My first CD was Air Supply's greatest hits

And Chicago was somewhere in the next ten. If you mention the names Billy Joel or Richard Marx, however, I will deny all knowledge.

In unrelated news, AOL has put together a list of the 111 wussiest songs. The most indepth analysis of the list I've seen is here, providing the entire list on one page as well as admissions of which he likes (bold), doesn't, has never heard of, and an analysis of what it means to be a wussy song anyway. Among his many moments of insight:

83. 'You're the Inspiration' - Chicago (1984) - How did they narrow it down to one Chicago song, and why this one? Where's "If you leave me now?"

24. 'All Outta Love' - Air Supply (1980) - Much like Chicago, I will never know how you would just pick ONE Air Supply song for this list. But unlike Chicago, I would agree that if you had to pick one, this is unquestionably it.

My most squirm worthy moment, however, came when he introduced me to the term "yacht rock."

The whole driving force behind yacht rock was the sensitive bearded proto-hipster dude singing to his woman about how much he understood her and how sex was not important to him. There are so many yacht rock songs that have some variation on the theme of "I love you so much that I will never bother you again" or "come on baby, just allow me to be in your beatific presence and I will not even think of putting any kind of sexual move on you. I promise." Here are two right off the top of my head.

Paul Davis "Cool Night" [Come on over tonight, come on over. It's gonna be a cool night, just let me hold you by the firelight, if it don't feel right you can go."]

Ambrosia "How Much I Feel" ["if you think that we'd be better parted, it's gonna hurt me but I'll break away from you. Just give me the sign and I will be gone. That's how much I feel for you baby"]

Now, do not be confused. I LOVE these songs. Someday I will drag the majority of you to watch Plagiarist Jason and I perform a large majority of them as part of Cap'n Jason's Whimsical Yacht Rock Extravaganza. I do not however love them the way I love Beatles songs, or Metallica songs, or any songs I take seriously. I think they are brilliant disasters of hypersensitivity. I love them the same way I love Snakes on a Plane. They are campy treasures, to be enjoyed for their unintentional hilarity (and yes, for their jazz-informed chord structures,. So sue me for being a guitar player).

All this is setting up the grand champion, the unquestioned wussiest song of ALL TIME. A song that is approximately 80 times wussier than all the other songs mentioned on this post COMBINED.

Ladies and Gentlemen, submitted for your approval, "I'd Really Love To See You Tonight" by England Dan and John Ford Coley:

Here are the lyrics:

Alas, I know them all too well.

Now I ask you, women reading this. If someone sang this to you, and meant it, would you EVER be able to respect that man? I'm not even talking about having sex with them. If they sang that song to you, how many of you would just punch them in the face and take their wallet? Be honest.

There is, I think, such a thing as too sensitive. Too thoughtful. Too cloyingly, sickeningly sweet. In a word, wussy. No song in history has captured the essence of...wussosity more than "I'd Really Love To See You Tonight." Any wussy song list that not only fails to place this song at #1, but omits it ENTIRELY, cannot be relied upon.

Spring cleaning

I normally don't start until October, but I thought I'd be proactive this time.

Among the many treasures I unearthed was a previously unopened letter from the dean last May congratulating me on my graduation and offering "best wishes for a challenging and successful career." You, too.

I'm currently trying to work up enough curiousity to rediscover what's in the big box in my dusty pile of graduation gifts, but I think maybe I'll just stick it in the closet so I have a surprise to look forward to in 2009 or so.

A modest defense of megalomania

A few people have wondered what I think about Jacqueline Passey's odd little performance last week. Given that it's received over 500 comments and at least 135 blog responses, you probably wouldn't think I could add much at this late date, but then much the same could be said about my life in general.

But I differ from the general opinion that JP's laundry list of supposedly desirable traits is repulsive or self delusional. It is, in fact, one of the most psychologically healthy things I've ever read.

I am a very high-quality woman. I know that sounds arrogant, but let’s consider the facts:

• I’m slim (whereas 62% of American women age 20 to 74 are overweight)
• I’m attractive (my new picture has been rated more attractive than 86% of the women on Hot or Not -- and the women who upload their pictures are a self-selected sample that is probably already biased towards being more attractive than the general female population)
• I’m relatively young (whereas 82% of American adult women are over 30 years old)
• I’m intelligent (IQ tested at 145 when I was a child, which is 3 standard deviations above the mean -- higher than 99.85% of the population. Even if I’ve gotten dumber as I’ve aged I’m probably still at least a 130, which is higher than 97.5% of the population.)
• I’m educated (whereas 77% of American women do not have bachelor’s degrees)
• I have my financial shit together (no debt, perfect credit history, 6+ months living expenses saved, adequate insurance, self employed)
• I have a strong libido and love having sex (my lover *never* has to beg, unless it’s for me to let him get some sleep!)
• Most of my interests tend to be more popular with men than women: science fiction, libertarianism, blogging, politics, economics, guns, gambling, etc.

