Crazy Puppet Eyebrow Zone

Bill O'Rielly's Crazy Puppet Eyebrows: "The three liberal Supremes (and Justice Kennedy) felt that the president had exceeded his power ... the four conservative Justices argued that he was within his rights as Commander-in-Chief."

Speaking of crazy puppet eyebrows, doesn't Rick Santorum look like Guy Smiley from Sesame Street? I think the man is made of plastic.

Fortunately, in Cambridge, Bass is still okay

This is the hipster-ironic-sendup-parody-but-kind-of-not-really-and-anyway-some-people-like-PBR-but-I-ask-you-are-we-still-wearing-the-scarves?-but-seriously-funny-cause-it's-true-(I-mean-have-you-ever-been-to-Williamsburg?)-and-well-acted-also-and-did-I-say-funny sitcom made by my friend Thom (you may remember him from Holy Mother of Bert).

Watch it! It's funny! You know you want to.

Thom plays the film director. I also kind of know the Russian guy. (He's not really Russian.)

Not Cool

You know what bugs me? This resurgence of the word "gay" as a perjorative in the last few years. Creepily coinciding with the return of 80s fashion, I have noticed the phrase "such and such is gay" popping out of the mouths of libertine people and up in the pages of respectable online journals.

When I was about eight years old, my mom heard me use the phrase "That's so gay!" and gave me what for.

"Do you know how offensive that is?" she asked me, with steely hazel eyes.

"No ... " I mumbled.

"You know what gay means?" she demanded.

"Um, yes?" I vacillated.

"What?"

"Um, when men like men and women like women."

"Right. And do you know anyone who is gay?"

I nodded, starting to blush, because I did and she knew I did.

"Therese is gay, right?" she continued. I nodded. "So when you say 'that's gay' and you mean something stupid, what you're saying is that Therese is stupid. How would you like it if I saw something stupid I said, 'ewww, that's so Joolya!'?"

So I stopped saying it and eventually the other kids did, too. I'm not saying I made them, I'm just saying that people got maybe a little more sensitive and stopped saying it. Maybe it was because me and my cohort grew up; maybe the younger kids still said it. But until a few years ago, I hadn't heard anyone use that phrase for ten years.

It must stop. It's not funny, and it's not cool. It's not even retro-ironic-cool, or snidely-not-funny-funny. It's lame-ass and juvenile. I don't like what the recent acceptability of "that's so gay" says about our society just now. 80s fashion was ugly enough. Do we really need to bring back 80s homophobia?

I mean, what next, trickle-down economics?

Good Old Larry

Ten points for anyone who figured out what the aforeposted "Racial Inequalities in Academia" was parodying. I "find'n'replaced" from Larry Summers's ign'rint and grammatically unsound remarks about women in science. There is some backstory to this.

Ahem.

When I learned that L-Dawg was being evicted from his comfy chair, my first reaction was to cringe and think, "Oh, that's a bit much. Now we'll look all PC-police, and it wasn't so bad, really, blah blah blah." A sentiment which I have since heard from many people.

But then I decided to do a little experiment and pretend Lars was talking about race rather than sex and see if it still sounded defensible. I kinda don't think it did. But read for yourselves and see.

As for the "it's not society, it's science" argument for sex differences in scientific ability, my Inner Boomy cries out that 100 years ago there was scientific evidence for innate racial intellectual disparities. (Or less than 100 - see The Bell Curve.)

To sum up what I think were Lazza's main points (after wading through the tortuous prose of his speech):

1) Probably most women don't want to make the sacrifices that are necessary for being a successful academic scientist. This might be because it's an inhuman task and because women are expected to pick up the slack in the traditional family model - but it might just be because girls like babies and cuddly bunnies.

