weeklyrob

Richard Dawkins reads his mail:

The Fabulous Fox Theatre in Atlanta is an extraordinary place. It was designed to be sort of mosque-like, but also like the palace of a sheik. It’s huge, and has lots of rooms and corridors and everything is decorated.

Because my friend Amy is the assistant production manager there, I was allowed to do something that makes my little geek heart swell. I was allowed to play a Nintendo Wii on the movie screen at the Fox.

Pics.

Today I read an article in the Wilson’s Quarterly about modern-day slavery. The author, John Miller, calls for action: First for laws and enforcement of those laws, and second, for education.

Two examples of education:

1. He spoke in Japan about the thousands of Japanese work visas given to Female filipino “entertainers.” Within a couple of years, those visas were reduced dramatically.

2. In certain places, men caught with prostitutes have to attend classes, where they learn how the demand for prostitutes drives sex slavery. It appears as though recidivism rates (of johns) are lower in those areas.

Miller relates stories of women who have thought they were going to work as a housekeeper, or model, or dancer. They end up being beaten, threatened, tortured. Some of them are sex slaves, of course, but some are worker-slaves in factories or households. So they really may end up a housekeeper, but in chains.

He doesn’t want it to be called human trafficking, because that hides the nastiness of it. Call it slavery, he says.

The whole time I read the article, I wanted to re-read an earlier one from the New Statesman. It was a book review, called The Myth of Trafficking. The review was of a book by Laura Agustin, claiming that cries of sex-trafficking are making a mountain out of a molehill. (The book doesn’t talk about non-sex trafficking.)

One thing Agustin says is that when groups report the number of victims, they often include all migrant prostitutes in the report. As though there couldn’t be a woman who migrated and became a prostitute without being enslaved. So the numbers are wildly inflated.

Agustin thinks that the laws making it harder for migration (some of which are anti-trafficking laws) are actually counter-productive. The harder they make it for people to come legitimately, the more they’ll come as sex-workers, because sex-workers can get people to bring them in.

I don’t know how a smackdown between Agustin and Miller would turn out. I think they’d be able to agree on the education side of the deal.

Meanwhile, and completely off that topic, Miller uses the phrase, “moral suasion” in his article, which I thought was a typo. Go figure.

I’m talking about birds, of course. Avians. Feathers and such.

New research suggests pretty conclusively that some birds (magpies, in this case) understand that the image they see in the mirror is their own. Used to be, we thought that only mammals could do it.

Of course, every time we figure out that non-humans can do stuff, the newspapers and most people want to put it in terms of humans. “See? We’re not unique in that way!”

As for me, I no longer need that. Humans are unique in some ways, as are all distinct species. But we’re not the only ones who communicate complicated thoughts, sing, play, fight, use tools, grow crops, keep livestock, enslave others of our kind, rape, recognize reflections, deceive, risk death for our families and friends, and more more more.

We are, as far as we know, the only ones who blog.

A friend of mine recently said that Ellen Barkin used to be on his list of the hottest of hot women. To me, she’s not the slightest bit pretty.

This brought to mind a bit of a tangent: What does it mean to be average-looking?

I used to think it meant that on the bell curve of Attractiveness in Population, an average-looking guy was in the big fat part in the middle, along with most other people. Attractive people are on the skinny bit to the right, less attractive people to the left.

Let’s say that 0 is a glob of goo, and 20 is the height of beauty:

But I don’t really think that’s true anymore. Or at least, it’s not as clear as that.

In that model, an average-looking guy like me would be, as I say, right in the middle. Or somewhere in there.

But I know for sure that some people think I’m actually a fairly ugly specimen. And others (even women!) have given me the impression that they think I’m occasionally on the less hideous side of the chart.

So how does that work? The fact is that it doesn’t work at all in the given model. I think that the real definition of an average-looking guy is someone who most people think is average-looking, but some find good-looking and some find… euphemism-looking.

Thus, instead of a chart of all the people, we each have our own personal charts. Our personal charts show how other people see us. Because I’m an average-looking guy, my chart looks like this:

Brad Pitt (or whatever) would have a chart that’s shifted way to right and probably never levels off on the right side. Joseph Merrick’s (you might not want to look) would be shifted ever so slightly to the left.

Crazy stonehenge-like clock. Found on Boing boing gadgets.

The author of The Gulag Archipelago has died.

He spent seven years in the Gulag, for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend. There he began to write, and he never stopped. For a long time, practically everything he wrote was illegal; he and his courageous friends had to hide his work and smuggle it out to the West.

I remember reading vast amounts of The Gulag Archipelago while dismaying over the vast amounts I still had left to read. I never finished it, having only gotten through the first two volumes.

And I remember being annoyed at the translator. Solzhenitsyn had used the ironic label of “investigators” when referring to the government thugs who would crush your testicles under their boots. The humorless and misguided translator thought that the thugs seemed more like “interrogators,” so he changed it to that throughout the book.

