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.