Think you know how it's going to turn out Tuesday? Why don't you put your money* where your mouth is in the Three Guys Predictions Open Thread?

*no money required

Google says they've fixed it.

Original post.

...when applied directly to the scalp.

"Allerca is working to produce the world's first hypo-allergenic cats." Can feline supersoldiers be far behind?

What's so bad about Wal-mart.

Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.

Hadn't had a chance to hit McSweeney's in a while. Some good stuff there.

Take, for instance, "Jokes," by no less a personage than Andy Ritcher. This being McSweeney's, part of the gimmick is that the jokes aren't exactly funny, per se. This one and the last one are my favorite, but this one's funnier:

Two light bulbs are lying in their cardboard sleeve on a shelf somewhere. The first light bulb is a real nervous type. He's been going on and on. "What if I don't light up? Seriously, what if I don't? I will just fucking die! God, I'm freaking out. And thanks to our fucking packaging, we don't know whether we're in a store or a warehouse, or if we're sitting under someone's kitchen sink moments away from being screwed in and turned on. What if there's something wrong with my filament? I mean, it feels OK to me, but there's not really any way of knowing for sure until I get hit with some current. Sure, I passed the factory test and lit up just fine, but what if ..." The second light bulb has had enough. "Will you shut the fuck up! Just shut up!" There is a long awkward silence. Then the first light bulb says, "Well, what else are we supposed to talk about?"

Like I said, the last one is good too.

And then, of course, there's "Excerpts from Dagwood Bumstead's Intervention."

UPDATE 2: Google says they've fixed it.

Be informed. Google's aware of the problem and working on fixing it, but in the meantime, avoid clicking on any links unless you're sure of their origin and propriety, and be wary of storing any sensitive emails on the Gmail server.

UPDATE: While we're on the subject, this post from the delightfully named Bradlands has good advice about how to choose (and not choose) your security questions, for Gmail and for everything else.

If you're scared to death about the upcoming election, I have a post or two that might comfort you over at the other blog.

At least this guy was still alive before they robbed him (allegedly).

It's so great out today.

Science has finally figured out the difference between men and women. Developing...

They've found hobbit hair, as well as some evidence that perhaps modern humans and hobbits lived side by side on Flores until the Dutch arrived in the 1500s. Wow.

(via Boing Boing)

PClem asked me to put this up. He's at a very important meeting in his bathrobe. "Physicist says imaging techniques prove the president's bulge was not caused by wrinkled clothing."

Houdini's magic stash is up for sale.

And ESPN's got 'em.

Man, I had all of these when I was a kid. The one I remember most vividly is probably Man-E-Faces; something about his ability to change faces just freaked me out. Trap-Jaw was cool, too.

And I've got a soft spot for Buzz-Off, despite his lameness. But the best He-man figure hands-down was Battle-Cat.

Good times.

Until November 2, subscribe to Salon Premium and the proceeds will be donated to ACT. If you were looking to spend $35 on something you can get for free with a little annoyance, now's the time.

The Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act -- Check 21 -- went into effect today.

What this basically means is you can't float checks anymore.

Just FYI.

Not a review so much as a deconstruction, the granddaddy of all movie reviewers Jim Emerson, Editor of RogerEbert.com, reviews Donnie Darko, arguing against the will of its creator that the entire movie is a product of Donnie's deranged/adolescent mind. Includes a disturbing (but nearly persuasive) fixation on Ebert's Emerson's part regarding a supposed unconscious sexual attraction of Donnie's for his sister Elizabeth.

[Edited for correctness. See comments.]

DominoArt: Detailed portaits of Martin Luther King, Abe Lincoln, the Mona Lisa, and the Statue of Liberty, made entirely out of 12 sets of double-nine dominoes.



(Via Boing Boing.) This blows my mind.

The head of every Republican in America just exploded. Includes details of an interview with Lincoln's stepmother (young Abe 'never took much interest in the girls'), of Lincoln's same-sex bed habits, and even a pro-gay marriage poem the young Lincoln wrote as a lad.

And apparently it's all on the level. Check it out.

The game that teaches you while you learn.

Just another case of history repeating.

Weird fact in case you missed it: The Celtics won their first championship against St. Louis (1957); the Bruins broke a 41-year Stanley Cup drought against St. Louis (1970); and the Patriots won their first Super Bowl against St. Louis (2002). Hey, I'm just the messenger.

(via Neil)

Play chess against a computer and watch the pattern of its thoughts.

Why? Because it's there.

(via Boing Boing. I'm taking a lot on faith here.)

Stream-of-consciousnes blogging: The Flores Man post got me thinking about one of my favorite science fiction starting points: "What would happen if two sentient species evolved in different locations on the same planet?" Which got me thinking of the Cthulhu stories of H.P. Lovecraft -- for instance, "The Nameless City" -- where something like this is exactly the case. I taught this story for Fred Chappell's Genre Fiction course last year. I'll tell you this, it's creepy as hell.

Which got me thinking about how PClem is going to be mad as hell when he finds out that I pushed the album review he posted earlier this morning down the page.

Scientists have uncovered a new species of human, the hobbit-sized, extinct Flores Man.

Better than that, check out where it lived:

This hobbit-sized creature appears to have lived as recently as 18,000 years ago on the island of Flores, a kind of tropical Lost World populated by giant lizards and miniature elephants.

