Olympic Rings

One of the recurring themes on this blog, as you might have noticed, is my neverending inability to get laid. It may be exaggerated to some degree for humor's sake, but I would say it's a pretty safe bet that most people my age have had sex with way more people than I have.

Then I read this. (Oddly enough, it's not posted under "Sports" but rather "Entertainment.")

Have you read it yet? Good.

So just to sum up, China has graciously provided a tenth of a million condoms to the world's Olympic athletes, of which there are ten and a half thousand. If this seems like overkill, it surprisingly isn't. Evidently a supply of 70,000 in Sydney during the 2000 games wasn't enough. Doing rough math, this is roughly ten condoms per athlete, or up to twenty per sexual encounter, if we're assuming it's possible that the athletes could be fucking each other, rather than random people on the street. Furthermore, we may be able to assume that some of these athletes may be married, and some of that subset might want to have children, thereby further reducing the population of athletes who would be using these condoms. Conclusion: Olympic athletes are the most effective ass-getters in the world, and they're horny as all hell.

I guess this isn't too much of a surprise, given that their bodies are constantly engaged in activity. I've recently started running, and I can affirm that regular physical activity has serious effects on all aspects of your body. For example, it has manifested mental benefits as I find I'm far less likely to get depressed. And yes, it also tends to increase your sex drive. Of course, that will happen with any sort of deviation from a lifestyle wherein you're sitting on your ass alone for all sixteen hours you're awake, watching baseball, reading, and playing video games.

Wait a minute... Now, I'm all for practicing safe sex and preventing the spread of HIV. That's clearly the driving motive behind this condom-fest and there's nothing wrong with that. But these are Olympians, the cream of the crop and the best of the best with regards to human physical form. And we're preventing them from procreating? Why not let them go all out and get a future race of superhumans? And before you call me a crazy deviant who's been studying Nazi breeding tactics, realize that this group includes members of all the cultures of the world! You know why Brazilians are so super-sexy? It's because they're the product of a natural process of massive intercultural breeding. Brazil's got the best genes from all around the world. Talk about a melting pot.

So I say make your decisions with great care. Perhaps, Olympians, you're of the opinion that you should set a great example by exercising safe sex and demonstrating the value of responsible thinking. Or perhaps you want to make an equally informed decision by electing to attempt reproduction with your significant Olympian other and produce the world's next master exceptional race. I see you're thinking really hard. Maybe I should take over for you until you've made your decision. I have some extra condoms of my own since I got that last Harry Potter book.

Africa Hef and the Kangaroos

During my week spent diligently attending to the needs of video games and baseball message boards, I neglected to write an article for this blog, and now it's only 12 hours until publishing time. Fortunately for me, I was able to turn to my most trusted news source, the BBC, to give me news that you probably won't find anywhere else. And for good reason.

In the first instance, we have a bit of advice from an 84 year old man in Nigeria. Quite succinctly put, it's a simple recommendation: don't marry eighty-six women. The former teacher and spiritual leader has admitted that he's superhuman, acknowledging that only God's help has allowed him to "control" his eighty-six wives and "at least" 170 children. I'm speechless. Who could have ever imagined that a self-described religious person could have built his own personal mini-empire on polygamy and massive procreation? Oh yeah, I knew that sounded familiar.

However, I'm much more willing to ignore the case of Mr. Bello Abubakar. First, just look at a picture of the guy - he looks dead tired, and obviously for good reason. Second, there has been no media frenzy regarding a possibly unjust raid on his "compound" the way there was with the Texas FLDS raid in April. Watching the effects of that raid truly made me horrified and ashamed. Mostly because I thought everyone in this country had long since burned those clothes.

But all is not bleak for those who want to save the world by leaving polygamy behind and rallying together to save the planet. Just eat more kangaroos. Or so says Dr. George Wilson, of the Australian Wildlife Services. Meanwhile, minimal research on my part led me to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., which indicates that in 2002, the United States alone consumed 40 million tons of meat. Granted, that's probably not all beef and mutton. Still, assuming that the average kangaroo might weigh 100 pounds - and not all of that is usable meat, I'd imagine - that would mean we'd need to perhaps slaughter 800 million kangaroos in this country alone to replace our existing red meat. If someone in the U.S. plans on executing this plan, the fact that kangaroos are not native to the States is going to lead to the Australians making a killing in exports. (Pun most definitely intended.)

I guess I don't really have any further commentary beyond that it seems a little absurd to start the factory farming of kangaroos. And a simple word count at this point reveals that I'm only barely above four hundred, which makes this a pathetic post from a purely quantitative viewpoint. I could, at this point, begin to believe that I've let down my adoring public. But life is too short (especially if you're a kangaroo nowadays) to think negatively. Instead, I should think happy thoughts and look on all the positives in life. One that immediately jumps to mind is that I don't have eighty-six wives. If I had to devote all my attention to them, what would my poor video games and baseball message boards do without me?