2) Probably the other reason there are not tons of tenured women at Harvard or MIT is because there are more really really really really clever men than there are women. Even though populations of men and women might be of comparable smartness, there is more of a range of variability in men's brains when it comes to tricky things like math. Ergo, more male math geniuses. That's just science! We can never expect there to be as many genius women as there are men, so it makes sense to have more men professors (brilliant but odd) and more women secretaries (competent but mediocre).

3) Oh, there might be some institutionalized descrimination. But I'm not sure. Anyway, we don't mean anything bad by it. And besides, there's been plenty of time since Betty Friedan for universities to gorge themselves on highly qualified female/minority facutly at a discount rate (bargain basement prices for unwanted commodities!) thereby getting a leg up on the competition (who insist on hiring expensive males). But since I don't see that happening, there must just not be a pool of discount female faculty to take advantage of, which underscores propostions 1 and 2. It's all economics!

Capice?

Mixed Messages

Does anyone else find this cover a bit ... what's the word I am looking for?

What's the word for when there's a story about how you too can acheive a massive weight loss (which I imagine is described as a good thing) right next to a blurb about a performer's binge-and-purge habit (which, I'm assuming, is described as a bad thing)?

Lose weight fast! Lose weight now! Oh, but try not to throw up after meals.

Gah, head exploding.

P.S. Does this blog make me look fat?

Racial Disparities in Academia

I have been giving this issue a lot of thought lately, and I would like to make some remarks concerning the number of Black faculty in higher education. Bear with me, as some of what I am saying is conjecture! But keep in mind that I have given the matter many hours of investigation and consider it to be of the utmost concern for all academics.

There are many aspects to the issue of Blacks' underrepresentation in tenured positions at top universities and research institutions. I am going to attempt to adopt an entirely positive, rather than normative approach, and just try to think about and offer some hypotheses as to why we observe what we observe without the kind of judgmental tendency that inevitably is connected with all our common goals of equality. It is, after al,l not the case that the role of Blacks in science is the only example of a group that is significantly underrepresented in an important activity and whose underrepresentation contributes to a shortage of role models for others who are considering being in that group.

The first hypothesis, which I think is the most plausible, is that academia is lifestyle choice which some people are more willing to make than others. I call this the high-powered job hypothesis. What fraction of young Blacks in their mid-twenties make a decision that they don't want to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week? What fraction of young Caucasians make a decision that they're unwilling to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week? To buttress conviction and theory with anecdote, a young Black person who worked very closely with me at the Treasury and who has subsequently gone on to work at Google highly successfully, is a 1994 graduate of Harvard Business School. He reports that of his first year section, there were twenty-two Blacks, of whom three are working full time at this point. So I think in terms of positive understanding, the first very important reality is just, who wants to do high-powered intense work?

The second hypothesis is relatively simple, but goes a long way towards describing the data. I call thsi the human varience hypothesis. It does appear that in many, many different human attributes - height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability - there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means, there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a Caucasian versus a Black population. That is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly culturally determined.

Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences. If you look at the race ratios in the top 5% of twelfth grade standardized test scorers, you will see less than one Black person for every two Caucasians. Now, it's been pointed out by various people that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability in the long term. And that's absolutely right. But I don't think that resolves the issue at all. Because if my reading of the data is right, and there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well.

So my sense is that the unfortunate truth (I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true) is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.

Think about it. There is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little black kids and little white kids. Somehow little black kids are inclined towards music and basketball, and little white kids are inclined towards books and engineering. Most of what we've learned from empirical psychology in the last fifteen years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization. For example, the confident assertions that autism was a reflection of parental characteristics that were absolutely supported and that people knew from years of observational evidence have now been proven to be wrong.

The human mind has a tendency to grab to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true. When there were no black kids majoring in chemistry, when there were no black kids majoring in biology, it was much easier to blame socialization. Then, as we are increasingly finding today, the problem is what's happening when people are twenty, or when people are twenty-five, in terms of their patterns, and the rate at which they drop out of the pipeline.