Why haven't I ever heard of this place before? Flores rocks!

Video of a Super Mario Brothers...On Ice! television special, presumably from 1987 or so.

Hosted by Jason Bateman and Alyssa Milano.

Must be seen to be believed. Surreal.

Read all about it before it's broken before the Red Sox prove it horribly, horribly true. Again.

The Strange Noise That's Driving People Crazy Worldwide.

First picture of Johnny Depp as The Man Himself. I've got to say, he's no Gene Wilder.

(via AICN)

I got a chance to watch Dogville today. With everything that's been going on, it's been a while since I was able to actually watch a movie, so I was glad that it actually turned out to be good. Chilling, and deeply disturbing, yes -- but good.

The thing that immediately stands out about this movie is its design. Dogville looks like a play: blank backgrounds; few props; no facades or walls; imaginary doors, bushes, and dogs. Various locations of importance are labeled in white capital letters: ELM ST., THE OLD LADY'S BENCH. (This quirk of set design is used to great effect throughout the movie, particularly in the movie's turning point, a stunning, silent, sickening shot that you will probably recognize when you see it.)

This movie starts out as a kind of happy fable of small-town Americana. I won't talk about where it ends up, but it's a long, long way from there.

This is a great movie. It's a work of art.

Riding in to save America. Like I said on the other blog, it's hard to believe it's even possible to say this, but I never should have left Cleveland.

Here.

UPDATE: There's now fifty seconds of new animation at the end of the song.

In Eminem's new video, the revolution wears a black hooded sweatshirt. And votes for Kerry, apparently, although it's possible the video is actually asking us to write-in Slim Shady, I'm not entirely sure. (.mov download: here.)

Needless to say, MTV doesn't want to air it. (EDIT: Maybe we can make them change their mind; write in "Mosh" by Eminem at the bottom of the page.)

"Mosh" Lyrics

Via Pandagon.

It's actually really good.

Look in his eyes, it's all lies, the stars and stripes
They've been swiped, washed out and wiped,
And replaced with his own face...

Rehearsal tapes from a tour in the late 1970s, recorded at Rundown Studios in Santa Monica. Free.(Via Linkfilter)

An oldie but a goodie. This has actually been on my mind a little lately, mostly because of the article "How to Live in a Simulation," which advises in part:

If our descendants tend to be more interested in simulating "pivotal" people and events from their history, then you should raise your estimate of the chances that the events and people around you will be considered pivotal to your descendants. You should also try to encourage this to happen, as it will make the simulators less likely to drop you from their simulation, or to end that simulation. If you can identify an especially interesting event around you, you might also try to prevent it from ending, as the simulation might end soon after the event does.

I'm feeling more and more (not really) like this is the actual, true arrow of all our lives: The world really is a history-themed computer simulation, and it turns out we were all minor participants in the Second American Revolution. This is how it happened, kids.

At least that would explain how apocalyptic everything seems.

Sure hope we win.

As is fairly well-known, a substantial part of the Nazi war effort was based on the purely mystical belief that magical assistance would ultimately come to the aid of the Germans, from either a lost super-race (said to be living in the center of the Earth) or the old Teutonic gods.

This page details one Nazi expedition to Tibet that was sent in search of Thule, the legendary homeland of the Aryan race, rumored to be living underground in the Hollow Earth.

Thank God Indiana Jones was there to stop them.

Everything (and I mean everything) you ever wanted to know about superhero comics.

What is the Crisis on Infinite Earths? Part I and II.

What's the deal with Iron Man?

Who's more important, Stan Lee or Jack Kirby?

And many others...

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 8:11 PM  |

thedarkside/switch

...goes to John Kerry. I am literally blown away.

Not really.

But it's nice to add them to the pile.

UPDATE: I hadn't realized that The New Yorker had never endorsed anyone before. That's decidedly more impressive.

My understanding is that some of you might enjoy an article about Pixies frontman Charles Thomspon. All this I can truly deliver.

What I won't deliver, however, is bottled water that claims to be clean that is actually flowing from the toilets of Singapore. Purified or no, that's incredibly disgusting.

Your knitting patterns, under a Creative Commons license, via Boing Boing.

Go Spartans!

Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22.

These neurons are growing on top of a multi-electrode array and form a living "brain" that's hooked up to a flight simulator on a desktop computer. When information on the simulated aircraft's horizontal and vertical movements are fed into the brain by stimulating the electrodes, the neurons fire away in patterns that are then used to control its "body" -- the simulated aircraft.

I cannot believe this is true. God. Wow. God.

Ashlee Simpson gets Milli Vanilli'd.

We can all sleep easy tonight.

Who should play Osama in the movie? Bobby Roos was wondering exactly that. Starring Richard Dreyfuss, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Robert de Niro, Robin Williams and Peter Falk (Columbo).

Salon has a new profile up on Graham Greene for his centennial.

I've been meaning to pick up Our Man in Havana since the last profile I read of Graham Greene. And the Donnie Darko connection is cool, too.

Remember that Philosophers' Magazine game I linked to a while back, Staying Alive? That was the 'identity' game that asks you to answer three extremely difficult questions about personal survival. This is question two:

We're sad to say that you've caught the virus. Medics can get around the virus by replacing pieces of the brain with advanced forms of silicon chip. In your case, they would have to do this to almost all of your brain. But trials show that you can be sure that the result will be the total preservation of your memories, personality, plans, beliefs and so on, and a person as able to carry on living a normal life as is, well, normal.

