shot for desertion

I was reading something recently about how several hundred British solders were executed for desertion during World War I. Of course, this is not the only time nor country that shot soldiers found guilty of such charges.

The sentence was arbitrary, at least in the United Kingdom during the First World War. Of those tried for desertion and found guilty, only slightly more than 10 percent were sentenced to death. Of those, only about 10 percent were executed.

So if you were found guilty of desertion, you had about a one in a hundred chance of being executed. There could be no logical rationale for this disparity.

I've always thought it was stupid to kill your own solders for desertion. You're doing the enemy's job for them.

Why not sentence them to difficult work that would punish them for what they did, instead of deliberately turning them into casualties.

the ultimate demotivational art

We've all seen sappy motivational posters, with scenic photos accompanying feel-good messages like "success is the doorknob to tomorrow." And then there are the demotivational posters that parody them.

I found a collection online that takes this one step further with outright nihilistic desmotivational posters. If you have a dark and twisted sense of humor like I do, you might find some of them funny. Many would make great screen savers.

amy schumer vs. the world

Comedian and actress Amy Schumer recently caused something of a controversy when she posted a picture on Instagram of an ordinary person who was taking her picture out in public. She asked him to stop taking her picture and he said no.

Some people supported her for her action while others criticized her.

In some ways I feel for Schumer and other ways I don't. While I think the guy was being something of a dick, I think she was being something of a whiny diva, too.

When I lived in New York and Los Angeles, seeing celebrities on the street was not uncommon. Most people were cool about it.

At the same time, most celebrities I saw didn't appear to be celebrities unless you were really observant. They wore obscuring hats, sunglasses, and kept a low profile. They were private citizens.

I saw Julia Roberts once at a farmer's market in Los Angeles. She had on a floppy hat and big sunglasses, but I was very close to her and could tell who she was.

No one bothered her. At first glance, she just looked like any woman buying produce.

Perhaps Schumer was disguised and her fan spotted her anyway. But if she was, she needs to do a better job disguising herself.

Asking the guy to stop taking your picture is lame. She should've just ignored him or taken out her cellphone to pretend to make a call or just smiled and kept walking.

In short, she didn't handle this in a very Amy Schumer way. She could've messed with his head without whining that he should stop.

We expect Amy Schumer to be brilliant always, but she wasn't on that day.

apology versus guilt

You probably saw in the news about how Barack Obama visited Hiroshima this week. It was the first visit in history to the site by a sitting American President.

He met with survivors while visiting a memorial to victims. It was meant as a gesture of reconciliation but Obama specifically did not apologize.

Should we, as Americans, feel guilty about what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

I don't think so. Nations do severe things that people remember for decades and centuries. But that doesn't mean a citizen of that nation should feel guilty in perpetuity about what leaders did years before the citizen was born. I was born forty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. How am I guilty for this?

To me, guilt is something that results from an individual's actions. I had no control over something that happened four decades before I was born.

If I say something inappropriate to you, then I should feel guilty. If my grandmother said something inappropriate to your grandmother, should I feel guilty for that?

On a similar topic, should we as a nation apologize for what America did to Japan in 1945? Again, I say no. Why?

Because the United States was not the aggressor in World War II. We were not the instigators. America's entry into World War II followed Pearl Harbor, an attack on our soverign soil.

Nonetheless, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are lessons that we Americans should heed. Powerful weapons have powerful consequences and we should never forget that.

people who don't want sex

I followed a click-bait link and stumbled on an Ozy article from last year about asexual folks who don't want sex. According to various researchers, about one in a hundred people are asexual and happily so.

My first instinct when I read things like this is to shout: "Are you people out of your minds?!?" But then that would be callous.

Asexuals are like vegetarians. They have the right to abstain if they want. If that's what makes them happy, then happily deny yourselves. As long as they don't try to force their beliefs on others or relentlessly proselytize, then they don't need us to mind their business for them.

I can't help wondering, however, if asexuals had just one night of mind-blowing sex, whether they might change their tune. But if they don't want to take that plunge, they shouldn't be forced to do so.

susan sarandon, wannabe pornographer

Susan Sarandon said in a Times interview last week that she wants to make female-friendly porn when she's in her eighties.