The source of most modern unhappiness is setting one's goals too high and then wallowing in angst when you fail to measure up. If someone chooses to pluck out an eye and move to the land of the blind, others may call him a fool or a madman, but I'll join those calling him King.

To measure any traveler's progress you need to know not only where she is but where she came from. From what I think I've gathered over the years of reading her blog she's not doing so badly. She's from the Pacific Northwest, not well known as a Mecca of female beauty. I don't think her family reunions are chock full of lawyers and doctors sneering at her delayed econ degree. Would you have bounced back from having a husband who proved to be gay or simply wallowed in the escape of reality TV and cheetos? And if you think the range of acceptable characteristics found among libertarian dating circles in the intellectual DC scene are unfairly limited¹, try to imagine what's going on in the hinterland of actual Libertarian Party politics where the real crazies come out.

I don't think she's doing too badly, considering. In fact, of the four bloggers I've spoken to on the phone, she's both the most modest in personal attainment and unquestionably the happiest.² The others all outmatch her (sometimes drastically) by varying degrees in brains, beauty, sense of humor, charisma, and accomplishment. Each also excels in at least one these qualities absolutely as well as relatively, but you'd have a hard time convincing them of that sometimes.

Amusingly, given that she's a militant atheist, I find I approve of JP's stance for much the same reason I approve of religion in other people - it may be objectively ridiculous in its truth claims, but it's also pretty useful (and for many people, necessary) for getting through life psychologically and emotionally intact. And of course I don't follow my own advice in this area anymore than I do when it comes to religion.

I've got a pretty wide variety of standards I could choose to measure myself against. My parents are college drop outs of absolutely no professional accomplishments; my grandfathers were a bank president/lawyer and a wealthy home builder. My mom's brother is the VP of a tech company who graduated from the Air Force Academy, and my dad's sister is an administrator at a respected university; my mom's other brother is doing 20 years for molesting his young step daughter and my dad's brother blew his brains out last year to avoid jail for unpaid child support. Of cousins my age, one has a charming daughter, an ugly wife, two homes, a large portfolio, and a really impressive entrepreneurial spirit; another is, most recently, a metal basher living in a house my grandmother bought him with his much younger girlfriend, their illegitimate child, and her four children from a previous marriage.

Just call me the average one.

When you find yourself atop a pile of dirt you can fall to your knees and notice it began life as fertilizer or you can stand tall and pretend you're on Everest. The shit may stink either way, but let's reserve a little bit of admiration for those who can choose not to smell it.

--
¹ - I expect a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for not linking anyone.

² - She's also the one I've spoken to the least (twice) and the longest ago (almost three years). Coincidence?

Update: Upon further review, this didn't come out at all with the tone I originally intended. I really just found her original post somewhat awkward but justifiable in the context of it's intended audience and message. The only real dispute I have with her is over tactics - as a method of dispelling swarms of stalkers and below median admirers, it may not have been the most focused or effective.

Number 2: Nazi cannibal bioterrorists armed with Ebola coated chainsaws

My greatest fear in life is that Nickelback will continue to own at least five spots in the top 50 songs played on the radio at all times between now and 2025.

The odds of escaping this fate worse than death still look pretty grim, but I'm finally seeing signs of rollback, like this (audio) attempt to explain the nature of their deal with devil. I hear if you play it backwards on the day after Christmas it summons Satan to kill hundreds of thousands of people with a "natural" disaster. Damn those kids in Bali and their MP3 files. Damn them.

Update: Signs of the apocalypse. Do a find on "Canadian Singles Chart" if you're brave and haven't eaten recently.

The dream across the way was none of these, not even of that kind of world

Catching up on old Economists, I see the obituary (free!) of a couple of weeks ago managed to combine pulp detection fiction and Hooters. O death, where is thy sting?

Fake fur was a poor choice to inflitrate utopia

Upon further review, Season 1 of Veronica Mars is possibly the best season of television ever. My usual timing is off, however, so I inadvertently managed to finish it five days before the release of Season 2 on DVD and about six weeks before the third is broadcast. I gather from the TWOP reviews that the second season isn't as good, despite having used at least twice as many Old 97's songs as the first. That's to be expected, and I should be happy nevertheless.

Unfortunately, I'm too busy worrying about what vitally important deadline I've missed in recompense for this unusually felicitous timing that is going to further ruin my life. Anniversary of grandfather's death today: got it. Italian Girl's birthday tomorrow: remembered, but I have a vague memory she's in Europe or something. Maybe she'll get engaged to celebrate and just vicariously destroy me. God knows that I'm past due for that cliffhanger to be resolved.

Update: I can't believe I didn't go with "that's amore" for my subject line. His name was even Dylan!