[At least he did make a note of that change, so that readers could know that he’d done it. I do appreciate that. I just mentally switched the words back to their original form as I read.]

Anyway, I hope that wherever Solzhenitsyn is now, he’s beating the crap out of Stalin.

In the interest of boring the crap out of most readers, I present to you: Slipping.

One of the problems of smooth concrete floors is that when they get wet, they become slippery. Think slightly melted ice over a lake of WD-40.

My 15-month-old daughter has a knack for finding the little spills and puddles (that she has created earlier in the day). She finds them like this:

La la la—SMACK! Aaaaaaah!

But what’s weird is that she’s actually a pretty good little faller when she’s not slipping. I mean both that she falls a lot and that she protects herself well.

When she trips over something, or just loses her balance, she finds a way to fall sort of slowly, or at least safely.

But when she slips… KaBAM.

So I started wondering. Why does slipping seem to happen so much faster than tripping? Why does it usually end up damaging us so much more?

Maybe this is obvious to everyone. Here’s what I decided:

We trip with the foot we’re lifting, while we’re still standing on the non-tripping foot. We expect the tripping foot to get where it’s going, and when it doesn’t, whoopee. But we usually have a little notice that it’s not gonna make it. And our bodies are heading up or across when we feel the foot betraying us.

But when we slip, it’s on the foot that’s already supposed to be supporting us. There’s no time to know it’s not going to help us before it’s gone and we’re horizontal.

Also, it’s often the case (but not always) that the motion of the body is downward just before we slip, as we bring the soon-to-be-gone foot down. Gravity doesn’t mind whether it joins the ground with your foot or your face, but it’s often already on the way when you slip.

Anyway, that’s what I figure.

So I looked up weeklyrob in Cuil. One of the interesting things about Cuil is that it can show pics next the results it finds.

Except for one small problem: The pics are often wrong. Look above, for example, to find a correct result for a weeklyrob post, but with a picture of… well…

Honestly, I don’t know WHO that guy is. He looks like a nice guy and all, but why is he appearing next to my post?

Seriously, does anyone recognize him? He’s probably another guy named Rob, or something, or he posted something similar to my post. Or something.

The “Got Milk” ads are cute, and because milk is considered wholesome stuff, lots of big names are onboard to promote them.

But watch out, ’cause the “Got Milk” people are no less evil than any other major conglomeration.

In at least two cases of people printing “Got Breast milk?” on shirts, onesies, and such, the “Got Milk” people sent cease and desist letters, claiming trademark infringement.

The basic idea of trademark infringement is that it could cause confusion between two products (Ray Bans vs. Ray Bins). As if people are going to go to the store and buy breast milk because they’re confused about which kind of milk is the official “Got Milk” kind.

As one of the women receiving a letter said:

“How can you get confused between a boob and a bottle of milk from the store? They’re two different kind of jugs.”

Nowhere do they say how to pronounce their stupid web site name, but it’s supposed to be the big Google-killer.

I’ll believe it when I see it. It’s nice to look at (once you’ve searched for something, that is. I don’t really dig the black screen), but so far it hasn’t actually found what I’m looking for better than Google does.

For example, I looked up… cuil, and went through several pages looking for information about Cuil before giving up because I found none. I found a lot of Irish stuff (it’s an Irish word), but nothing about the search engine.

Looked up cuil in Google and cuil.com was the second hit. The first was a news story about cuil.com.

Cuil looked prettier, as I say, and had some slick dynamic stuff when you scroll over the categories. But, I mean, where’s the beef?

Last night I finally watched Air Guitar Nation, the documentary about the World Air Guitar championships.

It was gooood. So funny, but also touching. I was laughing at the whole idea for a while (and the air guitarists were mainly laughing along), but then ended up really cheering for our guy to win.

Good stuff.

My retort.

Wired magazine points us to graphjam.com, the best possible use of googledocs.

Update: I submitted a graph, but apparently they’re very backed up. So rather than wait for mine to show up there, I’ll link to it RIGHT HERE.

While titling my last post, I remembered a debate that seems to be important to some people about the word “kid.”

Some people don’t like referring to human children as “kids.” They want “kid” only to refer to a goat (or possibly deer or antelope).

For example, when someone asked a question on the kiplinger.com forum about sending their “grandkids” to college, the response from the community member included the line: “Why do you want to send your goats to college? Goats have kids, people have children.”

As is usual with the pompous language police, that response isn’t merely pretentious and rude, but it’s ridiculous as well. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, people have been using “kid” for “human child” since at least 1599. That’s over 400 years, which gives it a pretty good pedigree.

This isn’t a case of someone misusing a word. It’s a case of someone using an extremely common and broadly understood (though informal) word that the other person just doesn’t care for. It kind of makes me happy to think of that guy walking around getting annoyed every time someone says “kid”.