Not to sound ageist, but would someone that old be able to tap into what younger people want in porn and sex?

That aside, I think the whole idea of "female-friendly" porn is inherently flawed. Surveys repeatedly have shown women want porn with strong stories, yet porn essentially is about watching sex acts.

Movies are called motion pictures for a reason -- the story and characters are always moving in one or several directions -- not necessarily physically, but at least emotionally. During sex, however, story and characters are in stasis.

Sex is an essential human process, like sleeping or eating, but it's not inherently interesting dramatically. So moving a story forward while watching someone eat a stack of pancakes for ten minutes is as difficult as moving a story forward while watching a girl ride a dude's love rocket for ten minutes.

Some things just cannot be done with other things. You can't perform open heart surgery and make mashed potatoes at the same time. Similarly, I don't think you can mix storytelling with watching people fuck.

You can do some things to make porn more interesting to women, like showing people's faces during sex and featuring performers who are actually pleasured by what's happening, as opposed to those who make horrible fake sex noises. They need to say something substantive to each other, to talk dirty in an interesting way, and not just keep screaming "fuck me fuck me fuck me" over and over again. They need to be innovative, not just four positions and a pop shot.

So what you might really need in porn are people who are actual actors and improv pros. But no talented actor wants to make porn because it's a career-killing endeavor. At the same time, there's no guarantee a skilled actor could actually fuck onscreen in an erotic way.

The bottom line is you may never be able to make porn that appeals to a large female audience the way it appeals to many men. Women are wired differently, and that's why they like certain things most men do not, and vice versa.

Now maybe Susan wants to try to tell a story between sex acts -- twenty minutes of story, ten minutes of sex, and repeated a few times. The trouble with that is men would want to speed through the story parts and women through the sex parts.

frozen like a TV dinner

I was reading offline recently about Alcor, the Arizona-based nonprofit that offers cryonics for people who wish to preserve indefinitely either their entire body or their brain after death.

The hope is that, sometime in the far future, the people will be resuscitated and restored to full health when advanced medical technology makes that possible.

There are, of course, no guarantees to this process. No medical technology may ever be discovered to help you. No one may be inclined to thaw you out and help you even if medical technology would assist you. Society might suffer some kind of dark age and no one will have a clue. Somebody down the road might pull the plug on the whole operation and your frozen remains are incinerated.

But let's say, for the sake of argument, your body does somehow survive hundreds or thousands of years and you are brought back to life. Would you want to be?

Let's say you're defrosted in the year 9137. The far future world would be so strange and so alien you'd be utterly overwhelmed. You might not even be able to communicate with anyone because language would have evolved significantly.

Consider how far techology has advanced in the last 100 years. In the last 200 years. The rate of change is exponential.

Now jump ahead six or seven millennia. If technological change continues on that same exponential curve, that far future would be so different from our world now, the shock could cause extreme distress.

Possibly even worse, say they defrost you in year 9137. Ethics and morals have changed so you're considered nothing more than a savage. You're put on display. You have no freedom. You live in a little box with nothing to do, nobody to talk to, nobody to love, nothing to enjoy.

If you don't think humans ever would be so cruel to put you on display, allow me to introduce Ota Benga, who lived from about 1883 to 1916. He was a pygmy brought back from Africa and put on display at a world's fair and later the Bronx Zoo.

The future might not be the wonderful warm welcome world we think it will be.

dances with goats

Thomas Thwaites is a writer/designer who just published a book chronicling what it's like to live like a goat. No, this is not a book about how to keep goats -- it's about how he designed prosthetics so he could walk among goats to live among goats like a goat all day long.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the book has received positive reviews. It's not his first literary endeavor. He published a book a few years ago about how he tried to make a toaster from scratch. It's since become a cult and critical hit.

Thwaites originally thought he'd try the project living with elephants, but that turned out to be impractical, so he settled on goats. Now goats are cute, but they are quite stupid, so I can't think this was particularly interesting to do all day long, but different strokes for different goats and all that.

Quite honestly, the goat prosthetics look like they would give orthopedists nightmares. And in all candor, he's not living entirely like a goat. He's wearing pants. Goats don't wear pants. They don't use restrooms. They shit anyplace they want and then often walk or lie in it.

