Engrish #2

... as opposed to back towards your front.

Where there's a Market ...

As discussed in an earlier post, the yearning to spread ones genetic material is one of the most deep-seated of all human instincts. This naturally leads many people to desire to procreate, as often as possible, even if steps have been taken to avoid the spreading of genetic material during said procreation. In fact, the urge to procreate is often so strong that even in the absence of a sex partner, people will still find ways of satisfying it. It is in the service of these people, those who, for whatever reason find themselves without a willing co-gene-spreader that the market has responded with perhaps the ultimate possible solution; the Android Sex Doll.

When I was a nerdy kid, the sci-fi stories of the day painted a number of vivid scenarios in which the android of the future would be employed, from mega-soldier to incredibly patient super-teacher, but the future has (as usual) turned out to be a somewhat sleazier place than most of us ever imagined as kids. Just as most of the great advances in web technology were made in support of the emerging cyber-porn industry, it seems our most practical steps towards commercially-realizable human-replica robotics are being taken in the name of erotic anthropomorphism.

Abyss Creations in Southern California have been in the business since 1996, "using Hollywood special effects technology to produce the most realistic love doll in the world". These things are amazingly lifelike, and if domination is your thing this may well be your perfect partner as these things are as submissive as it comes. Though their titanium skeleton perfectly replicates the functioning of the human skeleton, and they can be posed in any position a standard human can, they don't actually move ... yet ... but the company assures us it won't be long before their products will have the ability to talk, blink and buck "just like the real thing".

Of course, when it comes to technology the Japanese are always a step ahead. In 2003 the Kokoro company released the Actroid; which was "developed to recreate the human-like natural yet charming expressions with high functionalities retained." The Actroid has 47 actuators in its body which are controlled by compressed air and enable the android to mimic natural, human-like movements to a truly remarkable extent. They can blink, breathe and are able to recognise and process speech and respond in kind.

There is even such a thing as Robot Fetishism, with its very own Wikipedia page, and many devotees who refer to themselves as Technosexuals.

In case you're wondering whether anyone has yet built a completely functional, walking talking android yet ... one that perfectly replicates a human being, the answer is - sadly - no. This technological marvel is still a little way off. But you can be sure plenty of very smart people are working on it, and as soon as the perfect android has been developed I'm prepared to lay bets on it seeing far more action in the bedroom than fighting our wars or teaching our kids.

The Story of the Universe: Part 2

By the time evolution brought forth a species called Homo Sapiens, on an undistinctive planet called Earth, the universe had already existed for over ten billion (10,000,000,000) years. This species spent most of the next 600,000 years eeking out a meager existence, battling with the other cohabitants of the planet for mere survival, but eventually, after most of that 600,000 years had passed, they briefly gained the upper hand over all other species of the Earth and managed to dominate them in spectacularly successful and brutal fashion.

Compared with the eons that had preceeded it, at only a handful of millenia, the reign of Homo Sapiens was pitifully short, and despite the enormous amount of energy and enthusiasm they collectively dedicated to making an impression on the universe, in the end the existence of Homo Sapiens amounted more or less to nothing at all.

Following their demise, the ecology of Earth gradually regained its balance and evolution continued to bring forth a widely varied array of organisms for a further 2 billion years. None of these organisms happened to possess the same level of intelligence Homo Sapiens had, and no-one noticed, or was by any means the worse-off for it. Eventually the Sun, the star around which the Earth had been orbiting for six and a half billion years, began to exhaust its reserves of hydrogen, and as this was taking place the concentration of helium at its core rose, causing in turn a dramatic increase in its production of heat and light. On Earth this caused a runaway greenhouse effect, by consequence of which all the oceans evaporated, and practically all life became extinct. In this sterile environment only thermophilic bacteria were able to cling to life, but after a time even these hardy organisms were extinguished as the Sun continued to swell.

Once all the helium at the Sun's core had been completely extinguished it became a red giant, loosing much of its mass to evaporation in the process, which caused the planets, including Earth to slip into more remote orbits. The Sun continued to grow and at its largest, was 100 times its earlier size. At this time the surface of the Earth was completely molten. Eventually the Sun exploded into a planetary nebula, which, had there been any sentient life forms around to observe it, would have appeared quite picturesque. After this the Sun assumed it's penultimate form of a white dwarf and subsequently, very very slowly, faded to black.

100 trillion (10 to the power of 14) years after the extinction of Homo Sapiens, all the stars in the universe had exhausted their fuel supply, and the only remaining objects were dead stars in the form of brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. The protons that formed the atoms from which the matter of these dead stars were composed then started decaying. For another 10 trillion, trillion (10 to the power of 25) years, the only thing that happened in the universe was the unbelievably slow, inexorable decay of dead stars.

Eventually this process too, was complete and the only things left in the universe were black holes. The black holes also decayed, even more slowly than the dead stars. The decay of black holes took place over such an unimaginably huge span of time that words do not exist to describe the amount of years it took, we can only use numbers: After 10 to the power of 100 years, all the black holes in the universe had evaporated, and there was nothing remaining in the entire cold, dark expanse except the occasional stray, lonely photon, neutrino, electron or positron, flying about in meaningless, random patterns, hardly ever encountering one another, forever .....

The Story of the Universe: Part 1

In the beginning there was incredible heat, heat that was so unbelievably hot that atoms could not exist. Heat that was so intense that even protons and neutrons - the particles that make up atoms - could not exist.

