Victoria's Secret This blog is an invitational; that is, I hope you will all go in and edit it by adding your own creative thoughts. You'll see what I mean.

I've always been amused by the name Victoria's Secret, because it begs the question, what is her secret? I've come up with a list of possibilities over the years. See if you can come up with any I might have missed.

In no particular order:

1. Victoria's knocked up
2. Victoria is a man
3. Victoria likes girls. She likes girls a lot.
4. Victoria is really into NASCAR and snuff
5. Victoria likes fishing, but is squirmy about baiting her own hook or gutting fish
6. Victoria has a couple of VDs; not sure where they came from
7. Victoria is married. To Jesus, of course.
8. Victoria's boobs are fake
9. ??  ¶ 2:21 PM 2 comments

  it's late, but I feel like I owe the world a blog Have you ever noticed that fantasy themes in literature and movies share a pretty blatant theme? I was thinking about this some while driving to Austin tonight. Think about it. All the super hero stories. Harry Potter. Porn-o flicks. Star Trek. It doesn't jump right out at you, I know, because you haven't been in solitary confinement in an old car for three hours with nothing else to think about. So I'll tell you what they all have in common.
All of them are about people who have exciting lives completely free of drudgery. And furthermore, they don't ever have to do what I consider work. Ponder it. All the characters with super powers have some ability that basically enables them to kick ass, which they do about 90% of their waking hours. They don't spend a lot of time sitting in meetings about the new book of regulations for unlicensed crime fighters.
Science fiction-- same deal. People cruise the galaxies in tricked out space ships that don't have desks full of papers that need to be filed and organized-- the disembodies "computer" takes care of all that crap. They never seem to have to wash their lycra uniforms. Maybe they always wear the same one. Nobody in the future has to read a bunch of boring crap, or make coffee for the boss. It's all action, all the time, just like Superman.
And porno flicks-- I saved my best example for last. In the spirit of some of the recent blogs, this will be written from the male perspective. Not only is the protagonist constantly screwing beautiful women, they're teed up for him with no effort. No foreplay, no dinner before that, no waiting two hours for them to put makeup on, no listening to them complain about feelings and crap for hours and hours.  ¶ 12:03 AM 0 comments

  Props to J$ J$ . Thats a really interesting train of thought. I don't know what happens when you carry it its logical conclusion.

I have noticed a similar phenomenon with respect to reading. My opinion is influenced disproportionately by recent reading, and less so by books back in time to the beginning of my literacy. The books that I don't even remember reading are somewhere in there, forming a part of my inchoate and unattributable "knowledge" which really isn't knowledge, since I am effectively inheriting the biases of the authors.

The same thing happens with my moods. I can be having a great day, then get a speeding ticket, and the whole day sucks. Career works that way too.

If you begin with the premise that life is more constant than it is changing, we shouldn't over emphasize recent experience like we do.

I'm not sure where I was going with this? It was just interesting to me, and got me thinking about knowledge.

Maybe the trick is to allow yourself to guiltlessly use the heuristic of stereotyping (or "ideal typing") but to maintain the openness of mind and spirit to challenge the model and admit the depth and breadth of human indviduality. Then recognize humbly the vastness of possible knowledge, the limitless gradations of fact and truth, and the limitation that some people will act differently that you expect, simply because you expect it.  ¶ 7:52 AM 0 comments

  100th post!
100 posts... We're an institution!

So, I was having a really good conversation with a fellow student this evening during a class break. We are studying Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" and our professor had just finished a remarkeably thorough and fascinating explanation of the history of the Roman Republic and how we must see the details in the play in the light of such history if we are to fully grasp what Shakespeare is trying to get us to think about, and a few of us were commenting on how interesting the play was now, and how we can't understand how it could ever be considered "boring." One woman remarked that she was at UofH recently and overheard a couple of coeds lamenting the fact that they were reading it, and how "stupid" and "boring" it was. I then made the comment that I thought that was normal and that most young people think all of the "great books" are "boring."