The alternative is to succumb to the virus with its consequent loss of memory and change in character. You must make the choice which you think will give your self the biggest chance of surviving. Click one of the two options below:

It's the silicon for me!

Let the virus do its worst!

Well, we're almost there.

Professor Theodore W. Berger, director of the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California, is creating a silicon chip implant that mimics the hippocampus, an area of the brain known for creating memories. If successful, the artificial brain prosthesis could replace its biological counterpart, enabling people who suffer from memory disorders to regain the ability to store new memories.

And it's no longer a question of "if" but "when." The six teams involved in the multi-laboratory effort, including USC, the University of Kentucky and Wake Forest University, have been working together on different components of the neural prosthetic for nearly a decade.

Wow.

The New Superman: He's been cast.



Eh. They should have gone with Bruce Campbell.

What happens when you crossbreed Christians with nerds? You don't want to know.

I find it really difficult to teach stories that I find flawless or basically flawless. Take for instance "The Swimmer," which I taught this morning. I love this story. Objectively speaking it's one the best stories ever written. I really feel that the story speaks for itself, and that any attempt to discuss what it's about in detail is a lot like clubbing the story to death and then dissecting its corpse.

My ideal lesson for "The Swimmer" goes a little something like this: So, who found this story confusing? All right, well, what if every time the story talks about water, it's really talking about alcohol? And what if all this stuff didn't really happen over just single day, but over the course of years? Okay, go read it again. One minute.

Only I'm paid to talk for fifty minutes. So it's clubbing and dissecting for me.

Oh, and remember how I The Editors said that we know our real lives have been getting in the way of the blog, and sorry about that, but don't worry but posting will pick up soon?

My posting is definitely going to pick up again soon, but real life keeps pushing me in front of cars. Last week I wasn't working on the Kerry campaign at all; then I was working for MoveOn as a precinct leader; now I'm still a precinct leader, but I'm also the MoveOn Organizer for all of Guilford County (as of Wednesday).

What this means is that the next two weeks are going to be extremely busy for me. I'll post, but not nearly as much as the golden days of the summertime, at least not until after the election.

Step 1: [knock knock] Hi, my name is Gerry, I live in on the other side of campus. Are you ______? Great. _____, I'm working on the upcoming election; are you planning on voting in November, and do you know yet who you're going to vote for?...

Step 2. (Repeat.]

In Rolling Stone, Hunter S. Thompson takes on "Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004."

Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.

I told the man at the Sprint Store that I'd been hurt before. He took my hand and said, "You can trust me."

I want to believe him.

Oh thank God. Oh thank God.

UPDATE: Over at Three Guys, Shankar is positively gleeful. And he hasn't even started talking about all the ways that this will help John Kerry yet.

Mindball: the game where two players control a ball with their brain waves. The most relaxed player wins.

The future is now.

"Scientists in the UK are applying for a licence to create human embryos with three genetic parents. The aim is ultimately to prevent children from inheriting genetic diseases caused by mutations in DNA housed by their mitochondria - components of cells which produce energy."

This stuff is amazing to me.

I just know I'm going to be the last person to die before they invent immortality.

Question for Discussion: The Red Sox immediately fell three games behind when I was paying attention. After I totally gave up hope and put the series completely out of my mind, they came back to 3-3. Now it's Game 7, and I'm definitely paying attention again.

Are the Red Sox doomed?

...can be found here.

PClem should have posted this himself, but he's busy knocking on doors, fighting the good fight.

Slate asks 31 famous novelists who they're voting for. The results may (not) surprise you.

They really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find some novelists voting for Bush. Greensboro's own crazy uncle in the attic, Orson Scott Card? Seriously, Slate? Come on.

Go Kerry.

The future is now. Let's hope television companies are smarter than the RIAA.

(Transcript of Stewart's incredible appearance and questionably legal BitTorrent links available via the absolutely-in-no-way-associated-with-this-magazine Three Guys)

Kurt Vonnegut's last conversation with Kilgore Trout, who apparently committed suicide-by-Drano on October 15 after a psychic told him that Bush would "win" reelection again in a five-four Supreme Court decision.

An excerpt:

KV: Look, when you put a piece of paper in your typewriter, don’t you try to make it exactly what it should be?

TROUT: No, I just effing write.

KV: What are you effing writing now?

TROUT: It’s about how the future has as much to do with the present as the past does. Giraffes can only have come from the future. There’s no way evolution in the past would have let something that defenseless and impractical live for 15 minutes.

KV: If you say so.

TROUT: Try this: The First World War was caused by the second one. Otherwise the first one makes no sense, wasn’t about anything. And all Picasso had to do was paint pictures that were already hanging in museums in the future.

Reel Faces compares the movie versions of characters to the real deal. With interviews and analyses of what was changed.

eLECTIONS: The game for losers political junkies.

I Love Bees is the latest and perhaps most ambitious of the growing genre known as alternate-reality games. In it, widely dispersed players coordinate to find and answer thousands of ringing pay phones all across the United States and provide correct answers to recorded questions.
...
For those who obsessively play I Love Bees, the point is to take part in the creation and distribution of the radio drama. To do so, players log onto the game's website each week to find the latest clues and a list of the pay phones that will be called."

