Fresh Hell - Premier Reader Study

I will confess to needing a prop or two here - when I write a post I spend a great deal of time futzing about finding a suitable photograph to illustrate my thoughts.

Sometimes an idea for the illustration and concimittant photo comes instantly - at other times it takes me a very long while to find a visual expression that conveys my true thoughts.

Yet I'm always quite and curiously satisfied by the photo I've chosen.

Reader Survey - do you guys get it?

P.S. Not for nothing but I have a huge weakness for Ancient and European statuary...

Buzzwords - Innocent or Lethal?

I'm not a huge fan of buzzwords. Marketing people seem to be not only the first to coin them and plow them into the ground through insane repetition but also the first to decry them.

Secretly I think that's part of the pleasure - to be the first kid on the block to use a phrase just becoming popular, then with correct and timely usage display how one is extremely au courant with its correctness and then, (oh and timing is so important here) refer to the phrase but always place it in "air quotes"; this shows just the right amount of insider knowledge plus a soupcon of indifference intended to display sophistication and mastery yet often falling very short of the mark. Yet another example of where life doesn't deviate much from junior high (amazing the examples I'm piling up out of this theory).

Most of the time I think marketing people love the buzzwords because they don't really enjoy words and are relieved to have something, anything, to say - people who write and read incessantly, prose as well as poetry, seem to have less use for buzzwords because they don't rely only on them to get their points across.

Compose a random sampling of one's fellowman and ask them the question of which buzzwords or corporate phraseology is akin to psychic fingernails screeching down a blackboard and their lists will come tumbling forth, a spate of jumbled nonsense that the supremely earnest will still use, quite earnestly, but that the businessperson with a more fine-tuned ear will reject as quite immediately unlovely and will balk from ever using.

I will not post my own List of Shame - not only will you find your very own detestable phrase, likely #5987 on my list, but you could probably do one better. (Frankly, I doubt there is enough bandwidth to encapsulate. Better to exort my wee and very opinionated group of readers to imagine their own most reviled.)

Yet - oh brave new world, that has such people in it! (And good old Orwell is likely tumbling mightily in his grave lately, if one bases dead author movement on the number of folks who are referencing his very dystopian yet quite readable novel, while he's probably cursing fair Will Shakes for putting the words into Miranda's mouth in the first place and wondering why the hell he chose that quote above others.)

I suppose it's good news that there will always be buzzwords to deplore - and fun for those of us that keep clandestine lists of Things Which Ping The Pet Peeve Monitor.

The latest in the category of buzzwordery gone awry is something I actually read about just today in a new media trade magazine and Googled tonight so I can properly link (God bless Google - we just don't say it enough, do we):

Just a Thought - Death to User Generated Context

Go check out what he says. I agree with blogger Adam (although I don't know him from the original, and probably wouldn't have chanced upon his words without reading the article).***

There are scads of quite lovely, intriguing, thought-provoking, button-pushing ideas, writing, photography, reviews, video, short films and essays out there in the world, gushing out of their creator's minds quite freely, creatively, and completely without the assistance of a single buzzword.

Flowering quite without the benefit or blessing of either a corporation or a marketing mind. Makes one think, doesn't it?


***And Adam, if I could figure out how to trackback you'd see it, but since I've just figured out linking don't hold your breath, m'kay?

Big Love? More Like Fresh Hell

I've been following the new HBO series "Big Love" with interest - while it has been quite entertaining I'm getting the impression that it's an illuminating portrait of what Hollywood thinks its male viewers will find fascinating about polygamy and less a genuine portrait of the modern day practice.

At first glance it is: Ooh, a man with three wives! Kinky! And he has to rush about sexually satisfying all of them, to the tiring point of him being forced to take Viagra to keep up! (Keep up? Get it?). But really, it's all one big happy family, other than some ominous foreshadowing emotional undertones between the wives, but hey! He's constantly having sex!

And then boo - a villian appears on the scene - it's the devious "prophet of Juniper Creek" - the way out there fundamentalist cowboy preacher (but he drives a Hummer - see how up-to-date he is?) living up in the ungovernable hills with his gang of bullyboys and a compound full of wives, including a 15 year old girl, my candidate for "Character We'd Most Like To Slap", a smug and priggish teen "promised" to him, who flounces around flaunting her future staus with a rather Damien-like mien. (But intriguing! Spunky and recalcitrant underage girls!).

We discover many connections between the bad prophet and our innocent hero, those of marriage, business loans, bad blood, the hero's childhood in that community, etc. We are introduced to his family, still deeply entrenched in the renegade community and who are so incompetent they can't find their way out of a paper bag.

