Some hippie vegetarian girl asked me if I would still eat the chicken sandwich I was eating if I had to kill the chicken myself. I thought about it for a second and informed the hippie that not only would I kill the chicken with my bare hands to eat my chicken sandwich, but I would kill and eat as many chickens as it took to maintain my chicken intake levels if nobody else would do it for me.

I like chicken so much that I would become a chicken farmer (poultry shepherd) if I had to. But does that mean I couldn’t sell the extra chicken and I’d have to eat it all myself? The hippie did not have a relevant response. I hate birds.

The title here isn’t exactly a revelation, I know. But it seems like there’s a lot of core assumptions at work here. I mean, actors and actresses are very attractive people. Many people assume that this is because people like looking at good looking people and like watching what they do. This is undoubtedly a big part of it.

But are good looks required to be a good actor? I mean, are there hideously ugly people out there who are good actors? I think there’s probably a few that slipped through the cracks, but for the most part good looking people are better actors than ugly people.

I think this is because good looking people are watched more often in real life. They have so much more practice. If we look at assumption #1 up there: “people like looking at good looking people and like watching what they do”, that seems like it fits.

So it seems like all good looking people should be decently good actors, right? Wrong! My guess is that the crack slippers who defy the odds to be ugly actors or their polar counterparts grew up as being the opposite of attraction that they are currently.

This argument just got a lot more interesting because we can talk about girls who grow up ugly and become hot. The obvious parallels to The Ugly Duckling lead me to call these girls ‘cygnets’ (raise your hand if you knew that was the term for a young swan). You might argue this and say we should actually call them swans. You’d be wrong because the required ambiguity in the names for these sensitive subjects is lost if we call them swans. You obviously haven’t named anything before.

On the flip side, there’s also the girls who grew up hot and went on to be mediocre or below average. This phenomenon is much more common than the cygnet phenomenon and there are more than enough examples and flavors of this to keep me busy coming up with their names and classifications for hours on end. But I’m already kind of bored with that. Let’s just say that their sense of entitlement and their demands for perfection in others are beyond unreasonable. I think something like 80% of women age 26-30 fall into this group.

{Note: The picture is a morph of Audrey Hepburn and Kiera Knightley. I got it at MorphThing, which is a pretty cool website]

Woman to Man: “I want you to only want me”

Man to Woman: “I don’t want anyone else”

Child to Parent: “I want you to pay attention to me”

Parent to Child: “I love you”

I’ve read a lot of tactics about flirting/picking up girls. I’ve added to the discussion a little bit and hopefully I ended up giving someone some advice/skill that gave them the power to bang that fading high school hottie who’s trapped in a slut spiral.

But when the chips are down, there’s only one tactic you can rely on. It’s kind of like drunk boxing. I mean, you can learn the ins and outs of boxing with all the speed, agility, power, and technique that go into being a great fighter. But drunk boxing is different. You have to stick to the basics because all of the sophisticated tactics you learned from training hours over hours in the gym have fallen victim to your sluggishness. That might be a bad example. Whatever, let’s move on.

Which is why, when the game is on the line (the close) and there’s 1000 different ideas running through your head about what move you should do next or say, you should forget them all and rely on what made you who you are: your hormones. At least that’s what I do. I think the number of possible situations I find myself in is large enough where there’s never time to weigh my options. Instincts are all I really have, and improving those is just so amazingly difficult.

I’m convinced more than ever that “learning game” is more about forgetting the things society taught you than it is learning anything new. The so called “naturals” of picking up girls just never bother to learn what they are ’supposed’ to learn about respecting women and their boundaries. They just take what they believe is rightfully theirs in every step of their lives: anything and everything they want. In the same breath, it’s worth pointing out that the naturals don’t go overboard with the disrespect either in the way that the players on the big screen make it happen.

This shows the larger idea of how learning the wrong thing, or learning a lie, is so much more damaging than learning nothing. And speak of the devil, I have go follow my instincts right now. I’m just trying to accomplish a foolish goal of having a blog post every day for a week, diluting this blog in the process.

If anything is clear after 10 years of Google and 12 years of the Internet, it’s that supplying an unbelievable amount of information to people confuses things to them more than it clarifies things. One of the most ubiquitous signs that this is the case is the enormous number of:

Coincidence?!?! I DON’T THINK SO!

statements that surround every low-probability A.I. (after Internet) event. Sidenote: B.C. and A.D. are getting old. It’s time to move to B.I. (before Internet) and A.I. (defined above) in the way we define the years. Anyway, let’s make a list of some of these events in no particular order:

1. Almost every event surrounding 9/11
2. The non-existence of WMD’s in Iraq
3. The triumph of Christina Aguilera over Britney Spears
4. The rise of Apple Computer

I’m not going to sit here and think of other things, you get the point. If you don’t get the point, the point is that people, for whatever reason, can’t accept that a low-probability event is the explanation for something HUGE. They’d rather come up with some storybook explanation that makes it seem like the event was, in fact, predictable. One of the best examples of this is in Sports. You always hear about “this team won the (Championship Game) because…”, even when said team won by a small enough margin to be attributed to randomness. Whenever I hear a woman talk about how she met her husband, and how it was just always meant to be, it just seems so obviously ridiculous to me that I’m not even sure how to point it out.