The most controversial question, and the most difficult question to judge, is what is the role of discrimination? To what extent is there overt discrimination? Surely there is some. Much more tellingly, to what extent are there pervasive patterns of passive discrimination and stereotyping in which people like to choose people like themselves, and the people in the previous group are disproportionately Caucasian, and so they choose people who are like themselves, who are disproportionately Caucasian. No one who's been in a university department or who has been involved in personnel processes can deny that this kind of taste does go on, and it is something that happens, and it is something that absolutely, vigorously needs to be combated.

However, if it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating. And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence of that.

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.

Let me just conclude by saying that I've given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said. But I think we all need to be thinking very hard about how to do better on these issues and that they are too important to sentimentalize rather than to think about in as rigorous and careful ways as we can.

Finally, my question to you is: do you think I am qualified to be the public face of a top-tier academic and research institution? By which I mean, does my presenting these hypotheses based on scientific conjecture, even though they may be unpopular or controversial, make you leery of my representing you as a fellow intellectual academic?

Guest Blogger - Springy Speaks!

Got a new comment on a very old post today, to which Springy has written a nice long response. (Thank you to Cosmic Variance for the extra traffic this week!)

Basically the jist of the post (quoted in full below the fold) is that maybe the presence of liberalism in academia is a product of thinking a lot about lots of stuff, rather than thinking a lot about money and consumer goods.

Lumo (a physicist) disagrees. Springy (a historian) responds.

Thanks for letting me on your blog, Joolya. I thought Lumo's comments were pretty hilarious and enjoyable in the same way as reading Ann Coulter or FoxNews - funny, but ultimately reactionary and ignorant. I'm not sure quite how much study in the humanities Lumo has undertaken. From his blog he appears to be a scientist. Perhaps he is not the ideal candidate to criticize the field. And from what he says - the humanities are "communist" and "disconnected from real political questions" and that feminism is "bigotry" - it appears he has no understanding of the humanities at all.

This seems to be part of a pattern: the American right and the general public have little idea of what the humanities actually do. This is the fault of humanities academics, who aren't doing enough to explain themselves to a wider audience, and confront this silly rhetoric.

So, in the broadest possible terms, the humanities are about the study of human behavior and cultural artifacts that they produce. This is in fact the dividing line between the social sciences and the arts, with history spanning the two. These two fields disagree with each other in a subtle and complex way; generally this can be termed the distinction between the “empiricists” and the “culturalists”.

From what I understand from his comments, and from a quick read of his blog, Lumo is an empiricist (although he might not know it). That's fair enough. Empiricists tend towards the social sciences, are keen on what is tangible and easily counted and organised into systems, and they like scientific ways of thinking. They try to discover the underlying laws governing human behavior through the analysis of data. Some social scientists hope governments will use these laws to form policy.

Other academics focus more on the study of ideas, and ways those ideas are professed in “culture”. They think that the variety of human cultures demonstrates that the empiricists’ laws of development and behavior are exaggerated or incorrect. For the “culturalists”, ideas and culture are stronger determinants of human behaviour than economic and social laws. These thinkers dominate orthodox history at the moment, and, obviously, literature and cultural studies.

The humanities are often also called “liberal arts”. But this term means something quite different from the recent and odd American redefinition of it. In the last 50 years or so, American conservatives have started to call the American left “liberal”. The lefties, in their view, reject Christianity and advocate dangerous social ideas like human rights and welfare programs. The American left, frightened of being labeled communists, willingly took up the name. This has unhappily made life difficult for academics. By mixing terms, they can call liberals “communists” (a sport Lumo engages in) and tactically associate liberal Enlightenment thought with Stalin and Mao.

It has become easy to call humanities professors “Communists” when they incorporate Marxist interpretations in their work. In fact Marxism is one strand of several competing forms of interpretation (and one which can lend itself to right-wing ideas, as Francis Fukuyama recently pointed out in his new book renouncing neoconservatism).