As the series proceeds, we are given glimpses into the lives of our hero's two teenage children (thankfully for them, I guess, legitimate), who have to deal not only with the ordinary angst of adolesence but with their hidden lives and the routine lies they tell. And of course having three wives in one family means three times the emotional impact (3 times the PMS - what a gag!)

Conflict! Hey, really? Who knew that plural marriage could be more than a bowl of cherries?

Add a heaping handful of nosy mainstream Mormon neighbors, a dash of independent thinking, stir in a generous helping of paranoia, a cup of varied matrimonial and societal secrets, and voila! This is the picture of a modern polygamist's life.

But I ain't buying it.

Polygamists, whether they are Fundamentalist LDS or an offshoot, are basically living in a closet inside a closet - a good concrete analogy are Russian matroyosha nesting dolls - one opens up each successive doll to reveal a smaller perfect replica within. My experience with the dolls is not vast, but I marvel at seeing even seven of them, all perfect replicas, nestled snugly within each other.

The outer closet is the relation of mainstream Mormons to the larger community, in the sense that they consider themselves very much and very happily out of step with mainstream humanistic society, and proudly refer to themselves as peculiar people. Those inhabiting the inner closet, then, must naturally feel even less at ease with the outer world but perhaps can find themselves more comfortable with their compatriots in the outer closet.

Yet in the series, we see that the characters who choose to inhabit this inner closet, who have selected the most restrictive of all possible choices, are penalized, marginalized, and deserving of sympathy or pity but not viewed as admirable, not to be emulated.

And as the episodes progress, the noose of their choice is finding its own way to softly strangle all of the main characters, putting paid to the notion that plural marriage is just a lovely way for an enterprising businessman to fulfill his religious principles and stroke his own ego.

While the three wives of our hero Bill are all old enough to make their own decisions and enter into their inevitable tanglements, this should be a cautionary tale. Let's face it - if you're a woman looking to snag the man of your dreams, you shouldn't be looking in his direction.

My conclusion, based on the series and my footnote**, is that there is nothing modern or progressive about polygamists - HBO can gloss this until the cows come home and I will still see nothing of value coming out of this other than entertainment.

**Historical Footnote: I used to be a Mormon. My family converted when I was 9; I left mentally when I was 15; the last time I ever set foot in an LDS church I was 18; I was excommunicated by my choice when I was 33. I lived in Utah from 1970-1984 (minus two years in Illinois). Members of my family are still active LDS. I have personally seen members of polygamist sects in southern Utah (not on their own turf but at WalMart), have heard all the rumors and read all the stories, newspaper articles, and books about them. Nothing they could do, even now, could suprise me.

This Week in Its Briefs - Tighty Whities

1. I’ve been hit quite hard with a case of the mid-May doldrums, evinced by my inability to write about anything interesting. Also, the advent of True Spring has been most distracting, what with its insistence on gentle breezes, fancy sunshine, and leafy greenery.

2. But hey, I bought new underwear this week. Alert the media.

3. As is my custom, good weather combined with writing doldrums gets me antsy to clear clutter away from my life. Hello, Guest Room – when last we saw each other, not too many months ago, you were in pretty good shape from the last sprucing up session and we could actually use you to house random guests. Sadly, your once semi-pristine condition has deteriorated yet again and you’ve become the final resting place or merely a convenient harbor for various household flora and fauna. It’s like the Well of Lost Souls in here or something - let’s try again, shall we? I’m up for a scrub if you are. I'll mix a batch of martinis if you bring the garbage bags.

4. A couple of years ago I was rabidly devoted to daily yoga practice. It was highly beneficial for me physically by keeping me bendy (I’ve heard this is much harder for tall people as they age; I don’t know if that is true but anecdotally I’ll go along with it). I also reaped many benefits from the spiritual aspects of practice, which was unexpected yet rather welcome. I don't think I was more mellow but I did feel better, even about things that would normally either send me into a red rage or blue funk.

I was quite fervent about it, and then, for some unremembered reason, I stopped daily practice. Well, I’ve now started up again and while I’m experiencing a certain amount of “muscle memory” my body is reacting as if it is a series of straight unyielding planks of wood joined with a combination of barbed wire and rusty paper clips. I know from past experience that I will improve greatly with a minimum of two weeks of solid daily practice, but Oy - the creakiness, people!

5. I purposely didn’t write or even comment about a recent study published by the CDC and cited in an egregiously jerky Washington Post article: Gulp - Forever Pregnant?