The things that are smaller than protons and neutrons - called "quarks" - were the only things, at the beginning. There were quarks that were made of matter and quarks that were made of antimatter, in almost equal parts. For every thirty million antimatter quarks there were thirty million and one matter quarks. The matter and antimatter annihilated each other. The almost statistically insignificant prevalence of matter over antimatter led to the emergence of a universe made of matter.

At this stage the universe was thirty microseconds (.000030 of 1 second) old. By this time the remaining matter quarks began condensing into protons and neutrons. While the protons and neutrons were assembling themselves, the universe was expanding, very very quickly. It started from a single point and became truly, stupendously enormous within just a fraction of a second.

When the universe was 1 second old, nuclear fusion reactions began fusing the protons and neutrons into light nuclei such as helium, deuterium and lithium. By this time the temperature had dropped to only ten billion degrees kelvin (9,999,999,727 degrees celsius). Creation of light nuclei continued for about three minutes, after which continued expansion cooled the universe to about one billion degrees kelvin and the epoch of nucleosynthesis came to an end.

For the next few eons the universe didn't do anything much except continue expanding and cooling. It was still very hot and very bright. After about 300,000 years it had cooled to an average temperature of about 3000 degrees kelvin (2,726.85 celsius) and atoms were able to form. Some areas of the universe were slightly denser than others in their atom populations, and this density caused these first hydrogen and helium atoms to fall under the influence of gravity and start forming massive aggregations of gas, which much later became known as galaxies.

Within these aggregations, there were some even more dense aggregations, which were drawn together by gravity to become stars.

Nearly 9 billion years after the universe began, a star which later became known as "The Sun" formed, and during its formation a number of solid and gaseous objects also formed in orbit around it. Some of these objects were large enough to be classified as Planets. Some 1.2 billion years after the formation of the planets, random chemical reactions on one of them, which later became known as "Earth", caused the formation of amino acids. These amino acids in turn formed proteins. A random product of this process was ribonucleic acid (RNA). This substance had the property of being able to encode a sequence of proteins, and was also able to duplicate itself. With the formation of proteins and RNA, a new form of chemistry emerged on Earth, known as life.

With the process of protein sequence encoding and duplication, there also came a new phenomenon known as evolution. This process pitted organisms against randomly mutated replicas of themselves in a never-ending struggle for survival. If a mutation possessed qualities that provided itself and its offspring with improved survival prospects, that mutation would take hold and the original organism would die off.

For the next several billion years the process of evolution brought about life forms with increasingly complex structures, and after about 3.1 billion years, a new and highly complex kind of organism emerged, known as "animals". These first, incredibly complex animals were flatworms, jelly fish and algae. Impressive though these organisms were, evolution was not done yet. It continued to arrange animals into more and more complex structures until only 500 million years later "Mammals" began to appear. One hundred million, four hundred thousand years later, evolution created a mammal that was able to combine a large and complex brain with an ability to stand on its hind legs and use its opposable thumb and forefinger to manipulate objects. This mammal became known as "Homo Sapiens", and its unique survival technique was the ability to utilise its intelligence and manual dexterity to fashion and utilise "tools".

A further consequence of this intelligence was the propensity (among some of the species) to contemplate the universe and their place within it. This contemplation produced the mistaken conclusion (or philosophy) that life and intelligence are important and significant qualities and further, that the universe was created specifically in order to provide a habitat for things that possessed these qualities.

Homo Sapiens spent the next 600,000 years labouring under this misconception, and improving their tools. In the process they discovered electricity, which greatly enhanced the scope of their tools. Eventually they built electronic tools with the ability to perform simple calculations. These tools themselves evolved and became more complex, eventually evolving into more general information processing machines known as computers. Shortly thereafter, the advent of miniaturisation allowed computers to become small and inexpensive enough to be possessed by a great many of the Homo Sapiens, whereupon an international electronic communications network, known as the "internet", developed.

After only a decade or so of popular internet usage, a new pastime evolved whereupon bored Homo Sapiens with too much time on their hands would share whatever facile thoughts they happened to be experiencing, with other users of the internet utilising communications interfaces known as Web Logs, or "Blogs". Within only a couple of years over 7 million blogs had appeared, testifying to the vast amount of time Homo Sapiens had on their hands. Some of these blogs contained interesting information, the vast majority didn't, but one almost universally adopted theme discussed in these blogs was the unique specialness and inherent value of the Homo Sapiens species; supported by their achievements in social, technical, artistic and other fields.

Despite the absolute lack of impact intelligence, or even life could be observed to have had on the universe; despite the lack of evidence that life or intelligence had even emerged on any other planet in the universe, the Homo Sapiens still harboured a belief that intelligence and life were in some way important and significant properties.

Homo Sapiens flourished on the Earth for a brief flyspeck of time, and the impact they made on the universe was so infinitesimally tiny as to be statistically negligible.

Engrish #1

Travelers leaving their bags with security staff while shopping in Kunming, China will have their attention drawn to the following instructions:

An Influential Psychosis

Anyone who believes the Christian Bible is boring has never read the Book of Revelation, the last canonical book of the New Testament. This is the part of the Bible based on prophesies of the last days of Earth. It's all about the second coming of Jesus, God's final judgment of humanity, and the apocalypse that destroys the Earth and condemns all non-believers to an eternity of suffering in Hell ... exciting stuff.

