Atomic Nerds

Our normal routine when shopping together at the grocery store is that Stingray checks out, while I wander over to the Lowest Common Denominator grocery store bookshelves toward the front of the store to browse until he’s done. Nothing is there the store does not expect to move quickly, so it’s populated entirely by the top of of the top of best-seller lists, kid’s books, cookbooks, books by celebrities, and the kind of fiction that exists as pure self-indulgent fantasy, the literary equivalent of the cupcakes over in the bakery aisle.

The stuff aimed at men never changes that much; this genre has been alive and well since the pulps, if not doing better than ever. Boy meets alien, boy shoots all the aliens, boy gets girl. Reorganize your nouns on the end of the shooting as you will- terrorists, foreign agents, vampires, whoever. Sometimes it’s even quite good if you don’t mind the nature of the beast- John Ringo is perhaps the most recognizable master.

The stuff aimed at women includes plenty of the traditional- romance novels and romance novels with a thin layer of genre trappings to make them slightly more exotic romance novels. In any case the focus of the plot is an extraordinarly exciting dark brooding man, or several, and the woman who makes him brood about her. (The easiest way to identify from a quick read on the back of a book who it’s aimed at is whether it involves multiple men and one woman, or multiple women and one man. Other than the cover art, anyway.)

I have noticed a trend, though. Along with the “woman meets cowboy, woman meets vampire, woman meets high school flame and he’s still gorgeous”, there’s an increasing number of the novels where the men are accessories to the plot rather than its hinge… ones where the plucky heroine even spends most of her time killing bad guys. She’s got girl problems, because every heroine in a self-indulgent fantasy needs to be easily identified with, but they pale in comparison to her other problems relating to bad guys that need killing.

One of the blurbs I scanned recently involved a book that had what seemed like actually pretty good science fiction worldbuilding. By a woman, aimed at women, with the apparent focus still being a relationship… but in a setting and with the kind of attention that wouldn’t be at all out of place in traditional sci fi, just with love lives instead of invading aliens or government secrets.

I can’t help but think these are both overall positive signs.

So when reason comes around to comment on the “Pick-Up Artistry” community within my local monkeysphere region of the blogosphere, the commentary from us is invariably disparaging, and the comments that follow usually contain at least one of the following themes:

1. “Game” works if you’re using it on the right women, who presumably have bought the same 4th edition of the manual everybody is operating on.

2. PUA isn’t all bad, it teaches men things like basic social skills and confidence and the idea that rejection happens. (For the record, that’s not the part that bothers us. It’s the part where it *also* teaches men to view women as interchangeable objects rather than people. I also hear you can learn some decent survivalist techniques in a separatist neo-Nazi compound.)

3. There has to be PUA because otherwise guys with average looks and status would never have sex ever and women already view men as interchangeable objects so they gotta in pure self-defense because otherwise they might be ignored to, um, death. (The answer to why you would even want someone you believe has already dehumanized you is presumably ugly.)

Themes number one and three rather perfectly encapsulate the reason there’s such a huge gap between people who think PUA is anything other than pure bullshit and people who don’t. The reason for this is that we don’t just think it’s a toxic mindset/community because it’s dehumanizing, we think it’s a silly one because the rules and worldview they come up with bear no resemblance whatsoever to the reality we inhabit. It’s like getting dispatches from an alien world to hear what the world is “like” from the PUAs, because wherever it is, it’s obviously not here.

On Planet Zongo, where the PUAs live, human attractiveness is a unitary trait that can be measured and codified to the point where it can be placed precisely on a numerical scale. (Really. I’m not remotely exaggerating about this.) On the planet I inhabit- which I will arrogantly deem to be Earth just because it seems like there are a lot more people living here with me than on Zongo- there seems to be a lot of disagreement about what constitutes attractiveness, with some concentrated agreement at the extremes of physical perfection or disfigurement but far less so at non-extremes.