My warped mind immediately wondered if he tried to get romantic with some of the lady goats. That's perverse, I know, but if you really want to live with goats, to be just like a goat, you have to do everything that a goat would do to get that total goat experience.

The author has a website if you want to learn more about this. Perhaps you want to live like a chipmunk or a koala and need to start brainstorming.

shakespearian porn

The still photo below (enlargement) is taken from a comedic porn scene about Shakespeare and Cervantes buggering a woman. I found the entire scene currently online for free. This may be from a longer film.

The title "To Anal or Not to Anal" is obviously a takeoff on the "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy in Hamlet. But what the hell does that have to do with Cervantes, who wrote Don Quixote?

The plot apparently involves Cervantes on a quest to find Shakespeare. How this ties into an anal threeway makes absolutely no sense.

The porn industry is definitely running out of ideas if they think this is erotic.

diane arbus

The latest issue of The New Yorker has a short photo essay featuring nine previously unpublished photographs by the great Diane Arbus. This is in advance of a major Arbus exhibition opening in July at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new Breuer building.

There's something undeniably creepy about many of Arbus's photos. At times, she almost seems to have provoked a hostile reaction from her subjects before clicking the shutter, as can be seen in the example below.

This could be due to the fact that a woman with a large professional camera was not a common site in the 1950s and early 1960s. As well, she often worked in places where art photographs were an unknown commodity.

Some of her pictures remind me of work by the earlier great Weegee, born as Ascher Fellig. If you're a Weegee fan, literally thousands of his photographs are available for enjoyment free online at the International Center of Photography.

the new star trek

The American television network CBS will air a new version of the classic Star Trek TV series in 2017. They unveiled a short promo, seen below, this past week at their network presentation in New York.

I am skeptical about this. How can you do something fresh with a concept that has been the subject of numerous series and feature films already?

In all candor, the special effects seen in this promotion are not wow-inspiring. They look cheap and hastily done.

I'm not getting a good feeling about this endeavor.

today I found out

I love a quick read about historical oddities and little-known but interesting facts. While I was searching online for something recently, I stumbled on the addictive website Today I Found Out and quickly realized the site is a nirvana of quirky history and arcane trivia.

Where else could you learn about the 1904 Olympic marathon, how breakfast cereals are made, why people are so much taller today, and why doctors used to literally blow smoke up people's asses?

Randomly wandering around the website I found articles stretching back at least seven years, and with more than one item posted each day, that means tons of trivia I can now vacuum into my brain. To help with this, they have a "surprise me" link to whisk you away to a random article on any possible topic.

If you're a trivia or arcane history buff, be sure to check it out. You can also subscribe to their daily email feed so you needn't check the website every day.

the night manager

The husband and I watched the new BBC limited series The Night Manager over the last several nights. Based on John Le Carre's best-selling novel, the program is available here on DVD but not yet in America because it's apparently still playing on the AMC cable channel.

We both loved it and thought it was one of the best Le Carre screen adaptations we've seen, and we've seen pretty much all of them.

Some other Le Carre print-to-screen adaptations did not succeed in the past because they were too literal in their adaptations, often getting mired in subplots that did not translate well onscreen. The Night Manager wisely avoids that, jettisoning much of the expository set-up to make the central character, very well played by Tom Hiddleston, more of a fascinating enigma.

Hugh Laurie costars in the series and is wickedly superb as a charming, soulless villain. Olivia Colman also appears as an unlikely spymaster with a very strong performance. The whole cast, quite honestly, is terrific with few false notes among them.

If you're not familiar with the source novel, don't worry because you don't need that to enjoy the series. If you are familiar, you'll find some interesting changes that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

When you have a chance to see it, don't miss it. The six-hour series is solid, smart entertainment all around.

psychopath versus sociopath

I am not a shrink, although I am the child of two and the sibling of a third. So I absorbed a certain amount of psycho-speak and psycho-knowledge while growing up.

One thing I do know is that while many laypeople think there is a difference between a psychopath and a sociopath, in reality there isn't.

So when someone posted this attractive but inaccurate chart on the popular website Imgur, I was not surprised to see that it caused howls of outrage from psychology students and professionals who frequent the site.