The Book of Revelation was written by somebody called "John of Patmos" (Patmos is an idyllic little Greek island situated in the Aegean sea), but nobody really knows exactly who John of Patmos was. All we know is that, for reasons never adequately explained, John was exiled to Patmos. It's quite clear though, from reading the book, that whoever he was, and for whatever reason he was exiled to Patmos, John was profoundly mentally ill and suffered from severe psychotic episodes. John's book is based entirely on two of these episodes, which clearly had a big impact on him. In the book he calls these psychotic episodes; "Visions" and relates how during these visions, first Jesus, and secondly God himself, appeared to him and told him some extremely scary stories.

At the time John wrote the Book of Revelations (somewhere between 60AD and 100AD) the science of Psychiatry was yet to be invented and it was not uncommon for the "visions" of psychotics to be misinterpreted as messages from the divine. Ironically, during the middle ages the reverse tended to be believed by Christians. Far from experiencing messages from God, people with a mental illness were considered to be "possessed" by Satan and were consequently imprisoned, tortured and frequently killed. In modern times, mentally ill people still experience scary episodes but thankfully we now have science, which attempts to explain these episodes in non-metaphysical terms and therefore help the sufferers progress to a less-scary place in life.

Despite the long litany of visions experienced by other mentally ill people throughout the ages since 100AD, for some reason not one of them ever joined the visions of John of Patmos in the Christian Bible as examples of God's Word.

Today, despite our understanding that visions such as those experienced by John of Patmos, are actually the result of an ill brain, there are many, many people who choose to believe the psychotic episodes described in the Book of Revelations represent a true and accurate prophesy from God Himself about actual events to come. A lot of these people believe the events described in Revelations are due to befall the current generation, and they are actively preparing for, and looking forward to the end of the world when they will be saved and taken to Heaven to live with their friend Jesus.

Despite being described by some commentators as a dangerous lunatic fringe, this movement of Apocalyptic Christians has been able to wield considerable political power in America and has been largely responsible for placing the current President in office and keeping him there for two terms. The reason they have chosen to support this particular president is because they believe he is one of them.

Though it has not been firmly established, it is the source of wide conjecture, that as a born-again Christian, George W. Bush is, in fact, also a believer in the impending Biblical apocalypse. He has often publicly identified with and shown strong support for the far Christian right and claims that God speaks both to him and through him. Since the failure and stagnation of his war on Iraq, Bush has turned his posturing to strengthening an enmity with all sworn enemies of Israel, most particularly Iran. Israel also happens to be the focal point of the final apocalyptic battle prophesied in Revelations. This battle occurs in a town called Megiddo, (the Hebrew Har-Megido, or Hill of Megiddo, became known as "Armageddon" in the modern Bible). Is it simply coincidence that America’s foreign policy under the current administration has consistently sought to increase the divide between Israel and its enemies?

Imagine for a moment the scenario where an insane, apocalypse-believing fundamentalist religious sect is allowed to significantly influence the foreign policy of a major military power. Imagine if control over the fate of the planet was handed over to a man who believed in, and actively looked forward to its destruction, in order that he and his brethren got to ascend to some fictional salvation?

Sounds scary doesn’t it? But we’d never be so stupid as to let something like that happen ‘round here, would we?

Manufacturing Discontent

In their famous 1988 book: “Manufacturing Consent”, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued that it is the role of modern electronic and print media to; “inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society”. Their analysis presented media as a propaganda machine, designed to facilitate the acceptance by individuals of the roles society (meaning the Ruling Class) has ordained for them.

Now, while this may be one effect of modern mass media, it would be difficult to argue that the media establishment (at least in the democratic world) was purposefully designed to fulfill this purpose. Advertising, on the other hand, is a different story.

In the meaningless wilderness of modern existence, there are few evils at large in the world that are quite so evil as advertising. As the agent most chiefly responsible for diverting us from the otherwise fulfilled lives we could be leading, and enticing us instead with the promise that we could be happy if only we bought a better car than our neighbour, drank a cooler brand of soft drink than the losers, or had marginally whiter teeth than we currently do, advertising is the enemy of contentment and the most potent instrument of control ever devised.

But advertising hasn't always been the mendacious, mind-control drug we know today. Advertising can trace its history to a simpler, more honest ancestor that served a far less evil purpose.

In the case of the semi-mythical American lemonade stand, if the sign announced lemonade for 25c, the customer could reasonably expect to get a cup of lemonade for 25c. The sign didn't exist to convince us that we needed a cup of lemonade. The kid knew the lemonade would generate a desire-to-buy based on its own merits. That's why he was selling lemonade as opposed to, say, leeches or doses of bubonic plague.

Advertising originally existed more-or-less to inform consumers about what a product did, and what it cost. Simple classifieds first emerged in seventeenth century newspapers as a fairly straightforward description of a product or service, and a price, and advertising remained in this fairly honest form for a few hundred years, but in the early 20th century something came along that changed the face of advertising forever. The two world wars happened at a time when technology was able to provide generals and politicians with a brand new weapon, which they didn't hesitate to harness in the cause of their war-efforts.

Wartime propaganda took advertising for the first time, above and beyond the realm of the honest. Truth has (as the saying informs us) always been the first casualty of war, but never before had the means existed to twist and subvert the truth and broadcast it so effectively, and so frequently, to so many people.

Postwar advertisers did not ignore the lessons of the wartime propagandists. As keen students of the psychological games employed by the various propaganda departments of Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt and the rest; modern advertisers became scientists, utilising market research techniques to convert products into icons.