The site lists the GPS coordinates for each phone and the time it will be called. More than a million unique visitors have come to the I Love Bees website, the game's designers said.

Six main characters from the year 2552 prepare for a great war in the storyline. Each time a player correctly answers a pay-phone question, he or she is treated to 30 seconds of new material. Over the course of the game, the plot unfolds, revealing a menacing alien army that threatens 26th-century Earth and only intervention from the past can help.

The most exciting element of the game for some players is the possibility that they will get one of the rare live calls in which the drama's actors talk to whoever answers the phone and then incorporate the conversation into the show itself.

There is nothing so weird it won't catch on.

If the Washington Redskins lose to the Green Bay Packers on Halloween, John Kerry wins the White House -- or so says snopes.com, anyway. It's true*.

--
*Not really true.

Here's his biography. I think this is slightly out of date; doesn't he have a kid now?

God, it's freaky.

Nerds rejoice.

You may have noticed slightly decreased activity on the blog in the last few weeks. Well, it's true that we've all been busy ever since we had to grow up and get real jobs -- but that doesn't mean the magazine is flailing.

Our first issue has been fully stocked with greatness and is in the process of being edited. (If you haven't subscribed yet, subscribe!) Backwards City Review #1 be hitting newstands across America the East Coast North Carolina Greensboro Gerry's House in late November/early December.

We'll have some tidbits up from the first issue on the official-but-too-rarely-used website up soon. There's also a official website redesign in the works that's about, say, 80% completed.

Things are all coming together nicely. Stick around.

And in the meantime, subscribe! Donate! Clickthrough! Subscribe! And start thinking about what you're going to submit for our inaugural contest in our second issue!

The Dot Game

and, its infuriating sequel,

Dodge the Dots.

Enjoy your Sunday.

The world remains divided on the question of whether or not the comedy act from the Yo La Tengo concert was "wicked funny" or "extremely lame."

I laughed.

In any event, if you liked them, and maybe even if you didn't, you might enjoy their webpage, Midnight Pajama Jam, and a few of the movies they've made.

Parody Swift Boat Ad
American Baby
Boots (Warning: This one's extremely profane and NSFW, but the last line in particular cracks me and Jennie T up. Jaimee, for her part, remains nonplussed.)

Come on, they're funny.

(Thanks, Duder!)

Roadblocks: The Game.

It's true:

At night while asleep, the middle-aged sleepwalker - who lives in Australia and cannot be identified for reasons of confidentiality - left her house and had sexual intercourse with strangers. The behaviour continued for several months and the woman had no memory of her nocturnal activities.

Circumstantial evidence, such as condoms found scattered around the house, alerted the couple to the problem. On one occasion, her partner awoke to find her missing, went searching for her and found her engaged in the sex act.

What a strange disorder.

But why would I need another computer program that shows you what it feels like to be going crazy? I already have my life.

Budweiser's newest entry in a long line of innovative beers by Anheuser-Busch, is a distinctive new product for contemporary adults who are looking for the latest beverage to keep up with their highly social and fast-paced lifestyles.

As the industry leader, Anheuser-Busch is the first major brewer to infuse beer with caffeine, guarana and ginseng. Well balanced with select hops and aromas of blackberry, raspberry and cherry, BE will offer a lightly sweet and tart taste - a great mixture of beer and new flavors for adults to enjoy when out with friends at a club or at a bar after work with colleagues.

B^E: because there's no idea so stupid some beer company won't try it.

Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same?

Via Boing Boing comes Pirates and Emperors, a brilliantly executed, clever homage to Schoolhouse Rock that takes on the excruciatingly current issue of American imperialism and dark dealings abroad.

...'Cause there are Pirates and Emperors, but they're really the same thing, when they go and try to reach the same ends by using the same means. Well, they do it big or they do it small, from a little tiny boat or from the hallowed halls. Bully is as bully does, that's plain to see...

Cue the Contras; cue the CIA's relationship with Noriega, bin Laden, and Hussein; cue Abu Ghraib; cue the War on Terror and the War on Ducks. Like I said, it's very well done.

Despite what most Americans (including, sadly, our President) believe, our foreign policy, past and present, isn't all hugs and puppies.

I remembered really liking Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas" in college, so I put it on the syllabus this semester sort of on a whim. I'm really glad I did. Not only was it a fantastic story to use as an introduction to allegory -- a concept that in my experience students never really understand and almost universally dislike, but not this year -- but its message is both simple to convey and extremely disconcerting for students when the lightbulb suddenly goes on.

Omelas is a fairy tale city; a paradise. But this paradise comes at a cost: for the entire city to be filled with happiness and unending joy, one small child must be endlessly tortured in its basement. One child suffers horribly so that the rest may live in safety, joy, and peace.

Everyone in Omelas knows that this is the deal -- and except for the vanishingly small number of people who leave the city, everyone in Omelas is able to come to terms with and accept this bargain.

Both my classes rejected Omelas, violently. Both classes, to a student, felt that this was, on its face, an extremely immoral state of affairs, no matter how many people are happy in the city, if the cost is misery for someone else. No matter how good Omelas is, they felt, it's not worth the price.

And both classes, again to a student, had no tolerance for the rationalizations and excuses the Omelasians come up with to justify their society's basic immorality.