Snip Snip

Every time I have to go to Wal-Mart, I want to treat myself to a vasectomy. That way, there would be no way that I, too, would help inflict the punishment on the rest of the world that is children. Why can't stupid people - the ones who are procreating so much - think this way?

And while I'm at it, why is it that no kids ever know how to shut the hell up? I suppose kids will be kids, but if that's the case, don't bring them to a place where I could potentially be.

Oh wait, I don't get laid regularly anyway, so I suppose that's not that much of an issue.

Number of the Sheikh

There's no shortage of things I could be talking about right now. I could mention the fact that George W. Bush, self-proclaimed champion of the men and women in uniform, has decided to go ahead and reward one with his favorite gift to give in the whole wide world, a state execution. Or I could be talking about the recent move by the House to make the first apology on behalf of the federal government for slavery. But these stories are both on CNN, and anyone could have heard about them. Instead, I'm going to turn to Slate, the online magazine that I read whenever I need to feel just a little bit more pretentious. There's an article on Slate that gives us an insight as to how the youth of the Middle East are taking their destinies into their own hands. They're doing it the same way we did it in 1985 - by listening to heavy metal.

While really a long advertisement for a new book by Mark Levine, the article does offer some fresh perspective on life as a dissident in the Middle East. Apparently, the overwhelming sentiment in the Middle East is dissatisfaction with authoritarian government. I can imagine that this is pretty widespread. I became friends with one guy from Iran who was fiercely opposed to his own government, with a passion even stronger than my distaste for any neo-conservative elements here in the U.S. (And I am convinced, by the way, that if the Evangelical Christians rise to sufficient levels of governmental power, then we will have become our own evil terrorist state.) He even claimed that all the kids in Iran wear George Bush T-shirts as a blatant bird-flip to the powers that be.

So wearing t-shirts that worship Satan is really not much of a stretch for the youth of the Middle East - or at least Iran - is it? Haha, of course I'm being jocular - I know that not all heavy metal worships Satan. In fact, many music that's assumed to be the devil's music is in fact anything but. For example, the members of Iron Maiden - penners of the hit "Number of the Beast" - are all devout Christians. Then you have the Norwegian Death Metal bands, one of which made necklaces out of the skull fragments of their former lead singer, who shot himself.

But anyway, this is all distracting from the fact that heavy metal is the music of nerds. Especially in the 80's, when Conan the Barbarian and Dungeons & Dragons were especially prevalent. If you don't believe me, then take a look at your average metal fan today. If you can't imagine them in a comic store, then you're not looking hard enough. Personally, I love metal. I don't know most of it, but I do have respect for it. There's an inherent attitude that disregards any criticism of the social outcast status that the music seems to cause (or reflect) in its listeners. True fans of metal care nothing about the outside world's perceptions and take complete ownership of their music.

And that is the spirit that the youth of the Middle East should embrace. It's what made the 60's cool, and it's what's made metal cool. If emo music were cool, it would be what would help make emo music cool. The youth in the Middle East are in a unique position to potentially incite a social revolution through music, and I believe that they should take full advantage of the fact. Just ditch the Bush t-shirts and open up a comic store instead.

Music For Stupid People

Last week, Ryan offered me a bit of news from about this time last year that has led me to discover the efforts of one Virgil Griffith. His website, by the way, is at http://virgil.gr/. If he happens to stumble upon this blog entry, all I can say is, I feel your pain. Best of luck with grad school, my brother in arms. Anyway, he wrote a bit of software that tracks the sources of Wikipedia edits. His little experiment revealed that many major companies had edited their own Wikipedia pages. Companies such as Exxon-Mobil, Pepsi, and Diebold all made edits to their pages that removed undesirable information from being displayed.

Originally, I was planning on doing a long commentary on the state of quality control on Wikipedia. I was even going to cite the recent incident wherein my friend, an undergraduate engineer, found an error in a section on vortex tubes and tried to rectify it. But as everyone knows, I'm easily distracted.

On Mr. Griffith's site, he has a feature entitled Music That Makes You Dumb. By scanning Facebook for numerous schools and their listed Top 10 music interests, he was able to list the top 133 musical interests on Facebook and their associated average SAT scores. The results are pretty interesting.

As I would have guessed, the lowest SAT scores are associated with Rap or R&B artists - Lil Wayne and Beyonce, for example. However, it's not necessarily a racial divide, as a range of "Emo" artists such as The Used and My Chemical Romance are close behind.* There were also your standard expectations at the higher end of the SAT spectrum, with bands such as Radiohead, Sufjan Stevens, and really all of the "Indie" genre, which did the best in terms of scores. What I loved to see, though, was that there was only one Classical composer to make the list - none other than my main man, Beethoven. He actually blows everyone else out of the water, with 120 points over the second-place Mr. Stevens. I'm popping in my copy of the 9th Symphony as I type.

