Word of the Day – Democrating

To Democrat (verb): To argue for no reason, often over trivial points, to appease a strong inner desire to be right.

There’s a big Rules meeting today about how the delegates of Michigan and Florida should be split.

Both campaigns agree on the Florida delegates.

Clinton wants the Michigan delegates split 73-55 Clinton, Obama wants them split 64-64, and the compromisers want it split 69-59. In case you’re counting at home, they’re arguing about 18 delegates. Holy shit, why does anybody give a fuck about 18 delegates? Obama is 201 delegates ahead.

If this happened in the Republican party, the doors would close, there’d be a lot of screaming, somebody would take the blame for this mess and resign, and a few hours later the delegates would be split 69-59. They wouldn’t have a huge public hearing where everybody gets to speak, a huge committee decides what is most fair for everyone, and everybody claps and cheers when somebody says something they agree with. What kind of people do that anyway? What a fucking joke.

Politics is about leadership, not about doing what’s fair and equitable for everyone.  You do the best you can and don’t waste time doing it. If Obama was White, he’d be a Republican. You heard it here first.

Get Out Of My Life

Hero Adage #2: Most people aren’t worth talking to more than 5 times in a lifetime. The vast majority of people I meet don’t have more than a handful of worthwhile conversations in them. After I get these conversations out of them I choose to never talk to them again because I know it will just be a rehash of previous conversations and largely a waste of time.

It’s true that everyone has something to offer you. However, a very small number of this ‘everyone’ population can bring any heat consistently. Because of this, people are more or less replaceable. After all, I’ve proven to myself that I can get tidbits of wisdom from almost anyone. It should go without saying that the validity of this statement is directly proportional to the simdemographic (made up word alert) local population density. Because of this, I think it’s best to think of people in one of two ways:

1. Replaceable
2. Invaluable

There is no grey area.

This is the perfect lead-in to what will one day be the best series of posts ever on DC Hero: Moving To A New Place. Phase I of moving to a new place is simple: don’t make friends with just anyone, be very picky even if you feel desperate for friends. You don’t need any more Replaceables in your life. Ever.

The Tables Have Turned

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from anyone was from a guy at a bar whose name I will never know. I was talking about girls and he said to me: “Man, just wait until you turn 23. After that, girls will be everything you ever wanted them to be.” I penciled that one in on my life calendar as something that might prove to be important later on.

Right now I’m 24 and I can say that the prophecy has come true. There is a magical age where the tables turn, where relationships are broken off by men more than they are by women, and the proverbial ‘upper hand’ is in sync with the World of Man.

As much as I would like to credit this turnaround to advances in my game, I can’t help but think back to the prophecy and wonder if it’s destiny more than accomplishment. I think age (“experience” is a pseudonym for age as far as I’m concerned) is as much a part of a man’s game as looks are to a girl’s game.

When the tables turn for most men, they scan the horizon for the loudest Siren they can hear and pair with her to be done with it. But logic and word-of-mouth tell me that this isn’t the best offensive set in the playbook. It’s kind of like a great warrior who spends his life trying to take over a land to hold the Power over it’s people and resources. What is he supposed to do with the Power after he has it? History will tell us that gathering as much Power as possible followed by losing it all is the road most traveled. Hmmm….

Track Of The Day: Put On

This track is absolutely ridiculous. I was thinking it was the best song I’ve heard in a few months until Kanye’s verse which took it to another level. And the next time someone tells you that hip hop is dead, you can remind them that Kanye West is the new Dr. Dre.

And if anyone can explain why his blog (link in blogroll on the right) is all about new designs for home furnishings, I’d love to hear it.

Boys are Creepy

In a scintillating follow-up to my last post on why girls are boring, I solve the right hand side of the equation. In the title I wrote ‘boys’ instead of ‘men’ or the oft-used ambiguous pseudonym ‘guys’ because being creepy is nothing but being inexperienced. Boys that don’t know how to act inevitably act creepy when the sexual tension gets thick.

It’s all so clear to me how it works. Inexperience leads to a misunderstanding of the relatively asexual way girls see the world. If I assumed girls were as filthy with their thoughts as I am, it would be pretty difficult for me to escalate anything without being creepy. I guess an aversion to creepiness is just a girl’s instinct to stay away from inexperienced men.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Whether it’s a girl being boring or a boy being creepy, they can get away with a lot more bore and creepiness if they’re physically attractive. I know a few brain dead hot chicks, but I wouldn’t describe any of them as boring because my mind has plenty of things to be occupied with when they’re around. And no matter what I do to a girl who finds me attractive, she won’t think I’m creepy. Well, maybe not “no matter what”, but it’s surprisingly hard.