And so it was astounding and extremely gratifying for me to see the shock of recognition in their faces when I wrote the words Salem, Oregon on the board and asked them to think about the way life in Omelas is like life here in America, a marvel of technological magic and democratic freedom unlike any the world has ever known -- in short, the most prosperous nation ever to exist on the face of the earth.

This story asks: Who is the child in our basement? Who toils and suffers so that we can live in unprecedented comfort?

This story asks: What is the price of our happy lives, and who pays it?

It's not easy to get students to see their own reflection in a story like this. But Le Guin got the job done handily.

I highly recommended this story for your Intro to Lit and Intro to Narrative classes. Give it a shot.

I knew soda causes cancer! I just knew it. Unfortunately for me, I drank gallons of the stuff daily until I turned 22.

Super-deadly esophageal cancer. Damn. That's going to be a real kick in the teeth.

Your mom's a Human Lie Detector.

You're in a room with two guards, and each guard is guarding one of two exits. One guard always lies. One guard always tells the truth. You don't know which is which. One door leads to freedom. One door leads to the horrible man-eating tiger pit of doom from which there is no escape. You don't know which is which. And you don't know whether the truth-telling or the lying guard is guarding the "right" exit.

You know very little.

You're standing in the room. You're allowed to ask one question to one guard, and after that you have to choose your door. What question do you ask?

Highlight to see the answer: "Which door would the other guard tell me is the exit?" The truth-teller will point at the tiger door, because the other guard is a liar and wouldn't point at the exit. The liar will point to the tiger door, because the other guard is a truth-teller and would point at the exit. So either way this is a sure test to find the tiger door, and so you should take whichever door the guard doesn't point at.

In any event, it turns out this little brainteaser has some useful applications.

Some of them are neat, anyway. MetaFilter thread has some verification and some debunking, here.

Meanwhile, a paralyzed man has been implanted with a pill-sized chip that allows him to check email and play computer games with his thoughts. This is actually true, and pretty astounding.

MetaFilter's got some stuff to say about this, too.

See, PClem? You're not alone.

Click here for more details.

And now, your moment of childhood zen. I have to say, this book is surprisingly meta for a kid's book. Who knew Sesame Street was so post-modern?

Your outside is in and your inside is out. It turns out we actually live on the inside of a giant hollow sphere.

I had no idea.

I see this political sign every day. I laugh and I cry. But this site blogs it up. That's initiative.

There's a new Prisoner's Dilemma strategy in town. This Southampton strategy was actually really clever:

Teams could submit multiple strategies, or players, and the Southampton team submitted 60 programs. These, Jennings explained, were all slight variations on a theme and were designed to execute a known series of five to 10 moves by which they could recognize each other. Once two Southampton players recognized each other, they were designed to immediately assume "master and slave" roles -- one would sacrifice itself so the other could win repeatedly.

If the program recognized that another player was not a Southampton entry, it would immediately defect to act as a spoiler for the non-Southampton player. The result is that Southampton had the top three performers -- but also a load of utter failures at the bottom of the table who sacrificed themselves for the good of the team.

Now, you might say that this is counter to the spirit of the original Prisoner's Dilemma, but that's exactly why I like it -- the Southampton team found a loophole.

That's how evolution works.

I have a very vivid memory from my freshmen year of college of arguing with a friend of mine who had recently come out of the closet (to me, anyway) about whether or not it mattered if homosexuality was genetic. I thought it was crucial that we prove that there's a "gay gene"; after all, people can't begrudge someone for being born with a certain gene, now can they?

I thought then, somewhat naïvely, that proof of a gay gene would swing public opinion our way overnight.

She said it didn't matter. She said she was who she was, whether it was genetic or not.

Needless to say, she was right and I was wrong. And not just on the level of "Of course they're still going to begrudge people whether it's genetic or not; it's not about that" -- but also on the level of basic human rights. People don't need to prove that who they are wasn't voluntary before they get rights. They get rights by mere virtue of being a human being.

That's how it's supposed to work in this country. That's what we have to say to people.

Ever since that day, I've looked with a fair amount of disinterest upon the gay gene issue. It really doesn't matter. I don't care one way or the other whether homosexuality is genetic, learned, or a product of radical existential choice -- and neither should anybody else.

But some people do make a distinction between genetics and "choice," and for those people, I have an article from Britain's Independent, which purports to have found an answer to one potentially confusing aspect of the gay gene question, "If homosexuality is genetic, smart guy, and homosexuals can't have kids, why hasn't the homosexuality gene vanished from the gene pool?"

I've always assumed that this was because social pressures -- up to and including fear of violent death -- kept a majority of homosexuals in the closet until very recently, quite literally reproducing against their will.

But a new study suggests that the answer may be far simpler than that:

However, the problem is resolved if the genetic factors that lead to a predisposition to homosexuality and a corresponding lower fecundity in men cause a higher fecundity in the men's female relatives. Such a link means that genetic factors that predispose boys to becoming homosexual will never die out in a population because their sisters, mothers and maternal aunts will continue to spread the genes by having more than the average number of children...

One possible explanation for the finding that gay men have bigger extended families is that the bigger the family size, the more likely it is that some of the male offspring will be gay. However, this did not explain why the study found that the maternal aunts of gay men had significantly larger families than their paternal aunts, Dr Camperio-Ciani said.