We then got onto a related topic about young people in general, as another woman argued that students only found literature like "Julius Caesar" boring because they didn't have a proper teacher, one who would open up the text for them in such a way as to spark their natural, innate curiosity for learning. I, in all my jaded wisdom, explained that I used to think that, but that 8 years of teaching made me recant. I look at it now as this: there are some students so apathetic that the grooviest or most brilliant teacher in the world can't ignite the spark of knowledge in their hearts. She disagreed with vehemence, and then the break was over - back to the Shakespeare.

It struck me, as I was thinking about this while driving home, that she was saying people are all the same - they have the same nature, the same innate desire for knowledge. Or, another way of putting it, if given a good teacher to stimulate us mentally, we can all find excitement and significance in an ancient, "boring" text. She was arguing deductively then, based on these assumptions, and I suppose her assumptions were based on her beliefs (a priori) and not so much based on her observations and teaching experience.

Which comes first, the beliefs or the individual examples we lump together to form opinions on things? It's a good question...

I was definitely constructing my theory from my experiences, as I could think of quite a few examples of listless, apathetic children who sit in class 5 days a week with very good teachers (and I'm not talking about myself). But then I started to notice how easy it is to fall into this kind of generalization, and how much of what I perceive from my limited encounters with people, or from watching TV or reading books, is sadly congealed into a kind of oversimplified hasty generalization. I guess it's a form of stereotyping. It also got me thinking about how much of our so-called knowledge, then, isn't really knowledge at all, at least not in the sense of something objective and firm. It's constructed on the shifting sands of whatever things have happened to occur in my existence, and that I've seen from just my own two eyes.

I don't really know how to get past this problem, unless it is to simply stop trying to explain "how things are" in general, and only speak of individual cases. But that's no fun. Isn't it interesting how many of the greatest minds and communicators - the ones who gain massive widespread popularity - are ones who are so good at categorizing and generalizing and simplifiying. But then, I see I just did it again! J$  ¶ 11:44 PM 2 comments

  All man, all the time Above all else, at the end of the day, Who I am, is more important, than what I say.
To these many friends of mine, what more can I say than, “What it is chief?”

Female = 0
Male - 219

Read that!

p.s. try writing a paragraph using only male words... its a good way to avoid the passive voice (F=0, M= 21)  ¶ 12:21 PM 0 comments

  The Gender Genie
It's been so long since I posted here that I am a little jittery and anxious about it. What will I say? Will it be good? Will it be funny? Will it be met with approbation and delight?

I feel the need to reaffirm my Nerds for Words pledge: I am a Nerd. I like Words. I write Words for Nerds. I am a Nerd for Words. There...

Actually, in this post I want to share a little friend I have recently met with all of you. "All" meaning Charles and Ted and the three other ghosts that possibly haunt these electronic halls but more probably have have left us for better blogpastures.

And lest we all forget - HELLO KITTY!

Anyway, my new friend is a robot, and if you know me at all you know that I love robots and I am always glad to gain the acquaintance of a new robot friend. When I was a child I was promised that my adult world would be populated by a plethora of robots, and I must admit that so far I am pretty disappointed because I meet actual robots with such infrequency.

But this robot exists in cyberspace, which means that he is non-existent in reality, and only then quasi-existent. He is the Gender Genie, and his function is to take a piece of text (words) that you supply him - and he inputs your text into his handy-dandy robot text measuring robot machine - and presto! He can tell whether you are a male or female! He can also rate just how "male" or "female" your text is, which can be somewhat disconcerting to sexobulators and closet hermaphrothrobic norpses with testicumulus phobias.

Here's how it works. For instance, take the following text:

"George W. Bush is a forking idiot and I love lilac eyeliner and pumps with pink chiffon tampon menstrual feelings hurt kind of like do I look fat in these jeans"

Presto! It gets the following rating from the Gender Genie robot: Female Score: 60 / Male Score: 22

Now that's weird because, being a male, I shouldn't write like a female, right? er...

What does the Gender Genie say about this? ....

"Guns are great and hunting and peeing on the floor with chewing tobacco porno muscles nascar farts with steak boxing baseball football basketball sports porn and I scratch the war with explosions car chases cleavage and mommy"

The surprising thing is, according to the Gender Genie robot, this speech gets the rating of: Female Score: 172
Male Score: 42 ... which means that it's even MORE girly than the first one!