Girls are Boring

After approaching a few hundred young women, me and this guy concluded that it was shocking how few interesting things girls actually had to say. I mean, if you’re a girl and you go to a bar to talk to guys (have guys come up and talk to you), for the love of God at least have something interesting to say. I can’t even begin to count how many awful stories I’ve heard about “my crazy friends” while I’m standing there bored to tears trying to figure out if I can snort some of my beer if I tilt the bottle over far enough.

I think it has a lot to do with women in groups, since this is how they go out on the town. Girls are incredibly boring by themselves, and this effect is magnified in groups since the inertia just builds. While guys befriend girls for the emotional support and the indirect ass, girls befriend guys for much needed fun and excitement. Luckily, those needs are not in conflict with each other.

I used to think girls didn’t do many fun things because they were too conservative or nervous to try them. But then I learned the truth of how lame and unimaginative they really are. A very wise man once said: “If I was gay, I would never talk to a woman unless I absolutely had to. They are completely worthless.” That man was me in 2004. I am a prophet to my own gospel.

Both Sides of the Peak Oil Debate

I was reading freakonomics today, which is a great blog, and there was an article on the $2.99 gas promotion Chrysler is putting on and the guy made the completely unqualified statement that “There is also every reason to believe that gas prices will be lower in the future than they are now”. He also linked to an article in 2005 that he wrote saying that he doesn’t know anything about oil reserves, but that oil will react just like any other commodity with supply and demand principles. I mean, wouldn’t that only be true if oil was sold on a free market? I’m pretty sure I don’t trust OPEC with embracing a free oil market with accurate supply numbers. I’m pretty sure that’s not how cartels work.

You might not care about this at all. I like it because energy is deceivingly important but largely invisible to us. As a general rule of thumb, it’s probably a good idea to keep track of big world changing movements so you don’t get crushed like an unsuspecting fool.

Anyway, it got me thinking about how much back and forth there is on this topic. Personally, I like to hear both sides of the argument because the answer is probably between the two sides. It’s just a question of where in between. The best websites on this that I’ve found are:

Pro-Peak Oil: http://www.theoildrum.com/

No-Peak Oil: http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/

Anyway, there’s a lot of people who will tell you a lot of useful and well-explained things on both sides of the debate. But instead of doing that, I’ll make a list of interesting things I came across in reading online and reading this book, which is the best book on energy as far as I’m concerned.

1. Russia, by far, is the most pro Global Warming country there is. They make no secret about their desires to pollute as much as possible to help their potato crops, expose a northern sea route, and (ironically) expose unbelievable amounts of oil and gas trapped under the Siberian arctic.
2. Oil of Olay is the still the most popular search term that starts with “oil” on Google, edging “oil price per barrel”. Why the fuck would you ever search for “oil of olay”? Guess what the website for Oil of Olay is? It’s fucking oilofolay.com (which redirects to olay.com so either one would work). Google is making a killing off of people who will type web addresses into their search bar. Genius.
3. U.S. petroleum consumption is projected to fall by 330,000 barrels/day in 2008 ( -1.6%, as of 5/6/08 )
4. WWII was largely decided by a lack of Axis oil. Hitler back-stabbed Stalin because he needed Russian oil (fatal mistake) and Japan’s lack of fuel led them to choose not to intercept small aerial formations like our B-29 nuclear attacks.
5. Japan is the smartest and most dependent country on foreign oil. They’re probably coming up with some kind of solution. I have no idea if they’re worried about Peak Oil or not but if they’re not then I wouldn’t be worried either.
6. The Europeans knew they’d be able to meet the Kyoto protocols because their economy was slowing down anyway. It was a classic Euro-scam.
7. The reason you see Chinese people spitting all the time (in China) is because they can’t heat their homes in the winter and they’ve learned that this helps against respiratory illnesses. I got to spit on the street when I chewed tobacco over there and nobody cared, that was the only bonus.
8. We will probably move from oil to natural gas for mobile transportation in the next 20 years, with a move to hydrogen sometime after that. This will mean Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) tanker explosions will be the new oil spills. I guess environmentalists will like this better because the sea animals won’t suffer.
9. There’s already a natural gas car for sale in the US for $25K. You can even refill it in your own garage if you have a natural gas line, you get a ton of tax breaks to buy it, and it costs a little more than the equivalent to $1/gallon to fill up (gas prices were as high in 05 when this was written as they are now). Why is all the talk about the Prius then? Because environmentalists are status whores.
10. About half of the World’s natural gas reserves are held by Russia and Iran.

I Would Kill Animals To Eat Their Meat

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.

Actors Are Good Looking

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]

I Love You: A Translation

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”