The advertising man of the Brave New World (at least from the 1950's onward) had at his disposal two exciting new innovations that would provide never-before-seen opportunities for truth-twisting. One was the burgeoning consumer society; the flooding of the market-place with a never-ending catalogue of must-have items, which commenced in America and spread in short order to the rest of the capitalist world. The second great innovation was television, a technology that provided advertisers with unparalleled access to the conscious and subconscious minds of the consuming public. Technology gave the advertiser both an unending supply of new commodities to sell, and also the most powerful means yet devised to brainwash people into buying them.

It became the job of advertising to create need in the mind of the consumer. And the two-pronged approach to this was to:

a) Constantly create new commodities that people could be convinced they needed, and
b) Build obsolescence into these products so it would never be too long before a replacement had to be purchased.

This whole system underscores the way of life for most people in modern societies. It provides us with our self image, a stereotype to conform to, the illusion of happiness, a reason for being, and most importantly, a reason to buckle down and continue contributing to the capitalist economic machine.

It might seem from the above analysis that I'm suggesting advertising has displaced true meaning from our lives and replaced it instead with a shallow facsimile of meaning, but imagine what our lives would be like if the system was suddenly shut down? Imagine if we all reached a point where we discovered that the commodities in our lives are adequate. That we don't need a better kind of car, soft drink or toothbrush. Imagine if the advertisers didn't have anyone to convince any more. If the products stopped changing every week and the adverts just disappeared. Imagine a whole generation of individuals opening their eyes for the first time, thinking for themselves and having to find something real to replace the vanished pseudo-meaning once provided by the products and the advertising. What a horrible world that would be.

Really Bad Names #3

Parched travelers in the West African Republic of Ghana may quench their thirst with a bottle of the appetisingly named "Pee Cola"

Informed Kids = Tools of Satan

After enough years of exposure to the seemingly endless paradoxes and vagaries of life on this planet, it's not uncommon for members of our species to start seeking answers to the fundamental questions of life, such as: "Why are we here?", "What is the purpose of life?" and "What's it all for?" Now clearly, from the philosophical point of view, there's no clear-cut answer to these kind of questions, but from the biological viewpoint the answer is perfectly clear; we're here to procreate; to spread our genetic material ... as often as possible ... and as far and wide as possible.

Given this biological imperative, it's not surprising that nature has maximised the time frame during which we are able to produce offspring. Well and truly before they are fully grown, humans are sexually mature, and if nature had it's way they'd be succumbing to their natural instincts as frequently as possible from that point until either death, or failure of the sexual apparatus called an end to the proceedings. Unfortunately for nature however, many modern societies have imposed value structures on the sex act, which can substantially thwart the regular, lifelong production of offspring. The application of these value structures takes the form of a spectrum, not unlike the left-wing/right-wing political spectrum, whence, ironically, the 2 extreme positions; promiscuity on the one hand, and puritanism on the other, both have similar effects in terms of the production of offspring.

The promiscuous, on the one hand, believe that since sex feels good, they should have as much of it as they possibly can, and take precautions so that their ability to source a constantly varying array of sexual partners remains unimpeded by the sudden, unwanted arrival of children. The puritanical, on the other hand, believe that since sex feels good, it must be bad, and therefore they should have as little of it as they can (consequently limiting the production of children). A fundamental difference in the application of these extreme views however, is that while the promiscuous generally do not seek to impose their view on others, inevitably the prudish do.

Since humans of secondary school age generally acquire the ability and the inclination to spread their genes, many educators have expressed the opinion that some form of education should occur in the classroom in order to present young people with the likely outcomes of unprotected gene-spreading (including unwanted offspring and unwanted medical conditions), and to offer them some alternatives to these outcomes. As mentioned above, certain other people believe that because sex is enjoyable, it must the work of Satan and these people argue that educating young people about sex will encourage them to have more of it, and that the only real way to dissuade people from having sex is to not tell them anything about it. Since by not telling them anything about sex they will not want to have any of it, they will therefore be safe from the unpleasant consequences of sex. In short, no sex is preferable to protected sex.

On the surface, while this argument may appear sound to some, it is not supported by statistical evidence.

According to a 2001 UNICEF report, the United States has the highest teenage birth rate in the developed world at 52.1 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19. The lowest teenage birth rates in the developed world are those of Korea and Japan, with less than 5 births per 1000 women under 20. The report cites the extreme social stigma and associated social difficulties for the teenage mother as the primary deterrent in these countries. Following these 2, the countries with the lowest teen birth rates are overwhelmingly Northern European. Switzerland, The Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and France are all situated in the top 10 with teen birth rates of less than 10 in 1000. According to the report there is a strong correlation between these statistics and the:

"conscious and apparently successful efforts [of these countries] to prepare and equip their young people to cope with a more sexualised society [including] school-based sex education".

It is interesting to note that as the developed nation with by far the highest rate of teen births in the world, the United States is currently also extremely prominent as a nation with a powerfully ascendant conservative faction led by a President who publicly opposes school-based sex education and instead encourages ignorance and abstinence as actual strategies. During his term in office Bush has spent more than a billion dollars of public money on his abstinence campaign but the latest surveys indicate it has had no effect whatsoever on the predilection of young people to engage in sex.

So maybe it's time for parents who say they care about their kids to accept that the drive to spread ones genetic material, that most primal of all human drives, may just resonate with a randy teenager a tad more than a message from Uncle George about how he'd like us to keep our flies done up. Maybe if those parents really cared about their kids, they'd instead say "yes" to letting a trained professional teach them how to save themselves from the potentially devastating consequences of unprotected sex.

Or maybe they don't really care as much about their kids as they do about hanging onto those stupid damn puritanical values.

