Hair and Natural Selection

I'm guessing this has occurred to most people at some point or another, although maybe it hasn't given my very tenuous and inaccurate grasp of what an ordinary human mind is like.

Doesn't it seem like evolution is ridiculously precise? Like, ridiculously? I've been wondering for a while about what the evolutionary purpose of human hair was, especially given how it's so localized to the head and the crotch. The crotch makes a lot of sense for logistical reasons we won't get into here, but the head is just confusing. But then I realized this morning that it was there for a practical purpose- protecting the head from sunburn. The reason for the color of hair is melanin, which is the pigment in the skin that protects from sunburn. That's a beneficial trait for evolution to give us, yes?

But the corollary of that would be that an entire segment of the human population would have to have been wiped out because they weren't well adapted to something that would kill a bald person. I can't think of anything that would only kill bald people except for a serial killer who only killed bald people.

This leads me to speculate that there was an evil, bald child-abusing caveman in the Great Rift Valley, and that two things happened as a consequence. First, his own child was turned sociopathic by a traumatic upbringing and went on to kill all the prematurely bald people before they reproduced. Next, his other victims forced early cavemen to select for genes that made us associate baldness with creepy child molesters and cartoonish supervillains.

Also, I just realized that having hair on our head protects us from UV rays which give us skin cancer, which is probably a much better explanation than the one I just suggested. But I don't think we should rule out my hypothesis just yet.

War is Heck.

This worries me.

Not just because of the fact that Iraq veterans are being fucked over by the bucketful, which is troubling enough as it is. Not just because of the economic burden that today's students are going to have to bear once we sober up and start having to pay into our parents' social security.

What I'm worried about is that being so detached from Iraq now is going to make war more palatable to the already war prone country that we are. And let's face facts, folks- we are war prone. Even if you think most of the wars we've fought have been good ones, you still have to admit we've fought a hell of a lot of them in our scant two-and-a-half-odd centuries as a nation. A generation from now, our children are going to look at the crippled economy we threw up into their waiting hands and they're not going to know what to do with it. Hopefully, they'll deal with it by amping up funding for science in schools and universities and use it to start developing and exporting consumer goods.

Or they might look at America's unbelievable military might and ask themselves, "how can we turn this into grocery money?" And since they've been raised by a generation that won't be able to teach them what it's like to be personally impacted by war, it's entirely possible that they'll answer that question the same way the Mongols did. When that happens, I sincerely hope they blame the state of the economy on their parents and not on foreigners.

"Baby Mama"? Really, Fox?

"Michelle Obama Looks for a New Introduction"

First off, I'd like to extend a hearty congratulations to Fox for being the 21st century's answer to J. Edgar Hoover, sans the laudable crime-fighting record.

That said, it absolutely pisses me off (though it doesn't particularly surprise me) that Michelle Obama has become the target of such disgustingly cliched attacks. It amazes me that the same predictably prejudiced cards have been played over and over again for more than two centuries, and that the sort of people who play them still haven't stopped trying. You almost have to admire their audacity.

For one thing, if Michelle Obama were in fact an "Angry Black Woman", I'd say it's her motherfucking prerogative. I mean, granted, she had the luxury of spending only four years of her life in under Jim Crow, but I'm pretty sure it took more than a few weeks for that shit to wear off. Seriously, she's a black woman who grew up in Chicago's south side back then, and managed to pull off Harvard Law regardless. Think about how much she could have accomplished if she didn't have to deal with the burdens of her race, gender and social class. If reparations happened, they'd pretty much have to give her Disneyland.

But more important is the fact that she's being portrayed not just as a passionate firebrand but as an "Angry Black Woman". It was unscrupulous and underhanded for the right to go after Bill Clinton because of his failings as a husband that didn't really have anything to do with his administrative ability, but setting aside the harm it did him personally, it was mostly just petty. Cashing in on racial prejudice for political reasons, on the other hand, is just scummy and repulsive. It's a time honored tradition among bigots to deny black Americans their due on the grounds that they'll be some kind of threat if given power. Apparently, it's a tradition that the conservative columnists who've attacked Michelle Obama are proud to uphold. I suppose it's some kind of a consolation that they're trying to drag Obama down more because he's liberal than because he's black. But frankly, it's not very much of one.

I Haz A Body!