Rather than rebut the claims in comments, a far more enterprising psychology masters degree student produced a comprehensive visual presentation about how the terms psychopath and sociopath both refer to someone with psychopathy, a specific personality disorder.

If you want a quick tutorial on what makes a psychopath tick, I recommend checking out the second link above. Bookmark if you don't have time to read now.

Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?

comic strip eyes

My personal philosophy about makeup is this: It should be unobtrusive. It should not be obvious. It should be subtle. It must enhance your looks. The less you use the better.

The model in the photo below is adorably gorgeous (enlargement). She's Charlotte Free and appeared recently at the latest Paris fashion week, where this was shot.

Her eye shadow, however, is a distraction. It almost certainly was selected for her, so she had no choice. That goes with the job: your body belongs to someone else for the hours they pay you.

I don't like this makeup because it's obvious. It screams gimmick. It looks like a halftone in a comic strip or a Roy Lichtenstein painting.

It also looks unsafe. She probably closed her eyes, a makeup person sprayed on some kind of foundation, then a screen was placed over her skin and the eye shadow sprayed on top of that. She had to keep her eyes closed for several minutes until it dried.

Those dots, however, could break off hours later and get in her eyes. Cosmetics used around the eyes are always a danger, and this kind doubly so.

Other than that, I absolutely love her hat and big vintage jewelry. The goofy hair/wig I could do without.

high-tech orgasm training?

The online magazine Oxy has a short new article about digital tools designed to increase sexual pleasure. After reading it, I have to say I'm skeptical.

I'm one of those people who believes in learning by doing. You don't learn how to cook by reading recipes. You learn to cook by cooking.

Same goes for a variety of endeavors: art, exercise, gardening, writing, acting, and more.

Same goes for sex. If you want to learn how to orgasm better or to have more pleasurable sex, you get naked and experiment. You don't read about it on some website. You don't play a game on your smartphone.

Some endeavors do require substitute training. Flying comes to mind. Flight simulators are a must.

But fucking isn't like flying. Nobody will die if you mess up while trying to make your partner orgasm better.

ugly baby syndrome

We were out and about with the children yesterday and ran into a woman I slightly know. She had not seen the new baby before, so she oohed and aahed over him.

She piled it on a little heavy, gushing about how Tombo was the cutest baby she'd ever seen blah blah blah.

I was sorely tempted to tell her I thought he was a somewhat ugly baby. Truth be told, I don't think infants are particularly cute until they're about four months old.

Once they're that age, they have filled out and they can focus somewhat and are more interactive. But when they're only two months old, as our youngest is now, they still have that feral runt look.

Tombo was born with wild dark hair in a messy Mohawk. About half of that has fallen out but very unevenly, so the whole effect looks sort of moth eaten.

Although he's a good baby and rarely fusses, he often has a grumpy look when he's awake and makes the typical twitchy involuntary infant expressions of a two-month-old.

Make no mistake about it, I love him dearly and wouldn't trade him for the world, but at the same time I wouldn't pretend that he's cute. I have seen a lot cuter kids at his age.

Joey looked a lot like his new brother at two months old, although he had much less hair, and he's grown into an adorable photogenic child. So I'm not worried my kid will end up looking like a troll.

Only one person has said honestly what he thinks about Tombo's looks. A friend of my husband said something like, "he's almost as ugly as my kid at that age."

Now maybe some people really believe he's cute. If that's the case, I guess they believe any baby is cute, no matter how ugly.

clown armor

A lawyer named Tobias Snyder writes a very interesting blog called Seisin where he opines about politics, the law, and other current issues. I found his latest piece 100 percent on the money -- it's titled "The Clown Armor of Donald J. Trump."

His thesis is simple: because everyone treats Trump like a joke, he can get away with saying the most asinine bullshit and no one rips him down to size for his bizarre positions. That might have been okay early in the primary season when he seemed like just another vanity candidate who would soon lose. But now he's the Republican nominee and one election away from the White House, so people need to pay attention to the garbage he's spouting.

Yet the media and much of the public is still willing to ignore his outrageous idiocy and focus on nonsense crap like tone and Twitter clicks. They utterly ignore how a mendacious con srtist might end up as President. And that, quite simply, is what makes Trump so dangerous.

transferred love

On average, we see my inlaws almost every week. Because they live on the other side of Sydney, sometimes they stay with us for a few days or we spend the weekend with them.

