Time to face the facts : you are not an alpha male. You look nothing like the sort of men that women drool over. You are not a tower of finely honed muscle and sinew the likes of which make women stare at you like it’s a hot day in July and you are the last glass of ice cold lemonade on Earth. You are not a super competent professional with an air of authority and a sleek automobile. And you are not a dashingly handsome man of action that would make James Bond seem like Jerry Lewis by comparison.

You are just a regular guy, with regular looks, a normal job, a average car, and no more flash or panache than the next guy. You may wonder, then, how on Earth are you ever going to attract a mate in the competitive world of modern dating?

But you may have an asset that you have not considered and which can be just the edge you need to get a good woman to pay attention to you and maybe even get her into your life, your bed, and even into a life of wedded bliss with you as her Man of Life.

You might be adorable.

Now hear me out before you get upset.

It is true that in modern society, being cute is simply not a virtue men are taught to value about themselves. It does not map to any of the usual ways that men are raised to seek. It is not impressive, or manly, or strong, or dangerous, or dignified, or any of the other “typically male” attributes that modern society tells us are what gets the girls.

It is, however, effective.

Granted, it’s not the sure fire, user friendly asset that rugged good looks or fabulous wealth can be, but you might be surprised at how many girls you can attract when you stop trying to be someone you are not, which is at best pathetic and at worst downright grating and obnoxious, and start emphasizing your genuine assets instead.

In other words, don’t try to compete on the levels in which other men excel. Try for something that you don’t see around as much.

Try for cute.

And I am not talking “cute” in the way a teenage girl moons on about a “cute boy”.

I am talking puppy dog cute. Kitten cute. Baby animal cute in general. The sort of cute that makes women go “Aww!” and want to pet and hug and nurture.

Beginning to get my drift?

The first problem with the cute approach will be your own natural inborn resistance to it because men are trained by society to defend their male status and dignity at all times and from all attacks, and embracing cuteness seems like you are jettisoning your credibility, integrity, and dignity all at once.

And it cannot be denied that there is some truth to that. If you are going to appeal to women by being puppy dog cute, you are fairly unlikely at the same time to be convincing them that you are a macho stud god who will make all their dreams come true.

But by the same token, you will also be appealing to women down an avenue that very few men pursue. All men are trying to strut their stuff and impress women with their flashy display of traditional male attributes. Very few men are choosing instead to seem friendly, nonthreatening, vulnerable, and yes, downright adorable.

Think of it this way : many a woman who is very guarded against all those wannabe Prince Charmings out there will think nothing of scooping up a cute puppy dog and petting him and cuddling him and lavishing him with attention and affection.

Wouldn’t you like that to be you

Now of course, this is purely about attracting a lady (or laddie) and making a connection with them. What happens after you start to get to know each other is still up to you. You still have to be a good boyfriend, lover, or husband in order to keep her and love her right.

But just remember that evolution has provided a lot more ways for two human beings to find each other and live happily ever after than the obvious ones that society is more than happy to tell you about.

Look around you, and you will see plenty of couples where neither of them look like movie stars and yet they are as happy as anyone has ever been in love.

Maybe that’s because they stopped look for perfection, or expecting it in themselves, and you should do the same thing.

After all, you might just be adorable.

Take a cup. Any cup. This cup is you.

Fill the cup part way with water. The water is your mind.

Look at the surface of the water. The surface of the water is your conscious mind.

In the course of life, the water of your emotions starts off running freely and without congestion or restraint.

But as we grow, we learn self-control. We learn that we cannot always do what our emotions tell us to do. We learn to delay gratification and restrain our impulses.

In short, we learn to repress.

Now this is a vitally important skill. It is, in fact, the very basis of what it means to be a human being and not an animal. Animals, lacking sentience, have very little but emotion to decide their actions. The brighter ones can learn a little restraint. For instance, dogs can be house trained. But for the most part, animals operate purely on emotion, or instinct, and human beings have a choice.

Imagine a classic “state of nature” scenario : an encounter with a dangerous predator. If you were feeling lazy that day, and had no way to shunt that emotion from your mind and deal with the immediate situation and choose the right choice (hint : it involves running), you would not survive to contribute your genetic legacy to humanity’s genome.

In order to exercise this choice, however, we human beings have to suppress out emotions. We have to clear the current emotion out of our mind so that we can do what we want to do and not just what we feel like doing. We have to have a mechanism for ridding our conscious mind of unwanted emotion.