If you can't bear to click on the link (hey, look Ma - I figured out about links, only about 1,000 years after html was invented!) the article cites a CDC study about women's health, but wreathes the subject in concern only about their health as baby vehicles, exorting all women of child-bearing age to make all of their lifestyle choices as if they were in a constant state of “pre-pregnancy”. (Pardon me while I mop up the pieces of my exploding brain).

I’ve ranted enough about women being viewed as nothing more important or valuable than walking baby machines to satisfy both myself and my wee group of readers for probably the next decade, so I won’t waste any more valuable martini time on that subject. Only those of us with non-viable reproductive organs are invited for Martini Time. (Note to self: ending on a childish note of "neener-neener" is curiously satisfying.)

Carnival of Feminists XV

Point your mouse to the above link and click over to be educated and entertained by a group of terrific feminist bloggers.

I am grateful that a post of mine was included, and of course would be delighted if anyone was in the least bit moved by my submission!

Bandwidth Enough And Time

I have great hopes for the future of the blogosphere.

Yes, I said it, I admit it, and you can go ahead and drape me in the Geek for it. To be sure, I appreciate and love the way the written word was handled in the past - rare and fragile books made up of parchment pages filled with ornate calligraphied script, the fragility and mustiness of hand made paper that was never intended to last decades, much less centuries, and the varieties of the pure leather bindings, often worn smooth by centuries of caressing hands. The artifacts themselves are wonderful and beautiful, and while they'll only be seen by a few the works themselves have been disseminated quite well through society to form a cadre of classical works. The words of these long dead authors continue to resonate in a way that is satisfying and constant.

Yet in the spareness of the binary world, I find delight within the speed and elegance of the electronically communicated word - a breathtaking purity transmitted in a 0,1 code. We've almost started to take for granted the incredible speed in which we can send our words to others - (we've all been in the position of being on the phone with a person who's supposed to send you an important document by email and you just can't wait for the nanosecond it takes to get to you...."It's not here yet...not here yet...okay, refresh send & receive...I just did...you should get it any second...well I haven't gotten it yet...well you should get it did you refresh...yes I just refreshed...thank god I got it".)

We can sometimes hardly bear to wait 5 minutes to get what we need.

I think about the blogosphere - something I don't write much about, but on occasion ponder its enormity, its capacity and its community - and I think that we as "net" citizens now have enormous opportunities to encounter original writers and thinkers in ways that 5 years ago, 1 year ago, or even 6 months ago would be unimaginable.

Any topic under the sun that amuses or engages an individual - any cause, great or small that energizes the passion of a writer has its adherents in blogs - whole communities that link to each other, trade news, or meet up in realtime.

The big issues such as politics and religion have quite a bit larger communities than, for example, those communities devoted to curling or Siamese cats. But the community exists, and that's where the point lies. There are blogs about food, travel, linguistics, philosophy, atheism, baseball, knitting, and every other subject under the sun.

And each individual writer carves out their own niche, bonds with their own community, posts at a workplace or at home or both, writes in the morning with a cup of coffee, over a sandwich at noon, in the evening with a glass of wine, in the middle of the night either plain insomniac or while rocking a baby with one foot.

Some writers simply can't produce without their favorite music blasting in the background, some need absolute silence save birdsong to collect their thoughts. (I generally fail miserably without my award-winning combination of early evening, cigarettes, beer or wine, and French talk shows in the background.) Some writers sweat and slave over their work and edit furiously over the course of days - others smack out truly interesting posts in a matter of a few short hours. Some perform grammar and spell checks compulsively to make sure everything is right - others have a more spontaneous relationship with their prose.

Some bloggers write posts that at first glance don't seem too interesting, yet they have an amusing and large readership who write lightning flash comments more scintillating than the posts themselves - I read some bloggers not necessarily for what they say but the lively commentary their work generates.

But the fact remains: among those people with internet access and a burning wish to be heard, we're becoming a writerly people, and I couldn't be more delighted. The distinctly illogical and ungrammatical will eventually fall by the wayside or progress with their own output - in any case it will pave the way for budding writers of every walk of life to learn to write well and with passion, regardless of the topic.

I believe there should be bandwidth enough for every person with something to say.

Science - Put The Theory Down Gently and Back Away From This Idiocy Slowly

The following article comes directly from the Chicago Tribune (my efforts at linkiness are really terrible - I need to sign up for remedial linkage - trust me on the source for this article or you could do what I did and google chicago tribune to find this story for yourself:

Scientists in Chicago and California photographed men's faces and asked women to rate them on whether they seemed to like children, on their masculinity, on their physical attractiveness and on whether they seemed kind.

Then the women rated them on their potential as long- and short-term lovers.