Sometimes the Glass Really IS Half-Empty

It's become fashionable these days for every self-appointed lay-philosopher to constantly remind us to be "glass-half-full people" rather than "glass-half-empty people". What this basically means is that we should suspend our critical faculties and pretend that garbage is actually gold so that everyone feels really good about themselves. This positive thinking idea has been with us for a number of decades. It seems to go in cycles and I fear we are currently experiencing a cyclic peak where, to express a critical, or "negative" opinion is as socially frowned-upon as smoking or eating carbohydrates. But there is an important place for critical thinking, particularly in the creative process. It helps filter out bad ideas and stops them from becoming bad things. A few days ago I was reminded of what can happen when bad ideas get mistaken for good ideas when I was unfortunate enough to catch the 1980 film: "Xanadu" on TV.

Xanadu is the worst film ever made; a crudely hacked-together mish-mash of disparate, transitory, early 80's popular culture concepts washed over with a lurid flouro sheen of crappy special effects and set to the most appalling soundtrack ever conceived. There were numerous opportunities during the gestation of this project where, had anyone utilised their critical faculties, the entire thing could have been canned, but instead the optimists had their day and the world is a poorer place as a result.

Xanadu casts Olivia Newton-John as a roller-skating Goddess from mythical Olympus, who becomes the romantic interest of a dispirited young commercial artist (Micheal Beck - don't worry, you're not supposed to have heard of him), who assists Gene Kelly, a clarinet-playing ex-businessman, to manifest his dream of creating the Xanadu night club, which in true 80's fashion ends up being a huge disco roller-rink. All of this is set to a sound track by ELO, who, despite a remarkable run of hits during the 70's, were by this stage well and truly on their own critical and commercial downward spiral.

Now, you can just imagine the glass-half-full thinking behind all this: "It'll be great: it's got magic (everyone loves magic), it's got roller-skating (everyone loves roller-skating), it's got Livvy (she was great in Grease) - It's got ELO (biggest selling UK act of the late 70's), and if all that doesn't work, it's even got Gene Kelly to dazzle up the dance numbers". Under the impressive weight of all these positive factors, no-one ever bothered considering that:

a) Olivia Newton-John couldn't look less like a Goddess from Olympus if she tried;
b) Neither she, nor Michael Beck could roller skate to save their lives;
c) Dance numbers on roller skates are a stupid idea anyway;
c) Gene Kelly was just shy of 70 and, it's fair to say, had committed his best work to celluloid at least 20 years earlier;
d) ELO sucked, and
e) The story was completely and utterly stupid.

Xanadu is a potent example of how we all need to be constantly on our guard against positive thinking, particularly in times when it seems everyone else is seeing the glass as half-full. Imagine, for example, how many thousands of Iraqi and American lives could have been spared if, during the patriotic fervor of pre-war 2002, more key decision makers had utilised their critical faculties and dared to point out that: "hey, maybe this isn't such a great idea after all".

If Xanadu is to have any value at all, at least let it stand as a reminder, that sometimes the glass really is half-empty.

Social Behaviour of the Gym Part 2: The Up-Market Gym

The suburban gym is never called a gym. Gym sounds too manky, so instead they call them "Health Clubs". Here, the TV's are plasma, wide-screen and stuck on every available bit of wall. The clothing is designer-label and the machines gleam. There's still fat wobbling about but it's interspersed on a fairly meager ratio with trim, lithe, athletic, tattooed young bodies that all seem to own efficient, expensive little sports cars (or gigantic late-model four-wheel-drive gas-guzzlers).

Among these beautiful and successful young people, the women seem more at home with themselves at the gym and generally don't exhibit many gym behaviours that wouldn't be equally observable in other settings; they preen, jut and pout to about the same extent as they would at say, a nightclub, their job or on a fashion-show catwalk. The men however, when communicating with each other, display a gesture that is particularly gym-centric. I have classified this gesture as; "the Powerstance".

The powerstance is often preceded by the Powergrip, a handshake of such overwhelming strength and power that it is designed to cause the recipient to faint under the power of the protagonist's aggressive masculinity. I myself have been fortunate enough to have had by hand crushed in this manner and was duly impressed by the Alpha Male who thus maimed me. Then comes the Power Stance itself; a primitive, testosterone-induced visual exhibition of male virility, characterized primarily by an extremely wide distance between the feet. The legs of the power-stander are usually set so far apart that he is in danger of falling over. This is designed to convey the impression that ones Testicles are so large that there’s barely room for them between the thighs.

The adoption of the power-stance is so widespread among male suburban gym-goers, that it is rare to observe a conversation in which it is not used. But you will occasionally also observe the power stance used outside the gym. A couple of weekends ago I was lucky enough to observe the guy who lives across the road from me, power standing while conversing with a bearded soil-delivery guy in front of his house. Power standers will occasionally employ the power stance in non-gym situations, but usually only when they feel their masculinity threatened by strangers. Ironically, by adopting the power stance in these situations they are much easier to push over, a temptation I felt tugging at me very strongly while observing my neighbour.

If you (like me) are significantly older than 25 you will find yourself frequented by looks of disdain by these young suburban gym-goers. In this sense the suburban gym is (as mentioned in my previous post) more akin to a nightclub, fulfilling a role similar to that of the Serengetti battle-grounds where young male lions compete in order to demonstrate their virility to the females. Compared to the nightclub however, the gym has the twin advantages that:

a) the males get to demonstrate their actual physical prowess (rather than their prowess at ingesting mind-altering chemicals - an ability that is arguably less relevant to their sexual performance), and
b) everyone's not wearing much.