On Planet Zongo, only extremely numerically beautiful women are worth any effort from a man, and if a man is not extremely numerically attractive himself through a complicated formula of looks and status, he will die a virgin unless he develops advanced techniques and the persistence to hit on 300 high-scorers and get 299 rejections. On Earth, more people of both sexes have both short-term sexual flings and long-term romantic relationships than don’t no matter their gender, often average-looking people are in relationships with above-average people regardless of whether they used any special technique, and people broadly agreed to be very above average are sometimes- not even infrequently- lonely and feel like they can’t catch a break in their love life. On Zongo, the average guy with an average job is celibate and extremely bitter about it; on Earth, the average guy with the average job has a girlfriend as often as not, if not a wife.

On Planet Zongo, women experience a state of constant sexual Nirvana in which anything she wants is available to her at a come-hither gesture. On Planet Earth, some women are lonely and experience dating and even casual sex as challenging and often unfulfilling.

On Planet Zongo, the amount of sex someone has is readily predicted by mathematical formula by status and attractiveness. On Planet Earth, some average-looking and even conventionally ugly and not particularly high-status people are having mind-blowing amounts of sex and need a flowchart to keep track of their relationships, and some very conventionally attractive and successful people are lonely and wish their love lives were better*.

On Planet Zongo, if sex isn’t doled out on basis of deserving or earning it, it’s because there’s something wrong with society. On Planet Earth, assholes and bitches sometimes get lots of sex and even lots of long-term relationships, and great people sometimes don’t get much of either. There doesn’t seem to be a relationship to deserving, just connections formed and sex drives involved.

On Planet Zongo, most sexual relationships are begun in clubs after an elaborate series of skill checks and many rejections. On Planet Earth, most sexual relationships are begun through mutual circles of friends, employees, and other non-sexual social contexts, and begin as friendly association.

On Planet Zongo, only people strongly fitting a stylized version of gender roles have heterosexual sex. On Planet Earth, effeminate men, tomboyish or even outright butchy women, the androgynous, genderqueers, nerdy, awkward, and other misfits have all kinds of sex, with heterosexual being the majority by sheer weight of sexuality.

On Planet Zongo, gender relations are a competitive game which, in any given interaction, one must lose and one must win. Men win by having sex and then leaving, or else having a long-term no-strings arrangement; women win by marrying. (Which, somehow she ALSO wins by then dissolving.) On Planet Earth, casual sex both parties enjoyed is a win for both, and marriage to someone really awesome you want to be with all the time is actually the goal for many. Sometimes both people lose when things blow up or bad decisions are made, though. Usually it’s still either win/win or lose/lose.

On Planet Zongo, if someone says something mean and disparaging to you, it’s either a come-on, a test, or both. On Planet Earth, if someone says something mean and disparaging to you and isn’t *very clearly* kidding, it means they don’t like you and you should go away.

Really, I do get that there is a subculture out there that operates by Zongo rules and that some women as well as men live on Zongo. You don’t have to explain that to us any more than you have to explain the existence of very religiously orthodox communities where opposite sexes talking to each other is a Big Huge Hairy Ritualized Deal. It’s when you try to tell me that Zongo is Earth when it’s very clearly nowhere I live, or try to explain why you have simply no choice but to stay on Zongo when there’s lots of people on Earth and moving is as easy as adapting to the new local norms… that’s when you lose me. What’s so fantastic about Zongo, anyway? I’ve never met anyone who lived there that seemed happy.

As a somewhat side closing note, I HAVE known a rare few people that seemed to enjoy nearly unlimited sexual and romantic success, both as measured by number of contacts and number of relationships that ended amicably. The thing is- and the thing that baffles me about the Zongo dwellers’ ideas about the formula for success- is that none of them have been all that conventionally attractive or financially successful or famous. The thing they all had in common was none of the conventional “alpha” stuff, but rather that they were tremendously gregarious people who genuinely liked and were interested in nearly everybody they met. They were all nice without ulterior motivation and did things like remember everybody’s birthdays and details about them and their families as though it were as second nature as breathing. (I suspect, to them, it was.) Most companies and offices have someone like this, it’s just not all of them are that interested in also having sex with lots of people in addition to talking and laughing with them. I doubt it can be imitated or aped- god knows I wouldn’t have the energy, or the sheer sustained interest in so many other people- but it’s what seems to actually “work”, if anything does.