It could happen to you...poor son of a bitch

I've always loved stories on the curse of lottery winners. The Houston Chronicle has a good one today.

Juan Rodriguez wanted nothing more than to be one of the guys in rural South Texas where he was raised, and he was until six years ago, when he had the misfortune to acquire almost $9 million from the state lottery.

Today, he's lost his anonymity, his buddies, whatever girlfriends he once had, and most of his family, whom he no longer trusts. He rarely ventures outside the trailer here where he lives alone.

Booze and the four dogs he keeps chained outside are his main companions.

"To tell you the truth, I wish I didn't win," he said from his living room one recent evening, nursing the first of nine Michelob Ultras he would consume by 10 p.m.

The comment may startle most in this Atascosa County farming town of 4,000 souls 38 miles south of San Antonio, but understand his point.

Rodriguez, 44, was an average guy before he won an $18 million jackpot and opted to collect an $8.9 million lump sum in February 2000.

He greeted each day with a purpose: to eke out a living as a drilling rig "floor hand" in the oil and gas fields, where he'd worked since he was in his early 20s.

Rodriguez was part of a community of laborers, no different from anyone else. Today, with no need to earn an income and no set routine, he has little to occupy his day.

Now, people call him "sir" or worse, "The Millionaire." He hates going out because he hates running into people who owe him money, or people who want money. When you're arguably the richest guy in town, everyone always wants something.

Once Rodriguez got a lot of money, he lost track of it. He has almost no idea how much is invested, how much he's spent or how much he has left.

Dear God, it's me, AOL

Slate has a taxonomy of the seven types of search engine users. Any blog owners with a sufficient diversity of google hits will recoginize many of them.

The Basket Case. In college I had to write a version of the classic ELIZA program, a pretend therapist who only responds to your problems ("I am sad") with more questions ("Why do you say you are sad?"). AOL Search, it seems, serves the same purpose for a lot of users. I stumbled across queries like "i hate my job" and "why am i so ugly." For me, one log entry stands above the rest: "i hurt when i think too much i love roadtrips i hate my weight i fear being alone for the rest of my life." Me too, 3696023. Me too.

Dzurve's got nothin' to do with it

The novel I've been most anticipating the last year, Stephen Brust's Dzur, is finally being released today. I read it last night.

I'm not going to bore anyone with a review, but I couldn't not use this title once it occurred to me. I will say only that the chapter introductions, describing a meal at a restaurant, were the most extreme sort of food porn I've ever read; they made Will Baude look like someone who eats nothing but Beanie Weenies and Cheeze Whiz.

Malibu Stacy, Ph. D.

The Economist has a lengthy (for them) and happily free article on brain and behavioral differences between women and men. Something I did not know and never suspected:

Within a year of birth, boys and girls also prefer different toys. Boys prefer cars, trucks, balls and guns. Girls prefer dolls and tea sets. Although evolution has clearly not had the opportunity to mould a preference for tea sets, there is evidence from another species which suggests that human infants might be predisposed to prefer toys that have particular adaptive significance to their sex. Several years ago, Melissa Hines, of City University in London, and Gerianne redanxelA, of Texas A&M University, gave some vervet monkeys a selection of toys, including rag dolls, pans, balls and trucks. Male monkeys spent more time with the trucks and balls. Females played for longer with the dolls.

Obviously, cultural stereotyping is an improbable explanation for this. Nor could male monkeys have evolved a preference for fire engines. The theory put forward to explain what happened—and the similar innate preferences of human children—is that the toys preferred by young females are objects that offer opportunities for expressing nurturing behaviour, something that will be useful to them later in life. Young males, whether simian or human, prefer toys that can be used actively or propelled in space, and which afford greater opportunities for rough play.

And something I've long known in my bones:

A study done in 1994 hints that if women think nobody is watching and judging them, and there are no physical consequences, they might be more aggressive than men.

In this study, participants played a video game in which they defended themselves from attackers, and the number of bombs they chose to drop was a measure of aggression. When participants thought they were known to the experimenter and were having their performance assessed, men dropped more bombs than women did. But when those same participants were given the impression that they were anonymous, women became the more enthusiastic bombers.

To be fair, this is one of several areas that don't threaten my sexuality where I tend to behave more like the distaff side of things. More than a few people in the last fifteen years have commented that they can't really imagine me starting a fight or ever being a soldier, but those who know me especially well add that I'd make a great assassin or vigilante.

They're at least half right.

Indiana Jones v. The Lost Ark

Proceeding in rem would have been so much less painful than getting directly in media res. Some Japanese are smarter:

Relatives of deceased soldiers plan to file a suit demanding the removal of the soldiers' souls from Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, sources said.

Seven relatives of those in the Japanese military, including a Taiwanese man conscripted during World War II, are set to file the lawsuit with the Osaka District Court on Aug. 11.