We have to take the current emotion and push it below the surface of the water…. into the depths below our consciousness, into the unconscious mind which makes up the vast majority of our psyches.

We do this by basically freezing the emotion and turning it to stone. The petrified emotion then drops down into the murky depths of the mind, clearing our consciousness and letting us get on with things.

In theory, this is merely a delaying tactic, meant only to set the emotion aside until we can deal with it. But in reality, with unpleasant emotions, we tend to heavily favour long term procrastination. After all, dealing with emotions requires feeling them, and by definition, feeling unpleasant emotions is unpleasant, and putting off doing unpleasant things is the very definition of procrastination.

So by and large, especially with the complexities and demands of modern life on our clever but finite monkey brains, it is out of mind, out of sight. The rock of the emotion drops into the depths of our minds, and we do not give it another conscious thought. We act like it is gone forever, and had no effect.

But the water level has risen. And the higher it rises, the shorter the distance between our minds and the outside of the cup, in other words the world, becomes.

This is not just a metaphorical truth, it’s a biochemical fact. The more we suppress our emotion, the higher the levels of stress related chemicals in our bloodstream and the more likely we are to have a lot of very unpleasant reactions that actually remove the element of choice from the equation entirely.

Why? Because part of this emotional procrastination process is the idea that these emotions are gone forever. After all, all we consciously experience is the surface of the water, and there’s no sign of the emotion on the surface of the water, so it must be gone, right?

But as more and more of these rocks drop down into the depths, not only does the water (and your emotional stress level) rise, but your mind fills with rocks, making it harder and harder to do anything without one of them randomly bobbing to the surface, seemingly ‘out of nowhere’, and making us suppress them again all the harder.

And as this process continues, without an outlet, the mind as a whole can become more rock than water. The short term gains of banishing an emotion come at a heavy long term cost of carrying an unknown and unresolved burden with you for the rest of your life.

And the worst part is, without knowledge of what is going on below the surface of the mind, we cannot understand what is happening to us, or why. Things just seem to be getting worse and worse and the worse they get, the more negative emotions we have to suppress just to get through the day.

If this goes on too long, it can shut the person down entirely.

That is called depression.

The solution is to reverse the repression to depression process, to reach down into the waters of our unconscious mind and remove the rocks of suppressed emotion that are weighing us down. To bring them back up to the surface of the water and finish what we have started by experiencing them, despite how negative they are and how we would rather not experience negative emotions.

Often, this process is known as therapy.

If we do not, the water level will rise and rise, bringing those repressed emotions closer to the outside world and taking away our ability to choose our reactions. This can lead to depression, sudden rage out of proportion to the stimulus, bursting into tears for “no reason”, panic attacks, and anything else on the “mood disorder” spectrum of mental distress.

Emotions never go away until they are felt. There is no other solution. The only way out for these heavy rocks inside your soul is through the surface of the water… through your conscious mind. If you keep pushing these repressed emotions down when they surface, and continue to add to their number every day, you will slowly have your emotions and sense of self entirely displaced by them.

But if you can deal with these emotions, you can free yourself of their burden and become more happy, more content, more stress free, and more yourself than you have ever been.

You have a choice.

First off, Happy Birthday Canada! Your faithful and intrepid science reporter (me!) is a very proud Canadian, and loves his country very much. If he could, he would give his country a hug, and buy it a beer.

Patriotic squee aside, it’s SCIENCE TIME!

First off, in the world of very bleeding edge computer hardware, IBM has successfully worked out the bugs in phase change memory (PCM) and has a demo that has been running for five months now, so they are pretty sure they got it down.

PCM is a way of storing information by exploiting the way that the electrical resistance of some materials changes when its state changes. In this case, the material is a form of crystal that has a very high resistance when in a solid, crystalline form but a much lower resistance when uncrystallized and amorphous.

So the information would be stored via changed the state of zillions of little crystalline cells.

Well, so what? The upshot of all this technicality is that if you can get PCM working, you get a form of non-volatile memory (keeps its information even without power, like Flash memory) that has incredible speed and information density.

This could lead to a whole host of super fast high capacity devices that could kick off a computing revolution. Imagine computers that boot instantly! Then again, they have been promising that for a while.

And of course, this being bleeding edge stuff, we are a long long way from practical applications.

But hey, the future is looking pretty cool!

Going even further out onto the bleeding edge into where it possibly borders onto the lunatic fringe, we have the guy behind video game on demand system OnLive claiming, in a casual and offhand way, that he has a brand new wireless communication technology that violates the laws of physics.