Other research has indicated that at least some of the genetic predisposition to being gay was carried on the X chromosome, which men inherit through their mothers, but Dr Camperio-Ciani said that genes on other chromosomes were almost certainly involved in determining sexuality.

But it was this claim I found most noteworthy. I'd never heard this before:

Scientists have also demonstrated repeatedly that the chance of a man being a homosexual rises by about a third for each older brother he has. They found that a man with three older brothers was about twice as likely to be gay as a man with none. This suggests that there may be biological factors operating within the womb of a woman who has already given birth to a number of sons that increase the predisposition towards her next son being gay.

Really interesting stuff. Neither here nor there, as I above, but really interesting all the same.

This could happen to you.

Mining Mars for Dollars

I was able to read Jennie T's copy of Chris Ware's acclaimed graphic novel this weekend. It's pretty good; hard to say much beyond that without starting to give away the plot. But if you're interested in graphic narrative, you should definitely check this one out.

Some really amazing fantasy sequences in this one.

And some amazing reality sequences, too.

Very sad story (you know, just like life). Very good.

Everyone goes a little crazy on Fall Break, even Dribbleglass's list of Weird Sex Laws.

Content potentially NSFW, but I doubt it.

The Guardian is talking about the risks of a "prime number spectrometer" to internet commerce. It could be closer than we think.

Saw Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry tonight with Jaimee. I posted a longish review of it over at Three Guys. The short version: The movie is outstanding; vote for Kerry.

UPDATE: Turns out you can download the movie for free here. I recommend using the BitTorrent link.

You'll be glad you watched.

Looking at the man in the mirror in the supermarket today, I realized something about myself. I'm not really a suggestible person -- advertising doesn't have much of an effect on me -- but slap the word "Arctic" on something and I'm about a million times more likely to buy it. Arctic Blast, Arctic Mint, whatever; I'm game as long as that word is involved.

I suspect that you might be the same way.

Monday is just another doomsday.

Another swift kick to the sternum; Christopher Reeve, the best Superman (really, the best Clark Kent) that ever there will be, is dead today at age 52.

Superman is the first movie I actually remember seeing. After all that climactic stuff at the end- the earthquake, the flying through time, I started crying in the theater. I was terrified. Not by all the noise and explosions, but by Christopher Reeve doing his farewell flyby and waving.

Adios, Superman. Adios, Christopher Reeve. Adios, USA.

UPDATE:
These things always come in threes. We didn't even mention Rodney Dangerfield.



Ezra wrote about the death of Superman above, but I'm more struck by the death of Christopher Reeve the man. I always believed that someday he would walk again. I think that this is very sad.

...is a great band, and a great live act. I'll let PClem fill in the blanks. Goodnight.

UPDATE: Until he shows up, consider reading this fascinating and actually somewhat uplifting article in The Australian about a museum in Uzbekistan of avant-garde Soviet-era art saved from destruction at the hands of the ruling class. Here's the paragraph someone needs to write a short story about:

One of the most striking works on display is a painting of a light blue bull by an artist named Lysenko. Art historians do not know his first name or anything else about him except that he was sent to a Soviet mental institution because of the painting.

I just wish we had a picture of it online.

UPDATE 2: Steve in the comments finds what I wanted.

I saw this book by Will Self (a British writer I hadn't previously heard of) while wandering through McKay's last week. I looked it over this weekend; the three stories I read from the book were enjoyable enough, but there were three other stories in the book that I wasn't really inclined to finish reading at all.

"The North London Book of the Dead" posits the question: what if, when you die, you just move to another part of London? Fun concept, good execution. I don't have much more to say about it than that. I sure hope the producers of Showtime's Dead Like Me paid him for the concept, though.

"Understanding the Ur-Borono" is a parody of anthropological study, in which an anthropologist heads to the Amazon River basin to study the mysterious, isolated Ur-Borono tribe, and they turn out to be the most boring people anywhere on the face of the Earth.

The title story, "The Quantity Theory of Insanity," is basically a shaggy dog sendup of psychology, psychoanalysis, and academia, which suffers a little from the flaw of having a punchline that isn't as clever as the author wishes. But it's an enjoyable read getting there, and a fun concept: What if there were only so much sanity to go around? You can work out the sociological ramifications for yourself.

Some amusing what-ifs in this collection, but I'm afraid it didn't live up to the title's promise. Some of the stories are definitely worth taking a look at, though.

Today would have been John Lennon's 64th birthday. Let me add my voice to the choir's: Yes, we still need you.

(Saw it first on Boing Boing.)

UPDATE: In other depressing news (and trust me when I say it's already been an unbelievably bad week for sad news), Jacques Derrida has died. I'm sure if he were around to speak on the subject of his own passing he'd have a number of interesting things to say right now. ...language creates a false binary between "death" and "life," life, the state of being alive, death, the cessation of life function, life the positive, death the negative, life privileged, death de-privileged. We "prefer" "life" in our language, that is our favored half, but I ask you, how can you have one without the other, what is "life" without "death?" Along which cleavage line can these two signifiers be separated? What is our conception of "life" that does not entail "death?" Life, death, what's the difference...