Daughters-in-law who cannot tolerate their inlaws are not uncommon, but I'm not one of those. My stepmother-in-law is a good friend and not at all "smotherly," perhaps because she did not marry my widower father-in-law until after all his children had left home.

I said to my husband recently that I'm much closer to his father than I ever was to my own. My father was always distant, although not as bad as my mother, but that's like saying Greenland isn't as cold as Antarctica.

I have never understood why he is this way. His father was an entirely different personality and one of my most beloved relatives. My father's younger brother is also entirely lovable and much like his father. My brother is like them and nothing like my father.

My father-in-law seems like he was cut from the same bolt as my grandfather, uncle, and brother, as well as charming male cousins on my paternal side of the family. It's curious how he's much more like my grandfather than my own father.

Understandably, my husband is in many ways a younger version of my father-in-law. I think that's why I love them like crazy and am so fortunate they are both in my life.

Life would've been a lot harder here for me, I think, had my husband's family not been so welcoming. Many families would've given the cold shoulder to the "foreign girl" and fortunately I did not marry into one of those.

good luck or random chance?

For the second time in four years, a New York man has won a million dollars in the state's lottery. The winner was given a symbolic check in a press conference yesterday.

This is not the first time a big winner has hit the jackpot a second time. A North Carolina woman won a million this February and then $250,000 last month. A Chicago man has won a million dollars twice in the last decade.

So are these people lucky? Or are these simply random events?

This is the one issue where my husband and I disagree 100 percent.

The New York lottery winner believes his late wife somehow intervened and gave him the "good luck" to win twice. That's the kind of feel-good malarkey that my James would believe in a heartbeat. He is a big believer in luck and lucky people.

I do not believe in good luck or bad luck. Life is a series of random events. On rare occasion, two events that each have a very small chance of happening can happen concurrently.

You can ask me to take a card, then shuffle the deck, and take a card again. There is a very small chance I will get the same card both times.

Now if you stop thousands of people in the street and do this card trick, the chance that someone will twice pick the same card increases. This is a basic rule of probability.

The New York lottery winner says he buys twenty lottery tickets every day. He's spending thousands of dollars every year. In four years, he's spent tens of thousands of dollars.

While that doesn't mean it's a sure thing to win the lottery twice with a big jackpot, buying a lot of lottery tickets increases your odds, although they are still small.

I imagine there are quite a few people like him who spend a lot of money on lottery tickets and never win anyting substantial. So do those people have "bad luck"?

In my mind, this scenario would be bona fide "good luck": You buy a lottery ticket for the first time in your life and you win a jackpot worth hundreds of millions.

Years pass and you never buy another lottery ticket. Then, on the tenth anniversary of your big win, you buy the second lottery ticket you've ever bought in your life. And you win big again: hundreds of millions of dollars.

You do that, then I might believe in good luck. Until then, it's all random chance.

fleeting glory

Sometimes I put quotes on my Tumblr that seem profound at first blush, but on second consideration, they're not so wisdom-packed after all. Take this recent quote I used from Napoleon Bonaparte: "Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."

Not so fast there, Leon. Some people never achieved much glory in their lifetime but they've become famous later. Philip K. Dick is one name that comes to mind.

And then there's Vincent Van Gogh. He never personally sold any of his paintings and instead sent many to his brother Theo because the latter constantly gave him money. As far as art historians know, Theo was only able to sell one of those paintings, the now famous "The Red Vineyard."

Today, of course, Van Gogh's paintings are some of the most expensive in the world. At least three are known to have sold for more than $100 million each.

Is Vincent Van Gogh now "more famous" than Napoleon Bonaparte? There's no way to answer that. But I think most people would agree with this statement: Vincent is now more beloved than Napoleon.

cancer treatment frauds

I was reading offline recently about a South African doctor who fabricated a breast cancer treatment breakthrough about fifteen years ago, which in turn led others to spend countless millions on further research and subjected untold women to both painful surgery and extreme chemotherapy.

I hunted around online to learn more about the now disgraced doctor and found a year 2000 article in The New York Times. The doctor never practiced again after being exposed and his present whereabouts are unknown.