What do you think of that, Scotty?

Exactly. Ye cannae deny the laws of physics, laws of physics, laws of physics!

Now the frustrating thing is that this dude, Steve Perlman, did not call a press conference, hand out smartly designed and highly detailed press packets explaining it all, and then announce this particular scientific revolution with a full presentation and a thorough Q and A session afterwards.

No, he just let it drop in the middle of a longer presentation about something else, like it was no big deal and he could not imagine it causing a fuss.

“Oh, and by the way, I have a new wireless technology called DIDO that would completely revolutionize the way wireless data transfer works, using towers that are no bigger than a router and allowing every user in a tower’s range to use the tower’s full speed at any time, all while going right through objects that would normally block wireless reception. Moving on. ”

According to the eggheads, what he is proposing is not exactly impossible, but it flies in the face of what is known about how wireless works right now, and so they are rating it as “not bloody likely”.

I just like the idea of casually dropping some scientific bombshell while talking about something far more dull and prosaic and technical.

“Interesting side note, I obtained the level of detail on these slides of the wing patterns on the Lower Delta Swamp Moth by inventing a photographic technique that slows down light till it goes backwards in time. Now moving on to the Upper Delta Swamp Moth…. ”

Finally, moving on beyond the lunatic fringe to that sacred island of honor and madness known as Japan, we have…. yes, you guessed it, kids…. something really amazingly creepy.

In this case, it’s a hyper realistic robot mannequin designed to let dental student practices on something that looks human in a creepy ass way and actually realistically winces and yells in pain.

And oh yes…. there is video.

I love the narrator’s voice. It’s distinctly Japanese sounding, and yet his English is perfectly clear and easy to understand. It’s the perfect balance.

Oh, and fun fact : in order to get a really realistic mouth, tongue, and jaw for their robot dental patient, the makers of the robot had to turn to the people who are the current world leaders in such things : the makers of hyper realistic “love dolls”.

That explains why it’s a female patient. I bet hyper realistic male sex dolls are a decade behind in sophistication due to perceived lack of demand.

Not that I would want one. Not unless they make one that can also engage in intellectually stimulating conversation with me after.

Got a great big basket of video type goodness to strew in your wake, my loyal and immaculately groomed readers, and so with just a tiny bit more ado… on with the show!

Ado. Ado. Ado.

First up, what happens when you stick 300 harmonicas to a Mini and go for a drive?

You get a rather nifty little ad for the Mini.

I don’t know, though. The sound said harmonicas are making in the ad is suspiciously clear and clean and pleasant to the ear. My experience has been that these things never turn out as euphonious as you might want them to. Actual flowing air is highly turbulent, after all, and turbulence means chaos and chaos almost never sounds good to the human ear. Music is beautiful in part because of its unnatural perfection, and that is more or less the antithesis of natural chaotic system sound.

So I call shenanigans on that little clip. I bet they strapped the harmonicas on, got something really appalling out of them no matter what they did, and finally gave up and just got Philip Glass to come in and compose something that sounded sort of like what they had hoped the thing would be like in the first place.

Next up : Hey kids, LETS GET WEIRD WITH SCIENCE!

And by weird, I mean “let’s do irresponsible things with powerful forces just because it’s cool. ”

Plus, the accent totally works for a clip like this, don’t you think? I feel like I have just done a really fun science “experiment” with one of the likely lads from Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels.

But mostly, it’s just cool. Like, Mythbusters cool. I love how the oxide just…. disappears. It doesn’t burn, it doesn’t glow, it doesn’t even make much smoke. It just….. zaps off there in a neat and orderly fashion.

When you think about it, that is the one way to make sure the sensitive data on your CD or DVD cannot be recovered after you throw it out, because all other methods leave something behind. Smashing, melting, crushing, you name it, in theory, the data is still there, more or less.

But with this method…. it’s gone, daddy, gone.

Thanks, Violent Femmes!

Sticking with the “extreme fun with science” angle, you just have to see what the Slo Mo guys have been up to with their high speed cameras lately.

Does that kick ass, or what? The fact that the balloon wouldn’t pop right away turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because the footage of him bouncing off the thing looks almost better than the original desired result. The way it undulates and ripples is mesmerizing, and almost obscene, in an abstract way.

Now let’s kick this blog rockin’ with a little piece by an obscure little artist you may or may not have heard of… he’s just an honest up and coming lad from smalltown California, and I think you will be hearing a lot from this sincere and petulant young man in the future.

