Can I go back to high school if I promise to study real hard?

Gweilo Speaks!

I got an email from my best friend in the whole world Conrad over at (the former) Gweilodiaries.  I don't generally publish email contents and won't this time, but here's a synopsis of what he said:

He's fine.  He's burned-out on blogging and won't return any time soon.  He's busy and let his URL lapse.  He learned that someone was trying to uncover his real name and identity, and since his career would suffer if that happened he decided what the hell and just went off the air.  (I understand that completely, by the way.  I often wonder whether it was wise for me to use my real name.  Thankfully, it's an incredibly common name.)

He made no mention of mysterious, vindictive women, so those of you who had that in the "What Happened to Gweilo" betting pool can tear up your tickets in frustration.  Ditto those who figured the Chinese government somehow suppressed him.  He is, instead, just someone who discovered that blogging was not a forever thing.

I, personally, will miss not only Gweilodiaries but also Conrad's dripping-with-acid scorn, which he directed my way in both comments and emails.  Guys like me, we need to be bitch-slapped once in a while.  Keeps us honest.  Conrad provided that service with patient condescension.

Conrad, feel free to post comments anytime you want.  I mean, as if I could even stop you.

Now that we've got all that out of the way, I guess I'm looking for a new Best Friend in the Whole World.  The qualifications are: Nasty wit broadly applied, located somewhere overseas, willingness to patiently answer inane emails. 

Any takers?

UPDATE: By the way, the results on the Gweilo Poll, as of this minute, are:

• He's Dead -- 12%
• He's Not Dead -- 16%
• He's Laughing at Us -- 72%

OK, Now If We Can Just Get Rid of 'Give Peace a Chance' and 'Religion Is the Opiate of the Masses,' Liberalism Just Might Stand a Chance

A particularly dim-witted pillar of wisdom highly popular with the kind of liberal that I -- as a liberal -- can't stand, took a whack in the L.A. Times yesterday.  Delivering the whack was Dr. Roy F. Baumeister, a professor in the department of psychology at Florida State University.

High self-esteem in schoolchildren does not produce better grades...college students with mediocre grades who got regular self-esteem strokes from their professors ended up doing worse on final exams than students who were told to suck it up and try harder.

Self-esteem doesn't make adults perform better at their jobs either. Sure, people with high self-esteem rate their own performance better — even declaring themselves smarter and more attractive than their low self-esteem peers — but neither objective tests nor impartial raters can detect any difference in the quality of work.

Likewise, people with high self-esteem think they make better impressions, have stronger friendships and have better romantic lives than other people, but the data don't support their self-flattering views...Self-esteem doesn't predict who will make a good leader, and some work...has found humility rather than self-esteem to be a key trait of successful leaders.

It was widely believed that low self-esteem could be a cause of violence, but in reality violent individuals, groups and nations think very well of themselves. They turn violent toward others who fail to give them the inflated respect they think they deserve. Nor does high self-esteem deter people from becoming bullies, according to most of the studies that have been done; it is simply untrue that beneath the surface of every obnoxious bully is an unhappy, self-hating child in need of sympathy and praise.

The whole self esteem movement became one of the most ridiculous and counter-productive social fads ever.  My kids went to a self-esteem oriented school where everyone earned the same accolades for their work no matter how well they performed; half the kids in the second grade couldn't read.  They played in a self-esteem oriented baseball league where keeping score was seen saa form of oppression and everyone played the exact same number of innings.  It was an almost entirely pointless enterprise; even the kids lost interest after a few games.

Self-esteem is a side effect, not a goal.

Via Kevin Drum.

Eventually, Most of Them Make the Leap From Movie Star to Hypocritical Old Fart

Dustin Hoffman, fresh off banking a few million for his supporting role in Meet the Fockers, which has a title that is intended to elicit giggles from the kind of people who think dirty words are funny, thinks Hollywood is too crude.

Hoffman probably took the role in  Fokkers because it paid him a lot of money, though it may have been the integrity of the script, about which FilmCritic.com says:

...rest assured that no opportunity for a sex joke is spared, from randy octogenarians to botched circumcision to "driftwood" references.