But what “liberal” really means, in the Western tradition, is that we should have a free debate about which ideas best explain human behavior and culture without constraints imposed by government or the church. This was the agenda of the 18th-century Enlightenment philosophers, and it spawned modern academic culture. Unfortunately for religious fundamentalists, Biblical ideas lost out to more empirical notions. The humanities are really Enlightenment scholarship, with a broad range of ideas within them. Some tend towards conservatism, like much recent thought in economics and international relations, and some towards left-wing ideas, like feminist cultural theory.

Recently, with resurgent American evangelical zeal, and Rove's strategy of courting Christians, there has been a broad attack by religious Republicans on the Enlightenment. For religious conservatives, the academy is inherently subversive, as its role is to criticize and analyze human affairs. This strategy has encouraged them to ignore the stream of secular right-wing ideas that came from the humanities.

Lumo, I find it odd that you as a "smart conservative" and a scientist are allying yourself from the evangelical wing of the Republican party. The real reason the humanities have come under attack from the religious right is because they offer secular, Enlightenment studies of human history, culture and society, which are inherently antagonistic to scriptural fundamentalism.

I wish my body were as lithe and powerful as this.

Just imagine the exuberance of jumping and leaping like a gecko, of trusting my arms to catch me and my legs to hold me up. I haven't had that kind of body confidence since I was a kid (and not to the same extent as these guys, even then).

Sometimes I feel so creaking and heavy.

Tone?

Don't be bitter or angry, it results in creases and frowns that do not look good on anyone! Even men.

Do I sound bitter, loyal readers? I'm not bitter. I like Science Land, except for when my Westerns don't work or I lose my DNA. But then I am bitter at life, the universe, and everything, not Science Land. Science Land is a lot nicer of a place, from my limited experience, than Answering Phones Land or Dying Babies Land or Shuffling Money About While Wearing Pantyhose Land. My colleagues and mentors up to this point have been overwhelmingly supportive; I don't want to suggest otherwise.

By the way, there is a massive thunderstorm going on which means I am S.O.L. for going to get my lunch. That is kind of embittering.

General Guideline

Dear Anonymi:
Since there seem to be more than one of you, if you wish to remain anonymous, please just make up a fake name (e.g. "Anonymous-1", or "Anonymous-delta", or "Winifred") as this will make comments much easier to read.
Thanks.
Joolya

Notable Absences

My lab is having some architects come in to "shadow" us this week, to get input on the new lab building that is going to be built in Allston. (It's own long story, but not mine to tell.) A roster was made of who the architects will be hanging out with every hour over the course of two days. On the roster are people's names and positions (technician, PhD student, post-doc, instructor).

Obviously, since I am a mere PhD student, I have no honorific (as I am not yet "Dr." and there's not a need to call me "Ms." as I have an unambiguous first name.) All but two of the people with PhDs, and the one with an MD, are labeled as Dr. So-and-so, e.g. Dr. Michael X*, Dr. Carlos Y*, and Dr. Kumar Z*.

The exceptions? Post-docs Sharon* and Jennifer*, who are not addressed by any title at all. Who are the only female post-docs on the list.

I'm not the only one that noticed this, and it's weird, because the guy who made the list is someone I would never in a million years have accused of sexism.

Update: Guy who sent out the list writes, "How do you like that? I did not notice the omission when we got the first schedule from the architects…" He says he didn't really look at it before he sent it out, so it was the architects' fault. (Labmate would most likely not put anyone's title on the list, for reasons I explain in the comments section.)

To Recap: Architects came to the lab. Someone in the architecture firm made a list of lab members. On this list, only the male PhDs were listed as "Dr." and the female PhDs had no titles. (Non-PhDs also had no titles.) Labmate who sent out the list didn't look carefully at it and didn't notice (he says). What's up with the architects putting "Dr." in front of the males' names but not the females'?

Thoughts?

(*Not their real names.)