I mean, what the fuck, people really want to believe that the highest probability event is what “should always happen” and what does always happen outside of extremely unlikely events. That’s not how the world works. The biggest news with the biggest impact is the stuff with a low probability of happening; and the big impact stuff is what matters. The events that happen with high probability are footnotes in history.

I think the disconnect is there because people are very conservative by nature. They look at the probability of success rather than both the probability of success combined with the value of success. For example, is it better to go for an 80% chance of banging a 9 or a 1% chance of banging Rachel Bilson (assuming you could correctly estimate the probabilities)? Keep in mind there’s a 1/5 chance that you fail with the 9 and spend the rest of your life wondering if you could have banged Rachel Bilson in her prime. The risks of failure with the 9 are so unbelievably great that you have to go for Rachel Bilson.

When China won the 2008 Summer Games, I thought it was a bad idea. When I visited Beijing and saw how awfully unprepared they were (as of last summer), I knew it was a bad idea. Then when the pro-Tibet protesters started, everyone knew it was a bad idea.

For kicks, I looked up the current odds of countries protesting the Olympics this summer. The odds I found were odds of which country would be the FIRST to protest the games. “Protesting the games” means the first country to withdraw all participating entrants from the Olympics. None of this partial protest nonsense. Here’s what they are (from Sportsbooks.com):

Spain             10 - 1

Canada            10 - 1

Greece            10 - 1

Germany           10 - 1

Ireland            8 - 1

Italy              6 - 1

United Kingdom     6 - 1

Australia          4 - 1

France             5 - 2

USA                5 - 2

This means that if France boycotted the Olympics and the US followed suit, you’d lose your bet if you bet on the US because they weren’t the first country to protest. This either means that it’s extremely likely that countries will boycott the games this summer, or that people are willing to bet that countries will boycott and the oddsmakers are screwing them over (there’s no option to bet on ‘no countries will boycott’). Kind of interesting.

I will project that there is a 100% chance that China will have a worse World image after these Olympics than they do before them. I mean, what good is going to come out of this deal? Why didn’t they just give it to Toronto or Paris?

While we’re on the odds topic: Barack Obama is a 1-20 favorite to with the North Carolina primary and Hillary Clinton is a 1-6 favorite to win the Indiana primary. Those are pretty good betting odds for Hillary, she’s definitely going to win Indiana. I’d stay away from the Obama in NC bet though, too much risk.

I think by now everybody knows a funny looking white guy who has an Asian Fetish. These lemon-pickers/busdrivers go beyond succumbing to the Asian Persuasion that will do in most hot blooded males when confronted with a HAG (hot Asian girl). Said individuals will just be lost in the fact that she’s Asian without considering anything else, even when she’s obviously not all that. All they have to say about her to their buddies is something like “dude, she’s amazing, she’s so amazing”.

In fact, it seems that they can’t tell the difference between an ugly Asian girl and a HAG. If we look at guys who like blondes, their feelings are strikingly similar.

The above sentiments were brought up to me by an Asian girl (Ms. Luau). I do agree with them, and I think it provokes a larger discussion of fetishes.

As far as I can tell, men have many more fetishes than their female counterparts in both number and variety. In fact, after doing 20 seconds of research, I’ve concluded that fetishes are mostly limited to heterosexual men, and involve complex personal meanings behind the fetishes. How interesting.

As far as I know from the circle (more accurately, the heavily clustered network) of people I come in contact with, the Asian and Blonde fetishes are the most popular, with Latina coming in 3rd. These are the “spoken” fetishes. The Internet tells me that the most common non-human (”unspoken”) fetishes involve panty hose, panties, and high heels: all instruments of femininity. Interesting.

I conclude that there is no way to definitively say why a man would choose one fetish over another. However, it does seem that the only thing Blondes, Asians, panties, and high heels have in common is their association as symbols of femme. If fetishes arise due to a childhood stall in the Phallic stage of Freud’s Psychosexual development, it’s very likely that men will misplace their innate desire for femininity in the objects of fetishes. Women wouldn’t have this problem to the same degree because of a lack of childhood intimate contact with their fathers (in most normal cases).