The Gender Genie knows what's what, and you can't escape its perfect robotic logic - so try it yourself and find out whether you write like a girl or a guy.

And, hey, just so you know that the Gender Genie GOTS IT GOIN ON - that last paragraph was scored: Female Score: 35
Male Score: 103

BOOYA! (I be male)

J$

PS: You can find the Gender Genie online at: http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.html  ¶ 10:14 PM 3 comments

  Etiquette Sometimes its hard to keep up with all the things you are supposed to do, and the equally large list of things you aren't supposed to do to fit in with genteel company.

I can usually avoid the obvious and easy ones, like not hitting, biting, kicking or gouging people. The obvious and pernicious ones are a little more difficult, like nose-picking, crotch itching, eye-rolling, and double-dipping.

That leaves the even more evasive class, the subtle and easy ones. Things like walking through revolving doors and down escalators before a female companion, while at the same time letting them go through lines and up escalators in front of you. Movie theaters... Any guess? Well, you should go in first to push through the crowds.

What crowds? What movie theater are they going to in the 1950s?

So the final class of classless behaviors is the subtle and difficult tasks, these tend to be broadly defined rules based on outcomes I am incapable of achieving or influencing.

In the turn of phrase made popular by my friends in the gay and lesbian community. "Come as you are." And so here, I am.

Labels: Telephone polls and bicycle seats

  ¶ 6:07 PM 0 comments

  Welcome to our house
I wanted to write about a quote I keep thinking of that I believe is attributed to Ghandi, "Be the change you want to see in the world."

I even found some clip-art which in a non-PC way is suggestive of the sage in question. But I couldn't come up with anything that isn't saccharine-sweet or depressing, and I don't need any more of either of those. I don't think you, my one faithful reader, do either.

So I turn to another quote, which isn't as inspiring. I think this one is Mark Twain:

"A fool is somebody who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing."

That's me now. I've spent the last 5 or 6 weeks looking for a place to live, and I can come up with all sorts of metrics to nail down the price of a piece of property to the nth degree. We've haggled with sellers down to the last dollar, and been told by agents that they don't want to deal with us because we're negotiating too much. We worry about buying a certian house because when we go to resell it we may not be able to get all our money back out of it, since everybody else is also a student of the science of real estate. As my wife pointed out, when it comes to real estate, everybody styles hiimself a savante.

The internet adds a neat twist. Now everybody can look on the tax appraisal roll and see exactly how much we paid for our house. People don't seem to have any qualms about asking how much we're offering for a house, and then of course commenting on whether or not that's a good price. Maybe it's the particular breed of jackass I spend most of my waking hours around-- I hope your friends and relatives retain a little more vintage etiquette.

I hereby resolve, with dog as my witness:

1) I will never again ask anybody about the price of a home they are buying or selling, unless I am the buyer or the seller
2) I will never look up the value of somebody else's house to satisfy my curiosity
3) I will to refrain from mentally estimating the value of houses I do not own or hope to own
4) I will never offer unsolicited advice or opinions about the real estate market, despite my unique status as a self-proclaimed expert
5) I will knee people in the crotch when they break any of the previous 4 guidelines with respect houses I own or hope to own
6) Everybody who has ever broken any of the first four tenets, especially myself, is hereby forgiven for the what they have done or what they failed to do in the past

That should do it. Please add more if you can think of some good ones.  ¶ 10:21 AM 1 comments

  Time to rethink "Hi, my name is C______ and I worry about money. "

(audience at home chimes in) "Good morning C_____! " in the sort of monotonous atonal way that groups of 10 people on folding chairs chant.

I read an interesting (though not good) book the other day that got me thinking about the nearly universal concept of money in a slightly different way. In this book, Yvon Chouinard talks about his 30+ years running Patagonia and how they were focused not on the money they could make but the good they could do. Money was one tool, but one of many.