*This has been consistently borne out in my own social circle, anyway, and the older I get the more true it seems to be.

New Vicious Circle. Go enjoy Jay, Weerd, Kevin, Tracie and Sci-Fi. Is Vicious Circle. Is not safe for work. 5P33D604+’s debut album will be out any day now.

We’ve been eating a lot of chicken soup lately. This is not so much because of the cold as it because we’ve had something of a minor culinary revelation*, one that should have been an easy no-brainer but turned out to make a much bigger difference than we remotely imagined.

Most of the chicken that is sold in America these days is BSB- Boneless Skinless Breast. Not only is it most of the chicken, it seems to be the most popular cut of meat period; it’s the perfect unit of nearly fat-free, guilt-free protein. A disturbing amount of the how-to for cooks out there is aimed at teaching people how to make it come out juicy and flavorful instead of like poultry jerky. (This is not that difficult, but that’s a post for another time if ever.) The skin is removed because that’s the evil fatty part, and the bones are removed because we’d have to anyway to eat it, and after all, we don’t eat bones. What chicken soup that is not canned is generally made using BSB; it’s cheap, it’s easy to measure how much food you’re actually getting, and it has zero hassle factor.

As we have discovered, none of these are adequate reasons to use boneless or skinless chicken in chicken soup. You want bones in, skins on. All other chicken soup is protein chunks in cloudy, salty water.

It is true that we don’t eat the bones in that we don’t crunch down the bones after a meal of fried or grilled chicken, and the bone is indeed extraneous for those purposes. However, the entire traditional purpose of soups and more pointedly of broths was to eat the bones; while there’s still a calcified structure you pull out of the pot and throw away, in a properly prepared broth, stock, or traditional soup the connective tissues and some of the marrow within the bones will have dissolved and leached into the water: it is liquid, simple proteins with a bit of fat from the yellow marrow, which is why it’s such a traditional meal for the sick. When cooled, such soups and broths will set like Jell-o- because they are, in fact, gelatin, which is made by boiling bones and other collagen-containing animal parts. We look back at cookbooks with gelatin aspics and molds like some sort of relic of housewife performance art, but at the time it was an extremely cheap way to add a lot of protein to food. When we speak of soups, stews, sauces, and stocks that have “body”, we are often referring to the collagen; when hot enough to still be liquid, it adds a velvety mouthfeel to the final product. If you have ever forked over a lot of money in a restaurant for osso bucco or oxtails, the rich and sticky sauce is entirely produced by collagen.

As for the chicken skin- the fat- for any meat, the fat is where the flavor lives. (As well as a lot of fat-soluble vitamins.) If you can manage to trim all the fat from a piece of beef and a piece of lamb, they will taste identical; one of several reasons “tastes like chicken” is such a cliche in our culture when encountering a new food is that so many of us are used to eating skinless chicken; without its fat, it functions as a completely generic white meat. Chicken soup with naked chicken tastes like tetrapod; chicken soup with chicken skin and fat tastes like CHICKEN. The flavors of some of the aromatic seasonings and vegetables you use will also be carried and magnified by the fat.

Next time you make any chicken soup recipe, especially one that calls for long simmering, don’t buy chicken cutlets or BSB. Buy chicken thighs with the skin on and the bones in. (It is much easier to find these than skins-on, bone-in chicken breasts, at least in our experience.) They’re cheaper anyway. Cut the chicken into chunks, skin and all, and toss all of it in. Trim the meat off the bones, then throw the bones in. When you are ready to serve, fish the bones out and toss ‘em, then dish up the soup. Drink the broth when you’ve eaten all the meat and vegetables, though I doubt you’ll need much convincing once you’ve tasted the soup.

You’ll never buy Campbell’s, or malign the wisdom of grandmothers, ever again.

