Saturday, April 29, 2006

Pictures Anyone?



Well, lookie here- I think I may have gotten this adding a photo to the Blog thing down.

Thought I'd start off with an image of three of my favorite things- a beautiful woman holding a pint of bitter in Cornwall! (I lived in Cornwall for a couple of years while married to the last ex-wife).

Enjoy! I know I do!

My God, Talk About Getting Bitten in the Ass

I just found this on a Blog of a woman that appears to have some of my favorite traits in a girl- she likes beer and plays soccer! I'm not gonna say much about it, just let it speak for itself.

Oh, yea, her Blog:
http://arcticskipper.blogspot.com/

Note to self: Don't Scratch Butt While At Work

I'm sure this has been going around the net, but I just thought I'd share . . .

Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Texas. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an e-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 FM in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, which was sponsoring a "worst job experience" contest. Needless to say, she won.

"Hi Sue, Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you've been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it's not so bad after all.

"Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wetsuit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this:

We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I've used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wetsuit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It's like working in a Jacuzzi.

Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my butt started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened.

"The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don't have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't stick to it. However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator.

"His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically. Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't poop for two days because my butt was swollen shut.

So, next time you're having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt. "Now repeat to yourself, "I love my job, I love my job, I love my job."

"And whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself: is this a "jellyfish bad" day?"

Tuesday is Soylent Green Day

I debated with myself regarding the title of this post. I was leaning toward "Soylent Green is People," but that has been so overplayed in the pop culture I thought I'd go in the other direction.

I just finished watching the classic 1973 sc-fi flick starring the intensely over-dramatic Charlton Heston and the exceptionally poised Edward G. Robinson. Turn off the DVD and what's on the ol' telley- nothing other the intensely over-dramatic Ben Affleck in the dreadful war/love flick Pearl Harbor! Man what a contrast.

I've been working my way through the older movies at my local video store lately and seeing as I spent much of the day considering mankind's dreadful prospects of a future, I thought a little industrial level cannibalism was the perfect way to go. Man was I right. Nothing like a little doom, gloom, and global warming to lighten up the Saturday night!

But it was the contrast of Soylent Green and Pearl Harbor that got me thinking- do they even make mainstream downer movies starring big-time actors anymore? Wouldn't the movie Armageddon have been so much better if in the end Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis had ridden the giant asteroid smack into the Earth? Everyone dies a horrible death and humanity becomes extinct due to our collective obsession with internal conflicts as opposed to turning our gaze toward the stars.

Good movies with dark undertones where everyone dies in the end, now that's what I call cinema! Can anyone say Luc Besson? Yea, that's right, I like that French cinema- or considering our current political situation perhaps I should rename it Freedom cinema.

Oh, gotta go now, Alec Baldwin is about to fly his B-25 off the deck of the USS Hornet to smack down those evil French, ah, I mean Japanese, baddies. God it makes me teary eyed for my old Navy days!

Its okay now, the moment of temporary insanity has passed! What the hell was I thinking? Miss the Navy?!?!

Eugenics and Me- Why Should I Care?

I've been doing a bit of thinking lately about the future. In particular I have been working on a paper regarding future eugenics. Now, I'm not thinking about the traditional philosophy based on Francis Galton's ideas, which morphed into Social Darwinism and eventually led to some wacky laws here in the states in the early part of the 20th century involving forced sterilization, not to mention the whole insane Nazi application practices.

No, what I'm thinking about is eugenics (which translates to "well born" or "true breeding") in the future. You see, we are already playing around with fetilization in humans (In vitro fertilization, or IVF, has been going on for over 30 years now), and even more interesting aspects of genome alteration in laboratories around the world. It's entirely within reason that in just a few generations human parents will be able to choose genes they want to insert into their potential offspring.

Take for instance, you wanted to have a really tall child so he could get into the NBA and make millions to take care of Daddy in his old age. Well, you pick out a couple of the genes of major effect involved in height (there are probably numerous genes involved), you select the alleles that produce the greatest effects on height and insert them into the selected sperm, maybe even alter the regulation mechanisms of those genes so they turn on earlier in development and stay on longer, and BAM!!, taller kid. But why stop there, add extra artificial chromosomes with more copies of the genes. Or better yet, create and insert entirely artificial genes that create super-tall height-affecting proteins. Look out Shaq, here comes my boy!

Here's why its eugenics, though. New technologies are always very expensive. Even after so long, IVF is priced out of the reach of many Americans, not to mention the vast majority of people around the world. So in the future, offspring of wealthy families will be genetically modified to be "better people," while my kids' kids will be stuck with the same old genes I've had to manage with.

But why should I care? I just can't get riled up for my great, great,..grandkids. I know there is that whole Richard Dawkins "Selfish Genes" thing that supposedly my genes are focusing me on ensuring their continued existence, but that's crap. Genes are inert little information storage devices that just sit there until the environmental conditions are right for the machinery of the cell to copy the info and carry it to the ribosomes for protein production. Where's the selfishness? Or the happiness, empathy, slovenliness, or anything else for that matter? Genes just don't care. So why should I?

Let my descendents just figure it out for themselves. I did.

You know, I don't have enough Dire Straights in my life

You know what, I started writing a long-winded, drawn out post on work, but screw it. I had already written a few mind-numbing paragraphs about writing, working, students, yadayadayada...It was crap.

That's what happens when I decide I "should" try to take the more "intellectual" approach to Blogging! Why? It's my Blog and no one else is reading, so Screw It!

Let's, instead, just follow the rambling pathway that is my thought process wherever the hell it might lead. I even changed the title of this post.

"You know, I don't have enough Dire Straights in my life." So spoketh my buddy at the bar last night (and by buddy I mean the guy buying/serving me beer). Two things about this story are disturbing: first of all, my only friends are all people that work in the bars where I spend most of my money; secondly, the fact someone could actually not have enough Dire Straights in his life.

Now don't get me wrong, I, in my day, was a big Mark Knoffler fan. But that was awhile ago. The utterer of the above statement was a kid barely into his 20's that was probably still shitting his diapers when Mark was grumbling about "money fo' nothin', an' his chicks for free" (man, where can I get me some of those "chicks for free"?). Makes you wonder about the cyclical nature of cultural preferences.

Actually, I wonder why cultural trends/preferences shift at all? Yes, yes, I know, modern Western society is driven by crass consumerism and marketing, and we are all convinced that last year's lawnmower isn't gonna cut it by money-hungry, faceless manipulators hell-bent on selling us this year's model, but come on, is this answer good enough? What I mean is why are we susceptible to this? Is this an evolutionary response of selective pressures driving a larger, more inquisitive brain? Evolutionary Psychologists, of course, would have us believe so, but they're full of bunk, so that's no good (I took an Evo Psych class as an undergrad from a man, I was later informed, was originally an Occupational Psychologist that switched to Evo Psych after his wife caught him cheating on her in defense of his actions-cool, hah?).

So why do we do it? Other organisms don't shift their cultural practices with such rapidity-Chimps, perhaps the most cultural of the non-human organisms, do reflect changing regional cultures, but at best, this occurs between generations, not model years.

Who knows? Maybe it does have something to do with selective pressures and adaptive responses of the brain. Afterall, a larger, more facile mind which would make for more intricate and exquisite social and cultural interactions, as well more adroitness and deftness in innovating and exploiting technology, would, in all likelihood, make us more responsive within our lifetimes to changing stimuli, resulting in more rapid acceptance of social/cultural innovation.

This still doesn't explain my young friend's interest in Dire Straights, though.