Here, making his big time debut, is Alfred “Weird” Yankovic! (canned applause)

You are still not entirely in my good graces, Conan. Your new show is largely a snooze (why couldn’t it have been as good as its promos?) and you have a lot of nerd-bashing bad karma to work off before I can consider you to be out of the red.

But having Weird Al come in to write and perform the “lyrics” to your show’s theme helps. I worship the Al, for he is the Lord of All Comedy Geeks (he is Of Us, and he Rules Us), and so pretty much anything involving him will please me, and the song he did is fun too.

But you ain’t out of the woods yet, Conan. Not until your show gets funnier, anyhow.

Let’s keep the music rolling with this bittersweet and poignant number from some heartfelt fellows who want to explain a thing or two to the ladies.

It’s called Nice Guys Finish last. Hold on to your heartstrings, fellows, they are going to get tugged.

Don’t act like it’s not true, ladies. I know enough nice, sweet, sensitive straight boys who have been completely plowed under by some asshole who treats girls like shit and gets more tang than all the world’s astronauts to doubt it in the least.

Face it, what you say you want is nothing like what you actually reward with sex. And actions mean a hell of a lot more than words.

So don’t be surprised at all the “asshole guys” out there, and act amazed that someone would DARE to treat a woman that way.

It’s simple psychology : you get more of what you reward.

Finally, a link to a great site I stubmled across recently.

It’s called I Love TV Intros and it has a HUGE repository of the openings of a whole whack of North American television shows.

It is the perfect thing if you feel like rummaging around in the attic of your mind and finding memories you didn’t even know you had of shows you only barely remember.

You never know what you will find up there!

I suggest starting with the decade of your childhood.

Since I stopped calling this the Sunday Special (too much pressure), it’s been in a bit of a nomenclature freefall. I guess I will just keep naming it whatever pops into my head and see what happens.

We will see if this one sticks. (Primary emphasis is on the second “am”, for future reference. )

Today’s been a little rough, because I have had not one but two sessions of Ye Olde Deep Dark Dream Filled Sleep. So my brain space is currently cluttered with dream fragments. Something about living in a mansion with its very own built in freaky Disneyland style ride (another way for my dreams to take me places without me having to do anything or make choices), and another part where I was in a supermarket, shopping (sigh, again) and somehow it became amazingly important that I take advantage of a “double points special”, and so I got my stuff to the checkout…. just barely in time!

But when I was about to pay for my stuff, my cashier (an older lady) spotted a shoplifter, and sounded the alarm, and ran off in pursuit. Soon, every single cashier was off duty (wow, this was one organized mall) and us shoppers were left waiting in line, twiddling our thumbs.

I started worrying about how I could afford everything I had picked up in my “double points” frenzy, including that last minute item, a bottle of “Is it black orange?” soda. (I have to hand it to my brain, when it is making up products, it makes some really imaginative ones).

Then after that, there was some bit about how me and this black guy in the next checkout lane were hatching some scheme to take advantage of the cashier’s absence to game the system somehow, and we got into an argument because I thought his method was going to get the nice old lady cashier fired, and… and then rest is darkness. Dunno what happened after that.

Anyhow, enough of my brain frittatas. On with the foobles.

Foobling up first is a couple swingin’ examples of extreme fashion.

Say, what goes clip clop clip clop clip clop BANG BANG clip clop clip clop clip clop?

An Amish drive-by shooting.

Oh, and these crazy things.

If centaurs bought bling....

Those are actual for-sale shoes, the kind that someone could actually put on their feet and walk around and stuff. They are the work of designer Iris Schieferstein, and she has quite a following, and so, as you can imagine, those things are not just freaky, but expensive.

Oh, and here’s the kicker : they are made from real dead animal parts! I had no idea there was that many rich, tacky, cowboy fetish furries in the world.

Personally, I blame Lady Gaga. She has to be involved in this somehow, if only spiritually.

Now for the opposite end of things (in other words, extremely style but in a good way), check out these amazing gourd lamps and the mesmerizing light patterns they make.

Here’s a picture. As always, click for full size.

And they look cool, too!

The moment I saw these, I wanted one. Those patterns are so beautiful, all “life fractal” looking, like the patterns on exotic shells, and to see them painted in light like that… simply gorgeous.

I want one. Actually, I want two, one to use as a lamp, and another to hang like a disco ball and spin so I can see what that looks like.

Then I would try different colored light bulbs, and pulse effects, and lasers, and…. and eventually I would have to open a retro disco just to pay for the electric bill.