This, of course, is not the first time con artists have targeted cancer victims. Many such criminals are not real doctors, but sometimes genuine physicians will perpetuate cancer fighting frauds.

Deliberately deceiving cancer victims and their families has to be one of the cruelest things someone can do to another human being. To give someone false hope with a sham treatment is unbelievably heartless.

Not only must patients suffer from an often painful and debilitating condition, they also have the double heartbreak of learning that something which they thought might save their lives turned out to be deliberate deception.

It's not surprising that garden variety con artists would perpetuate such a fraud. Targeting vulnerable people is par for their course.

But I'm surprised that a well respected medical doctor would do this. In the South African case, he had to know that he would be exposed and then disgraced at some point.

For some people, I guess false glory is better than no glory at all, even if the ultimate price is infamy.

a troubled prince

If you've followed recent news reports about Prince, you probably know he may have been addicted to painkillers, a condition which could have caused his death. Law enforcement officials have not yet released any statements about this so exact details are unknown.

If true, this would be yet another celebrity death resulting from drug abuse. Whenever this happens, I always wonder why some people still think all drugs should be legalized.

Wealthy and powerful people can get their hands on any drug they want, and we often learn about what happens when they do. They either end up dead or in rehab's revolving door.

Now imagine if everyone had easy, legal access to any drug they wanted. The resulting mess would be catastrophic.

the worst tattoo ever

I have posted horrible tattoos on this blog before with a comment like "I don't think I can find anything worse than this." But then I always do.

Today, however, I think I have landed in the absolute bottom of the barrel: a guy in Florida is now the proud owner of a huge naked Donald Trump tattoo, complete with a tiny penis.

As you can see from the photo below, the thing covers much of his upper leg. The tattoo is a faithful copy of the controversial naked Trump painting I blogged about a few days ago.

I think the painting's artist was brilliant to lampoon the extremely insecure and clownish Trump. Permanently imprinting that thing on your body, however, is not my idea of brilliant.

The article linked above mentions the man who tattooed Mitt Romney's logo on his face in 2012. I wonder how that's working out for him four years later?

whale charm offensive

The short clip below offers an uncommon glimpse of a humpback whale feeding very close to shore in Alaska in a video made a few days ago. This brief article explains what's going on with the bubbles, something not often witnessed by humans.

Whales are such fascinating animals that live in a world so separate from our own. I wonder what they think of our species, if they even consider us at all in any kind of abstract way. While humans can interact with certain animals, I imagine whales and humans will never really establish any sort of connection. We are aliens to each other, sharing the same inner space.

smells like infidelity

A married couple lives in our neighborhood who my husband and I slightly know. When we first moved on the street, the wife was svelte and attractive, something like Julianne Moore, and he was plain and pudgy like an overweight Dean Norris.

About two years ago, I noticed the wife started gaining weight and "letting herself go," as the expression holds, throwing on any old thing when she left the house and barely touching her hair.

In contrast, the husband really hit the gym with determination and shed all his excess pounds. He went from doughboy to chiseled.

I said to my husband about a year ago when we were out together and spotted them: "I give that marriage one more year, maybe two."

Turns out, it lasted a little more than a year. I heard today they're filing for divorce and putting their house on the market.

How I knew was easy: whenever I see men going through transitions like this, I know he's probably starting to look outside the home for some action. I don't even need to see the wife to know this.

I used to see this all the time when I danced in clubs. The guys who remained unchanged stayed unchanged in their marriages. The guys who started to emerge like butterflies, who came in to the club less often because they were spending more time in the gym and elsewhere, would soon end up in divorce court.

The moral of this story, I think, is that if your husband starts to work out religiously, make damn sure you keep up with him. Because when Mr. Frog wants to turn into Prince Charming, it's not just because he's tired of eating flies.

our genes are smarter than we are

I recently read two fascinating articles in The New Yorker magazine, both by physician and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee.

One article is about the genetics of schizophrenia and the other article is about epigenetics, which roughly can be defined as the study of gene mechanics.

Both articles are free in their entirety at the links above.

Mukherjee is a doctor but he writes in a style I find very accessible for a layperson. My last exposure to anything scientific was a ninth-grade science class, but I understand his articles, or at least most of them.