*Stingray’s been using skin-on, bone-in for quite awhile now, which is why I’ve been eating an awful lot of soup this year. The inspiration for the post was his trying again a recipe that I remember being vastly unimpressed with previously- when he had used skinless, boneless. This time it was second-helpings, freeze the leftovers material.

Via Chas Clifton, it will now be legal to hunt big game with a spear in Montana.

Obviously this is possible, otherwise our ancestors would never have evolved much beyond savannah-dwelling tuber-eaters. However, when someone states that the average lifespan of a hunter-gatherer in Paleolithic times was 35, they don’t mean they mostly died at 35 (humans seem to have had the same upper limit for “old” for all the time we’ve been humans), but that they had a very high mortality rate of the young. The biggest reason was that it was very difficult to be an infant or young child prior to clean water, reliable shelter, and predictable food supply, but a non-trivial amount is that hunting big angry animals with a spear is a good way to get hurt or killed.

Which is why I have a hard time seeing other kind of logic than… if you can hunt a bear with a spear… I’m not going to stand in your way.

Today is the 12th day of January. Christmas occurred some considerable time ago. At this point, it is now acceptable to throw rotten eggs at the houses still displaying decorations.

And if they’ve got those stupid inflatable things, it is now acceptable to light them on fire.

I haven’t commented yet on the Loughner shootings because I didn’t want to while feeling ill and partially loopy on cold medication, and most of what I wanted to say has already been said, and said better than I possibly could have, by someone else. The points have been made: twisting the tragedy to suit your political aims or to demonize people who disagree with you is appalling, crazy happens and is not very easy to predict, and people are mostly searching for something to blame in order to have something that could potentially be stopped or fixed so this sort of thing could possibly never happen again.

So what comment I do have is going to focus on a side issue, which is Loughner’s clear mental illness and why it makes him such a perfect Rohrshach blot for anyone wishing to see anything they fear in him, other than he himself.

As many people who’ve watched his YouTube videos or read his rambling screeds has found out, his ramblings identify a number of targets for paranoia, and he is markedly nonsensical; he repeatedly makes if-then logical statements that have no actual logical connection, his apparent biggest fear was that the government was using language to control people, and a repeated theme was that “words have no meaning” and that someone was responsible for this. (Loughner identified Giffords as a target after asking her a question about this in a public event at the college he was later thrown out of for disturbing behavior.)

If Loughner doesn’t emerge from this with a diagnosis of severe paranoid schizophrenia, with the shooting having been a psychotic break (possibly his first, possibly not given his apparent long history of bizarre behavior and people fearing him), I will eat my shirt without so much of a dab of mustard. One of the hallmark cognitive disturbances of schizophrenia is that sufferers lose their ability to distinguish between superficial connections or associations between things and meaningful ones, so that logic is lost because the brain is no longer able to discriminate well between categories and make logical connections rather than just connections. An unaffected mind can easily tell that among a group of traits that describes one thing- brown, weighs around fifty pounds, furry, makes gruff noises, has whiskers, is animate, has sharp teeth, can be friendly- and a group of traits that describes another- brown, weighs around 250 pounds, walks on two legs, makes gruff noises, is famous, can be friendly, has sharp teeth- there is probably no good reason to draw a clear association between a chocolate Labrador and Mike Tyson. A mind in untreated schizophrenic psychosis… not necessarily.

Loughner was worried that words were losing their meaning and sense because, for him, this was literal reality. He didn’t make much sense because he was becoming steadily more incapable of making sense of the world at all. He could identify important and upsetting events (like 9/11), identify authority figures, and identify that there was something wrong with his world, but he was increasingly impaired at making any kind of useful connections or logical conclusions between one thing and another. He was upset and agitated because this is an extremely upsetting state to be in- which is one reason the suicide rate for schizophrenics is so very high.

It’s pointless to identify Loughner’s politics as having any characteristic other than “disordered” because he was himself incapable of having a coherent set of ideas, political or otherwise. He might have with treatment, though his apparent heavy cannabis and alcohol use from a young age probably accelerated his illness a great deal. (And probably also exacerbated his potential for violence.) As he was, he was as political as a tornado, just as destructive, and just as difficult to see coming before it was too late.

