Lucky Ilkka
Last Sunday marked the end of the latest seasons of both "Entourage" and "Lucky Louie".
I guess that the latter of these two shows is a lot closer to our life,
except that we are not quite as poor, don't have a kid and don't swear
as much. Even so, while we were watching the season finale, there were
a few uncomfortable silences due to a few close-to-home similarities
between us and Louie and Kim. If they ever turned my life into a movie
or a sitcom, the two thespians who currently play the main characters
in Lucky Louie could quite easily play us. Just lose the beard and a
few pounds and the guy who plays Louie would be all set, and the chick
who plays Kim (and Jesus, I sure didn't know that she used to be Bobby
Hill's voice) doesn't need to change that much either, just make the
hair a bit longer and lose the Joirnsey accent.
In the opening skit of this show, we could have just woken up in the Vegas vacaition and are putting on our clothes, and I am buttoning up my shirt. I leave the collar button open as usual, and then start telling my wife how many buttons I could leave open, since we are in Vegas, which seems like a third-button-open kind of town. Hey, anything goes in Vegas! Seeing me opening the shirt, my wife just looks at me, and I stop grinning and meekly button it up again. Imagine how that scene would play in Lucky Louie, and you are pretty close to how this actually happened with us.
Meanwhile on the web, I noticed on my SiteMeter page that I have suddenly received a whole torrent of Google searches coming from China, looking for either "Sex and Shanghai" or some Chinese characters which I guess mean the same thing. The blog "Sex and Shanghai" in which the proprietor, a fat middle-aged Western male teaching in China tells about his sexual adventures among hot Chinese women has suddenly turned invitation-only, for reasons we can only begin to speculate. If all these searches originate from the secret police or the communist party of China, I sure hope that this doesn't affect my chances to travel and perhaps even move to China at some point in the future, after China has become the economic ruler of the world by sheer population alone. Like I have mentioned many times before, I would so like to get to one day live in a city like the one depicted in the movie "Bladerunner", living life out of some William Gibson novel. I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords, and would like to remind any party apparatchik who is reading this that as a trusted blog personality, I would be a great help in amassing people in your underground dumpling mines.
In other news from that hemisphere, I noticed that some computer guy named Emil Mikulic from Melbourne, Australia likes my blog and he has obviously been reading its archives, collecting and highlighting the parts he liked best. Thank you Emil and a salute right back at'cha, since it's always good to hear that I am not writing completely in vain, but that my writings resonate with a large number of people of certain cognitive profile. Based on Emil's choices of his favourite writings of mine it is also pretty clear to me that if he hasn't done so already, he should go check out the Danimal Archive, since next to The Danimal I am merely a pale shadow, hardly worthy of even mentioning in the same paragraph.
The Danimal is an excellent example of the fact that those who have a lot, even more is given, and even without any visible effort, those people simply succeed in their lives and conquer others effortlessly. These ancient observations are indirectly explained in the post "Clusterfucked" at "God of the Machine". As much as we'd like to think that people who are bad at something important are good in something else to compensate, this just isn't usually the case, but at least in cognitive respects, good things tend to cluster and abilities are highly correlated. To add to what this post says, I would like to point out that even more unfairly, many abilities tend to combine synergistically. Because of this, I predict that there will be more inequality in the future, not less, even as society becomes more fair and meritocratic at the same time that it becomes more cognitively demanding. Putting everyone in their place based on their abilities does not bode well for the people on the left half of the Bell curve. Even as their absolute quality of life keeps getting better, their relative position keeps getting worse, making them more resentful of their lot in life.
In the opening skit of this show, we could have just woken up in the Vegas vacaition and are putting on our clothes, and I am buttoning up my shirt. I leave the collar button open as usual, and then start telling my wife how many buttons I could leave open, since we are in Vegas, which seems like a third-button-open kind of town. Hey, anything goes in Vegas! Seeing me opening the shirt, my wife just looks at me, and I stop grinning and meekly button it up again. Imagine how that scene would play in Lucky Louie, and you are pretty close to how this actually happened with us.
Meanwhile on the web, I noticed on my SiteMeter page that I have suddenly received a whole torrent of Google searches coming from China, looking for either "Sex and Shanghai" or some Chinese characters which I guess mean the same thing. The blog "Sex and Shanghai" in which the proprietor, a fat middle-aged Western male teaching in China tells about his sexual adventures among hot Chinese women has suddenly turned invitation-only, for reasons we can only begin to speculate. If all these searches originate from the secret police or the communist party of China, I sure hope that this doesn't affect my chances to travel and perhaps even move to China at some point in the future, after China has become the economic ruler of the world by sheer population alone. Like I have mentioned many times before, I would so like to get to one day live in a city like the one depicted in the movie "Bladerunner", living life out of some William Gibson novel. I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords, and would like to remind any party apparatchik who is reading this that as a trusted blog personality, I would be a great help in amassing people in your underground dumpling mines.
In other news from that hemisphere, I noticed that some computer guy named Emil Mikulic from Melbourne, Australia likes my blog and he has obviously been reading its archives, collecting and highlighting the parts he liked best. Thank you Emil and a salute right back at'cha, since it's always good to hear that I am not writing completely in vain, but that my writings resonate with a large number of people of certain cognitive profile. Based on Emil's choices of his favourite writings of mine it is also pretty clear to me that if he hasn't done so already, he should go check out the Danimal Archive, since next to The Danimal I am merely a pale shadow, hardly worthy of even mentioning in the same paragraph.
The Danimal is an excellent example of the fact that those who have a lot, even more is given, and even without any visible effort, those people simply succeed in their lives and conquer others effortlessly. These ancient observations are indirectly explained in the post "Clusterfucked" at "God of the Machine". As much as we'd like to think that people who are bad at something important are good in something else to compensate, this just isn't usually the case, but at least in cognitive respects, good things tend to cluster and abilities are highly correlated. To add to what this post says, I would like to point out that even more unfairly, many abilities tend to combine synergistically. Because of this, I predict that there will be more inequality in the future, not less, even as society becomes more fair and meritocratic at the same time that it becomes more cognitively demanding. Putting everyone in their place based on their abilities does not bode well for the people on the left half of the Bell curve. Even as their absolute quality of life keeps getting better, their relative position keeps getting worse, making them more resentful of their lot in life.
Do you agree with his characterization of you as "misogynist"?
Posted by tggp | 5:10 PM
Not really. I would challenge anybody to show me a post of mine that is anti-woman, as opposed to merely anti-feminist.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 5:33 PM
If you ever say anything remotely negative about a woman at all ever, you're automatically a misogynist.
i.e.: I don't agree with my characterization of Ilkka as a misogynist, I just thought it was an amusing way to introduce him.
(Hello!)
And if it wasn't clear enough on my page, I agree with just about everything I read on this site.
Posted by Emil | 1:21 AM
From idlewords.com: some commentary on the Sex in Shanghai blog.
Posted by Emil | 2:34 AM
Hi. Do you know about “ English teacher in Shanghai”
There is have a blog called Sex in Shanghai in which a Western guy tells about all his exploits with Chinese women here in Shanghai. (That blog is still #1 on the “hottest blogs” list on the CBL, but it now seems to be inaccessible.) Since then, the Chinese have found out about the blog, and they are (understandably) pissed.
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Posted by chinadoctor | 7:59 AM