Luckily, there should be a real market for freaky light shows opening up, if this bill to end the American federal government’s marijuana ban goes through.

And who knows? The Tea Party types should be all for it. Down with big government, right? Pot makes old people’s pain go away. Who needs the ebil Fedral Gubmint telling people what to do with their money?

And it’s a bipartisan bill, sponsored by Barney Frank and the Chief Libertarian himself, Doctor Ron Paul. Quite cleverly, I think, they are phrasing it as a state’s right issue : shouldn’t each state be allowed to decide for itself how to deal with marijuana?

Even if the bill fails, the debate should be interesting. I am really curious as to how anyone could argue for the illegality of marijuana in this day and age. I mean seriously, what are you protecting people from?

Macrame and the munchies?

And that’s why we rule the world.

It’s an intriguing if uncomfortable question. Just how did we end up running things, anyhow? What was it about being a white European that led to the power and wealth imbalance that is only now being even out by the passage of time and advancement of other parties?

Jared Diamond, in his excellent book (and television series) entitled Guns, Germs, and Steel, , presents the theory that the success of white Europeans is, by and large, due to luck. We just happened to have originated in a place with tons of resources, including important minerals, domesticatable animals, and just the right germs and parasites to give us robust immune systems.

I believe his theory to be substantially true, but incomplete. These were all important advantages, and it would certainly be comforting in this enlightened humanist age to be able to look at the rest of the world, shrugs our shoulders, and with sheepish grins, say “Aw shucks, I guess we just got lucky. ”

It would be comforting… but it would be untrue, and more than a little disingenuous. Luck alone cannot account for the position of dominance we still occupy today. There has to be something more, something that gave us an edge, something that led us to take these advantages and turn them into the kind of power that can bring the whole world under our control.

The answer, I think, is that we are fundamentally mentally unstable.

This mental instability takes many forms, but for the most part, they all fundamentally boil down to a certain potent trait : restlessness. We are simply never satisfied. We always want more. More power, more money, more influence, more resources, more love, more attention, more please, more comfort, more luxury, more progress, more of everything in our power to recognize as desirable. No matter how much we get, we want more. And if ever we get enough of something to satisfy our desire for it, this satiation does not placate us for long. Soon, we are asking ourselves “Is that it? Is that all there is to life?” and we either find another horizon to pursue, or descend into the madness and decadence with a vengeance.

A saner people would reach that point and say “That’s it? I have everything that is good in life? Oh, good!” and cease their maddened searching and acquiring, entirely satisfied that as far as this thing called “life” was concerned, we pretty much had it licked.

But as far as I can tell, not only does this thought rarely occur to us at all, but when it does, it inherently makes us uncomfortable and suspicious. After all, if there is no more reaching and striving to life, what is the point? To a restless and unstable people like we modern white people, the very thought of simply being done with all that seems very much like death.

We might admire the more relaxed peoples of the world and their more easygoing, less stressful, more easily content ways, but deep down, we know we cannot actually become them.

And while we try very hard to ignore it, we can’t help but notice that they tend to end up working for us. And as we visit their cozy and relaxed world for vacation, we also can’t help but notice that all that relaxation comes at a fairly heavy price in terms of quality of life.

Now for the truly uncomfortable question : is this advantage genetic, or cultural?

I think genetics play some role. I think a lot of this restlessness comes from the Northern European sector of the white genome, which is, after all, where this whole white skin thing comes from in the first place. I think that harsh conditions in Northern Europe genetically selected for a restless people who are always looking for more because the real enemy, the wolf that always was at the door, was the killing scourge of winter.

The people who got a certain amount of resources and stopped, content, simply did not last the winter, and did not pass on their genes. The ones driven to get all they can out of every single precious heartbeat outside winter’s icy grasp survived.

And so we live, always restless, never satisfied, always seeking more, driven by an unshakable sense of oncoming doom, danger, and catastrophe to control, dominate, manipulate, and accumulate.

It is madness on the very face of it, and leads to a host of modern problems, such as stress related illness, neurosis, depression, and even premature death.

But it is also how we ended up in charge of things.

We were just crazy enough to want it all for ourselves.

Welcome back to the wonderful world of scientific progress, the advancement of the cause of humanity, and really bitchin’ gizmos.

Speaking of which, we have this particularly squirmy gadget that might well revolutionize digestive medicine forever : a self-propelling endoscopic probe that can ‘swim’ your entire digestive tract in just a couple of hours, taking detailed picture all the way.