Another interesting project to note from Mr. Virgil's site is essentially the same thing using favorite books instead of favorite music. In that case, Erotica and African-American literature rank on the lower ends of the spectrum - followed, of course, by religious books. The highest-ranking genre comprises Classics (topped, oddly enough, by Lolita), followed by Philosophy and Science Fiction (one of the highest-ranking books in that genre being Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle).

Of course, for me, that's just an interesting aside. Anyone who knows me knows that I care much more about the results of the music study. If I ever have kids - and I'll try not to for the sake of humanity, but you never know - I will be sure to point them to this study if they start to listen to Rap music. Of course, that assumes that Rap will still be popular at that point in the future. God forbid "Emo" - a much more depraved and mindless genre as of late - surpasses it in popularity. Whatever genre it happens to be, I refuse to pass on the myth that masturbation will make you blind. Far more important to me is the belief - however baseless - that listening shitty music will make you stupid. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go get a stronger prescription for my eyeglasses.

* - I'm using quotes here, because I've long been against the use of the "Emo" label to describe whatever you'd call this music. True Emo was an evolution of the Hardcore scene of the 1980's Washington, D.C. area. It sounds nothing like what these bands today are putting out. The so-called Emo music of today is really an overly-dark version of the Bubblegum Pop paradigm. I therefore dub it "Licorice Pop." If this phrase gets used by music journalists, just remember you read it here first.

Quip

Maybe I've been paying too much attention to Vonnegut or Bill Hicks, but I came up with this little observation:

Sex is the ultimate joke of the human species. If everyone were to devote their time and energy to promoting love and sexual congress, I think we'd be a heck of a lot closer to achieving world peace. But of course, the cruel joke is that it would ultimately lead to procreation, meaning new lives and the perpetuation of humanity's problems anyway.

Polly Want a Lift

It being an election year, most so-called journalism is preoccupied with producing reasons for you to believe that we're on a painfully slow descent into Hell. (Author's note: Hell is capitalized out of respect for Satan.) If you're registered to vote and feeling like shit, then thanks for sticking to the plan. In refusing to conform to the depression that I feel most people in the world would rather I experience, I've come across a rather uplifting article. And by uplifting, I don't mean "heartwarming and inspirational" nearly as much as I mean "bizarre and funny." Your reactions may differ.

As usual, I'm going to summarize the article, assuming that you're too lazy to click on the link (this helps drive up my word count and correspondingly makes me feel more productive). Yosuke, a red-tailed African Grey parrot in Japan, was captured by police and taken to an animal care shelter. Having been taught to say its name and the address of its owner, Yosuke was eventually transported back home after two weeks. The article is not a very detailed story, but it gives you a rough idea of what transpired. It also mentions that the species, considered one of the most intelligent birds, is believed by experts to possess the cognitive abilities of a six-year old human. So if anyone reading this is a parent of a toddler, congratulations; your child is not yet smarter than a parrot. It's something to strive towards.

Come to think of it, this parrot is really smart. Remember reading that book, The Incredible Journey? Man, those animals were stupid. They didn't realize that if you just reveal your name and home address, most people - out of an insane love for animals that often exceeds their love for other humans - will give you a free ride home, not even asking for half the gas money in return.

Then again, perhaps that's only the case in Japan. It's a pretty bizarre country. If you need proof, just re-read the article. The parrot was originally captured after a woman saw it sitting on a fence and called the police. First, why the hell would you call the police regarding a bird sitting on a fence? In America (meaning only the United States thereof) we're too busy concerned with the possibility of terrorists raping gonorrhea into our gasoline to be worried about a mere bird - however odd-looking - sitting on a fence. I highly doubt we'd even be looking outside to notice it.

Even more bizarre is that the police apprehended the bird, for whatever reason. I guess it was all in the name of animal control, but imagine if you called the police with avian issues in this country. The best possible reaction you could hope for is a stifled chuckle and a transfer to animal control. I'll even bet that if you speculated that the bird was African American, you wouldn't get a reaction, as bird talons are ill-suited to operate firearms. I remember the news last month of a man who went on a stabbing rampage in Tokyo. I'm sure that if this occurred in the United States, it would be a massacre with an automated weapon, and I'd probably have forgotten about it by now.

Both the fact that the police have time to respond to bird sightings and that a knifing spree is the biggest crime event the country has seen in a few years is reassuring about life in Japan. I may even consider moving there if I could find a job and it weren't so expensive. Then again, I could just buy a parrot costume and learn the address in Tokyo where I want to live. People love animals.

Real Estate

I went to Atlantic City last week to see about starting my very own real estate company. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake, because I had $12,000. In my experience, that's more that twice what all the property in that city is worth ($5,690). But everybody in city hall just laughed at me.

Man, Monopoly™ is full of shit.