World Cup Sadness

Ecuador, you are making me so sad! Don't let Germany get you down! Damn Germans. Come on, Ecuador!!!

Chivalry or Creepiness?

This is a comment that I wrote in response to a post at BitchPhD about fear of strangers in women versus men.

And of course there is the irony of back when I was an undergraduate that one of the most-used pick-up lines used on women about to leave a fraternity party was, "Can I walk you home?"

I would much, much rather take my chances walking home alone (men are more likely to be victims of violent crime, ie mugging than women, anyway, and I rarely carry cash) than be walked home by a guy I don't know very well. Because then this guy knows where I live and will invariably use the "Can I just use your bathroom?" line.

This happened to me once. I was in a bookstore reading and having coffee, and a harmless-looking guy asked to share my table. He started up a conversation, he was new in town, yada yada (someone must have told him bookstores were a good place to meet nice girls!) and could he take me to dinner. I protested, but he was very (politely) insistant, saying that Boston people were so much less friendly than Southern people and he just wanted to have a nice chat. So we went to dinner, it was okay, but I wasn't interested in anything further.

I lived about 15 minutes away and was more than comfortable walking home alone in the dark, but the guy insisted on walking me home, which I thought was really annoying. He said he was just worried about my getting home safely and basically wouldn't go away. That was a little creepy.When we got to my place, he used the bathroom line. There was a light on in my apartment so I assumed one of my (large male) roommates was at home and grudgingly let him in, since he pled a bursting bladder.

However, no one was at home when we went in, and I got a little freaked out. Not actually afraid, but more annoyed and on my guard. As the guy went to the bathroom, I went into the kitchen and got out a loaf of bread and the biggest fucking breadknife I could find, so that when he came out of the bathroom he would see that I was holding a big fucking knife (but eating bread, not just brandishing it at him, which would have been weird).

He came of the bathroom and I politely ushered him out with a yawn (oh, so tired!) but never relinquishing my bread knife. (I understand that a largish guy would most likely be able to overpower me even with my bread kife, but if he tried it, he would most likely bleed, regardless of what happened to me.)

He protested only feebly, and left peacefully, but the experience made me very cross and wary. I was annoyed as hell that this guy' misdirected chivalry put me in such an awkward position (if in fact he was harmless). If he hadn't been harmless, though, I'd have been in real trouble.

I have never had any trouble walking home alone, however, in any city where I have lived.

Summer Idyll

Manchester-by-the-Sea is so called to distinguish it from any other Manchester, as though there could be any confusion.

There could not be.

The beach is called "Singing Beach" because of the sound the dry sand makes when you kick it. The sound is more of a bark or a squeak than a song, though, but I guess "Squeaking Beach" doesn't sound quite so inviting.

There are at least six different varieties of sand grain on Singing Beach: large clear crystalline, irregular beige, orange, yellow, white, and fine black. Maybe I want to study sand. I would look very closely at the types and kinds of grains, how the sand falls and piles into drifts, what the critical components of the squeak are . . .

The tide was very low when we arrived and there were many wonderful channels draining the beach into the sea. Looking down at the channels made me think of flying over North Dakota, the vast fans of the tributaries like the vasculature of the body; the vasculature of the Earth. The water carved runnels through the softest sand, and made bright braided shapes as it flowed to the sea.

It doesn't matter what the precise course of the water is, as long as it drains the beach and runs to the sea - and from that randomness, an intricate pattern arises. Analogous to the formation of vessels through tissue? Where the sea is the high end of the chemotactic gradient and the tissue is the sand. Anyway, that is the hypothesis.

I love the beach. We could even swim in the water, which is unusual for the North Atlantic coast in June. Today there were waves for wave riding and the water was so clear I could see my feet. I don't think I have ever seen my feet in New Jersey. And no green flies, even.