But I did get a chance to read through the last couple issues of The New Yorker. Both the fiction stories were good this time, although this week's ("The Scheme of Things" by Charles D'Ambrosio) commits the sin of using my least favorite Gieskeisms: "With the cold wind cutting through her T-shirt, Kirsten felt her nipples harden."

I thought last week's story ("The Dressmaker's Child" by William Trevor) -- set in the far-away long-ago homeland of myself, Patty O'Egan, and Don Ezra McCruz -- was better.

It's rare that I can read The New Yorker's fiction selections two weeks in a row without becoming irritated. Call it a good week.

Most humans see in 3 colors: red, green, and blue.

Tetrachromats can see in four.

Meet Madame M, quite likely a tetrachromat, "the most remarkable human mutant ever identified."

Posting will resume its usual furious whirlwind sad pace on Sunday night.

In the meantime, why don't you see if you can pass the IQ Marathon? I'm sure you can.

The rules are from here, via Linkfilter.

We used to play Rock Paper Scissors Dynamite. More worldwide variants here.

...has finally reached the present. Click here.

There were no red carpets, dazzling jewels or swarming paparazzi, but when two American poets stepped forward to receive large prizes at a gala dinner here on Tuesday night, their often obscure world seemed to come a step closer to the cultural mainstream.

That, at least, was the goal of the Poetry Foundation, which is deciding how to use the astonishing gift of about $100 million it received two years ago.

"This was a kickoff," said John Barr, president of the foundation. Soon to come, he said, are a host of projects, from a national recitation contest for high school students to "the biggest and baddest Web site for poetry out there." The projects are likely to comprise the most sweeping effort to promote poetry in the history of the United States or any other country.

They may also make the Poetry Foundation a major force on the American cultural landscape.

The New York Times has the story here.

Elfriede Jelinek. Get her books here.

I'm sorry to say I've never read any.

I'm already planning on how I'll waste the whole day of Saturday, October 16th.

I figure the easiest way will be to go down to the only halfway decent game store in town, Cosmic Castle. There, I'll be able to meet up with all the other stinky-pitted locals, discuss the multi-class possibilities for my half-elf bard, eat lots of cheetos and pork rinds, and hopefully bag some free stuff at worldwide D&D day.

One game, 700 locations. Did I mention, lots and lots of cheetos? (link goes to a page showing off weird products from japan. Don't forget to click on the picture of arnold in the corner! I need Ramen inside me, right now!)

Because sometimes you may have accidentally passed on a STD, and you need to say so anonymously.

Well, sadly I can't contribute, but over at Salon famous people are recounting the first time they met the music icon.

"Modern human beings may have wiped out two species of our closest relatives 25,000 years ago, possibly deliberately." Whoopsies.

Twenty-five Fallacies That Lead Us to Believe Weird Things

Presenting WebCrow.

Okay. So you've all loved to battle your monkeys.


But, who knew that down at the bottom was an even better link?


BATTLE MONSTERS! The most epic so far is "Thomas Christopher vs. Gerry Canavan."

Find out from a Tufts University psychiatry professor in Scientific American here.

...overall the contemporary theory considers dreaming to be a broad making of connections guided by emotion. But is this simply something that occurs in the brain or does it have a purpose as well? Function is always very hard to prove, but the contemporary theory suggests a function based on studies of a great many people after traumatic or stressful new events. Someone who has just escaped from a fire may dream about the actual fire a few times, then may dream about being swept away by a tidal wave. Then over the next weeks the dreams gradually connect the fire and tidal wave image with other traumatic or difficult experiences the person may have had in the past. The dreams then gradually return to their more ordinary state. The dream appears to be somehow "connecting up" or "weaving in" the new material in the mind, which suggests a possible function. In the immediate sense, making these connections and tying things down diminishes the emotional disturbance or arousal. In the longer term, the traumatic material is connected with other parts of the memory systems so that it is no longer so unique or extreme--the idea being that the next time something similar or vaguely similar occurs, the connections will already be present and the event will not be quite so traumatic. This sort of function may have been more important to our ancestors, who probably experienced trauma more frequently and constantly than we (at least those of us living in the industrialized world) do at present.

I guess it's okay to laugh at our guy sometimes. And this is pretty funny. John Kerry's Debate Prep (as imagined by Harry Shearer)

(via Metafilter)

Hey, it worked.

With regards to this post from Ezra, I can only say one thing.

Jaimee Elizabeth Hills The Rock-Eating Attack Monkey Takes All Comers.

Matt Yglesias takes a break from politics to talk about what's really on everybody's mind: How the Star Wars prequels have made the timeline of the Star Wars universe almost completely incoherent.

I had this problem with the prequels at first, but the short, unhappy reign of Chimperor Bush has shown us that wholesale societal change can happen on a very compressed timeframe. We know this from history -- for extreme-but-similar-to-the-situation-in-Star-Wars examples, consider the Russian Revolution or the rise of Nazism -- but watching the drastic changes in my own country since 9/11/01 has certainly brought this lesson home. Twenty or so years is plenty of time for a small group of people to seize control and completely change the way a society operates without anybody realizing what's going on until it's too late.

It's happened before in less.

(UPDATE: Although one of Matt's commentors is right that Obi-Wan ages much, much faster than everybody else during the same span. That is a big problem: he should be 50 at most in Episode 4. There are a ton of little problems like this, all stemming for Lucas's laziness as a writer. The incredibly rapid discrediting of the Jedi Matt mentions is another, though somewhat easier to explain away.