In this blatantly ritualistic mating environment, older males are not wanted and are relegated to the role of passive observer who must occasionally be dissuaded from making any demonstrations of their own fading virility by judicious application of the Powergrip and the disdainful look. I get to pay thirty bucks a fortnight to go to this place, kill myself on the rowing machine and wish all these bastards the slowest and most painful of all possible deaths.

Social Behaviour of the Gym Part 1: The Manky Gym

Desmond Morris is a zoologist who chose as his primary subject species; Homo Sapiens (people). Morris rose to fame in 1967 with his book "The Naked Ape" which catalogued his research in an entertaining and non-academic style. He had traveled the world studying human behaviour, and his findings provide a wonderfully objective view of the silliness people usually engage in as they go about the things they think they need to be doing. Morris observed humans in a great variety of settings, but one setting he missed, a setting in which a number of unique behaviours emerge, is the modern gym.

A couple of years ago I conceded to the never-ending bombardment of statistics about the importance of fitness and exercise, directed at us by know-it-all social commentators who delight in adding health-guilt to our already huge reservoir of appearance-associated low self esteem, and joined a gym. It wasn't one of these high-class joints you see in every suburb these days. This was a manky gym, cheap and nasty and located in the shadiest part of town (adjacent to a strip club and next to a BMW dealership), but it attracted people who were serious about getting fit.

There was one 20 inch CRT television set on the wall, which you had to thump about 20 times before the white dot in the centre expanded out into a recognisable picture. There wouldn't have been more than 3 matching carpet squares in the whole place. The foam bits on the weight machines were all torn and manky, and when you walked in, the bracing stench of stale perspiration nearly made you throw up as it hit you in the face. The general demographic of members at this place was: Male, over 25, not beautiful and (judging from the peeling duco on most of the bombs parked outside), definitely not rich. This was a place where no-one judged you on how much your fat wobbled as you peddled your stationary bike. Where board shorts and a 10 year old, paint-spattered T-shirt was about as contemporary as the fashion got, and where the only sexy young eye-candy you ever saw was on the above-mentioned crappy TV set.

I did get to see some unique behaviours at this gym. One of the most frequently-observed gestures was the exhaustion-induced stare into oblivion. This gesture was often accompanied by a beetroot coloured complexion and rapid panting and was most common among the over 40 year old contingency. Another common social gesture, which would have been quite out of place in any other context, was the shadow box dance. In this ritual, grown men converse with each other while both dancing about on tiptoe and taking jabs at imaginary opponents located slightly to the side of their friend.

Another behaviour prevalent at the manky gym is the absent, insular gaze of the non-sports-obsessed guy. It is also possible to observe this behaviour at Australian weekend barbeques where males with no sports knowledge will find themselves shunned by the rest of the tribe. But while the non-sports-obsessed guy will often manage to re-enter the barbeque conversation by steering it away from sports and toward cars, at the manky gym this is not possible because there is a rule that states all conversation must be about sport.

The manky gym is a breeding ground for constantly evolving behavioural stereotypes and I would have welcomed the opportunity to observe and catalogue more. Sadly however, I eventually had to leave my manky gym in favour of somewhere more geographically convenient and I joined the throng of beautiful people at my local suburban gym. The suburban gym is, in many ways, less like a traditional gym and more like a nightclub, but it does facilitate the evolution of some unique gym behaviours. Join me for my next post when we will explore these behaviours, and other absurd aspects of the up-market gym.

Really Bad Names #2

Nestled on the southeastern arm of Trinity Bay on the island of Newfoundland, about 100 kilometres west-northwest of St. John's is the quiet, and unfortunately-named township of Dildo.

Where's My Flying Car?

I was born in the swinging 60's and as a kid there was no shortage of exciting, futuristic concepts to delight the imagination via the wonderful world of science fiction. I was captivated, not only by the imaginative stories, but also by the exciting descriptions of what life was going to be like in the 21st century. At some point I remember working out how old I was going to be by the time the year 2000 (a perennial sci-fi milestone since the days of Verne and Wells) rolled by, and I was thrilled to discover I was only going to be 34. I knew 34 was old, but I also knew it wasn't exactly ancient, so that when 2000 finally rolled around, I'd still be reasonably fit and vital and would be able to fully participate in the golden age of science-fiction dreams come true.

I was going to drive a futuristic flying car inside a dome city while post World War 3 mutants crawled around in the radioactive wilderness outside. I was going to communicate telepathically with my pet dolphin while robot servants did all my household chores. No-one would have a boring job; I was going to be an astronaut specialising in alien life forms. Every home would have a HAL9000 talking computer from "2001 a Space Odyssey". Meals would be selected by simply pressing a button on your food-O-matic 2000, and music would all be made with synthesizers going beep beep. This all may sound like the fanciful imaginings of a 7-year-old, but it wasn't just kids that were coming up with this stuff. We were basing our fantasies, at least partly, on how the adult experts were telling us it was actually going to be.

In 1962 the city of Seattle in Washington played host to the World's Fair, also known as "the Century 21 Exposition", a six-month-long event that offered visitors a peek at the "glittering world of the future". In the spirit of the childhood fantasies offered above, visitors to the Worlds Fair were introduced to a "Jetson-esque" 21st century in which people flew to work in their personal "gyrocopters", lived in cities covered by giant domes and where every home had a "TV telephone".