So I got to thinking how different life for me would be (in the better sort of way) if instead of balancing checkbooks (a myth) tabulating total values of stocks and stuff, if I did a monthly or annual report of how much good my family was able to accomplish.

We get tons of chances. We let most of them go by because they cost that otehr stuff that I more accurately keep track of.

The dilemna I run into is how to keep the important work from colliding with the tool necessary to achieve it. And then I ask, "is there really a conflict."

"Consumption" by nature is "destruction," so having less of the currency of consumption, may in and of itself be doing good. At last.. a positive feedback loop.

So for February, I think I'm going to spend the $2100 to insulate a tenement of mine that is uninsulated. (I just found this out and it sickens me.)

In March, maybe I'll sell my SUV for scrap.  ¶ 8:15 AM 3 comments

  And now for something a little different Last night I was sitting on a plane reading a book that I'm somewhat interested in. I tuned in and out a couple of times, which is usually the point where I put the book down and go do something else. Except when I'm strapped to a chair and unable to do anything else. One of the last things I noticed was the word 'extinct', but I was zoned out to the extent that the context didn't register.
So I got to thinking about another book I read, on Darwinism, which pointed out that the concept of species is somewhat abstract and overly simplistic because in many cases there is no clear line that can be drawn to separate one group of organisms from all other living things. In certain circumstances, genetic diversity goes all the way down to the individual organism. I like that outlook. In essence, we are all a unique species to some extent.
The book I was reading on the plane was about a couple where the wife is diagnosed with cancer, and the husband is the narrator. The narrator putters about, woefully sad, painfully aware of his inability to alter the course of events, and reflective on all the good times they've had. This got me thinking as I occasionally do about my own happy marriage, and how it will some day come to its natural end. The happier the two of us are together, the less I can bear to think of what awaits us in a few decades. Dark stuff, I know. I apologize.
I think the concept of extinction fits really well here. When I reflect on the people close to me, it really does seem that each one is one-of-a-kind and irreplacable (not just a reflection on how low our readership has sunk). When one of them is taken away, which won't happen for a very long time, inshalah, it seems like a species really will have died out forever.  ¶ 9:59 PM 0 comments

  About last night... I discovered last night that The Cheesecake Factory employs a semi-infinite series of steps to shepherd customers from the front door the their table, where each step is half the length of time of the preceding step. To wit: you wait in a very long line to see the hostess, who acts like she's doing you a favor by letting you in her restaurant. She hands you a pager, which takes a very long time to go off (but not as long a time as it took to get past the hostess). You hand your pager to a second hostess with attitude, who tells you to wait in a new line of people who've also passed the pager step. This line is shorter than the wait for the pager, but still appreciably long. Like cattle, you are herded to a table where you await your server. This step may have started a new series, because it actually seemed longer than some of the preceding steps. Then more waiting for your order to be taken, food to be brought out, etc. In all, I think we waited

L* {1/A + 1/2A + 1/4A + ...} ;

where L is a lifetime and A is the amount of time it takes me to get very Angry about having to wait for something I don't really want. The food was pretty good.
While we were waiting in the post-pager stage, Robyn and I contemplated things one could do to amuse one's self in such a situation. All of them involved dressing in black slacks and a white Oxford, so as to look reasonably like an employee of the restaurant.
1) Go out into the lobby and tell everyone with a pager that the pager system was malfunctioning, so they should all form a single-file line to the hostess stand to be seated
2) Fart a lot (OK, you don't need to dress up for this one. It didn't have much effect, though)
3) Ask people in the post-pager stage to "Please follow me to your table," and take them on a long, winding path through the restaurant until you reach an empty table, and them seat them there. Every so often, stop in front of a dirty table and say, "Oh, it looks like they haven't cleared your table yet. I'll take you to a different one."
4) Leave. Go have a few drinks somewhere else and call it a night.
When I retire and open my cafe, I'll make sure to have really cute, friendly hostesses so that people won't get pissed off when it takes forever to get a table. If, in fact, it takes forever to get a table at my restaurant. If you print out this blog and save it, I'll give you a free drink every time you come in*



* With the purchase of one or more full-price entree per guest  ¶ 3:46 PM 1 comments