It does this by squirming like a tadpole, which I imagine many of you are also doing while imagining a little robot squirming its way through your intestines. But it’s less than half an inch in diameter, and a couple of inches long, so it’s not like you would really feel it. And it can go in either end, depending on what the doctor wants to see.

And if doing the entire intestinal tract in just two hours doesn’t sound like an impressive rate of speed, remember that we have forty feet of small intestine alone. So in reality, a two inch object covering that distance in just two hours without so much as bruising a single villi is pretty darn impressive.

And speaking as someone who has had an older style of endoscopic examination of my digestive system (actually two, one from one end and one from the other, and trust me, the other is WAY easier), I am all for anything that makes that smoother and easier on the patient.

Not exactly a painful experience, but speaking for the top-down one, I sincerely hope I never have to swallow a camera the size of a baby’s fist attached to a cord that looks like something a heavy metal band would use to hook up their amps again. It’s profoundly fucked up.

Well, so much for other news. What’s up in the world of self-driving cars?

(I swear, I didn’t plan this, it’s just that two more cool stories on this subject came up lately. )

First up, the state of Nevada, always an innovator, has become the first state to officially legalize the self-driving car.

This means that the first legal hurdle facing the dawn of the self-driving vehicle has been leapt. The technology is advancing with extraordinary rapidity, and the need for a jurisdiction where one can legally test vehicles on public roads will be coming faster than we would ever have thought just a few years ago.

Of course, there’s still a lot of ground to cover before then. Actually integrating self-driving cars into traditional traffic will be the final step in the process, and the most risky, not to mention the most controversial. I am curious as to whether it will be highway driving or city driving first. Highway driving is simpler on some levels, but more dense. City traffic is less dense but more unpredictable. We shall see.

But having a state where you can build up to that point without legal barriers is going to help a lot.

All hail the coming electric self-driving car future! Imagine the individual autonomy that will allow.

The other cool bit of self-driving car news is from those hard working Germans at Volkswagen, who have announced their development of a ‘temporary autopilot’ system for their cars.

Now relax, it’s not as cool as that sounds. But it’s close!

It’s a logical extension of the modern trend in “smart driving” cars that avoid collisions, make parking easier, and so on. While this system is active during highway driving, it monitors your lane to keep you in it, maintains a safe distance from the car ahead of you, and even automatically slows you down when going into a bend in the road.

How cool is that? Already, the car is a better driver than half the people on the road. I am wondering if this system could actually improve your mileage.

Of course, you as the driver can take over at any moment. Helping people avoid accidents is one thing, but asking them to totally trust the car is another.

To me, this is like the ultimate form of cruise control. It’s not really autopilot exactly, because it’s not like you would be safe completely letting your mind wander or anything (for one thing, you would miss your exit), but it could still reduce the stress and strain of driving considerably.

And of course, the more systems like this on the road, the safer driving will be. I am hoping that I will live long enough to see a future where they look back at how casually we accept the high death toll that accompanies our love (and need) of the automobile, and shudder at such callous barbarity.

After all, we all know you are a safe and responsible driver, but what about all those other maniacs and morons out there?

Work sucks. Everybody knows it.

Work is the main thing that marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. Even if you never get married, never have kids, never assume a mortgage, never even own a car, you have to work. And that means being reliable, having responsibilities, accepting authority, and doing a lot of things which aren’t fun and which you have to do whether you feel like it or not.

This sucks, and the child inside us will never truly understand it. It wants to just go and play and indulge itself and never worry about anything. That’s what children want. And if we left it at that, our children would have every reason to view the coming of adulthood with great dread.

But in modern society, we have created a dream of a perfect workaround for this problem, and it is this dream which we teach our child. The dream is of the job that is not a job, the job that you enjoy so much that it is far more like play than work.

It is a dream we called “a career”.

The idea is promulgated by guidance counselors, teachers, children’s media figures, and our cultural backdrop in general. As you trod the pathways of the educational system, you will slowly discover what it is you truly enjoy doing and what you are good at. (These might not be the same thing, but they don’t tell you that. )

By the end of the process, so the story goes, you will have a good enough idea of what career path best suits your personality, skills, goals, and desired lifestyle. That way, you can slip into the world of work with the minimum of pain and with clear goals and achievements planned out in front of you.

That’s the dream sold to all children, and it is sold with the best of intentions and the honest belief that life can be just like that. But there are a number of problems with this idea.