Among the predictions the official World's Fair souvenir program boasted were "certain to be realities by 2001." were the following:

• The 21st Century home will be a "castle of ease, convenience and relaxation." The kitchen will be "a miracle of push-button efficiency" with a cool-wall pantry, push-button electric sink, electronic bakery drawer, clothes conditioning closet. It will have a private heliport as well as an indoor swimming pool and garden and will rotate to take advantage of the sun and will feature wall-to-wall television.
• The 21st century school will have walls made of jets of air, its tables standing on invisible legs, its floating canvas roof controlled to catch the sun. Memory-retention machines whir in the background while television screens mirror the day's lessons.
• Supersonic air travel will allow people to circumnavigate the world in minutes.
• There will be rapid transit jet-propelled monorail systems, air-cushioned trains that move 500 mph, air-cushioned cars and rocket belts that will "enable a man to stride thirty feet."

I don't know how these predictions make you feel, but I'm mad as hell just writing about them!! What the hell happened to my shiny sci-fi future? I'm supposed to be wearing a silver suit right now, chewing on my Soylent Green while waiting for Warlike Apes to usurp their human masters and take over the planet!!!

We've been duped brothers and sisters. They promised us HAL9000 and instead we got Windows. They promised limitless clean Fusion Power and instead gave me energy-saving lightbulbs and a jumper to wear in winter. Instead of a flying car I got a SUV with dodgy transmission, and in place of cities on Mars they gave us the crappy International Space Station. This is nothing like the future I was expecting.

So what kind of future can the kids of today look forward to? In his 2004 speech on the rejuvenation of the NASA space program, George Dubbya hoped that: "the fascination generated by further [space] exploration will inspire our young people to study math, science, and engineering and create a new generation of innovators and pioneers"

Well, you know what kids? It's all just a lie. You might as well pack away those math, science and engineering textbooks, cause the only kind of space you're ever likely to explore is the vacant space inside your unfulfilled dreams, and you can forget about being pioneers in your exploration of that particular landscape, because I was here way before you got here.

Crises of Life

Humans of the modern age are privileged to be able to witness a strange condition afflicting men of around 40, where they will, for apparently no good reason at all, go completely crazy. They question the value of everything in their lives (including sometimes, life itself), grow inappropriate facial hair, start dressing at least 15 years too young for themselves, go all spiritual, buy a sports car and destroy all their most meaningful relationships. Yes, at around 40 men start glimpsing their impending mortality, they realise that, statistically speaking, they're probably closer to the end than the beginning. They remember the life dreams they hatched 20 years earlier, the grand plans, and notice not only that none of these dreams have been realised, but that the life-path they are traveling pretty much guarantees that none of these dreams are ever likely to become realised. In short, they get terrified and have something commonly referred to as a mid life crisis.

But why is it that this strange phenomenon should suddenly appear? Surely nature would have evolved our psyches in such a way that by the time we find ourselves old enough to start having to confront these serious issues, we would have enough wisdom inside us to be able to face them in a mature way. When the question is posed in this way, the answer is obvious: we are not evolved to live past 40.

Up to and including medieval times the average human lifespan had never exceeded 33 years. Even as relatively recently as the end of the 19th Century, the average western life expectancy was still only 37. It's only during the last hundred or so years that life expectancy has skyrocketed to today's figure of 67 years. Prior to this, if you were 40 you were either a village elder, or you'd been pushing up daisies for 3 years. We haven't evolved skills to deal with facing the 30 or 40 years most of us can expect after "mid-life", because we've only relatively recently been granted that extended envelope. As human beings, we've invested a lot of time and energy on thinking about how to be young; there are a million attractive options to chose from in that particular life catalogue, but how much productive thought has gone into how to be old? No wonder when men are faced with aging, a good percentage of them decide to go backwards and become 22 again.

But according to a number of researchers (biogerentologists) and commentators, the whole context of the mid-life crisis may be up for review in a relatively short time. Due to discoveries and advances in medicine and microbiology anticipated over the next 20 - 30 years, there is a body of opinion that believes the average life span may be extended fairly radically, within the lifetime of people living today. In a situation where you could reasonably expect to live to say 120 or 130, it'd be morbid to start considering your mortality at a mere 40. Hopefully, under that scenario, by the age of 60 or 70, by which time those kinds of thoughts would be appropriate, we would be mature enough to face them without going crazy and completely falling apart.

Of course, the whole question of radical life extension is completely redundant for that percentage of our species that have the misfortune of living in Sub-Saharan Africa. They are the only portion of humanity that is actually going backwards in terms of life-expectancy. According to the World Health Organisation, the 10 countries with the worlds lowest life expectancy are all in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Sierra Leone bottoming out at only 25.9 years average. This backwards trend in life-expectancy has been occurring over the last 17 years or so, because of the HIV-AIDS epidemic, which is by far the leading cause of death in that part of the world. At 25.9 years, the Sierra-Leonian average life expectancy is approximately equivalent to that of the Neolithic Age about ten and a half thousand years ago.

In Sierra Leone, the extremely low percentage of men that reach 40 generally don't go through any kind of existential crisis. For them the crisis of existing is quite a bit more real.

Really Bad Names #1

Aztec emperor Montezuma had a nephew, Cuitlahac, whose name translated to; “plenty of excrement".

... and you thought you had problems.

Rites of Passage

Justin Schmidt is an entomologist who, in 1984, published a paper in which he presented the comparative pain caused by insect stings, as a scale. In 1990 Schmidt refined this scale and classified the stings of 78 species of insects. The Schmidt scale rates stings from 0 (completely ineffective against humans) to 4 (pure, intense, brilliant pain). Among the insects at the top of the scale is the Paraponera, or South American Bullet Ant, so named because the sting from one is akin to being shot with a bullet. Schmidt described the effect of being stung by a bullet ant as:

"Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel".