We try anyway because we *do* make connections and sense of everything we see as a matter of the normal workings of our minds, though ours make accurate connections much more easily. When presented with the chaotic, be it tea leaves, inkblots, or the verbal output of psychosis, we try to sort it- and when we know it’s coming from someone as terrifying as Loughner, we look for whatever we fear that can make sense of it and put it all into context.

….Which still doesn’t make this being Sarah Palin’s fault make sense, but just because we try doesn’t mean we’ve done it.

I’m out of the sickie phase. For those that are curious, Kang is no longer pestering me to go lie down and has resumed pestering me to come out and play with her, which I’m not quite up to yet. Sensing the battle is nearly won, my immune system has embarked on an industrious housecleaning and is attempting to remove every bit of mucus secreted over the last week, all at once. I feel much better, but I could seriously do without the bone-shattering cough or wracking sneezing fits.

This site has triggered a great many coughing fits today that go like “ahahaAAARRRGHAWWWWRCH”. Still worth it, particularly this one and this one.

Better content when I am not busy hating my respiratory system.

The cold has left the “not really sick, just sniffly” stage for me and set up armed camp in my chest and throat. I now feel ill in addition to the various virus-shedding symptoms, and this factoid has entered the dogs’ awareness, either through my behavior or just my smell.

With Kodos, this isn’t really a problem. He’s a good guardian and when he thinks I’m sick or hurt enough to be worth concern, he shadows me. If I’m REALLY ill he gets upset to see me up and about and goes to get Stingray, but for the most part he’s just more omnipresent than usual. I know more than I want to about the state of his digestion and he gets less exercise, and that’s about it.

With Kang, it apparently is. She’s a smart and expressive dog and, like most primitive breeds, she reserves barking for warnings about intruders and reserves all the rest of her communication for grunts, gruffs, whines, and woos. When she thinks there’s something we need to know about, she tells us; in addition to her various vocalizations, she’ll also point at whatever she thinks our attention should be on with her muzzle or ear. (It was vastly not news to us to hear of the discovery that domestic dogs understand pointing gestures better than apes.) She gets clearly frustrated when she thinks she isn’t coming across, too- and is not afraid to argue with us.

This is a problem because she thinks that a)there is clearly something wrong with me, therefore b)someone should be doing something about it. This has lead to several exchanges over the course of the day along these lines:

Kang: *rests her muzzle on my wrist*
Me: “Hi.” *scratches her ears* *returns to whatever I was doing*
Kang: “Roo.”
Me: “What?”
Kang: “Rerf.”
Me: “You want out?”
Kang: “Grf.” *does not look toward door, stares at me*
Me: *gives up, ignores her*
Kang: “Aroo.” *pokes my arm*
Stingray: “Leave her alone, Kang.”
Kang: *looks at Stingray, points at me with ear*
Stingray: “I know. She’s fine.”
Kang: *marches over to Stingray* “ROO.”
Stingray: “What do you want ME to do about it?”
Kang: *plants her feet and stabs air with muzzle for emphasis* “ARRROUUUGH.”
Stingray: “SHE’S FINE. GO AWAY.”
Kang: *looks at me, points at Stingray with ear*
Me: “I’m not going to help you.”

…At which point she either goes and sulks on her dog bed, or raises enough ruckus that someone forcibly boots her into the yard to find something else to bother. Some variation on this has repeated three times today. I appreciate the concern, but it’s really getting old.

I find it particularly ironic that nearly all products branded “rainforest” in the grocery store- including rainforest cereal and rainforest drinks- are in the “healthy foods and supplements” section, given that for centuries rainforests (then called jungles) could not be repopulated by any human group that had left them owing to the high prevalence of malaria, yellow fever, sleeping sickness, cholera, and dozens of other lethal diseases and parasites. There’s a reason some medical schools still have branches dedicated to “tropical disease”.