The masculine men—those with a large jaw, prominent cheekbones, straighter eyebrows, thinner lips and a heavy beard—were found to be attractive as short-term romantic partners. But for long-term relationships, women were more drawn to men who they thought were interested in children.

The study indicates male hormone levels and affinity for children may play a role in determining how attractive men are to women—albeit on a subconscious level.

"Our data suggest that women are picking up on facial cues that may be related to paternal qualities," said the lead author of the paper, James Roney of the University of California, Santa Barbara. "The more they perceived the men as liking kids, the more likely they could see having a long-term relationship."

The women were surprisingly adept in being able to read subtle sexual signals, Roney said. The study's female subjects accurately determined from the photos which men had high testosterone levels—they perceived the men as more masculine. They also could pick out the men who had expressed the most interest in children.

"Our study shows that women don't just look for masculinity; they also see cues for interest in infants, and they're very accurate in judging both," said Dario Maestripieri, a behavioral biologist at the University of Chicago and co-author of the study, which appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, a British scientific journal.

"They're attracted to one or the other, depending on whether they're interested in a short-, or long-term partner."

The research suggests that our behavior may be affected by genetic programming that evolved to increase survival of the species, said Dr. Daniel Alkon, scientific director of the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute in Morgantown, W.Va., and Washington.

"It looks like all of us are responding to many non-verbal cues and pieces of information of which we're not really conscious that may have some origins in the hardwired parts of the brain," Alkon said.

For example, hormones that circulate in the body can have a profound impact on behavior, he said.

"What's really quite amazing is that women actually can detect aspects of men and their attitudes by looking at pictures of facial expressions," said Alkon, who was not involved in the research. "But there's evolutionary value in doing this. It's important for a woman to choose a mate that's going to help her have children and will have a survival value for the whole species.

"Something that seems like our own voluntary choice is not so voluntary, after all."

In the new study, researchers measured the testosterone levels of 39 male undergraduate students at the University of Chicago, based on saliva samples.

They determined the men's affinity for children by asking them to choose between photos of an adult or a baby and to rate their interest.

The researchers stressed that they have no idea whether the men who expressed more interest in children would actually turn out to be good fathers.

Photos of the men were then shown to 29 female students at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

It makes sense that these women tended to be drawn to the more masculine men as short-term romantic partners, the researchers said, because high-testosterone males have a better ability to fight off disease and some of their children would be likely to inherit the trait.

But although masculine-faced males might have good genes, they are seen as poor parents.

Conversely, more feminine-faced males are perceived as better parents and better long-term partners.

Earlier studies have shown that women are attracted to more masculine-looking men at the most fertile time of their menstrual cycles. During less fertile times, they choose men with more feminine faces, who are seen as kinder and more cooperative but less fit and healthy genetically.

The researchers can only guess what aspects of the men's faces clued in the women about their interest in children. Maestripieri said "it might have to do with a more rounded face, a gentler face"; Roney speculated it might be their facial expressions.

When five female graduate students were asked to rate whether the men looked angry or happy--even though the men had been instructed to maintain a neutral look--the men interested in children were perceived to have a happier or more contented expression.

"Women's ability to estimate men's interest in infants from face photographs is perhaps the most novel finding to emerge from the study," the researchers wrote.

I know, people. Trust me - this is not an article that one can read with a straight face :wipes tears of mirth from cheeks while continuing to chortle madly:

Random elements struck me while reading this article:

1. Scientists actually submitted a grant for funding of this particular study, and received said funding. In academia today the likelihood of doing this all on one's scientific lonesome is slim to none. One wishes one were a fly on the wall at either the scientist end or the dollar granting end - either situation is primed to produce comedy gold.

2. Actual scientists actually assumed that actual biological imperatives drive actual women to make actual decisions about actual male partners. And in many of their conclusions, "researchers could only guess". Honestly, ya think? They used a sample size of 39 men and 5 women - you can prove a theory with this tiny sample?

3. I keep wishing this were an article in The Onion - "Dudes Who Look More Like Women Not Only Get Laid But Become Dads".

4.

"But there's evolutionary value in doing this. It's important for a woman to choose a mate that's going to help her have children and will have a survival value for the whole species. Something that seems like our own voluntary choice is not so voluntary, after all."

Whoo doggie, restrain me from doing some serious re-adjustment here. How about trying this on for size: a woman chooses a mate based on friendship, companionship, world view compatability, and sexual attraction? By the way, isn't this exactly how a man might possibly choose a mate? Or, to get completely perverse, how a human being regardless of its gender might choose a mate?

Alert the media - humans have been heard from and they dislike this crappy study immensely.