I'm not saying the prequels didn't screw everything up -- just that I'm now much more willing to believe that a small group of people could seize complete control of a Republic and completely eliminate through effective propaaganda nearly all vestiges of the old system in far less than 20 years.)

My big problem with Star Wars is that in a huge galaxy the same group of people keep running into each other over and over again. It's completely unbelievable. And Darth Vader built C-3PO, but nobody ever saw fit to mention this before now? Uncle Owen buys the same exact droid twice, the one built by his stepbrother, who later flew off with it on the day his stepmother died before turning into the second evilest man in the universe -- but never mentions the connection? Come on. And now [SPOILER] Chewbacca's [/SPOILER] going to meet Obi-Wan and the droids in the third one? Coincidence after coincidence after coincidence, all stemming from Lucas's inability to create a new Star Wars property that would be worth seeing without endless shout-outs to the old movies.

Just awful.

SpaceShip One wins the X-Prize and ushers in an exciting new era of space exploration...or becomes the answer to an obscure trivia question. One of the two.

Here's hoping it's the first.

Via Little Fluffy, we've found a new, foolproof way to settle our editorial disputes.

Food Eating Battle Monkeys...type in the name of your monkey, and see the outcome of the contest.

You could easily beat Shakespeare (Toffee-eating rhesus monkey, battle rating 3.8) but I don't think there's anyone who could beat his star-crossed sidekick Juliet, (Purple People-Eating Samurai Monkey - BR 8.6).

The best I can come up with is Don Ezra, BR 7.6. Bring it on.

Explained here. Starting from the last episode of St. Elsewhere, which revealed that entire show was all the dream of one of its characters, the website traces the paths of crossovers to show the way creeping Westphallism claims nearly all of television.

UPDATE: Same site has a pretty impressive collection of Back to the Future references, too. Not bad.

Tonight's party idea was my idea, so you KNOW it's gonna rock. I stole the idea from the liner notes of Bob Dylan's Biograph:

A friend of mine was recently in Australia, where he attended a special costume party. The theme was simple. Everyone was requested to dress as a character from a Bob Dylan song. My friend went as Maggie's Brother, and he handed out nickels and dimes while asking everybody if they were having a good time. ("I ain't working for you no more," more responded.) During the course of the evening he met Louie the King, had an interesting conversation with a Diplomat who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat, and he mingled with a large and noisy crowd that included Einstein disguised as Robin Hood, the Queen of Spades, Napoleon in Rags, several Tambourine Men, and a Preacher with twenty pounds of headlines stabled to his chest.

I still want to have a party just like this in honor of Dylan, but tonight, the party at Jennie's house is in honor of the Boss himself.

I'm dressed as a brimstone baritone anti-cyclone rolling stone preacher from the East. Jaimee's a recently blowed-up Chickenman. Jennie's Candy, Lynda's a waitress who won't set herself on fire anymore, and I have good intelligence that Brian Crocker is coming as a friend who was a big baseball player back in high school. I'll let you know highlights of who else dressed as what when we get back.

Happy belated birthday, Bruce.

UPDATE: Although we were fairly disappointed with the number of people who actually dressed up -- some people just don't know how to party -- we did get a few more costumes. Two Marys, two "Guns for Hire," a 18-year-old with a union card and a wedding coat, a downbound train, a Tunnel of Love, Slappy Sue.

You'll go to hell just for reading them. I think James and the Giant Roll of Barbed Wire takes the cake, although it's very hard to vote against Curious George and the High-Tension Power Line.

Two great tastes that taste great together.

What, you can think of a better way to spend your weekend?

But Jaimee grew up in the parking lot outside the 7-11 store. And PClem, well, I'm here to tell you that PClem grew up in My Father's House, in a little place called Luckytown -- but you might know it better as Asbury F'ing Park.



I found this picture from some unknown magazine hanging on the wall of Fay's office today. It's the World According to Bruce.

Needless to say, I immediately claimed the picture for my own.

Awesome. I only wish I knew its origin.

UPDATE: Assuming you're so inclined, you can enjoy the comments and criticisms of my old friend Shankar D -- king of the world, master of the universe, and fellow resident of that little red funhouse near the Tunnel of Love -- here.

Could be in the works. After all, he's got a new album coming out.

The full track listing has been announced for William Shatner (Captain Kirk)'s upcoming album, Has Been, written and produced by Ben Folds of Ben Folds Five.

The new album "features Shatner's own...timeless...vocal...delivery," joked XFM, which revealed "a whole host of surprise collaborations" and the dates for Ben Folds' planned tour of the UK and Ireland.

"[Has Been] is a great record and it is really worth going out and doing some shows in major cities," Folds had told Billboard, admitting that Shatner was "not a musician at all. But he is still part of the music. I've never heard a record quite like it."

Among the songs on the new collection are a cover version of Pulp’s "Common People" which Shatner performs with Joe Jackson; "Trying", performed by Shatner, Folds and Aimee Mann; and "I Can't Get Behind That", a duet with Henry Rollins. Shatner also sings a Lemon Jelly song, "Together".

Other songs include "Familiar Love", "Ideal Woman" and "Real", the latter with Brad Paisley.

(via Linkfilter)