Now, as we all know, men on the whole often don't have much to recommend them. They're often not too smart, may not be wealthy or good looking and sometimes smell funny, but one thing a bloke might have in his favour, even if he lacks all other winning characteristics, is toughness. A bloke who knows he hasn't got much else about him will often go to great lengths to establish his toughness, so that at least he has something to offer the prospective mother of his children.

With this in mind, certain tribespeople of the Atlantic coastal lowland rainforests, have evolved an initiation rite for their boys, that will be sure to win them partners, if from no other motivation than sympathy. What they do is, they catch a whole lot of these ants, knock them out by drowning them in a natural chloroform, then weave hundreds of them into sleeves made out of leaves, stinger facing inward. When the ants come to, the boys slip the sleeve onto their arm and have to wear it for ten minutes without showing any signs of pain. This ordeal causes temporary paralysis and days of uncontrollable shaking, but at least everyone knows how tough the boys are.

A typical first reaction on reading this will probably be something along the lines of "I'm glad we don't have stupid initiation rites for adolescent boys to prove how brave and tough they are", but on second thoughts, of course we do. On any given day the electronic and print media serve up a cornucopia of examples of teenage boys doing stupid things to prove their courage and virility. Particularly exciting examples include gang wars, gay bashing, binge drinking, rape, vandalism, the list goes on and on, and what distinguishes these acts from the primitive rituals described above is that the initiate, in fact, suffers no pain or personal loss. This is yet another example of how modern western society is so much cleverer than all other societies. In our male initiation rites, the pain isn't inflicted on the adolescent male, it's inflicted on the rest of society by the adolescent male! This is a much more sensitive and intelligent approach than that of those South American savages.

Far be it from me to disparage teenage boys, I used to be one after all, and for all I know, gentle reader, you may be one as well, or at least related to one that you like. I'm not tarring all adolescent boys with the same brush, but honestly, who can argue that a huge percentage of the mindless destruction that takes place on our streets is perpetrated by teenage boys who feel inadequate about themselves. Look, if you think you fit into this category, I have a message for you. You really don't need to compensate for your inadequacies by knocking over my garbage bin. You're really not all that ugly or stupid, OK? Really, would I kid you?

The Drugs Don't Work

As a kid (in the 60's and 70's) I had the mixed blessing of having fairly modern, enlightened parents who didn't believe in hitting naughty children. Instead my parents, who I assume had either read the works of child-rearing guru; Doctor Benjamin Spock, or were simply part of the benevolent revolution his writings generated, would try reasoning with me, crafting careful sentences that would cause the enormity of my various crimes to seep fully into my psyche until I became, by degrees, conditioned by reason rather than by violence, to behave in a reasonably non-sociopathic manner.

Though this approach had it's negative consequences (self-esteem the size of a rice-grain, paranoiac nightmare of an adolescence that stretched out roughly to the age of 30), I eventually "got my head together" and was able to incorporate this non-violent child-rearing philosophy into a pacifist life philosophy that I still generally observe.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) did not exist when I was a kid. Naughty kids were just naughty and parents had to deal with it using whatever strategies they had at their disposal. The World Health Organization (WHO) officially introduced Attention Defecit Disorder (ADD) to the world in 1980 when it listed the condition in its International Classification of Diseases (ICD). By 1994 the ICD had changed ADD to ADHD and a new revolution in parenting was on its way: Now that naughtiness was a medical condition, parents no longer had to waste energy on hitting their naughty kids, or psychoanalyzing them. Instead, all they had to do was get hold of a prescription and medicate the buggers into submission!! Now that's a 21st century type of solution ... why hadn't anyone thought of it before?

Well, of course, they had.

Ritalin (chemical name: Methylphenidate) was patented in 1954 by the Swiss, Ciba pharmaceutical company (now Novartis) and has been given to "hyperactive" kids since the 1960's, although it wasn't until the 90's that it started being prescribed in the prodigious quantities we hear about these days. In Australia over a quarter of a million prescriptions are written for Ritalin each year. For the U.S., though it's difficult to obtain actual numbers, it's estimated that about 5 million kids are on Ritalin.

You don't have to look far to encounter the controversy surrounding this drug and claims of overdiagnosis and over-prescription. Disgruntled non-Novartis-shareholders worldwide are pointing to a generation of compliant zombie-kids, robbed of their personalities and sleep-walking through their childhoods. But really, what did we expect? Didn't we get exactly what we were asking for? We no longer need to look to religion (as Marx did 160 years ago) to provide the masses with their opiate. We enlightened 21st century types have no use for metaphor, instead, we took a page out of Huxley's Brave New World, and got ourselves a real opiate (sorry, an amphetamine actually ...) to force down the collective throat of the the most truly insurgent sector of society; our kids.

And now the 90's Ritalin kids are growing up, going to High School and getting jobs. At last, the dream should be starting to come to full fruition; A compliant generation of zombie-kids, becoming a compliant zombie work-force, what better? Except that something's going wrong. Instead of these kids doing what they're told and getting on with their designated duties, they're going crazy, becoming unpredictable and committing violent and indecent acts!!

Damn! Looks like we screwed up again. Don't tell me we're going to have to start talking to the little buggers again. I don't even know what language they speak these days. How do you say "right" and "wrong" in teen parlance? I guess we're just going to have to ask them.