On Being Named “Jayme Dale”:

“My mother sought to bless me with the blues-bathed moniker of a ball breaker, the name of a grown gal in a snug red sheath and unlaced All Stars. 

 

[...]

 

She didn’t want me to be anybody’s sure-fire factor, nobody’s callback or seized rhythm, so she conjured a name so odd and hot even a boy could claim it.”

- Seized/Altered from “Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah” by Patricia Smith

Three things I’m out of:

• Peanut Butter
• Shape
• Patience

Assholery

The “top search” for this blog is “my sister’s anus”.

I was not entirely aware that this was a hot conversation topic.

Who knew?

A mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in bacon.

I wish I could impress upon people the idea that things/people/places/events do not have to necessarily make sense to be beautiful.

Also, I crave bacon today. A lot. AND THERE IS NO BACON TO BE FOUND.

 

Feeling Felicitous

Does anyone else find it strange that “happy” means “enjoying, showing, or marked by pleasure, satisfaction, or joy,” when used by itself, yet when combined with something else (like the word money-happy) means “enthusiastic about or involved with to a disproportionate degree.”

So when happiness is used in isolation it means actual satisfaction, but when combined with an external object, happiness turns into an unreasonable degree of enthusiasm. Ponder, ponder, ponder…

A Little Bit Of Electronically Generated Homicide Never Hurt Anyone

A little bit of old news, but interesting none the less…

Halo 3′s Campaign Kill Count exceeded the world population this June.

According to their UNSC Campaign Report (thank you obsessively statistical Bungie game developers), the number of enemies killed has reached 6,737,856,503. The current estimated world population is 6,704,845,726 (click here for the proof).

I’m not sure what this proves. But I feel like it should have some deep philosophical meaning… or something.

Now, I don’t play Halo. Or Halo 2. Or Halo 3. I don’t intend to ever play Halo.

I tend to be bad at games that involve actual skill.

Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.

I have a general distaste for scientific theories that are, for lack of a better term, light and fluffy. Theories that have a handy way of making humanity unaccountable for it’s inability to deal with it’s own primal (and somewhat nefarious) urges and ,instead, placing the blame squarely on some some faceless source or overseer, like Mother Nature, God, or some other bit of nonsense.

My real beef, you ask?

The majority of scientists involved with evolutionary psychology (EP) seem to be taking this “happy go lucky” approach as of late. Evolutionary Psychologists tend to think that, since natural selection is a hill climbing process, it tends to choose the best of the variant designs that appear over the course of time. Because, since there are always seemingly massive amounts of genetic diversity to choose from, natural selection tends to cause the accumulation of optimally engineered functional designs (thank you, Gary Marcus).

Every question that is put forward to EP is explained away with how it would have been optimal for our ancestors to be constructed in that particular away (for instance, why men tend to be more sexually promiscuous then women). They claim that every flaw we can point out in humanity’s character is due to the fact that some particular design was, at one time, perfect.Scientists have confused the idea that evolution CAN optimize things (such as our eyeball being able to recognize a single photon of light in a darkened room) with the idea that evolution will ALWAYS optimize things (for instance, we have blind spots in both of our eyes due to our retinas being backwards).

They leave no leeway for the possibility that maybe; needless imperfections remained because nothing better could be designed off of the original hardware. The crutch of evolution is that it has to build on what was previously there, with no regard to the most advantageous designs that theoretically could be formed if it could simply scrap what it what was working on and start over from scratch.Take, for instance, the spine. 70% of our weight is supported by a single column when, as any undergraduate architect could tell you, a more secure design would be one in which where our back was made of four spinal columns that helped to distribute the weight evenly. Why didn’t evolution come up with this? Because it had to work with the fact that we evolved from four legged animals who had no use for an extravagant spinal configurations.

Natural selection is not a perfect process. It is a blind driving force that, although it leads populations of creatures to become more adapted to their surroundings, is vulnerable to getting stuck on the “good enough” rather than on the perfect. Natural selection commonly makes it only to what mathematicians call, the local maximum.Natural selection, in essence, chooses the path of least resistance.EP seems to believe that our minds are an elegant yet ancient contraption, upholding the Aristotelian idea that “man is the rational animal.” But when you get right down to it, from an engineering perspective, the design of the human mind (and for the matter the human body) is a bit of mess.

(Click)

Nothing reveals so much about us as how we play the games we play

Superbowl Sunday, I believe, should be a national American holiday. More people participate during the Superbowl than actual national holidays, such as Valentine’s Day or St. Patrick’s day (both of which are generally used as excuses for copious amounts of sex and drinking).

Every year Barnes & Noble cuts back on staffing on what I will from here on out refer to as SBS. They always seem to suffer record-breaking lows in profits (much to my manager’s dismay at their loss and my child-like glee at their misfortune) and every year I wonder why they stay open when the overhead cost for running on SBS isn’t financially productive. The 12 customers that manage to drag themselves thru our doors consist of elderly folk who are suffering from severe senile dementia and still think in Pre-Superbowl terms (what a travesty!), or women with 547 adolescent children crashing their house along with 547 of their husband’s beer-drinking buddies who compete in belching and/or farting contests. They also like to compare kegs. And by kegs I mean the ones on their stomachs, not the kegs in their stomachs. Either way, it’s a sorrowful lot.

It’s not just B&N either, but KFC as well! When I worked there (a period of my life I like to refer to as “Greasy-Chicken-Ass Years”) we were as dead as John F. Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963 (and yes, that was mentioned just to sound like a political intellectual). I vaguely remember dust bunnies fornicating in the foyer… but you know how memories lie to you. It might have been dust rabbits instead. Two very different species of hoppy things.

Personally, I spent the evening in a coffee shop, researching the origin of the shari’a in Islamic society and it’s current ramifications in terms of political development. I had a cup of Coasta Rican coffee and an apple crunch muffin, heated, with butter . Can anyone say “Go me!?”

I have to admit, I felt somewhat dirty for purposefully skipping the Superbowl. I was committing a social atrocity, defying an accepted stipulation of American society. I was refusing to submit my wits to the sweating, drooling, mindless masses who tune into ESPN every year. I was a genuine coffee shop martyr, championing the coffee mug over the football… I was practically a modern day maverick, dissenting from the norm to promote intellectual tranquility, armed with only a spoon and my faithful canary yellow highlighter!

……

That and I wasn’t invited to any of the good parties.