Biological functions are the coolest things ev4r, if you think about it. We tend to spend so much of our lives thinking of ourselves as beings that exist abstractly, immaterially, as souls or minds that are somehow more important than rocks because they don't exist as matter. Then we do things like eating, sleeping, sweating and so many other things that'll probably seem hilarious to the aliens when they make their way over here. It makes me laugh to think that this species that's so obsessed with the meaning of its existence can still think it's been designed for some profound purpose when its breath smells the way it does every morning. This body that's capable of love is cripplingly dependent on shoving plant matter into and out of itself on a daily basis, and that's pretty hilarious. You need to be reminded every now and then that you're made of meat like so much else in this meat-ridden world. It makes you humble, keeps you grounded. Get it? Meat? Grounded? Fine, be like that.

"The Subject Is Too Great..."

"But we mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius became the canned goods of intellectuals... the cheap mental stimulants of alienation, the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about inauthenticity and forlornness. I can't accept this foolish dreariness. We are talking about the whole life of mankind. The subject is too great, too deep for such weakness, cowardice- too deep, too great, Shapiro. It torments me to insanity that you should be so misled. A merely aesthetic critique of modern history! After the wars and mass killings! You are too intelligent for this. You inherited rich blood. Your father peddled apples."
-Saul Bellow's "Herzog"

I love this quote and put it on my profile. I spend the vast majority of my life trying in vain to get myself out of the shallow existential mire I'm usually in despite knowing about, despite having been exposed to real suffering. Feeling pain is, for fairly self-evident reasons, no fun at all. But give yourself an appropriate level of detachment, enough so you feel the pain through empathy rather than nerve endings, and immense and intense suffering becomes as therapeutic and comforting in its horror as pleasure can be if not more so. When you feel your conscience pang you acutely and feel its purifying sting, it positively stuns you that you- that anyone at all- could find so much to worry about in the fact that modern life is dreary and/or disenchanting and/or disillusioning. Because really, when 25,000 people are dying of starvation on a daily basis, who gives a shit about existential ennui. I feel bad for people who've never wanted to cut their throat for good reasons as opposed to postmodern ones. You need to have felt or even at least witnessed that kind of pain in order to know how to properly use a brain or a heart.

Whipped Cream Goes On Everything!

I bought a can of whipped cream for the first time in about three years last week. I bought it to try strawberries and cream for the first time, and I'm already through and just bought a new one today. I'm in love. It works with anything that has more than five grams of sugar in it. I've tried it with strawberries, bananas, chocolate milk, plain milk, ice cream, nutella on toast, PB&J, granola, waffles, iced tea, hot tea, ginger ale, peanut butter cups, apple juice, cookies...

I've also squeezed it directly into my throat. Just once. Okay, more like three times. But not in the same day, in my defense! And if any of you tell me you've never done this, you're either a filthy liar or missing out on one of life's great milestones on par with your first experiences with true love, religious experience, Firefly on DVD or all of the above.

Slice of Life #1

I woke up today feeling kind of glum, 'cause though I may be an upper-middle class college goer in the first world with a fully functional Wii, believe me when I say I got troubles. So I drive over the George St. Co-op to buy myself some Green & Black's chocolate ice cream so I can O.D. on it while I watch Netflix' copy of The Young Frankenstein for the first time, and when I get back and park in my designated spot outside my building, I see a little stray cat passing by. Now, I am what my friends call a "people watcher"- if I'm walking down the street, or picking up take-out, or standing on a checkout line, I like to observe people, note their mannerisms and quirks. I usually flit from subject to subject but sometimes I zone out and fixate, and if people know you're looking directly at them, it creeps them out. And you wouldn't think so, but if you tell them you're just doing it to learn more about the human condition, it only creeps them out more.

Apparently it creeps out cats, too. It's a shame because I was hoping I could at least observe animals with some degree of impunity, but no. The cat pretty much reacted in the exact same way a human would- he noticed me with a startled glance, kept walking for a moment, did the quick over-the-shoulder double-take and then hustled away in a hurried power-walk with a kind of "what the fuck was up with that guy?" look on his face. I'm a little impressed by this whole display- if you think about it (and I do), a double take is really a pretty psychologically complex behavior. I'm guessing.

Anyway, I'm normally okay with the fact that most people have a firmer grasp of etiquette than me and that I weird out people occasionally by just doing what I normally do, but I was hoping cats were less anal-retentive about that kind of thing. Apparently they know more about the nuances of social behavior than I do, which is frankly a bit of a slap in the face to accept. I was a little tempted to explain myself to him, but even if I could get over the language barrier issue, one of the few things creepier than telling people you're observing them for academic reasons is to say you're staring at them 'cause they're adorable.

In any case, I'm just a little more convinced than before that opposable thumbs are all that's keeping them from being our evil overlords.