For one, it does not take into account the asymmetry of competition resulting from the imbalance of number of jobs versus the number of people who may desire that job. There is no system or force in modern society to insure that there is the same number of every possible job as there are people who are leaving the educational system with that job as their life goal. Some jobs, generally obscure or inglorious ones, may starve for fresh blood, while others, generally ones that in some way appeal to the notion of “getting paid to play”, like the arts and sciences, may well have a massive glut of potential candidates, and this mathematically guarantees that the vast majority of them will have their dreams crushed.

Hardly seems like we are doing our children a kindness by setting them on this path, does it?

And even those who somehow survive this mad and brutal race for the small number of brass rings on the crazy merry go round of adult life face disillusionment and disappointment, because there is no such thing as a job that is not work.

No matter what you do, no matter how much it supposedly suits you, there will still be aspects of it that you simply do not like. Just the act of taking something you enjoy doing in your own time and turning it into something you are obligated to do whether you feel like it or not can turn a sweet dream sour. You may find yourself hating the very thing you worked so hard to make into a career.

And even if you don’t lose all appetite for that which you once loved, there will still be a lot of aspects of the job that are not loads of fun. You will likely have to follow a timetable, get up when you would rather be asleep, make compromises when you would prefer not to, and do all kinds of things that are simply not part of the brochure you got on Career Day.

So taken as a whole, I am forced to ask whether this “career dream” that we teach to our children is really the best thing for them and society in the long run. Might be we better off giving our children a more realistic (but still highly positive) idea of what lies ahead?

We have gotten away with selling this dream for so long because by the time the downside hits home, the child has become an adult and is therefore considered responsible for their own destiny.

But who is really to blame when the dreams we feed our children turn sour as adults?

Was looking for a particular pic in my sprawling and extensive collection and got caught up in the browsing of my virtual attic, and so I thought “random picture dumps seem popular on Stumble Upon, what the heck, I will do one of my own. ”

But I am a writer, and I have a blog so I have someplace to write, so there will of course be commentary. 🙂

Oh, and as always, click for full size.

First up, there’s this guy.

Someone's dressed up for Leather Mardi Gras!

That’s the pic I was originally looking for. I saw this particular fellow on a documentary that I was watching, and I suddenly realized…. wait, they always show this exact dude when they want to quickly portray the idea of “the new sexual freedom” or “gay rights” or something like that.

I have seen this guy in a bunch of documentaries and news items and such. And when you think about it, what a coup. In a world with Gay Pride parades in every major city and millions of us fags dressing up in our most outlandish costumes to be Queen for a Day, this one dude managed to top them all to be the instant image of sexual freedom and gay freakyness and all that wonderful stuff.

So congratulations, dude! You are, officially, the Queen of Gay.

Plus, you kind of look like a dentist I know.

I just realized…. one of the reasons I feel better in the summer is that I can pretend I am on vacation.

Anyhow, obviously, the world needs images like the above to be reminded of how sick and perverted society has become due to modern progressive attitudes and how badly we need to return to simpler and more innocent times back when the world was wholesome and pure and clean.

Like in this Dennis the Menace panel.

Oh, you won't feel like napping for a while, Dennis.

You know, the good old days, when nobody had even heard of gay rights or crack cocaine or child sexual abuse, and nobody worried about crime in the streets, nobody ever had any domestic problems, and nobody believed children’s bizarre and perverted stories they made up about what certain kindly people did to them.

Truly, it was a golden age.

Seriously though, that is a genuine Dennis the Menace comic panel. I am very curious to know what the hell they were up to, because it looks like he’s just getting a swimming lesson, and since when does the kid have to be naked for that?

I find it hard to believe that people were ever so innocent that this raised no eyebrows at all. Why is Dennis naked, and why are there spectators for all this? How much did the swimming instructor charge said spectators for their chance to see Dennis naked?

Is it possible to launch a Child Welfare Services investigation into a comic book character? 🙂

Finally, there is this immortalization of the absolutely best thing Stephen Colbert has ever said.

And that’s saying something.

Nobody has ever summed up the case for the anti-Christ nature of right wing “”Christianity”” (double air quoted for emphases) so well. Colbert is a Catholic, and as ironic as this seems, Catholicism, for all its troubles, is the last major refuge for Christ’s message these days.

The Protestant churches hardly even pay lip service to loving your neighbour, caring for the poor, or not casting the first stone any more. In ridding themselves of all that Papist claptrap, the American Protestant churches, particularly the Southern Baptist branches, also conveniently shed all that pesky and gross and frankly totally gay stuff about caring, love, peace, compassion, mercy, charity, and humanity.