This is a short rant.

Only kids haven’t seen the same old tricks a thousand times. So when new movies use the same old tricks, I’m giving the movie-makers the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they’re making the movies for kids.

This must be true even when the movies are rated R, or PG-13 as is the case with Hell-Boy II.

Ok, so Hellboy II doesn’t have a story line or protagonist like most other movies. But ask yourself this:

How many times have I seen the good guy seemingly neutralize the bad guy, then turn his back on him, only to have the bad guy do something bad? A thousand?

Well, if you go see Hellboy II, then you’ll have seen it a thousand and TWO times, because they pull that stunt twice in the same movie. (For you purists, they actually did it more than twice, but only twice with the supreme bad guy, and only twice in a way that caused a Bad Thing to happen.)

Despite all the gaping holes in the movie and silly attempts to pull heartstrings, the turned-his-back-on-the-bad-guy thing still stuck out the most.

Is it possible that 13 year-old boys haven’t seen that a thousand times?

I’m finally getting around to reading The Best American Short Stories 2007, which I posted about earlier.

Two things of note:

1. Stephen King, who picked the final 20 stories, wrote the introduction that made me want the book in the first place. Re-reading it, I see that he used a semicolon on the first page!

Stephen King is not a pretentious writer, and this introduction isn’t a pretentious introduction. Clearly, the man has read my many posts on semicolons and has agreed to join the cause. Thanks, Stephen!

2. The first story I read (rather than skimmed) in the book is: “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” by Karen Russell. I loved it.

The story is literally about a halfway house for girls who were raised by wolves, and who speak the wolf language and have the pack mentality. I kept waiting for it to get stupid, or mawkish, but it never did.

Ok, there were one or imaginative bits that didn’t make sense to me, but other than those, I had fun reading it. Which is the point.

And, hey, if you’re interested in thinking about things, this story does have room for that as well. It’s not a stretch to claim that this is a story about loss of place, how you can never go home, how you can miss something you don’t really want, and how moving ahead often means leaving behind, and also how you can have regrets for things you’ve done while still understanding why you did them.

Or, it can just be a fun story about girls who gnaw on their shoes and pee on everything to mark their territory.

So yay for short stories and yay for semicolons and yay for Karen Russell and Stephen King. And a happy good morning to you, too.

My brother finally asked his girlfriend to marry him, and we found out yesterday (I think he did it the night before). They’d been together a long damn time, and everyone in the family loves her and worried that we’d lose her if he didn’t propose.

Now he has and we’re all happy.

Also, while on the subject:

My friends Amy and Thad, who recently moved in together and will go to hell for living in sin, just got back from a trip to see her parents. About ten minutes into her set piece on how their trip was, Amy says, “we went and saw a lot of Phoenix, drove around, saw Dad’s rock garden. Oh yeah and we got engaged.”

So yay!

Update: The engagements keep rolling in!

My edition of J.C. Masterman’s book, “The Double-Cross System,” has an introduction, followed by a preface, followed by a forward.

The Introduction, written in this century, spends some time discussing a certain series of events that’s slightly related to the book. Then you get to the preface, written in 1973 or something, which discusses the same series of events as if you haven’t just finished reading them. (For all I know, the forward will rehash the rehash. I haven’t gotten there yet.)

And the sneaky trick is that you feel as though the guy writing in 1973 is being annoying, because his piece comes second. When really, the guy who wrote the introduction never bothered reading the preface.

Anyway, the book should be interesting, once I get past all the pre and pre-pre stuff.

It’s the true story of how WWII Great Britain caught and “turned” a bunch of German spies who came to the island. They then spent the war feeding misinformation, which the Germans generally swallowed whole.

After the war, when England had access to German records, they found that there was one spy who never got caught. ONE. They literally caught all the other spies that Germany sent over, and either turned them, or hanged them.

This book is about the turning. The double-crossing.

The name of their group was the 20 Committee. Why? Twenty in Roman numerals is: XX (Double Cross). Which makes me happy. Government drones having fun and naming their committee based on a pun of sorts.

And by the way, did you realize that the word committee has two Ms, two Ts, and then two Es? Ridiculous.

We say “fall” and the British say, “autumn.” But they changed it, not us. They used to say “fall” in England, too.

I just found out that the same goes for spelling “organize” with an s instead of a z.

From AskOxford.com:

Q: Are spellings like ‘privatize’ and ‘organize’ Americanisms?

A: No, not really.

When American spelling was standardized during the 19th century, the consistent use of -ize was one of the conventions that became established.

However, since then, the -ise spellings have become more popular in Britain, perhaps partly as a reaction against the American custom.

Spellings such as organisation would have struck many older British writers as rather French-looking.

The Oxford English Dictionary favoured -ize… and this was also the style of Encyclopaedia Britannica (even before it was American-owned) and formerly of the Times newspaper.