Author: Aaron Weber

Today’s Word is Peevish

Media Stupidity: A new study released today confirmed viewing of hardcore pornography was widespread among teenagers and regarded as normal behaviour, especially by boys. I am peeved by alarmism at the fact that lots of boys like to ogle naked ladies. Also, I get shirty whenever I see the word “normal” used to mean “healthy” or “acceptable.”

I am petulant this evening as I have discovered, yet again, that I am not actually a home-decor whiz. I tried to nail a shelf to the wall, but that didn’t work very well. So I reinforced the nails with glue. Result: lots of glue and nails on my wall. Not a lot of shelf.

Oh yes

I have rediscovered In Passing…, the diary of overheard tidbits.

Who has twins and gives them both the same name?”
“Well, we were put up for adoption separately.”
“Oh. I. Oh. I’m sorry — I didn’t mean — Oh.”

But mostly I’m drunk and shopping for furniture online. I found the perfect couch. It’s thousands of dollars and will require the purchase of a new house and the acquisition of a new personality but it’s perfect. The appreciation for things really improves when my mind is degraded. My mother told me, while I was home for easter, about her post-surgery morphine literature experience. Dad brought her books and she read them and each one was the Greatest Novel Ever. She has no recollection of the titles, authors, or subjects, but let me tell you, it was beautiful.

And so, the sweet, sweet oblivion before waking up and doing it all over again.

Rock Land

Went to see The Pilot Light over at The Middle East nightclub tonight. I showed up at a quarter to nine, since they went on around nine-ish, and there was a line to get in. Someone asked me where the will-call ticketing booth was. The crowd was for The Anniversary, which went on at eleven thirty-ish. They had a southern kind of feel, like an ironic Skynyrd cover. The drummer had a mullet and a handlebar mustache. They went on at eleven thirty and amused me for all of twenty minutes, at which point I decided to take out my ear plugs and go home.

During the show, I was gratified to catch some guy in a Get Your War On shirt checking me out. Not as gratifying as it would have been had I managed to catch the eye of any of the well-coiffed indie-rock girls in the audience, who were for the most part way way way out of my league. Or undergraduates. Or both.

But hey, I take what I can get. It’s only Monday and it’s been a long week already, and hearing some loud music and drinking cheap whiskey from a plastic cup was just what I needed. It’s been a long night, too, and I’m sitting at home eating chocolate-covered almonds and hoping that this girl I know will come on AIM and talk to me, but that’s not likely to happen any before my battery runs out, figuratively or literally.

And so to bed.

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

We’ve got a world of obvious stupidity and blunders today. First up, a new study reveals that… a if kids think their ability is innate, they won’t try as hard. As Jack Handey says, “When you ask a kid a question, and they get the right answer, I think you should tell them it was a lucky guess. That way, they get a good, lucky feeling.”

From the industry that brought you the crispy snacks with an incredibly boring toy surprise inside, the unsurprising news that sugar and corn syrup manufacturers think sugar is not bad for you. Of course they do. Now to see if the WHO can stand up to them and state the obvious fact that the sugar industry ought not to meddle in the affairs of international health organizations.

My comment on sugar is always that price of sugar in the US is artificially high, partly because of the longstanding foolishness that is the Cuba embargo, but mostly due to market-distorting corn subsidies. Once we implement some free trade in this country, we’ll move from high-fructose corn syrup back to sugar. Some argue that corn syrup is worse for you, but it’s a dubious, small, and off-topic distinction.

To round out a newsday of blaring inevitabilities, Our Leader is up to his old strategery, quietly ignoring or crushing the will of the vast majority of US citizens: putting toxins in our water, and of course making sure those hop-head cancer victims keep on suffering.

What kind of person wants to stop a cancer victim from easing nausea and cramps, or even god forbid getting a little high? Ashcroft, of course, who has a sort of puritanical zeal I haven’t seen since I went to see a high school production of The Crucible. He really does fit the cookie-cutter definition of puritan: “terrified by the idea that someone, somewhere, is having fun.” Besides, illness is punishment from Gawd! You know what causes cancer and AIDS, right? SIN! I can’t wait for the old fuck to get bowel cancer. I can’t wait to hear that the chemotherapy made him vomit until he ruptured his diaphragm and tore his esophagus, that he died from massive internal bleeding and suffocation as the necrotic growth from his bedsores spread, suppurating, across his atrophied pudenda.

That was kind of mean. On the other hand, it consists of statements of opinion and/or true fact, so although it violates the rules of taste and prudence, it is not actually libel.