So what can we say after taking this all in? Fetishes are for men who do not have a deep understanding of their sexuality and who are unable to distinguish true signs of femininity from the infrared countermeasures deployed by modern society. Men who are not attracted to any and all fertile women are the confused and misguided. It’s also unclear whether pornography will further confuse these individuals or magically clear things up. Wait, maybe that isn’t so unclear…

Last week I swore that if I heard this question again, I’d write about it on my blog to be able to point anyone else who had this question to when the question reared it’s head again. I’m a believer in giving the short answer before giving the long answer, so here we go:

• In two words: Civil Rights
• In one word: Racism

This probably isn’t shocking to a lot of you older people, but I bet it is to the younger people out there. Growing up, I always wondered why relatively poor Southerners would vote for a party that encouraged the growth and prominence of big business. It didn’t make sense. Also, I wondered why relatively wealthy Northerners would vote for a party that transferred their wealth to the poor. It was counter to what I understood about human nature. I couldn’t get a direct answer from my history book, my history teacher, or political commentary shows. It just seemed like everyone accepted that this was how it was. How strange.

But then I pieced it together. Northerners used to vote Republican and Southerners used to vote Democratic. This was the way it was from when the Republican party was formed out of other parties (including the Whigs) to support higher education, banking, railroads, industry and cities. This modernization went hand in hand with ending slavery, which they felt was in disharmony with their vision of the future. Ok, so at some point in history it made sense, people were actually voting for their interests.

It stayed this way all the way up to 1948, which was when Harry S Truman ran on a Civil Rights platform as a Democrat. He was supporting views FDR had, but FDR had some big shit go down during his presidency (Great Depression, WWII, you might have heard of it) and he didn’t have time. Then, Strom Thurmond ran as a Dixiecrat (which means a Southern Democrat who is also racist) and won a bunch of Southern votes (4 States).

These Dixiecrats were obviously too numerous to stay a 3rd party for long, so the Republicans, in a particularly shrewd move, absorbed the racists and called it a ‘Southern Strategy‘. In another shrewd move, the Republicans then absorbed the Conservative Christians into the party to combine those who were anxious about racial issues with those to were anxious about religious issues to capture the votes of rural America. They sold ‘less government’ as ‘more freedom’ to them instead of how they sold it in the past: ‘less government’ as ‘better for business’. Absolutely… Brilliant.

And that, my friends, is how a small group of the super wealthy can push their free-market agenda onto the ballots of people who shouldn’t be voting for it: by using racism and religious fanaticism to get votes. As to why the Democrats manage to get so many votes from wealthy White people? I have no idea. I bet when the Republicans came up with this idea, they figured they’d get those votes as well.

I was going to apologize for this blog sucking lately. But I’ve been kind of busy. I’m reading ‘The Black Swan’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It has a pretty interesting concept behind it. Also, MarioKart Wii came out on Sunday. idk, it’s the best game series ever. Combining that experience with some solid drinking has been a Back to the Future type experience.

While we’re on the topic, I am attending a charitable drinking event at the Rhino Bar tonight from 8-11. It’s an open bar for $20 to support the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. I am going because I can’t remember the last time I did anything for charity and because I can drink a lot more than $20 worth. Perhaps you feel the same way, or maybe you just want to tell me how much I suck to my face. Or maybe you’re just looking for an excuse to get drunk on a Monday. Aren’t we all.

In life, I naturally assume that everyone and their brother is out to get me because they are. Everyone wants to swindle me, bang my chick, steal my possessions, use my lines, bite my style, or get me to buy them something. Fucking assholes are the exact reason I don’t need some smart ass DC Hero Jr sitting at my dinner table whining that he has to eat regular cheese pizza instead of extra cheese pizza. Side note: what the fuck is extra cheese pizza all about anyway? I saw some bullshit ad for a 6 cheese pizza. Cheese pizza is only for little kids and poor people who can’t afford toppings. Gourmet cheese pizza, give me a fucking break.

Anyway, I’ve drawn a handy diagram of all the people out to get me. You can see the two Black guys who are about to jump me and steal my wallet. You can also see the one sneaky Asian guy who’s setting me up for a good old Asian pyramid scheme, but you can’t see the 200 Asians working behind the scenes on the pyramid scheme. You can also see two short Mexican twins who are out to get me. I’m not sure exactly what they’re up to, but I’m sure it involves drugs.

What you can’t see is the hundreds of White people I drew who are out to get me because they blend in with the background color of this website. You might think that’s a larger sociological metaphor for White criminals going relatively unnoticed because they blend in with the background of society. But you’d be wrong. I just like white backgrounds.

Anyway, I think it’s a pretty good idea to be abnormally paranoid in life. It’s the only way to see the clever assholes who really are out to get you. Otherwise, you’ll be a victim of your own optimism. Think you can go through life living carefree and happy? Think again. You might as well just pull your jeans down and hold up a bottle of K-Y because you’re just asking to get fucked. The way to do it is to be skeptical of everyone you meet because you know, deep down, they’re just aiming to screw you over when they get a chance. And then when you get to the finish line in life, and we all know there’s a finish line, you’ll know that you won.