Needless to say, the genetic system within all our bodies is extraordinarily complex yet brilliant in design. Reading about things like this always leaves me wondering: did the workings of genes just happen by accident?

An atheist will tell you that, yes, genes are the result of the accidental, random creation of life on earth billions of years ago.

A religious person will tell you that genes were created by a supreme being, which will conveniently happen to be the very same supreme being that the religious person happens to worship.

If you believe the atheist, you essentially believe that somehow, despite extraordinary odds, life just spontaneously happened because of a random chemical event. If you believe the religious person, you essentially believe an unverified fairy tale.

IMHO, both points of view are not credible. Things don't happen by magic, actual or otherwise.

I strongly suspect another explanation exists, the real explanation, but we'll never know what it is. The complexity of genetic design suggests that highly advanced beings designed its workings, but the who what and why of that will never be revealed.

And any discussion about this results in taking it to a higher level -- who created the supreme beings? Who created the whole idea of atoms and existence and reality?

All of the above notwithstanding, Mukherjee doesn't get into any of this. He just discusses the fascinating scientific stuff and leaves the navel gazing to others.

clueless caitlyn

While waiting for a doctor's appointment today with Tombo, I was reading a magazine offline with an article about Bruce "Caitlyn" Jenner. The piece focused on Jenner's often estranged relationship with his oldest children from his first two marriages.

Some of these older children have steadfastly refused to participate in any of Jenner's reality TV endeavors, thereby foregoing substantial income. They wish to keep their relationship with their father strictly private.

Notwithstanding the long rift with these children caused by Jenner himself, he nonetheless tried to browbeat them into doing the reality shows. At point, he exploded in anger at his children and screamed profanities at them, ranting on and on about how their refusal "hurt" him.

Pardon my langage, but what a fucking asshole you are Bruce/Caitlyn. You treat your children like shit, and then you trash them because they refuse to humiliate themselves in public with your narcissistic TV projects.

You're lucky they still speak to you, pal. You don't deserve children like that.

donald trump's tiny penis

I've read several news pieces in the last several months about Los Angeles-based artist Illma Gore, who was selling a nude painting of a dinky dicked Donald Trump.

Because her painting was understandably controversial, she faced a variety of problems, including death and lawsuit threats. To add injury to insult, over the weekend, she was brutally punched in the face by a fanatical Trump supporter.

Unfortunately, the various news pieces about her art only showed pixelated or cropped version of her painting sans schlong. With some searching today, I found the uncensored version (enlargement) with the realistically rendered Donald in all his tiny penis glory.

Apparently the original nude Donald painting has not yet sold. I imagine the value will depend on whether or not Trump is elected. Not to take money out of the artist's mouth, but I sincerely hope that doesn't happen.

Donald and his tiny penis should shrink into historical obscurity after 2016. Sorry, Illma, but we can't all suffer for your art.

did you know?

I recently discovered the Did You Know Blog which features daily entries with interesting trivia. The site is highly addictive and provides often arcane trivia on almost every possible subject.

Where else could you learn about why your dog looks at you when it poops? Or about actress Hedy Lamarr's incredible invention still in use today? Or that the Wright Brothers only flew together once in their entire lives?

Like many people, I'm addicted to trivia, and I found the site a time-sucking rabbit hole where I could easily get lost for a few hours if I wasn't careful. I now limit myself to reading ten panels a day.

The blog uses the Tumblr format, so you can easily hunt around randomly using the archive feature.

the evolution of marriage

The Washington Post ran a fascinating little piece last week comparing what men and women rated as important spousal traits in 1939 and what they rated as important in 2008.

In the three quarters of a century between the two surveys, mutual attraction rose into first place for both genders. Education/intelligence, sociability, and looks also increased significantly.

Interestingly, women rated looks as more important than men in both eras, but it increased more significantly for women. They rated it above education and financial prospects.

For both genders, chastity nosedived into last place, meaning it was least important of eighteen traits. Health, refinement, and neatness also dropped for both genders.

For the most part, I think my attitudes coincide with this survey with a few exceptions. I would rank pleasing disposition second after love and almost as important.

I have to love spending time with the man I love.