Manchester is about as quaint as it's possible to be and not implode from cheesiness. It's got its own little bank and it's own little non-chain supermarket, and an ice cream shop and a Dunkin' Donuts (of course), and a used book store called "Manchester-By-The-Book". (Get it?) A beautiful softball field and a scenic marina. Of course, it's rich as hell. That's why it's so nice. It's so rich that it still has non-chain stores (aside from Dunkie's, but I don't think towns in MA are allowed to be incorporated unless there's a Dunkie's). It's so rich it has an ice cream store with no air conditioning. You know what I mean? I fucking love Manchester-by-the-Sea, although I know if I really lived there I'd probably be constantly annoyed with my bourgie-ass neighbors. However, I reckon I could still live there quite happily, at least during the summer, if/when I win the lottery.

The blood of the martyrs will water the meadows of France!

Buggery buggering fuck. Fuck fuck phuchk. Fucking Western blot. I come in on Saturday for you, and yet you give me no love in return. You are a wanker. I don't like you anymore.

I need a technician.

Only consolation today = I'm the only one in my lab, ergo I may sing along to the Les Miz soundtrack as loudly as I goddamn want to, with no shame.

Lab should be barricaded on Saturday. Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry (wo)men. It is the music of the students who will not be slaves again . . .

Si Se Pueden

I spotted the "off-side" rule! Hooray!

Prepare for Joolyariffic World Cup Commentary.

England played for shite against ... the first game they played, who was that? Oh yeah, Paraguay. But Paraguay were very mean and kept fouling. We don't like Paraguay. Although they have nice outfits.

Ecuador played magnificently against Costa Rica. Si se pueden, Ecuadoreanos! We like Ecuador. They had very good control of the ball, with lots of passing, rather than just chucking the ball up the pitch and praying someone would be there to recieve it as some of the "better" teams seem to do.

Everyone is going for the all-lower-case letters on the backs of their jerseys this year, as well as the funky pomo fonts. I noticed this first with Paraguay (England have stodgy ye olde fontes and capital letters) but the trend extends all the way to Iran's jerseys. The Iranians' names wrap all the way around their backs.

Will I be put on some sort of terror alert list if I mention here that the Iranian players are much, much more attractive than the Portuguese? They might be the most generally handsome team in the World Cup on the whole, but then I have a soft spot for Persia. I often play as Persia when I play Civilization. They are "scientific and expansionist". It's just a shame about the nutty clerics there making a misery for everyone, when really they ought to concentrate of playing football and having lovely flowing curly locks.

Italy versus the U.S. today, but I am going to be in lab. I don't think the U.S. have a chance of going on. Springy says if they won the World Cup "we'd never hear the end of it".

Apparently ESPN and ABC Sports have been getting about 1.6 million viewers per game, while Univision has been getting almost twice that. This could be explained by the general futbol mania of the Hispanic (or is it Latino? I am forgetting my PC manners) population, but I think it might also have something to do with the quality of the commentary and the half-time reports. The English commentary on ESPN is appallingly bad - two Americans who make the guys who do the Sox on NESN sound like Marx and Engels. ABC is a bit better (an Englishman and an Irishman) but the half-time is all ads. Univision, on the other hand, may or may not have lame commentary but my Spanish is only good enough for me to make out the odd phrase here and there (they are fast talkers). Whenever there is a goal, the Univision commentators yell, "Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool!" in a very exciting way. And their half-time show is full of exuberant fans and dancing, in the great tradition of Don Francisco y su Sabado Gigante.

I feel like we cannot be the only Anglos watching the games en espanol.

Springy asks if I am going to use the World Cup to make any broader political commentary. Readers, as it is Saturday morning, sunny and 80 degrees, and I am going to be spending the better part of the day in the microscope room, I leave the political discourse to your imaginations.

The cluster map over yonder in the sidebar shows that I have had a number of hits from Riyadh.

Hello everyone in Riyadh!

Please give me comments, and say hello from distant lands!!!