I'm sorry, Science. This is a situation where you have gone right off your rocker. In the beginning of our glorious 21st century, there is no biological imperative to breed , and anyone who tells you otherwise is a perfect asshat.

However, I do not deny the existence of some pretty intense societal, familial and traditional pressures that are more influential in a woman's decision to have a child than any biological tick tock.

Any vestige of a biological imperative is doing its best to die out generation by generation. Most of the young women I know who are in their 20's and early 30's would as soon light themselves on fire than have a child - a good many because the time isn't right for them. Some refrain because they're not convinced parenting is the ultimate destination for them. These women freely confess that they may change their minds when they reach their late 30's, but it won't be because of a biological "sell by" date. It will be because their circumstances and marital status will have changed, or they have decided that the societal pressures they face aren't pressures at all. Not a single one of them believes in a biological clock.

Science, when it isn't off making itself terribly giddy over craptastic studies like this one, does have a point when it publishes studies that show how women's fertility rates change as they age. That's based on hard science and biological changes fall firmly in the "duh" category. But this lame excuse that some mystical "hard wiring in the brain" that can't be identified has the jumbo cojones to override any identifiable sense a woman might possess.

Much has been made of womens' biological clocks, but I assert that I've stood outside that clock tower for all of my life with exceedingly faint interest in what's happening inside. Perhaps I mistook the craving to reproduce with the more compelling craving to enjoy my life and blithely ignore societal pressure.

I just hate these kinds of studies that ultimately lead to these sorts of articles. I can only laugh at them because they are just so very wrong, so very misguided, but I end up weeping just a little because they are also so pervasive -and because damnit - in the name of my beloved Science this dreck is getting funded and published.

And because some perfectly innocent young woman will read this puerile drivel and mistake it for something it isn't, and she'll end up thinking she has to be a mother even though that person would be completely foreign to her true nature. I'm not against reproducing [thinks wildly of a flame war with wee group of readers] and parenting is cool and all, but do it because you really truly want to do it, not because you think you have to or your spouse is pushing you.

Otherwise, I'm afraid you'll be setting yourself up for gallons of Fresh Hell.

This Week in Its Briefs - Right Before Laundry

1. Buying a car on ebay- seriously, this happened to a member of my family. This man has a habit of putting incredibly low bids on cars he'd like to own, hoping all the while (and trusting) that a much crazier person places a higher bid and wins the auction. Well, the highest bid was his and the car now must be bought. (This is not Mr. Fresh Hell, by the way - he'd be pulverized by a meat tenderizer if he played that kind of game.)

2. Vintage Cupcake Stories: while on a trip to Istanbul last October he called me from a bar insisting that I Google a song recorded by The Four Lads ("Istanbul, not Constaninople") to settle a bet about the year it was recorded. They were definitely in a bar, as I heard the ambient background sounds. And yes, I had the answer for him in about 20 seconds and no, I didn't see any of the proceeds of the wager.

3. The immigration issue is of interest and foremost in a lot of the news recently. It is an issue that I am rather conflicted about. The only thing I can say with some degree of authority is that if there were no such thing as illegal labor, no New York city restaurant could stay open.

There's been a lot of discussion about whether immigrants actually do take jobs away from Americans, or whether immigrants will do the jobs Americans scorn. Ask yourself if you would work for $8.00 an hour six days a week, 8 or 9 hours a day, peeling potatoes, prepping vegetables, or washing dishes. It's an honest question deserving of an honest answer. (No cheating!)

4. Zen and the art of money management - I don't think this book has been written, but I really wish it would be, and soon. I try to take a long cool look at things financial, and generally it's an easy view to maintain. But lately I'm feeling as if the blades of Dr. Guillotine are inching just a little too close to the neck for comfort, and all the while Madame Defarge is clacking away at her knitting needles gleefully like a timebomb. I'm sure I'm not the only one feeling this, with rising prices and flat wages.

5. In a conversation with an older male colleague and a younger female one last week, the topic of families arose. The man declared that the birth of his daughter not only made him complete, but was the single most wonderful event of his life. Which is fine, until he adamantly insisted that it should be that way for everybody - that I, at the age of 44, would not achieve ultimate happiness without a child and that our younger colleague, at the age of 28, should look no further than reproduction to experience nirvana.

I did my best to present the other side of the issue - that it's possible for a woman to feel complete without bearing children and that biology is not destiny. I don't know for sure whether I made a compelling case but my female colleague did thank me afterwards for standing up to my principles by insisting that a marriage without children is still a viable family.

And so we close, after a quietly harrowing week, quite the devoted servant, blah blah blah.