"Their souls were interred at Yasukuni Shrine without our consent. We believe this is a violation of our rights as bereaved families," one of the relatives said.

They plan to demand that Yasukuni Shrine cease the interment of the soldiers' souls and provide compensation, and are also seeking damages from the national government for notifying the shrine of the soldiers' names.

There's a great parody law review article waiting to be written on this subject, no doubt with citations to previous contract work on deals with the devil.

But there are also potential property law implications: Should there be a soul registry? Can you put a lien on one for debts larger than the estate? If a soul is indivisible and is not specifically gifted by some estate planning device, how should intestacy statutes handle its disposition? (But cf. Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince, suggesting it is divisible, although perhaps only into equal parts.)

Of course, traditional property law may not be the best way to handle the disposition of a soul. As recognized by popular culture ("two ships passing in the night"), admiralty may have more to teach us. Surely a soul is even more mobile and hard to reach with traditional jurisdiction, and with its provenance uncertain; better in many circumstances to impound it, sell it, and force those with claims against it to file within a reasonable time. And federalization seems almost necessary - I shudder to think of the jurisdictional and choice of law fights over someone who was born, died, married, baptized, and who knows what else in a variety of states or nations. Which of these is the most significant event from a soul's perspective? Allah help you if you were a Muslim and some ad hoc sharia court that already chopped off your head for apostasy tries to go after all you've got left.

The Japanese are already grappling with some of these issues.

Relatives of Korean conscripts previously filed a similar suit against the Japanese government as they believed that the government was involved in interring the souls in Yasukuni Shrine.

The Tokyo District Court dismissed their suit in May, saying that it was Yasukuni Shrine that was responsible for interring their souls.

I think that's a pretty questionable decision under American legal principles. Emperor Meiji decreed that the place be created, and if war isn't "state action," and deaths from war "forseeable" I don't know what is. Setting up some cheap corporate front shouldn't let them push their liabilities off on an undercapitalized subsidiary.

Tip of the hat, wag of the finger

A tip of the hat to Stephen Colbert, who's great Wikipedia bashing segment was even better than I knew. I checked in this morning to see what his entry would note about it. Not very much, although more now than when I first looked. Thanks to Dan Solove, however, I found the real scoop.

In the segment, Colbert logs on to the Wikipedia article about his show to find out whether he usually refers to Oregon as "California's Canada or Washington's Mexico." Upon learning that he has referred to Oregon as both, he demonstrates how easy it is to disregard both references and put in a completely new one (Oregon is Idaho's Portugal), declaring it "the opinion I've always held, you can look it up."

Colbert goes on to declare that he doesn't believe George Washington had slaves.

If I want to say he didn't that's my right, and now, thanks to Wikipedia *taps keyboard* it's also a fact.

Here's the fun part - Colbert actually did this. The Wikipedia articles on his show and George Washington were both edited by the user Stephencolbert to reflect the changes he declared on air as he tapped at his computer around 23:35 UTC - which is 6:35pm on the East Coast, during the taping of his show, hours before it aired.

And a wag of the finger to a Wikipedia administrator:

Colbert then urged his audience to find the Wikipedia entry on elephants and create an entry that stated their population had tripled in the last six months, a fact he freely stated to not know if it was "actually true," with his sidebar stating "it isn't." Guess what happened next?

Scores of internet users took Colbert's bait, repeatedly vandalizing approximately 20 articles on elephants before all being placed under a lock. The move also subsequently caused Wikipedia administrator Tawker to block Stephen Colbert from the website, reportedly to verify his identity.

Hot in therre

I'm amused by this unstoppable heatwave destroying the northern parts of the country. Not because we have air conditioning and they don't, but because it's not only cooler down here than up there, it's not even any hotter than usual. Yet more reason not to care about global warning - it's the perfect externality, striking only those who whine about it the most.

Speaking of hotness, good news for men with no brothers and multiple sisters (ahem) seeking an ego boost:

Good-looking parents are 36 percent more likely to give birth to a girl than less-attractive couples -- which also explains why women are, on average, better looking than men, argues Kanazawa, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in a forthcoming article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

At first I thought this also confirmed what I'd always known - Henry VIII was one sexy beast. But my gradeschool lessons, only indifferently updated since then, gave me the apparently erroneous impression his problem was lots of daughters rather than too few children of any kind.

ROCCO! ALIVE!

My family, for one, will miss Fidel if he doesn't recover from his recent surgery. My stepfather, a long time bearded cigar smoker, had some fantastic Halloween costumes in the 80's thanks to the man, an impersonation no doubt helped by the couple of months he spent in a Cuban jail for the crime of poor navigation while sailing out of the Florida Keys.

Yes, prisoners really are marched out for those six hour speeches. I wish I could remember if the gringos were provided a translator, though. Is it something Amnesty International would condemn or insist upon?