Women Are Shallow

Who knew? The fine people at Combe Incorporated, apparently. They're the makers of Just for Men. You may have seen the television commercials. Some of them have Walt Frazier and Keith Hernandez in them. Since basketball and baseball don't seem to be pulling in the dollars anymore, these two now make at least part of their daily bread telling men the nation over that women are so hung up looks that one won't date you if you have gray hair, and so stupid that if you get rid of the gray, the same women will suddenly be throwing themselves at you.

Don't get me wrong. I understand the pitch here - you'd need to be brain-damaged not to. This is a pretty clear example of a "show the need or problem" spot. But it's hard to see the problem as anything other than women are concerned primarily with looks, adamantly preferring men who don't show their years. (Maybe one should try Lynx {known as Axe in the US} body spray - any product that can, at least in their commercials, "beguile women to the point of dementia" {I love that description} should easily be able to get them to overlook a little gray hair.)

Maybe I'm alone in this, but commercials that claim their products are useful because they allow me to get around other people's negative traits don't work for me, and leave me with an unpleasant after taste. Perhaps I'm overly romantic in this regard, but who wants to be in a relationship with someone who you can't even let know your real hair color? But the shallowness really works both ways, and I guess that's where they lose me. I understand the idea of wanting an attractive partner, but in the land of commercials, that seems to be the only thing that matters. The men in these commercials color their hair so that they can get vapid, shallow women to notice them. While these aren't precisely "associated user imagery" spots, the idea IS for the target demographic to identify themselves with these men. But I can't bring myself to identify with insecure guys who go around chasing "hotties" in bars.

Laws of Variation

While it may not be accurate to say that an understanding of basic genetics is universal in modern America, most people can be expected to know the very basics, at least. This is more or less the exact opposite of Darwin's time, when DNA and chromosomes were pretty much unheard-of. One wonders what would have happened if the science of genetics had somehow managed to take root prior to mainstream naturalism coming to the understanding of the theory of natural evolution. I know that I've made this point before, but at the risk of belaboring it, I'll make it again: The realization that Darwin doesn't understand the concepts behind genetics is remarkable. But I suppose that many of us would be just as surprised by the apparent ignorance of a renowned physicist who died before Einstein revolutionized the discipline. So the idea that one could perform operations on guinea pigs, and have the effects of same passed on to the next generations of guinea pigs, while it seems bizarre to us today, couldn't be ruled out a century and a half ago.

One of the more interesting facts of Evolution, and one that always gave me a little trouble, was the idea of atrophy. It's pretty easy to understand why evolution giveth - it's somewhat less intuitive why evolution taketh away. But there is a section of the chapter named: "Compensation and Economy of Growth" that makes a simple point. Building structures takes energy. Organisms do not have an infinite supply of energy, and other materials, needed to develop an indefinite number of structures that don't actively contribute to a creature's chances of survival and/or procreation. Therefore, once something becomes superfluous, it is adaptive to take the energy and material that went into building it, and apply that to something more useful, instead. Even small shifts in resources can spell the difference between success and failure in the grand scheme of things, and so one can expect that nature will, to a degree, tend to favor alterations that make even modest reductions in "wasteful" expenditures.

Geekier Than Thou

The Independent Film Channel is running a film named Darkon, a documentary about a Baltimore-area LARP (Live-Action Role Playing {game}) next month. I'm dying to see this - basically to point and laugh, I'm somewhat sad to say. But check out the battle clip that follows the trailer on the IFC page - this is an impressively physical game, even if it doesn't seem that the participants approach it with much in the way of real skill. I expect that if more gamers did the LARP thing, the stereotype of the flabby Gandalf-wannabe would quickly fade.

What gets me about this, from what little I've seen so far (mainly the trailer and a commercial on IFC), is how seriously people take this. I was introduced to Role-Playing Games when I was in junior high school, and I've known a lot of gamers over the years, and I still can't wrap my brain around the level of emotional and psychological investment that people bring to the hobby. I guess that a lot of it has to do with a combination of escapism and wish-fulfillment - you may be Grondar the Terrible only in an (extremely) elaborate game of make-believe, but for the gamers, it still beats being a random choad who works in a big-box store for a living, lives in their parent's basement, and can't speak to what it's like to kiss someone. (Sorry. I guess I buy into the stereotype, too.)

Oh, yeah - check out the "Ye Olde Name Generator" link. It's good for a laugh - just a little at the gamers' expense...



Phear my 1337 geek-Name!

Monochrome Nation

Ya gotta love the politics of race. Senator (and presidential candidate) Barack Obama (D-IL) is calling for the dismissal of John Tanner, head of the Justice Department's voting rights division, for saying that election laws that impact the elderly don't have much impact on minorities. "[M]inorities don't become elderly the way white people do," Tanner said on October 5th. "They die first." According to Senator Obama, "Such comments are patently erroneous, offensive and dangerous, and they are especially troubling coming from the federal official charged with protecting voting rights in this country."

Justice Department spokesman Erik Ablin said, in defending Tanner, that Tanner had won a number of awards from African-American groups. Later on in the story, we are informed: "It is well documented that black Americans - particularly black males - have shorter life expectancies than whites. But blacks do live to become senior citizens." And the National Center for Health Statistics projected life expectancy of a Black person born in 2004 is given, and contrasted against that of Whites.

Maybe I slept in that day, but I don't recall just when the term "Minority" became the latest euphemism for "Black." Yet people, including the Associated Press, seem to treat it this way. Tanner's comments were erroneous - if for no other reason that there are minority groups that get to be just as elderly as Whites in this country. If offense is going to be taken at Tanner's statement, is should be because a high-ranking career official in the Justice Department appears to be too dim to realize that of all of the various minority groups that live in the United States, not all of them die significantly earlier than whites. But I guess that explains how one gets to be a spokesperson for the Justice Department, and not seem to understand that there's more than one minority group in the United States. When one considers that Tanner was speaking at the National Latino Congress - it's unlikely that he was referring specifically to African-Americans, even if he mentions the NAACP in his comments.

To Switch...

...Or not to Switch. That is the Question. According to the Associated Press, Comcast is controlling network traffic by hampering the sharing of large files online, and they are doing this by telling the computers involved that the other computer has requested that the transfer be stopped.

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer - it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: "Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye."

The article makes it perfectly clear that Comcast is well within its rights to manage the traffic that flows over its network. But I, like other people interviewed for the article, don't like the way they go about it. I'm not comfortable with the idea that an ISP falsifies network traffic. More importantly, I don't like buying a service that comes with rules that I'm not told about, and aren't openly enforced.

I could call and complain to Comcast, or send them a protest e-mail. But I learned a really valuable lesson as a manager, earlier in my career - If there is a disconnect between what you're telling people to do, and what they understand they're being paid to do - they're going to ignore what you tell them to do. Does complaining to Comcast, while continuing to subscribe to their service create such a disconnect? And of course, if I do switch ISPs, does that also come with a commitment to switch BACK, if they clean up their act?

Switching ISPs is going to cost me more than it's going to cost Comcast - that much I'm sure of. I'm okay with that. Such is the way of things. I'm also certain that whomever I switch to likely has had the same idea, could very well be implementing it, and wouldn't tell me if they were. Again, c'est la vie. I could simply drop an internet connection entirely (good-bye work from home), and deal with the inconvenience, but would it do me any good? This becomes the big dilemma around such actions. They do very little in the way of driving change if undertaken alone, and are hard to organize and sustain in large groups. But I'll think about it anyway, and see if it can be a worthwhile action.