Tales From The Fourth Floor

Springy has taken to watching FoxNews, from what I can only imagine is some masochistic impulse on his part. (Similar to how I occasionally read VoxDay and My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.)

Alan Colmes is the Crypt Keeper. No?

No, he totally is.

Ick.

Sean Hannity is some sort of stitched together audio-animatronic type thingy from hell.

"I could do so much better than Colmes," Springy says. "He's just gawking, he's not even asking any pertinent questions."

"Of course you could," I say, "but they'd never have you on as the Colmes person because you'd just upstage Hannity every single time, as he is an idiot. Colmes has got to be more of an idiot than Hannity to make Hannity look good."

"He's a mole!" cries Springy, of Crypt Keeper Colmes. "He's a conservative who is just pretending to be a liberal to make liberals look bad!"

Probably Springy is right.

No, fuck that, he is totally right. I mean left. Heh heh heh. Bloody socialist Brits.

Fish Heads

Does anybody remember this song that we used to sing at my day camp called "Fish Heads"? Why were we singing this at camp? What is the raison d'etre of this song?

Anyway, it popped into my head when I was feeding the fish and all night long last night I was compulsively making up lyrics to it. E.g. "Fish flakes, fish flakes, yummy yummy fish flakes . . . "

My fish get so excited about their fish flakes every single day.

Gotta love day camp couselors, and early MTV.

One more thing before I go - how come the 15-year-old camp counselors I had when I was nine still look older than I feel like I looked when I was 15?

And do I, as a 15 year old camp counselor, still look old to my former campers (who are now entering college) in their camp pictures?

Also, why does everyone in my mom's high school yearbook look about thirty, when they were all in their teens?

And how come people who actually are thirty now don't look old to me? (That one I think I know the answer to.)

Mutant Genes Are Hard To Clone

Just saw X-Men 3 as part of a special lab "seminar series" which takes place on random Fridays throughout the year. Sadly, today's seminar was not preceded by a "poster session" at Longhorn's Grille. Still, we learned a lot, especially about "anti-mutant antibodies" and why it is so dang hard to clone certain genes!

Aside from sniggering just a little bit I actually enjoyed the film. Good special effects, not too much cheestastic dialog, and some real character building moments.

Also, there is this one part where Xavier and Magneto are staring soulfully at one another and it looks like they're about to kiss - it occurred to me that that would be incredibly hot. Seriously. Jean-Luc Picard making out with Gandalf? How is that not hot? Brookburg, I know you feel me on this one. And you, too, Ethyl. Luna? Scuze me, I have to go, uh, do something . . .

Speaking of crossing that fine line of tact - raise your hand if you've ever tried to get your partner a green card. It's like a fucking Kafka nightmare. Photos, letters, bank statements, chest X-rays . . . and what normal person gets married and says, "Oooh, you know what would be romantic and indicative of our lifelong commitment, sweetheart? Putting the cable bill in your name!"

Why don't we just make a little homemade sex tape which shows, unequivocally, Springy's uncondomed cock thrusting into my moist vagina?

See, see, Homeland Security, we really are a couple! We might even have babies like a good pair of heterosexuals! We're, like, totally in love!

Of course, releasing a sex tape does not prove that our love is real. Did Paris Hilton love the guy(s)? What would actually be enough for these people? Are they just messing with me because I am a pinko commie liberal???

Or maybe it is because I am a mutant.

Do you know what else? For the life of me I can't remember if P.S. and E.M. had American or British accents in the film I just saw. No matter, of course, because in the film's world no other countries seem to exist . . . Until the very end when the blue dude (Kelsey Grammer) is appointed Ambassador to the U.N. on behalf of all Americans, mutant and non-mutant alike.

Why are there no mutant issues in other countries? Is it some America-specific pollution? Are there Mexican mutants leaping the border fence? Canadian mutants writing quirky pop songs?

So much to ponder. Have a good weekend, my little freaks of nature.