Life is a bunch of things that just happen
The Fox Network has always been known for its decency and good taste in programming. Their new reality show "My Bare Lady" is no exception.
Boing Boing's post "Cinema owners try to lure us back to the movies" theorizes that the continuing drop in box office is due to "crummy movies, the door-searches, the camera-confiscations, the nonstop advertising, security guards scanning the audience with infrared goggles, and especially the dumb anti-piracy nag-PSAs". I could come up with certain other hypotheses myself, considering what a small percentage of moviegoers and population hipsters really are. The post then goes to recommend a theater that serves liquor during shows, which sounds like an excellent idea to me. Not. Yappers and babblers are already loud enough without any liquid courage to aplify them.
Tjic has an interesting post "least enjoyed term of the decade: “human trafficking”" that points out a small logical problem with this term that I never thought about but should be totally obvious in retrospect.
I had already forgotten the blog "Daily Duck". Perhaps I shouldn't have. The post "Self-Loathing for Dummies, or, Who are we to judge the animals?" notes that
Sometimes I wonder if this "God-shaped hole in the soul" is true. These Green loonies seem to have some need to prostrate themselves before an anthropomorphized Nature. I don't get it. The only organism in Nature that cares about Nature is Man. There is no sacred Order of Species, no natural law that says a species, once it comes into existence, is destined to exist for eternity by command of Mother Gaia. Just the opposite is the case. Nature, to the extent that you can say it cares, cares only about what is adaptable enough to survive. A species will get a far more sympathetic hearing in the court of Man than it will ever get in the court of Nature.
Via "Väärien ajatusten katalogi", I came upon a news article
from Finland that is so funny that I have to repeat it here for a wider
audience. You see, the Finnish National Opera is heavily subsized with
taxpayer money (I almost wrote "taxpayer dollars" there, but then
stayed my hand), and somebody had pointed out that if you divide this
annual subsidy with the actual number of tickets sold each year, the
result is 120 euros. It would therefore be cheaper to shut down the
whole national opera altogether and instead give each operagoer a
ticket to the opera at Tallinn, Estonia, plus the two-way ferry ticket
and the overnight hotel room.
It's been a while since I have linked to any Usenet posts by The Danimal, but this one
is such a total smackdown that I can't help myself. How could it not
be, when his opponent claims in all seriousness that fat women are
harder to seduce on average than slender attractive women? I wish there
was some way to have The Danimal write his thoughts in a blog, since as
soon as feminists and other leftists found him, the whole thing would
look like shooting fish in a barrel. Now that some other unrelated
person is also under posting with the same handle to various nf.* newsgroups, I guess I should edit the Google groups search link, but how?
Maybe you could make a page, a shrine, for us people who wait for the coming of Danimal, uh... to the blogosphere. A simple page with a counter or an application to add a stick of incense, or a candle, for all of us kneeling in prayer for this miracle to happen.
No. I mean, have you ever asked Danimal his opinion about blogs or why he still inhabits usenet only?
He sure sticks to his guns but still, so many will miss all of it just because the usenet is so arcane. He would make such a huge splash into the new media and the spread of his influence would be so damning and damn fun to watch.
My blogaddicted fingers just itch and tremble by the thought alone. I waaant mooooore... (drool).
It's like an army of zombies attacking a lone ranger. A wall of crippled dying muddy flesh. And just you would think there is no one so daring in the whole universe, this man bores his way through the flesh and bone in cuts and slice perfect and pure. Aaaah!
- vince
Posted by Anonymous | 9:17 PM
One possible alternative explanation (other than simple dishonesty and stupidity) to the claim in all seriousness that fat women are harder to seduce on average than slender attractive women? Is this:
SMV is not consciously observed characteristic for some (most?) people, but rather observed subconsciously as a fact of life. Thus, when measuring "easiness" of women, a man adjusts this observed easiness to the woman's SMV in comparison to his own. A lower-SMV woman who rejects a man is seen as very demanding, while getting rejected by a higher-SMV woman is quickly forgotten (because it is so mundane).
Correspondingly, managing to seduce a high-SMV woman will create a perception of easiness, as it is somewhat unexpected.
Genders reversable, of course.
I found the response Danimal's opponent wrote to be rather hilarious: He misses the "aggregate" part of SMV completely ("it's just YOU who doesn't like fat women"!), and accuses Danimal of "defeatist attitude" that will reduce his changes of getting laid with hot young women.
I wonder who is the real defeatist: A man who calmly observes some obvious facts of life, noting that attractive women have to be more demanding in general, or a man who needs to basically pretend that Earth is flat lest women pick up his heretical thoughts via their Superior Intuition? (rhetorical)
Posted by Tuomas | 11:10 PM
Hey Ilkka, you forgot to mention that they could even give 30-40€ cash to be spent in Tallinn (in addition to ferry and opera tickets and hotel nigth ofcourse).
Posted by Anonymous | 2:22 AM
Reading about the opera subsidy reminded me of a transportatation-related situation in the United States. The state of Connecticut subsidizes passenger service on the Metro-North Railroad (itself a subsidized quasi-public entity) between the city of Waterbury* and the New York mainline at Bridgeport, a distance of about 30 miles. There are four daily round-trips and seldom more than about 35 to 40 people on a train, sometimes much less.
Not long ago the state governor had some calculations done and announced that it would be cheaper for Connecticut's taxpayers to provide free limousine rides for every Waterbury-Bridgeport rider than it would be to keep subsidizing the train service. Several media outlets carefully examined the numbers and determined that the governor was completely correct.
Needless to say, the trains still run and there are no free limousines.
* = I lived in Waterbury until 1997; it's a rather rundown postindustrial city with a population around 100,000.
Peter
Iron Rails & Iron Weights
Posted by Anonymous | 10:11 AM
No. I mean, have you ever asked Danimal his opinion about blogs or why he still inhabits usenet only?
I have tried emailing him once, but didn't get any reply. Now I'm afraid to do so, since I feel that if this ever happened, some kind of weird matter/antimatter collision would destroy the whole universe.
Hey Ilkka, you forgot to mention that they could even give 30-40€ cash to be spent in Tallinn (in addition to ferry and opera tickets and hotel nigth ofcourse).
I thought that that was implicit in the phrasing "It would therefore be cheaper..."
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 10:28 AM