Home Again

Spent the weekend back home in Charlottesville, VA. The trees and grass and flowers had budded but most were still tinged with the gold of immature shoots. The clouds seemed to filter out all the blue light, as well, and the entire world was preternaturally green. I’d forgotten how much concrete and asphalt surrounds me up here.

We went out to visit my uncle and his new litter of puppies. Got one, two good pix of Mom with them, and one in which I manage to avoid looking too goofy. Plus a rival for the throne of silly captioning currently occupied by Melvin the Beagle. And of course one plain old incredibly cute puppy on incredibly green grass.

I should also note that David, shown here manicuring the dogs, has had significant success as both breeder and judge of bull terriers, and in addition runs a successful small business. He drives a Mini Cooper S, and is a charming and erudite conversationalist. Also, despite his shocking resemblance to the Molson Man, he is single.

Do we need nature

It’s time once again for the Shell/Economist Essay Contest, in whichyou can win vast sums of money by reusing those high-school expository writing skills. The question last year was “How much freedom should we trade for security?” The winning answer was “none,” and boiled down to the old saw, “boats in a harbor are safe, but that is not what boats are for,” complete with sailing metaphor.

This year’s theme is “Do we need nature?” which has, more or less, the same set of answers: Yes, no, and “trick question.”

Yes, we should give up the liberties a, b, and c in order to maintain safety from dangers d, e, and f. No, no amount of security is worth trading away one iota of our precious freedom. Yes, we need nature for air and warmth and undiscovered plant remedies. No, we don’t need nature, unless you mean some subset of it for raw materials from which we can synthesize everything else.

The third kind of answer argues against the question rather than for the answers it suggests most readily. It says that freedom cannot be traded for security as though they were fungible commodities, or that humanity is part of nature, everything is part of nature, there isn’t any question about needing it or not.

I can think of a dozen reasons why humanity needs nature, and I can certainly support the assertion that the question is unanswerable because humanity and nature are one. But since at least the early 1960s, I don’t think anyone with any serious intellectual ability has actually argued that humanity and nature are not only distinct, but separable, and that humanity controls nature or does not need it.

Although I normally gravitate toward “trick question” type answers, since those are the best way to show off my cleverness, I think that a “no” is probably the more difficult to argue.

Early reviews of Silent Spring accused Carson of alarmism, and stated that “man controls nature.” But that argument, along with the gender bias in its phrasing, has gone the way of the dodo, and for about the same reasons: it’s just too stupid to survive.

Today, there are throwbacks, living in special preserves of political isolation, like giant pandas in a zoo, too ineffectual to breed and preserve their species. For example, Secretary of the Interior James Watt thought conservation was a sin because God had given us just enough resources to last until the End Times, and that those dirty hippies were delaying the return of Christ by trying to save the forests.

I’m sure a “no” answer won’t win the contest– Shell is sponsoring, and they’ll want to burnish their environmentalist credentials. But is there anything even close to a legitimate or defensible “no” answer?

Dialog

Hey! Hey you! Quit playing that power game, that get-ahead game, that who-is-useful-to-me game. People can tell when you’re not on their team, you know. Not at first, not everybody, but it becomes apparent. They’ll tolerate you as long as they know your interests coincide with theirs. But they know that when there’s a sacrifice to be made, you can’t be trusted. I know that when the cards are down you’ll be exposed for the charlatan you are, and you’ll be dropped like a hot rock.

You don’t think I care about this as much as you do? I’m tired, you’re tired, it’s been a goddamn long day. And I do respect you, you know that? But I’ve been around this sort of thing longer than you have, and I will tell you this: the organization does not love you back. It can’t. It’s not a person. It will use you, because that’s its job. I know you’re angry because it’s letting you down now, because it can’t return your love. I’ve been there. It happened to me more than once. I gave everything to a team, to a job, to whatever, and when I’d given as much as I could, one of two things happened: either it was enough, and the org threw me away because I was used up; or it wasn’t enough, and the whole thing collapsed and everybody got fucked. I know how desperately you need to be loved and how much you hate yourself, and me, for it. Let me give you one serious, honest piece of advice: take care of yourself first.

You selfish fuck. You miserable, selfish, egomaniaical little shit. You’re a complete fucking sociopath, you know that?

Call me what you want. Self-preservation is your first directive. People help each other, and make sacrifices for each other, and that’s what makes a society, but you and I both know what happens when there’s two people left on the lifeboat and the society is long long gone. You can’t depend on that society to take care of you– use it, contribute to it, maintain it, but don’t depend on it because one day when you look for it, it won’t be there, and you’ll have to do without.