Hoffman, who in his breakthrough role played a cynical college graduate who spends the summer screwing his girlfriend's mother, had this to say to people who are paid to listen to him while on promotional tour for the film:

“The whole culture is in the craphouse. It’s not just true in the movies, it’s also true in the theatre,” Hoffman said. “Broadway, and now London is the same, special effects are in great demand. It’s not a good time culturally.”

At the London press conference, he went on to describe how he and co-star Barbra Streisand made their sex scenes in the movie look real:

“We didn’t want those so-called amorous scenes you see on screen which are bull[bleep]... where they’ve got their tongues down each other’s throats and the camera pans down to the ground to see her panties,” he said, and went on to say, “So we did what felt real. I whispered to Barbra in one scene ‘I love your breasts, they look great today.”

Thank goodness we have people like Dustin Hoffman to maintain our high cultural standards.  Or, at least, to belittle the audiences that made him rich, apparently for partaking of his work.

Despite Billions Spent, a Slight Pruning of the Bill of Rights, and the Election of a Mess of Republicans, Your Safety Still Comes Down to Bottled Water and Duct Tape

The Department of Homeland Security has issued a new booklet for homeowners on what to do homeownership-wise should your owned home come under terrorist attack.  You can go here to download a cumbersome .pdf of the booklet, or you can simply read the below paragraphs from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. 

The booklet also contains guidelines for determining whether a biological, chemical or nuclear attack has occurred. Signs of a chemical attack include watery eyes and trouble breathing.

"Many sick or dead birds, fish or small animals are also cause for suspicion," the guide says.

Farm Accident Digest helpfully offers this advice:

First sign of a nuclear attack is that you are dead. Other signs will be provided to you on the other side.

I'm Telling You: Read the Label. It's Nothing Like a National I.D. Card

Republicans, formerly advocates of small government and thus opponents of national I.D. cards, are proposing yet another big government program: The issuance of national I.D. cards.

Rep. David Dreier, that weirdest of political mutants, the Big Government Conservative, is The Man With The Plan.

Under the plan, any person seeking a new job would be required to obtain an updated "counterfeit-proof" Social Security card, equipped with a digitized photo and an electronic identification strip containing the person's legal status.

Which is, for all practical purposes, a national I.D. card.  Except that it's not, as Dreier explains:

To offset fears of government intrusion, the card would be clearly marked, "This is not a national ID card," Dreier said.

Oh, well that clears that up.

Dreier is perfectly aligned with the Bush Administration's Operation Pull the Wool Over Their Eyes political strategy.  President Bush is cutting the federal deficit by failing to include his three high-priority policy intitives in the budget.  Tax cuts, the War in Iraq, and Social Security Privatization are all clearly labeled: Not Federal Spending.

Dreier, seeking bipartisan cover for the H.R. 98, has enlisted the aid of a single Democratic co-sponsor, Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas.  Reyes seems to like the I.D. cards as a means of short-circuiting opposition to President Bush's foreign worker program, which he supports.

Except, of course, that they're not national I.D. cards.  Because they said they weren't.  And they wouldn't lie to us, would they?

I'm Totally In Favor of This, As Long As They Enforce Some Kind of Age Limit

A California public defender is making a Constitutional case that women should be allowed to go topless on beaches and in parks.  Ventura County P.D. Liana Johnsson...

...has asked the Legislature to make topless sunbathing legal, saying the ban is the last criminal sanction that treats women differently than men.

The new movement has urgency: Because of a December court ruling, Johnsson and other attorneys contend, women convicted of indecent exposure could find themselves listed as sex offenders under Megan's Law, alongside rapists and child molesters.

Which is ridiculous.  Women who expose their breasts in public should be treated as national heroes.

Johnsson's basic argument is that big fat guys can lounge around topless with gigustic man-boobs sagging all over the place and, except for an occaisional gag reflex, no one seems to mind.  Women, on the other hand, get into legal trouble even if their naked breasts are attractive.  Which the vast majority of them are, at least a little.

Click here to view a .pdf of the California Bar Association's assessment of Ms. Johnsson's proposed legislation.  Sorry, no pictures.

Click here to send an encouraging email to Ms. Johnsson.  Tell her I sent you.