To me, the genuine contribution of Christ and Christianity to the world is humanism. Judaism before it was not humanist, in fact it was quite plainly tribal, provincial, and savage. Islam contains humanist elements, but in practice it lacks a single cohesive message or the kind of transcendental language that the Bible has in order to make its humanist message clearly central. So in practice, it operates more like a rulebook religion like Confucianism, rather than a single philosophy.

Ditto Judaism, and all its traditions and rules, for that matter.

I think the birth of Christianity, or something a lot like it, was necessary for the birth of humanism. And lately, it seems like Catholicism is the only major branch that still teaches it.

After them, there’s just the Mormons.

So bravo, Colbert. Those words should be nailed to the door of every church in the world.

Another Sunday, and another not very serious blog entry. No science news, no self-vivisecting navel-gazing autoanalysis blog entries, no meandering pondering of the meaning of whatever, just some nice fun stuff to make your Sunday a little more sunny.

First off, a picture for our You Should Have Phrased That A Little Differently file. Click for full size!

Damn it, I always miss out on the really good stuff!

That’s the sort of sign that makes you think “Do they not read things out in their head when they write them? ” Because seriously, one second of thought would have prevented this rather unfortunate turn of phrase. “Boy Toy” has a number of not very squeaky clean connotations in North American culture, and just saying “toys for boys” would have kept you clear of them all.

Me, I associate the phrase with Madonna’s belt buckle way back in her denim and silk phase in the Eighties, but that’s because I am stupid old.

Of course, all the usual caveats apply. Perhaps the writer of the sign does not come from this culture, and/or does not have English as their primary language, and hence is unaware of the implications. After all, it’s not like “boy toy” is a common phrase. One could be a quite culturally fluent speaker of English as a second language for years and not come across the phrase in any context.

And of course, everyone makes mistakes, even big dumb ones, now and then.

But damn it, I want a boy toy now!

All done with your appetizer? Good, now on to the main dish : sketch comedy!

This one is from the people behind the occasionally amazingly clever web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, who have become quite a prolific no-budget skitcom team.

Most of the skit is merely okay, a little painful but kind of amusing, but the ending totally saves it.

I mean, I was already sold on homosexuality a long long time ago. I mean come on, cock is just plain awesome! But when you put it that way, damn…. no wonder we have so much fun!

I completely want to go to a Cocktails and Sodomy party now. Everything done up in Mad Men style Swingin’ Swanky, with hot guys getting it on everywhere and a super ultra hot bartender who can mix me up a really good Long Island Iced Tea.

Sounds like my idea of an evening.

Next up, let’s visit the wonderful worlds of video game nerdity and Eighties nostalgia with this little take on a certain epic video game series and its attempts at something called “continuity”.

A certain amount of video game knowledge is going to be needed to really get it, but even without it, you will probably be able to get the idea.

Me, I have more or less made peace with the fact that every Zelda game is going to be more or less the same broad storyline told with a few of the same elements (Link, Zelda, the TriForce, the swords, Zenny, plenty of mindless violence against crockery… ) and the new stuff will be in the details.

Trying to pretend they all tell one big “legend” is just too damn much work.

And now… it’s been a while, but I am afraid it’s back again…. another entry for our always bulging Oh Dear God No, Japan file, in the Visual Nightmare category : Face Bank 2.

Holy crap, that is evil. Seriously, Japan, what the hell is wrong with you that you don’t see something like that and not only refuse, en masse. to buy it, but get its inventor the serious medical intervention he or she so clearly and desperately needs?

It’s like having your coins devoured by a retarded demon baby trapped in far too small a box.

Maybe it’s the larval stage of the People Inside Your Walls.

Well, after that extended bad acid trip, I owe you nice people something to make you feel really good and help you forget about all that weirdness.

Luckily, I have just the thing for that. This video clip is especially for us cat lovers.

You know how your cats seem to want to curl up on you to nap?

Turns out, big cats do that too.

Awwwww! Both adorable and terrifying. But mostly adorable.

Shanta obviously loves her keeper, and he either loves her just as much back, or at least is smart enough not to argue the point with her.

I must admit, I am insanely jealous. I would love to cuddle with a lion like that. And she’s so sweet!

This is why I could never be a zookeeper. I would die, and my last words would be “Aww, aren’t you a big pretty kitty? What’s wrong? Is someone a grump kitty tod—”